MORNING SERIAL

WE sat for a breather on the lip of the quarry and took in the view. I had never been so high up above the village.

It was as if we had taken up our seats in an opera box, looking down at the place I knew so well but rendered strange from this great height, all laid out like a stage-set far below. I saw the village, the pit, and the river with new eyes as they were reduced to toy-like dimensions by the distance. I realised how confined and cramped my view of things had been until now. It was exhilarating. I popped a wine gum in my mouth by way of celebration, and Dad smoked a cigarette.

‘It’ll keep the midges off us,’ he said, puffing away.

Although I never saw any. I looked behind me up to the mountain top – there was still a long way to go. And so we laboured on, the muscles in my legs beginning to protest as we climbed towards the summit. Then suddenly, the ground simply flattened out, and we were standing on flat moorland.

I felt a little deflated. I had anticipated a jagged, pointy mountain summit, just like the one in photographs I’d seen of Hilary and Tensing on the top of Everest.

My father explained to me that this mountain, like all the mountains separating the communities of the Valleys was flat topped; in fact this moorland was the original ground level of this part of Wales until Ice Age glaciers had come and gouged out the Valleys themselves. We were standing on original earth, the valley simply a scar carved out of it. The trees I knew from peering up at them from the valley floor, the trees that stood silhouetted against the skyline, were on the mountain top to our left, and we were definitely not in England. Just walk a little further that way, explained my father, and another valley, the Cynon Valley would open up, and then another mountain, and then the Rhondda Valley, then another and another, all the way to the Amman Valley, on the western edge of the coalfield where they still spoke Welsh.

England was in fact in completely the opposite direction, and a long way off.