MORNING SERIAL

HIS old man understood the eager impulse to act. To understand was not to approve. He said it was self-indulgence. He called it social gratification. He thought it was a political w**k. He’d say that ignominy was seeking refuge in ignorance. He talked like that. It made it all the harder to pay him any attention any longer. When he was not angry he seemed almost sorry for it all, that it had come to this thrashing about, the lies of rhetoric fuelling the necessary expression of bravery. The way he talked was the way he thought.

* * * * *

His old man would nonetheless turn out of bed with him in the murk of a wintry dawn as the strike’s buzzsaw activity lengthened. They would join small nodes of men gathering into guerrilla squads to trudge over mountain roads into other valleys to bypass police blockades, and swoop to picket and push and shove. The old man would begin to argue that to compromise was not to surrender, only to be told to shut the fuck up. Billy would move away from him, using his camera as an excuse, using its viewfinder to find faces, locate gestures, swim amongst the sea of expectation that swirled around platforms of oratory where Arthur Scargill eerily referred to himself in the third person, and to them as if their individual lives had been melded together with his. Perhaps, finally, they had. By his Presidential decree. Images began to define events. But not, ever, for the old man.

*****

His old man cadged a lift from Billy to Paynter’s funeral in Golders Green just before the bone-chilling cold Christmas of that year. Billy walked with him from the packed car park. At 70, the old man was stooping a bit now. They walked through a dank late-morning gloom, past incongruous evergreens and dripping shrubbery, towards the crematorium.

> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com