MORNING SERIAL

HE had, the old man said, just wandered into one of his WEA classes, on Art and Literature in the Industrial Age, or some such stirring title, and sat, apparently transfixed, at the back.

He was, in the early 1960s, considerably younger than the dwindling band of educational veterans which my father’s grizzled application of social history to culture usually attracted.

Ceri was an orphan and an apprentice collier who had married Olwen at eighteen. Lady Olwen now. Ceri never threw anything away that might prove useful, and a lifetime of philandering – early and late – had not broken the utility of his marriage to her, who ran his home and raised his children to be teachers and solicitors, all in his absence.

The marriage was no fiction, it was just a side story within the space of his personal, always personal, narrative.

He had been recommended to go to the old man’s class by the kind of union official who, in those days, acted as recruiting agent for educational uplift. He had been told to broaden his horizons if he was to make a mark in the union.

He was already a Young Communist of course. But then that was like saying, for his youth and ardour in that place at that time, that he went to chapel or liked the movies or sh***ed girls or chainsmoked. But he did believe.

And he did see how that helped him to be seen, to be noticed. In the Good Cause, of course.

He became an assiduous attender. Assiduity would become his hallmark. It was funny, how you had to wait to the end, of a life, as of a book, to see how it all turned out. And that it could have been different. Maybe. Choices. Pathways, and all that.

Only I didn’t go in for “all that” anymore. For some people in some places at some times it was fixed.

Our time had been made for Ceri and he always seemed to know it better, quicker, than any of the rest of us.

Maldwyn had just seen ways to make money.

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