Fay
By: Rob Cullen
Tags: Resistance Poetry, Free Verse, Résilience, History, Poetry On Medium

…

A hidden stream runs deep

through the soil under this town.

There is the river, of course

churning through its channeled

constricted, structured way.

…

But there is another web,

of hidden streams,

a ream of unwritten rivulets,

unrecorded culverts and drains,

that ooze in black gleamed silence,

beneath the stones and roads,

that carries through the ages,

those familiar names and voices,

and streets laced with that great,

intricacy of an unintended design.

…

An interlocking mesh of unwritten

words, of so many hopes,

and deeds of long forgotten

lives, toiling endlessly to ensure,

that food and clothes are bought,

and that children survive.

…

And the quiet discord of lives,

spent in worthwhile causes,

left unrecorded somehow.

What is it about old places

that draws me, holds me,

a barely grasped feeling — of remembrance,

a briefly held semblance — of recognition,

as when meeting a long lost friend,

whose changed in some way.

…

But that look in the eye

or a hand’s gesture, a smile,

perhaps, remains and lingers,

no, not unchanged exactly,

but an essence that has been distilled,

or reframed, like western skies,

that change from one day to the next,

but the blue of western skies remains.

…

Walking through the park on Sunday,

I noted that a tree had been planted

to Ben Elkin, but nothing for my old friend Fay,

the husband is mentioned but the wife?

Ah, I forgot that’s the way for wives,

and women, they become invisible,

in these towns, this place, these valleys.

…

In memory of Fay Elkan died 19 July 2006 aged 92 and her work for the British Red Cross and so much more.

…

©robcullen5/11/2015.

…

In Wales we look back on a past framed by the coal mines, and the struggle of miners to earn a living wage, in a tough murderous industry. Life was brutal and it is right that so much focus is placed on the miner.

But there are always the wives!

On June 23, 1894, the community of Cilfynydd suffered its darkest day.

The day began like any other as the miners went to work, while above ground Richard Street was crowded with shoppers.

But at 3.50pm two big explosions were heard. Within hours, 2,000 people were huddled at the pit head.

The Albion Colliery in Cilfynydd

The incident left 290 men and boys dead, along with 123 horses. Only 16 men were brought out alive, of which just five went on to survive.

It was thought to be the worst disaster in mining history.

The Senghenydd mining disaster of 1913, when 439 men lost their lives, would prove this belief misheld.

The disaster occurred at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, a small hamlet near Caerphilly, Glamorgan, Wales, on 14 October 1913.

The explosion remains the worst mining disaster in Britain. The deaths of 440 men from a small community had a devastating effect; 60 victims were younger than 20, of whom 8 were 14 years old; 542 children had lost their fathers and 205 women were widowed.

The impact on individual households was great: 12 homes lost both a father and son, 10 homes lost two sons each, while the death of one father and son left an 18-year-old daughter to raise her 6 siblings alone; another woman lost her husband, 2 sons, a brother and her lodger.

Once again…the numbers are appalling!

Two hundred and five women were widowed.

Five hundred and forty two children had lost their fathers. Their fathers the “bread winner”.

Immediately poverty and suffering was staring in through the windows and doors.

And it was for the widows — the women to see a way through!

…

The old photographs of the Gresford colliery disaster in North Wales come from the same scoresheet. On 22 September 1934 an explosion and underground fire killed 266 men. A litany of criminal neglect by the Mine’s Management and Mines Inspectorate as the subsequent inquiry exposed. Profit at any cost.

The grim faces of men, women and children waiting at the pit head for news, any news of the men who didn’t come up that day!

…

foto atributed to The Mirror The Gresford Colliery disaster.

In 2010 I started research into my family history. The starting point for this was finding the location of my Great Grandfathers grave site. Looking through the Cemetery log of burials it was easy enough to find him, his name was distinctive. There was a number. So far so good. But when I went to find the grave there were no identifying marks. I anticipated a lack of a gravestones…I’d been told that Methodists spurned such adornments.

I asked the gravedigger if he would assist me in finding my Great Grandfather’s grave. He readily agreed and took me back to the patch of mown grass I’d already been to. I was struck by a strangeness in this man’s presentation — he was unusually apologetic and left me as soon as he was able. It only struck me later sitting in the car, reflecting on the oddness of what had taken place — that my Great Grandfathers grave was a paupers burial and the gravedigger had avoided mentioning this to me.

As part of the research I returned again to the cemetery burial log as by this time I’d become engrossed by the high number of infant mortality deaths. I had become deeply shocked by the infant mortality rates on or around the Miners strike of 1910 and for several years after. The South Wales valleys suffered the highest mortality rates for children in what was then called Great Britain.

I looked again at the burial record of my great grandfathers interment and realised that of the nine people buried in the grave I only knew one name. My great grandfather. I also realised that my great grandmothers name was missing. It was without doubt a paupers mass grave.

From the burial register it was plain to see that starvation had taken its toll through the numbers recorded of infant birth deaths and deaths of mothers during and after childbirth — mothers whose health had been seriously undermined by malnourishment. As part of my research I walked around Trealaw Cemetery, looking at and photographing grave memorials. The history contained on the gravestones was a profound record of the human story of misery and struggle over the 20th Century and before.

The blank green grass of the pauper mass graves in stark contrast to the elaborate memorials of “millionaires row” where the bones of the mine owners, industrialists, bankers and others of the so called “great and good” lie in their vaults.

foto©robcullen02022015

The story of the miners wives is not just one of misery and poverty. But also of the determination, the struggle to see the battle through and ensure that children are fed and survive; that children are clothed and educated. But also to right wrongs.

In the 1984/85 miners strike in the UK — the Wives of Miners set up their own highly successful campaigning group not only to support the miners but also the community. They correctly perceived that the mining communities were under threat from a Government that was intent on the destruction of the cohesive power of the Miners Union, whatever the fallout of that involved. The miners wives were determined to fight for the preservation of their communities and much else besides.

And that brings us to the present day and the mass graves of covid deaths. The absence of funerary rites — the silence of it all.

It is happening all around us — in the midst of this epidemic with daily announcements that the death toll is rising acutely -who would know? The relatives of course. But in the community? There is this peculiar estrangement from what is going on, what is happening to our people. It is as if the taboo that has pertained to death has enlarged and taken over the present day — when we are living through a disaster. It is as if the boil of our anger or what should be our anger at the incompetence of the political class — is being lanced.

It feels as if we are being managed.

…

The silence.

…

I am grateful to my friend the artist, writer and film maker Carole White for the guidance provided by her book “Struggle or Starve” — “Stories of everyday heroism between the wars”, an often harrowing account of the struggle of women and daughters to support their families in the South Wales mining communities.

A struggle I witnessed as a child, growing up in the mining valley Rhondda, as the mining industry was plummeting into a rapid decline.

©robcullen14122020.