I am somewhat ashamed to realise that of the 36 books I’ve blogged about so far, not one has been by a Welsh writer (this may be especially shameful as I’ve chosen three Irish writers). So I’m glad to say that when I looked at my list of books read in 2013 – there were 49 of them – with a view to correcting that omission, I found that I’d read no fewer than three Welsh authors that year: Dannie Abse, Owen Sheers and Menna Gallie. Of those I have chosen the last, probably the least well-known, and her 1962 novel The Small Mine, which I have once again borrowed from Cardiff Libraries.
I have another reason to choose Menna Gallie: she was born and raised in Ystradgynlais, which was my dad’s home town. She no longer lived there by the 1960s, but she obviously remembered it in The Small Mine, disguising it as Cilhendre and describing it as a ‘village’ – even though in real life Ystradgynlais was, and still is, big enough to be called a town.
For those familiar with the locality, the novel’s early pages would surely evoke Ystradgynlais:
Joe crossed another bridge, across the river that kept company with the village street. A friendly, pebbly river, where boys swam in summer, that folded itself in and out of the village, collecting tins and old saucepans as it went. (p15)
That would correspond with Tawe as it flowed through the town – although not necessarily always in a ‘friendly’ way, as my father’s younger brother was drowned in it at the age of (I think) 14. One of the bridges would have justified the name of the Penybont Inn, the pub that my grandparents kept and which is immortalised in a painting by Josef Herman, the Polish artist who settled in the town in the 1940s.
Anyway, enough of the famil
y history: back to Menna Gallie’s novel. Apart from the fictional ‘small mine’ of Brynhyfryd (the Welsh for ‘pleasant hill’) above Cilhendre, other places that get mentioned, such as Pontardawe and Cwmtwrch, are real enough. By the early 1960s, in which The Small Mine is unmistakably set, there was little mining in the immediate area (see p.14: ‘Now there were no workings in Cilhendre, except for the small mines; small, private drifts, too insignificant for the coal board’), although in the next valley to the east, above Crynant, the Cefn Coed colliery, also mentioned in the novel, was still in operation until the late 1960s.*
As befits its title, the novel begins underground, with central character Joe finishing his shift and heading towards the ‘cage’ that would raise him and his fellow-miners to the surface:
Here they waited, tired, patient, black, eight hours of coal and darkness heavy on their shoulders and on the thin backs of their necks. The air was thick and artificial, like food out of tins. The cage came down, was filled … And on the top it was autumn. (p.2)
I thought at first that MG was unlikely to have experienced the coalface at first hand and was borrowing from other writers’ mining narratives, but apparently not: the online Bywgraffiadur Cymreig (Welsh Dictionary of Biography) tells me that ‘To get an idea of what actual mining was like, Menna Gallie spent two eight-hour shifts underground alongside miners’. Still, it’s clear as the novel proceeds that her concern is less with coal mining itself and more with the wider Cilhendre community: while a miner’s death is the central event, wives, sweethearts, old people and young boys all play their part. Soon after the death, which occurs about half-way through The Small Mine, there is a communal celebration of Guy Fawkes’ Day – preparations for which are the occasion for some mildly humorous back-and-forth. Overall, though, the mood is sombre. There is a feeling that the main characters are trapped in their roles – as grieving mother, unloved outsider or political obsessive. This seems to be emphasised in the novel by the Welsh habit of adding descriptive stereotypes to names – Dai Dialectic, Lil Cream Slices or Cyril the Lorry, for instance – as if such people can’t escape the names the community has bestowed on them.
I like to give a taste of what I’ve been struck by in a book, so here’s a sample of MG’s descriptive style:
The Nazi bombs had taken the roof off Swansea Market and let the sun in. … [T]he sun beat a tom-tom on the colours and smells there. Beat on the bronze and clean-cut yellows of chrysanthemums, on bright green sprouts and cauliflowers, on the polished, cold-green apples and the warm-brown potatoes and conference pears, on the Welsh wool blankets, honeycombed with colour; on the cruel red of meat and the nasty green of artificial parsley … (pp.112-13)
And here’s some woman-to-woman dialogue:
‘Hullo, Mrs Griffiths, how’s young Cyn now? Broken down, has she? – nothing like a good cry is there, fair play.’
‘Cyn’s all right, thanks Lil. No, she hasn’t broken down, she knows best how she feels. It’s not for us to say. Can’t bear to go there, you know how it is, but I’ll send a little wreath from the two of us; looks better, don’t you think?’ (p.107)
A little more about Menna Gallie before I end: it’s 30 years since her death, and though there seem to have been some low-key events to mark her centenary last year,** it’s only through the efforts of the small independent publisher Honno that she has stayed in print. Born Menna Humphreys, she married W.B. Gallie, a philosophy lecturer at University College, Swansea, in 1940, just a month after her English finals at the same institution – and five days before he went off to military service. After the war she, like many another academic spouse, followed her husband as he moved to other universities – Keele, Queen’s, Belfast, and finally Cambridge. (His output includes the books Philosophy and the Historical Understanding and Peirce and Pragmatism.) It must have been while she was living in Northern Ireland that Menna wrote her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom (published when she was 40), as well as The Small Mine; her Irish experiences no doubt informed her later novel You’re Welcome to Ulster.
*Since originally publishing this, I’ve found a useful website that reveals that in fact mining continued at the Ynyscedwyn colliery, on the north-eastern edge of Ystradgynlais, until 1968. (In 1961, according to the South Wales Coal Directory, it employed 513 people.) It has since been demolished and grassed over, and a school, Ysgol Golwg y Cwm, now stands on the old site.
**Some authorities, such as The Small Mine’s back cover, say Menna Gallie was born in 1920, but I prefer to believe the Bywgraffiadur Cymreig: ‘Although she celebrated her birthday on 17 March 1920, she was in fact born on 18 March, 1919’.
Old geezer re-reading 