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DEEP DUFFRYN 1944
Much as I feared and hated the thought of working underground I had no inclination to register as a conscientious objector. I wasn’t an enthusiastic patriot — my view of the war was C. Day Lewis’s who wrote of ‘defending the bad against the worse’ - but felt I shouldn’t shirk sharing the fate of my fellow countrymen. It was just my bad luck I should have to ‘do my bit’ as a miner rather than as a soldier, sailor or airman.
As so often in life things that at the time seem to offer nothing but misery in retrospect are seen as an enriching experience. So I look back now on the few months I spent down the pit working among the Welsh miners. The only area of choice in the matter was to what coalfield you wished to be sent. I could have gone to Kent which was nearer but chose South Wales because of ancestral connections. My mother always insisted I was condemned to the pit because our name was Morgan and the authorities supposed mining was in our blood, our DNA as they would say nowadays.
It didn’t seem that way to me when I entered the cage (after a body search by the security man for any matches or cigarettes on my person) and dropped at an alarming speed to the pit bottom. As it settled I felt my stomach was still bobbing up top, reluctant to join me. It was a good mile or so walk to the coal face where we worked. We jogged and stumbled, our safety lamps swinging from our belts, crouching like monkeys sometimes when the roof was low. It didn’t do much for my morale when I saw how many steel struts holding the roof up were bent and twisted from the tons of earth bearing down on them. One of the first lessons we were taught was ‘never leave your lamp’ To ram it home the old miner teaching us made us switch off our lamps. The darkness swooped immediate, total and terrifying, much more than a mere absence of light. I felt what it must be like, to be trapped by a roof fall, waiting and praying for rescuers in such utter blackness.
I was given into the care of a mentor or, as the miners say, a butty. My butty was Harry Maggs, not a very Welsh name. He was a tall, lean, gentle man, to tall for a miner, a man I should guess in his forties. Although he was no rabble-rousing Red he had been a union representative and had, for a year, been banned from working, blacklisted by the owners, Powell Duffryn. His job was ‘opening up’ new seams of coal which meant I began work in a 3’6” seam. It was very gruelling and painful, dragging myself along on my side, ‘like an amputee’ as I tried to describe it once in verse, to dump the coal Harry had dug into the tub or dram waiting on the main road — the underground road to the pit bottom that is. When the dram was filled the haulier hitched his pony to the dram and hauled it away.
Our haulier was an old fellow who hobbled on bent legs. His hip had been broken once when a refractory pony had pinned him to the pit wall. As far as I could see he bore his poor charges no grudge. The guilty beast had long since earned his manumission and was now, one hoped, browsing in fields of asphodel — though no doubt cursed to hell at the time!
You should understand there were no facilities down the mine. When you ‘had to go’ you took your shovel and a roll of toilet paper, moved out of the olfactory range of your workmates and squatted. When you had your ‘snap’, usually a cheese sandwich and a swig of cold tea, you had it sitting at the working, dirty hands and all. Deep Duffryn boasted pithead baths so at least things had progressed. We didn’t — as in those between-the-war films about miners — have to bath in a tin tub in front of the fire, having our backs scrubbed by our women folk. Mind you, as a young virgin of eighteen that was an appealing image! We scrubbed one another’s backs under the showers, singing Cwm Rhondda as we did so. I still recall the sympathetic thrill as I scrubbed naked backs pitted with blue scars and scored with knobbly abrasions from old rock falls.
I shared my first digs in Mountain Ash with another Bevin Boy. He was older than I, a brawny fellow, and, unlike most of us, accustomed to hard manual labour. I remember on our first night together — we had to share the bed — he complained how small the room was. ‘There isn’t enough room to swing a cat’ he said. ‘I’m too tired to start swinging cats even if I had one’ I said, thereby earning myself an instant reputation as a wit.
I can’t remember how many weeks I had been working at Deep Duffryn when I woke one morning to find my companion staring at me in horror. ‘What on earth have you done to your face?’ he cried. My cheek had swollen like a balloon. I lurched over and was promptly sick into a conveniently open drawer of a dressing table beside the bed. I reported to the doctor who pronounced that I was suffering from something he called ‘Blast’. This was caused by the draughts of air circulating through the mine by the operation of heavy wooden doors opening and shutting. I don’t think I was off work for very long; whatever blast was it wasn’t fatal. It wasn’t until I went into the Army that the mine doctors blast was identified as an abscessed tooth.
My bed mate worked at ‘getting coal’ and therefore with a gang of other fellows. We were invited to join them one night for a drink in a local pub. It was like witnessing the beginnings of the old time music hall. The chairman would bang the table with his gavel and call on ‘Dai Jones to give us a song’ and Dai would rise, pint in his hand, and give us a heart felt ‘Dafydd yr Garreg Wen’. The two Thomas brothers would be next, strolling one behind the other, across the floor, Flanagan and Allan fashion, singing (as I remember) ‘Red Sails in The Sunset’. There were no standup comedians thank the Lord, though a few recitations.
I wasn’t used to drinking pints and after the third or fourth the room slipped its moorings and began to sway. With the excuse that I must ‘shed a tear for Wales’ i.e. go to the loo, I left the company and staggered homewards. The landlady’s young son was in and looked at me curiously as I attempted a few slurred words before stumbling up the stairs to bed.
Our landlady was a young wife with a son whose husband was away in the Forces. It perhaps became a subject of local gossip that she was sharing a house with two young men so it was gently intimated that we should find other lodgings. I say we but I have a lingering memory that my companion stayed put, to become a substitute husband for the wife and father for the son. It was an accommodation not unusual then when wives were left alone for six long years of war.
I found lodgings with a Mr. & Mrs. Yeo. She was a large, stolid, slow-moving woman and her husband a small, yellow faced, worried looking man. He was an ex-miner working now as a stoker at the local gas depot. He would come home from work, have his meal and sit in his chair sucking his pipe. I would hear a clatter and turn to see him, pipe fallen from his mouth, head on chest, dead beat from his days labour.
Here again I had to share my bed, this time with a grizzled old miner. Every night when he returned home from the pub, before he settled to sleep he would utter his mantra: Don’t let the bastards grind you down Jim boyo’.
I remember I had just bought Laurie Lee’s first book of poems, ‘The Sun My Monument’ and alone in my room I paced up and down reciting it aloud to myself. I didn’t realise I could be heard by Mrs. Yeo in the kitchen beneath. When I went down for my tea she asked ‘Been reciting Mr. Morgan?’ I was embarrassed but glad I was living in a country where poetry was accepted as a normal vocation. When under interrogation I told my butty I was interested in poetry he offered to take me to meet a local bard who had won the Chair at the National Eisteddford but somehow it never happened. I was too shy I suppose.
Mountain Ash boasted a magnificent library bought and paid for out of miners’ pennies. It was there I made my first acquaintance with modern literature, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. I understand this library along with many other miners’ libraries is no more, its piles of volumes dispersed, I hope not to a refuse tip. I hate to think some bustling — or should I say hustling — supermarket has been raised on its site. Most of the great chapels, where once (to quote Pope) ‘heaven was won by violence of song’ are derelict and in their place youth clubs where youngsters, high on ecstasy, fling themselves around to the manic beat of ‘pop’, ‘pop’, ‘pop’.
It was June l944 and the great news of the D-Day landings was conveyed to us underground by headlines chalked on the side of the drams. I went home for the weekend and encountered the Nazi’s new secret weapon the ‘Buzz Bomb’. Pilotless it flew across the skies with a steady drone then when its engine cut out fell to earth with devastating effect. I found it more scary than the Luftwaffe bombers to which we were inured. I think I was probably glad to get back to South Wales.

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