A Welsh Eye-2

The Way to the Sea

By GWYN THOMAS

VEN now the rattle of a train means just one

thing to me. It is the bizarrely entranced day each summer when we valley children poured in our thousands down the sloping streets to the station, into the train, to edge out of the close, inclosing hills, through the lush fields of the Vale of Glamorgan, to the sea. At the first sight and sound of us the fish moved off a mile and kept a cold eye on the whole Sunday School movement that had sponsored our act of joy, once a year, one magic glimpse of the sea.

But there will never be such optimists as those boys in the dawn weather patrol. The sky might look as if it were shaping up for the most baleful act of spleen since Noah, there might even be a cloudburst swilling the Waiting trippers down to the bed of the Taff, we were not put off.

`It's all right. It's for heat. It's just a haze for heat. It's always the same. If you can't•see the top of the mountain, watch out for sunstroke. Don't take coats. It'll be a scorcher. Just a handker- chief for the back of the neck stuffed into your cap and hanging loose like in the Legion.' Then we would limp home for a vapour rub and a stoup of hot broth. Our blood, after a broken night, tended to be thin and the early morning air, as a matter of principle in such an astonishing milieu, was mordant.

Active preparations began at seven. Any family taking less than a hundredweight of sand- wiches was accused of trifling with the treat. We were the only tape-worms ever to appear publicly in blue serge.

Appetites were sharp even as we walked down to the vestry for our tickets.

`Hey, our Dad, could I have a sandwich? One of the roast porks?'

`Blod, Merf wants a roast pork.

`At this time, a roast pork! The dearest and the best! All right then. But don't let him get at the fruit. He's a terror for the fruit. Last year we let him get at the bag at Porth. Bad in Ponty. Had to get off the train in Creigiau.'

The scene at the station was like a crisis in Babylon. Often a number of Sunday schools would go on the same day, at the same time. Then the local station master reached the heights of Job.

`No co-operation! No sympathy! No thought for the Great Western Railway. The biggest gathering of Christians since the revival of 1904, and all wanting to go to Barry on the same train. No love or trust among you. If one Sunday school went on its own it would be afraid the other four would be back home praying for heavy rain. There's that lot from Tregysgod. There's a crew. A rough lot, the last recruits to the faith before that Darwin put paid to inno- cence. If the train feels a bit low and bumpy when it pulls into Barry, those boys will have thken off the wheels. Riffs! They should have gone by special camel at seven.'

On crowded days the slogan for each compart- ment was, 'Pack them in, there'll always be time to winkle you out of the woodwork at Barry.' It explains the superb breath-control of many Rhondda vocalists. On a really big treat they in- haled deeply at Penygraig and could not breathe out again until they got to Barry. It was a feeble child who could not get lost in that set-up.

`Where's Merfyn? Stop the train! Wave a flag! Is that him there with the jacket over his head?

Look for him. Oh, there he is. Where was he, Enos?'

`Next compartment. Under that big soprano who tells fortunes. Madame Tetra Thomas. There she was sitting so jocose in the corner of the com- partment, humming "Arise 0 Sun" as she always does at the beginning of a treat., Then she shouts to Mr. Hallet, the guard, "This seat is very lumpy, Hallet." She gets up. There's our Merf. Crushed and blue.'

When the train swung west from Pontypridd our faces lost their defensive frown§ and the sound of children singing spread froin compart- ment to compartment. Children in the bottom layer of the rack were excused.

At Barry some shrewd lads, recalling the showers of pennies and oranges that kindly folk had dropped on them when they got lost the year before, made an instant bee-line for the Lost Children's Pound, and some of the most astute crouching I have ever seen was done by some of us trying to remain lost and hang on in the Pound when our parents came crowding around the wire fence to seek us' out.

The Figure Eight was a magnet for most, with a high percentage of people who were driven half-mad by the uprush of wind caused by the sudden dips and turns of this contraption. One often saw respectable elders trying to stand up in the front seat of the roller coaster, plucking desperately at their layers of, serge, their faces pale as death, slapping their .hands to their brows, shouting 'Take me, 0 God,' and vowing never again to turn their back on Calvin.

The more daring hired bathing costumes. These articles had usually stretched with age and would have given a comfortable lift to a Zeppelin. The lads came thoughtfully out of the hiring shed, these shapeless blue robes hanging from them, looking like a gaggle of druids who have now decided to leave Wales the short way.

`Captain Webb, don't talk.'

`I like a bit of slack myself. I don't like those old tight things.'

`Watch my breast-stroke. What's the pier charge at Weston, boy?'

More than once these bathers laid themselves down on the water, faced in the general direction of the Somerset coast, gave a. tremendous 'jerk of the legs and shot like torpedoes out of their costumes, to a salvo of cautionary shouts from clusters of deacons on the foreshore.

Patient fathers trailed behind their young through the teeming, fascinating booths of the fairground.

look, our Dad. Over there. Death of n. What did he die of, Dad?'

k of support, I suppose.' `Hey Crippe `Lac Shorter days have never been. Through the first shadows we made the journey through the green vale back to the valley. In our compartment we lay thankful, silent, the air charged with the strange smells of repletion and sand. Even the desperate appeals of our mothers had grown weary, husky with acceptance.

`Merfyn, don't you drop your rock in that gentleman's bowler.'

`Hold your chips out of the window, Bron. They're strong.'

`If it's more of that old pop you want, Prue, put your pinny on for pity's sake.'

And plain in the dusk was the face of fulfilment, gentle and wry.

Barry Island has been the jewelled eye in the childhood summers of millions of us, and from its docks has poured a quantity of coal large enough to have left at least three mountains in the north quite hollow. There are few South Walians for whom Whitmore Bay and Bindles Ballroom have not furnished some hook of memory on which to hang a pleasant, evening thought.

Barry is, of course, a Jekyll and Hyde town. It developed rapidly into one of the finest Welsh ports, and it also had a stretch of sand that gave it the glamour of Bali for the herded troglo- dytes dreaming of the sea in the austere terraces of the valleys to the north. Now the docks have passed their zenith of wealth and power. The amount of coal passing through the dock gates would just about keep a vestry warm.

On a sunny day show me a town that has not sent a coach to Barry and I will show you a town with a broken-down, Barry-bound coach being manhandled into making a start. There must be valley-towns where people keep coaches as they once kept rabbits. They come, too, from the very centre of England. It is good to think of the Island doing its best to enrich the culture of the Midlands.

The Island for many Barrians, it would seem, is a kind of secret wound. From certain view- points, let me admit, the Island can be somewhat rasping, but Barry has a dozen other places perfectly designed for the fastidious and the sen- sitive. The latter would rarely see the Island as anything but the Kingdom of the Chip, a hell- ish waste of candy floss, a romp of zanies wear- irig Paper hats printed across with slogans of the

most brazen tone. 'Come on kid, I'm game.' The promenade tradesmen are regularly denounced as a covey of crafty horse-dealers who concede to the town no fair proportion of their gains. The tradesmen angrily retort with a survey of their toil and risks. But the Island is part of the essential Barry. It is what it is because it is the biggest and nearest centre of colourful recrea- tion for a huge industrial hinterland.

On first sight it looks as if you have stumbled on some section of humanity that has abandoned all activity but chewing. In these few acres at least the Welsh jaw has got its own back on the slump. The pattern has not changed greatly since the days of my Sunday school pilgrimages. The old Figure Eight in its new reddish casing looms above the fairground like a temple, and within its tunnelled dips and glides there is a constant litany of delighted gasps.

The mood now is altogether steadier, less apocalyptic, nourished into a nice numb jocosity by an abundance of shillings. There are the same inscrutable platoons of big-shouldered boys knocking the punch-balls so hard that slates drop off in Maesteg. The cafés bulge and the reign of the home-made sandwich is over. No more: 'I've brought the eight kids down with me but Redvers is coming on the next train with the food.' And Redvers would come into sight stooped like a yak under a package of sand- wiches, vast and ill-tied, which would wait for Redvers to touch sand and then spill, ushering in a new era of rough chewing for the Celt.

I walked around the station to see the multi- tudes being entrained for home. The railway offic- ials were as bland and as obliging as ever they were with us. Not as many Sunday schools come now. You no longer get those days when the en- tire body of true believers in the Lower Rhondda descended like hail on the beaches of Barry. And the hour of return was like distribution-day in Heaven. 'Porth Congregationalists, Platform Three, ten past eight. Hafod Baptists, Platform Four, quarter to nine. Ynyshir Seventh Days, Platform One, any time now.' Once a group of wise alecks with me among them tried a simple jape. We approached the official and introduced ourselves: Blaencwm Buddhists.' Back shot the answer : 'Rickshaw from Penarth, two in the morning.'

I walked, at dusk, along the beach. I passed the very spot where in 1923 I almost drowned when serving as a short recruit in a human chain organised to stand in the sea and dredge with our toes for the teeth of the Sunday school superintendent who had swum right out of his loose, hired costume, and had shot his dentures in an explosion of shame.

Whitmore Bay has a warm loveliness. Trample such a place as you may, beauty continues to have the tough persistence of the lugworm. As I stood there a cloud of children squealed in the last mad ecstasy of a long day's freedom. A circle of gulls waited patiently to re-inherit the silent beach and a few of them squawked about the day's litter. The fairground still hummed to staunch those very real hungers felt in lives that have been pressed squat by an excess of disciplined labour and social dreariness. '

These extracts are taken from A Welsh Eye, by Gwyn Thomas, with illustrations by John Dd. Evans, to be published by Hutchinson in October.

© Gwyn Thomas 1964.