Bread and Roses, Part Five: After the Rescue

5.1 After the rescue: the news that drowned the bells

What you remember of Christmas 1910 is not pine and sugar frosting. It is coal smoke staining the sky a grey-yellow, blood in the black slurry outside the pit head, and crying that came in waves against the iron gates. When the carols leaked out through the gaps in the chapel windows they were like strips of cloth cut up by the wind; by the edge of the colliery only broken ends of them were left.

In those days you saw despair. Despair is not a phrase; it has a definite weight. The blanks on the list were like a shaft you could never fill. And it was in that dark that you first pulled yourself out of the cage.

When you took the women down, you watched the flame in the Davy lamp shrink to a point. You heard the singing of “Bread and Roses”; the women of the colliery, a flock of little canaries going down for the first time, pushed the fear back with their throats and took lives out of the hands of death. When that fair head appeared again through the coal smoke, your hope came back with it.

The rescue dragged on into the beginning of 1911. Your father tried to keep the reporters out, tried shutting the telegraph away in its box, tried writing losses as rows of manageable figures. And the news got out through the cracks like coal dust, into the post office, into the newspapers, into the streets of London.

Your picture appeared in the papers: a group of women wrapped in blankets, faces black with coal, lanterns in their hands, standing outside the pit head. The headline was written with too much excitement — “The Unbreakable Welsh Canaries”.

The women of the town crowded round that picture and laughed. “If only we’d washed our faces first,” one of them said. Another poked at the muddy hem in the drawing and teased, “We really ought to have changed our skirts before we went down, or the Londoners draw us like coal scuttles.” The laughter went round the room, touched the black crape in the corner, and sank again.

And it passed, the way a wind passes, without blowing away the names that were missing.

The stoppage lasted only to the end of winter. You could not say whether it was the Baron’s so-called efforts, or whether your father was simply lucky.

That winter, accidents came one after another all over Britain. As though they had once competed in output, the pits that winter competed in the number of the dead. First a dozen or so, then dozens, then hundreds. Telegram followed telegram, and the newspaper columns filled up with black borders. Your town’s disaster very soon stopped being worth looking at; it was pressed down by new headlines and covered over by larger figures, the way an old wound is pushed aside by a newer and more painful one.

London, though, grew warm. People talked about pit disasters in the streets, the papers ran extra editions, and in the Fabian drawing rooms they held teacups and said the system, said the rules and capital. Somebody kept photographs of colliers in a folder like evidence; somebody had the death toll off by heart to use in an argument.

And none of that warmth could keep the colliery from reopening. Your father’s orders stayed short: back to work. Output. Reputation. The books. All of which pushed the matter of your marriage down to something unimportant.

You stood outside the screening shed, roaring again, and heard the hum of the belt filling the air once more. Coal dust came back down onto people’s lashes, onto children’s collars, onto the window sill of the charity school.

And in that moment you seemed to understand: in the rescue, you had torn one opening in the dark, and the dark had not got any smaller for it. It had only moved to another pit head, another family, a bigger figure.

In his office the checkweighman knocked his knuckles on the desk, slowly, one at a time, as though calling a roll. “This isn’t a problem with our one pit. It’s a problem with the whole of their rules.”

You thought of your father’s keep the losses down, of the clang as the gate bar came down. You thought too of that little canary spelled out in knocks under the ground. In that instant the fact that you had saved people had not changed, and it made you see more clearly: you can save people, and you cannot save an age.

Half a year later, spring came late. On the day of the memorial service the grass outside the chapel was pushing up new green, the earth smelled wet, and the bell was dull and long, falling on black crape and on shawls.

You saw Kate in the crowd. She had recovered — apart from a scar left on her face, and a slight limp in the right foot that made her lean a little when she walked, she was still herself. She did not smile at you, and she did not throw a remark at you. You looked at each other across the crowd and neither of you spoke.

And you found suddenly that after a disaster, change is not a pleasant word like making up or forgiving. Change is more like a new hard callus grown over a bone. Her limp, the scar on her face, and the pen in your hand that has written lists and written appeals.

Neither of you can go back.

And you do not want to.

5.2 Ink, money, and names on paper

Late summer, 1911, early morning. Thin mist lies along the low stone houses of the colliery town, and the roar of the screens in the distance reminds you: the dark of that pit in the winter was not carried off by the spring.

The distance between the study and the school is short; this half-year has pushed you over a threshold.

Except that you and Kate are not what you were.

At night you crowd round the small table in the back room of the school. The lamp wick crackles twice and the flame shivers in its glass. Cuttings are spread over the table, their edges furred, coal-dust fingerprints layered one on another.

Kate sits at the corner of the table and holds a pile of cuttings down under a paperweight so the night wind does not lift them. She does not say comforting things, and she does not say thank you. She only pushes towards you what you need. Names, dates, the ways the foreman docks pay, who blocked the road when the pit head was sealed.

Her silence is like a solid beam holding up the shaking of these months.

There are light footsteps outside. When Martha pushes the door open there is still black slurry on her soles; she scrapes her feet twice on the threshold and takes off a layer of wet coal dust. She has a bundle of slips of paper in her arms.

You untie the cord. On the papers are sentences taken down from speech, crooked, letters missing corners, and more often symbols drawn in pencil: house numbers, surnames, dates, the shillings owed. There are coal-dust fingerprints round the edges, print over print, as though a crowd of people had pressed their hopes down on your table.

Martha stands by the lamp and reads them to you one at a time.

“Second Row, number six. Mrs Griffiths, three children, the eldest eleven, already at the screens.” “Number six and a half. The Davieses. Mother’s leg hurt, two weeks’ rent owing, children out of school.” “Numbers six and seven. The one who died the day the tub went over… she wasn’t first on the list, and they paid the least for her.”

You copy every one of them into a cleaner book.

“They say it’s fate.” Martha stops, her voice husky. “Say a pit’s always been like that.”

You do not look up. You finish the last name before you put the pen down.

“Fate needs proving,” you say.

Martha is stopped for a moment. “Proving how?”

You take out from the bookcase a file with slips in it. It is an old habit you brought back from London: marking the clauses with thin strips of paper. You turn to the cold hard wording of the mining regulations and the inquiry reports: ventilation, gas, weighing, stoppages, liability.

“The language they wrote is the language they understand.”

You push a page across to Martha.

“Learn these words. You have to learn to ask: on what grounds do you do this?”

Martha stares at the page. She used to shake when she wrote her name at school; she does not shake now. She puts out a finger and, through the coal-dust prints, moves slowly along the lines.

“Could I learn it?” she asks.

“You have already,” you say. “You remember house numbers, you remember dates, you remember how much they short-paid. What you’re missing is turning those marks into sentences a newspaper can print.”

You pull open a drawer with a stack of envelopes in it and a wallet. There are a few cheques in the wallet, and when you put them on the table Martha’s eyes flicker.

“What are you doing?” she asks, guarded.

You know what she is afraid of. People in the coalfield are afraid of alms, afraid of the kind of kindness that presses a person down. And it is exactly what they lack.

“Money buys column space,” you say. “It pays for printing. It gets a compositor to set our sentences in. It gets a sheet of paper from this town to Cardiff, and even to London.”

Kate speaks then. “They’ll say you’re buying sympathy.”

You look up at her. The lamp jumps once under her lashes and there is a small ring of light in her pupils. You do not argue. You only turn the book to the pages you have just written and let her see the house numbers, the rent owed, the children out of school, the compensation figures, all of it plain.

“We’re not buying sympathy,” you say. “We’re buying a chance they can’t pretend to be deaf through.”

You take a blank sheet; the paper is yellow under the lamp. You begin the first paragraph. You write facts, write times, write the sound of the bar coming down, write the telegraph put away in its box, write the guards holding back the families, write who was crying outside the pit head. You put the air of that day into it: coal smoke, the wet sound of slurry, the rattle of the rope.

Martha stands beside you and watches. At one point you stop and hand her the pen.

“Write this line.” You point at the space you have left. “Write your own name, and then write: I witness this.”

Martha takes the pen and hesitates a moment, and the nib goes down with a very light scratch. She writes her name out in full, and then the two words.

You look at that line, and the fire in your chest does not go out; it has been sealed into every word on the paper instead. The paper is thin, and it can go through a gate bar, through a telegraph line, through an office, through the people in white gloves, and in the end set something alight.

Then you pass the paper to Kate, her eyes shining in the light.

“Write what?” she asks.

“Write what you’ve seen,” you say. “Write the stoppages in the screening shed, write the foreman’s ledger, write how under the sun is used to cut a wage too. Write the knocking you heard the day you went down. Write why you went down.”

Kate takes a breath and takes the pen, and the barrel looks thinner still between her rough knuckles. She writes slowly and does not stop. Her letters are not as handsome as yours, and there is force in them, like a wedge driven into a crack.

The lamp burns lower and the damp on the inside of the glass beads up.

The roaring outside goes on. And for the first time you feel that the roar is no longer only ordering you to be quiet — it is also telling the two of you to leave.

A few mornings later you seal the finished piece into an envelope, the wax still warm and a little soft under your finger.

You stand at the school door, Martha with the book in her arms, Kate with her coat buttoned to the top and her right foot tapping lightly at the ground.

“Cardiff first,” you say. “The march has already begun.”

Martha takes a breath and nods. Kate does not nod. She turns her eyes further off, as though looking at a city none of you have reached yet.

This time she takes your arm, and says quietly, “Don’t look back.”

You do not look back. You will not look back.

You knot your scarf and push the envelope into your bag. Leaving this colliery town does not mean throwing it away. You are only taking the house numbers, the names, the blood and the coal dust out of it, to a bigger city, to where more people will have to hear.

5.3 On the town hall steps: her shout and your law

Spring 1912, Cardiff town hall. The wind in front of the square is like a cold knife, coming out between the flag ropes, pouring into collars, cutting until the skin hurts. The colliers’ cap brims run together into one dark line, shoulder pressed to shoulder, the wet wool in every shade.

Further off the police are drawn up in a long line, standing still, their belt buckles glinting in the cold light; the officials stand further back still, as if nailing the word order to the ground.

You stand at the side of the steps with a few sheets of paper in your palm, the items you wrote last night: a minimum wage; how settlement is calculated; stoppages must have grounds; weighing must be checkable. Martha is half a step behind you with a small book of house numbers and names in her hand, the pages yellowed and curling from use.

Through the roar of the crowd, that figure goes up the steps. Her right foot leans a little and steadies at once. The wind lifts the tail of her coat, lifts her hat and shows the fair hair, and the line of her jaw is set hard. Her eyes go over the crowd, and over the police.

The sheet you handed her is already crumpled in her grip. She is nervous; her hands shake. And she stands there.

“A minimum wage!”

She begins, and the wind takes the sound, and then it goes off like a resonance in the chests of the crowd.

“We want a minimum wage!”

First a low roar, then a bigger echo; fists go up, heads crowd forward, and the slogan knocks about between the stone walls.

The sound gives Kate her courage, and she shouts out the sentences you wrote, one by one:

“How’s the weighing worked out — put it in writing!” “On what grounds do you dock our pay — we want law!” “Who signs the ledger — show us the rule!” “What the foreman calls us — take it back!”

Every line lands and the crowd answers. Hearing it, you think suddenly of beats on a piano. You were taught to put the note down on the right beat; and now Kate has turned the beat into slogans and pressed the slogans into everybody’s breathing.

At the last she lifts a hand and points at the town hall windows. “We’re not here to beg. We’re here for rules!”

“Rules!” the crowd answers, and flags, cheering, placards and a wave of sound come drowning in towards you.

Kate is surrounded by them. Rough palms slap her shoulders and her back; somebody pushes a cap into her hands, as though handing over their courage. She has grown up. She is not the girl of sixteen or seventeen you first met, and not the child who dug her heels in to spite you. She is steadier, cooler, and stronger.

She is pushed along by the crowd, and her eyes are searching all the time, through one layer of cap brims after another, until at last they hit you.

And at this moment she is laughing like a child, and shouts to you, and the sound is drowned and forces its way stubbornly out again:

“Little canary!“

5.4 The Great Pilgrimage: silk banners on Watling Street

“Little canary—!”

The call springs out of the crowd with the stir at the foot of the steps in it, and the frayed edges the wind tears into the syllables. You turn almost by instinct.

Your eyes land on a road full of flower shadows, and the sunlight hurts them. You lift your head, and out of the banked flowers comes a face you know. It is Martha. She is taller, her shoulders sturdier, and when she laughs she is still the child in the school, only steadier now.

She pushes up her hat brim and bites the words deliberately, the way Kate does. “The way you turned round just then — far too quick. You’ve given yourself away.”

You want to say don’t be silly, want to say don’t copy her, and your lips move and nothing comes.

Martha leans closer and lowers her voice, as though pushing a secret into your ear. “You miss her, don’t you.”

You look at her face. Her nose, the line of her jaw — something of Kate in them. And that likeness is not a soft thing; it carries the wind of the valleys and the grit of coal dust, the hardness of having had to grow up early. You understand suddenly that time has not worn the disaster, the strike, the singing under the ground into the past.

Time has only worked them into your bones, so that even the way the two of you walk has changed.

A year is enough to turn a great deal from possible into done.

You remember the wind of 1912 at the foot of the town hall steps, lifting cap brims, making throats ache. After that day the nights of the coalfield were not only the roaring of the screens. Ledgers and lists stacked up in corners, the pages furred from turning. A minimum wage was written out neatly over and over; the items on the stoppages were copied into short sentences and pinned to doors.

Martha grew fast, fast as coal fire going up. Before you knew it she was no longer only carrying slips of paper in at the door, no longer only standing by the lamp reading them to you. She would stop somebody at the mouth of an alley and get it clear from them which street had been short-paid, whose child had been made to go to the screens. The house numbers went into her head first, and the pen came out back at the school, scratching over the paper.

In that year the colliers learned to work together too. Complaints at the pit head were gathered into meetings and representatives, and turned into lists and rules that could be negotiated. They were always arguing about it: who makes contact, who runs to the newspapers, who copies out the stoppage rules from every pit. And at the end of the arguing it always came back to the same word — we. No longer shaking separately, but holding on to one another’s hands, standing shoulder to shoulder, calling out in one voice.

And it was that year that Labour men began to appear more often in letters and conversation. Somebody mentioned London, said there were people there willing to listen, and people willing to go and speak about the pits — in the squares, in Parliament. Though very often one line from the men who matter, we shall return to it later, could stretch your winter out and let the cold go on.

And it was into that cold that Kate went to London. That speech brought her an invitation, and she was going to put herself inside a bigger machine, to learn how its gears bite and how they jam a person.

You stayed in Cardiff. You worked on the ground, at the things that look insufficiently heroic and that somebody has to do: turning rent owed and children out of school into items that can be questioned, turning a foreman’s violence into sentences that can be taken to court. You still lived in coal smoke, still walked past the roar of the screening shed, only you could no longer take order for something that exists naturally. You knew it is written by people, and locked up by people, and can be taken apart by people.

Martha was beside you, busy as a small bee, and you understood suddenly: her work is no longer sweet for somebody else.

You were busy that year too, and only late at night, when everything was quiet, was there time to open the letters from London. The paper was thin, its corners always a little soft, as though soaked by the rain that never stops in London. The ink was blurred here and there as well. And the first line was always clear —

Dear little canary,

Kate’s hand was still not handsome, the strokes marked with the force of them, like wedges knocked into a crack.

She wrote about the streets of London: rain that would not stop, crowds like a tide, carriages and motor cars and trams all mixed together; members’ doors like iron, the union office always in an argument. She wrote about the Labour Party’s meetings, about the people who are listened to, how they turn lives into figures and how the figures turn round and bite them. She wrote about herself: that her right foot aches if she walks a long time, that she does not want you to worry, and so she wrote the ache very lightly, as though afraid the notepaper too would find her a nuisance.

And so, when the summer of 1913 really came, with the sun on the dust hanging over Watling Street, Martha’s “Little canary—!” woke you out of your daze again.

This is the pilgrimage. Martha laughed when she said the word, as though she thought it too solemn; and once you were really on the road you found it is like a pilgrimage: not going to ask for a miracle, but walking yourself, step by step, into testimony.

The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies has organised a non-violent march. Companies from everywhere run like streams from different directions into London, the destination the meeting in Hyde Park. Yours is on an old road, the surface changing between dust and flagstone, with now and then the ghost of an old milestone. Somebody says this road is called Watling Street, and has been stringing towns together for a very long time, and is now stringing you together as well. A modern reader may take it for a line on a map; in your time it is the hard ground under your feet, the dust at the edge of your shoes, and the preciousness of every drink of water along the way.

There are many banners in the line. Silk shines in the sun, as if the colours had been woven into the wind: purple, white and green, the ribbons tied to the poles, the poles warm from palms. Somebody hands out water, and the rim of the coarse cup knocks your teeth and the cool goes down your throat. Somebody else sneers, standing at the roadside, spitting out “women, go home” like spitting. More of them watch you in silence.

Martha wears working trousers with dust on the cuffs, and her stride is long and certain. She carries the smell of bread about her — the solid, heavy strength that exists in order to stay alive.

And you are more like the roses. Not fragile: persistent. You carry the echo of the classroom and the platform; you use language as a weapon and wear not bending as a bearing.

Side by side, the two of you are bread and roses set down together. You do not only mean to survive. You mean to live.

You carry a banner you sewed yourselves. The stitches are not even and the edge has run off the line in a few places, like breaths left in the hurry. On the cloth it says — Bread and Roses. You look at the words, and the singing under the ground comes back into your ears. The lines Martha sang when she was younger:

— Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes —

— Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.

Now the singing has come together again, and it is enormous, magnificent, like a river, pushing you on.

Walking, you are suddenly not quite there.

The colliery town, the chalk dust of the charity school, the bright smashed silver of the ballroom, your father’s orders, the clang of the bar coming down, that little canary spelled out in knocks under the ground — they go past in front of you like a spliced strip of pictures. You had thought all that belonged to the last century, and your fingers still remember the dryness of coal dust and the bone behind your ear still remembers the shudder of the rope. Something new is budding, growing upward. It did not appear all at once. You — the two of you, all of you — brought it into this world a little at a time.

Martha takes a breath beside you and wipes the sweat at her temple and lets the smile out again. “See, you’ve walked all this way and you haven’t gone down.”

You are about to answer, your lips have only just moved, when a call comes from behind you, so familiar that it hurts —

“Little canary!”

The voice comes out of the back of the crowd, pushed along by the wind, like a spark landing in dry grass. Your back tightens and you almost turn round too quickly again. The call is too like Kate, like that first line when she writes from London, like the rhythm she knocked on the pipe underground.

“She made me promise not to tell.”

Martha takes your hand tightly and says it quietly, close to your ear, while you are still flustered.

“She wanted to surprise you.”

You stop. The banner shivers lightly in your hands and the silk makes a small sound. You hear your own breathing, clear and quick, as though there were a canary leaping in your chest.

And slowly, you turn round again.