TWISTED GILDED GHETTO

BY ERIC PAGE

Waves of Silence

Annwfyn and I had grown up together, been born on the same day. Living in the Welsh valleys there was endless opportunity for adventure and for rain. The lush deep green of the mountains and riverbanks caught this verdant opulence from the frequent rains drawn down from the Atlantic clouds by the mountains, which curved around the valley, walling us in, in our soft, green prison. Annwfyn and I had spent that summer building dens, weaving towered bracken and laying down a thick carpet of pine needles that we’ve carried across the stream from the scented darkness of the forest.

This was the ‘70s; behind the green curtains the old industrial waste lands of South Wales were breathing their last rusty groan. Coal mines, steelworks, rolling mills, quarries and huge fantastical mechanical monsters which shuttled the raw materials in buckets the size of buses along the cables stung across the valleys. Now gone, the soft ghosts of heritage have taken their place, the river runs with trout, not coal dust, the mines are museums, the rolling mill sill, the quarries filled with their own bones and forested over for 40 years, the steel works replaced by gleaming hospitals built on the only flat land for miles. It’s this silence which always startles me when I return, the churning, clanking, clanging, blasting noise only exists in my memory, the only industry now the busy bees.

Annwfyn had pinched some rope; we’d climbed to make a swing in one of the huge old oaks hugging the steep slopes. Early October, still warm enough, the hedgerows full of nuts and huge sweet blackberries. We climbed the tree and tied the ropes when the rains came in. Shrieking under the sheets of water we dashed into one of the old mine openings, dark solid openings in the granite, long disused, often home to toads and bats and curtained with glistening cobwebs, there were shelters.

We obviously knew not to go too far inside, knew the danger of the endless abandoned industrial scars going back before the Romans. It rained on, the path turned to a brown slurry of leaves, twigs and flowers, our flowers floated in slow circles in the puddle, our faces streaked with rain, laughing at the torrents when the grumbling started, the deep dissatisfied groan of slagheap and shale shifting. Within a moment Annwfyn and I were chest deep in cloying sludge, trapped by the sucking mud. Fear froze the moment into my mind, I can see her looking at me, trying not to panic, holding my hand. The rain stopped, for hours calling, crying, getting very, very cold, then night came...

I’d never been so scared in all my life. Annwfyn sang to me to keep my spirits up, and then sleep took us. A hard slap woke me, the light burning my eyes, strong arms reaching, pulling me up, blankets, towels, wiping, wrapping me, thrown onto a blanket I was carried down the mountains. We’d been missed, the dogs had been sent out, searching all night. Cwn Annwn had sniffed us out, the hound of Annwfn we called it. Annwfyn’s huge dog led the frantic rescue party to us, or so I’d thought.

In the yard my mother stood holding Annwfyn’s mother, weeping. They’d found her body first, she’d been swept away by the torrent before the toxic slurry closed around me. Drowned. She’d never been holding my hand all through the night, keeping me safe, singing soft songs to keep me awake, telling me everything would be OK, that we’d be found soon. I’d felt her hand in mine all through that long night, told the policewomen who looked away sadly at Annwfyn’s mother. “Shhhhhhhhh,” she said, “you hit your head, imagination, she was never there”. At her funeral that cold October morning, my arm in a heavy plaster cast, I heard a snatch of song from across the valley, coming from deep in the darkness of the pines and a giggle. I smiled to myself and learned to be exquisite and never explain.