John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

Maerdy, South Wales

January 1927

Drizzle fell in the faces of the returning men, soaked their clothes, and made the once proud banners behind which they walked yet more sodden. Hobnailed boots clattered on cobbles and the men tramped onward with their eyes straight ahead, not looking at the shop windows they had long shunned, not looking at the eyes of the children bunking off school, not looking at their women watching them. They had fought for longer than anyone else but they had lost and they were all but broken.

The great wheels above the pit had not turned for eight months but now the spokes of the winding gear scissored the sky. The overseers were underground checking for gas in the tunnels, preparing for the first shift. At the colliery gates a mass of police stood in capes, gleaming dully with the wet. Protected from the rain by the eaves of the lodge was a blackboard, pinned on it a type-written list of the men the owners thought fit to return to work. Missing from the list were the names of the troublemakers, the hard-core union men, the Communists, the men who would never work at the pit again.

The line of men came to a stop at the colliery lodge, broke ranks and mingled about. In silence, those at the very front read the list. They moved away, then more and more men came to take in the mineowners’ decree: this man can work, that man can starve. A fresh shudder of rain came in from the black hills, its noise rattling on the tin roof and drowning out the start of the disquiet below.

Soon the disquiet grew. One of the non-men, not on the list, tried to walk through the lodge gate into the colliery and was pushed back by an overseer so forcefully that he fell over, bashing the back of his head on a brick. There he lolled in the mud, groggy and groaning, the whites of his eyes flickering in their sockets. A few of his friends picked him up and took him back to see a doctor but the rest stayed by the lodge, their anger growing. A second overseer started barking orders, giving voice to the silent division written on the blackboard. A pole bearing the Mardy colliery banner smacked down on his head.

As he crashed to the ground, the police moved in a great wet shoal towards the men – and the riot began.

It lasted for hours, a great mess of shoves and pushes, bricks thrown and windows smashed, bones broken and skulls fractured, the men getting the better of the fight for most of the day. There were more than a thousand of them, and only two hundred police.

Towards the end of the day, police reinforcements came from Somerset and Gloucestshire, dozens and dozens of them. That was when things started to look hopeless for the men.

A police van sped downhill to be met by a hail of bricks and stones. It stopped and a lad, but fourteen years old, went to ram a steel pole in the spokes of the van’s back wheel. As he did so, he slipped on the wet, the pole tumbling downhill – and the boy fell awkwardly on the asphalt.

Moments later, a fresh hail of bricks pelted down – and the police driver wrenched the van into reverse, crushing the boy’s skull beneath the rear wheel, sluicing blood and brains over the road. At the sight of it, a young police officer started to retch in the gutter.

A flashgun sparked and a police sergeant came running up to the man with the camera who had captured the accident. The sergeant raised his truncheon to bring it down on the man’s head.

“Give me the camera, butt,” the sergeant said, “or there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Stop!” came the reply. “I’m a reporter from the Western Mail ! ”

“Don’t be stupid, butt,” said the policeman, and the world turned to black.

In the morning, the drizzle was finer but no less depressing. The boy’s house was in one of the poorest streets in the pit village, black drapes in the windows, a black ribbon tied on the door knocker.

Resting his bicycle against the wall, he tapped gently on the knocker and, after a time, the door opened to reveal a tiny girl in a black cotton dress like a doll from Victorian times. For a time, she stared at his face solemnly; then she turned on her heels, and he followed her down a dank unlit corridor to the kitchen at the back of the house. Here, two boys and two girls – all dressed in black, all thin, the oldest no more than ten – sat around a table, their mother tending a kettle on an iron stove.

Without turning around she said, “So?”

“I’m a reporter from the Western Mail .”

“You ever worked down the pit?”

“No. I suffer from claustrophobia.”

“What’s that?”

“Fear of confined spaces.”

Still with her back to him, she said, “We don’t talk to those who haven’t been down the pit. Too many lies have been written about us.”

“Please, I want to tell the story of what happened. I want to report the truth.”

“Listen, mister, I don’t know who you are or which bloody newspaper you work for but this poor house has seen trouble enough.” She turned around and instantly her voice faltered as she studied his face. “Who did that to you?”

A livid blue-black bruise ran from just below his right eyebrow to his jawline, the right lens of his owlish spectacles cracked from side to side. He was short, tough, a little swarthy – “a touch of the gypsy” was how his district editor put it – but he had a sweet, innocent smile that was all the more winning because of the bruising.

He didn’t reply.

“They told me,” she said, “there was a reporter there who took a photograph of my boy when he’d been run over. They say the police beat him senseless and took his camera.”

“That was me. My name is Gareth Jones.”

“Are you going to write a story about what happened, the truth mind?”

“Yes. The truth.”

“His da died in the pit last year, just before the strike. Roof collapse, they said. His da was buried alive scratching a living for his little ones – and the boy they killed yesterday, he was our only hope. Strong lad, like his da, full of mischief. Our only hope and they killed him.”

“It was an… an… an…” Jones’ stammer always came at the worst moments, “an horrible accident,” he finally said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

She invited him to sit down at their table, made him tea and opened up her heart to him. There were times, moved by the passion of her words and the stillness of the children as they sat, listening to every word, that he had to reach for his handkerchief and blow his nose, to hide his emotion. When they had finished talking, the little girl led him down the dank corridor again. As Jones stood by the door, he palmed a five-pound note – almost a month’s wages for him, far more than he could afford – into the girl’s hand. She stared at him curiously as he walked out into the rain.

Jones returned to the district office, cycling the way back to Aberdare, and tapped out his story in dogged silence, the other cub reporters watching him with a kind of awe. When he was finished he stood up, walked over to the district editor and handed him his story.

The district editor had been passed over for promotion to head office in Cardiff so a sourness often gnawed into his soul. After reading the story twice, he shook his head and placed his copy on the spike. “No-one’s going to be bothered about a road accident in Little Moscow,” he said. “Write up that report of the ways and means committee, sharpish.”