When I was younger, I watched the 1976 BBC TV adaptation of this novel, starring Stanley Baker, Sian Phillips, and Nerys Hughes and loved it; I went on to read this book and the three sequels. But this is the first time I have reread the book.
Ii's a coming-of-age novel, a bildungsroman, in which young Huw Morgan grows up into a large Welsh mining family during the later part of the reign of Queen Victoria. The pay of the miners is being steadily eroded by the pit owners and the beautiful green hillsides of the valley are being covered with slag heaps; the river is becoming increasingly polluted and the slag is threatening the houses of the men. There are problems with the unions and there are strikes and children start dying after one strike drags on and on. The tensions threaten to divide Huw's father from his more militant sons. At the same time there are the pressures of the 'chapel' morality that exists in the valley. Huw objects vociferously when a young girl is shamed in chapel for becoming pregnant out of wedlock but shame seems to be one of the principal ways in which good behaviour is enforced within the family and the closed society. The day after Huw is beaten by a schoolmaster, two family friends, prize-fighters, invade the school and beat up the teacher with impunity; Huw's father employs the prize-fighter to teach Huw how to box; later, when Huw attacks a fellow pupil, breaking his jaw, he escapes prosecution. It seems that sexual morality is rigorously enforced but brute violence is encouraged.
The principal characters (Dada, Mama, Bronwen, Mr Gruffydd, and Huw himself) are carefully drawn, in their complexity, although they are always seen from the point of view of Huw, whose understanding develops as he grows. Other characters are more tangentially glimpsed: inevitable, I suppose, when Huw's own family is so large and when you add to that all those who marry into the family and the other villagers. Thus, I found it difficult to distinguish between the characters of Huw's brothers Ivan (the choirmaster), and Ianto and Davy (the union leaders), and Owen (the mechanic), and Gwilym who married the girl that Owen should have married, and while Angharad his sister has a key place to play, I was less certain about the personalities of Ceridwen and Huw's last sister seems to be forgotten almost as soon as she has been born.
But the principal joy of the reading lies in the prose and the descriptions which are lyrical and original. Sometimes, however, the exuberance that is Huw's love for life got in the way of the narrative. For example, I couldn't quite pin down the moment that Huw broke his leg. Nor was I certain whether Ceinwen actually does get pregnant; Bronwen hints at this but it isn't made explicit and later Huw hints that he has no children, again without saying so clearly. It's great to be impressionistic, but I felt that some of these points were important for me to know.
It is never easy working out exactly how old Huw is at any moment in the narrative but he seems sexually innocent and naive for far too long, not knowing how babies are made even after witnessing a woman giving birth. He has scarcely learned the facts of life before he is having sex on the mountainside. The morality is a little inconsistent although I feel that is an accurate depiction of the quandary that is adolescence.
The strength of this book, which I suspect is what made it a best-seller in 1939 when it was first published (and a feature film in 1941), is the wonderful joie de vivre depicted in the descriptions of the taste of food and the beauty of the countryside (and the pleasure of sex). Llewellyn writes like a mixture of Dylan Thomas and Laurie Lee: the prose is lyrical and musical.
Selected quotes:
- “There was never any talk while we were eating. ... And that way, I think, you will get more from your food, for I never met anybody whose talk was better than good food.” (Ch 1)
- “If I had not started to think things for myself and find things for myself, I might have had a happier life judged by ordinary standards, and perhaps I might have been more respected.” (Ch 3)
- “There must be some way to live your life in a decent manner, thinking and acting decently, and yet manage to make a good living.” (Ch 3)
- “It is a pity that real, well-meant tears cannot come with out the sounds that go with them. The scrapings in the throat, the fullness of spittle, the heavy breaths and halting, gulping sighs, are not fitted to be the servants of heart-felt grief.” (Ch 5)
- “He always said that God sent the water to wash our bodies and air to wash our minds.” (Ch 5)
- “All along the river, banks were showing scum from the colliery sump, and the buildings, all black and flat, were ugly to make a hurt in your chest.” (Ch 5)
- “There is a good dripping toast is by the fire in the evening. Good jelly dripping and crusty, home-baked bread, with the mealy savour of ripe wheat roundly in your mouth and under your teeth, roasted sweet and crisp and deep brown, and covered with little pockets where the dripping will hide and melt and shine in the light, deep down inside, ready to run when your teeth bite in.” (Ch 5)
- “It was then that I had thoughts about Christ, and I have never changed my mind. He did appear to me then as a man, and as a man I still think of him. ... If he had been a God, or any more son of God than any of us, then it is unfair to ask us to do what he did.” (Ch 7)
- “The clock rocked away, seeming to get louder at every stroke, as though it were rowing time towards us, until I was wondering why it was never heard at other, ordinary, times.” (Ch 8)
- “There is a fright you will have to stand up before lines of faces that have become wet and shaky through the nervous water in your eyes. Your mouth is dry, with sand on the tongue and in the throat, so that your breath comes hot and sore with you. Then it is time to sing and you have forgotten the words. Each one has grown a wheel and rolls away from you down into the pit of Forgot.” (Ch 10)
- “Beautiful was the valley this afternoon, until you turned your head to the right. Then you saw the two slag heaps.” (Ch 11)
- “Foolish is the mind of man to make bogeys for itself and to live in terrors of fear for things which lack the substance of truth.” (Ch 11)
- “So we breathed, both of us on top of the mountain, while the mists went to purple and rose, and the sun burnt through and covered us both with warmth and came out across the Valley in such strength that we could not bear to look. So it may be, I think, when we meet God. But worse.” (Ch 11)
- “In the clerking jobs we were supposed to dress like princes on the money of a maggot.” (Ch 12)
- “Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes at the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.” (Ch 16)
- “The everyday things, those little jewels that stud the action of living, we're making themselves known. A blister on the heel, sweat about the neckband, a wrinkle in the stocking, were coming to mean more than the feelings brought forth by that which filled the little white coffin.” (Ch 17)
- “O, Brandy Broth is the King of Broth and royal in the rooms of the mouth. ... Drink down the liquor and raise your eyes to give praise for a mouth and a belly.” (Ch 18)
- “It is strange how you should hate the man, and yet pity him from the depths.” (Ch 19)
- “One night I heard a choir of a thousand voices singing in the darkness, and I thought I heard the voice of God. Then children began to die.” (Ch 20) What a juxtaposition!
- “Poverty is not a virtue, any more than poverty of the spirit. Life is good, and full of goodness. Let them be enjoyed by all men.” (Ch21)
- “I found a risen newness pillared in my middle, yet, for all its newness, so much a part of me that no surprise I had, but only a quick, sharp, clear glorying that rose to a shouting might of song in every part of me and drew tight the muscles of my body, and as the blood within me thudded through my singing veins, a goldness opened wide before me, and I knew I had become of Men, a Man.” (Ch 24) Huw’s first erection.
- “There is good to see happy faces round a table full of good food. Indeed, for good sounds, I will put the song of knives and folks next to the song of man.” (Ch 24)
- “No pig fits his skin better.” (Ch 24)
- “What is there, in the mention of the Time To Come, that is so quick to wrench at the heart, to inflict a pain in the senses that is like the run of a sword, I wonder. Perhaps we feel our youngness taken from us with the soothe of sliding years, and the pains of age that come to stand unseen beside us and grow more solid as the minutes pass, are with us solid on the instant, and we sense them, but when we try to assess them, they are back in their place in Time To Come, ready to meet us coming. ... Sad, sad is the thought that we are in for a hiding in every round, and no chance to hit back, fighting blind against a champion of champions, who plays with you on the end of a poking left, and in the last round puts you down with a right cross to kill.” (Ch 28)
- “The mouth reaches for newer fruit that seems to be near, but never to be tasted. The fingers are intent on searching to soft places, but the senses are too far from their tips and impatient of their fumblings. And at the middle, where the arrow steel is forged, there is a ruination of heat that seems to know, within itself, that coolness will come only in the hotter blood of woman. There is itch to find the pool, twisting to be free to search, momental miracles of rich anointments, sweet splendours of immersion, and an urgency of writhings to be nearer, and deeper, and closer. In that kissing of the bloods there is a crowding of sense, when breathing is forgotten, muscle turns to stone, and the spinal branch bends in the bowman's hand as the singing string is pulled to speed the arrow. ... Then the tight-drawn branch is weak, for the string has sung its song, and breath comes back to empty lungs and a trembling to the limbs. Your eyes see plainly. The trees are green, just the same as they were. No change has come. No bolts of fire. No angels with a flaming sword. Yet this it was that left the Garden to weeds. I had eaten of the Tree. Eve was still warm under me.” (Ch 30) Huw loses his virginity.
- “I knew from the way she said it, without feeling, an opening of the mouth with one word after another on a string, all the same size and weight, that it was no use to ask why. A wasting of time.” (Ch 31)
- “The air was a stink of blueness, sharp with the heat of bodies, and with the weight of puddled beer drying into boards that never knew soap and water, and soured with tobacco spit.” (Ch 37)
- “Born in the image of God, they were, every one of them, and some loving woman having pains of the damned to bring them forth, to sit there with their mouths open, like calves under the net in the market-place.” (Ch 37)
- “Big jaws he had, that seemed to come out of his chest without help of a neck.” (Ch 37)
- “For please to tell me what is better to look at than a lovely woman, and I will come from my dinner to see.” (Ch 40)
- “There is a wholeness about a woman, of shape, and sound, and colour, and taste, and smell, that you will want to hold tightly to you, all, every little bit, without words, in peace, with jealousy for the things that escape the clumsiness of your arms. So you feel, when you love.” (Ch 41)
March 2024; 447 pages
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