Free The Line Between Us by Kate Dunn Page B

grey tea Ma was bearing in my direction.
    “Well, you know now,” she said grimly. “The pit owners want to reduce pay even further, on account of Germany giving their coal to France for free because of the war; it’s always because of the war.” She sounded aggrieved, as though she had been cheated of something. “The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain is drawing a line, though. Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day. It says it there, in the paper. I’ll stand by that.”
    “It won’t affect many people in Morwithy, will it?” I sipped my tea dubiously. “Ianto Pryce’s family, maybe, but mostly we’re farming folk.”
    “Ifor,” my sister upbraided me, “it’ll affect us all, every man Jack of us. They’ll squeeze us till the pips squeak, then they’ll go on squeezing after that.”
    “Keep your hair on!”
    “You’ve been working up at Nanagalan for too long. You’ve turned native,” she snapped.
    That stung me. “Look –”
    “Now, now,” said our mother. “Lay the table, will you, there’s a boy.”
    Delyth’s words stayed with me. I thought of the hours I worked in God’s fresh air with the weather in my face and the light streaming into the valley. I couldn’t begin to picture the black of the coal face, a darkness so intense that it blinded the ponies who toiled in it. I thought what would happen to our precarious household if our income was docked by a quarter: thin soup a little thinner, meat and two veg reduced to just two veg. And the twice-brewed tea? How far could we make that go?
    The day that eight hundred thousand men were locked out of the mines because they wouldn’t accept new terms, a general strike was called. Delyth downed tools straight away and refused to go to work.
    “You’re not going up to the house,” she said in disbelief, when I came down in my working clothes.
    “Someone’s got to,” I said, hunting for some cheese on the cold shelf, so I could make a sandwich for my lunch. “We’ve got to eat,” I added pointedly, when all I could find was a small piece of Double Gloucester pared back to the rind.
    “You’re a scab.”
    The words were so quiet I wasn’t certain that I’d heard them. I turned to face her, to be sure. “What?”
    She gave me a look of scalding contempt. She didn’t need to repeat herself. I wrapped the sandwich in my handkerchief, making brisk folds in the material and pressing them flat meticulously. “You go your way,” I said when I could fold the thing no more, “and I’ll go mine.”
    Samuelson skived off, never one to miss a chance, though his only notion of solidarity was to himself, so I went down to the vineyard to finish off the tying in I’d been busy with the day before, removing the side shoots on the vines and training the principals between the wires so the sun could get at them. I liked the rhythm of it: the snipping and the reaching and the twisting. I worked for an hour or two, making my way along the slanting hillside, up one row and down another, interrupting the bees, humming myself.
    At the top of the slope the front door slammed and you came running through the Herbar out onto Dancing Green, another young lady at your side and I could hear the two of you laughing. You had a couple of racquets and some tennis balls and you began knocking them about and I kept my head down and made my way along another row, listening to the thwack and twang as you returned the balls to each other. From time to time I glanced in your direction, following the swallow flight of your run as you darted hither and thither, your hair like a banner in the breeze.
    I heard the miss hit, the dull groan of the racquet, before I saw the ball soar down the hillside towards me.
    “Ifor,” you called, laughing. You didn’t need to ask. I found the ball in the lumpy grass between the vines a few rows down and made my way up the hillside, tossing it and catching it, tossing it and catching it, until I reached you and I