Free How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn Page B

demands and back them up with
     unanimous support.”
    “That is the trouble,” said my father. “You are a crowd of bits of boys all in the
     thing for what you will get. Demands, you call them. Well, I am against demands of
     any kind. You cannot reason with demand, and where there is no reason, there is no
     sense. As for your support, whatever you call it, some long word, what is the use
     of it?”
    “Unanimous, Dada,” said Davy. “It means altogether. And the use is to make the owners
     give us fair terms.”
    “Unanimous,” said my father, saying it carefully. “Yes. It do sound what it is. A
     collection of dull monkeys who cannot think for themselves. And the people who speak
     for them will have tongues a yard long and nothing else inside their heads. All the
     space will be taken to coil up their tongues. I have met them.”
    “I shall be one of them, Dada,” said Davy.
    “I wonder,” said my father. “At all events, I shall not. That is final.”
    “There will come a day, Dada,” said Davy, “when you will have to.”
    “When that day comes, Davy,” said my father, “I will think about it again.”
    Ivor was with my father from the start. Nothing Davy would say could move him, and
     that caused trouble between them. Davy even stopped speaking to Bronwen because of
     it.
    So indeed for a time we were a happy lot there, with my father acting like a lodger,
     and my brothers doing everything they could to make him be a father, and my mother
     trying all ways to keep them together.
    The owners must have found out that my father was against the union idea, because
     as soon as old Mr. Rhys the Superintendent died, my father was offered his job, and,
     of course, he took it. Being superintendent made my father next to the manager, and
     put up his pay, and made him one of the most important men in the village.
    But at the same time the men began to think he had gone in with the owners, and that
     talk hurt him more than his trouble with Davy. He hated to think that anybody would
     suspect him of being disloyal, especially to the men, but there was no way he could
     fight the talk because it was never said in the open.
    He often spoke to my mother at night and I heard every word. My mother was always
     ready to try to make him happy again, but it was not from her that he wanted it. It
     was from the men, and there was no way of reaching them, because they never came to
     him now as they used to. He noticed the change from the moment his name was put on
     the board.
    For the first few days the men passed him without greeting, except to touch their
     caps civil. But when it passed into two days and more and then a week, and still the
     men were not speaking to him except about matters of work, he began to know that he
     was distrusted. As though he was to blame for being made Superintendent.
    Mama spoke to Davy about it, when she found that nobody would listen to Ivor.
    “Davy,” she said, “what is this about your father?”
    “Well, Mama,” said Davy, and he knew, of course, what my mother meant. “It is this.
     It is very strange Dada was chosen for Super when everybody knows he is my father.”
    “Why is it strange, boy?” my mother asked, with the knife half in and out of the pie.
    “Because I am his son,” said Davy, “and living in the same house. I am the union rebel
     to the owners, and Dada is known to be against me. Why did they choose him instead
     of Tom Davies or Rhys Howells? They are both senior, though they cannot do the job
     better, it is true. Dada was picked to slap my face and the boys who are with me.”
    “There is nonsense, boy,” my mother said, and putting the plates down with a noise.
     “You are like a lot of children with you. Dada has always done what was good and for
     the best. There is no better man in all the valleys. If you do grow up to be one like
     him, God will smile indeed. You tell those fools of men that your father is as much
     for them as he