The Island of Apples

By Glyn Jones

The Island of Apples is a brilliant study of a pre-adolescent boy's romantic imagination and dangerous enthralment, set vividly in the south Wales of Methyr Tydfil and Carmarthen in the early twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781783161270

Glyn Jones

Glyn Jones was born in 1905. One of the giants of twentieth-century Welsh writing, he published novels, poetry, short story collections, translations and works of criticism until his death in 1995. He received several awards for his contributions to literature in Wales. Brought up in a Welsh-speaking, chapel-going family, Glyn Jones was educated in English, which remained his primary writing language, although he read and spoke fluent Welsh. The first chairman and then vice president of Yr Academi Gymreig (English section), he was deeply concerned with supporting the literature of both languages.

Book preview

THE ISLAND OF APPLES

The Island of Apples

GLYN JONES

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2011

© Glyn Jones, 1965

©Introduction, John Pikoulis, 2011

First published 1965 by J.M. Dent & Sons

Revised Edition published 1992

New Edition published 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-2429-5

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-127-0

The right of Glyn Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Glyn Jones and The Island of Apples

Glossary

T

HE

I

SLAND OF

A

PPLES

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Glyn Jones and The Island of Apples

‘Could all this have happened? Was it true, was it real, or only a dream?’ (p. 286)

I

In 1965, five years before the translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude introduced English-language readers to a modern version of magic realism, Glyn Jones published The Island of Apples (London: J. M. Dent and Sons). It is a no less dazzling example of the same kind. Like Márquez, he mixes the fantastic with the real, revealing character not through close psychological examination but shifting narrative patterns while approaching his themes only indirectly. Sometimes, the focus is on the everyday, sometimes on parodies of the kind of stories that were popular at the time of the novel’s setting, the early twentieth century. The tone veers from the colloquial to the passionate, from the farcical to the poetic, with particular emphasis on minute physical description, to the point of the grotesque, as if what fascinated Jones also repelled him.

Particularly striking is his use of suspended narrative. A story is begun only to be suspended for pages or chapters before being picked up again, adding to the air of mystery. This rambling, interrupted style converts episodes into pegs onto which various diversions can be hung. A character appears and then vanishes, thereafter weaving his way through the action in carefully chosen episodes, teasing the reader. Or he appears in ‘magical’ guise in one episode and realistic in another. Or he remains hidden from the reader so effectively as to become almost invisible.

Throughout the storm of sense impressions and general folderol, an argument emerges and it is this that binds the material into a unity. The reader is forced to play detective, chasing various threads that lead to the novel’s ultimately tragic conclusion. In a very real sense, it is the reader who gives shape to The Island of Apples.

On its original publication, Jones explained the meaning of his book thus:

‘The Island of Apples’ is Avallon, or Avilion, or Ynys Afallon, in the Celtic mythology the island of eternal youth. The story deals with the arrival in a beautifully situated Welsh valley of a handsome, accomplished, glamorous and fantastically brave young stranger, and the effect of his presence on a group of boys who become his friends.

That is the book’s plot, but by no means the whole of the story. First, the reader needs to identify who the stranger is who comes to Ystrad (alias Merthyr Tydfil, where Jones was born in 1905), why he comes and what effect he has on others. Above all, The Island of Apples is a story of youth, its ardours and hopes, suffer­ings and joys. The epigraph is drawn from T. Gwynn Jones’s ‘Ymadawiad Arthur’ (the Departure of Arthur): ‘Ynys Afallon ei hun felly’ (it is only the island of Avallon which is like that). This refers to King Arthur who, after his death, was carried to Avallon and restored there before preparing to return. In The Island of Apples, Avallon is Ystrad, a place and a state of mind, one no sooner discovered than threatened.

Glyn Jones wrote three novels in all. The first, The Valley, the City, the Village (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1956), tells of Trystran Morgan, who lives in Ystrad with his grandmother and uncle before going to university. Discussing his prospects with his headmaster, he tells him:

the thing I enjoy most in the world is looking at things and light and handling paints and paper and trying to put down what I can see, sir: I hope that’s not wrong, sir? (p. 86)

It is not, but it means he is regarded suspiciously by a society that had not seen his like before. For Trystran, nature does not offer a site of beauty or moral inspiration – he would much prefer squashed slugs and bumpy clouds to Wordsworthian uplift – and he sees people as objects, not sentient beings. ‘O for a life of sensa­tions rather than of Thoughts’, he might say with Keats – or, at any rate, thoughts that are sensations. As his university friend, Gwydion, says: ‘the artist is the creator of values but only of artistic and not moral values’ (p. 171). It is the artist alone who grants meaning to life.

Though a boy of the mildest temper, Trystran is a misfit, then. His grandmother wants him to be a minister, a man of the people, but she treats Ystrad as a revealed reality; for him, it is constructed, the result of Merthyr’s extraordinarily rapid transformation from rural enclave to industrial powerhouse in the preceding century. And what has been constructed can be deconstructed before being constructed again.

Such differences emerge in his description of her ‘mangled hands’.

They were red and rugged, the hands of a labourer, their knotted erubescence evidenced familiarity with the roughest work … Often, when I was older, and knew the meaning of those bony and inflexible knuckles, the large inflammatory fingers, I turned my gaze from them with shame and pity and watched my own painter’s hand, culpable, indulged and epicene, as it moved adroitly in the perfect glove of its skin. (p. 10)

Granny’s hands prompt pity and shame in him. They are a labour­er’s hands whereas his belong to one who has escaped the grind of life as from gendered existence. ‘Epicene’ implies that he is sexless. Though he experiences emotion of a physical kind, it comes to him faintly, like a rumour from a distant country, and he is unsure how to respond to it, not because he is repressing his instincts or hiding from them but because the pulse beats so low in him. He is an eunuch for the kingdom of art.

That is why he sees Granny’s hands as ‘erubescent’. A painful reality is granted a picturesque sheen, the thing itself disappearing beneath his description of it (especially if the reader has to chase up the meaning of the word in a dictionary). Hands that might inspire indignation in others merely intrigue Trystran. As Gwydion remarks: ‘The sole function of art is to give us the thrill of non-recognition; of life the thrill of recognition’ (p. 170). In life, people confront the familiar, in art the unfamiliar. Thus it is that, in The Island of Apples, evening clouds are compared to layers of smoked haddock – the bizarrer the comparison the better. Granny exists to feed Trystran’s dandyism. He reflects:

The desired hold of innocency was still then powerful upon me. The generations of my grandmother and my uncle, faithful to the reticent and fastidious Puritanism in which they were nurtured, saw childhood as symbolic of some Edenish inno­cence and so cherished it, accepting regretfully the signs of its departure. So in the serene and mellow atmosphere of their home I awaited, with instinctive misgivings, manhood and initiation. I dreaded lest these should mean my exit from the angel-encircled garden of which I felt myself to be an occupant. (p. 33)

That is the theme of The Island of Apples. For Trystran, staying a child is the pre-condition of his ability to function as an artist, for it preserves his capacity to respond to things at their freshest. The prospect of growing up fills him with dread, as if he were being carted off to the guillotine in a tumbril.

Granny may have understood something of his distress for, at the end of the novel, she comes back from the dead to pronounce the following verdict on him:

‘You are the third generation of your race to read books. You are the second to live without the fear of poverty and old age. You are the first to choose the work you wish to do’ (p. 313).

II

Jones’s second novel, The Learning Lark (1960), deals with Dewi Davies, a teacher at the Penn Street secondary school in Treniclas (alias Ystrad). However, his heart is not in it and neither is his author’s. The Jonesian hero belongs not with teachers but their pupils, not with adults but with the very young. The Island of Apples seizes on that logic.

It opens at a very specific point of time: the end of Dewi Davies’s second year at grammar school, when he is twelve or so, on the cusp of adolescence. The crisis is upon him: will he be forced to leave his island of apples or will he make a stand? Can he stay young, fed as he is by his eyes, or mature? Of course, this is a battle that cannot be won, save symbolically. Rather, it would represent a triumph over himself. In the year of the book’s publi­cation, 1965, Glyn Jones was sixty; in the same year, he retired after a lifetime of teaching. Remarkably, The Island of Apples does not recall boyhood so much as recreate it. No space exists between the novel’s ‘now’ and ‘then’, no afterglance of reminiscence to tell past from present. There is only what was and now magically is again and will go on being, a continuum of child-time rather than a sequence of development.

The Island of Apples has a fabulous story to tell. One day, Dewi Davies wakes up to find that something strange has happened to him: the imagination has entered his life or, rather, swum into it, for the memorable opening sentence (as memorable as any that has been written) reads: ‘The first time I ever saw Karl Anthony he was floating down past our house in the river’ (p. 3). The reader is immediately hooked. In a book full of sensational events, this is undoubtedly the most sensational. Like a Puck or Ariel, Karl enters Dewi’s life and reveals his destiny. He is his alter ego or epipsyche (a twin or hidden self). ‘No one in the valley knows anything about me, Dewi’ (p. 156), he says, as if voicing his own thoughts. Dewi instinctively responds to him: ‘although I had never spoken to him he filled my thoughts all the time, he was like someone I had already known for years, who had always been there, ever since my childhood’(p. 59).

In fact, Karl is his childhood, or an idealized version of it, a fantasy projection without whom he would stay colourless. Indeed, readers might be forgiven for not noticing that he exists. He is the disappeared hero, one who vanishes into his patchwork of tales, throwing attention onto others, like John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.

Though outwardly bland, however, Dewi fizzes in his head. It is his undeclared wishes that drive the novel to its conclusion, one that is as remarkable as its opening. Having arrived in a flood of water, Karl departs in like fashion, again apparently dead following the wreck of his yacht, the Tir na n-Og (or Land of Youth). The muse-figure who has come to alter his life forever now moves on to touch the lives of others. He is the mutable spirit of creativity, cipher and portent, and ceaselessly mobile.

In the novel, Jones gives him some realistic colouring by turning him into a sixth former. His grandfather was born in Ystrad and became an opera singer, his parents have vanished and he returns who-knows-why from who-knows-where trailing tales from a Europe reminiscent of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. A character from one fiction steps straight into another.

In Ystrad, Karl embarks on more adventures. None is more exciting than his climb of the ruined viaduct, the Nannies. This repeats vertically his floating down the Nant at the start. It is a tour de force of description that prompts a simple question: why does he do it? The answer appears to be: because he wants to, just as he likes scaling mountains, crossing bridges, leaping over rocks and galloping horses. Even so, it might not actually happen. The Island of Apples repeatedly plays on the confusion between appear­ance and reality. It could not be otherwise, for Karl himself may not exist, being more the product of wishful thinking.

After crawling, swaying, gripping and scrambling his way to the top, he enjoys a view of the valley such as no one has enjoyed before:

what a sight it was, hundreds of feet in the air, and what a blissful feeling. I forgot all about my bleeding hands in the cool breeze there, and my boiling hands. I saw that newly risen moon through the long stems of hay, a new moon lolling back above the rim of the valley, misty in a fume of glowing lemon. Far, far below, the night lay deep over the earth, it was like looking down into the black waters of a mysterious lake, thick and dark and tranquil, between the sides of the mountains. Up the valley, all Ystrad was dressed with lights, the small intense seedlings of the roadside lamps stretched out in a vast rigid pattern upon the earth, and the little heaps of the town lights floated everywhere, small intense clusters glittering in the over­all phosphorescence, showing where the shops were, or the pits; I saw laid out upon the dark floor of the valley the fallen constellations, the crystal skeleton of Ystrad, the diamond anatomy of the town. (p. 148)

This insistent writing caresses its subject in an attempt to pene­trate to its ‘crystal skeleton’, its deep structure. Karl literally enacts what the artist does imaginatively.

No wonder Dewi likes him so much. Trapped in Ystrad’s all-too-depressing reality, he develops a crush on him much as a second-former might over a sixth-former who is captain of rugby, victor ludorum and star of the school’s annual musical produc­tion. With his crew-cut, snowy hair (it turns gold later, lending him a god-like air, before becoming a pale straw colour ‘with a flare of red in it like ripe grass’ (p. 224)), with his silver earrings, silk crimson sash, brown riding boots and black tooth, he is far removed from the stereotypical image of the Merthyr schoolboy. They are the outward signs of his inner virtue. Even so, the head­master in The Learning Lark is said to have ‘purple hair, a purple suit, and purple tattoo marks on his wrist’ (p. 22), so he may not be as unusual as all that.

Once in Ystrad, Dewi begins his mission of destruction. That is the undeclared narrative of The Island of Apples, one that lies beneath the stories of Dewi’s family and his friends. Dewi/Karl has several enemies. The most important is Time, the agency that is carrying him away to the future. He does away with Time by whiling it away, climbing the Nannies, causing fires to erupt in the sky and leading expeditions to the country. He is the anarch who obeys no laws. After Time come figures of authority such as the headmaster, Roderick (‘Growler’) and Dewi’s parents. The Island of Apples represents a boy’s revolt against those who, in Philip Larkin’s words, fuck you up, the same revolt Holden Caulfield conducts against the ‘phonies’ in The Catcher in the Rye. The idealized image of Welsh family life receives a fatal blow.

Dewi’s parents, Jack and Carrie Davies, own the now-defunct Dragon Mills, which they run as a business trading in woollen goods, hats, boots, suits and the like. Jack is a mild, inoffensive man, the sort who inspires pitying contempt in his son. Stumpy, hairy-chested, moustachioed and pince-nez’d, he is, for the most part, quietly occupied and utterly ineffective. Perhaps that is how all fathers appear to their sons at one time or another. Carrie Davies, however, is very different, a dominatrix with ‘a temper that went up like a fire of shavings all the time’ (p. 76). Dewi thinks her purpose in life is to humiliate him. ‘She always enjoyed making a fool of me, I was sure of that’ (p. 31). The grumbling tone masks the seriousness of his objection. ‘My mother used to give me the worms with her bossiness’ (p. 38).

On her first appearance in the novel, Carrie is described as ‘stately, and tall as a policeman’ (p. 26): ‘she liked everything to go on what she thought was normal. When anything a bit out of the ordinary happened she went mad’ (p. 27). Perhaps her passion for the ordinary inspires the opposite tendency in him. There are more things in heaven and earth than exist in his mother’s philosophy.

Some children feel that nothing they do can please their parents. Disapproving faces regard them with a look of disappointment which is as permanent as the snow in Siberia. There is no hope that they can change their minds; the best they can hope for is the avoidance of their active displeasure. Correction reaches them loudly and frequently and leaves them fearful for their lives, their emotional lives if not their physical ones (if the two can be told apart).

When I was smaller, and my granny didn’t have anything special to do, she would place the palm of her hands flat on each side of my head and lift me off the ground like that. She was strong through breathing a lot, my father told me, and singing contralto, but it sounded more like double bass to me. But strong arms or not, that was all over now, I would never again have that terrible feeling that just when my boots were leaving the floor, my body would drop off at the neck and leave my head between my granny’s hands. (p. 122)

Granny’s hands, again! They are the stuff of nightmare.

What Granny begins, Carrie continues. Dewi recalls her appearing in a crimson helmet-like hat with golden hatchet trim­ming: ‘what with her black looks and her crackling eye it made me think she was going to chop my face in two’ (p. 195). Again, ‘when our glances crossed I could hear in my head the sharp hiss of steel like swords clashing together’ (p. 196).

The result is that he is an annihilated being, all his feelings driven into himself. His resentment gathers force until Karl arrives to rescue him or, rather, his resentment creates Karl.

Two things follow: in trying to rescue him from the Nant, Jack Davies falls in and catches an infection that will kill him. Dewi makes the connection explicit: ‘it was through rescuing him my father had died’ (p. 154).) Then Carrie sickens and dies. Symbolically, Karl finishes both of them off, enacting what Dewi secretly desires. After his mother’s death, Dewi cannot imagine her as a girl or corpse – scarcely human at all.

When Jack falls into the Nant, Carrie orders Dewi to hand him his nightshirt, his own having been packed for the following day’s excursion to Abergarth. By way of return, she gives him her bathing costume, a one-piece affair in serge which is as rough as sacking to his skin. It is the kind of routine humiliation she subjects him to. Jack Davies may have sensed something of his son’s unhappiness for he buys him a glass coach (reputedly once a bishop’s) which Dewi uses as a glass summer house where he can

hide from that terrible scream of my mother’s that seemed to reach me all over Ystrad, and that used to make me sweat in my dreams – ‘Dewi! Dewi!’ a screech louder than the old caca­hawk’s in the Pantglas woods. (p. 41)

After being rescued, Karl vanishes, leaving behind a jewel-encrusted dagger. It is his Excalibur, the sword King Arthur (another ‘K.A.’) received from the Lady of the Lake and which protected him against defeat. Dewi immediately assumes it is meant for him and smuggles it under his coat. It is for him both a beautiful object, with its curved blade and ornate handle fash­ioned from two serpents and elaborately encrusted with jewels, and a weapon. Having been raised in an industrial wasteland, he has experienced little beauty and even less hope of discovering a more rewarding way of life. Karl gives him both. Again, Karl seems to voice his own thoughts when he says:

I hate everything about my life here, this madhouse, Growler’s paltry school, the valley, everything. I am homesick for nobility, and honour, Dewi, weary of the pettiness, of all that is common and vulgar, and the small satisfactions, do you know what I mean? – parched for a glimpse of the mysterious brightness burning at the back of the sun. That world is my home. (p. 229)

III

Glyn Jones described his own relations with his mother in his Foreword to Goodbye, What Were You? (Llandysul: Gomer, 1994):

My mother lived into her 90s and I never lost that infantile awe which what I saw as her sternness and her remarkable good looks inspired in me. She was deeply religious, brave, kind and with a will of iron. Her satisfaction at whatever success I achieved as a writer was, I think, muted – she would probably have preferred me to have been a minister or missionary. In my relations with her I always experienced a constraint, of inad­equacy, a sense that I was not living up to what was expected of me. (pp. xi–xii)

This is the emotional nexus of the novel and it is further amplified by the portrait of his father as a man who was convinced of the vanity of life. This, ‘plus his own bland and generous tempera­ment ensured that he would accomplish nothing’ (p. xi). A grim verdict. In The Dragon Has Two Tongues (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1968), Jones describes his father as ‘at once a great sceptic and a romantic dreamer’ (pp. 21–2).

There was a fourth member of the family, however: Glyn’s brother, David: ‘My brother, four or five years older than I was [a revealing inexactitude], a fine athlete, as a young man handsome, clever, charming, always seemed to me nearer to my mother’s idea of what a son should be’ (p. xii). That nicely mixes appreciation with resentment. David may have provided the kernel for Karl, the companion who is also a stranger. Karl repeats David’s virtues as well as the age difference between them while freeing them from their bourgeois-materialist connection. In Karl, Jones fash­ioned someone he could admire unhesitatingly.

IV

After Carrie’s death, arrangements are made for Dewi to live with his aunts further down the valley. Until then, he is boarded with Titus Powell, a macabre figure, outwardly respectable but living ‘very close to the ground’ (p. 84). His eldest girl is a hunchback, one son a cripple, another a stammerer and another a dirty boy whose face is covered with blackheads. The plot might have been engineered to reach this precise conclusion for at Academy House he shares the top-floor apartment, decked out like a tent, with Karl. (Dewi calls it ‘the indoor camping life’ (p. 238).) Anticipating the moment, he says: ‘if my granny had her way, I would be living with Karl. In the house of the madman and the murderer’ (p. 178). ‘Murderer’ might refer to Mr Powell, whom Rees Mawr, the Dragon Mills’s warehouseman, considers a murderer for having forced a child on his wife every twelvemonth, but also to Karl, for it is at Academy House that they seal their friendship and prepare the final assault against the elders: the burning of the headmaster, Growler’s, house, and his murder.

The animus against Growler is explained by the fact that he repeats at school the role played by Carrie at home. (By no coin­cidence, Carrie was once a headmistress, as was Glyn Jones’s mother.) Dewi observes: ‘he thought he knew everything about everything’ (p. 108), implying a further objection when he adds: ‘I couldn’t bear the touch of him, and he always seemed to want to do it’ (p. 103). Again, however, Growler’s death and the burning of his house may not actually occur, being more wishes that come magically true. Nor is Karl necessarily implicated in either, though the sequence of events he initiates when he arrives in the valley certainly is. Glyn Jones himself suggested that Growler may have died of a heart attack even though, to the boys, it appeared as if Karl had stabbed him, he being the only boy openly to oppose him.

The clue to Growler’s fate lies in another highlight of the book, the episode that takes place in Pantglas woods. It leaves Dewi smiling at ‘the wonderful thing that had happened … I felt I had to be on the same side as Karl’ (p. 110). At one point, Karl appears with the fainted body of Jeffy Urquart in his arms. This is a mascu­linized version of the pietà familiar from Christian iconography; once more, a child lies apparently dead, vividly symbolizing child­hood’s endangered state. The boys’ concern for Jeffy is the obverse of their resentment of Growler for intruding into their company and bossing them about with suggestions for Jeffy’s treatment, which Karl rejects flatly.

Both Growler and Titus Powell, another domestic tyrant who thrashes his elder daughter till her cries pierce the house, are the kind of grotesques that fascinate children. Of Powell, Dewi says: ‘He was a tall big-bodied man, very stout and important looking, with an untidy beard, grey, and often with what looked like cobwebs of dried snot on it, as though he had cleaned his fingers in it after wiping his nose with them’ (p. 81). Of Growler’s yellow hair, he says it is ‘spread lightly across [his head] like a layer of marzipan’ (p. 74). Both men come to a grizzly end, Powell after falling naked from his bedroom window and lying like ‘a huge soft slug of hairy white soap swelling up off the pavement’ (p. 249), Growler with a dagger through the heart.

Karl and Dewi are chased as suspects in these shocking events by the police with their dogs and an angry mob of citizenry. They are enemies of the people who have become rebels with a cause. Of course, the furore takes place in Dewi’s head. But, try as he may, he cannot escape. Even so, he wins a victory for himself, one that lets him continue living, outwardly compliant but inwardly free. Karl lives to fight another day. He has already, we are told, died once before, climbing cliffs in Spain after an eagle’s nest and now goes on to repeat the example of a ‘globetrotter’ in Ystrad who ‘walks round the world by day and sleeps at the world’s secret centre at night’ (p. 229). Dewi pays him this last tribute: ‘Without Karl I didn’t feel as though I lived at all, not even existed’ (p. 289).

For Wordsworth, childhood was a realm of innocence over-shadowed by the prison-house of adulthood. To that extent, The Island of Apples may be considered Wordsworthian, but its version of childhood is anything but Wordsworthian. For Dewi, child­hood represents a site of tension between mother and child, the one dependent and demanding, the other giving but also taking, protective but separate. These contradictions complicate any love he may feel for her. Put that way, his story is not so different from others’.

V

The Island of Apples is that rare thing: a novel without sex, politics or religion. In the same year that it appeared, Emyr Humphreys published Outside the House of Baal. Each novel highlights the virtues of the other: the former is cold but furious, partial and obsessive beneath its surface charm; the latter is Tolstoyan in its range of sympathies and epic scope. Jones’s novel expresses outraged virtue, Humphreys’s infinite understanding and an irony that is never more penetrating than when applied to subjects dearest his heart. The contribution of both these novels to the art of fiction has yet to be appreciated.

Glossary

(Based on a list supplied by Glyn Jones; I should like to thank Mario Basini and Darren Evans for additional information.)

gwli – a narrow passage between buildings

clecking on – telling tales about

ach y fi – an expression of disgust

niff – an offensive smell

gambo – a two-wheeled farm cart

double-skin – a soft ball consisting of a bladder encased in another skin, usually of leather

drovers – woollen long johns for men

Mawr – large

dubliw/dubliws/dubs – privies

cwtch – nurse, hug

sash – a cummerbund sometimes worn by young colliers with their afternoon suits

sâm – liquid fat

wff t – an expression of impatience and contempt

ganzy – a jersey or pullover

gammy – imperfect

dai-caps – flat caps, more rounded than the modern kind and with no metal clips; at this time, miners used only oil or carbide lamps

straw-benjy – straw hat or boater

Hen Ganfed – The Old Hundred, a hymn tune associ­ated with Psalm 100 (‘All People that on Earth do Dwell’)

tea and titty – tea and milk

Duw – God

geogger – geography teacher

bobby-slops – policemen

hwyl – emotional fervour

mingier – meaner

tump – mound

tuppences – penises

booggy – ball of snot

strap – on account, not paid for

Rhys Lewis – the title of a novel by Daniel Owen (1885), generally regarded as the first in the Welsh language

stife – kitchen smoke

Cambrian Dash and the Welsh Powderhall – then famous foot-races, sprints

potched about – pottered about

British school – schools established by the Nonconformists for the labouring classes

dukes – fists

lamping – beating

Iesu – Jesus

flamer – a vague swear word with connotations of aggression

Black Cat – a brand of cigarettes

crawn – matter, pus

chopsy – pudgy

fair dooz – to be fair

bwbach – bugbear, hobgoblin

napper – head

bell-oil – beating

bosh – kitchen sink

sark – sarcasm

dix-stones – five stones

Not S