Somewhat after Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989)

Last night I dreamt I went to Blaenllechau again…I came upon it suddenly; the approach masked by serried ranks of terraced housing on the rolling road that climbs up the Rhondda Fach…There was Blaenllechau, our Blaenllechau, clinging to the mountainside as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the wet slate roofs reflecting the gorse, bracken and oak. Time could not wreck the sweet embrace of those walls, nor the site itself, a silver seam scratched upon the plundered land.

It was as if I’d never been away these long Cardiff years. In the club everyone wanted to buy me a drink, wanted to know my news, wanted to tell me I was missed. Later on, the booze flowing, a halting, solitary voice rose softly above the hubbub…Nid wy’n gofyn bywyd moethus, Aur y byd na’i berlau mân, Gofyn wyf am galon hapus, Calon honest, calon lân...and gradually, one by one, the whole room joined in and hymned the chorus in three-part harmony…Calon lân yn llawn daioni, Tecach yw na’r lili dlos, Dim ond calon lân all ganu, Canu’d dydd a chanu’r nos…

“Look! Look!” someone yelled unexpectedly, and we rushed to the door. We stood transfixed by an unearthly red glow on the other side of the valley. The mountains were on fire! The house! The house! The house is burning….

When we got there, through thick smoke and licks of flame we just caught sight of a woman standing impassively at the window, before she disappeared from view under crashing beams and collapsing ceilings. He thought it was his mother and I had to hold him back to stop him dashing into the furnace. Only when his Mam and her devoted dog appeared beside him, breathless but alive, did we realise the woman at the window was neighbour Ivy. Confused with senile dementia, she was prone to letting herself in uninvited through the never-locked back door and putting the kettle on. We watched as the tiny miner’s cottage that had passed through the family for generations crumbled before our eyes. Later Ivy’s charred corpse was found in the still smouldering ruins.

Last night I dreamt I went to Blaenllechau again. It seemed to me I stood by the bare ground where the house had once been but there was nowhere for me to enter, no warm welcome to greet me. There was just a gap, one of many in the steadily depopulating terraces hastily built when coal seams had first been exploited in the once beautiful Rhondda Fach. I called in my dream for my darling boy and his endearing Mam, and had no answer. The street was uninhabited. The windowpanes were cracked and forlorn. Everybody had gone and I wept alone.