Too Cold For Snow

the perfect place.
    The shoot was scheduled to start on a Monday. Gruffydd delivered the script a week before and the actor, who’d been chosen to play the Communist, Peter Fry, was dressed by the best costume lady in the land. The Stardust Agency supplied twenty extras, who chomped their way through an entire van load of bacon butties before they started filming.
    Louis called ‘Action!’ and the great creature Illusion was awakened in his lair. That’s how he saw it, fancifully, and he was the boss.
    The men had been told that the owners, the Crabtrees, were going to shut the strikers outside the factory and if needs be bring in scabs to work their shifts. A sulphur-coloured sun lit up the bracken-covered hills, which themselves seemed tinged with brimstone as the determined men marched towards the churchyard at Moriah in Penydarren, where they were due to gather to work out their tactics. They had already been told of how the soldiers had broken the strike at Abermardy after three consecutive nights of defenestration and an appalling incident where a police horse had been blinded and another killed with a brick.
    The sound of hobnails marching in determined unison resounded around the terraces. You could smell determination in the air. The world was marching. This part of the world was a soup, a cawl of people from all over. Staten Island would be hard pressed to match the relentless magnetism that drew in men from Cardiganshire, from Somerset, Cornwall and Lancashire too. Women marched with the men and one of them, from the Somerset levels, stood up to address the gathering in an accent thick as churned butter. They worked just as hard as the men, she argued, as did the children who worked for a pittance.
    The foment of revolution had begun in the public houses and early libraries. The workers had read incendiary books and explosive pamphlets. They had absorbed broadsides which railed against the world order; conduits in bright bindings for new ideas concocted in European cafés and argued for with all the vehemence of Old Testament prophets.
    The crowd had swollen now and they filled the square next to the church. A man railed against injustice and castigated the newspapers, which weren’t to be trusted since the proprietors drank in the same clubs as the mine owners and foundry owners. The crowd bustled him along with the ease of moving a baby in swaddling. He kept on talking in his preacherly way all the while.
    The man was called Morgan Davies and had given them a heady sermon, offering his unvarnished view to the crowd, which was mesmerised by the smoldering passion of his voice and the felicity of the examples he had chosen. He told them how heedless some men can be about the lives of others.
    ‘About the same time that Peter the Great was using huge numbers of men to haul granite into a swamp to create his great city, there were so many serfs working the land that in one of the great estates there was a serf orchestra. Because there were so many serfs the estate owners didn’t bother to teach them to read music but just told them when to play the one note they knew. And when one of them died from exhaustion there was always another to take his place. This meant that life was worthless; the value of a man less than a horse, much, much less than a horse.’
    A cloth-capped crowd ringed him in now.
    ‘Behold the man,’ he continued, ‘behold the man who stands before you and says that all this must change.’
    His arms were stretched out, as if invisibly nailed into the rank air, his back rigid with self-belief.
    ‘Behold the man who says that I, a communist, believe that our struggle is universal, and that the principles we uphold are pit props to shore up the dignity of man. We will allow the working man to hold his head up high. We will restore his dignity.’
    And as if the word ‘high’ was a cue for some ingenious magic trick, where all the mechanical contraptions were hidden by slight of hand, Morgan’s hob-nailed boots left the ground, the bulk of his belly weightless now. Within half a minute Morgan Davies started to levitate above the ground; first, some six feet in the air and then, as if he weighed no more than a small ball of chaffinch-feather-down, it seemed as if his body was caught by a breeze and he was lifted higher as he was still orating. But soon the words became dislocated: ‘shackles’, ‘a lack of poverty’ and, finally, when he was two hundred yards or so in the air,