Robert Havard

Recently I've been making paintings in series, like the following small oils (mostly 16x12 inches) on the theme of washed-up timbers.  First you find a Passage to the Sea: 

There you find strange objects:

                                  Wart-hog

                                          Tree Agony

                                          Washed up

Bardsey Ahoy!

                                              Seal and Foot

A series of larger oils follows on The Basin, a spectacular ice-sculpted bowl near the top of Rhondda whose features cried out for palette-knife treatment.

                                               Rocks 1

                                      Basin Flashback

 The Rocks, the Con Club and Harry the Blind

                 River

         It must have happened in the night    

         when nesting birds lay heavy with sleep.              

         They woke, like me, and shook their wings,  

         startled by the river's crystal light:

         the rocks, mountain, ferns and sky, all there,         

         lustred on a satin sleeve.

                                                     Something

         told me, this moment was mine to keep:

         when age comes to ache my bones, tremors

         of subsidence perturb my soul,

         I'll fly to the mountain like a bird.

Two portraits follow of blokes who fought adversity in their own way: Gwilym took Richard Burton down a peg when he called in for a pint at the Castle Hotel, Treherbert; and Gordon showed good grace on being dropped from the Black Lion Llanbadarn's pool team.

                     Gwilym Trefleming Thomas

     Lines in Memory of Gwilym Trefleming Thomas

     At first light, on Bute Square,

     a hooter and the tramp of boots:

     comrades in arms, without guns.

     That first shift, off the farm:

     air down Lady Margaret, up Bute shaft,

     kept the dust off your lungs.

     Hundred per cent, you gave and got;

     hundred per cent, scarce a day lost.

     Dram for dram in a three-foot run,

     fills an ocean.

     Semaphore eyes see in the dark;

     your forehead, pockmarked with calamities;

     that nose, catacombs of erosion.

     Black boots, white scarf,

     laced and buttoned for all eventualities.

     You were gone, Gwilym,

     before the canary choked.

     Above St Mary's, the language is ripe.

     At the hairpin, they gob on scratchings of grass,

     resigned.

     You walk home,

     the moon on Cwm Saerbren;

     stump of kindling under one arm;

     magnolia, on the breeze, from your garden.   

Ron Berry  (1920-1998) from Blaencwm, Treherbert, quit mining after an injury underground and took up writing.  Two of his novels were reprinted in the recent Library of Wales (Parthian) series, including So Long Hector Bebb, possibly his best, about a brain-scrambled boxer.  Rigorous in his craft, warm in company, Ron caught the fag-end aura of his patch bang on. 

Secrets, below, is a cropped version of Three Miners at Coedely, a photo taken by American Eugene Smith for Life magazine in 1950, last auctioned at Southeby's New York in 2015.

 Secrets                                  

It was a secret where they went

and a secret what they did all day.

We'd see them come back on our streets

-white teeth, eyes white- in an eruption

of spit and smoke, like they owned the place.

But they owned nothing, those who scoured

the pavement for lumps in their gob,

those whose backs broke in sagging beds.

Cold mornings we'd hear the hooter

and the tramp of boots off to war.

But paupers they were every one.

That was the worst kept secret: dogs

of the earth, mugs we'd say, expendable.

They didn't own the dust in their lungs.

One night in March 2017 six fires were lit simultaneously on different Rhondda hillsides, leaving the fire-fighting services powerless to stop flames reaching down towards the houses.  No-good boyos with smart-phones?  Too much testosterone or plain frustration?