Read Online Children in Her Shadow by Keith Pearson - Free Book Online

working people. Ruth this may be the place where my war ends but if it is, you should know that I am happy for so many of the things I have seen’. His letter closed with the following line: ‘ I miss the valleys of my beautiful Wales and the song of its people, I miss the sparrow and the black bird but I am a happy man, and if I should die here in this far off land, tell Mam …..I saw swallows in February’ . Ruth wept as she read the letter knowing that his fears for the ambitions of the Japanese forces were well founded.
    The letters to her mother also followed the same familiar structure: Ruth would start by answering the questions raised by her mother in the previous letter, questions that were beginning to have a familiar ring to them. Her mother could ask the same question in so many different ways and Ruth could herself answer them with the same opaqueness.
    The questions would start simply enough, ‘Are you eating enough, are you sleeping enough and how’s the weather been?’ Inevitably they would move to the vague: ‘Are you able to get out much?’ or ‘What are your friends like?’ and ‘Have you met anyone nice this week?’ They both knew that the central theme of the questions were the same, “Are you going out with a boy?’, or ‘Do you have a boy friend?’ and if so ‘What is he like?’ The word game continued for months with neither party saying exactly what they thought.
    The next part of the letters from Ruth’s mother was taking on an increasingly open and adult theme as her mother opened up to Ruth about her father’s moods, drunkenness and ill behaviour both in the home and at his place of work. Ruth would politely offer sympathy but recognised that in part these letters were cathartic and as such required no response.
    Then a letter came in early December in which her mother confided that her father had been sacked by the colliery for his fighting at work and his ill tempered behaviour. The fights, of which this was only one of many, were always about the same thing, why he was not fighting on the front line as many other Irish men who had come to Wales had gone on to do for the British crown to which so many still felt loyalty, and why Ireland had remained steadfastly neutral. This fight however was one too many and as a result, Ruth’s mother was confiding in Ruth that she felt the prospects of him getting work in Wales, or anywhere in England were poor. She went on to say that she feared that before many days passed they would be thrown out of their tied cottage. The strict rules set by the colliery company who owned the house were that you can live in it for as long as you are employed by the colliery.
    The following two weeks of letters in the run up to Christmas revealed that a date had been set for the family to move out of the house. Without any job or prospects of getting one her mother wrote: ‘ It is increasingly likely that we will have to move back to County Roscommon in Ireland where the Arigna Coal Mine is eagerly looking for workers with experience of working in very narrow seams ‘. Ruth knew that her father had this experience but she also knew of the dangers of working in such seams.
    Ruth quickly wrote back to her mother and arranged that she would telephone Mrs Thomas at the Senghenydd post office at a pre arranged time so that they could speak. On the morning of Christmas Eve as arranged, Ruth went to Blackpool post office and made the telephone call to her mother. The conversation was short and emotionally charged as Ruth absorbed the news that her whole family; her mother father, brothers and sisters would indeed be moving to Ireland in one week’s time.
    Her mother begged Ruth not to succumb to the demands from her father that she must move back to Ireland with them. She explained that at best they would move into appallingly small tied accommodation and that the pay would be poor for her father given the circumstances of his dismissal and the requirement