Winners and Losers Read Free Page A

the name of anyone who hasn’t moved on from this unlawful assembly in the next sixty seconds.’ Turning his back, he walked away. Too many strikers had been fined for offences ranging from disorderly conduct to affray and assault for anyone to ignore the threat. Fines meant prison, since no striker had the means to pay them.
    â€˜Thank you, Father Kelly, Reverend Williams,’ Betty said gratefully. She hooked her arm into Megan’s.
    â€˜Glad we could help, ladies.’ Reverend Williams tipped his hat.
    â€˜Go with God and go safely, ladies.’ Father Kelly gave them a warm smile before continuing on his way.
    Megan and Betty walked along the pavement until a group of uniformed Hussars blocked their path. When it was obvious that they weren’t going to move, the women stepped into the gutter. Holding her skirt up to avoid the piles of horse manure and dog mess left by the strays turned out by the families of strikers who could no longer afford to feed them, Megan picked her way down the street, all the while sensing the officers watching them. When she saw a gap in the traffic, she crossed the road but there were even more police on the opposite pavement.
    A queue snaked out of the door of Rodney’s Provisions. Megan and Berry joined it. As the procession of women with their collier’s dummy moved on out of earshot, an unnatural silence fell, thick and heavy, like a suffocating blanket over the town. When it was their turn finally to step inside the store, Megan started nervously. A sergeant and a constable flanked the door, their backs to the front wall, their hands clasped around the truncheons hanging from their belts as if they were expecting the customers to turn violent. Betty gripped Megan’s hand briefly to give her courage, turned her back to them and looked to the counter.
    Rodney’s, along with every other shop in Tonypandy barring two, had been targeted by the incensed crowd on the night of the worst riot. The mob had only by-passed the chemist’s owned by Willie Llewellyn, an ex-Welsh rugby international and local hero, and a pawnbroker who’d had the courage –or insanity –to fire a pistol in the air when they reached his door.
    In comparison with some of the neighbouring businesses, the shop had suffered lightly. The mahogany counter that ran the full length of the back wall had been scarred by hobnailed boots, the glass cake case reduced to a metal frame, the marble cheese and butter slabs cracked, but most of the other shop fittings remained intact. And despite losing three-quarters of her goods to the looters and having to pay a carpenter to board her windows and doors until replacements could be made, Connie Rodney didn’t bear a grudge against her customers. She couldn’t afford to. Even if she put her business on the market, no one would buy it, leastways, not until the strike was settled and the miners started making wages again. So, like the other tradesmen in Dunraven and De Winter Streets, she’d ordered as much replacement stock as her suppliers would credit her with, which judging by her shelves, wasn’t much, and opened for business.
    â€˜Half your usual weekly staples, same as last week?’ Connie asked Megan when it was her turn to be served. Connie had stopped selling luxuries like jam, cheese, butter, tinned goods, sugar and dried fruit during the first week of the strike. Now that it was heading into the third month, some housewives were even dropping margarine, flour and potatoes from their shopping lists. Fires were needed to boil potatoes and bake bread, and without the rations of coal that were part of a miner’s wage, there was no fuel.
    â€˜No, thank you, Mrs Rodney.’ Megan lifted her empty basket on to the counter. ‘My uncle has asked me to buy what we need on a daily basis from now on.’
    â€˜Well, we’re open six days a week.’ Connie gave her a rare smile.
    With her long