"Was I always a painter? No, Lad. I started about twenty years ago, just before I retired."
I looked at Stan's painting. It was a landscape- a picture of tall green mountains with rough and wind- torn, slate- grey rocks at the top. There was a river running through the valley between the mountains, almost touching the clutch of small stone houses on either side. It looked very peaceful.
"I spent most of my life in engineering," Stan said. But I'll bet you don't know how I started off... have a guess."
I tried to visualise Stan in some engineering shop. Somehow it did not seem to fit his gruff smile or the outdoor look on his face.
"Something out in the open, Stan?"
"You're right in a manner of speaking," Stan said, with a chuckle in his voice. I was a blacksmith's boy. But underground..."
Stan looked around the room, yet I could tell by his eyes that he was looking back to the days of his boyhood in Wales. He did not see the paintings that were set out on display on a heavy, linked system of tall, boarded stands. A group of people stood admiring the quality of the various creations of local artists. Some of the artists sat dumb and unsmiling before their work. They were obviously bored by the thought of the long afternoon ahead and the remote possibility that among the crowd there would be some who could afford the wall space and the small amount needed to buy a work of art.
"We'll sit for a bit longer," Stan announced. "That old set of stands was a bit heavy for me..." You puffed a bit as well... Do us good to just take things easy."
I was about to settle back in my plastic chair when a lady came over and asked if we would like a cup of tea. I opened my mouth to make my usual comment from my RAF days that the tea should be so strong that the spoon must stand up in it. I was forestalled by an elegant wagging finger. It was quite apparent that my particular brand of nonsense would not be tolerated by this lady. She was well into her fifties, but I could tell that her buxom form would be still quite able to give me a belt for any saucy remark.
At Stan's careful thanks the lady bustled away and then returned to push two cups at us made from plastic foam. Stan sipped at his and smiled. The woman grinned and battled her way to the other side of the room. She left a great swathe in the crowd, which took several seconds to close up again.
"Where was I?" Stan said. "Oh, yes, I was telling you about being a blacksmith's boy. I didn't start out that way. They didn't want me to go down the pit, so I got a job with the local baker... Horse and cart job that was.... It was OK, but then the round seemed to shrink and I was offered a job with the blacksmith at the pit."
I must have looked sad at the thought of men and horses being down some deep hole in the ground with only the flickering of artificial light for company.
"No," Stan said. "It wasn't underground in quite the way you're thinking."
Stan paused as his eyes dwelt for a long moment on his painting. "I could see those great green mountains from my bedroom window... I must have been about fourteen then.... What they'd done was to cut right into the mountain at the side. You just walked in and kept going slightly downhill. Then you were at the stables."
I said nothing. I watched as Stan took another sip of tea and waited for him to continue.
" I used to help the blacksmith shoe the pit ponies as they were brought up from the face with loose shoes and the like. It was a good job and I liked the feel of the ponies and the smell of the harness and the red-hot iron."
An altercation broke out, interrupting Stan, as two women fought a tough little five-year old for possession of a bag of crisps. The child was winning until the older of the two women, presumably its grandma, caught the child a smart and magnificent clip on the ear. The child just grinned and scampered away still clutching the bag of crisps.
Stan laughed as the women screeched outrage in the thick air. "I got a bigger clip on the ear than that for nearly getting myself killed soon after I started at the pit."
"What happened?" I asked as a woman looked at my poor impression of a nude lady and turned her nose up in disgust as she hurried away.
"I had to go and fetch a horse from part way down the journey. -That's what they called the long road that the coal trucks travelled after they had been linked onto the continuous chain, which carried them up and out of the mine. My horse had dragged a truck up from the face and had gone lame. They had got it out from what was known as the gun, - a big steel detachable shaft that was fixed to the truck- and left it there waiting for me."
Stan paused as a great wide smile illuminated his face. He chuckled to himself just at the moment when our buxom tea lady came to collect our plastic cups.
"If you're laughing at my skirt, I'll kill you both," the woman said. "I've had about as much as I can bear from those others."
"No," Stan said. "I was just about to tell him about the time when a horse farted and blew my lamp out. Pitch black it was then and only the rough mine wall to guide me."
"I'll guide you in a minute!" the woman said, half smiling in embarrassment at her appreciation of Stan's one time plight. "Hand me those plastic cups. My Archie needs them for his seeds."
When the woman was safely out of earshot, Stan resumed his tale. His face had become grave.
"There I was, standing in the pitch black with no lamp alight. I had no matches, so I was panicked into doing a foolish thing. I walked back along the journey, listening, in all the din of the mine, for the rumble of full coal trucks. There were only very small depressions in the wall for a man to hide in while the trucks passed and I went as fast as I could from one to the other. In the end I got back to the stables and safety. I got one hell of a belt from the blacksmith for not staying where I was. I could have been so easily killed. A truck must have jammed over the hopper and stopped the train. I never made that mistake again."
"Yours wasn't an electric lamp then, Stan?"
" No, Lad. The miners had them, but the Blacksmith and I had the old paraffin type. - I suppose we were the only ones left in the whole pit that had them. We worked near the mine entrance and I expect the management thought we did not need the electric ones. Funny old management then. It was before the National Coal Board. Private you see. We had to be careful not to dig too far and end up working the coal in the next valley. All that belonged to another mine and the blokes there."
Stan fell silent as the past surrounded him with memories. Long ago summers were calling him back to a time when the world was made up of villages and few men dreamed of foreign shores. Even the art exhibition seemed to belong to another time. The people looking at the paintings could have been ghosts from a century ago. They drifted by on invisible feet, lost in yesterday's silence and today's lack of money.
"Everybody knew everyone else in those days," Stan said at last. "Not like now, when you don't even know your neighbour. We never had to lock our doors then. Not even when the depression came. They were hard times, Lad. But even so we got on. We were all in the same boat."
Something in Stan's eyes- a sadness, and a kind of triumph gave his words a magic that lifted me through time until I could see and taste those days as if I had lived them myself.
" Some of the women could not take it," Stan said. "All of us children were half starved, though we didn't know it then. We used to put cardboard in our shoes to cover the holes. -I was lucky. My dad got old tyres and cut them up and nailed them over our worn soles."
"We didn't know no different. Why, my old dad used to walk miles sometimes. Ten, fifteen miles a day looking for work. He had cardboard in his shoes and him a top class pitman. But there was no work for him."
"Sometimes he'd get a call to go down to the reservoir. Sure enough there'd be some poor lass in the water dead. She'd have given most of her food to the youngsters and her man. Then as time went on and Parish Relief got too thin she'd crack and jump from the railings, half way up the mountain, and land in the water."
"Sometimes dad managed to catch them before they jumped. Hell of a job to get them out of it, once their mind was set... bad old days... But as I say, there was a sense of community then. We helped each other as far as we were able...Then the pit closed and the job came."
Stan stopped speaking and took a mug of tea from a tall woman in a red coat. She handed me one and smiled her thanks for our elderly efforts with the stands. A few paintings had gone, but my nude was still unsold. An intense young woman was eyeing it with a strange adoration, which made her spiky hair stand on end.
"Is this the only print?" the young woman's huge eyes were pleading in her pale face and her navy-blue business suite, complete with pin-stripe trousers, accentuated the thinness of her trembling body.
"Yes," I said, hardly daring to look at the flat chest that was thrust in earnest anxiety at me. "I have the original lino-cut that I did in the sixties when the model, my then girlfriend, was young. But it only let me take that gold print from it before it fell to pieces."
" Oh, thank God," the woman announced. "I'm so pleased. It reminds me of Judy. I love her even though she has left me."
"She may come back," I said as the modern outlook, welcoming love in any form filled me with sad acceptance. "Take it as a talisman to help her find her way. Drop a couple of quid in the Hospice collecting box by the door and I'll be happy."
The young woman scurried off with my best nude in a brown paper bag. Stan watched her as she paused for an instant to slip a few coins in the box by the door.
"Yes," Stan said, indicating that he saw only the whirling patterns of the past and not today's often too open sexuality that was not ever talked about in those days. "Yes. Jobs came right enough. I left the pit on a Friday and by the Sunday I was on a train for the Midlands and work in Birmingham, thanks to the Ministry of Labour...They helped us boys when the pit went down."
" By Monday morning I was settled in digs and was working in a factory. I earned nineteen shillings a week. The digs cost that, what with food and laundry, but the Labour Office made my money up to twenty-one shillings. Two bob, in those days, got you a packet of fags and a seat at the pictures, so I was alright."
I could tell by the way Stan took a swig of his, by now, cold tea that he must have settled in Birmingham's new environment of engineering factories. His love of watching the working of hot steel at the pit's stables and his budding flair for this had calmed his homesickness with the gentle art that is craftsmanship.
"I went on like that for a year or two," Stan said, "then my cousin got work in Luton and sent for me. We lodged in Dallow Road. I worked for the Tyler. Pumps we were on. I stayed there, in digs, for two years and then I sent for me mam and dad. They settled at once. I got a place in North Street, off Frederick Street, but me mam missed her garden. Then I got a place to rent up High town Road. It had a garden, so me mam was happy."
"Oh, the war?" Stan said. "Yes, I'll tell you about that. I went off into the Army like the rest. I was lucky. I was in R.E.M.E. Workshops. Then I was back in Luton. I was sat in front of a milling machine and the factory wall was less than six feet away. It had no window. It got me down working that machine in the corner with only a wall to look at."
" I went to the doctor and he said all us men were the same. The army had told us what to do all the time and we weren't used to seeing to ourselves. I was alright after that and I settled. I met my wife, - she worked in the offices- and we took a little place, there were lots to rent then. We used to walk through Wardown Park on a Sunday and then into Luton to look at the shops."
Stan took another swig of his tea and set the cold mug on the floor beside his chair.
"Forty years went by like a flash," Stan said. "One moment I was young with a growing family...Then they'd all grown up and gone to make families of their own....That's when I started art, Lad. A cousin of mine used to do it back home in Wales. She had a studio and I went to stay with her for a week or two, a year after my wife died. I caught the bug."
Stan fell silent for a while as the ghosts of the past came to visit him and smile.
" I never looked back. I married an artist, twenty years ago. She was a friend of my wife. She teaches in Luton, as you know. She got you started. She makes me take care of myself these days. Bad old heart I've got....She went out to the town on Wednesday. I waited until she got on the bus. Then I got the spade out. I love gardening, you see."
"Well," Stan said, his eyes twinkling with amusement. "Well, I got so far as to lift a couple of clumps of grass from the flower bed. I'd wanted to get rid of that grass for months. My old heart started bumping and I felt so dizzy that I had to go indoors and sit down. Then I felt so tired that I nearly dropped off to sleep. I had to keep jerking my eyes open. I was frightened to go to sleep in case I never woke up! - Funny how you get isn't it? Still...Look, all those folks have gone now. I suppose we'd better pack up and get that stand down again. We'll take it slow this time...Looks like one of 'em bought my painting. That's a few more quid for the Hospice."
Stan slowly eased himself upright and walked over to the stands.
Editor's note
Stan and his wife Eileen organise and man the Crafts for Christmas shows in aid of the local Pasque Hospice. Eileen teaches art at the Farley Hill and Park Street Community Centres. The amateur artists display their work at the Christmas Craft show and at other events. They have raised £4000 between them over a period of four years.
by Richard Walker
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Copying, reprinting, or distribution of this story, in whole or in part, is prohibited without written permission from the author.
