Border Country Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  About Raymond Williams

  Foreword

  Part One

  Pt 1 Chapter One

  Pt 1 Chapter Two

  Pt 1 Chapter Three

  Pt 1 Chapter Four

  Pt 1 Chapter Five

  Pt 1 Chapter Six

  Pt 1 Chapter Seven

  Pt 1 Chapter Eight

  Pt 1 Chapter Nine

  Pt 1 Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Pt 2 Chapter One

  Pt 2 Chapter Two

  Pt 2 Chapter Three

  Foreword and Cover image by

  Library of Wales

  Copyright

  Border Country

  Raymond Williams

  LIBRARY OF WALES

  Raymond Williams was born in the Welsh border village of Pandy in 1921. He was educated at Abergavenny Grammar School and at Trinity College, Cambridge and he served in the Second World War as a Captain in the 21st Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery. After the war he began an influential career in education with the Extra Mural Department at Oxford University. His life-long concern with the interface between social development and cultural process marked him out as one of the most perceptive and influential intellectual figures of his generation.

  He returned to Cambridge as a Lecturer in 1961 and was appointed its first Professor of Drama in 1974. His best-known publications include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973), Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977).

  Raymond Williams was an acclaimed cultural critic and commentator but he considered all of his writing, including fiction, to be connected. Border Country (1960) was the first of a trilogy of novels with a predominantly Welsh theme or setting, and his engagement with Wales continued in the political thriller The Volunteers (1978), Loyalties (1985) and the massive two-volume People of the Black Mountains (1988-90). He died in 1988.

  Foreword

  I first read Border Country when it appeared as a Penguin paperback in 1964. Its author was familiar to me for his pathbreaking critical studies Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), but an undergraduate from the Rhondda at Oxford did not buy hardback novels, and I had only been made aware of the existence of Raymond Williams’ 1960 novel from biographical blurbs. I shelled out my five shillings and took it home. For me it crackled with the excitement of a discovery I had somehow known all along. I did not stop reading until, some time the next day, it was finished, and I have never stopped re-reading that original copy since. The hook for me was the instantly recognisable emotional and intellectual journey of a working-class boy who goes away from his shaping community. By the 1960s this had become a familiar pattern, one to be repeated for generations, but it was an experience originating directly, as occurred in Raymond Williams’ own life, from that first limited grammar-school exodus of the 1930s. This is still usually told as a story about successful individuals gratefully climbing ladders. Not so here – instead, with a subtlety of touch matched by an integrity of vision, the novel does what no history fully can do and little fiction has achieved: it shows the inescapable intertwining of individuals’ lives and social conditions in the fluidity of lived experience that we all share. Although you can approach Border Country in more than one way, the final route out will always be the same, for, as Matthew Price reflects at the end of the book’s odyssey: ‘The distance is measured, and that is what matters. By measuring the distance, we come home.’

  Border Country is a deceptive novel. It grips us immediately with its story of one man running and never stopping, but from the first page it also asks the reader to think deeply about how we conceive our general history as a society. The style of Border Country is pared down, almost entirely pruned of similes and metaphors, and quietly serves its straightforward tale, but the novel is also clearly and defiantly proud to be so plain. It is patently a novel about Welsh people set in Wales, and it deals centrally with the myth and reality of the 1926 General Strike, as it was felt through Welsh history and in individual lives. Yet it is geographically marginal to those thunderous struggles in the coalfield, and its Welsh character is more locally rooted than nationally defined. On publication in 1960, this novel, which had been worked on since the late 1940s and was completed in 1958, seemed to some to be, in its dogged realism, past its time, but in its global relevance today it is more contemporary than ever.

  The novel is set in motion, from its very first sentence, with Matthew Price running for a bus in London. He is a university lecturer who is working on population movements in the industrialising valleys of South Wales in the nineteenth century. He is dissatisfied with the scholarly techniques he has learned to measure this human displacement and renewed settlement. The results have ‘the solidity and precision of ice cubes, while a given temperature is maintained.’ In actual life no such precision is possible. So what exactly is being measured? It is the overall picture, without which no change can be measured, but after which the real nature of existence has been lost: ‘The man on the bus, the man in the street, but I am Price from Glynmawr,’ Matthew muses to himself.

  Raymond Williams from Pandy spent his lifetime working out how not to betray that individual essence whilst at the same time understanding its wider and connected cultural being. I believe he showed the way best in his fiction, where the journey is undertaken not in order to go back – for that is never possible – but in order to see how social renewal can occur as growth in human terms. Border Country is, therefore, concerned with both Space and Time as the twinned defining attributes of human communities.

  The time-shifts move us from Matthew’s return – by train and car – to be with his dying father, Harry Price, railway signalman, to Harry’s own coming to Glynmawr with his young bride, Ellen, to work in the 1920s. It is the General Strike of 1926 that brings one form of self-definition to a head. In a number of brilliantly poised passages of dialogue, Raymond Williams takes his variously committed railway workers through the gradations of political commitment and self-sacrifice which weighted their act of solidarity with the locked-out miners with such profound social significance. Its meaning resonated as late as 1984, when the last industrial reference back to 1926 was made. And possibly, if we understand such support in terms of irreducible human values rather than political flotsam, it retains such meaning even beyond its particular time. Certainly that is how Williams would have us see it. His insistence is that it is only by contemplating how individual destiny interplays with wider forces, always experienced spatially, that we can makes sense of life in the human chronology of Price from Glynmawr. The alternative, and profoundly so, is submission to non-sense.

  The novel’s most plangent tone is, in counterpoint then, a lyrical one. ‘I know this country,’ the writer informs us in the prefatory note to its first printing and we can easily see that he loved it too. Not as a landscape for tourist consumption but as a land made over and over, often with intense struggle between social classes as much as against nature, to create human habitation fit for the potential of always changing communities:

  Once they were up on the road, Harry and Ellen could look out over the valley and the village in which they had come to live…

  The narrow road wound through the valley. The railway, leaving the cutting at the station, ran out north on an embankment, roughly parallel with the road but a quarter of a mile distant. Between road and railway, in its curving course, ran the Honddu, the black water. On the east of the road ran the grassed embankment of the old tramroad, with a few overgrown stone quarries near its line. The directions coincided, and Harry, as he walked, seemed to relax and settle. Walking the road in the October evening, they felt on their faces their own country: the huddled farmhouses, with their dirty yards; the dogs under the weed-growing walls; the cattle-marked crossing from the sloping field under the orchard; the long fields, in the line of the valley, where the cattle pastured; the turned red earth of the small, thickly-hedged ploughland; the brooks, alder-lined, curving and meeting; the bracken-heaped tussocky fields up the mountain, where the sheep were scattered under the wood-shaded barns; the occasional white wall, direct towards the sun, standing out where its windows caught the light across the valley; the high black line of the mountains, and the ring of the sheep wall.

  The patch of eight houses lay ahead: set so that looking to the north and west the spurs of the mountains lay open in the distance. Harry stopped, put down the leather box, and looked around. ‘All right, last bit,’ he said after resting, and they went on to the houses.

  Within its frame, then, of Time and Space, we share in and comprehend human endeavour and human growth and human loss. There is not a false or sentimental note anywhere in this book. Nothing is romanticised and nobody is idealised. We are never allowed to see what is local in action as being somehow limited in reach or implication. Raymond Williams fully understood that his country on the border was only different in its specific shapes, so that at someone else’s border, in the changing particularities of other histories of migration and settlement and struggle, the narrative, personal and general, continued.

  I believe that Border Country is one of the most moving and accomplished novels of the twentieth century, written anywhere by anyone. In Wales, the fact that it was written by Williams from Pandy is an occasion for small, extra celebration. More importantly, in its new Library of Wales format, it deserves to go out more widely than ever into the world, so that by being measured it can properly
come home to us again.

  Dai Smith

  Part One

  Chapter One

  1

  As he ran for the bus he was glad: not only because he was going home, after a difficult day, but mainly because the run in itself was pleasant, as a break from the contained indif­ference that was still his dominant feeling of London. The conductress, a West Indian, smiled as he jumped to the plat­form, and he said, ‘Good evening,’ and was answered, with an easiness that had almost been lost. You don’t speak to people in London, he remembered; in fact you don’t speak to people anywhere in England; there is plenty of time for that sort of thing on the appointed occasions – in an office, in a seminar, at a party. He went upstairs, still half smiling, and was glad there had been no time to buy an evening paper; there was plenty to look at, in the bus and in the streets.

  Matthew Price had been eight years a university lecturer, in economic history. He knew of nothing he more wanted to be, though his anxiety about his work had become marked. He was generally considered a good lecturer, but his research, which had started so well, had made little real pro­gress over the last three years. It might be simply the usual fading, which he had watched in others, but it presented it­self differently to his own mind. It is a problem of measure­ment, of the means of measurement, he had come to tell himself. But the reality which this phrase offered to interpret was, he could see, more disturbing. He was working on population movements into the Welsh mining valleys in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. But I have moved myself, he objected, and what is it really that I must measure? The techniques I have learned have the solidity and pre­cision of ice-cubes, while a given temperature is maintained. But it is a temperature I can’t really maintain; the door of the box keeps flying open. It’s hardly a population movement from Glynmawr to London, but it’s a change of sub­stance, as it must also have been for them, when they left their villages. And the ways of measuring this are not only outside my discipline. They are somewhere else altogether, that I can feel but not handle, touch but not grasp. To the nearest hundred, or to any usable percentage, my single figure is indifferent, but it is not only a relevant figure: with­out it, the change can’t be measured at all. The man on the bus, the man in the street, but I am Price from Glynmawr, and here, understandably, that means very little. You get it through Gwenton. Yes, they say the gateway of Wales. Yes, border country.

  It was a long bus-ride out, and it was dark when he got off: town dark. The lamps had been lit among the bare trees, and shone down into the little front gardens. There were trees and gardens all along this street. When, soon after their marriage, Matthew and Susan had seen this street, they had felt they could settle in it. It was suburban, what­ever that might mean, but this was little enough to pay for trees and a garden. Theirs was the end house: grey, single­-fronted, with a wide bay window. At the gate stood a labur­num, as he had learned to call it except when it was in flower, when it was a golden chain again. On the gate had been a panel announcing ‘Laburnum House’, but this had been burned. Collecting the names of houses had been one of their earliest pastimes, before they married. Susan, the daughter of a Cumberland teacher, had been one of Matthew’s first students. They had married two months after her graduation. While she was still his student, they had walked, endlessly, around a London still strange to them both. Their direction, always, was from a large street into a smaller, until they were virtually lost and had to ask their way back. They had found this street on one of these walks, and since they had settled in it a new line of shops and a new junior school had been built nearby. Their two boys had been born and would grow up here, and would think of it as home.

  As Matthew pushed open the door, there was a shouted protest. Harry, just inside the door, was jumping to tap back a limp red balloon, which had to float between the door and the stairs as goals. He missed it as the door opened sud­denly, and the balloon floated down under Matthew’s feet.

  ‘Anyway, that’s not a goal, that’s interference,’ Harry shouted.

  ‘You were missing it, anyway,’ Jack shouted back furiously, his hair loose over his eyes.

  ‘Half-time,’ Matthew said, punting the balloon away and closing the door. ‘Anyway, where’s Susan?’

  ‘Getting tea. Anyway it’s no good, all its wind’s going.’

  Matthew walked through to the kitchen, first stumbling on a heap of marbles and cursing. Susan opened the kitchen door and there was a further scuffle as Rex, the collie pup from Glynmawr, tore out and jumped up at Matthew. The telephone rang.

  ‘Not again,’ Matthew said. ‘They time the bastard for when I get home.’

  ‘Say no anyway. We don’t want a drink with anybody, we don’t want coffee, we can cook our own supper.’

  ‘They can’t hear you, Susan. And I’m not answering it.’

  ‘All right.’

  He took off his coat in the kitchen, and closed the door, but the ringing went on.

  ‘Are you sure it’s not work?’

  ‘That would be important, of course. Some tidy little committee.’

  ‘It sounds as if they’re serious,’ Susan said, as the ringing continued.

  ‘These social types always are.’

  They looked at each other, anxiously, seeking reassurance. The boys opened the door and Jack asked, ‘Are you ever going to answer that thing?’

  ‘All right,’ Matthew said, and went quickly out. He picked up the receiver and said, impatiently, ‘Price.’ Susan had followed him, and was watching his face as he listened. There was a sudden tightening to attention, and he glanced up at her.

  ‘Yes who is that exactly?... I see... When?... Yes... Yes, thank you.’ He was pushing the receiver tightly into his face, as if he could not understand what was being said. When the call ended, he got up and stared at Susan, saying nothing. She watched him, intently, while the boys shouted as they ran past.

  ‘Tell me, love.’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘No, some kind of stroke. It was a bad line. They can talk endlessly but they couldn’t make it clear.’

  ‘They want you to come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you get through tonight?’

  ‘I don’t know. I simply don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll pack your things. You ring inquiries. You must get as far as you can.’

  Matthew nodded, but moved away from the phone. The dog was barking as the boys played with it in the passage.

  ‘All right,’ Matthew said, standing quite still.

  ‘Ring inquiries,’ Susan said, facing him.

  ‘All right.’

  They looked at each other for a moment, as the boys and the dog rushed past them; then each turned to what had to be done.

  ‘He’s a proper collie,’ Jack shouted, ‘only of course he’s got to be trained.’

  ‘We know that,’ Harry said.

  2

  Abruptly the rhythm changed, as the wheels crossed the bridge. Matthew got up, and took his case from the rack. As he steadied the case, he looked at the rail-map, with its familiar network of arteries, held in the shape of Wales, and to the east the lines running out and elongating, into Eng­land. The shape of Wales: pig-headed Wales you say to re­member to draw it. And no returns.

  The usual photographs were at the sides of the map. On the far side was the abbey, that he had always known: the ruined abbey at Trawsfynydd that had not changed in his lifetime. On the near side was the front at Tenby. A railing horizon, in the wide paleness of sky and sea; then, making the picture, two girls smiling under cloche hats, and an Austin drawn up beyond them, the nose of its radiator in the air. Like the compartment, the photographs were more than thirty years old: nearly his own age. Damp had got in at the corners, irregularly staining the prints.

  The wheels slowed, and the train passed under the gaunt footbridge and drew up at the platform, past the line of yellow lamps. A scurry of rain hit the misted glass. He jerked at the window strap, and reached out to open the door. No one else got out. He stood alone on the dark platform, looking around. Starting as late as he had, there had been no useful stop after Gwenton; he would have to walk the five miles north to Glynmawr.