Book Review: The Small Mine

Suzy Ceulan Hughes

The Honno Classics series is a favourite of mine, bringing to me the work of Welsh women writers of whom I might otherwise only have heard, if that.

Books in the series are all provided with excellent introductions, with Jane Aaron’s foreword here being no exception.

The series includes no fewer than four of Menna Gallie’s novels, and The Small Mine was apparently the author’s personal favourite.

Mines

Joe Jenkins is a likeable young man who, despite other opportunities, has followed his father into the recently nationalised coal mines of south Wales.

He has a little bit of a thing going with poor Sall Ever Open Door, but his sights are set on the lovely Cynthia, and he has a mind to own a car.

When he is offered better pay at a small, privately-owned mine, he jumps at the chance, dismissing all the warnings offered about poorer health and safety by his father and his Communist-leaning friends.

Tragically, the older men’s concerns prove to be well-founded when Joe is killed in an accident when he is alone down the mine one Sunday morning.

Except that it isn’t entirely an accident …

It’s a gripping story, but perhaps even more riveting is Gallie’s depiction of life in a small mining community in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Joe’s ‘face was black, beautified, dramatised by the coal, white eye-balls bright, a flash of teeth in the coal-rimmed lips, the licked inner bottom lip wetly red, sensual, male’; the miners work in the ‘wet, intimate darkness of the pit’; yet here is Bryn, his head covered with a cloth as he breathes in hot steam to clear his chest, and Steve, pensioned off early.

Gallie captures the poignant contradiction between the reality and romantic picture of the miners’ life and community that was still so apparent at the time of the strike some twenty years later.

The community of Cilhendre is close, but it is also riven.

It is real, and memorable, and uncannily contemporary.

This is a review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Books Council of Wales.