Letter from Brynmawr: Sky dancing above a wasteland

Stephen Price

I’m not one for favourite things, or admitting them at least.

A favourite song, when there are so many.. A favourite film.. it’s no competition, it might change. I’ll always seek more, even if I find it.

At odds with the photos I share from Wales’ lakes, peaks, shorelines and most beloved buildings, one place calls me back time and time again with the deepest hiraeth.

A place I don’t even have a name for.

A field.

A simple field, bare perhaps to those who pass by, but for me an otherworld, a place to undo, to think and unthink, to unravel and return to a lost feeling, a lost person.

A borderland between the Brynmawr of today, and the wilds of Waenavon, Cwm Nant Gam and the Milfraen.

My dad is nearing the end of his life, and asking him how he referred to the fields as a boy, he can only recall ‘Ben Woods Fields’ – a name others in the town still use.

Its name lost to time, lost to another language.

Solace

The field became a sanctuary for me during my mam’s end-stage lung cancer.

A bank at its top left corner reveals a hidden stream, hawthorn, and a perfect place to sit.

Brynmawr, like so many urban valleys towns, requires a walk to the periphery for wilder, softer footing, and for the six or so years since my mum’s death it’s the field that has called me the loudest.

Often I’d take the dogs to graveyards, skipping between graves of ancestors and strangers alike, or loop the town’s ponds, but the field is where I could perhaps make sense of the loss approaching.

My mam was called ‘stoic’ by one of her church friends. Agonising lymph and lung cancer, and never a complaint.

The field was a refuge from the visits she shouldn’t have had. Long lost neighbours and friends not seen for decades calling in, while those who were by her side at all times made cups of tea or waited for them to go.

No one speaks about the anger grief imparts. I’d not been familiar with it before.

Or loneliness either, such is life when your parents dote.

Clattering

Walking the field daily with joyful dogs, safe from harm and escape, became a repetitive, meditative, healing space.

Looking east towards Pen y Fal and Ysgyryd Fawr, thronged with tourists and natives alike in search of a challenge and a photo, my field at first glance seems to offer nothing in comparison.

But it’s here I’m uninterrupted, able to unknot. And in my stillness, the secrets are revealed.

Gorse, fungi, mosses, hawthorn.. meadow flowers, sheep jaws and ribs, blue and white fucking china.. And the grey, grey skies above.

Bone-chilling winds on a summer’s day.

It was while looking out from the field into the blue grey that I first spotted the jackdaws.

Jackdaws are the bird of the town. Their clattering a familiar, cellular sound of home.

But I didn’t expect to see or hear them here.

They take my bread and my seeds only when I am out of sight.

They distrust with good reason.

They knew Brynmawr long before her previous name of Gwaun Helygen (Marsh of the Willows), and watched each tree fall, watched others they knew killed for fun.. for food.. for nothing. They remember.

Always there, but never knowable. I found them out.

I caught them dancing.

Murmuration

Opposite the field, on the other side of the valley, is a rubbish tip, a wasteland, a short distance from my old high school.

Despite proudly referring to my roots, tongue in cheek, as ‘Inbred-Brynmawr’, my both parents coming from the town and their parents before them, I’ve only recently made peace with my old school.

A few months back, I took a photo, with the caption: ‘My old high school and a nearby rubbish tip. I forget which is which.’

Overwhelmed by everything all at once, I kept back like the jackdaws.

I’d seen what people could do, what they did do, to my kind.

One of the last things I said to my mam was, ‘thank you’.

That it was a joy to live where we did.

I know now that the school, that the overwhelming every day, could have been a joy too.

If only I’d been unafraid.

How beautiful the jackdaws are when they’re unafraid.

When they’re free.

When they’re dancing.