There are different ways of seeing, there are different ways of being

by Richard Huw Morgan

This is not the piece I started to write. That in itself is important. Adaptation is vital to survival. When I began writing this one of the bees in my bonnet was the Orwellian Doublespeak of the Westminster Government’s “Shared Prosperity Fund”. Funds previously distributed by the EU to the devolved Welsh Government to pursue national priorities replaced with a costly competitive bidding process pitting local authority against local authority. Sticking plasters to mask industrial decline. I had intended to relate this to stated public transport policy and it’s reality in practice, including the shuttling of ‘human resources’ between dwindling employment opportunities.

Then things went ballistic. With the likely closing of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot we can now realistically describe Wales as a post industrial economy. The raison d’etre of the English speaking Wales created by the Industrial Revolution has all but vanished, leaving the ossified detritus of a human geography birthed in a bygone age.

But if you refocus your eye, and your imagination, it is not difficult to peer through the pealing paint to another time. The time before the aberration of the extractive industrial age hijacked other ways of thinking, and being. With that refocussed eye you will find traces, in presences, in absences and I would argue, most importantly in communal attitudes.

Living in Trefforest the material traces of radicalism are all around, many hiding in plain sight. Like the Round Houses, the entrance gates to Dr William Price’s unrealised National Folk Museum of Wales. Built by the Socialist / Chartist / Druid / Surgeon / Naturist / Etc Price in 1859, slap bang in front of a rock face on land that he did not own, it was perhaps unsurprising that this endeavour did not succeed. It would be another 25 years before his name became famously, or infamously, attached to the reintroduction of cremation to Britain when he publicly burned the body of his son, Iesu Grist, Jesus Christ. Not until 1948 did Wales get it’s National Folk Museum.

In nearby Pontypridd stands William Edwards’ ‘Old Bridge’, the physical embodiment of faith, duty and perseverance. Originally the ‘New Bridge’ that gave the industrial boom town its name before the local postmaster, fed up with misdirected mail, resurrected the name of a long forgotten bridge “The Bridge of the Earthen House” for the town. Things change. Built in 1756 by a preacher and dry stone wall repairer with no previous experience of bridge building, for an unknown purpose, in an entirely rural location, as shown in JMW Turner’s painting. It was in fact Edwards’ fourth attempt with the three previous versions washed away or collapsing under their own weight. On completion the bridge had the longest single span in Britain, remaining so for the next 40 years, longer even than than the world famous Rialto bridge in Venice. 268 years later it still stands having witnessed both the wholesale industrialisation and subsequent de-industrialisation of the area.

Other traces of radicalism, as I recount to my 4 year old daughter, are present in their absence. Perhaps I’m not making sense to her. We are walking through a carpark where once stood the remarkable Ynysybwl Cooperative Society building, a fantastic emporium of mutual aid established in a neighbouring village that provided the boom town of Pontypridd with a cornucopia of material needs. We are on our way to the bus station. It is the last day of the school summer holidays and she has decided that we should catch the bus to Aberdâr.

The previous summer her suggestion for the last day of the holiday, a trip to the freezing delights of Ynysybwl paddling pool had been inspiring. Run by community volunteers and on that day, as many others through the long school holidays, providing a free picnic for anyone who wanted to eat. No questions asked, no haves and have nots. Just children and their grown ups. Organised mutual aid and the spirit of the Co-op living on.

And today it is Aberdâr, and Parc Aberdâr in particular that is the destination, birthplace of that other fabulous Welsh co-operative movement, the Eisteddfod. Not that we were going for historical reasons, more like fish and chips, a very posh glass of orange in a cafe and an exhausting paddle round the pond in a fabulous swan shaped pedalo.

The trip there is full of excitement and expectation. All is going well, most of the day’s snacks, healthy and otherwise, have been eaten in the first few miles while enthusiastically commenting on, and rating, play parks that we must visit later on. Another community run paddling pool in Penrhiwceiber that will have to wait to next summer. Then a sudden yelp, and then tears. In her distraction a small finger has been mistaken for a Wotsit and blood is flowing (well, in the eyes of a four year old). Comfort and assistance is offered by passengers but in such situations there is only one thought that comes to her mind, ‘I want my Mummy!’, expressed loudly, repeatedly. Thanks lyfli!.

But it is the return trip that will stay longest in my memory. Ten minutes after leaving Aberdâr and a third of the way back to Pontypridd, on the Fernhill estate there is a problem. The bus is not moving. It soon becomes apparent that one of the passengers, an elderly lady, has realised that she is on the wrong bus. And discussions begin. Twenty or so passengers, plus driver, spontaneously focus on problem solving, on how to get the lady back on track. The conversation lasts a good quarter of an hour as we sit there, ideas of turning the bus around, accompanying the lady to the train station, people offering to pay for a cab. Not a single grumble about the delay.

I know nothing about our fellow passengers, their personal circumstances, their daily lives or behaviours. This is not a romanticisation of ‘community’. Simply a comment on the possibility for spontaneous compassion and collaboration in the face of adversity. An echo of the anarcho-syndicalism of 1912’s ‘The Miners Next Step’? The Womens Support Groups of 1984?

I don’t know these people, but these are people I want to know, and if we are to have a future, will need to know better.

It is this spontaneous mutual aid that gives me hope for the future. Adaptation is vital to survival.