Welsh Idyll

By the time work stopped on Friday evening, the gold was half a million pounds and the lead worth another hundred thousand pounds. That was more lead than poor old Gwaldys the Hiss could pull and that was just the first week as we learned how to work.

On Monday I was back in London at the offices of British Rail. After some intense negotiation I was able to buy the line for a million and a half pounds and for fifty thousand pounds I had a more modern steam tank engine and an ex-War Department diesel. They were mine, not British Rail's (or rather they belonged to the Blacktown Development company) and were on loan to British Rail until the line formally became private.

I paid for Gwaldys the Hiss to go a preservation society's workshop for a full overhaul and rebuild. Meanwhile the line was operating its scheduled services on time and goods trains exporting lead were even more frequent than passenger services. The gold was a problem. I had to buy an old Royal Mail sorting office coach with built in security. The town's banks couldn't take the gold. It had to travel by rail to Cardiff.

By the end of the first month our gold deposits were ample to buy the railway line and leave a large amount over. The lead? The proceeds from the lead covered all the wages and operating costs. Even without the gold we could have employed every person in Blackrown AND made a profit. We were employing everyone, or almost everyone except Cerys the Post and Myfanwy. Even the farmers were working part time at the mine and making more money that way than from their farms. The women were clerks, cleaners and canteen staff with a few actually doing mining. The whole community was prosperous.

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I could end my account here. Myfanwy and I had provided a stable and prosperous future for Blacktown.

Over the next few months we employed an experienced mine manager and a team of industrial chemists. Apart from the gold obtained by processing the old slag heaps, and we had fifty or more years to do that, we had the lead and some silver. We were able to set up a process that produced coal briquettes from the dust, and the rest of the slag was converted into roadstone that we used to build the road, at first only single track with passing places alongside the railway track.

After five years we had closed the line and built a wide road all the way to the next nearest station to Blacktown, eight miles away. From there the road took a more direct route with some minor hills, hills too steep to be climbed by a steam engine but easy for any road vehicle. The road was only five miles long because the railway line had hugged the sides of a scenic valley. We kept the eight miles of tack as a heritage railway initially run by the newer tank engine, the diesel loco and the restored Gwaldys. After restoration to her original company's colours of a brilliant deep blue her former name of Gwaldys the Hiss was no longer appropriate. She became Glorious Gwaldys instead.

The Development Company changed the face of Blacktown. All the town's houses had been owned by the mine and rented out at a stupidly low rate fixed before 1939. The rents hadn't covered the maintenance costs which is why we could buy the mine's assets so cheaply.

Unusually, and because Blacktown was beyond civilisation at the time, the mine had built substantial detached houses instead of the tiny terraces usual for a mining town. The Development Company gave the freeholds to the tenants and provided grants for improvement such as indoor bathrooms, loft insulation. The town's water supply was now filtered to get rid of coal dust. What the filters caught produced about fifty pounds worth of gold over a year and a ton of coal briquettes. But everyone now had clean water. The town and its people gradually became less black.

Six months after I had asked Myfanwy to be my girlfriend, we closed the mine for a day for our wedding. The whole of Blacktown attended, even Cerys who should have been on duty.

That night in a bedroom in my house I still didn't believe that Myfanwy was my wife. She rode me vigorously to prove that she was.

I could go on. I won't. Blacktown is no longer black, except for an extended West Indian family who opened a Fish and Chip shop and then a café serving much appreciated Caribbean food. The whole town has a future. I'm proud of that.