I come from the Welsh Valleys. There’s a reason they’re called “the Valleys.” They’re steep narrow glaciated valleys without much flat land at the bottom. There are valleys just like them all over Wales. Most of them have a church and a few farms, maybe a thousand people in the whole valley. That’s what they can naturally support. Our valley, the Cynon Valley, like its neighbours, has a population of more than a hundred thousand, all living in Victorian terraced houses, terraced up the hillsides like grapes, stuck together in rows with barely room between to hang out washing. The houses and the people are jammed together, like in a city, worse than a city, except that it isn’t a city. But away from those rows, it was wild. And even in them, you could always lift up your eyes.
You could lift up your eyes to the hills from whence cometh your help—a psalm that always seemed self-evident to me. The hills were beautiful, were green and had trees and sheep, and they were always there. They were wild, in the sense that anyone could go there at any time. They didn’t belong to anyone, unlike the flat farmed fenced-in countryside around the school. The hills were common land. And even down in the valleys there were rivers and woods and ruins, as the ironworks ceased to be used, as the industrial places were abandoned. The ruins sprouted plants, returned to the wild, then the fairies moved in. What we thought would happen with the Phurnacite really did happen. It just took a little longer than we’d imagined.
We spent our childhood playing in the ruins, sometimes alone and sometimes with other children or with the fairies. We didn’t realise what the ruins were, not for a long time. There was an old ironworks near Auntie Florrie’s house where we used to play all the time. There were other children there, and we’d play with them sometimes, wonderful games of hide and seek, chasing through. I didn’t know what an ironworks was. If pressed, I’d have worked out the etymology that someone must have once worked iron there, but nobody ever pressed me. It was a place, a thing. It was all over rosebay willow-herb in the autumn. It was unusual that we knew what it was.
Most of the ruins where we played, in the woods, didn’t have names and could have been anything. We called them witch’s cottage, giant’s castle, fairy palace, and we played that they were Hitler’s last redoubt or the walls of Angband, but they were really old crumbling relics of industry. The fairies hadn’t built them. They’d moved in with the green things after people had abandoned them. The fairies couldn’t make anything, not anything real. They couldn’t do anything. That’s why they needed us. We didn’t know that. There were a lot of things we didn’t know, that we didn’t think to ask. Before the people came I suppose the fairies would have lived in the trees and not had houses. The farmers would have put out milk for them, perhaps. There wouldn’t have been so many of them either.
The people had come to the Valleys, or rather their ancestors had, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Under the hills there were iron and coal, and the Valleys were the boom towns of their day, filling up with people. If you’ve ever wondered why there wasn’t a Welsh immigration to the New World on the scale of the Irish or Scottish ones, it isn’t because the people didn’t need to leave their farms in the same way. It’s because they had somewhere of their own to go. Or at least, they thought it was their own. English people came too. The Welsh language lost out. Welsh was my grandmother’s first language, my mother’s second language and I can only fumble along in it. My grandmother’s family had come from west Wales, from Carmarthenshire. We still had relatives there, Mary-from-the-country and her people.
My ancestors came like everyone else, after iron was discovered, and coal. People started building smelters on the spot, railroads to take it out, houses for workers, more smelters, more mines, more houses, until the valleys were solid strips of habitation up and down. The hills were always there between, and the fairies must have huddled in the hills. Then the iron ran out, or was cheaper to produce somewhere else, and while there was still coal mining it was a pitiful remnant of the boom of a hundred years before. Iron works were abandoned. Pits closed down. Some of the people left, but most stayed. It was home by then. By the time we were born, chronic unemployment was a fact of life and the fairies had crept back down into the valleys and taken over the ruins that nobody wanted.