Word: slag
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Huw Morgan begins his story he is close onto 60, slag heaps have crept close against the house his youth was spent in, and he is about to leave forever his native valley in Wales. Within a page he has sunk back more than 50 years deep into glassily clear reverie, into a time when the valley and life in it were beautiful...
...elder brother Davy got very busy forming a union more radical than his father would have to do with; later on a terrible five-month strike ended with many children dead, its Pyrrhic victory a minimum wage below what had been paid before. And subtly, implacably, the slag heaps enlarged upon the valley, to that day when the tipping piers were set tall above the dwellings of the miners themselves, and the grim end was plain in sight...