Try My Wings

Smashwords Edition, License Notes Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. To take the possible out of the impossible. A strong stream of pressure from the South. I got on the number twenty-four bus and waited patiently for the old couple in front of me to find a seat. There was a nip in the air outside now that a cold wind had picked up off the Coity, crafting great swirls of leaves, litter and careless drift. I smiled and walked on by, managing to get a place by the window towards the back. It reminded me of the last time I had been on this form of public transport. A little different, the team coach on the way to an away game somewhere along the valley. The cloudy, white hair of older generations now surrounded me apart from a two girls who sat staring and tapping away on their mobile phones. Before it had been talk of the opposition "they're mad" or "crack open the beer" as was the way with rugby teams. The black, sooty clouds were now closing in on the bus as the afternoon promise began to filter away and teatime whistled on. There had been great cries of passion, hurt and fatigue. The huge, clunking mechanism of industry, ceased to bang on, the oil of human endeavor no longer able to lift and wrench mining resources out of the good of the land. The familiar tale of the canary in the shafts of the earth got cries of laughter as the bright man in a miner's suit led us down foot by foot in a cage, the canaries were now free as we became the fodder in his yarn. My window view passed a creek that caught my eye, focused on strangely rich and autumnal brown, despite the clocks shortly to go forward an hour. Tin, grey rushes amongst golden tans. My head turned towards a large graveyard as we continued along the Varteg. We drove through the wildness of the landscape - tall, swinging grasses, hardened and prickly bushes and isolated trees were deep and aged in coarse greens and dry, muddy browns. The scrub of stubborn goarse and worn, dead bracken had odd, unfamiliar buds of yellow - dabs of paintbrushes on the untamed landscape. The bus bounced along the road, inconsistent in its rhythm. The comfort in its lack of luxury was a barrier against the inclement weather on the other side of the glass. I hesitated a moment as the warm chatter of the passengers began to subside then increase then subside and I found myself remembering about the howling wind in a game against Talywain. We were approaching this village, I had remembered on the way up, passing the free and reckless abandon air with which the small, Welsh Mountain Ponies and

larger, shiny horses seemed to guard the entrance to the beauty at the top of the mountain. "Back up on the top of the Blorenge is the grave to Foxhunter, a champion racehorse" said a gruff, hearty voice. It belonged to a man with a thick mop of white hair sat to the left of me on the other side of the aisle. The power and importance of what he had just said to me finally sunk in and I escaped the rejection of a loss at Emlyn Park and replied "It seems a fitting place - everything good seems to be underground". The man asked if I had been to Big Pit and again I replied positively. We passed The Globe Inn, Balance Road, Cooperative street, Bel Air Studios, the Lotus House and the darkness of the valley gave way to a lightness as the sides opened up to lusher climbs and green, green patches of fields. There were scattered woods and occassional settlements, farmhouses no doubt. Further on some bland, coffee cream houses even had solar panels. A good a team as you would ever see were the Pooler side of the seventies was what he had said and we passed the 'Up and Under' and 'The Scrum Half'. The man sat on my left exhailed heavily and shifted in his seat. "I used to drink in those pubs" he continued, the strong Welsh accent of man hung on the important bits. The grandeur of the large park in the middle of the town seemed so out of sorts with the run down shops and closed, failed business - tanning parlours and television repairs. Despite this, the odd bit of class - a church, the market and the Snow White laundrette, hinted at opportunity. "I almost played for Pontypool once" I told the man "What happened?" "I missed the bus" Even his wife chuckled. As the bus weaved through the Eastern Valley the man's wife said "On a good day you can see over to Llandegfedd reservoir, on a bad day the smoke and fumes of the Kurty factory". It was the wife of the man close to me. "When valiant Welshman had a try to blow the aqueduct sky-high" barked the man to anyone that could hear. I chuckled. We curled past the Afon Lwyd river, its colour as fresh as the grey of the slate on the workhouse of them that sweated on those that swept the slag. On approaching Caerphilly I remembered playing for a club in Newport and it was said that I would pull on the red of Wales one day I was so fast. The bus station was not far, the Chartist Tower in its foreground. You can see the Bristol Channel on a clear day from the top of Blaenavon. It's clear to every visitor to the town, some might say houses up there have a sea view. The waters of mouth after mouth sipping, either go to the city of its namesake or round to the capitol of Cardiff. Ebb and flow, moonlight of changing hoizons and valleys roll with the compass. The one I had been up and down was the most easterly of the South Wales coalfield. John Frost Square in Newport did not seem to be the end point of all of the coal transported by

horse, canal and then train. There was no finish line, after all I was a winger born to run and that was all I could dream of. Like those fathers who had dreamed of the dragon and got only his fire. The white sky was endless and the talk on the bus had turned to mutters about joy riders from big cities in England, scathing and hushed.