How green was my valley

How Green was My Valley is one of the most seductive book and film titles ever, and could be borrowed for today. I am not sure exactly how the title came to etch itself in my subconscious, since it was, firstly, the name of a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, and then a 1940 Hollywood film that won six Oscars.

My mother was a huge film buff and I can only think that I must have been taken to see it during my childhood many years later. Before the coming of television in TT and its widespread take-up by the late 1960 and 1970s, cinema was big business and long queues formed outside the numerous film theatres around the country, especially on Friday nights, for matinees and evening screenings at weekends.

The “double” was what people wanted to see – two films, usually a new release and an older feature. Successful films were continually recycled into “doubles” slots, so they remained for a long time in the schedules and afforded cinema fans an encyclopaedic knowledge of the stars of the silver screen, even though they belonged to past generations.

I remember almost nothing about the film or the musical version that followed, if I ever saw either, and I don’t think I ever read the bestselling book, which was translated into 30 languages, or saw the two adaptations for BBC TV, but I felt a profound attachment to the ideas I saw as implicit in that title. It contained a mystery. If it was a question, was it about uncertainty over a memory, self-questioning about a false sense of past contentment, or was it, maybe, a statement about paradise lost? Did it have sexual connotations?

The novel was actually about the life of a family in one of five coal-mining valleys in South Wales around the time of WWII. It apparently so over-romanticised the life of miners, and the film even more, that miners did not recognise their reality in the story.

The sentimental, saccharine flavour, however, won massive audiences and forever mistold the truth of the terrible job coal mining is.

The reports out of COP26 about the reluctance of the Chinese and the Americans to give up on coal production in the short and medium term reminded me of the other truth Llewellyn misrepresented, which was discovered about 20 years ago. The author pretended to be from Wales and to have worked in the pits, and created a whole deceitful narrative about his life and origins. In fact, he was English, did his research vicariously and wrote the book while fighting in WWII. It made the title even more perfect in its slipperiness and perfectly apt for this time.

In the 1980s, I visited the Welsh valleys and saw how the ugly slag heaps were already being greened. There was diminishing evidence of the long glory years of coal as the dirty mineral that powered the industrial revolution, employed well over a million people, and made Britain great. The miners belonged to the super-strong union that often held the British government to ransom, and not without some reason.

Like us in the Caribbean, they had been put to work in the service of wealth and power, and although not branded and shackled possessions, like the ancestors of some of us, they were trapped into short, impoverished life cycles, enduring extremely dangerous and subhuman working conditions. They lived in tiny, crowded terraced dwellings.

Over the centuries they became a cultural and moral force. They understood their power and their economic indispensability had to be reckoned with, until a protracted strike in the mid-1980s brought the country to its knees and reduced coal consumption by 33 per cent. Its decline has been rapid since then.

Some argue that politicians killed King Coal, but politics might have only hastened its death. Like slavery, coal ceased to make economic sense, even if the political imbroglio overshadowed that fact. UK coal consumption started declining in the 1960s, and by 2012, only 40 per cent of its electricity came from coal; in 2017, only two per cent. Now, coal has been abandoned as a source of fuel and employment, having lost ground first to gas, then renewable energy over the last 40-50 years. Latter-day EU clean-air directives and the UK’s carbon taxes drove a staggering 75 per cent decline in just five years.

It may be too late for environmentally endangered small island states, but China and the US will stop coal production when it serves their economic purpose, and they can and will find the mechanisms to do so when the time comes. Then they will have to face the social and political fallout, as Britain did.

Most ex-mining communities in Britain have struggled to find new sources of investment and employment. They blame the EU for coal’s demise, and voted for Brexit. In the US, people in threatened coal-mining states voted for Trump, who courted them with making America great again. The miners probably heard and have “make coal great again” ringing in their ears nostalgically. It’s difficult to give up on a way of life that endured for centuries, regardless of how imperfect it really was.