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Xenophilia 2 - Ancestral Voices

by Mihangel

Llandygái 2001

My name is Elfed Griffiths, though I now prefer to be known as Elfed Maelor. I live in Llandygái near Bangor with my ever-understanding Tad and my new-found love Huw - Huw Macsen, lately better known in his native England as Hugh Lestrange. Like me, he is sixteen. Last July, with his distinctly odious mother, he moved to our village. He spent the summer holidays with me, learning Welsh from me, becoming (in my eyes) as good a Welshman as me, falling in love with me, and ending up in a car crash which left his mother dead and both his arms broken. He was now an orphan, with my Tad as his guardian. How all this happened has been told in a previous tale.

After five days he was released from hospital and came back, his arms in plaster, to our house which was now his house, to my room which was now his room, to all the tender loving care we could give. Tad, who had always treated him much like another son, now treated him exactly like one. They were very similar in character, quiet, gentle and caring, and had hit it off the moment they first met. Huw now treated him just like a father. He gave up calling him Maelor - his first name - and called him Tad instead. What was more, while Huw was still in hospital, Tad took me to a furniture shop and paid for a double bed of my choice, to replace my single one. It didn't surprise me a bit. He'd known that I was gay in a theoretical sense for as long as I'd known it myself, and he'd accepted it without question. He was so accepting that I'd almost given up wondering why. He now accepted, just as unquestioningly, that I was gay in a practical sense. And of course he accepted Huw on equal terms.

I too offered what tender loving care I could. Legally, Huw was now effectively my brother, while in practice he was my lover. In both capacities I tried to support him, to soothe his physical injuries, to help him through the frustrations of semi-immobilised arms. Although I naughtily offered to assist, he could just about look after himself in the loo, but in the bath I had to wash him. I had to brush his teeth and comb his hair and shave him and help him dress. Thus I learned my way about his body more quickly, perhaps, than I otherwise would, and this sudden intimacy, because it was necessary, caused no embarrassment. And in bed I had to take the lead in much of our love-making.

Although I enjoyed helping him and he was grateful for being helped, those early weeks weren't easy. There was the painful process of his mother's inquest and funeral, and of emptying and selling up their former house next door. On top of that was the potentially difficult process of introducing him to a school that was new to him, where he didn't know the kids and staff, and where only Welsh was spoken. I did wish that these changes hadn't had to happen all at once. Yet he seemed to cope with them quite remarkably well, and Ysgol Tryfan accepted him with a welcome for his sunny nature and with sympathy for his accident and injuries. On the face of it, I needn't have worried, for - along with Tad - he was about the most unflappable person I had met.

Yet, as I learned my way around his mind as well as his body, I found that the apparent stability was only skin-deep. What he displayed to the world proved to be his own brand of the traditionally English stiff upper lip, instilled no doubt by generations of conditioning. It was not that annoying brand of slightly arrogant superiority, but a gentle and loving one of calm serenity. It turned out, none the less, to be a mask, an armour, a defence, and not just for his gayness. Inside, he was as vulnerable as anyone else. I discovered this the very night he came home from hospital. I got him ready for bed, and into bed, and climbed in with him. We spent the next five minutes giggling like children, working out how to cuddle without me being battered and bruised by the lumps of concrete which were his arms. He tried to hug me, but it was like being embraced by something out of The Mummy's Revenge. In the end we found it best to lie on our sides, with his lower arm raised out of the way, or for me to lie on my back with him partly on top, so long as he put no weight on my shin, which was still sore.

At last we got ourselves comfortable, and the switch was thrown, instantly and automatically. The moment I held him tight and our mouths met, my heart rose to my throat. His body began to shake and his lips tightened. For maybe ten minutes he sobbed his heart out, while I stroked and soothed and sobbed in unison. "O Duw! Sorry," he said as the quaking gradually subsided. "I've never been so happy before."

"Nor me, Huw cariad. But don't be sorry. Just tell me."

"Not yet. Love first."

So we loved each other, for the first time - the hand job I'd given him in hospital hardly counted. Twice each, in turn, in ecstasy. Then, with our bodies exhausted but our minds still in overdrive, our emotions came tumbling out, in utter disarray. Rearranged into coldly rational order, what they boiled down to was this.

For my part, though Tad had always been there as my anchor, I had been a loner by nature. I too had worn a mask, more fratchety than Huw's, less serene. But still a mask, which I no longer needed, not with Huw. Loners are not necessarily lonely, but I now realised for the first time that I had been: lonely for companionship of my own age, lonely for partnership. That was now supplied. I found a new anchor, of a different sort. I had first fallen in love with Huw's loving mask. It was not false, for it did not falsify. But the vulnerable soul inside it turned out to be more loving and lovable still.

Huw's relationship with his mother had always been brittle. The anchor in his life had been his father, frequently absent on military duty, finally blown up by a landmine in Kosovo. Beneath his imperturbable exterior, Huw had been deeply wounded by the traumas of the last few months, and his loneliness had been more desolate than mine. But now he found two new anchors. Of one sort, in Tad. Of the other, in me.

The hot lava of love welled up from ever greater depths. It swept away our crumbling defensive barriers for good. It evaporated our lonelinesses. Its heat set our souls on fire. Small wonder we both wept. Next morning, when we staggered downstairs at a disgustingly late hour, Tad looked at us searchingly, and smiled.

At last, in October, Huw's plaster came off and his independence was restored. His fractures had healed well, but he needed to rebuild the strength in his arms. Ignoring the exercises he had been given, he killed two birds with one stone by hugging me hard at every opportunity. More than that, we could now explore each other's bodies in full.

We could also explore our country again. Because it is difficult when riding pillion to hold the driver round the waist with rigid arms, we had had no chance of resuming our excursions by scooter. Now that he was back in working order, we began to champ at the bit. But the demands of school, unsettled weather, and shortening evenings limited our ambitions. We spent most of our spare time at home.

One of the perks of Tad being a second-hand bookseller was the books that passed through his hands. If they weren't up our street, or if we had read them already, he would put them straight on the shelves at the shop. If they were more interesting, he might bring them home for us to look at before selling them on. Or he might keep them. The downside, in that case, was that he did not recoup his outlay, but in this respect Tad was weak-willed, and he had accumulated a large library at home. Much reading was therefore done, by all three of us.

One Monday evening in late October we were hard at it. I don't recall what Tad and I had our noses into, but Huw was deep in Thomas Pennant's Tour in Wales, the first edition of 1783. Suddenly he drew his breath in sharply, and as I looked up I saw a big grin spread across his face. He threw me a wicked look, got up, searched the bookshelves for Y Bywgraffiadur Cymreig, the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, looked something up, and smiled broadly at the pair of us. "Elfed, remember you told me you're descended from Archbishop Williams of Cochwillan?"

"Not likely to forget. You rushed off and found he was a descendant of Edward I, sod him."

King Edward, who back in 1282 had finally squashed the last remnants of Welsh independence, was my pet hate, and it was shameful to admit that my Welsh veins were tainted with traces of his evil English blood. It didn't anger me now: it just irked.

"Even so," I went on, "the Archbishop was a good Welshman. Must have been - mustn't he? - if Charles I locked him up for years in the Tower of London."

"What makes you think this good Welshman was your ancestor?"

"Family tradition," Tad chipped in, "on my mother's side."

"Then family tradition's wrong, Tad. Back in August I was only looking for his ancestors, not his descendants. And it says here" - he waved Y Bywgraffiadur at us - "that he never married. He didn't have any descendants."

"Well, even archbishops are human. Or so I'm told. He could have had illegitimate children."

"No, Tad, he couldn't. Some enemy of his accused him at the time of, um, having an unchaste sex life. And here's what Pennant says in reply. 'In his childish years,' - he was born in 1582 - 'with other play-fellows, he was diverting himself with leaping from part of the walls of Conwy to the shore. The fall was in so critical a part, as ever to secure him from all reproaches of unchastity. I mention this merely to rescue him from the reflections flung on him'."

Tad and I worked out what these delicate words meant, and looked at each other with dawning delight. "Duw!" I said. "He lost his cerrig!" - his balls - "He was castrated!"

"Ummm. Not sure it's quite so simple," countered Tad. "Eunuchs can still have a merry old time, if they lose their cerrig after puberty. They don't produce sperm, but everything else works fine. But Williams had his accident in his childish years. Before puberty, it sounds like. Iawn, that would keep him chaste - he wouldn't be able to perform at all. But his voice would never have broken - would they have made him Archbishop with an unbroken voice? - and he wouldn't have grown a beard. Yet there's a portrait of him in Penrhyn Castle, in which I seem to remember he needs a shave." He was hunting on the shelves, and brought down a guide to the Castle. "Yes, look." The heavily-jowled face in the painting had a very obvious six o'clock shadow. "No, I don't think he lost his cerrig. More likely he lost his pidyn" - his cock - "or damaged it beyond repair. That would secure him from reproaches of unchastity, wouldn't it?"

"With a vengeance." Huw and I were smiling.

"Well, well, well. I weep for the poor man" - not that Tad showed any sign of tears - "but I admit I'm mightily relieved to have him out of our family tree. And therefore to have King Edward out too. That's great news, Huw. Thanks."

"Any time. But what do you know of your ancestors, Tad? For sure?"

"Remarkably little. On my mother's side I can go back about five generations. Hang on." He rummaged in a cupboard and brought out a big envelope. "Here's all I know of her ancestry." He handed Huw a single sheet of paper. "But on my father's side I can only go two generations back, to my Taid." Taid is Welsh for grandfather, as Nain is for grandmother.

"Tad, you shock me." Huw was well versed in his own genealogy and in the nuts and bolts of searching out ancestors. He had done quite a bit of it with his own father. "I thought all good Welshmen knew their descent in the male line for umpteen generations back, and could recite it off the top of their heads."

"Not this one. I must be a bad Welshman. All I've got to go on is what's in the family bible, and what very little my Mam could tell me about my father's side."

"Family bible? Can I see it, please?"

Tad found the big Victorian volume on the shelf and opened it at the flyleaf. On it was written, in a succession of different hands, the basic outline of four generations. In translation, it read:

Given to Owen Griffiths by his father

Owen Griffiths, born Nantlle 23rd January 1880
Married Gwen Lloyd, Llandygái 17th August 1915

Emrys Griffiths, born Carmel 22nd May 1916
Married Anne Morgan, Llandygái 22nd September 1949
Died 30th March 1953

Maelor Griffiths, born Bangor 19th July 1950
Married Gloria Jefferson, Llandygái 5th June 1984

Elfed Griffiths, born Bangor 8th April 1985

"We know about you, Tad. But tell us more about your Tad and your Taid. It looks as if your Taid never died!"

Tad laughed. "Owen? Nobody knows when he died. It's an odd story. He started as a quarryman at Penyrorsedd quarry. Then he was ordained and became Methodist minister at Carmel. Then he married my Nain Gwen. In the church here in Llandygái, as it happened. Here, because her parents lived in Talybont just down the road, and in the church because she was Anglican. They had one child, my Tad, Emrys. But only a year or so after Emrys was born, Owen disappeared. Simply walked out. That's all I know. I don't think Emrys was ever told why. At any rate, nobody heard from him again, and Nain took Emrys back to her family in Talybont.

"Not long after that, she died, and Emrys was brought up by her parents. He became a quarryman too, at Penrhyn, and he was killed in a rock-fall there when I was two. I was his only child. So neither he nor Owen had any chance of handing down family traditions to their sons. All I know is what my Mam told me, which is what Emrys had told her."

I had heard this before, of course, but it was new to Huw. "What a story! Three generations of only children, all losing one parent, or even both, when they were babies!" The third generation he was referring to was me, for my own Mam had walked out on Tad when I was still in nappies. "And there aren't any family papers or photos that you've inherited?"

"No papers, not about this lot. Well, a few bits about Emrys. Just his birth and death certificates and things, and a few snaps. Here's a rather nice one." A young man with a wide grin was leaning against a narrow-gauge locomotive in the quarry.

"Of Owen, there's only one photo." He dug it out of the envelope and checked on the back. "Yes, it says he's the one trimming." It showed two boys of about thirteen, one of them sitting at the trafal, trimming slate with a hand-held knife..

"You know, he looks rather like you, Elfed," said Huw. "Prominent cheekbones."

"Mmmm, yes, see what you mean," I agreed. "And Tad, look, he was left-handed too, like you and me. Was Emrys, d'you know?"

"Sorry. No idea." Tad turned back to the bible. "And that's all. I don't even know the name of Owen's father. I wish he'd seen fit to write it here. Not just 'given by his father'."

"Well," said Huw. "We should be able to find it out, here and now. The 1881 census is online now, on the IGI site. You know, the Mormons' International Genealogical Index. The census was taken in April, so Owen would have been just over one. What parish is Nantlle in?"

"Ummm. Must be Llandwrog."

Huw moved to the computer and tapped, and in a few minutes he had his answer. "Iawn! Here we are! Only one Owen Griffiths aged one in Llandwrog. Living in Nantlle. Born in Llandwrog. Only child of John and Mary Griffiths. John was a slate quarryman born in Beddgelert, aged thirty-nine. So there's a new generation for you."

"Y nefoedd fawr! Huw, that's great! You know, it reminds me that there's a mystery photo in here too. I'm not even sure it's of our family. But it's obviously old, so I wonder if it can possibly belong to that new generation."

He burrowed in the envelope and produced a small brown print mounted on thick card with bevelled edges. It showed a confident-looking man of perhaps forty, seated on a chair. He had short dark hair and luxuriant side whiskers, and wore a high floppy collar with a wide loose bow tie, a short waistcoat and a long jacket. He gave the impression of being small in stature. Standing behind him, one hand on the back of the chair, was a boy of about sixteen with a sensitive fine-drawn face who, though whiskerless, resembled the man in features and in dress.

"But that's Elfed!" cried Huw. "I mean, it looks even more like him."

"Dammo di!" Tad exclaimed. "So it does! I haven't set eyes on this for years. When I last did, Elfed was still a chubby youngster. Yes. It does look like him now, doesn't it? So they pretty certainly are ancestors. Now, what sort of date is it? Hmmm. The dress is just the same as I. K. Brunel's wearing in that famous photo. I'd say late 1850s. Turn it over, I think there's something on the back."

There was. The printed message 'John Williams, Photographer, Tremadoc,' and a brief note in ink 'DG & JG.'

"Well, that fits," said Huw. "If JG is the boy, he's presumably John Griffiths. Owen's father. Or should it be grandfather? Wait a mo." He did sums in his head. "He'd have been born in roughly 1842. So he'd be about thirty-eight in 1880. No, that's a bit young to be Owen's grandfather, isn't it? He's much more likely Owen's father. And if DG was John's father, I reckon you've got the makings of two new generations here." He beamed at us.

His enthusiasm was firing us too. "Where do we go from here? To find out more? Is it going to be difficult?"

"More difficult than in England. Think of the shortage of names here. I read somewhere that in rural North Wales about 1850, over 95 per cent of the people shared only twenty surnames. There weren't many more first names either, and most of those were English ones, before Welsh ones made a come-back. William Joneses were two a penny. The difficulty's making sure you've got the right William Jones. Much harder even than finding the right William Smith in England. And we're unlucky in having a John to look for, though at least Griffiths isn't quite so common.

"As for where to look, well, there are two main lines of attack. One of them's parish registers. We need to look at the Llandwrog ones, not that they're likely to tell us much more about John and Owen. And at the Beddgelert ones for John's birth and his parents. They'll presumably be in the county archives."

"Haven't I heard that the Mormons have got all the parish registers online?"

"For England, yes, or nearly all. But their coverage of Wales, especially North Wales, is thin to vanishing point."

"Pity. What's the other approach?"

"Censuses again. Trouble is none of the earlier ones is online. So they're horribly tedious to search. We'd have to go to the Archives for the one nearest in date to this photo. That's 1861. Start with Beddgelert and hope John was still there. If he wasn't, it'll be looking for a needle in a haystack. He might have lived anywhere. No, hang on, we do have one clue, don't we? If he and his father had their photo taken in Tremadog in the late 1850s, presumably they lived within easy reach of it. And another thing. It's not at all unlikely that his father was a quarryman too. What slate quarry was there then, within easy reach of Tremadog?"

"Gorseddau," said Tad without hesitation. "The classic example of how not to run a quarry. And yes, it was working in the late 50s and 60s. It can't be more than three or four miles from Tremadog over the top, though it's a sight further by road. That's the best bet, by far. It's in my mind because I've just bought a run of a rather nice periodical called Gwynedd Diwydiannol, Industrial Gwynedd, which I thought might interest you. And one of them's got an article about Gorseddau." He fished them out of his bag. "Yes, in volume 3. All about Ty Mawr Ynysypandy, in Cwmystradllyn. That was the mill where they sawed slate from Gorseddau quarry into slabs for tombstones and lintels and things."

Though I'd heard of the place, and seen the odd picture of the ruins, I'd never been there. But as we pored over the article and its illustrations, our appetites were whetted. Not only was there this extraordinarily impressive mill and the quarry itself to explore, but also, it turned out, the tramway which carried the slate down to Porthmadog and the remains of a village built for the quarrymen. The whole thing closed in 1866, after an active life of only twelve years, and had not been worked since.

We got out the 1:50,000 map to see the lie of the land. It was about twenty-five miles south of Llandygái. The least indirect route was the main road, the A487. A few miles short of Porthmadog it crossed the lower end of Cwm Pennant, that lovely valley extending northwards into the mountains which had inspired Eifion Wyn's immortal lines

Pam, Arglwydd, a gwnaethost Cwm Pennant mor dlws
A bywyd hen fugail mor fyr?

'Why, Lord, did you make Cwm Pennant so fair, and the life of an old shepherd so short?'

I'd been right up to the top of it with Tad, and loved it. But I'd never been up Cwmystradllyn, a tributary valley which fed into it from the east.

So Gorseddau had a double attraction, not only as the possible stamping ground of long-forgotten ancestors, but as an intriguing place in its own right. Huw and I looked at each other and nodded. That must be our first port of call, followed by the Gwynedd Archives in Caernarfon. For the moment neither was on. The evenings were too short to go after school, and the Archives, Huw discovered from their website, closed at 5.30 and weren't open at all on Mondays. But ahead was looming the half-term week and nine continuous days of freedom. Exploration in the field was therefore destined for the weekend, the Archives for Tuesday onwards.

Over the next few days we did a little more research. Gorseddau was in the commot of Eifionydd, and Gresham's great book told us the history of the land ownership and, essential knowledge for consulting the censuses, it showed us the complexities of the local parish boundaries. Four parishes were intertwined in a geographical jigsaw: Dolbenmaen, Ynyscynhaiarn in two detached portions, Penmorfa in two portions (one of which included the mill) and, worst of all, no less than eight portions of Llanfihangel y Pennant (one of which included the quarry and village). Huw searched the web and came up with quite a collection of modern photographs of the mill and the quarry. And from the net he printed off first-edition six-inch maps, surveyed in 1888, which gave us the detailed geography and pinpointed the abandoned village of Treforys. Tad photocopied the article in Gwynedd Diwydiannol for us, to save getting the original wet and dirty. We were ready to go and look.

Cwmystradllyn 1854-57

The industrial revolution was in full swing. The population of Britain doubled in fifty years. The railways spread tentacles of iron across the land. Mining, textile and engineering centres expanded, almost exploded, into sprawls of factories and houses. New buildings need roofs, and the slate industry of North Wales had never had it so good. Many a new quarry was opened, and in 1854 a typical syndicate of Englishmen jumped on the bandwagon and formed a company to work Gorseddau quarry. No more than trial scratchings had taken place there before, but the speculators were persuaded by the glowing report of a German mining engineer of dubious expertise that riches awaited them.

Their authorised capital was ultimately £125,000, an enormous sum for such a purpose at such a date. Over the next three years the necessary land was leased or bought outright, and work began on opening up the quarry. Ambitions ran high. To carry the expected produce out, an eight-mile tramway was engineered down to the harbour of Portmadoc. For sawing blocks of raw slate into slabs, the massive mill of Ty Mawr was erected beside the tramway at Ynysypandy, a couple of miles below the quarry at the nearest point where decent water power was available. And, to accommodate the workforce, not only were barracks built in the quarry itself but, on a bleak and wind-swept hillside nearby, the brand-new village of Treforys. A kindly landowner gave the site for a small school, which also doubled for worship until a proper chapel was built.

The valley, before all this upheaval began, had been an isolated backwater with seven impoverished tenant farms and a population of forty six. But by 1856 nearly three hundred extra inhabitants had swarmed in, recruited by advertisement and by word of mouth. Very few were local, for the population was far too small to meet the demand. Most were lured here, by the prospect of above-average wages, from the established slate quarrying areas of Bethesda, Llanberis and Dyffryn Nantlle to the north, and even from as far as Anglesey.

As it turned out, few men came with their families, and the village was never fully occupied. Most, if they had families, left them back at home, wherever that might be. During the week they lived in the barracks or in empty houses in the village, and when work ended at midday on Saturday walked maybe twenty miles home, returning first thing on Monday morning. Those who did not have families - and there were many of them - spent the week in barracks and the weekends in the fleshpots of Portmadoc. The Gorseddau workforce included more disreputable and footloose characters than was usual.

The quarry lay at the centre of the amphitheatre which forms the head of Cwmystradllyn, a terrain of rock and heather on the mountain and of rushes and sour grazing on the flatter ground. It faced down the length of the valley and across a sizeable lake - dammed to supply water to the mill - towards the slightly lusher pastures of Eifionydd beyond. The slate vein lay awkwardly. Its strata were vertical and lacked the natural joints which in a good quarry allow the rock to be freed in reasonably small blocks. It merged imperceptibly into the bastard or useless slate, it was covered by much overburden, and it was criss-crossed by dykes of igneous rock of no use to anyone. The only way to attack it was horizontally from the front, in a series of galleries stepping up the hillside. Preparing the site for productive working - making it ready for the rockmen who extracted the slate itself - was a tedious job, difficult, expensive and dangerous. It was done by men who, though no underground burrowing was needed here, were called miners.

A little roofing slate had already been sent out from the quarry by cart, but in May 1857 the slab mill and the tramway were completed, and the whole concern moved into more serious production. To mark the occasion a ceremony was held at the quarry, attended by some of the directors who travelled up from Portmadoc in a brand-new passenger carriage specially built for them. James Brunlees the engineer was there too, and Edwyn Dixon the English over-manager, and Thomas Evans the Welsh under-manager or foreman, and all the two hundred-odd workmen. Florid speeches were made in English and in Welsh. To christen the tramway, off went the first train of laden wagons, rolling down by gravity with the horse to pull the empties back trailing along behind.

A rock cannon, the traditional home-made firework of the industry, had been prepared on a large flat rock half way up the quarry. Holes had been drilled in it in zigzag pattern, thirty-seven of them, six inches deep, all linked by a shallow groove. Each hole was charged with a measure of powder and stemmed with hard-packed slate dust. A powder-filled goose-quill fuse led through the stemming, and along the groove connecting the holes was poured a trail of powder covered with goose fat to keep out the air. The trail was lit at one end, the fire fizzed its way from hole to hole, and ignited each charge in turn in a deafening bang-bang-bang. This was the signal to broach the barrels of ale brought up from Porthmadog by tram. The real fun began, and not a few got drunk on the cwrw da.

The quarry was in business. The directors and the manager, in their innocence, waxed full of optimism. Most of the men, Thomas Evans included, who knew their slate far better, were well aware that the rock was crap and that the quarry could never pay. But they kept their counsel, for it gave them work.

Cwmystradllyn 2001

Saturday threatened uncertain weather. Tad knew how much our excursions together meant to us and, even though we were likely to get soaked, he didn't offer to take us by car. Nor did we ask him to - he had his own agenda in getting the garden put to bed for the winter. The scooter could not go fast, and the journey would take well over an hour. Down the A487 we buzzed, past Caernarfon, past Penygroes. Half a mile beyond Dolbenmaen and its medieval motte we branched off left past the woollen mill, and turned left again onto the narrow and winding cul-de-sac which leads up Cwmystradllyn. A mile or so further on, as I carefully negotiated a blind right turn, I nearly drove into the wall in astonishment.

It was a murky day. Heavy black clouds were rolling in above. Ahead and slightly to left, the rounded mass of Moel Hebog, capped with a precociously early sprinkling of snow, glowed evilly under the leaden sky. And directly in front of us rose Ty Mawr, haloed in glory by a solitary ray of sun which burst like the eye of God through the clouds. Perched on an outcrop rising steep from the stream below, the mill looked for all the world like the ruins of a medieval abbey. So monumentally grand a building was totally unexpected in this landscape where all other human architecture - such few farmhouses and barns as there were - was small-scale and functional. It was easy to see why this was called Ty Mawr, the big house.

We parked the scooter in a widening of the road just short of the bridge below the outcrop, and as we took our helmets off we gazed up at the gable looming high above us. The mill, we knew, had been bought by the National Park twenty years ago, consolidated, and left open for anyone to visit at any time. The entrance was beside the bridge, in the form of a kissing gate. We made it live up to its name, as we always did at any kissing gate, provided we were alone. We scrambled up a rough and slippery path through the waste tips until, on the right, a lofty archway opened in the foot of the mill wall. Inside, we found ourselves on the floor of the deep pit, cut at one end from the solid rock, which had once housed the great waterwheel for driving the machinery.

We emerged and climbed further up to the main level. The stone-built shell of the building was complete, but all the machinery and floors and roof were gone. It had had two storeys plus an attic, and in one quarter a basement dictated by the lie of the land. On the side away from the stream, two curving branches were thrown off the tramway to enter the mill, one on the ground floor, the other, via an embankment with a great retaining wall, on the upper floor. Inside, empty sockets for beams and joists showed where the floors had been, and we disturbed a peregrine that had been sheltering in one of them. The lower floor was split into two by the chasm of the wheel-pit, the wheel having been set entirely below ground level. The whole mill was lit by serried ranks of round-arched windows and doors. It was quite clear that no expense had been spared. The result was a building of immense architectural power, even more impressive, perhaps, as an empty shell than when complete. Awe-inspiring, we decided, was the best description. We saluted James Brunlees the engineer who had designed it, and Evan Jones the local mason who had built it.

Our article told us that roofing slates were split and trimmed in the gwaliau or huts in the quarry - the usual procedure in those days - and that the mill produced only slabs. Raw blocks delivered to the ground floor by tramway from the quarry were sawn and planed into slabs by great machines invented by Edwyn Dixon the manager. The mill's speciality was chimney pieces - mantlepieces and fire surrounds - which were polished and carved by light machinery and by hand on the upper floor.

We spent the morning exploring the site, photocopy in hand, arguing out the details, until we understood its workings. We ate our sandwiches sheltered from the wind behind the embankment. One or two farm tractors and the mail van passed on the road below, but otherwise we saw not a soul all day. We then traced the route of the water supply to its take-off point on the stream. We followed the tramway a short distance in either direction: its engineering was generous, and no expense had been spared here either. But the rain now set in, and drove us to shelter in the tunnel which fed the water to the wheel. Through gaps in the squalls we could make out the quarry at the head of the valley, two miles away, and the hillside where Treforys ought to be, though we could see no sign of it from here. But we chickened out of going further today. Instead, cold and damp but uplifted and happy, we mounted the scooter and made our long way home, to soak in a hot bath rather than in wet clothes.

Next day the weather was similar. This time we sailed past Ynysypandy without stopping and continued for three quarters of a mile, past the old school, to the end of the tarmac at Tyddyn Mawr. This was the furthest house still occupied. After the second world war, we had read, the dam on the lake was enlarged to supply mains water to Llyn, and at the same time the few farms around the lake were bought out and the buildings stripped to avoid pollution to the reservoir. We walked along the tramway above the lake, aiming today for the quarry.

We passed Plasllyn, the house built by the slate company for the manager - not Dixon the over-manager who lived elsewhere, but Thomas Evans the foreman who supervised day-to-day operations. Typical of quarry managers' houses in the mountains, it was surrounded by a small plantation. Its last use was as a youth hostel; but it was reputedly haunted, and after the last warden had run screaming into the night it was demolished, leaving nothing but a mound of rubble, though the stables were still there under their bare rafters.

We sploshed through some wet cuttings before the tramway swung right to enter the quarry. The towering waste tips were held back from spilling on to the track by a great retaining wall. It was an extraordinary sight. About fourteen feet high, it did not stand vertical but curved outwards over our heads to overhang by a good five feet.

"This must be the Wailing Wall," said Huw as we prowled along its length. "That website had a picture of it. Grief, the stones are monstrous. They must be corbelled. Couldn't stay up otherwise. Yes, look." We had reached the far end and could see the thing in cross-section, with its horizontal courses each projecting beyond the one below. "Some of those stones must be nine feet long. But why build it like that?" I had no answer.

Beyond the Wailing Wall lay a flat area with the ruins of a row of buildings. It was quite easy to work out from their design that the end parts had been the smithy, office, and stables. In the middle was a double block of two-storey barracks. Everything was an empty shell or a total ruin. Beyond again, the tramway curved round to the foot of the incline into the quarry.

We stood back and looked up it. Just to the right was the great re-entrant of the quarry workings blasted into the hillside.

"That's four main galleries," I said, counting the stepped floors. "Apart from the one we're on. They must be, what, fifty feet apart, vertically. And look, another two, three, four smaller floors higher up."

Huw was scanning the long waste tips which ran along the contours in both directions from each floor. "Am I crazy?" he asked. "It looks as if there's far more waste in those tips than can possibly have come out of the quarry."

"Well, it's bound to be deceptive. I mean, a cubic yard of solid rock takes up much more than a cubic yard of space when it's broken into bits. Anyway, slate quarrying's always fiendishly wastful. Tad told me once that even at the very best quarries, for every ten tons they got out of the ground, only one ton was sold. The rest ended on the tips. Bad quarries might sell only one ton out of every hundred, or worse. And we know Gorseddau was lousy."

Up we went, to the first floor, and looked over the edge. The floor below seemed a long way down: how often had men fallen over? The gallery itself around the quarry pit was littered with lumps of rock, some as big as cars or even small lorries, either abandoned there when working stopped or fallen since.

"Hey, Elfed, look at these!" Huw had noticed some deep holes in the native rock, most of them split open longitudinally so that they appeared as semicircular grooves.

"Shot-holes for blasting. But they're enormous." They were about four inches in diameter. I had been round a number of quarries and knew roughly what was what, but had never seen the like. "They were usually made by jumper - a sort of long bar with a chisel end, worked by hand. Lift, twist, drop, lift, twist, drop. Yes - there's a typical jumper hole." It was little more than an inch across. "These monsters must have been drilled by machine. Yes, look, you can see the marks from a rotating bit. Wonder what it was powered by."

We could not answer that either, but explored along the waste tips, those on one side of the quarry provided with small gwaliau or dressing huts, those on the other with corbelled blast shelters. Two more floors proved much the same. Then rain driven by a strong north-easterly began to lash down, and drove us back to the tramway where we tried to shelter in the lee of the Wailing Wall. As we cowered, we noticed that some of the softer rocks had graffiti scratched into them, of all dates from the 1850s to the present. I spotted one which was out of the ordinary, and pointed to it with my stick.

"Huw, look."

It read:

RJ © JG 1857

Beside it was

JG © RJ

"Hmmm. Could be our John Griffiths, I suppose." said Huw, seeing what I was getting at. "But could be any other JG, boy or girl. Like Robert Jones declaring his passion for Jane Griffiths, and the other way round. Though I wouldn't have thought Jane would write graffiti."

The voice of reason. None the less, I had a private and obstinate feeling that the graffiti were speaking to us. But we were getting cold, chickened out again, and headed for home. Once more we had not met a single human being all day.

We had showers when we were in a hurry, as on weekday mornings, but for driving out the cold, we agreed, a bath was second to none, and second only to bed for togetherness. This was because our bath was old-fashioned and large, large enough to hold us both at once. In it, we were quite infantile. We had a rotund little blue and yellow rubber shark for squirting water in a thin jet which, we found, was extraordinarily stimulating when played on the pidyn. Stimulation by jet invariably led on to stimulation by other means. So it did that evening. Fulfilled, we sat there face to face, legs interlocked, each with a foot in the other's crotch, while Huw drew patterns in the thick wet hair on my thighs: something I could not do to him because his legs were as smooth as a baby's.

He traced HM © EM on one thigh.

I replied by tracing JG © RJ on the other.

"You've got that on the brain, haven't you?" he asking, grinning at me.

"As well as on the thigh. Yes, I know. I'm a persistent sod. But I have this gut feeling that these two are ... counterparts." I pointed from one thigh to the other. "It won't go away."

He responded by lunging forward to kiss me, and the tidal wave washed the messages away.

After tea, Tad produced another book. "I'd forgotten I'd got this." It was The Slate Quarries of North Wales in 1873, a collection of articles published in the Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald. "I know this is rather late for your purposes, but it's got a description of a drilling machine patented by a certain Dixon. Is that the same Dixon who was manager of Gorseddau? He was a bit of an inventor, wasn't he?"

Yes, it was the same. It described a drill of the kind used by miners for developing a quarry. It made big shot-holes like those we had seen today, each holding 25 pounds of gunpowder, and the blast loosened huge blocks of rock. That fitted well, though it was hand-powered: it must have taken an awful lot of men an awful long time to drill a deep hole.

On Monday we returned to Gorseddau for the third time. It had to be Treforys today, and mercifully the weather had improved. Again we followed the tramway from Tyddyn Mawr, but by the ruins of Talyllyn farm we cut up to the left along a track behind Plasllyn. Our map of 1888 showed the village as three streets running above each other along the hillside, dead straight and parallel, and connected by a link road. And there they were, camouflaged, when seen from a distance, by tussocky grass and dying rushes, but obvious when you were on them. 'Streets' now seemed too grandiose a name. They were very rough, very steep where they cut across or through naked outcrops of rock, and barely usable, we imagined, by wheeled vehicles. The drainage had gone to pot and stretches of them were now deep bog.

Along each street, on the downhill side only and equally merging into the landscape, stood semi-detached houses, well separated from their neighbours. According to the map there were eighteen blocks or thirty-six houses in total. Each block proved identical, its two houses being mirror images of each other. They were in the typical Welsh rural long-house style, essentially single-storey, with the door on the side away from the street. Each had three rooms. The main living room was some twelve feet by fifteen, with a sizeable fireplace for a range. Off it led a slightly smaller room with a smaller fireplace. Over the smaller room but not the larger was a croglofft or attic room, entirely in the roof space, reached presumably by ladder. The walls of some houses had collapsed virtually to ground level, while those of others, even the gable walls, were almost complete.

The streets were bounded by a continuous waist-high stone wall on the uphill side, and on the downhill by a similar wall except where it was interrupted by houses and by gaps for access. As we wandered round the back, we noticed ditches, some of them still in water, running straight down to the street below. "Elfed," said Huw, prowling, "each house had a long strip of land, bordered by these ditches. A garden."

"See what you mean. But dunno about a garden. Look at it - just rushes and rocks. It must be a thousand feet up here, and fiendishly exposed - what could you grow here? Potatoes, possibly? And chickens? Or there might have been a family pig - that was common enough - though I can't see any pig sties. Wooden, perhaps. Though you'd have to import wood, while there's all the stone in the world for free."

"Same goes for tai bach - privies. Where did they crap? Into the ditches, which washed it all down to the street below?"

"Or into buckets, which they emptied any old where?" We never solved that problem, but just beyond the far end of the middle street we found a spring, the only obvious water source for the whole village. It was time for lunch, and we sat on the nearest dry perch, the broken-down street wall beside the third house from the spring.

"You know, Huw, the best-preserved houses are the ones nearest to the spring. I wonder if they were the last to be occupied."

"That would add up. When we get to the census, I hope it'll give house numbers, so we can work out who lived in which. But then we don't know which end of which street the numbering would start."

"Most logical, I'd have thought, if No. 1 was at the west end of the lower street. Nearest to Porthmadog. If that's right we're now at" - I counted on the map - "No. 20."

When we had finished, as I stood up, I dislodged the slab I had been sitting on, which had formed part of the coping of the wall.

"Hang on," said Huw. "Isn't there writing on that?" It was a rectangular slab of sawn slate, about fifteen inches by twelve by four. I picked it up, put it flat on the wall, and brushed loose dirt off. Yes, there was writing on it. The first line, quite deeply cut in fairly neat capitals, read

MAE ROWLAND JONES YN CARU JOHN GRIFFITHS

Beneath it was a large heart. Under the heart was the date,

CHWEFROR 14EG 1858

On either side of the heart, rather cruder lettering read

A MAE JOHN GRIFFITHS YN CARU ROWLAND JONES

Rowland Jones loves John Griffiths, and vice versa, 14th February 1858. We looked at each other open-mouthed. No way could I utter a word. Huw had to say it for me.

"You were right, Elfed. They're the same people as on the Wailing Wall. They were gay. Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. Gay. In a macho society like this. And if this is your John, then your great-great-grandfather was gay."

"Not a joke, then?" I asked, finding my voice.

"It's not the sort of thing you'd do as a joke, is it? Look at the date - it's a ffolant. A valentine. Surely they wrote it themselves. They must have brought the slab up from Ty Mawr - it's sawn. There's hardly any other sawn stuff round here. And look at the lichen on it, only on these three edges. It must have sat like this." He fitted it against the surviving stretch of coping, where the stones stood on edge, at right angles to the line of the wall. "When the coping was complete, nobody would ever see the writing. Not till the slab was knocked down by a sheep, or a man. It was hidden, deliberately. And don't you think they put it here because it was nearest to where one of them lived? No. 20?"

I couldn't argue with his reasoning. I knew in my bones that it was sound. I couldn't prove it, not yet, but none the less I knew for sure that my ancestor four generations back had been here, on this exact spot, with his lover. Had they been in the little bedroom barely six feet away? Could they there have ... ? I suddenly got rampant.

Huw knew exactly what was going on in my mind, and in my pants. "Elfed, cariad, come inside." There he hugged me, hard against hard, and kissed me. The floor was thick with sheep shit, but we didn't have to lie down. He squatted, undid my belt and zip, and loved me. Then I loved him. Precisely where, surely, they had loved each other, nearly a hundred and forty four years before.

When it was over, I found myself caught in a complex mix of emotions, and tears rolled down my cheeks. Love, yes of course; love for Huw, as ever. But much more than that. Again Huw read my mind, and again hugged me close.

"It's relief of a sort, isn't it, Elfed?" he murmured. "However understanding people are, people like Tad, we always feel odd men out, don't we? In our own little world, in Llandygái, at school, we're odd men out, as far as we know. Iawn, we know we're not freaks. We know we're far from being alone, in the big wide world, nowadays. Which helps.

"And now you know that you're not alone in time. That must help. To know that you're not alone in your family tree. That you're not the first Griffiths to be gay. That even among the Griffithses you're not a freak. Is that right?"

"Yn llygad ei le, Huw. That exactly right. I know in my guts that this is my John. I've found a Griffiths I can identify with. In a way I can't even with Tad." The relief, the comfort, was immense. I felt myself reaching out to John across the years, and approving his love for Rowland. I felt John reaching out to me, and approving my love for Huw.

"Thank you, Huw. For being you. And for being here. With me." I breathed a deep sigh, and came back to the present. "Look, shall we clean the place up a bit and take some photos?"

We pulled up grass and nettles from the floor as best we could, and scraped the worst of the sheep shit away, and removed some of the tumbled stones, until the internal layout of the house was reasonably clear. We took many pictures, inside and out, including ourselves, and including the ffolant.

"What do we do with it, Elfed? If we leave it here, someone may find it and add rude remarks. Or just laugh at it. We don't want that. Oughtn't we to take it home and look after it properly?"

Yes, it was the right thing to do. We wrapped it carefully in a spare sweater and slid it into Huw's rucksack. It was heavy, but he had carried much heavier burdens before.

Any more investigation could only prove an anticlimax. "Gadaw i ni fynd," I said. Let's go. We squelched down towards the tramway. "And who was Rowland Jones, Huw? That's what we've got to find out too."

Cwmystradllyn 1857-58

Pre-eminent among the Gorseddau miners was Daniel Griffiths, a small wiry man and a born leader, who lived hard. He had learned his trade in the small copper mines of Cwm Pennant just to the west and of Beddgelert just over the watershed to the east. He was employed as a contractor on piece-work, agreeing with the company to blast away so much rock for such and such a price, from which he paid his specialist gang. Both in the community of Treforys and in the hierarchy of the quarry, he was a man of standing. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he had a fair command of English. Like most of them, he was a bit of a rough diamond.

What with all the development work still needed, Daniel prospered mightily. When he was paid at the end of a contract, he doled out generous wages to his gang. But he had plenty left over. Some he would give to his wife. Then he would disappear to Portmadoc to enjoy himself until the rest ran out. He was lucky. For more ordinary quarrymen, the life was hard; but they knew no other. Their pay averaged 3s 6d a day or less than £1 a week. Barracks-men brought their own supplies with them on Monday mornings, enough to see them through till Saturday - bacon, butter, bread, eggs, potatoes and tea in a bolster case slung over their shoulder. For families in Treforys, though some things might be bought from neighbouring farms, the nearest shop was in Penmorfa five miles away, most easily reached by hitching a lift on the tramway. Most of them kept chickens on their own plot, and a pig which they would slaughter and cure in the autumn. Their fuel was peat cut locally, or coal bought at a price from the quarry company. Their houses were damp, respiratory diseases were rife, and sanitation was non-existent.

Daniel lived on the middle street in Treforys, in No. 19, the fourth house from the spring. His wife Ellen described herself as a dressmaker, though in practice the clothes she made and mended were almost entirely for the quarrymen. She was assisted by their younger daughter Elizabeth, now aged thirteen, for hers was a thriving little business. Their oldest child, Catherine, was no longer at home, having gone into service with the Huddarts at Brynkir Hall. Their next oldest, Evan, had also left, to work in the quarries in Dyffryn Nantlle.

Daniel was proud of his mining gang, and treated its members well. Most of them were older and more experienced men, but every trade must have its apprentices. His included two youngsters. One was his second son John, the apple of his eye, who for the last three years had been working with him and learning the art of mining. He was now fifteen and not far into puberty, which in those days came late. The other was a new recruit. Rowland Jones, sixteen-turning-seventeen, was one of the many children of a small farmer near Llanllyfni who doubled as the assistant overseer of a little quarry nearby. At first Rowland lodged in the barracks at the quarry, returning home at weekends. But then the pattern changed.

Treforys had been intended for families but, because far fewer than expected had moved in, most of the houses were empty. The obvious solution was to use them as barracks and reduce the pressure on the barracks proper in the quarry. Daniel's competence and his friendship with Thomas Evans gave him standing, and towards the end of July he was able to rent No. 20 as an overflow. He hardly needed it for his own family. Currently, parents and daughter slept in the two bedrooms and John in the living room: luxury, compared to some families - Ellis Jones's totalled seven, crammed into an identical house. Daniel's reason for renting the new accommodation was to offer it to his mining gang. But, unexpectedly, almost all of them preferred the camaraderie of the barracks and only Rowland opted to join the Griffiths menage. This now lived, in terms of space, more luxuriously still, for John moved out of No. 19 to join Rowland in No. 20, though they ate with the family next door.

Although as fond of horseplay as any of their contemporaries, both boys were gentle and quiet by nature, modest and intelligent, odd men out in a community of largely coarse, loud-mouthed and shallow extroverts. Both went in some awe of their confident fathers. Both had been to school and could read and write reasonably well. Beyond a superficial lip-service, neither had much regard for religion. The same held true of the whole Griffiths household, as it did of the quarry in general. Elsewhere, and especially later, it would become a commonplace for men in barracks to spend winter evenings singing hymns and debating the doctrine of the atonement. Not at Gorseddau. The Methodist revival of 1817 had blossomed in the main centres of population and among the farming communities, but had withered among the wandering labourers. They were not, with few exceptions, that sort of men; not at any rate when away from their families, if they had them. The image of the quarryman as a God-fearing and sober son of toil was largely foreign to Gorseddau.

Here they were rough men. A sizeable part of their pay went on drink, mostly gin. Sometimes they brawled, but for the most part they lived in a loud and boisterous comradeship. In the embattled local farms, and even in the respectable homes of Treforys, 'lock up your daughters' became the watchword. Two prostitutes, following the trade, established themselves for a while in the village, quite unofficially, and their enterprise paid them well. Men with no ties would spend their weekends living it up in Portmadoc, and even a few family men like Daniel who could afford it might go on a longer randy, womanising out of their wives' reach.

The word 'homosexuality' had not yet been coined, in any language. The law regarded buggery between males, otherwise known as sodomy, in the same way as other sexual crimes - fornication, adultery, bestiality - and in practice treated it as a catch-all offence covering all 'unnatural vices' as well as the specific act. Sodomy was still in theory punishable with death. It was endemic in gaols, in the navy, in parts of the army, and in some public schools. Male prostitution was widespread in London. Even there, sex between males was always casual and furtive. In rural Wales, even in the new centres of the slate industry, it was simply not part of the culture. People knew in principle, from hearing apocalyptic sermons, what sodomy was and, as the preachers instructed them, almost all abhorred the thought. Even in ungodly wildernesses like Gorseddau it was virtually unknown, for it was regarded as effeminate and unmanly. Boys were safe in barracks: safe from the attentions of men.

But no girls within reach were safe from boys. Early experimentation was the norm. Youths were almost expected to follow the tradition of pre-marital sex, and a large percentage of brides arrived at the altar already pregnant.

John and Rowland had become firm friends. John missed the companionship of his older brother Evan, and Rowland, as the only other youngster in the mining gang, came naturally to fill the gap. The friendship which sprang up between them was nothing remarkable. But the love affair into which it grew was a rare phenomenon indeed. At first, it progressed imperceptibly. It was standard practice of a summer evening for men and boys to go down to the lake, strip off and swim, both for the fun of it and to wash off the sweat and dirt of the day. Thus John and Rowland knew, and secretly admired, each other's bodies. Both were shapely and muscular, neither was too much marred by bites from bedbugs and fleas. Their interdependence and their friendship grew closer. They became almost a pair of brothers, almost inseparable. When they moved into No. 20, they shared a bed.

This was absolutely normal. At home, John had shared with Evan. In barracks, Rowland had found himself sharing a bed with an ex-sailor full of marvellous tales of exotic places where the Portmadoc slate brigs and schooners had taken him. An interesting character; but in bed he farted with the monotonous regularity of a foghorn. Rowland was not over-fastidious, but months of this torment had been one of his main reasons for accepting Daniel's offer. The other was his friendship with John.

It was clear, their very first night together, that John did not fart, but that he did have other pressures which needed releasing. Although he was an unobtrusive about it as he possibly could, it is difficult in a none-too-wide double bed to masturbate without your neighbour knowing, at least if he is awake. It happened all the time in barracks, and nobody thought anything of it: it generated nothing more than friendly jocularity. But the knowledge that John, handsome friendly John, was giving himself relief within his reach turned Rowland on as he had never been turned on before.

"Enjoying yourself?" he whispered. John froze. "Don't stop. I don't mind. Who're you thinking of? Margaret?" - she was one of the few desirable girls in the village.

John, when he finally replied, was giving nothing away. "No, not Margaret."

"Well, if you don't mind, I'll enjoy myself too." There was no answer. So he did, and John resumed as well; and neither needed to be unobtrusive now.

Next night they started, and finished, simultaneously. And the next two nights as well, enjoying the companionship of it. The fifth night, as they got into bed, John asked hesitantly, "Rowland, have you ever been with a girl?"

"No, never. Have you?"

"No."

Rowland took a big risk. "John, remember I asked who you thought of? You didn't say. Iawn. But you never asked me."

"All right, who do you think of?"

"Of you."

There was a gasp. "Iesu Grist. And I think of you."

"Ahhh! Then ... John, shall we ... help each other?"

"Ought we to?"

"Nobody'd object if we had it off with Margaret. Except her Mam. And our parents, if we got her pregnant. And this wouldn't be going nearly so far, would it? Only helping out, not ... doing anything. And I can promise you it's good, John. I tried it once, with a friend in Llanllyfni. Helping each other. It doesn't harm anyone. Nobody else would know."

John had never heard of anyone doing such a thing, but could find no fault with Rowland's argument. Yes, it was another step in their friendship, in their trust. He wanted it. He needed it. He reached out his hand and laid it on Rowland's pidyn, and Rowland laid his own on John's.

Their nightwear was their underwear, the flannel vests and long johns which all quarrymen wore all year, whatever the weather. The slits in front gave limited access. Within a minute they found it much easier to help each other when naked, even if the straw in the mattress felt more prickly. And John quickly found that Rowland was right: how much better it was to be helped than to do it by himself. For that night, they went no further. Then Rowland went home for the weekend, leaving John in an agony of frustration, and deep in thought.

He had long known that he admired Rowland, that he liked him very much, for his brotherliness and his fun. They understood each other. He was simply a good person to be with. That he could love him as well as like him had been so unthinkable that he had never thought it. But he had now found a new and deeper element in the friendship, and in a flash of intuition realised that he already did love Rowland as well as liking him. Was that right, or was it terribly wrong? For an answer, he had to wrestle with the limitations of his own mind-set.

Pulpit talk weighed lightly with John. Normally, he thought little about it. But he could not entirely escape the moral instruction which school had tried to instil in him. He neither accepted it uncritically nor totally rejected it. True, his intelligence and his sense of fair play rejected the stern and unforgiving portrait of God painted by his teachers, and replaced it with a loving and supportive one. He did believe, loosely and generically, in God as creator, as a benign being who presided over humanity. He accepted that God made us the way we are: tall or short, bright or dim, musical or tone-deaf.

This creed was no doubt shaped by the two guiding principles he had picked up from his parents. One was love, warm and caring from his mother, rougher but equally genuine from his father. The other was loyalty. In their marriage, he knew, his mother was a paragon while his father was not. But, however lax in this respect, Daniel did insist on another brand of loyalty. Quarrymen worked in teams where trust was essential. If you failed to take care in belaying the rope from which a colleague was dangling over a rock face, in levering free a block of slate with men working below, in setting and firing a blast, then you might well kill someone. A team's success depended on all its members being loyal and trusting and playing their part. Rockmen usually worked in partnerships of two, often for life. The core membership of mining gangs had to be bigger, but could be just as long-lived. Brief partnerships were the least successful. So love and loyalty lay at the core of John's simple philosophy.

He took another step forward. Most men were attracted to women. It was totally acceptable to love one to the tune of marrying her and living with her in, sometimes, life-long fidelity, and of having children. That was how the human race continued. It was natural. In addition - in his society at least - it was acceptable and even normal, despite the disapproval of the preachers, to lust for a woman and, casually and furtively, to tumble her. These couplings were not intended to result in babies; nor, for that matter, were many couplings in marriage. So coupling wasn't solely for reproduction. It gave pleasure, it satisfied cravings, in some cases it expressed love. Yet John had never felt the remotest desire to couple with a girl, whether in lust or in love.

Take a step further still. To some extent there was a symmetry. John was aware, without knowing any details, that some men, a very few, also coupled with men. That too was a casual and furtive lust, practised supposedly only if a woman was not available. Almost everyone regarded it as deviant and unspeakable. But - and here the symmetry broke down - he had never heard of men positively loving men, of living with them in lifelong partnership as husband and wife did, of even wanting to do so. He had never heard of it because it did not happen, in any walk of society. The very concept of alternative sexual orientation had not yet emerged. The only distinction lay in what one did, not in what one was. In John's culture, a man who did not marry and did not tumble women was regarded as unmanly, as an object of suspicion, unless he was a saint of such obvious piety that he was above suspicion.

He moved on yet another step. Love or lust for women, being almost universal among men, was clearly natural and God-given. So why did John not share it? Why was it boys - or rather Rowland - who turned him on? Was this his sin? No, it couldn't be. He had quite clear views on wrong-doing. He knew that stealing, or unjustifiably beating someone up, was wrong. Those were things he could choose to do, or not to do. But between women and Rowland it was not a choice: it was a simple unchangeable fact. And therefore, being unchangeable, it was a God-given fact. It was on a par with his being left-handed - that was something he was quite proud of, as a part of his individuality that distinguished him from the majority. His teachers had tried to drill him out of it, with singular lack of success. Nobody else minded one jot. God made us the way we are.

His simple theology therefore told him, and the influences on his short life confirmed it, that his desire for Rowland was God-given, and to be accepted. It was not a casual spur-of-the-moment impulse, like stealing something or beating someone up. It was not comparable to those randy sods in barracks shagging every girl in sight. That was lust. This was love, a love which he felt should be life-long. He was well aware that his thinking was out of the ordinary. He was not aware that, for his day, it was revolutionary. And everything hinged on Rowland feeling the same way.

Rowland did. When he came back on Monday morning his first words were, "John, I've been thinking. Can we have a talk?"

There was no opportunity until work was over. They made their way back to Treforys together and, for the sake of privacy, climbed a little way up into the heather. "I've been thinking," said Rowland again. "Thinking about what we did on Friday night. That was good, wasn't it? And, you know, John, I don't love girls. I love you. I've worked that out now. I want to love you with more than my hand. I want to love you with my body, and with my soul." He proceeded to spell out his own homespun philosophy, which chimed remarkably closely with John's.

John's answer was to kiss Rowland, inexpertly. "And I want to love you, Rowland," he said. "Love is good, whoever it's for. And good things are sent by God, aren't they? He won't mind. And if he doesn't, why should we?"

Why indeed? But other people would mind that they deviated from the norm. So nobody else must know. They agreed on that.

Later, as they went to bed, they took off their underwear with the rest of their clothes, and without any further debate they set off on a voyage of exploration. Relying solely on mother wit, they discovered lands which others, unbeknown to them, had charted before, but were new and exotic to young innocents remote in Welsh mountains. It was the first of August, Rowland's seventeenth birthday.

The following day, as he sheltered from a squall under the overhang of the Wailing Wall on his way back from work, Rowland was moved to scratch a message on a soft stone:

RJ © JG 1857

A few days later he looked at it as he passed, and beside it was now written

JG © RJ

An autumn of new-found bliss turned into a winter of deep satisfaction, but not without alarms. A Gorseddau man on the spree in Portmadoc, thwarted of the services of his favourite tart but desperate for relief, offered the same price to a not unwilling sailor and had him, bent over a bollard on the public quay. The sentence of death was later reduced to twenty years' hard labour: nobody had been executed for buggery for the last two decades. "Don't worry, John," said Rowland when news reached them. "That was lust, not love."

Rowland still sometimes went home to Llanllyfni at the weekends, but more often he stayed over to keep John company, and to help with his domestic chores - digging peat from the turbary, carrying it home when dried, collecting milk from Cefn Bifor farm, fetching a sack of flour from Clenennau mill, picking up slops from the barracks to feed to the pig.

One such Saturday afternoon in February, the day before John's sixteenth birthday, they walked down the tramway to Ty Mawr to see how things were going there. The sluices were shut and the waterwheel was still, but there were noises from within. They found Robert Owen the quarry carpenter and Ellis Jones, a specialist in carving and finishing chimney-pieces, absorbed in moving the drive-shaft bearings of a polisher. They prowled round, looking at the great sawing and planing machines on the ground floor and the chutes which fed rubbish down from the floor above. They wrote their names and drew pictures in the thick layer of slate dust which covered everything. Then Rowland's eye lit on a sawn slab, too small to be saleable, lying on top of a waggon of waste and obviously destined for the tip.

"Ellis!" he called. "Could you lend us a small chisel and mallet for the weekend, please? I'd like to try my hand at carving."

"Iawn. So long as you look after them and let me have them back first thing Monday. Here you are. But the payment is another pair of hands to help with these bearings."

"John, bach, would you help Ellis? I want to get on with this."

"What are you going to carve?"

"Hah. A secret."

Nineteen years before, when he was courting Ellen, Daniel had carved an elaborate love-spoon for her, and it now adorned the living room of No. 19. It was Rowland's inspiration, though his material was not wood but the less tractable slate. He carried the slab back to No. 20 and set about cutting an inscription, drawing very faint guide lines and lightly scratching the letters until they were spaced to his satisfaction. Luckily the mallet was wooden, so the noise was not too obvious. It was a couple of hours before John returned, and Rowland was ready to display his handiwork.

"There you are, cariad. This is for you. Rydw i'n dy garu di. I love you, and here's a token of it. A ffolant, a valentine, for today. As well as a gift for your birthday tomorrow."

MAE ROWLAND JONES YN CARU JOHN GRIFFITHS

Beneath it was a heart, and beneath that the date,

CHWEFROR 14EG 1858

A professional stonemason might have turned up his nose in scorn, but for a novice it was very creditable work. He had fully earned the hug and kiss he got. Then Ellen called them to eat.

Later, by candle light, John looked at the inscription again, and felt it was incomplete. "Rowland, there's plenty of space either side of the heart. Can I add my message there?" Which he did, unskilfully, less neatly, but with just as much love.

A MAE JOHN GRIFFITHS YN CARU ROWLAND JONES

When it was finally done, he had his reward. The slab stood on the windowsill and oversaw their lovemaking, but next morning an awkward question arose.

"Rowland. What do we do with it? We can't leave it here."

"Why not? Your tad can't read."

"No. But Mam can."

"Oh. Well, let's hide it under the bed."

"But Mam sweeps there. Sometimes."

"Um. Well, what about the wall outside? Swap it for one of the coping stones. We'll know it's there, but nobody else will notice."

So they removed an ordinary coping stone, which they dumped some distance away, and put the ffolant in its place. Nobody did notice, not for nearly a hundred and forty four years.

Meanwhile, their idyll continued ...

Caernarfon - Llandygái 2001

So the boys' ffolant was restored to the current Griffiths home. We were back before Tad, and laid it on the kitchen table. When he arrived we led him to it, without comment. For a long time he gazed wordlessly, and at last he said, simply, "Tell me."

We told him, all the little we knew, and Tad was visibly moved. "Bless them. It must have been even tougher, in those days." He sighed. "I only hope this John is our John."

"The censuses should tell us tomorrow."

"So they should. By the way, I rang up Rhiannon Morris today, the archivist - I know her because I sell her books from time to time. To see if she was happy about youngsters like you looking at her precious stuff. Luckily she was in, though the office was closed. And yes, no problem. Just take some ID with you and she'll give you tickets."

We spent the evening listing what we knew and what we wanted to find out, and we cleaned the ffolant and set it in the place of greatest honour, the centre of the living room mantlepiece.

Tuesday morning found us at the Archives in Caernarfon, waiting for the doors to open at 9.30. Rhiannon Morris welcomed us, wrote out our tickets, and showed us how to find the census returns we wanted and how to feed them into the microfilm readers. Huw knew from bitter experience that searching takes time, and to speed things up we divided the work. I started with the Llanfihangel census for 1861, the only one that fell within the working life of the quarry. In the event things proved remarkably easy.

The parish might be large in size, but it was small in population. The census, we knew, was taken on a Sunday, so that we expected to find only true residents, not barracks-men who would be away for the weekend. Up Cwmystradllyn there were only four addresses with quarry employees present. The 'Gorsedda Quarrymen's sleeping apartments' - the quarry barracks - had an elderly labourer from Anglesey spending a solitary weekend. Talyllyn farm had one miner as a lodger. Plasllyn House had Thomas Evans the foreman and his family. And 'Treforrys House' - the village - had a mere nine families. Sadly, the census did not give the house numbers, and our hopes were dashed of finding who lived in which. But one of the nine households comprised:

Daniel Griffiths, head, aged 42, slate quarry miner, born Dolbenmaen
Ellen, wife, aged 43, dressmaker, born Llanystumdwy
John, son, unmarried, aged 19, slate quarry miner, born Beddgelert
Elizabeth, daughter, unmarried, aged 17, house servant, born Beddgelert

There was no Rowland Jones. Either he was a barracks-man at home for the weekend, or he had left the quarry. But the rest was crystal clear. This John Griffiths had been fifteen in 1857, and he had lived in Treforys. He must be Rowland Jones's lover. And not only that. He fitted exactly with the details of the 1881 census we had seen online. Unless there was another John Griffiths born in Beddgelert at more or less the same time, he was Owen's father. He was my great-great-grandfather. And Daniel was his father. As for the photograph ...

That was what Huw was working on. He found John Williams, photographer, Tremadoc, in a trade directory of 1859 but nothing earlier, and in the Ynyscynhaiarn census of 1861 but nothing later. The dates fitted. We reckoned, because John looked quite young, that the picture was taken in 1859 when he was seventeen, which was much as Tad had already deduced. And, from the likeness to me, we were now as certain as we could be that DG and JG were Daniel and John.

For the next step, Huw left the microfilm reader and asked for the parish registers which should cover Daniel's and John's baptisms and marriages. I stayed with the censuses, starting with 1841, the first which included any detail, in search of them at dates other than 1861. This was a protracted job, since I had no addresses to guide me, and all I could do was look in likely parishes for the names. There were a number of red herrings which proved to be different John Griffithses or occasionally (since the name was much rarer) different Daniel Griffithses. Huw had similar frustrations ploughing through the registers, but also an unexpected bonus.

At one point I looked up to see him gazing at me across the room. His eye held a gleam of glee. Then he asked Rhiannon something and consulted a book that she pointed out on the open shelves. Then the office closed for lunch. As we went out, Huw pointed to an entry in a large volume lying open on his table.

"Dolbenmaen baptismal register," he said. "1818."

'6th March,' read the printed form filled out in ink. 'Daniel Griffith. Name of father, Griffith Robert, Garn, transported 7 years. Name of mother, Dorothy.'

"I told you your family had black sheep in it," Huw said when we got outside. "Every proper family has black sheep."

I was still fumbling. "Black sheep? You mean Daniel's tad was a crook?"

"Well, maybe not much of a crook, by our standards. Depends what his crime was. But he was convicted of something and sentenced to seven years' transportation."

"What, you mean sent to Australia as a convict?"

"Yup, probably. And if he was, the chances are he didn't come back. Most of them didn't. But I looked up Transportation in an old encyclopaedia. It said that some of them weren't sent to Australia but were tucked up in convict hulks moored in the Thames."

"Well I'm damned." I didn't feel any shame at having a convict for an ancestor, not that far back. "Better than being descended from Edward I, anyway!"

Huw merely grinned, as he always did when I reminded him of the blackest sheep in his own family.

"Can you find out what he did?"

"I'll try. Better ask Rhiannon where best to look. And at least we've got a date. He can't have been shipped off more than nine months before Daniel was born, can he?"

That, and the rest of our current tasks, took us most of the afternoon. But, to cut a long story short, we eventually got what we were after. Our findings, when pooled, added up to this.

Griffith Roberts of Garn Dolbenmaen was convicted earlier than we thought, at the Caernarfon Easter Assizes in 1817. The black sheep's crime was sheep-stealing - stealing just one sheep - and the report in the North Wales Gazette gave virtually no details. The offence, it seemed, was common enough to raise no eyebrows and excite no comment. By 16th July, the Quarter Sessions Order Book revealed, he had been taken by sea from Caernarfon Gaol and dumped on a convict hulk in the Thames. Huw had beckoned me over to look. "So he probably didn't go to Australia," he whispered. "But look at the dates. Dorothy must have visited him in gaol and they must have, you know, there!" He didn't dare put it in words, not in the innocent silence of the search room..

Daniel Griffiths took his father's first name as his surname. In our family, this was the final fling of the old Welsh system of patronymics, until I revived it by calling myself Elfed Maelor. When in 1839 he married Ellen Jones he was working as a copper miner at Aberglaslyn in Beddgelert. She signed her own name, but he could only make a mark. Five months later Catherine was born, followed in 1841 by Evan, in 1842 by John, and in 1844 by Elizabeth. All of them were baptised in Beddgelert. Some time in the 1850s Daniel moved to Gorseddau, and by 1871 he was back in Garn Dolbenmaen as a slate quarryman. By 1881 he was evidently dead, for when we looked later at the online census he was not recorded anywhere.

John was born at Aberglaslyn on 15th February 1842. He was the only John Griffiths baptised in Beddgelert anywhere near the right date. That clinched it. He had to be Owen's father. He really was the right man. In 1851 he was a schoolboy, in 1861 a miner at Gorseddau, in 1871 a quarryman at Nantlle. There in 1878 he married Mary Pierce, and there in 1880 his son Owen was born. He was still in Nantlle, still a quarryman, still married, in 1901, the last census available.

So far so good. The outline was clear, though there were masses of loose ends waiting to be followed up - Griffith Roberts's forebears, for a start, all the wives, and all the deaths. And Rowland Jones had not yet shown up. The trouble was that we didn't know where to start looking for him. A blind search of the 1861 census for the whole county was out of the question, and one of the slate-producing areas alone would still be a monstrous task. There was only half an hour left before closing time when fate stepped in. We had told Rhiannon Morris that we were after Gorseddau quarrymen, and when we handed back the last of the parish registers she asked how we were getting on. Well in one direction, we said, stuck in another.

"Have you seen Chwareli a Chloddfeydd yn y Pennant? That's got more of the social history of Gorseddau than anything else I know."

She showed us where it was on the open shelves. It turned out to be a slim booklet, the write-up of a public lecture on the mines and quarries of Pennant, with only ten pages devoted to Gorseddau. But a quick glance showed that we had struck gold. There was just time, before we were kicked out, to have the pages photocopied.

Back at home with our trophies, we reported to Tad, who was delighted that John and Daniel were confirmed as ancestors. He was also intrigued by the black sheep. "Poor man!" he said. "1817, eh? It was a tough year, that. A bad depression in the wake of the wars. The harvest had failed the year before, and there was famine. And at Garn, you say? That was when squatters were carving out smallholdings from the common land there, to try to make their own living. The temptation to steal must have been very strong."

"Well, at least we now know why sheep always give Elfed a wide berth," remarked Huw. I blew him a raspberry.

We also read the lecture properly. On the matter of the moral standards of Cwmystradllyn, it quoted a history of Sunday Schools in Eifionydd. This said that while the school, opened at the same time as the quarry, catered for the increased population, it was only the religious revival of 1859 which increased the number of chapel-goers because, until then, 'the worldliness and ungodliness of the quarrymen was proverbial. There is nothing strange about this when we recall that the dregs of almost every neighbourhood had congregated in the valley.' And another contemporary, in a graphic phrase, had called Gorseddau 'a sort of Johannesburg for quarrymen.'

The lecture also quoted a letter by the grandson of one of the local farmers on the subject of Daniel Griffiths the miner, who was known to his contemporaries as Daniel Bach. 'I have not heard that there was anything special about Daniel Griffiths's work as a miner, but he certainly succeeded in giving that impression to his employers, because he could earn as much as he wanted, wherever he was.' He lived in Treforys, and from the early days he was responsible for opening up the galleries. Having paid his gang, he would have £50 or £60 - a fortune - left for himself. He would spend days fishing the lake, then on the Saturday go down to Port with a double-barrelled shotgun and a dog or two at his heel. He would spend a week at the Sportsman or Commercial, in the company of those he supposed to be gentry, shooting game on the Traeth and returning to the hotel for convivial evenings. When his purse was empty he hired a carriage to bring him back to Treforys. The state of the upland road, especially in winter, was indescribable. The carriage sank to its axle, the driver fumed, but Daniel insisted, 'Drive on, my boy! I've paid to be set down at my doorstep!'

"Persistent sod!" remarked Huw. "Just like his great-great-great grandson!" I blew him another raspberry.

Even more to the point was a quotation from the Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald for 16th January 1859.

ACCIDENT. - On Tuesday last a serious accident occurred at the Gorseddau Quarry, Cwmstrallyn, to a man named Rowland Jones, aged 18 years, son of Mr Wm Jones, assistant-overseer, Ty'nllwyn, Llanllyfni. By means of a machine in use at this quarry, a hole had been bored in the rock, which was charged with about 30 lbs of powder for blasting, in which operation Jones was engaged. He lighted the fusee and retired, but finding that more than the usual time had elapsed without an explosion, he returned to the spot. The blast went off just as he arrived there, and the poor man was thrown up into the air, a height of about eight yards, and in an upward direction, so that he fell outside the level on which he had stood, down to the next gallery - the depth from one to the other being about 17 yards. The entire fall would therefore be about 25 yards. He alighted on his feet, and the clogs which he wore were split into several pieces. His face was severely burnt and lacerated, but the most serious consequences of the accident were the effect of the fall on his intestines. We hear, however, that hopes are still entertained of his recovery by Mr Evan Roberts, surgeon, of Penygroes, who has been unremitting in his attention to the sufferer.

The lecturer added the comment that he seems to have survived, because his death is not recorded in the parish registers of Llanllyfni, Llanfihangel y Pennant or Penmorfa.

"Duw hollalluog!" I said, looking in amazement at Rowland's ffolant on the mantlepiece. "God almighty! Surviving a fifty-foot fall, or more! I wonder if he really did survive, though. He could have been buried somewhere else."

"Well," suggested Tad. "Isn't it worth trying your magic online census? 1881? If he lasted another twenty-odd years, he'll be there. Jones is a needle in a haystack, but Rowland wasn't a common name at all."

Huw got busy. There proved, in the whole of Britain in 1881, to be no less than 206 Welsh-born Rowland Joneses.

"Hmmm. Have to narrow the search. In place and in date. Let's look just at the county. When was he born?"

"Let's see, eighteen in 1859. He must have been born in 1840 or 41."

Huw limited the search to those born in Sir Caernarfon between 1838 and 1842. "Good, only four now. Born in Edeyrn, Pistyll, Aberdaron and Llanaelhaiarn. Oh dear. None of those are in a slate area, are they? Which is the nearest?"

"Llanaelhaiarn, surely."

"Let's look at that one, then. Oh dear. Aged forty - that's OK. But he was living in Penmaenmawr, Calvinistic Methodist minister, married with children. Can that be right?"

"Aros funud!" said Tad, clapping his forehead. "Hang on! Rowland Jones in Penmaenmawr ... that rings a bell. Yes. Quite a well-known poet. Bardic name Rolant Llyfni. He's bound to be in Y Bywgraffiadur. Look him up, Elfed."

I did. "Full marks, Tad! Yes, here we are. Rowland Jones (Rolant Llyfni), Calvinistic Methodist minister and poet, 1840-1913. Born Llanaelhaiarn, son of a farmer, family moved to Llanllyfni. Wheeee! - 'first worked at Gorseddau quarry where he was seriously injured in an accident. On recovering, he was drawn to the ministry and, after training at Bala, was ordained 1863.' Minister of Ebenezer, Penmaenmawr for 50 years ... Member of this and that committee ... Trustee of something else ... Poetic works ... Won chair at National Eisteddfod 1893 ... Sources include 'Papers in Caernarfon RO.' Wow! So his affair with John can't have lasted all that long. I suppose he was converted in the 1859 Revival. But we've got to find these papers. Caernarfon RO? What does that mean?"

"Caernarfon Record Office," explained Tad. "Later became Gwynedd Archives Service. So look tomorrow. But don't expect too much. A teenage quarryman in the 1850s would hardly have kept a diary recording his love affairs. Though I suppose in later life he might have written up some discreet memoirs."

Cwmystradllyn 1858-59

Against illicit sexual encounter, the Griffiths household had strict precautions in place. With good reason, Elizabeth, now fourteen and youthfully attractive, was carefully protected against randy males. She was not allowed outside the house unless accompanied by her mother, father or brother. Even Rowland, by himself, was not trusted as an escort. Nor, indoors, could she be alone with Rowland or any other male. Ellen too lived under some restrictions. Like many a man who is less than faithful to his wife, Daniel was jealous of her fidelity to him. He viewed with suspicion every grey-bearded gaffer who called to have his torn jacket mended. Leaving handsome young men like Rowland alone in her company would tempt providence beyond the limit. In practice, therefore, mother and daughter formed an almost inseparable pair and, in Daniel's absence, John was their custodian.

In June, William Hornby, one of the Gorseddau company directors, was prosecuted in Manchester on a charge of buggery. The jury refused to believe that so respectable a member of society could have been involved in so unspeakable a crime and, in the teeth of the evidence, acquitted him. In September, the mere rumour that two young men in the slate town of Bethesda had indulged in carnal sin together was enough to set every pulpit thundering and to lose them their jobs at Penrhyn quarry. The sheriff's officers investigated and found the rumour groundless. But the supposed sinners did not get their jobs back. Their ostracism continued, and their families' too.

John and Rowland, when they heard, heeded the lesson and were more careful than ever. But it simply never entered Daniel's head, nor his wife's, that such a thing might be happening under their own roof. Nor did it enter anyone else's. It was no secret that the boys shared a house, alone. But since it was by parental consent it must be above board. They could hardly have been luckier in their way of life, and their way of love.

After the ffolant, their idyll continued for nearly another year, until January.

The miners were removing a large piece of dyke on Floor 3, an igneous intrusion that interrupted the slate vein. They had bored a deep hole with the Dixon drill, dismantled and removed the machine, poured in a whole keg of powder from the magazine, tamped it, inserted the fuse and stemmed it with care. They had blown the bugle to signal that a blast was imminent, and all the other quarrymen had dropped their tools and taken refuge in their blast shelters. Rowland lit the fuse and rejoined his colleagues, who disdained shelters but had retreated out of danger behind a spur of rock.

They waited, and waited, and nothing happened. "Shall I go and look, Daniel?" asked Rowland.

The current contract was almost completed, and Daniel's mind was miles away, planning his next randy to Portmadoc. "Mmmm," he said.

Rowland went. He was abreast of the charged hole before Daniel came back to the present and the reality sank in. "Rowland, tyrd yn ôl!" he bellowed - come back! - and dashed out from behind the spur. John, suddenly awake to imminent disaster, was at his heels. Too late. In that instant the reluctant spark reached the charge, and the dyke erupted. Aghast, they saw the searing shock wave, accompanied by a hail of rock fragments, hit Rowland full in the front, carry him diagonally up into the air, and drop him vertically beyond the lip of the floor and out of sight. Small pieces rained down round them, while the larger chunks of displaced rock slumped ponderously forwards to the ground, accompanied by deep rumbles and a massive cloud of dust and smoke. Father and son did not wait to see it. They were already racing round to the incline, the nearest way down to Floor 2.

John, heart in mouth, expected to see a lifeless distorted wreck. But they found Rowland curled on his side in a foetal position, teeth clenched, his cut and scorched face grimacing in agony, and twitching. He was not dead. At the same time a crowd of Floor 2 men arrived from their shelters, but Daniel yelled at them to stand back. He had not been a miner for twenty years for nothing, and knew all too well the drill for handling blasting casualties. "You!" he ordered one of them, "Find Thomas Evans and tell him what's happened! You and you! Fetch a door from the stable!" The quarry possessed no stretcher.

John was on his knees, finding Rowland's hand, which seemed uninjured, and pressing it gently. "Rowland, it's John here. It'll be all right." He was rewarded by a hint of recognition showing through the grin of pain, and by his hand being gripped tight. "Rowland, where does it hurt most?"

"Bol," he muttered through his teeth. Stomach.

Daniel heard it too, and sighed inwardly. He knew that, whatever bones might be broken, the real danger was internal injury. He took off his filthy neckerchief, rolled it into a sausage, and thrust it between Rowland's teeth. "Bite on that, lad! It'll help!" He noted the shattered clogs and delicately felt the feet and legs, but found no obviously broken bones. Suddenly Rowland began to heave, and John whipped out the neckerchief before he vomited profusely. Praise be, there was no blood in it.

As John was wiping his mouth for him, Thomas Evans arrived hotfoot from the office, his little emergency pouch of medicines in his hand. He took one glance. "Laudanum," he said. It was not only the best narcotic there was, but the only one he had. "Half a drachm, I'd say. A good teaspoonful."

He looked at John, who removed the neckerchief again and whispered in Rowland's ear, "Open your mouth, cariad. This'll help the pain."

With an effort, Rowland obliged, swallowing automatically as the laudanum was dripped from the spoon on to his tongue. It took effect surprisingly fast, and he slowly relaxed into a half-conscious haze, gripping John's hand less tightly now.

Thomas sent all the men back to work except for half a dozen who might be needed. Vital decisions had to be made, and he drew Daniel aside to confer. "Tad! Thomas!" pleaded John, not leaving Rowland's side. "Don't send him away! If he's going to die, let him die here. If he's going to live, let me look after him here."

They understood. The nearest public hospital was in Bangor, many hours away at a gentle rate: a rough high-speed journey would finish him off. If they followed normal practice and sent him home to Llanllyfni, the same might well apply, and they knew the Jones household was too overcrowded to offer the care he needed. If he was going to live, he'd have to stay in Treforys. Always provided the doctor agreed, of course, for medical advice was essential. But which doctor? The nearest ones were in Tremadoc and Portmadoc, but they had little experience of injuries like these, while those in Penygroes, on the doorstep of the Nantlle quarries, dealt with such patients aplenty. So Thomas ordered a man to take a horse from his stable, gallop to Penygroes, summon Dr Roberts, and inform Rowland's parents.

"Who's going to pay Dr Roberts' fee?," asked Thomas. "I can't." He meant that the company couldn't, or wouldn't. Only the largest quarries took any responsibility for their men's injuries.

"I'll pay," decided Daniel. He knew he was largely to blame for allowing Rowland into danger, and the guilt was heavy on him. If it scuppered his coming randy, so be it. That would be his punishment. "If Rowland's tad can chip in, fine. But I'll underwrite it."

"Iawn. That's good of you, Daniel. So who'll look after him?"

It was usually a woman's job. "Not Ellen," said Daniel quickly. He couldn't risk it. "John's offered. Let him."

"And the quarry loses another pair of useful hands?"

"He's in my employ, Thomas, not yours," Daniel reminded him. "And they're cyfeillion mynwesol." Bosom friends: he had no idea that they were anything more.

"True. Iawn. John," he called across, "you've got a new job. You're now a nurse. Right, let's get him to Treforys."

The door had been taken off its hinges and brought up to Floor 2. They gently lifted Rowland, slid it under him, and lowered him on to it on his back. Four men carried it by the corners. John walked alongside still holding his hand, and Thomas and Daniel followed behind. Like a funeral cortege they made their slow way down the incline, along the tramway and up to No. 20 where equally gently they lifted Rowland on to the straw mattress. "Clean up his face, ngwas," said Daniel. "Very carefully, with water. Keep him warm. Don't do anything else till the doctor comes. Iawn?" He clapped him on the shoulder, nodded at the others, and they all left. Work had to go on. Rowland was still half asleep, eyes almost closed, moaning occasionally.

There was nobody else in either house. Ellen and Elizabeth were at Penmorfa market. So far, John had manfully bottled up his emotions. Now that he was alone he could let them out. His sobs penetrated even Rowland's fuddled brain, and he perceptibly squeezed John's hand. Each gave the other wordless comfort. After a while John pulled himself together. He had made his offer from the heart, and he must honour it. Everything was up to him. It was midwinter cold, and he kindled a fire in the little grate. From next door he collected warm water from the kettle on the hob, the cleanest rags he could find, and an oil lamp to give better light in the dim-lit room. Then he began with the utmost care to clean up Rowland's face.

It was covered with blood from dozens of cuts, some of which were still oozing, but the eyes seem undamaged. Delicately, inch by inch, John wiped it, using the corner of rag to tease out tiny fragments of rock lodged in the wounds. He saw that the skin, now that it was exposed, was scorched from the heat and the eyebrows were singed. But it was not raw. It would be tender for a while, but to his inexpert eye it did not look too bad. Rowland had been wearing a cap, so his hair was intact.

Then John turned his attention to the body. The hands were unmarked: perhaps he had had them in his pockets. He unbuttoned the jacket, shirt, vest, flies and pants, unbuckled the belt, and opened the clothes out to expose the torso from neck to crotch. What he saw made him catch his breath. No superficial damage was visible but, instead of the smooth muscular abdomen he knew, there was a deep hollow below the ribs and a corresponding mound, like a grotesque little beer belly, rising above the pubic hair. The guts had shifted bodily. Cythraul diawl! What was he supposed to do about that? He was suddenly aware of something he did have to do, at once. Slinging over Rowland all the blankets there were, he rushed outside to throw up.

On his knees, bent double, engrossed in his misery, he did not hear the horseman arrive. "Not another patient for me, eh?" said a voice. Dr Roberts turned out to be a brisk and jolly little man.

In his relief at unloading his burden on to other shoulders, John could only babble.

"Calm down, young man! Wash your mouth out and drink some water. If we're going to help your friend, we need cool heads." John obeyed the voice of authority and scooped from the water butt, while the doctor unbuckled his saddle-bag. "He is your friend, I take it? Your name is? John Griffiths? And his name's Rowland, son of William Jones at Ty'nllwyn? And you have the task of nursing him? Iawn. Now, tell me what happened."

John obliged, as coherently as he could.

"So he's had half a drachm of laudanum, four hours ago."

"Not that long. Two, maybe."

"But I was told the accident happened at nine. It's now after one." Grief, how time had flown. "Right, let's see him, then."

He looked closely at Rowland's face, felt his forehead, listened to his breathing, took his pulse. "Hmmm. Cold sweat, shallow breath, slow pulse. Did you clean his face up?"

"Yes. Very carefully."

"And a good job you've done."

"But his belly, doctor!" Surely that was far more important. He pulled the blankets back.

"Hmmm. Has anyone tried to deal with this?"

"No."

"Good. If you don't know what you're doing it only makes it worse. But I'm going to need your help. Listen carefully, lad. You know about your intestines?" John nodded, hesitantly. "Twenty five feet of them. Coiled up tightly" - he demonstrated on his own round belly - "inside a bag called the peritoneum, which holds them in place but allows some movement. The peritoneum is anchored to the backbone by a membrane called the mesentery. When Rowland hit the ground, his body stopped but his guts carried on falling. Result, a prolapse. Enteroptosis, we call it. The mesentery was stretched or even, heaven forbid, ruptured. The intestines are sagging in a heap at the bottom of the abdomen. Our job is to get them back in place. You lift him from the hips, to let gravity help us, while I manipulate. As high as you can. Iawn?"

John climbed on to the bed, managed to wriggle his shoulder under Rowland's buttocks, and heaved them up until his body was at forty-five degrees. The doctor purposefully kneaded the abdomen for a while with the heel of his hands. "Iawn. Best I can do. Lower him gently." The belly was now back to its normal contours. Rowland already seemed more at ease, or more accurately in less pain, and had slipped into a deeper sleep.

"Next thing is to check his bones." Between them they removed Rowland's clothes, and while John lifted where appropriate, Dr Roberts felt. He spent a long time on the feet. The ankles were a little swollen. "Extraordinary! He landed on his feet - the clogs testify to that - but his knees must have been bent. Otherwise his thigh bones would have ended up at his shoulders. We can't be sure until he wakes up and tells us what hurts, but I can feel no fractures. Anyway, broken bones are less important than displaced guts. The same goes for strained joints and muscles. He's bound to have those too.

"Now listen carefully again. This is what you must do, and must have him do. He must rest, totally still, on his back. That's to allow the mesentery to recover. With his legs drawn up. That's to reduce tension in the abdomen. He may stretch them occasionally, one at a time, but only under your supervision. His diet must be light and fluid. Solid food will give his guts too much work to do. Understood?

"Now. Even if all goes well, he will have pain, for many days. To dull it, give him laudanum, twice a day. Not as much as he had this morning. I suggest a quarter of a drachm, that's fifteen minims, at a time. You'll have to be the judge: he needs enough to overcome the pain but not so much that it knocks him out. Give him more or less, as he needs it. It will also help keep his bowels at rest. But on no account more than a drachm at a time. Too much laudanum kills. You know what it is? Tincture of opium." He handed over a bottle and measuring spoon.

For some time, John had had a question to ask, an urgent question but one he dreaded asking. "Is he going to live, then?"

The doctor looked him in the eye. "Hogyn, I don't know. I just don't know. He may - there's plenty of room for hope But we don't know what the internal damage is. The mesentery contains lacteal vessels which convey nourishment from the intestines to the blood. If they are ruptured, or too many are, he will die of starvation, in effect. If the mesentery is stretched beyond recovery, his intestines will continue to sag and will become blocked. And if internal inflammation sets in - peritonitis - it will probably kill him. That is the gravest danger. If it does, you will recognise it by rapid breathing, fast and feeble pulse, a cold sweat, and an acutely tender and much swollen abdomen. Give him the full dose of laudanum - a drachm - and send for me at once. In any event, I will come and see him three days from now.

"In any case, apply hot fomentations to his abdomen - towels soaked in hot water. For his lesser problems, here is some ointment for his burns. For his joints and muscles, get some embrocation from Thomas and apply it. He's bound to have some for his horses. All clear? Good luck, lad!" And off he rode to the quarry to talk to Thomas and Daniel about his fee.

Thus John was launched into a month-long nightmare. Regulating the dose of laudanum to the right level. Suppressing panic when fever briefly set in and peritonitis seemed imminent. Persuading Rowland to lie still in the right position. Cajoling him to drink broth and gruel aplenty. Discovering how to get him to pee into a bottle and crap into a makeshift bedpan with the least possible mess. Stopping him from scratching the blisters and itches on his face as his superficial wounds healed. Massaging his joints and muscles with embrocation. Soothing the bedsores which afflicted him. Tactfully keeping visitors at bay when Rowland's parents, his own family, and half the workforce wanted to crowd in and give their good wishes. Keeping the laudanum out of Rowland's reach as he recovered, for it proved very addictive. Dosing him with less noxious herbal remedies as his weaning from laudanum left him with nausea, headache and constipation. Learning, when the cuts and burns were healed enough, how to shave Rowland's soft sparse stubble, for he had never wielded a razor before. Supporting him when he finally left his bed. Teaching him to walk again for, extraordinarily, the doctor had been right and no bones had been broken.

The women uncomplainingly kept up the supply of food, but rarely looked in. Daniel had made it plain that Rowland was John's patient, not theirs. The nurse spent virtually every minute of every day and every night at the patient's side. Never once did a carnal thought enter his head. His mind, like his body, was too weary. Then, on his sixth visit in four weeks, Dr Roberts found the nurse asleep in bed and the patient watching over him, and smiled.

Caernarfon 2001

At 9.30 on Wednesday morning we were back at the Archives, more interested in the love affair than in my family as such. Again we divided the work. I found Rowland's baptism in the Llanaelhaiarn register - born 1st August 1840. I checked the Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald for 1859 for the accident report. The small and tight-packed print made for hard reading, and constantly diverted me with lurid accounts of shipwrecks and of murders. I carried on leafing through the same bound volume, in the hope of something on the Revival as manifested at Gorseddau. Sooner than I dared hope, at the end of March 1859, I found it: the brief notice of a cymanfa bregethu - preaching meeting - at the quarry, addressed by Humphrey Jones and the Rev David Morgan, when 'scores were drawn to Christ.' This, no doubt, was when Rowland was converted, only two and a half months after his accident.

Meanwhile Huw, who had drawn the short straw today, was ploughing through censuses in pursuit of Rowland. He was in Llanaelhaiarn in 1841 as a baby and in Llanllyfni in 1851 as a schoolboy. He was not there in 1861, though the rest of his family was. Presumably he was away at the Calvinistic Methodist college in Bala, which was in a different county - Meirionydd - for which they did not have the census here. In 1871 and through to 1901 he was in Penmaenmawr as a minister. Judging by the age of his children, he had married in about 1863, the year he was ordained.

I finished my job before Huw, and moved on to the catalogue of the Rowland Jones papers, which had been donated to the Archives by a granddaughter. As Tad had foretold, they were nearly all to do with his later life, especially Methodist affairs and his poetry. I skimmed through, but nothing struck me as of interest. Then Huw, his census-searching over, took a look, and his more methodical eye spotted two items which might just possibly be of interest. We filled in order forms for them both.

One was 'Photograph, two young men, identity unknown, no date.' It turned out to be a nugget of pure gold. In its size, in the mount, and in the photographer's imprint on the back, it was identical to ours of Daniel and John. And one of the subjects was John, standing again, wearing, as far as we could recall, exactly the same clothes - the pictures must have been taken at the same time. Seated on the chair, instead of Daniel, was a young man who, given the source of the photo, could only be Rowland. Yes. A magnifying glass showed blemishes on his face, like pock marks but bigger. Scars, surely, from the blast. As I bent close over the picture, a tear dripped off my cheek, but luckily landed on the lens.

The other item in the catalogue was a bundle of letters congratulating Rowland on winning the chair at the 1893 eisteddfod. The catalogue merely listed the writers: 73 names including a John Griffiths. To our huge delight he proved to be our John. The letter, written from Nantlle, was quite short and formal.

My dear Rowland,

More than thirty years have passed since we last communicated. But I am compelled by your recent triumph to break the silence ...

There followed a brief paragraph of rather stilted congratulations. Then it became more personal, but very discreet. Nobody, unless like us they had the clue and could read between the lines, would see anything significant in it:

Whatever your feelings may now be, my dear Rowland, I still recollect our twenty months of freedom together in No. 20, and your convalescence there from your accident, with unbounded pleasure and gratitude.'

Tactful, but clear. Both had been in No. 20, without supervision. And Rowland had stayed on there after his accident until, presumably, the Revival cymanfa. The story of the love affair was taking on a dim outline.

We got photocopies of the letter and, to tide us over, of the portrait, and we ordered a proper photographic copy of it too, though that would take a fortnight. After that, we could think of no more leads to follow in pursuit of Rowland.

The Archives closed for lunch, and as we chewed our sandwiches beside the marina in Victoria Dock we also chewed over what we had learned of John's lover.

"Huw, John looked like me. I wish, somehow, Rowland had looked like you. But he didn't. Black hair, not fair, and his face was quite different. Attractive, but different. I reckon I'd have fallen for him if I'd been around then, and you hadn't. Are you jealous?"

"Silly boy!"

"Though it's pretty obvious he turned all pious and threw John over. I don't like that, at all. He may have been attractive, but he must have been a total prick. But Huw. He kept that photo. Does that mean he still had a soft spot for John? And another thing. Studio portraits can't have been cheap in those days. I wonder who paid for them. Daniel, I suppose. Diverting some of his drinking money for a lad he must have known was his son's bosom friend. Did he suspect anything more than that?"

"I don't suppose we'll ever know the answer to either. But you're right. The real tragedy, I reckon, was the Revival cymanfa. Up to that point, I'm sure they were deep in love. Just like us. They'd lived together for twenty months. And then, think of it, Rowland must have suddenly gone all cold and distant and superior. He must have regretted what they'd done. After all, he didn't stay in touch. And I'm equally sure that John did not regret it. It must have hurt him, Elfed. Their parting. Hurt like hell."

"If you threw me over to become a minister, Huw, I think I might kill myself."

There was a long silence.

Cwmystradllyn 1859

John slept off his weariness. As Rowland joined him in bed on the evening of St Valentine's Day, the anniversary of their ffolant, they both found themselves in desperate need of breaking their enforced month-long abstinence. Rowland still had much ground to make up in other departments, but in this one, they discovered to their relief, his recovery was complete. The following evening, John's seventeenth birthday, they celebrated similarly.

Rowland no longer needed full-time nursing, but Daniel allowed John to stay with him during the day. He knew loyalty when he saw it, and approved. Simple loyalty to a friend and team-mate, he thought. And, even less than before, he dared not leave a virile and handsome young man alone with his womenfolk. So the boys remained together for another month, bringing back strength to Rowland's body. Gentle exercises helped his abdomen, walks that progressed from a few steps along the street to ever higher up the mountain restored power to his legs, constant massaging all over his body quietened the complaining muscles. Ordeal had matured their love into a greater depth and thoughtfulness. Youthful ecstasy had mellowed into more adult fulfilment. The light of their heaven was restored, and indeed enhanced.

William Jones, Rowland's father, was an assistant overseer and not exactly on the breadline. But with his large family he could not have carried the whole of the doctor's fees, though he contributed what he could. He knew full well that without Daniel's financial help and John's unremitting care his own son would have died. What token, he asked when he visited Rowland one weekend, could they give to mark their gratitude? Rowland's suggestion, after due thought, surprised him: a pair of photographs, of Daniel with John and of Rowland with John.

Photographers were still a great rarity in North Wales. One or two had set up shop in Bangor and Caernarfon, and roving ones like Roger Fenton had passed through. But now John Williams, son of one of the publicans in Tremadoc, had just started in business. No ordinary quarryman would contemplate having his photograph taken. He simply could not afford it. But Rowland and William agreed to share the cost, and next Saturday Rowland persuaded a reluctant and apprehensive Daniel and John to climb into their best clothes. To save Rowland's legs they travelled down by tram. All three did their best to hold their pose for the excruciatingly long exposures, and the resulting prints were distributed among the four of them.

It was the middle of March when Dr Roberts examined Rowland for the last time. He was pleased, indeed astonished.

"Well, your face had healed well, ngwas, though you'll have that slight patchiness from the burns for the rest of your days. And those small scars. But you're ready for work again now. Both of you. You'll be going back to your tad's gang, John?"

"Yes." It would be a wrench, but it was inevitable.

"But not you, Rowland. Bruised joints and torn ligaments mend slow, and the longer you protect your mesentery from strain the better. So it's light work only for you, for the foreseeable future. I've been talking to Thomas. He tells me you've been practising carving in your convalescence, and he's offering you a job as assistant to Ellis Jones. In Ty Mawr, decorating chimney pieces. Your tad agrees, and so does Daniel. Iawn?"

"Iawn. That's a relief, in a way, though I'll miss the gang. Thank you, doctor. I'm grateful for that. And deeply in your debt for saving my life."

"Nonsense. No debt to me. You owe your life to God and to John. Dare I say it, especially to John."

The new work suited Rowland. He came home from Ty Mawr not unduly tired, and Ellis spoke well of his progress in carving. John found his feet again in the mining gang. On the face of it, all was well. But, after the doctor's last visit, the light of their heaven began to dim.

Rowland's cheerful self gradually evaporated. In the evenings he spent hours lost in a brown study, and at night his lovemaking grew half-hearted. John became increasingly worried. "Cariad, what's wrong?"

For several days the only reply was a monosyllable or a grunt. But eventually, as John's tone changed from puzzlement to frustration, Rowland did attempt an answer.

"I'm thinking of what the doctor said. 'You owe your life to God and to John,' remember? I know I owe my life to you. Without your love and your care I'd have died. You saved me because you loved me. You loved me just as I loved you. I do know that.

"What I'm thinking about is ... what I owe to God. He saved me too, so he must love me. And I feel that I ought to love him in return. But can I love you both? Loving God must be right. So is loving you wrong?"

John saw a wedge being driven into a crack, and his heart faltered. "But Rowland. If God had disapproved of you loving me, he could have let you die. But he didn't. Yes, of course he loves you. And it seems to me that's a sign that he approves of our love."

"Or does he love me despite our love? Did he save me to give me a chance to love him back?"

"We agreed, didn't we, that he made us the way we are. So he must approve."

"Or did he make us the way we are so that we can prove ourselves by changing into something better?"

"Why can't you love us both?"

"I can love you if God doesn't come into the picture. But if he does, I've got a horrible feeling that loving you is a sin. I'm sorry, John. I just don't know."

Their simple theologies could take them no further. So things continued for another unhappy week. Unhappy for Rowland, wrestling with his conscience, unhappy for John, cast half adrift. Until at the end of the month their conundrum was brutally resolved and the light of their heaven was extinguished for ever.

Religious revival was already sweeping the United States. Thence it crossed to Ulster, and moved on to Britain. In Wales the movement was led by Humphrey Jones, recently active in America and now returned to spread the gospel in his native land. He toured the country with his convert the Rev David Morgan. Both were Calvinistic Methodists but, in the fervour of their preaching, denominations hardly mattered. At Gorseddau the schoolmaster and unofficial chaplain to the quarry was an Annibynwr or Independent named Edward James. At the end of March, concerned at the moral state of his flock, he persuaded the revivalists to hold a cymanfa bregethu, a preaching meeting, at the quarry. Not in company time. But they were given permission to address the men - the men who wanted to be addressed - when work stopped at noon on Saturday. A couple of hundred assembled on the flat ground beyond the barracks and office, and Jones and Morgan stood looking down at them from a few yards up the incline.

Their message was non-denominational. It was a very simple message, even simplistic, designed for simple people. Jones had his say first, holding forth about salvation in general. Then Morgan took over, working his way systematically through a short list of the more generous sins. He reached his final category.

"And there are fornicators here among you today. And adulterers. And yes, even some guilty of the sins of Sodom. I won't name you, but God knows you. You are there, and there" - he stabbed his finger indiscriminately at the crowd, safe in the knowledge that the guilty would feel personally accused - "and your name is Fornicator. You have been lying in filth, and unless you repent, you will lie for ever in the filth of everlasting death. But, glory to God, my Jesus is the saviour of fornicators, and his blood can wash you clean. If you will commit yourself to him, his holy spirit will cleanse you, just like that" - he snapped his fingers - "and make you honest men, and heirs of his eternal glory. And then you will not desire to fornicate, for as sure as God gives you life in your soul, he'll give you a bodily life which is more satisfying than all the sins of the flesh. But those who do not repent - mark this - those who do not repent will end as carcasses in the pit of hell. Eu pryf ni bydd marw, a'u tân ni ddiffydd. Their worm will not die, nor their fire be quenched."

Daniel and Thomas Evans were listening morosely from the back of the throng. The rhetoric washed over their hard-bitten heads without touching them. Not far off, John was lounging beside Rowland. It washed over his head too. Bombast, he thought. Sure, there were plenty here who had been unfaithful, who had hurt others, in the flesh or in the heart. But they didn't include him, or Rowland. His own God, the God that he understood, had made them. He had made them the way they were. Their love hurt neither of them. Nor did it hurt anybody else Nor, seeing that he was responsible for it, did it hurt God. Their love was good, and God would punish neither of them for it.

He turned to Rowland with a rueful and deprecating smile, only to see him transfixed, face bright red, eyes wide, and mouth agape. Even before Morgan had thundered to his conclusion, Rowland was haring round the outskirts of the crowd to be the first to accost him with a quick question. He was succeeded by scores of others, many of them on their knees. On the way back, he had a word with Thomas and Daniel. And then John's world finally collapsed.

"John, I've seen the light. This is my road to Damascus. I have sinned, I know it now. Heaven knows I've sinned, and I repent. God gave me my life, and now I must give it back to him. I'm going home to tell my family, and I won't be coming back. I've told your tad. I've told Thomas too. He's off to Carnarvon now in his trap, and he's giving me a lift home. And you repent, John, or you'll end up in hell."

In a state of deep shock, John watched him run off down the tramway and up to Treforys to collect his possessions. Thomas and Daniel followed more slowly, Thomas continuing to Plasllyn, Daniel turning up to the village. After a short time Rowland came down to Plasllyn, bag over shoulder, to meet up with Thomas. John suddenly awoke, and began to sprint. There was something he had to say, something he had to affirm, before it was too late. When he reached Plasllyn the trap had gone. It would be on the road, so he followed the tramway which was more direct. When he reached Tyddyn Mawr the trap was just visible ahead of him. It would stop at Ty Mawr to let Rowland collect his tools.

When he ran gasping along the embankment into the top floor, he found that Rowland was indeed there, packing his tools into a sack. "John! Are you coming with me, then? Have you repented?"

"No ... I haven't ... because ... I love you!" he panted. "There's nothing ... to repent ... in our love."

"You're wrong. Only God loves me, properly. Our love was impure. Goodbye, then, John." He swung the sack over his shoulder, and abruptly disappeared down the stairs. His eyes were focussed wholly and brutally on the present and the future, not on the past. Never a word of thanks, of friendship, of love.

Wounded to the core, shattered, bewildered, numbed, John continued to mouth the words, time after time, "Nothing to repent in our love." Uselessly, for nobody heard. He slowly went down to the ground floor. He had saved Rowland's body, but at the snap of a revivalist's fingers he had lost his soul. What was there left to live for? The maintenance men had lifted some of the planks covering the wheel-pit, and he could see the top of the great wheel