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secure in the knowledge that she had ruined the day for Evan and upset Caterina. But the wedding was only the first of many irritants that Megan introduced into Elizabeth’s life.
    Although Megan had come from Bonvilston Road, which was across town and as alien to the people of the Graig as distant places like Cardiff, she was instantly accepted into the community. Elizabeth felt the slight keenly. Despite the fact that she’d lived most of her life in and around Pontypridd, everyone on the Graig referred to her as “the young Mrs Powell” to differentiate between her and Caterina. In a village where first name terms were the rule rather than the exception the title was an insult, particularly when Megan was “Megan” from the outset. As popular, well-liked and accepted as Caterina, Evan and William.
    Elizabeth burned at the injustice of it all. In the early days of her marriage she’d desperately tried to please her neighbours. She’d joined several of the committees of her uncle’s chapel. She’d visited the sick, cleaned the vestry, organised Sunday school outings and even offered to coach backward children with their school work. But in doing all of that she’d failed to realise the potency of her neighbours’ pride.
    Rough, untutored self-educated, they earned their weekly wage the hard way, and held their heads high. Taught from birth to scorn charity, they mistrusted the motives that lay behind her overtures. And she, schooled by her father and uncle in “charitable deeds”, was incapable of helping people from a sense of fellowship or kindness simply because she’d never possessed either of those qualities.
    It never crossed her mind to blame her own short comings for her isolation from the community. Uncultured and uneducated as her neighbours were, they could sniff out those who condescended and patronised a mile off, and she continued to condescend and patronize without even realising she was doing so.
    Outwardly she and Evan were no different from anyone else. They had no money to spare or “swank” with. In fact between the demands of her children, the mortgage, and what Evan gave his mother most weeks she was hard put to stretch Evan’s wages until his next pay day. But close acquaintance with poverty did nothing to diminish her sense of superiority. If anything it entrenched it, along with her long suffering air of martyrdom.
    A year or two passed and she gave up trying to make friends of her neighbours. She decided she didn’t need them. After all, they were hardly the type of person she’d associated with in Training College or during her teaching days. Instead she concentrated on domestic chores, filling her days with the drudgery of washing, cooking, cleaning, mending and scrubbing. Making herself a slave to the physical needs of her family, and keeping herself and them strictly within the bounds of what she termed “decency”. But in the daily struggle whatever warmth had once existed between her and Evan was irretrievably lost.
    When war broke out and flamed across Europe in 1914 it affected even Pontypridd. In the early days before conscription, some men, including miners, volunteered, sincerely believing they were marching to glorious battle and an heroic personal future that would return them to their locals by Christmas. (With luck, covered with enough medals to earn them a few free pints)
    Evan knew better. So did William – when he was sober. William and Megan celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary in 1915. Caterina looked after baby William, and William, excited by his and Megan’s’ first night out together in a long time, went to town. They started the evening at six o’clock in the Graig Hotel then gradually worked their way down the Graig hill, via every pub, until they reached the Half Moon opposite Pontypridd Junction station, and just the other side of the railway bridge that marked the border between the Graig hill and town.
    Concerned about the state William