“Aye, Mam.”

He could see a tear in her eye, and he turned away quickly, because it made him feel weepy too. He took his cap from the peg. “Bye, then,” he said, as if he was only going to school; and he stepped out of the front door.

The summer had been hot and sunny so far, but today was overcast, and it even looked as if it might rain. Tommy was leaning against the wall of the house, waiting. “Aye, aye, Billy,” he said.

“Aye, aye, Tommy.”

They walked down the street side by side.

Aberowen had once been a small market town, serving hill farmers round about, Billy had learned in school. From the top of Wellington Row you could see the old commercial center, with the open pens of the cattle market, the wool exchange building, and the Anglican church, all on one side of the Owen River, which was little more than a stream. Now a railway line cut through the town like a wound, terminating at the pithead. The miners’ houses had spread up the slopes of the valley, hundreds of gray stone homes with roofs of darker-gray Welsh slate. They were built in long serpentine rows that followed the contours of the mountainsides, the rows crossed by shorter streets that plunged headlong to the valley bottom.

“Who do you think you’ll be working with?” said Tommy.

Billy shrugged. New boys were assigned to one of the colliery manager’s deputies. “No way to know.”

“I hope they put me in the stables.” Tommy liked horses. About fifty ponies lived in the mine. They pulled the drams that the colliers filled, drawing them along railway tracks. “What sort of work do you want to do?”

Billy hoped he would not be given a task too heavy for his childish physique, but he was not willing to admit that. “Greasing drams,” he said.

“Why?”

“It seems easy.”

They passed the school where yesterday they had been pupils. It was a Victorian building with pointed windows like a church. It had been built by the Fitzherbert family, as the headmaster never tired of reminding the pupils.