'My name is Laddy Merridew. I'm a cry-baby. I'm
sorry.' 'And my name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward.
And that's worse.' The boy Laddy Merridew, sent to live
with his grandmother, stumbles off the bus into a small
Welsh mining community, where he begins an unlikely
friendship with Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town
beggar-storyteller. Ianto is watchman over the legacy of
the collapse many years ago of Kindly Light Pit, a
disaster whose echoes reverberate down the generations
and blight the lives of many in the town. Through
Ianto's stories Laddy Merridew is drawn into both the
town's history and the conundrums of the present. Why
has woodwork teacher Icarus Evans striven most of his
life to carve wooden feathers that will float on an
updraft? Why is the undertaker Tutt Bevan trying to find
a straight path through the town? Why does James Little,
the old gas-meter emptier, dig his allotment by
moonlight? And why does window cleaner Judah Jones take
autumn leaves into a disused chapel?These and other men
of the town, both past and present, and the women who
mothered them, married them and mourned them, are bound
together by the echoes of the Kindly Light tragedy and
by the mysterious figure of Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins,
whose stories of loyalty and betrayal, loss and love,
form an unforgettable, spellbinding tapestry. |
|