Welsh Journals

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bandages and splints. They arrived at the Circle about the same time as the audience from the Workmen's Hall and the Roman soldiers who had been part of the cast of Judas Maccabaeus which was being performed there. These stood about, shivering and looking perished in the cold, with coats thrown over their togas, the performance having been abandoned when they were hurriedly called off the stage to surrender their helmets to the rightful owners, the Cwmcatti Fire Brigade. While most of the houses in Cwmcatti stood empty and their occupants stood fire watching in the Circle, a lone figure sidled along from house to house in Coronation Road, also known as Sheepshead Street, which was entirely deserted. Siki Lovell from the caravans down by the railway, Who Was Well Known For It, had already collected the rent money from under the clock on the mantlepiece in Mrs. Jenkins' No. 3, and a line of washing, left out to sweeten, from her sister-in-law's next door. Before the excitement of the night was over he had made a very good haul and had skipped it over the mountain to his mother's people who had a camp near the Twmpa. By this time the Fire Brigade had arrived in full muster and were breaking their way into the house and shop. No one had seen so much as a glimmer of Mrs. Dobell, and her two sisters were loud in lamentation and much to the forefront. Sam Small Coal from Up the Top, was the first man in. He got the kitchen window up, stepped on to a weak spot in the sofa and went through with both feet. Nothing daunted, he pushed up on through the smoke in the kitchen and up the stairs to the bedrooms. Mrs. Dobell, who was a bit deaf, had gone to bed early with a cold in her head, two aspirins and the wireless, but the noise in the Circle had roused her up and made her wonder what was going on. She got out of bed in time to see the top of a ladder appear against the window pane. Knowing full well that no one was likely to be cleaning the windows or painting the front of the shop at that time, she was pondering on it and slowly dressing to the strains of the Merry Widow Waltz when Sam burst in upon her. Mrs. Dobell was a tidy lump of a woman and he must have been struck comical by the way she looked, standing there in a man's pants and vest, her late husband's things that she'd taken to wearing, on account of feeling the cold so badly. She let out a screech and tried to pull on her long black skirt, but it got caught on one of the knobs of the wireless. There was a change of programme, and a loud outburst of cheering from the set and the crowd below when Sam carried her, struggling,- to the window.