- Mr. Gruffydd: You've been lucky, Huw. Lucky to suffer and lucky to spend these weary months in bed. For so God has given you a chance to make the spirit within yourself. And as your father cleans his lamp to have good light, so keep clean your spirit... By prayer, Huw. And by prayer, I don't mean shouting, mumbling, and wallowing like a hog in religious sentiment. Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking. When you pray, think. Think well what you're saying. Make your thoughts into things that are solid. In that way, your prayer will have strength, and that strength will become a part of you, body, mind, and spirit.
- Huw Morgan: There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday. In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the sides of our hill. Not yet enough to mar the countryside, nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.
- Angharad: Look now, you are king in the chapel. But I will be queen in my own kitchen.
- Mr. Gruffydd: You will be queen wherever you walk.
- Angharad: What does that mean?
- Mr. Gruffydd: ...I should not have said it.
- Angharad: Why?
- Mr. Gruffydd: I have no right to speak to you so.
- [he leaves]
- Angharad: [stopping him] Mr. Gruffydd, if the right is mine to give, you have it.
- Dai Bando: A man is never too old to learn, is it, Mr. Jonas?
- Mr. Jonas: [uncertainly] No.
- Dai Bando: I was in school myself once, but no great one for knowledge.
- Mr. Jonas: [angrily, shaking his cane] Look here, what do you want?
- Dai Bando: Knowledge.
- [taking Mr. Jonas' cane]
- Dai Bando: How would you go about taking the measurement of a stick, Mr. Jonas?
- Mr. Jonas: By its' length, of course.
- Dai Bando: And how would you measure a man who would use a stick on a boy one-third his size?
- [throws Mr. Jonas' cane aside]
- Cyfartha: Tell us!
- Dai Bando: Now, you are good in the use of a stick, but boxing is my subject... according to the rules laid down by the good Marquis of Queensbury.
- Cyfartha: [saluting] God rest his soul!
- Dai Bando: And happy I am to pass on my knowledge to you!
- [backhands Mr. Jonas, sending him reeling]
- Huw Morgan: [narrating] Memory... Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed, and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago; of men and women long since dead.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Huw, I thought when I was a young man that I would conquer the world with truth. I thought I would lead an army greater than Alexander ever dreamed of, not to conquer nations, but to liberate mankind. With truth. With the golden sound of the Word. But only a few of them heard. Only a few of you understood.
- Dai Bando: Position again.
- [Dai Bando and Cyfartha drag Mr. Jonas to his feet]
- Dai Bando: Could I have your attention, boys and girls? I am not accustomed to speaking in public...
- Cyfartha: Only public houses.
- Dai Bando: But this -
- [backhands Mr. Jonas in the nose, sending him sprawling]
- Dai Bando: never use. It's against the rules. Break a man's nose. Now then -
- [turns to find Mr. Jonas collapsed against the wall, unconscious]
- Dai Bando: I'm afraid he will never make a boxer.
- Cyfartha: No aptitude for knowledge.
- Huw Morgan: [narrating] It is with me now, so many years later. And it makes me think of so much that is good, that is gone.
- Beth Morgan: I have come up here to tell you what I think of you all, because you are talking against my husband. You are a lot of cowards to go against him. He has done nothing against you and he never has and you know it well. How some of you, you smug-faced hypocrites, can sit in the same chapel with him I cannot tell. To say he is with the owners is not only nonsense but downright wickedness. There's one thing more I've got to say and it is this. If harm comes to my Gwilym, I will find out the men and I will kill them with my two hands. And this I will swear by God Almighty.
- Mr. Gruffydd: But remember, with strength goes responsibility - to others and to yourselves. For you cannot conquer injustice with more injustice - only with justice and the help of God.
- Mr. Gruffydd: I know why you have come - I have seen it in your faces Sunday after Sunday as I've stood here before you. Fear has brought you here. Horrible, superstitious fear. Fear of divine retribution a bolt of fire from the skies. The vengeance of the Lord and the justice of God. But you have forgotten the love of Jesus. You disregard His sacrifice. Death, fear, flames, horror and black clothes. Hold your meeting then, but know if you do this in the name of God and in the house of God, you blaspheme against Him and His Word.
- Ianto Morgan: We are not questioning your authority, sir, but if manners prevent our speaking the truth, we will be without manners.
- Huw Morgan: [narrating] Someone would strike up a song, and the valley would ring with the sound of many voices - for singing is in my people as sight is in the eye.
- [last lines]
- Huw Morgan: Men like my father cannot die. They are with me still - real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green was my Valley then.
- Beth Morgan: Nothing is enough for people who have minds like cesspools. Oh Huw, my little one, I hope when you're grown their tongues will be slower to hurt.
- Huw Morgan: [Narrating] Everything I ever learnt as a small boy came from my father, and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday.
- Dai Bando: [Cyfartha is holding Mr. Jonas in boxing position] Now look, to make a good boxer, you must have a good... *right hand*, you see?
- [strikes Mr. Jonas with a right jab, the force of which knocks Mr. Jonas into the wall]
- Dai Bando: Now, you see, that is how you will punish your man - with a right and a left, and put your shoulder into it!
- [Mr. Jonas is slumped against the wall, dazed]
- Cyfartha: The gentleman is talking to you!
- Huw Morgan: [narrating] I think I fell in love with Bronwyn then. Perhaps it is foolish to think a child could fall in love. But I am the child that was, and nobody knows how I felt, except only me.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Who is for Gwilym Morgan and the others?
- Dai Bando: I, for one. He is the blood of my heart. Come, Cyfartha.
- Cyfartha: ...'Tis a coward I am. But I will hold your coat.
- Beth Morgan: [as two of her sons leave] America - my babies. This is only the beginning. Then all of you will go, one after the other - all of you.
- Huw Morgan: I will never leave you, Mama.
- Beth Morgan: Huw boy, if you should ever leave me, I'll be sorry I ever had babies.
- Huw Morgan: Why did you have them?
- Beth Morgan: To keep my hands in water and my face to the fire, perhaps.
- Huw Morgan: [narrates] Then the strike was settled - with the help of Mr. Gruffydd and my father. Work again. Work, to wipe out the memory of idleness and hardship. The men were happy going up the hill that morning.
- [the colliery gates are closed by guards, leaving some of the men shut outside]
- Huw Morgan: But not all of them. For there were too many now for the jobs open, and some learned that never again would there be work for them in their own Valley.
- [after the church elders castigate an unwed mother]
- Angharad: How could you stand there and watch them? Cruel old men, groaning and nodding to hurt her more. That is not the Word of God! "Go now and sin no more," Jesus said!
- Mr. Gruffydd: Angharad! You know your Bible too well, and life too little.
- Angharad: I know enough of life to know that Meillyn Lewis is no worse than I am!
- Mr. Gruffydd: Angharad!
- Angharad: What do the deacons know about it? What do you know about what could happen to a poor girl when she loves a man so much that even to lose sight of him for a moment is torture!
- Angharad: I couldn't spend another night without knowing. What has happened? Is anything wrong?
- Mr. Gruffydd: Wrong?
- Angharad: You know what I mean. Why have you changed towards me? Why am I a stranger now? Have I done anything?
- Mr. Gruffydd: No... the blame is mine. Your mother spoke to me after Chapel. She is happy to think you will be having plenty all your days.
- Angharad: [scornfully] Iestyn Evans?
- Mr. Gruffydd: You could do no better.
- Angharad: I don't want him. I want you.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Angharad... I have spent nights too, trying to think this out. When I took up this work, I knew what it meant - it meant sacrifice and devotion and making it my whole life to the exclusion of everything else. That I was perfectly willing to do. But to share it with another... Do you think I will have you going threadbare all your life? Depending on the charity of others for your good meals? Our children growing up in cast-off clothing - and ourselves thanking God for parenthood in a house full of bits? No. I can bear with such a life for the sake of my work. But I think I would start to kill if I saw the white come to your hair twenty years before its time.
- Angharad: [softly] Why? Why would you start to kill? Are you a man or a saint?
- Mr. Gruffydd: I am no saint, but I have a duty towards you. Let me do it.
- [Angharad kisses him, and leaves]
- Mr. Morgan: Go along with you girl, a cup of tea for the men, is it?
- Beth Morgan: Tea?
- Cyfartha: Tea? No tea, Mrs. Morgan. In training he is.
- [holding up two fingers]
- Cyfartha: A glass of beer, if you please.
- Beth Morgan: [exasperated sigh]
- Huw Morgan: And so it came to Ianto and Davy, the best workers in the colliery but too highly paid to compete with poorer, more desperate men.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking. When you pray, think well what you are saying, and make your thoughts into things that are solid. In that manner, your prayer will have strength, and that strength shall become part of you, mind, body, and spirit.
- Huw Morgan: [narrates] Then came the scrubbing - out in the back yard. It was the duty of my sister Angharad to bring the buckets of hot water and cold. And I performed what little tasks I could as my father and brothers scrubbed the coal dust from their backs. Most would come off them, but some would stay for life. It is the honorable badge of the coal miner - and I envied it on my father and grown-up brothers. Scrub and scrub, and Mr. Coal would lie there and laugh at you.
- Angharad: [about Mr. Gruffydd] How is he, Huw?
- Huw Morgan: Not as he was.
- Angharad: Is he ill?
- Huw Morgan: Inside, in his eyes, in his voice. Like you.
- Angharad: Please go home, Huw.
- Huw Morgan: [narrates] After dinner, when dishes had been washed, the box was brought to the table, for the spending money to be handed out. No one in our Valley had ever seen a bank. We kept our savings on the mantelpiece. My father used to say that money was made to be spent, just as men spend their strength and brains in earning it - and as willingly - but always with a purpose.
- Beth Morgan: [to Huw] Fight again, and when you come home, not a look shall you have from me... not a word!
- Huw Morgan: [narrates] Twenty-two weeks the men were out, as the strike moved into winter. It was strange to go out into the street and find the men there in the daytime. It had a feeling of fright in it. And always the mood of the men grew uglier, as empty bellies and desperation began to conquer reason. Any man who was not their friend became their enemy. They knew that my father had opposed the strike, and now it was they who opposed him.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Where is the light I thought to see in your eye? Are you afraid, boy? You heard what the doctor said?
- Huw Morgan: Yes, sir.
- Mr. Gruffydd: And you believed it?
- Huw Morgan: Yes, sir.
- Mr. Gruffydd: You want to walk again, don't you?
- Huw Morgan: Yes, sir.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Then you must have faith. And if you have, you will walk again, no matter what all the doctors say.
- Huw Morgan: But he said nature must take her course.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Nature is the hand-maiden of the Lord. I remember on one or two occasions when she was given orders to change her course. You know your Scriptures, boy?
- Huw Morgan: Yes, sir.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Then you know that what's been done before can be done again - for you. Do you believe me, Huw?
- Huw Morgan: Yes, sir.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Good. You will see the first daffodil out on the mountain. Will you?
- Huw Morgan: Yes, sir.
- Mr. Gruffydd: Then you will.
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