One Blue Moon by Catrin Collier

she’d told him so. She wanted to wear his ring, to be with him all the time. By his side where she could keep him away from all the other girls who made eyes at him.
    Why had he allowed a simple thing like lack of money to come between them? Why wouldn’t he change his job for a daytime one and marry her? They’d find somewhere to live even if it was only a rented room. Then she’d cook and clean for him. Be there whenever he came home. Why couldn’t he realise that she needed him all to herself? That every time he talked to, or smiled at another girl it hurt. Enough for her to create the scene that had driven them apart.

Chapter Four
    Evan and Eddie hadn’t had a bad day. Leaving home at half-past five, they’d paid their sixpence to hire a shire horse and cart for the day from the yard down Factory Lane. It had become easier since they’d been counted as regulars. They no longer had to fight their way into the stalls to get one of the better horses or sounder carts. Ianto Watkins kept back one of the best rigs for them, and Goliath, a huge shire whose ferocious appearance and rolling eyes belied his sleepy nature.
    By eleven they’d unloaded and sold two cartloads of rags to the pickers’ yards. Rags that they’d called in on the streets of Cilfynydd. But it had cost them. Eddie had had to hand over every last farthing, halfpenny and penny of the three shillings’ worth of change Evan had set aside to tempt the women into selling their family’s worn clothes; clothes that of choice they would have kept until the cold weather had abated. But then, Saturday mornings were special. Good days for the rag and bone men with every household trying to scrape together the ten pennies they needed to buy a beef heart for Sunday’s roast.
    Between eleven and three they’d delivered goods to customers of Bown’s second-hand furniture shop, one of the few that was surviving the recession comparatively unscathed. Evan was proud of his Bown’s contract, and justifiably so. It didn’t bring in much – seven shillings a week at most – but as he pointed out to an unimpressed, scornful Elizabeth, it paid for the cart rental.
    It wasn’t easy trying to make a living out of rags. Evan hadn’t been the only unemployed miner to think of the idea, and there were far too many carts on the streets for comfort. It had taken Evan eight weeks just to pay back the pound he’d borrowed off their lodger Charlie to set up in the trade, but now he and Eddie were clearing a steady pound a week during the bad weeks, and as much as thirty shillings in the better ones. It wasn’t good money by pre-pit-closure days, just enough to pay the bills and the mortgage. But as Elizabeth frequently and sourly pointed out, there wouldn’t be much in the way of food on the table if it wasn’t for the seven and six a week Charlie and William each paid to lodge with them, and the twelve shillings a week Haydn handed over out of the twelve and six he earned in the Town Hall, as well as the six shillings he picked up for his three short days on Horton’s stall.
    They were surviving. ‘Getting by’, as his mother used to say, Evan mused as he wearily flicked the reins in an effort to keep a tired Goliath plodding on. And surviving was more than some of their neighbours were doing. Bobby Jones, whose wife was in the same jail for the same offence as Megan, had taken his five children to the workhouse and abandoned them there. An hour later the bailiffs had moved into his house, carried out the furniture, loaded it into their van and driven off. No one knew where Bobby had gone. Rumour had it he was on the ‘tramp’. And Bobby’s family weren’t the only ones who had ended up in the workhouse or were heading that way. The Richards next door would be out on the street if it wasn’t for the eighteen shillings and sixpence their son Glan earned as a porter in the Central Homes, and the five shillings Mrs Richards made scrubbing out the Graig Hotel