THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

I looked at the smooth blue sky and the glowing white roofs, the black road, choked with blacker figures of waving men passing down the hill between groups of women with children clustered about their skirts, all of them flushed by flickering orange lamplight flooding out from open door-ways, and heard the rich voices rising in many harmonies, borne upward upon the mists which flew from singing mouths, veiling cold-pinched faces, magnifying the brilliance of hoping eyes, and my heart went tight inside me.

And round about us the Valley echoed with the hymn, and lights came out in the farms up on the dark mountain, and down at the pit, the men were waving their lamps, hundreds of tiny sparks keeping time to the beat of the music.

Everybody was singing.

Llewellyn/Valleys