Abner and Mick advanced to the edge of the bivouac. Its inhabitants did not seem to be disturbed by their presence. Mick, who was never at a loss for words, gave them good-morning. A tall man, with a large, unshaven face and a check handkerchief knotted round his neck, who was sitting on a log by the fire, turned and stared at him. He had wide, humorous eyes and when he spoke he gave the impression, by winking, that his words concealed some subtle joke. Meanwhile with each of his hands he sat fondling an immense and hairy forearm.
‘Well, lad, what is it?’ he asked, in a strong Lancashire accent.
Mick explained that Abner and he were looking for work on the Welsh water and asked if it were anywhere near by.
‘Eh, you’ve a good step yet,’ said the other. ‘They’re working up beyond Chapel Green, two miles from Lesswardine. Been long on the road?’
‘Four days,’ said Mick. ‘I hear there do be a good job goin’ there.’
‘Ay,’ said the north-countryman sardonically. ‘Work for them that likes it.’ His wink seemed to imply that Mick obviously didn’t.
Three other men lounged up to them. Another, who was holding a shovel over the fire, sang out: ‘Come on, Joe, the rasher’s done.’
The big man raised himself from his log. Before this it had been impossible to realise his hugeness. ‘Better have summat t’eat wi’ uz,’ he said.
His sudden hospitality, so little in keeping with his appearance, surprised Abner. In a few minutes they had settled down with the rest to the enjoyment of the frizzled bacon and large cans of tea. Mick was soon at home, contriving at the same time to eat enormously and to keep the conversation going.
The encampment, as he had first explained to Abner, was one of many such that may be found scattered up and down the length of the Radnor march in summertime. The men who inhabit them are known as cloggers. They come from the black industrial towns of Lancashire, and their business is the making of wooden clogs. All are skilled labourers, and in each of their communities there is a foreman on whom the commercial responsibilities of the venture falls. Early in spring he makes a visit to the border country and bargains with farmers and landowners for the right to cut the thickets of black alder that choke the bottom of every valley in this western brookland. In May the rest of the gang follow and there begins a nomadic life in which they wander from valley to valley, felling the thickets, stripping the black bark from wood of a milky whiteness and cutting billets of a size suitable for clog-making. On rainy days when their harvest is well in hand, they carry the process further, and set to making the clogs themselves. Sometimes they live under canvas on the site of their labours; sometimes they find lodgings in the nearest village; always, as strangers—or rather as migrants—they carry with them a reputation for boldness and extravagance in speech and behaviour; but, for all that, the border people make much of them, knowing that they earn plenty of money and spend it freely.