I was so amazed by this photograph of the Dowlais Great White Spoil Tip I worked it into chapter one of The Prime Minister’s Affair. It dominated Merthyr Tydfil until the 1970s. I pass the site from time to time and wonder at the labour that went into the creation of a monster.
‘.… his new Welsh comrades seemed ready to forgive him for being a Londoner and a little la-di-da because he was an old soldier and a worker too, with scars and calluses and money for beer. He had bought Owen a pint and listened to the story of how he was blacklisted for leading a strike. At closing time his new comrades had found him a bed for the night with an old grey woman who lived in a terrace beneath a slag mountain she called her old grey man. That was how the paperchase had begun.’