The past in maiming us, makes us. – Frank Bidart[i]

ON MOST DAYS when I was very little I would be pushed in a pram past a massacre site on the way to my grandmother’s house. Or perhaps it was the site of a stand-up battle. It is sometimes hard to tell with these things. The place was the Castle Inn, situated on the High Street in the slate-grey industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil, spread untidily along the Taff Valley, bordering the Brecon Beacons, the Vale of Glamorgan and the Black Domain, South Wales: vast coal deposits below ground and belching iron and steel works above.