A Small Country (8 page)

When she was twelve years old, though, and had gone from the little private school at Henblas to the county grammar school at Llanfryn, she announced one day that she had been chosen to represent her house in the St David’s Day eisteddfod at school. Since honour points only were awarded, no money prizes, Rachel was unable to object, and Josi was delighted and determined that his daughter should acquit herself well.

‘Miss Lewis, Rhydfelen school, would train her,’ Nano had said. ‘They say she’s very good.’ And though Josi would have preferred a qualified singing teacher, there were only three weeks to the eisteddfod, so that he decided to ride over that very day to catch the schoolmistress before she left school.

He was outside on the dot of three-thirty; in time to see the little ones, capped and scarfed and gaitered, running home through the bleak February winds. The big children followed; several of the boys crowding round offering to hold his horse. ‘Too cold for you,’ Josi said, ‘run off home.’ He distributed some ha’pennies, tied the horse to the post by the gate and walked up the path.

He opened the outside door, stopped a moment in the porch sniffing the familiar smell; sweat and chalk and damp clothes, then tapped at the classroom door.

Miss Lewis was sitting close to the stove, lacing her outdoor boots. She greeted him warily. She knew him by sight; knew who he was.

The meeting did not go well. Miriam Lewis had only recently been appointed schoolmistress to the little one-teacher school, and was finding that there were too many people – members of the local gentry, ministers of the various chapels – who thought they had a right or duty to help her run the school.

Josi explained his errand.

She said that she trained only children from her own school. She was tired and cold and Dewi Williams, a great bully-boy of thirteen, had been difficult all day.

She regretted her refusal as soon as Josi had left. From a safe distance she watched him striding down the path and getting on to his horse. If he had been just a little less sure of himself, just a shade less handsome, she would have been more courteous.

She was insecure, that was the trouble. Born and bred in uncompromising poverty, pride had been the only luxury; had remained the devil at her elbow.

Her mother, a widow who had lost her tied cottage along with her husband, had brought her up in a tumbledown shack, just about managing to keep them both alive by going out washing and scrubbing floors. Miriam, dark-skinned and under-sized, had led a solitary life, no brothers and sisters, unwilling or unable to mix with other children.

When she was about twelve, approaching school-leaving age, the squire’s wife, at the Christmas celebrations in the church hall, noticing her because she had received her gifts of an orange and a three-penny piece with a sullen thank you and no curtsey, had asked Ifan Jenkins the schoolmaster whether she was ‘all right’, wanting to know, presumably – she acted as an unofficial employment agency – whether she was fit to go into service. He, having other plans for her, had shaken his head.

He knew how to get round her. While the other children were chanting the names of the rivers and mountains of Canada and Central America, he would take her aside and they two would work on Euclid and Geometry and Matriculation English, and then she became an ordinary, contented child, would even smile from time to time. If she had been a boy he would have moved heaven and earth and the county education authority to get her a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. As it was, he had gone to see her mother and begged her to let her have another year at school as an assistant uncertificated teacher.

‘She’s got a remarkable head on her,’ he’d told Mary Lewis, and she had been amazed; she had always considered her poor Miriam not quite twelve to the dozen; it was only idiot children in her experience who devoted so much time to rearing fledglings and singing and crying over dead hedgehogs and mice. Still, to be a teacher was a fine and grand thing, and if Jenkins the school said her daughter would make a teacher, then she would take in more washing, scrub more floors to keep her at school a bit longer; of course she would. And with Lisi Jenkins so kindly offering to get her the material for a suit and a winter cape, it was only the boots she’d have to worry about; a teacher, even a fourteen-year-old assistant, uncertified one, couldn’t go to school bare-footed.

So Miriam hadn’t had to go into service.

Not that she had had it easy. After her breakfast of bread and tea, she would walk, summer and winter, the three miles to school, getting there by seven-thirty, so as to have an hour’s tuition from Mr Jenkins, analysing and parsing, precis and composition, model drawing, music, mathematics, literature; English, Welsh and Burns; they did a day’s work in that hour, then a cup of tea from Mrs Jenkins and she was ready to meet her pupils at ten to nine.

Her double life, studying and teaching, had gone on for four years, until at eighteen she had gone to Swansea to be examined for her teacher’s certificate.

There again, she had nearly lost everything to her pride.

The last exam – she had been at it for three days – was music. The theory paper had been easy enough. Afterwards, she had had to submit to an oral examination. Some simple piano pieces, she sat with her back to the examiners, trying not to laugh; there was a piano at school and she could play music, not just tunes.

‘Good,’ one of the examiners said when she had finished. He was a large, fleshy man, well-greased; he looked like a prosperous butcher. ‘And now we would like you to sing for us.’ He handed her another sheet of music.

‘I don’t feel like singing,’ Miriam Lewis had said, and in the silence that followed, ‘I will not sing a note.’ Who did they think they were, sitting there like three monkeys.

‘Can’t you sing?’ a second man asked in a high, nervous voice. He looked like a draper, the sort who sold women’s ready-made underclothes and simpered over them. ‘You played the piano so nicely.’

‘I don’t feel like singing.’ Of course she could sing. Who did they think she was, she’d taught singing for three years. Simply, she wouldn’t lower herself to humour them.

‘We’ll have the next young lady, please,’ the third man told the usher who was standing at the door, jumpy as a rabbit. ‘That will be all, Miss Lewis.’ The third examiner was a decent-looking man; she’d felt a little sorry not to have been able to oblige him.

And that was it.

She’d suffered a great deal in the following months, wondering how she was going to explain her failure to her mother and Mr Jenkins. It had cost five pounds to sit the examination, another two for the train fare to Swansea and the accommodation, no one got their certificate without satisfying the examiners in every subject. She finally got her results. She had passed with a distinction in every subject, including music.

She had told Mr Jenkins, then, about her refusal to sing for the gentlemen fools.

‘Yes, I heard about that,’ he said. Perhaps someone had written to him, he wouldn’t elaborate, but gave it as his opinion that what he called her ‘donkey streak’ could only be an asset to her in the teaching profession.

She remembered – a little ruefully – what he had said, as she watched Josi Evans ride away.

Josi rode home almost enjoying his humiliation at the hands of the little schoolmistress.

‘Who does she think she is?’ Nano demanded, when he told her what had happened.

‘She thinks she’s as good as anyone else,’ Josi said, ‘and she’s quite right.’

‘Huh!’

In due course, Catrin got first prize in the junior solo and Josi was so pleased that he bought her a new pony which they called Melody.

He didn’t see Miss Lewis again for some months, though he thought about her grave, unsmiling face from time to time.

In July that year, Tom came home from school with measles. He was feverish for several days, having to lie in a darkened bedroom when he wanted to be out fishing and roaming the woods. One evening, when he was convalescing, but as usual bemoaning his luck, Doctor Andrews, there on his daily visit, grew impatient and told him how fortunate he was to be getting better so soon. The Rhydfelen schoolmistress almost died of the measles,’ he told him. ‘She had to stay in bed six weeks; she’s still not back at school.’

‘I hadn’t heard about Miss Lewis’s illness,’ Josi told the doctor as he took him downstairs. ‘Where does she live? I’ll send her some of our peaches.’

And the next day he gathered the choicest of the hothouse peaches, arranged them in a basket with a frill of leaves, and took them himself to Rhydfelen. It seemed a strange attention to pay to someone who had done nothing but refuse him a small favour, but Josi was a strange man.

Miriam Lewis was in the garden of her cottage when Josi rode up. She was sitting in a basket-chair, a shawl over her shoulders and another over her knees. He left his horse at the gate and strode up the path, but as he reached her, found himself afflicted by a most unusual shyness.

‘Doctor Andrews told us you’d been ill,’ he said.

Without another word, he deposited the basket at her feet.

Miss Lewis was as tongue-tied as he.

An elderly woman came out of the cottage.

‘My auntie,’ Miss Lewis said. ‘Hetty Lewis. Auntie, this is Mr Evans, Hendre Ddu.’

Auntie proved as voluble as the other two were silent.

‘Oh, there’s lovely peaches and how kind of you, Mr Evans. Miriam, well, she’s had such kindness from everyone. She’s only been here since September, but the people, oh, they’ve taken her to their hearts and no mistake. Strawberries she’s had and runner beans already, and only July. Eleven chickens altogether. You can’t die now, I told her, you can’t expect wreaths on top of all these chickens. It would be selfish, wouldn’t it, Mr Evans? No, the Good Lord has spared her as Mr Jones, Soar, said this morning, to carry on her good work in Rhydfelen. And now she’ll have to go to chapel a bit more, won’t she, that’s what I say.’

‘Perhaps Mr Evans would like a cup of tea,’ Miss Lewis suggested. Josi’s eyes hadn’t left her face during her aunt’s recital.

‘I would,’ Josi said.

‘Fetch yourself a chair,’ Miriam said. ‘Go in through the back door and you’re in the kitchen.’

‘Better for you both to come to the parlour, it’s getting quite cool now.’

Miriam stood up obediently, but before she had been able to adjust her shawls, Josi had picked her up and carried her through the kitchen and into the little dark parlour. She was as light as a child.

‘Are we friends, then?’ Josi asked, while they were alone.

She didn’t answer but both were aware of what was hovering over them.

Josi drank his cup of tea and left.

At this time, Miriam Lewis was courting. Her sweetheart was a bank clerk from Henblas who used to cycle to Rhydfelen every Sunday afternoon to have tea with her. His name was Gareth Vaughan, and he was hard-working, religious, and bound, people said, to get on. His father, working at the same bank, had got on, so that he was under-manager when he died, and had left his widow with a house and a good annuity.

In a way, Miriam would have liked to marry Gareth; he was gentle and considerate. He was fairly intelligent, or at least not stupid. She even liked his mother.

He spoke of selling his mother’s terraced house in the old part of the town and buying one of the new villas being built on the Carmarthen Road. His mother liked the idea; they were double-fronted, detached houses, and she would be perfectly happy, she said, with a sitting room of her own, and the front garden to potter about in.

Gareth had said they could have a piano and that Miriam could give lessons. They would have a little maid. There was a sizeable garden at the back, he would grow vegetables there; in a few years would be able to afford a greenhouse.

Miriam was never anything but non-committal, she’d think about it, that was the most she’d say. Yet one day she had gone, alone, to the building site and tried to imagine what married life would be like. One or two of the houses were almost completed; solid, square, red-bricked, with square bay windows on the ground floor. Gareth had mentioned the large, airy kitchen with tiled floor and modern range; the scullery behind.

She tried to imagine choosing furniture and curtains, but couldn’t. She tried to imagine herself cleaning and shopping and preparing meals for Gareth, but couldn’t. The unfinished house she was looking at made her feel nervous and inadequate.

As Miriam Lewis, schoolmistress, she had duties and obligations which she didn’t shirk, but they were a result of what she was, and had chosen to become. She felt unfitted, completely unfitted, to undertake Mrs Gareth Vaughan’s burdens. Having to conform, doing what the neighbours did, going to chapel on Sunday; being not only a wife, a daughter-in-law, probably a mother, but a member of a respectable, red-bricked society.

‘I can’t marry you, Gareth,’ she had told him, the next time he’d cycled over to see her.

‘You may change your mind,’ he’d said. Which was what he always said.

One Sunday afternoon shortly afterwards, she had had a surprise visit from Ifan Jenkins her old schoolmaster, and his wife; Mrs Jenkins, it turned out, had relatives living nearby. They met Gareth Vaughan, though very briefly, because he was on the point of cycling home to the evening service at Henblas.