Love and War (5 page)

‘To hear him carrying on about the Germans being God’s children, only led astray, is deeply offensive, don’t you think so, Rhian? Gwilym Martin, Horeb, isn’t such a milksop, I can tell you. No, Mr Martin gets to the point quick enough, praying for the forces of God to smash the legions of Satan, and no nonsense about forgiveness either. I’d switch to Horeb in a minute, only Bryn’s afraid of losing custom in Tabernacle. Rhian, I hope you won’t let Huw know how disloyal Mr Roberts is being. I’m sure it would be no comfort for him to realise that his own minister is siding with the enemy. I hope their Padre – not that I like that name, very High Church it sounds – I hope he’s at least on the right side.’

‘I bought a new dress yesterday.’ I say blithely. I’ve long realised that’s it’s not a bit of use trying to alter or modify my mother-in-law’s views on anything; all I can do is wait for one of her dramatic pauses and then seize the opportunity to change the subject.

She’s astonished. ‘A new dress?’ Nobody can be as astonished as my mother-in-law. ‘A new dress? Did you need a new dress?’

‘I thought I did. Yes. I haven’t had one for ages. Not since the wedding.’

‘Well, well, well! A new dress!’

She lets the idea permeate into her mind as she mashes the potatoes.

‘I wish I’d have known you were thinking of a new dress, Rhian. You see, I’d have offered to make you one. I’ve got a yard and a half of lovely pre-war material – beige – which would have been ample for the bodice. Such lovely quality. Two yards of some contrasting colour for the skirt, say a nice apple-green, was all you’d have needed to buy. About five shillings was all you’d have had to spend. And perhaps six pence for a packet of fasteners.’

‘What a shame you hadn’t mentioned it.’

‘A new dress! Oh, I hope it didn’t cost too much.’

‘No, it was quite reasonable.’

‘Where did you get it? At J.C. Jones?’

‘No. I went to Studio Laura.’

‘To Studio Laura? Oh Rhian, what a pity! Didn’t I tell you about that Mr Browne who owns Studio Laura? Well, Mrs Watkins, Park Villa, is convinced he’s a German spy. Yes, she saw him out very late one night when she was taking Mot for his last walk, and there he was, lurking in the shadow of the breakwater and staring out to sea with a pair of binoculars.’

‘Great Heavens! I hope she reported him to PC Jones.’

‘Don’t make fun of me, Rhian. If he’s not a spy, why isn’t he in the army?’

‘Well, I suppose he could be too old. I should think he’d be about the same age as Gwynn Morgan, Art, who seems to be a friend of his.’

She sighs again as she carries the meat to the table.

‘That Gwynn Morgan. He’s another fine one. Always has to be different, that man. Why doesn’t he dress like a teacher, for a start? Probably fancies himself as one of these artists. And his wife is some sort of foreigner. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that Gwynn Morgan is another of these conchies, like Mr Roberts.’

‘Or a spy. I know for a fact that he’s got a pair of binoculars.’

Huw’s parents have an oppressively ugly house. It’s crammed full of nasty new furniture: a three-piece suite and pouffe in cabbage-green velvet with bronze braiding, tables and chairs and an outsize sideboard in shiny, yellow wood and an Axminster carpet – A1 quality – in autumn’s most vulgar shades. Every flat surface is covered with a display of glass and china ornaments which shiver when you shut a door.

To me, every object seems one too many, but Huw’s mother cherishes each one, tenderly recalling its date of purchase and price, and dusting or polishing or blowing on it every day. Almost every week she’s altered the position of something or other; the double-decker tea-trolley or the brown standard lamp or the large technicolour painting of Cader Idris, and I’m called upon to comment on the result. ‘Oh yes,’ I say, nodding my head sagely and fast to indicate that she’s now got it to a T ... And I’ll be equally enthusiastic when it’s back in its original place the following week.

Huw’s father is proud only of how much it all cost. ‘No one else in Llanfair has got things as expensive as these,’ he says. ‘Well, it’ll all be yours and Huw’s when we’ve gone.’

His wife frowns, none too pleased to be reminded of that day she’ll have to leave even the Al Axminster and the Royal Derby plates behind her.

The house where I was brought up is different, the poverty of generations of my farming family ensuring that nothing was ever replaced. Most of the furniture is scrubbed pine, centuries old, well-worn but still reflecting something of the skill and integrity of the country craftsman who made it. The floor is of blue flagstones.

After Sunday School, I write to Huw.

Dear Huw

It’s been another quiet week here. I wonder where you are and what you’re doing. There are so many rumours. Everyone seems to think we’ll be hearing something as soon as spring comes, something momentous. The papers are full of phrases like ‘the beginning of the end’. Whatever happens, you know that I’ll be thinking of you and praying for your safety.

I bought myself a new dress yesterday, dark blue and quite plain. Well, I thought I needed something to cheer me up, I suppose. I went to the new shop on the prom. It was rather expensive, but luckily I’d happened to meet Mr Morgan, Art, when I was having a coffee in Glyn Owen’s and he said he could get a discount for me because he does the window-dressing there. Anyway, he came with me and the owner, Mr Tremlett Browne, took a third off the price. Mr Morgan asked after you and sends his regards.

Mr Roberts’s sermon this morning was on forgiveness. Your mother was, as usual, annoyed because he prays for all wounded soldiers instead of only ours. Mr Martin, Horeb, is much more patriotic, it seems. She wishes she could go to Horeb for the duration, but your father declares he couldn’t share bed or board with a Methodist so she’ll have to put up with poor Mr Roberts. Anyway, I like him. He may be a bit of a pacifist, but though people like to forget it these days, Christ himself had unfortunate leanings that way.

Your mother cooked a lovely dinner – lamb and mint-sauce (bottled).

I have no more news, so I send you my usual love.

Your wife,

Rhian

I wish I hadn’t bought it, that new dress. All is vanity, sayeth the preacher. I wish I could stop thinking of the way Gwynn Morgan looked at me when he saw me in it. All day I’ve tried hard to think of other things, serious things; war and death, oh, and the moral degeneration which is worse than death. But then I remember that look, that emotion encircling us, and happiness breaks in again. I can’t seem to help myself.

Three

WHEN I GO HOME to the farm on Wednesday evening, I find my mother playing the harmonium to her POWs. The lorry taking them back to camp breaks down fairly regularly on the snow-bound hills, so they often have a happy half-hour

like this.

At least, it’s happy for my mother. The POWs have a tired, strained look; if it’s appreciation, it’s the sort too deep for expression.

They’re a strange pair, Gino and Martino: quiet and rather sullen. I don’t mean that there’s anything strange about them being quiet and sullen; after all they are prisoners and hundreds of miles from home. The odd thing, I suppose, is that most of the others are usually bubbling over with mirth and friendliness.

My mother thinks her two come from a backward, rural area where there’s very little culture. I suppose she’d hoped for a tenor and a bass who’d sing Verdi as they drove the plough; these two hardly talk, even to each other. She’s desperately sorry for people who have neither music nor religion – Roman Catholicism being, of course, empty ritual and ceremony – so she tries to make it up to them by playing them Welsh hymns.

‘Buon giorno, buon giorno.’

They turn their meek eyes towards me.

I try to ask them what sort of day they’ve had. Sometimes my terrible Italian raises a smile, but not tonight.

I kiss my mother’s cheek. ‘Don’t stop because I’m here,’ I tell her, knowing there’s little hope of it.

‘Well, I’ll go on till the lorry comes. It shouldn’t be many minutes.’

My mother has never had an hour’s musical tuition in her life, but is able to play any tune as long as it’s a hymn and sad. ‘Why have we always got to be carrying the cross?’ I used to ask her when I was a child. ‘Why is it always our turn?’

It suddenly strikes me that my mother has become almost pretty again; she even seems to have put on a little weight. Of course her skin has been ruined by rough weather and rougher treatment, but her eyebrows are finely marked, her nose is straight and beautiful and she has a lovely delicacy of ear and jaw-bone. Strands of hair which have escaped from her bun are curling around her face in a way I would think contrived if I didn’t know better. My mother is as God made her and it’s not too bad.

It must be admitted that her Italians have been a great help to her. My father died during my last year in college four years ago and our helper, Dafi Blaenhir, who was about twenty years older, died early the following year.

I’ll never forget how Dafi Blaenhir cried at my father’s funeral. My mother and I were calm and tearless. I know I felt rigid with pain, as though all the normally soft and yielding parts of my body had been calcified, so that even to sigh made my lungs creak. Dafi Blaenhir cried for us like a hired mourner.

My mother, noticing his wet cheeks, had given him a large white handkerchief to take to chapel, but he must have forgotten it. Anyway, it would have taken a bath towel to stem the flow; his stiff Sunday collar and his flannel shirt-front were soon limp as dish cloths. He’d never got married; my father, I think, meant more to him than his closest relatives.

My father left school at fourteen but went on studying all his life. I think he bought every Welsh book as it came out, poetry, short stories, essays, criticism, and read them all, slowly and thoroughly. He was a poet too, as many farmers are in this part of the world; the long days of hard but repetitive work and the beauty of hill, field and sky, seeming to make a man eager to struggle with words and prosody. He rarely came home to supper without having a new englyn to recite to us – only a four-lined verse, admittedly, but one of formidable complexity, with set rhythm, rhymes and alliterative pattern. Sometimes the completed verse wouldn’t rise above the nature of an exercise: something to occupy the mind, something a man cobbled together when alone, finding the knack of it easier with practice. Often, though, it would soar; an englyn, like a sonnet, having some perfection of form which makes the sum of its lines greater than its parts.

When he’d finished, Dafi Blaenhir would gasp his appreciation and my father used to say that that ‘Whew’ meant more to him than all the prizes he won at local or national eisteddfod.

Gino and Martino get to their feet as soon as they hear the lorry arriving, and I can’t say I blame them.

‘Pasta for supper?’ I ask them, miming extravagantly. ‘Spaghetti? Macaroni?’

‘Bara caws,’ Gino says firmly.

‘Ah, yes. Bread and cheese for us – pasta for you.’ I’m smiling so broadly that it’s beginning to hurt my cheeks.

‘
Buon noce
.’

‘
Nos da
,’ they reply as, grave and unsmiling, they make their way to the door.

‘Well, Mam,’ I say when they’ve gone, ‘I don’t know that a smattering of Welsh is going to do them much good when they get back to Italy.’

‘You can be quite sure it’ll do them no harm, anyway. It’s a way of communicating with them, girl, pointing to this and that and offering them the Welsh word. I can’t always remember the English, you know that. And they like people to make a bit of an effort. Old Hetty, now, she always stops for a chat, tells them the names of her thirteen children and where they’re buried, poor things. They’re always glad to see old Hetty.’

I’m restless again and make an excuse to go outside for a breath of air before supper.

The moon hasn’t risen, but the snow casts a sharp, blue light on the track up to Rhydgaled. The hedges are bright with frost. There’s no wind.

We hardly ever have snow in Llanfair; when we do, it never settles. But here, only fourteen miles inland and about a thousand feet up, it’s a different world. I was often unable to go to the County School for a week or two at a time. I’d fight my way down the lane to the main road only to find that the bus driver had already turned back to town, deciding not to risk the last few miles. Stiff with cold I’d wait the required half-hour, then trudge home again to claim a second breakfast. To tell you the truth, I rather liked those days of unofficial holidays, sitting in the kitchen immersed in a book, a blanket over my knees, occasionally having to stop reading to minister to a tiny, half-dead lamb that my father brought in and thrust at me.

I was a dab hand with lambs. My father never let me have one as a pet, though. After a couple of hours, very occasionally a whole day and a night, it would be out again, roughing it with a foster-mother. There’s no room for sentimentality on a farm. I understand that now.

I stumble against a dark, ivy-covered bush, waking some small birds taking shelter there against the long, cold night. They scold sleepily as hens do when disturbed. I realise that I’ve almost forgotten the smell of a hen-house. Perhaps I should have stayed in the country and married a farmer: a rich farmer.