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After Mr Isaacs had left, the next-door neighbour came out again. ‘My big worry is that she’ll do away with herself,’ she told them. ‘I’ve heard her say that she’ll never be able
to manage on her own. D’you know she left the house at eight this morning, what can she be doing? It’s almost midday now. I wonder if we ought to go out to search for her?’

‘I think we should,’ Josi said. ‘It’s a gorgeous morning, I can’t bear to think of her thinking of suicide, though one couldn’t blame her. The last of her three fine children gone. It seems too hard.’

They entered the thick woods which were a dark emerald green that morning, the sun only fitfully able to penetrate the foliage. They listened as they walked, hoping to hear the sounds of someone crying, someone lamenting, but there was no sound. They came to the river. ‘Gwynfor’s boy is a fine swimmer,’ Josi said. ‘Perhaps I’ll go to Fron Isa to see if I can bring him back with me. He’d enjoy a dip on a morning like this. I’ve never been a swimmer and I’d drown if I were to try to swim in that current.’

Josi went off and Tom was left alone on the bank, feeling sure that the tragedy of war was going to claim another victim. How could poor Sarah go on? She was a widow, very frail she looked, her only relations living in North Wales. What had she been doing since eight o’clock that morning?

There were no birds singing, no noise of any sort to be heard. Tom wished he had brought some paper and a pencil. As a boy he had loved drawing woods and the river and his mother had thought that he and Catrin had real talent. She herself had drawn and painted as a young girl and had always supplied them with expensive drawing paper and paint. For a moment he forgot the tragedy around him and wondered if he could make a livelihood as an artist as he was obviously unable to be a working farmer. He remembered drawing and painting with Edward when he was at university. They had joined a sketching club and had both enjoyed drawing the beautiful buildings and bridges of Oxford. As always there was a hard pain in his chest as he thought of Edward, who had been killed on the first day of the Ypres Offensive, the worst day of the war according to some.

Josi returned with young Gwyn. ‘I’ve told him what he’s to look for, but he’s a brave lad and he’s ready for it. The lad’s got relations at New Quay and they all swim like seals there, he’ll be fine. Just look at the banks as you swim along, lad, the places where a body might be held up by branches or weeds. If she’s in the river, she won’t have gone far.’ Josi’s eyes misted over, remembering Miriam’s suicide and the end of his happiness. He had pictured her a hundred times thrown onto some outcrop and half-covered over with seaweed. He was convinced that Gwyn would find Sarah in very much the same position. Tom put his arm on his shoulder. ‘Black days,’ he said, his voice full of sympathy. ‘I’ve had some, too, Tada.’

After about ten minutes of anxious waiting, Gwyn returned with grim news. He had found Sarah Morris’ body and she was dead. ‘She was quite dead, Mr Ifans, but she looked very peaceful; at first I thought she was smiling at me.’ The boy came out of the water and burst into tears.

‘Good boy,’ Josi said, ‘good brave boy. When you’re dressed I’ve got half a crown here for you to slip into your pocket. You’ve done well.’

‘She was very kind to me, Mr Ifans,’ Gwyn said. ‘She let me borrow Dewi’s bicycle more than once. This war is a bloody old thing isn’t it?’

‘You’re right,’ Tom said. ‘That’s what it is, a bloody old thing. And here’s half a crown from me as well.’

They walked down to where the lad had found the body and then waited for Davy Prosser and Ifan Walter to help them carry it back to the cottage. They were all quiet, even instructions were whispered. The woman next door came out to give them cups of tea and to say she would lay out the body. Tom wished he was young enough to burst into tears and howl with grief as Gwyn had done. The war is a bloody old thing isn’t it, he thought.

The funeral was well attended, everyone from the three parishes seemed to have turned up to show their sympathy with the poor widow who had found life too much for her. Mr Isaacs made no reference to the fact that suicide was a considered a sin against God. On the contrary, he seemed full of sympathy and pity for the poor woman.

He prayed for her and for her young soldier son whose life had ended almost before it began. He was only nineteen and a popular, lusty, curly haired boy, always ready for any mischief or prank.

Mr Isaacs reported that Dewi was the seventh young soldier to be killed from their small parish. ‘It’s the fourth year of the war. They’ve taken our horses and they’ve taken our young men. How long, oh Lord, how long.’ By the last hymn, many people were in tears.

A young relation from North Wales, a Miss Tudor, came down to take over Sarah’s cottage. Fair play to her, she found the money to pay for the shroud and the coffin and for the funeral tea. On the next Sunday, Mr Isaacs introduced her to the congregation as Sarah’s niece and it was learnt later that she was a dressmaker and that she would be living in the cottage and was hoping that people would be pleased with her fine workmanship and fair prices.

Catrin was one of her first customers. She had bought a length of crimson slub silk in Carmarthen and wanted it made into a dress. Miss Tudor seemed to have no patterns but she knew exactly what Cartrin wanted, took measurements and would like a fitting in a week’s time when it would be cut out and tacked. The cost was not mentioned.

‘What is she like, this Miss Tudor?’ Lowri asked.

‘She’s small as a child and she has brown hair pulled severely away from her face. She looks like an industrious little mouse. I hope she’s a good dressmaker. I paid a lot for that silk.’

By the following week she had found out that Miss Tudor was not a good dressmaker. She was in tears when Catrin turned up to fit the new dress and confessed that she had never before worked as a dressmaker, but had thought it would be much easier than it was. ‘I’ve always been good at making clothes for my dolls,’ she said, sniffing into a minute lace handkerchief. ‘My stitching is very fine, but I didn’t realise how difficult it would be to cut out shapes for grown-ups. Please don’t be cross with me.’

The beautiful silk was spoilt. Luckily Catrin found her story so amusing that she wasn’t as indignant as she might have been.

‘Could you let me have just a little money?’ Miss Tudor asked. ‘I did try my best. I was up until three o’clock this morning altering and trying different things. If I had some money I’d go back home and try to learn dressmaking as my mother wanted me to.’

‘I couldn’t refuse to pay her,’ Catrin told Lowri later that day. ‘She doesn’t seem to have any money. I’ve asked Graham to call there to take her to the station next week. I won’t tell him that she’s ruined my lovely material.’

‘I think you have enough left to make a skirt,’ Lowri said. ‘It’s only the bodice she’s ruined. Shall I try to make you a nice full skirt? You could wear it with that cream Chantilly lace blouse you have. And I won’t charge you anything.’

‘Thank you, love,’ Catrin said. ‘I can’t help thinking about little Miss Tudor. I promised to go back there if she comes back when she’s done her apprenticeship.’

She never came back and the small cottage stood empty for years.

Chapter six

When Graham next came over to the farm, he sat alone with Josi for a long time

Josi told them all later that Catrin had fallen into a serious depression after her excitement over her brother’s return from France and the baby’s birth. Apparently the medical profession had recently been made aware of a phenomenon described as post-natal depression which was a serious illness and could well last for some months, even years, and in the worse cases for a whole lifetime.

After taking advice from doctors who had experienced such a phenomenon, he had decided that the best course of action was to bring Catrin and the baby back to Hendre Ddu where she had her family to turn to, rather than to leave her alone all day while he was out seeing his patients. ‘She can bring Molly, the little nanny, with her to attend to the baby and to take over some of the night nursing, while I keep the housekeeper to look after me.’

Josi, of course, said that they would all be very pleased to help in any way they could and would be delighted to welcome Catrin and the baby whenever it was convenient.

‘Now,’ he said seriously to Mari Elen, ‘do you think you can be a really good girl while Catrin is with us. She’s not well and needs rest with no shouting or bad behaviour.’

‘I’ll try to be very good,’ she promised. ‘But if people are unreasonable towards me and treat me as a child, then, of course, it’s very difficult for me. It’s hardly my fault if Miss Rees thinks I’m too young to hear anything she has to say and sends me downstairs to fetch her a glass of water when she already has a full jug of fresh water on her side table. I promise to be good if people are good to me.’

‘But cariad, you are a child and people don’t want to burden you with grown-up troubles you can’t understand. But come and tell me or Lowri if you think people are being unreasonable to you, instead of screaming and kicking. Do you promise? Catrin is quite seriously ill and we must all be very careful of her. May is returning to London very soon, but she’s going to make arrangements for the wedding and after that she will be returning here to be mistress of Hendre Ddu. I heard a whisper last night that she may be asking you to be her bridesmaid, which will mean a lovely new dress and a crown of flowers. I shouldn’t really have told you that, but you see I want you to be happy.’

‘I hope pink rosebuds, then, for the headdress. And I think I’d better choose the dress I want so that Auntie May won’t choose anything babyish.’

‘Heaven forbid,’ Josi muttered. He often felt too old to be a father of someone so very young and new as Mari Elen. He also felt that he would far better understand a little lad. Women were a mystery. Catrin had been so excited and happy to be a new mother and now she was ‘seriously depressed’. Perhaps she needed a glimpse of the real world where women had babies without the means to care for them. He had seen cases of frightful poverty, but not, thank God, amongst the workers at Hendre Ddu.

Lowri was clearly the best companion for Catrin. The two were almost the same age and had always been firm
friends. ‘You must now forget all the work that you
normally do and concentrate on being with Catrin,’ Josi told her. ‘You can leave everything else, particularly caring for Miss Rees, to the new nurse. She seems so capable. Well, of course she is. Dr Andrews would have made sure of that.’

Tom and May seemed to drift about the farm in a daze of happiness. Tom was learning to walk with a walking stick instead of a crutch and never mentioned his misfortune in losing his leg. ‘On the contrary I regard it as the greatest good luck. I got out of that hell hole before being thrown out for attempting a mutiny. I wish someone would.’

‘What would your father, the colonel, think of my son’s cheerful insubordination?’

‘I think he has some ideas of what a fearful carnage the war is turning into. All the same, I shall certainly advise Tom to keep his thoughts to himself when he comes home to ask for my hand.’

That evening Lowri was unable to join the company for supper. Catrin was strruggling to feed the baby and Lowri was up with her, trying to get the tiny girl to take a
few drops of nourishment from a spoon, all of them weeping.

‘I’m not having a baby when I grow up. They’re too much trouble and they cry too much. I think the one we’ve got is rather bad tempered and spoilt,’ Mari Elen said.

‘Has Lowri always been Catrin’s best friend?’ May cut in tactfully.

‘Yes. Lowri is a relative of mine, a second cousin I believe, and when she came here as a servant we impressed on both Catrin and Tom that they were to think of her as a cousin and not merely as a maid.’

‘We’ve always had that easy relationship with all the servants here,’ Tom added. ‘In Wales most of us like to think that we’re all more or less one class. When a lad is hired at Michaelmas to be the junior in a farm – “gwas bach” we call him, “the little lad” – it’s very rare for him to leave the family afterwards, he shares their poverty in the hard times, and shares their meals in the kitchen until he’s too old to work and then retires to one of the cottages. It’s almost unheard of for him to try to better himself by moving to another farm and it’s a disgrace to the family if that happens. It means he was treated badly. But most often the sons of the house and the ‘gwas’ are firm friends. The very word “gwas” can’t be translated as “servant” but as “lad”.

‘I have to admit that it’s very different in England,’ May replied. ‘I’ve been to stay in one or two very grand houses with some of the friends I went to school with, and there the servants are trained to turn round to face the wall if they come across any of the family in any of the passages. I always found it very embarrassing.’

Josi and Tom looked at each other in amazement. ‘It’s no wonder that the Russians are planning a revolution,’ Tom said. ‘If I were a serf and treated like that I’d certainly be one of the revolutionaries and prepared to give my life for the cause.’

‘And I wouldn’t blame you, son.’

‘But there’s unrest in the army too, so many of the rank and file are suspicious and antagonistic towards their officers. Believe me there’ll be a great upheaval when the war is finally over. During my time in France, well over two and a half years, I came across dozens, perhaps hundreds of South Wales miners or sons of mining families. Oh, they swear and spit and speak a comedy type of bastardised English, all “butty” and ‘‘duw-duw’’and “mynufferni”, but they’re all intelligent and very politically aware. Their leaders are sent to Ruskin College by the Working Men’s Union and they come back Marxists to a man and they all seem to be waiting for a class war. Of course they regarded me as bit of a joke, but at least I managed to convince them that I was no spy and eventually they recognised that I was passionately interested in what they had to say.’