Thimblewinter (8 page)

The season I write this in is winter and sometimes it feels as if I am as old and sterile as this season, the frost starting to settle on my heart. I will write this though, because as Glyn Richards knew, we need to keep our stories, even if, with the years, the memories get polished and buffed up until we can’t really tell truth from myth. This, then, is what happened in our valley that time ago and what we did or, rather, it is as I remember it.

The thing that awoke me the next morning - and snatched me out of a dream of fires burning and houses aflame and old women keening - was a noise as loud as all the drums of hell. It was one of the giant steam tractors starting up. I was curled up beneath a blanket next to Nes. I sensed she was awake, but she wasn’t moving. Cal was blowing on the embers of our fire. Two lost-looking young men crouched a distance away and I guessed from how they were garbed that they were the sailors Cal had talked of. One set of clothes was probably all they possessed, so they wore their profession wherever they went. Mrs. Sharma was away getting water and the Constable was standing by the Land Rover arguing with three people who could only be the soldiers. But they soon stopped talking and then the time was taken with packing up. Nes moved close to the fire and drank the tea that Mrs. Sharma put in her hand. The soldiers were in a very ancient white van, which the brothers reluctantly climbed into with them.

It seemed a long time before our convoy joined the road-train that was forming up, but it couldn’t have been much more than half an hour. It was just that the morning hung heavy on us all, as we were all still mindful of Richards’s death. Though he was all but a stranger to me, I felt his loss as more than just that of a man, as if something more, some door on the past, some tap of knowledge, had been closed or shut off. Nobody asked anything of Nes, nothing was said, it was just accepted that she would come along with us and accompany us for however long she wished.

As we drove slowly towards the place where our train was assembling, we passed the party of nuns, who were all gathered together in prayer. They had knelt down in the rutted and ruined tarmac of the car park and many people had come to join them, trying to find any little solace they could in this moment of stillness.

As we passed we saw that the London soldiers were forming up near the holy women and I hoped that the Constable’s words had hit home and they would travel together. As we passed them, the lone officer in his old tattered uniform, the peaked cap still bearing some vestiges of braid, saluted us and called out:

“Good luck and good hunting!”

There were fewer people travelling with us this time. It was becoming late in the season and soon the big road-trains would leave off their journeys until the spring thaw. Cal had told me that no-one with any sense, or having any sort of choice, would travel along these roads in winter; there were too many wolves, human and otherwise.

The rain soon came on and the day closed in on us. The train bumped along the highway and then wallowed down the old cutting onto the track that would take us north. We were quiet in the Land Rover and closed in our own small world, no-one saying much, Nes almost mute.

All in all, it turned out to be a hard enough day. The rain kept on and the road, enough of a challenge even in good weather, turned into a mire. We spent most of the afternoon dismounting and pushing vehicles - up the road, down the road, or even off the road - as they gave up on their unfortunate occupants, who then had no choice, but to trudge on with us as best they could.

By mid-afternoon, the train boss called a halt, there being no point in going further in the wet. Stragglers kept coming in and fires were lit to dry us out. We hadn’t lost anyone; even bandits kept to their shelters in this weather. Tarpaulins were being rigged to give us shelter from the rain and to let us discard the wet-weather gear we had been swathed in all day.

I don’t know whether it had been planned or not, but from now on our Land Rover and the soldiers’ white van pitched up together and we made one fire and shared our food. To start with, there was an awkwardness about this, but this soon rubbed off with most of us. Of the two brothers, one was quiet, but the other liked to talk and he had much to say of their sea voyages. At the time, these seemed adventures to me, strange and exotic, but later I realised that the furthest they’d ever gone was to Ireland, though that fact in itself made them more travelled than most of us and was far enough away for me to imagine.

Both these brothers were familiar to me, they were like me, like the people of the valleys, but it was the soldiers who seemed stranger and more different. The girl among them, with her cropped hair and spare frame, looked like the two men and gave out the same air of violent efficiency. They called her May, but I never found out if this was her first name or a family name, or just a nickname. She was pleasant enough in her way, but treated everyone in the same bluff manner, even Mrs. Sharma, as if she had never mixed with anyone outside an army barracks.

The other soldier was quite different. He seemed to be constantly joking, no matter how dire the scrape he was in. His humour had a sharp edge, so he wasn’t always a welcome companion, but often he was more than tolerable. They called him Dai, nothing else, and because there were always Davids called Dai in the valley villages and they needed to distinguish him from the others - and because of his profession - he became known as “Dai the Death”.

It was the Sergeant who proved so deep as to be unfathomable. While he would get into profound conversations with the Constable, these were always of the job in hand and seldom venturing into other more personal territory. And he was always Sergeant Summer, as if he didn’t have a first name or had discarded it so long ago that it was now forgotten. He kept himself apart often and was one of the quietest men I had ever come across. His eyes were blue as the sky, but seemed to look through you, as if he had seen so many other things that you were inconsequential. 

It never became what you might call cosy around our fire, but things were friendly and sociable enough as each party got something of the measure of the other. As the light faded and the rain turned to a drizzle-sodden mist, Nes emerged from the Land Rover, where she had stayed until then curled up in her blanket. I ran to meet her, started to ask her something, but stopped as I saw the flash of anger in her eyes. So I trailed after her as she moved into the fire circle and sat down.

“It’s not the first time I’ve lost someone,” she said, quietly, under her breath. And I don’t know if it was intended for me or for herself alone.

I sat apart from her, feeling clumsy and not knowing what best to do. Later I helped Mrs. Sharma get water, as Cal and some of the others went for more firewood. We had camped near a spring that the road-train crews knew of, so the water was sweet as it had been filtered by the hill-side for any amount of years.

It must have once been a beautiful place, set beneath an overhanging crag of rock in woodland, but now the ground around it was muddy and partially paved with rusting sheets of corrugated iron and most of the trees had been taken for firewood. It was a long enough way away, so it took us time to haul the old plastic jerry-cans back. We didn’t talk much, but Mrs. Sharma said, just as we neared the camp:

“After something like that, you know, people need to take their time.”

I don’t think I really understood what she meant, but I thought about it as I slunk back beside the fire and listened to the others talking. As the evening went on, people drifted off to bed, but no-one seemed to notice me or take the time out to chide me to my blankets. The ground looked hard and, though there was some room in the Land Rover, Mrs. Sharma could send up a terrible racket with her snoring, so I lingered in the warmth.

A few of them were left there; May, the garrulous one of the brothers, and Dai, holding forth on something. I could see that they had got hold of some drink and were fired with it. Nes, too, was there, but whether she stayed out of interest or apathy I couldn’t tell. First I stared at the fire, unconscious of what was going on, but then I found myself listening. What he told us, was like a fairy tale, or rather a legend, of some far away time, so distant did it seem to me in time and in space.

“We’d retreated from the Severn, we’d been ordered not to hold the bridge. There’d been a couple of bombing strikes on it, so it was in bad shape, but still people came on; people fleeing from the cities; armed militias; regulars. No-one knew whose side anyone was on anymore; the truth was there were no sides, just people trying to survive. We were told to fall back on Cardiff, to concentrate our forces they said, but in the end we were down to a couple of infantry regiments and a handful of tanks; we were just about out of petrol by then so we walked.

Our unit ended up in Cardiff bay. There wasn’t any military logic to this. It was a political consideration, defending the National Assembly building and the seat of government. Against who, we didn’t know. The rumour was that there had been a coup in London, that a faction of politicians, army generals and business men had seized power and were trying to secure all the power stations and petrol refineries and had closed off all the channel ports. There was also a rumour that an American division was marching up from Pembroke, but again no-one knew the truth and we didn’t know if – if, that is, they were coming - they were going to be on our side.

We deployed as best we could, but we were too thin on the ground to make any difference and when they came, they came from the sea. They still had helicopters, two cobra gunships. I was with the sergeant and we’d dug the section in down by one of the quays. We had a heavy machine gun emplaced and though we were raked time and again by fire, he kept it firing until we ran out of ammunition. Then he covered our retreat and we just had time to see a white flag waving from the Assembly Building. It was chaos because we all had on the same uniforms, friend or enemy.

I holed up with May and the others just near the Pierhead building in a bomb crater, waiting for the sergeant. We didn’t know whether to throw our arms down and walk out to join the soldiers and civilians, who were streaming out of the Assembly building. It was good that we didn’t, because a unit of militia had turned up in the wake of the regulars who had rolled over us and gone on to exploit their advantage, fighting up towards the city centre.

The militia started roughing people up, anyone they thought was an officer or a minister or the like was pulled aside for special treatment. Some they shot on the steps, others they walked down to the harbour and shot them on the pontoons, so the harbour was soon filled with bodies. I was all for opening up on them with my rifle, but the sergeant had caught us up by then. This surprised us because we didn’t think he get himself out in one piece.

He stopped May and I firing, said there’d be a massacre if we did, they’d kill all of them. Some regulars turned up then, and stopped the executions, but all the defenders, soldiers and civvies alike, were marched away and basically disappeared off the face of the earth.

We waited for a lull in the firing that was still going on; there were still snipers and small pockets of resistance in Butetown, young guys and girls with Molotov cocktails and shotguns going out to delay the advance so their families could get away. We slipped away then in the confusion. We did not know that our high command had surrendered - without petrol or ammunition they had no choice - and our soldiers were surrendering en masse, giving up their guns and being marched off into oblivion.

The looting and the burning was going on everywhere, soldiers and militia were all grabbing what they could,  food was in short supply as was petrol , but everything was being carted away, televisions and computers, furniture, washing machines and fridges. Despite the fact that it was only a matter of time before there’d be little enough electricity to light a bulb, let alone power any of these gadgets.

It was the sergeant who got us out, up the carnage on the M4 link road, picking up a truck with a half-full tank on the way, bluffing or shooting our way through road blocks. Otherwise, I don’t know where we’d be now; with the world collapsing around you it was too easy to just give up. After losing everything, what’s your life?

He kept us going. Then the junta fell, as things fragmented, but the sergeant kept us together, all of us, but one by one we lost our comrades; Kelso to a booby trap in Pyle; Davies and Gren to a sniper in Afan Argoed; Pip to gas gangrene in the Neath valley, Lodwick and Patience to the flu. We’re all that’s left, but we never surrendered.”

He was quiet then, as if he’d said all he had meant to say and a little bit more besides. There was regret in his voice as he bid the others good night and went to sleep by the van, followed closely by May.

I did not truly understand all that he had said and I wondered how many years they had lived like this. It occurred to me that they still seemed to adhere to some code, some ideal of conduct that had been overtaken by events. They were like lost legionnaires looking on as Rome fell, still flying the Empire’s standard, when there was no longer an Empire.

My eyes had been opening and closing as sleep was stealing over me, so the last few events of his story took on a dream-like quality to me. I had no intention of moving from the fire, so I curled up there, safe enough, not too close to the flames I hoped. Later, as I drifted off I felt the extra weight of blanket laid over me and felt the familiar form of Nes close to me, as she slipped down beside me and snuggled up for warmth.