Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  With Ros and the children speaking Welsh around the house, it seemed only right to try to learn the language, but it was a hopeless undertaking. Most of the words rolled out over a curled tongue, requiring the same mechanisms from the back of the throat as bringing up phlegm and spitting. After a lot of effort I acquired individual phrases such as ‘Sut dach chi heddiw?’ (How are you today?), ‘Dim parcio yn Stryd y Castell’ (No parking in Castle Street), ‘Nos dawch’ (Good night) and ‘Diolch yn fawr iawn’ (Thank you very much). Not enough to carry on a conversation, just a little string of polite words I could use in the Co-op or at the chemist.

  Rob did no better, but Jack knew all the commands for a working dog in Welsh: ‘Dos!’ (Get away), ‘Cymbei!’ (Come by), and ‘Gorfadd!’ (Lie down). Rob thought the only Welsh he required was ‘Hello, my darling’ and ‘What are you doing tonight?’ He hadn’t had any luck in finding a girl, and no one had taken his eye.

  Meanwhile, Sam and Lysta were well on their way to becoming bilingual. Their favourite book was Dick and Dora, and Ros read it to them in Welsh. It would be their first language when they went to the village school in Carmel. Every day she introduced new words to help broaden their vocabulary, thinking they had a better chance of being accepted, less noticed for their Englishness the more Welsh they spoke. She told me that’s how it was around here, and we had to prepare them for life beyond the farm. Children who lived in the village already knew one another. It was harder for those coming from the remote hill farms, some of whom had difficulties mixing with others, who had formed their friendships in the village playground and running into one another’s houses. It was a struggle for anyone from a farming family, harder still without a sibling by your side. Those first days at school can be a painful initiation, when newcomers stand alone at break time.

  With the lambing season now upon us Jack rarely had a night’s uninterrupted sleep. We had fifty ewes at Dyffryn in the top acres. The barn was full of pens made from wooden hurdles where Jack kept the ewes needing special attention, the lambs who had had complicated births, and the orphan lambs needing to be bottle fed. Jack was running the show; every night he watched the ewes with Meg. Welsh sheep are hardy creatures, spending most of their time up in the hills, but they can still need a helping hand when it comes to giving birth.

  In that month Jack never got near a razor blade. A thick black beard covered his face. He wore rubber overalls to protect himself from the rain. He looked haggard, not like my brother at all, more like Rob when he first arrived. He grabbed what sleep he could, lying fully clothed on the sofa, Meg beside him. Sometimes we would pass him in the mornings snoring, still wearing his wellington boots. He looked like some homeless figure who had wandered in during the night. I saw very little of him and we hardly said a word to each other. He was out in the fields during the day, and at night walked amongst the sheep with a torch, or sometimes bottle fed lambs in the barn. He had asked Ros to keep as much of Frieda’s milk as possible, and it was she who carried the warm bottles up to the barn and saw most of him. He came into the house only to stuff food into his pockets, or collect a thermos of soup.

  The last of the gilts from our first batch had farrowed, and we were rearing forty-eight piglets. Usually two or three days after their birth, Rob and I carried out the most bestial of acts upon the male piglets. Castrating them was cruel but necessary, Josh assured us, because uncastrated porkers produce what is called tainted meat. So Rob would hold them with their back legs apart and I, armed with a scalpel, cut them, squeezed out their bollocks and sliced them off. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we then sprayed on an antiseptic which stung the poor little blighters, and they ran around the pen squealing in pain. We hated it. Out of all the chores, there was none worse. It affected me so much that I asked everyone from vets to butchers to the Fatstock Marketing Corporation, who owned the abattoir, if it really needed to be done. And, of course, back came the predictable response. ‘You don’t have to, but it will mean you lose your premium price.’ In other words, I would make a loss on every male pig I raised. So I continued doing it, hating myself for it. But like everything that happened on the farm, you became hardened to it.

  Another five gilts arrived from Josh; now we were in a cycle that later in the year would see porkers being finished off at 140-lb live weight and ready to be slaughtered every month.

  Word was getting out about what we were doing at Dyffryn. Although I had never considered who might become interested in what we were trying to achieve, more and more people were seeking an alternative to a materialistic world. We received a letter from a group of ex-hippies living in wigwams in the Brecon Beacons who thought it would be a ‘cool idea’ to come and join us, ‘spreading the word, man’. The very thought of it filled me with horror. The last thing I wanted was a band of drop-outs invading the place, playing flutes and penny whistles and dancing round their tents at night.

  If someone had asked me ‘So exactly what is the plan?’ I would have said it was no more than a continuous push towards self-sufficiency, so that we could live off the land as naturally as possible. The exchanging of goods, bartering, brings an added richness that cash doesn’t provide. Of course, there has to be a comparable value to what is being offered in the transaction; a jar of honey is worth a dozen eggs, for example. For now we had only Tom Felce, happy to swap fish for vegetables, but once we had enough produce I planned to open a farm shop, and if the customers preferred to barter rather than pay cash, that would be fine by me. I was sure this would appeal to people. It wasn’t going to replace the hard currency of everyday dealings, but I did wonder what the Inland Revenue would think about it. Maybe they would allow me to pay my tax with a bag of turnips and half a pig.

  During one of my enlightening chats with Vida Koeffman, who liked my bartering idea, she told me she knew several people who would be keen to give it a go. That very day I got a phone call from Jim Best, a retired naval officer who lived in the hamlet of Nasareth. A friend of Vida’s, he had six beehives he could no longer look after. His hips had gone, ground down through the years, and now his knees were following. ‘Brain still works, though. Gosh, I wish I was thirty years younger.’

  I was immediately excited at the thought of having beehives at Dyffryn. I visualised them down in the lower fields, amongst the gorse and heather. Honey from wild Wales: I could already see the label on the jar. But what did I know about bee-keeping? Absolutely nothing. I had once read Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee, a beautifully written book, explaining life within the hive in the most poetic language. A collective intelligence, full of self-sacrifice for the benefit of the greater whole.

  Jim couldn’t wait to pass on the art of apiary. Despite his arthritic hips, he took me to his garden shed, which was full of wartime radios, receivers and strange-shaped aerials. On a desk a pair of headphones lay beneath a microphone. ‘I keep in touch with the remaining few.’ He meant radio hams dotted around the world. He put on a pair of white overalls and a straw bonnet, flicking away the black veil, and stepped into a pair of wellingtons. I followed him as we trudged through the bog of a rutted field almost in slow motion, as if walking on the moon. Ten minutes later we came upon his colony of hives, set out in a wide circle under lichen-covered apple trees in an old orchard. Although it was late March there was still a nip in the air and no more than a handful of bees were in flight. Jim walked towards the hives and lifted out one of the vertical frames, full of golden honey.

  ‘This treasure has been gathered by the most highly evolved community on the planet,’ he said.

  Without hesitation, although a complete novice, I agreed to take the hives on the understanding that Jim would be my mentor, visit us once a month to get me into the swing of it. I could see it being a profitable sideline. Jim walked the lower fields of Dyffryn, deciding where the bees would best thrive, and we moved them in amongst the flowering gorse in mid-April. In exchange for the colony he accepted a fattened lamb for his freezer and a retainer of six jars of honey
per year. This was bartering at its best, with both parties happy.

  I could never get to grips with our financial situation. The only thing I knew was how much money we had in the bank, which was dwindling. Surely things must improve soon. After all, we had bullocks fattening up, lambs putting on weight, piglets being born, porkers soon going to the abattoir. This is what I kept telling myself, but I was always anxious. We’d been at Dyffryn for over two years, so I made an appointment to go and see Winford Hook in Porthmadog, an accountant recommended by Dewi, who warned me he was a realist who spoke with a cruel tongue.

  One of the peculiarities of living amongst the North Walians was that I had never been addressed by my Christian name. Nor had I ever heard, within the dysfunctional farming community, any other man called by his either. They referred to one another by the place they farmed. ‘Better speak to him over at Llwyndu Canol,’ Gethin Hughes would say, meaning I should talk to Hughie. Likewise Hughie, when referring to Gethin, ‘That neighbour of yours at Cae Uchaf.’ It intrigued me that they could not speak each other’s name. It was as if the place was neutral, and these men could not bring themselves to show any personal feeling. Indifference has no emotion attached to it.

  Such was the case when I walked into Winford Hook’s office in Porthmadog for the first time and saw a dim shape struggling to rise from the mahogany chair behind his desk in the gloom. I reached for his hand, saving him considerable effort. Then as he sat back behind towers of accounts and folders, my vision of him was largely obscured by the paperwork. It occurred to me that he looked like King Kong, peering at me through the skyscrapers of New York. He did indeed resemble a gorilla. Thick eyebrows, puffy cheeks, hair swept back, a broad neck that bulged against a tight-fitting collar.

  ‘Perry,’ he said, indicating an embroidered chair. There was a cat asleep in a disused fireplace. ‘Sit yourself down.’

  There were books in glass cases around the walls, all containing the word tax in the title. A frail woman appeared at the door, her curled hair neatly styled, as if the rollers had just been removed.

  ‘Tea, Perry?’ said Hook, giving me a long look, his eyes following me until I sat down.

  ‘Yes, please . . . is there something wrong? I have come at the right time?’

  ‘I was expecting somebody older.’

  After he had leafed through my invoices, suggesting I should use a bookkeeper to present my year-end accounts, the delicate lady returned and began a slow journey across the room, holding two cups with spoons clinking in the saucers. As she put them down on the desk, I noticed that the cups stood in moats of brown tea. Who she was I did not know; we had not been introduced. Maybe Hook’s assistant, or receptionist; she could have been his wife, or perhaps all three. She appeared to be suffering from some nervous disorder. I made a special point of thanking her, while Hook ignored her. We sat in silence, he with his head resting on his hand, nothing more than a sigh coming from his lips. He eventually looked up and said bluntly, ‘This is a bit of a mess.’ Then he delivered the hammer blow. ‘You would have been better off staying in bed for the past year.’

  This damning remark quite winded me. It was like a punch in the stomach. I had to put my tea down, my hands shaking. In the moments that followed I could offer no response. It felt as if all our efforts had been worthless, and to Winford Hook, who dealt only in the financial reality of profit and loss, that is exactly what they were. That afternoon in his office, my life had been reduced to a pointless exercise, the dabbling of an idiot pursuing a naïve dream.

  ‘Well at least the tax man won’t be coming after you.’

  Winford Hook began a monologue that I timed at nearly twenty minutes on the sad decline of hill farming in North Wales. Propped up by subsidies, families working together, tied to a harsh way of life with a meagre profit to show for their labours; sons no longer wanting to endure long hard winters merely to earn a pittance, as their fathers and grandfathers did. Sons who could see factories being built where a man could work a forty-hour week for a living wage.

  ‘I know of over a hundred hill farms where the boys have left the land. Most of them work down at the Firestone factory in Caernarfon.’ He summed it up by telling me of a forklift truck driver working the night shift who brought home more than his father farming fifty acres over in Nebo. ‘And he drives a Rover to boot! So what are you going to do, Perry? Invent some new way of farming?’

  ‘I have some ideas,’ I said.

  ‘Well they’d better be good. You made a loss of eight thousand pounds.’

  I didn’t drive straight back to Dyffryn. I needed to be alone, to straighten myself out. It was as though every hope had been crushed. I drove to Dorothea and walked around the abandoned slate quarry, ghostly as it was, submerged in cloud, with rusting cranes and other machinery drowning in the rising waters. It felt as if I were staring at a manifestation of the psychological state I found myself in. It offered a strange comfort, the derelict buildings roofless, trees growing through the rafters. Waterlogged sheep took one look at me and turned away, indifferent to my presence. The old engine house with its cogged wheels, the handless clock face dripping its monotonous raindrops. The eeriness seeped into my soul as I walked around the piles of slate. There was a constant whispering in the damp air, as if those who once worked here haunted the place. I read the graffiti on the walls, the bits that were in English, mostly by lovers, hearts pierced with arrows proclaiming undying devotion. I cursed Winford Hook for his brutal honesty, while the survivor in me was determined to prove him wrong. But I had to admit that perhaps it was foolishness that had initiated this whole idea in the first place. Regardless of the outcome, I decided that what had been said at our meeting would remain my secret. For Ros, Jack and Rob it had been no more than a discussion about the accounts: we were doing OK but still needed to reduce our overheads. What else could I say? What good would it have done to have come back defeated?

  Driving up from Penygroes, slowing to a crawl on the tight bend outside the cemetery, I met Arfon coming down from Carmel. As I squeezed past his Land Rover he wound down his window and said, ‘If you can be bothered to catch them, they’re yours for the taking.’

  ‘What are?’

  ‘The chickens in the yard. I don’t want them. It was she who liked eggs not me.’

  ‘Are they laying?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably somewhere in the hay barn. Come by if you want them.’

  Then he was gone. Every conversation with Arfon was like that, always in passing. I’d see him out and about from time to time, and wonder what he was up to, where he was going. He seemed on the wane, a man withdrawing, caring less and less, as if he was giving up the fight. Was it he or his wife who had pinned the little enamel horseshoe onto the front of his cap? Probably her, hoping to bring him some good luck.

  My mother had been paying flying visits, Ros driving her around looking at properties in the area, making arrangements to meet estate agents. In June Dinah finally settled on a stone cottage, Hendy, at the end of Tram Road in Penygroes. She could walk easily into the village from there and was no more than five minutes from the bus to Caernarfon. She paid £9,000 for the property. It had been the home of a batty old spinster, a retired librarian who was now being hived off into a bungalow nearer her family in Bangor. It stood in a quiet position without close neighbours, bordered on one side by a dairy farm where Gareth Hughes kept a herd of Friesians. I didn’t know him; apparently he had a glass eye after being horned by a bull.

  My mother had failed her driving test at least a dozen times, finally giving up hope when she reversed the car into a telephone box. Now she was flirting with the idea of buying a moped so that she could get up to Dyffryn. She wanted to be independent, hating the thought of being reliant on us to come and pick her up. It worried me that in the winter she would be faced with wet slippery roads, ice and snow. She had no affinity with machines. After she bought her moped she did little trial runs up Tram Road, wearing a large red helmet li
ke a glacé cherry. She wobbled a lot, over-revved, had difficulty changing gear, sounding as if she was riding an angry mosquito. Eventually she mastered the basics, especially the crucial skill of balance and the importance of slowing down to take corners.

  Dinah was a good-looking woman, bringing a touch of glamour to Penygroes as she zipped around the streets at a heady twenty m.p.h. She still dressed fashionably, and turned a few heads amongst the men who, completely out of character, would bashfully introduce themselves, offering their services if she were in need of a handyman, or someone to mow the lawn and look after the garden. Cards were pushed through her letterbox and Ted Williams, the womanising window cleaner, couldn’t wait to get his chamois leather out.

  And these were the dour, insular menfolk of the village, who had never once come forth to shake my hand. What a difference a pretty woman made. I imagined nervous wives behind net curtains feeling threatened by the blonde bombshell on the moped. But my mother thought it all jolly good fun and was determined to play an active role in village life. She organised Welsh lessons from the chemist Owen Bethel, a widower of some years, who out of hours was seen walking a sad-eyed bloodhound up and down the high street. A man of unbroken routines, he would sit in the snug in the Vic, downing a pint at eight each evening, leaving promptly twenty minutes later. It was rumoured he had a stash of cash hidden away, and he was the only person in the village who had been on an aeroplane. Every year, the first week in July he flew to the Costa del Sol. In his early sixties, he was a man of some standing in the community. I knew he would make a play for my mother and I told her so. ‘I’m old enough to look after myself,’ was all she said.