Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  THE STORIES

  MEMORY

  Gazooka – Gwyn Thomas

  A Christmas Story – Richard Burton

  Natives – Ron Berry

  MEMORYSTICKS

  A Roman Spring – Leslie Norris

  A View of the Estuary – Roland Mathias

  The Inheritance – Sally Roberts Jones

  The Way Back – Tony Curtis

  A Sort of Homecoming – Tristan Hughes

  BREAKDOWN

  That Old Black Pasture – Ron Berry

  The Writing on the Wall – Raymond Williams

  Bowels Jones – Alun Richards

  Strawberry Cream – Sîan James

  Whinberries & Stones – Deborah Kay Davies

  November Kill – Ron Berry

  BREAKOUT

  Foxy – Glenda Beagan

  Charity – Clare Morgan

  Too Perfect – Jo Mazelis

  Barbecue – Catherine Merriman

  Wanting to Belong – Mike Jenkins

  Mama’s Baby (Papa’s Maybe) – Leonora Brito

  Some Kind o’ Beginnin – Mike Jenkins

  Dat’s Love – Leonora Brito

  Woman Recumbent – Stevie Davies

  The Enemy – Tessa Hadley

  We Have Been to the Moon – Huw Lawrence

  Pod – Stevie Davies

  Blood etc. – Gee Williams

  Fresh Apples – Rachel Trezise

  Waste Flesh – Gee Williams

  Dalton’s Box – Des Barry

  Mrs Kuroda on Penyfan – Nigel Jarrett

  The Ferryman’s Daughter – Alun Richards

  The Fare – Lewis Davies

  Muscles Came Easy – Aled Islwyn

  Running Out – Siân Preece

  Miss Grey of Market Street – Robert Nisbet

  The Stars Above the City – Lewis Davies

  The Last Jumpshot – Leonora Brito

  Chickens – Rachel Trezise

  Bunting – Jon Gower

  I Say a Little Prayer – Robert Minhinnick

  Old People Are a Problem – Emyr Humphreys

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  EDITOR BIOGRAPHY

  PUBLISHED LIST

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  LIBRARY OF WALES

  Copyright

  STORY II

  The Library of Wales Short Story Anthology

  Edited by Dai Smith

  LIBRARY OF WALES

  In Wales for Isabelle

  INTRODUCTION

  If Wales down to the 1950s had too readily been a crucible for common heroism, that tragic condition which so often requires the comic to transcend its inhumane demands, so in the past half-century the mock-heroic, as boastful and contemptible in public life as it can be self-conscious and subtle in private reflection, has been the confused tonality of a country increasingly cut adrift from accustomed mooring points. Not that, all tied up safe to welfarism and communal warmth, it seemed exactly like that at the beginning of this period. And nor, in truth, does it seem quite like that now. Our relative prosperity, certainly relative to what had been our previous lot, and our comparative stability, as expressed despite a few dips and troughs in our politics and society, have been duly reflected in the short stories which have fingered our increasing diversity and our looser identity. Yet this very emphasis on a more individually wayward contemporaneity has struggled to cast off the shadows of a radically different past. We cling, it seems, whether in folklore or historiography, to lifelines of explanation. Our imaginative writers have also tacked and tacked about, in style and in genre, to probe for deeper means of discernment.

  This sense of things, of kicking off and yet still treading water, has been grounded in a self-reflexive perception largely absent from the earlier fiction of observation and re-counting. Now, we move into the columns of double-accounting where what we thought and dreamed as much as what we said and did, is held, as if altogether, to assess the accuracy of our tabulated lives of diurnal bookkeeping. Those stories which had, in our actual past, not been directly touched by the world of work, on the land or in industry, could seem fey in their removal from the pressing realities of most Welsh lives. Even Dylan Thomas at his most suburban and surreal kept one eye knowingly cocked for those other Welsh worlds, which he admitted he did not know. Soon, neither would most people, whether directly or not. The absence of heavy industry as an overall definer first came not as a loss of numbers but as a diminution of collective impulses. Since lip-service, culturally and politically, was still paid to this lingering social phenomenon it did not fully impinge on a wider consciousness. When the numbers crunched to a halt via closures and end-games, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Wales was less distinctive economically, and so socially, than it had been over the preceding century. In compensation, perhaps, from the 1960s the tendency was to emphasise our intellectual and cultural definition.

  In this, especially, the Welsh language became a rallying force which extended significantly beyond the linguistic fate of Welsh itself. Across key areas of Welsh life coherent networking, generational and familial and ideological, ran ahead of sluggish representative politics. At the same time as collieries and steelworks and nonconformity and communism began a disappearing act, so did a majoritarian culture, one which was largely Anglophone but stubbornly Welsh in origins and aspirations, swing between the extremes of a mythical heritage and the complexities of its unfolded history in an attempt to anchor itself in the contemporary. In literary terms the cultural flux was not content anymore to be labelled ‘Anglo-Welsh’. It was never meant other than as a literal description of the language used by those who did not, or could not, write in Welsh. But in the 1960s, when equivalence was to be insisted upon, it was depicted as a lesser and uneven term. For some of Wales’ English-language writers it was not sufficient recognition of their straightforward identity. For others, notably a younger generation of poets also writing in English, the desired equivalence could only be won through the forthright expression in their verse of those patriotic values signalled by contemporaries writing in Welsh. The kulturkampf was, in truth, largely mild, certainly tolerant, but it remained persistently present because, patently, society-at-large in Wales could not be captured, let alone witnessed, in one tongue only. And the witness from those who did not ‘see’ in Welsh would need prose fiction and empathetic identification if their windows were to be clear for sight.

  This would not prove easy when only the vanishing past, disturbingly enough, seemed to validate the hard-fought values which were being, so uneasily yet so readily, lost to common view. Somewhere along this cultural spectrum respectful obeisance to that past was simply not enough if the witnessing was to reach deeper. It would be Ron Berry, born in the Rhondda in 1920, who quizzed the History as a Shitstory. His irreverence, allied to the conviction of his stylistic break, cracked open the code of omertà by which one Wales had silenced another. The voice, he showed us, would need to be sardonic as well as engaged, even cynical if fierce, above all original through its demotic distinctiveness. Berry was ahead of his time.

  During Ron Berry’s productive lifetime – and one could add that of his fellow bullshit detector, Alun Richards, too – the material production of Wales was the virtual creation of burgeoning cultural institutions. A simulacrum Wales, generally more comfort blanket than intellectual hair shirt, was being spun out of museums and media, in books and through artefacts, on the airwaves and in galleries. Our best storytellers had to equip themselves with rather more than the microscope or telescope viewfinder of their predecessors: literary radar alone allowed for the detection of an insidious mission creep out of a history being simul
taneously cleaned-up for consumption. The innocently self-serving and the calculatingly hypocritical in the Wales that twitched helplessly into the 1980s, unlike the human remnants of our industrial leftover communities, bled only on the page. Story, Volume Two, is replete with stories whose scalpel-wielding authors document and expose the making and faking of Wales in our time.

  Part of the counter to a widespread cultural rodomontade was a determined insistence on the worth of individual differentiation in a society long committed, in every sense, to a collective of clichés and labelling. We hear constantly in the work of younger writers an existential refusal of, practically a scream against, any process of pinning the butterfly to the social wheel. Less and less was written about work and its definers, or even the anthropological fascination hitherto reserved for working-class otherness. More and more, our writers centred on their own angst, on the close analysis of personal relationships, on sexuality or ethnicity as key markers of experience, and they manipulated fantasy, myth and the surreal as a defensive slap against the pain of having to have a common history at all.

  This volume of Story, therefore, starts and ends with the contradictory notes we begin to hear struck, insistently and unceasing, since the 1950s. The memories of childhood, and of an accompanying world lost to the touch, were not fake but they could soon be dismissed, necessarily perhaps, for their own wistful nostalgia and, contradictorily, by the actual memory of the brute facts of how so many had worked merely to get by, to spend time, their only truly liquid currency, before unlamented death. For many Welsh writers, at their peak in these years, Wales became a country they could only locate, to any real desire or generational need, in a past they could no longer literally inhabit. The sheer, melodramatic weight of that past, the lived history of their earlier selves, oppressed the mind but yet directed the pens of those writers who had escaped via the professions, into public service and teaching, or even exile. The pattern can be traced in the manner in which an appetite for Welsh fiction, particularly in the short story form, would be met by a flurry of anthologies from the 1970s. Yet, at the same time, the assertions of purpose-made manifestos, almost in echo the one of the other, by editors of previous anthologies from the 1930s onwards, now gave way to a wider range of lesser certitude. By the 1970s earlier awe yielded to a perspective on achievement.

  When Sam Adams and Roland Mathias brought out their collection of just twelve short stories, in 1970 in The Shining Pyramid and other stories by Welsh authors, they were making quietly insistent statements of fact. To begin with, their book, the fifth anthology to appear since the 1930s, was the first to be published in Wales. And, they said in their note to the volume, its emphasis was to be strictly on perceived quality. This was, too, the first collection to place its stories in the chronological order of dates of composition not publication. A kind of tradition was being claimed, and it was no coincidence that this was also the first volume to include nothing that was translated, whilst proclaiming that all the chosen writers were Welsh. Or rather that all the authors were Welsh men, for no woman found her way in.

  A year later, in 1971, the doyen of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ Letters, Gwyn Jones, would claim that the new anthology he had co-edited with the Welsh language writer, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, was the first ‘with any real claim to be true to its title or representative of its subject’. This was because Twenty-five Welsh Short Stories included ten that were in translation from Welsh. There were four women writers included, three in translation. This tandem, a genteel partnership rather than either a full-on affair or agreed separation, continued up to the 1990s. Alun Richards followed the principle, if not the full practice, of the Gwyn Jones model in his two influential collections: The Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories in 1976 and in 1993 in The New Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories. The former had twenty-four stories by twenty-four authors, of which seven were in translation and the latter had, with some repeats, twenty-eight writers of whom seven were in translation. There were five women writers in 1976 and seven in 1993, two of whom were in translation from Welsh. Richards’ editorial comment from the fraught, if still recognizably connected, 1970s echoed the past:

  These stories have been chosen to fulfil such requirements [i.e. ‘being at the core of another life…through the mind and the world of the central character’]…but they are, in addition, of a place and a time. The place is Wales and the time is this century, since the short story is a comparatively new arrival here. They reflect Wales, not always flatteringly, as it is and has been.

  The trouble was that a cusp point was approaching where all that had been seemed to be in danger of losing its way. Affirmation of what the short story had been about to that point, allied to a vigorous defence of its historical contextualisation, was the task Robert Nisbet shouldered when he edited his collection, Pieces of Eight: Contemporary Welsh Short Stories in 1982. The editor was clear, though his crystalline note of what was fundamental would soon crack under manifold pressures, that the short story:

  working…with places and people, idiom and local detail, will be much more [than poetry] a product of its time and place, [and this]…will inform a story, in a fairly fundamental way, will penetrate to moods and awareness, even when the world’s concerns seems to be substantially elsewhere…[For] Wales now…a sense of community and a sense of the past are fundamental to our way of looking at things…[that] past which informs and gives the communities [of Wales] much of their meaning.

  By the next time Alun Richards took up his pen as an editor of Welsh short stories, Wales was no longer what it was or had been. Its very ‘meaning’ was, for many, in doubt. In 1984-5 the Miners’ Strike had, in its travail and defeat, tolled the death knell of that South Wales culture and society which Alun Richards knew best and admired, at its best, most. By the mid 1990s Wales was set to overturn the ‘No’ vote overwhelmingly registered in the 1979 Referendum on devolved government.

  In 1997, albeit by the narrowest of margins, a ‘Yes’ vote would bring in a Welsh Assembly, institutional government for Wales, which South Wales’ pre-eminent post-war writer bitterly opposed, then and in 1979. Already, in 1993, he looked on at the unfolding development of events with his baleful eye and noted the divergent truths all around him:

  The success [of the previous volume] lies…in the variety of stories as much as the badge of nationality…Wales…is a diverse and small country…The collective experience of its writers reflects the diversity and in selecting the stories [in both languages], I have tried to represent all Welsh writers, including those whose work belies the idea of Wales as a homogeneous society.

  It was clear in which camp he stood himself. Paradoxically, convergence around ‘the idea of Wales’, in the civic and public sphere, was not mirrored by any lessening of cultural and literary diversity. Indeed the latter, in both Welsh and English, was often trumpeted as the strength of necessarily parallel strands. Necessary, that is, if the fiction of national homogeneity was only to be allowed into the mind as rhetoric, a mode rightly shunned by the best fictive explorers of our strange new ways. Diversity, transparently so, was the position on the literary native ground, even as the eagles of ideology mapped out a homogeneous national framework. Many chose to navigate by their own compass.

  Emphases, by editors and writers, in the two decades to the end of the millennium became noticeably more assertive, chippier even, about the autonomy of their own custom and practice and, from that time to this time, its quite tangential relationship to anything which might, or might not, be being depicted of the real or the historical. The poet, John Davies, collected twenty-five stories from twenty-five English-language Welsh writers in 1988 in The Green Bridge: Stories from Wales. The anthologist was bullish:

  A good story offers a past and a future that aren’t there…Nor is there, was there a Wales as it exists in most fiction. It is not social realism that has stimulated the best Anglo-Welsh short stories…they have invariably been mythopoetic…fusing the two known places, the actual and the d
reamscape.

  On the sliding slopes of Wales at the end of the 1980s this was a view widely disseminated. A known world, the hitherto actual, was slipping away, and occasionally at landslide pace. On such shifting ground, intellectual balance could be all if only we could reach for it. Within the scholarly Humanities or Cultural Studies a welcome critical apparatus, both in historiographical and literary criticism, began to mine the meanings held within our fiction. But current practitioners were not so ready to be transfixed. In 1993 the fantasy writer, Phil Rickman, introduced Tales of Terror with the gleeful scream that ‘…while virtually all the tales are set in Wales, most of them could easily be set anywhere in the UK. Or, indeed the world’. The dis-, or mis-, location, earned via a clamant universal aesthetic, appealed a few years later, in 1996, to Robert Minhinnick when he assembled both poems and stories in Drawing Down the Moon. The poet-editor, understandably enough, wished to champion the kind of artistic insight which once, at our beginning, had no apparatus of support outside the writer, and since then had, he thought, acquired clumsy interpretative friends:

  In the critical vacuum created by the [post-structuralist, post-modernist, and therefore irrelevant to creative practice] English departments, it has been Welsh historians who have read and interpreted and championed such writers as Alun Lewis and Gwyn Thomas. The trouble with this school of criticism is that its texts, composed by writers who were unique and possessed of individual and difficult things to say, have been perceived as barometers for social and historical change…Such writers wielded scalpels. But their words have been appropriated and used as blunt instruments to make historical points.

  If this was the case then it might well be conceded now that, in critical terms, our university departments of English have, in key instances, produced over the last decade or so essays and monographs more subtle, nuanced and alert to the sensitivities of autonomous texts. It is, too, an act of cultural intervention by the Welsh Assembly Governments elected after 1999 which gave us, for the first time, a sustained body of texts, written in English for Wales, which can be so quizzed. That is, of course, the Library of Wales series, of which Story I and Story II are the latest volumes to be published. If we are then able to place these texts, enjoyed and explicated, into the context of that scholarly historical enquiry which has transformed, through its historiography, the intellectual life of Wales since the 1960s, then we may well return to that intricate and inter-relationship between author and subject which is, indeed, the creative starting point of any imaginative outcome.