by Dai Smith
Goronwy lifted his thin, true eunuch’s tenor through ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’. He followed this with a chorus piece from The Desert Song.
Martin said, ‘Something I’d like to do, buy drinks all round. I couldn’t afford to, not even when I was on yardage down in the Red Vein district.’
‘Why bother! You can’t make such comparison,’ declared Felix.
‘Neither is she at all like her father,’ Martin said. ‘Idris Pryor’s a tight man, always was.’
‘Similar to her mother,’ said Felix.
Levi prolonged his, ‘Aaaah.’
They stared at one another, brief, silent, glinty scrutinies.
From Felix, ‘Aye.’
Martin, ‘Well, yes, same as Maisie when Maisie was Maisie Beynon.’
Levi, ‘Undoubtedly.’
Goronwy spun around on his stool, plump face utterly impassive, his blindness shielded, sunk in rolls of pinkness. He spun again, pudgy fingers roving, tinkling ‘Rock Around the Clock’.
Stan Rees and a blonde woman began dancing.
‘Go-go, that’s your real go-go,’ said Felix.
Rising from the table, Levi waggled his stiff leg. ‘Old style, boys, handed down from Africa! Or from Iolo Morgannwg. Come on, have a go-go!’
They trucked awkwardly to the beat. After the dance Maisie Pryor hurried across the room, a trim woman in her late forties. She said to Levi, ‘“Lonesome Road” please, for our Pam.’
He made the announcement. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, by special request, “Lonesome Road” from Martin Davies and Felix Mathias! Give them a big hand!’
Male voice partly baritones, they achieved Gregorian purity, singing directly at each other, solo phrases given each to each, balanced, the harmony of instinct.
Mrs Charles and Mrs Sen-Sen James sent high piercing squeals above the applause. Pamela Pryor brought three whiskies from the hatch.
‘Years ago,’ Felix said, ‘we were near enough perfect. Right, Martin?’
Levi intervened. ‘Water under the bridge. On short notice you boys did very well.’ He caught Pamela’s wrist. ‘See, Miss Pryor, time goes by. My butties are out of practice. Can we expect a number from you?’
‘Contralto,’ said Martin. ‘I remember this girl in a school concert. St David’s day it was.’
‘Oh, I wish I was back in Upper Coed-coch,’ confessed Pamela. It’s depressing where I am now.’
‘Aye, the hiraeth,’ said Levi.
‘Hiraeth won’t pay the rent or keep grub in the pantry,’ said Felix.
Martin carefully pummelled himself on the chest. ‘Hold on! Got it! “Greensleeves”! I’ll pass on the word to Blind Goronwy.’
‘Oh, no no no!’ Suddenly Pamela’s pleading collapsed to enigmatic composure.
Martin waited for her at the piano. He held up his arms. ‘Quiet one and all, right ’round the room, please! Thank you!’
Pamela sang ‘Greensleeves’.
Said Felix, ‘Her head’s screwed on the right way, different from Maisie at her age.’
‘Meticulous, despite the fact she’s half pissed,’ said Levi.
Martin downed his whisky. ‘Strong contalto. Sheer quality.’
Felix chuckled in delight. ‘Us three, we’re all of us half pissed.’
‘As we are entitled,’ stressed Levi.
Their heads close together over the piano, Goronwy and Pamela quietly chanted snatches of ‘Myfanwy’. Stan Rees had his hand up the blonde’s skirt. Billy Tash gave some money to Jesse Mackie. Glenda seemed lost in daze. The widows Charles and James were watching Stan and the blonde. Hopkin Morgan eyed the clarity of his seventh pint, and lowered it to a third. The dog Whitey remained motionless. Idris and Maisie Pryor smiled at themselves.
Goronwy lifted the lid of the piano. ‘It’s in there somewhere! My Joseph Parry music sheet!’
‘“Myfanwy”! “Myfanwy”!’ yelped the widows.
‘In public,’ muttered Felix. ‘Stan Rees better leave that girl alone or she’ll spew her guts up.’
Levi raised his fist, ‘Boys, rapture is on the loose tonight! Blind Goronwy and Miss Pamela Pryor are about to unlock the paradox of paradise! Entrancement of the species! A throbbing pore in the flesh of flux! Aye aye! Reality grinds behind the gargoyles of our humdrum dementia!’
‘Husht, man,’ said Martin.
Miss Pryor and Goronwy sang ‘Myfanwy’.
‘Up, Wales,’ growled Felix.
‘You bloody cynic,’ Levi said.
Martin added a rider, ‘Fel, don’t be a shit all your life.’
Goronwy banged hard for silence. He turned his blind head. ‘We call upon Levi Jones for a monologue!’
Stan Rees came over with his blonde. ‘How about it, Levi? Give us “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God”.’
‘“If”!’ shouted Hopkin Morgan.
Felix and Martin said, ‘“If”.’
‘“Dangerous Dan Magrew”!’ screeched the widows.
The blonde’s mouth hung open. ‘Well a’ bugger me, let ’im make up ’is own mind for Chrissake.’
Stan threatened her. ‘Watch you language in company.’ He grinned at Levi. ‘Take no notice, she’s been on the vodka and lime since seven o’clock. Tell you what, Levi, recite “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God” and I’ll buy you fellas a pint.’
‘“If”, insisted Martin.
Stan’s grin fell sour. ‘No offence.’ He steered the blonde way. ‘C’mon.’
Levi limped across to the piano. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, some Rudyard Kipling. These days old Rudyard is seen as a bit of a flag-waver before Britannia turned constipated on her throne. I must ask you to make allowances. My memory is not so good. I might get stuck here and there.’
‘He’s on form,’ said Martin.
Goronwy spun delicate chords, pacing Levi’s elocution. Afterwards he recited ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’.
Martin approved. ‘Nice performance, Levi. You held ’em in the palm of your hand.’
Stan Rees refilled their glasses.
Eira came into the back room, Hopkin Morgan’s third childless wife. The alsatian trailed her to the piano. Blind Goronwy celebrated Eira’s faded reputation, playing ‘Blue moon’.
‘Torchy girl from days gone by,’ said Levi. ‘Duw, the scorched christs and creamy lucifers of long ago, long before they even sank the bloody pits.’
‘Blue moon, I see you standing alone,’ sang Eira, her arms reaching out to Hopkin, his stubbed teeth grinning pride.
Sprawled at their feet, Whitey dreamed along his nose, sensitive quivers plucking the roots of his cocked ears. Jesse Mackie went to sit beside Mrs Sen-Sen James. His forearms were on the table, each side of his pint. As Eira pecked a thank you kiss on Goronwy’s forehead, Mrs Sen-Sen went to the hatch for a Scotch egg and a packet of crisps for Jesse.
‘Eira’s over the hill like the rest of us,’ said Martin.
‘Liberation, emancipation,’ cried Levi faintly. ‘Freedom from anxiety and remorse. We’re aeons from the jet set, light years from lotus delirum!’
‘Quiet, man, talk sense,’ warned Felix.
Levi pulled up the leg of his trousers. Howling softly, he slapped his misshapen knee. ‘Boys, Charity blows her snot in the bandage off the eyes of Justice!’
Goronwy played ‘Calon Lân’. Everybody sang. Billy Tash followed Glenda to the serving hatch. She bought a bottle of brandy. Goodnight, Mrs Jones,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Mr Davies. Goodnight, Mr Mathias.’
‘Party?’ enquired Martin.
Billy slid the bottle into his pocket. Glenda’s features squeezed disdain. ‘It’s for Billy, he’s not feeling well.’
‘Touch of the ’flu I think,’ Billy said.
Glenda edged herself in front of him. ‘And besides, he works outdoors in all weathers.’
Levi held up his open hands. ‘Say no more! The man who succeeds in business starting from scratch, he deserves nothing but the best!’
�
�So long as you don’t cast sneers, Levi Jones.’ Glenda’s eyes were green, glacial. She caught Billy’s arm, leading him from the room.
Mrs Sen-Sen bought three hot pasties wrapped in doilies. Jesse Mackie sat between the widows. They mothered him competitively. Eira bought a pasty for Whitey. Maisie Pryor and her daughter visited the Ladies. Stan Rees and his blonde were kissing. She drooped limply in her chair, eyes wide open, empty as sky.
‘Whoor-master, he’s nothing but a whoor-master,’ growled Felix.
‘Ordinary greed,’ muttered Levi.
Out in the public bar, the landlord rang his handbell.
‘Can’t be!’ Martin said.
Felix drained his glass. ‘Bloody well is! Last orders. My turn.’
They rose together with fresh pints as Goronwy hammered the opening chord of the national anthem. But the widows and Jessie Mackie wound up the night, singing ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome In the Hillsides’. Blind Goronwy was leaning on two pillars in the Gents.
Levi, Martin and Felix stood near the door. They shook hands with everybody. Outside the pub, moon glow chilling the forested hills, they huddled for a few minutes, talking, then strolled home, still arguing, comparing, marking boom-times, tumults, struggles, the rising and falling histories of Upper Coed-coch.
MEMORYSTICKS
A ROMAN SPRING
Leslie Norris
I have this place in Wales, a small house set in four acres of pasture, facing north. It’s simple country, slow-moving. I look down my fields and over a narrow valley, green even in winter. I go whenever I can, mainly for the fishing, which is splendid, but also because I like to walk over the grass, slowly, with nobody else about. The place is so silent that you discover small noises you thought had vanished from the world, the taffeta rustle of frail twigs in a breeze, curlews bubbling a long way up.
It’s astonishing the old skills I find myself master of when I’m there, satisfying things like clearing out the well until its sand is unspotted by any trace of rotten leaf and its water comes freely through in minute, heavy fountains; or splitting hardwood with a short blow of the cleaver exactly to the point of breaking. I’ve bought all the traditional tools, the rasp, the band saw, the edged hook, the long-handled, heart-shaped spade for ditching. After a few days there I adopt an entirely different rhythm and routine from my normal way of living. Nothing seems without its purpose, somehow. I pick up sticks for kindling as I walk the lanes; I keep an eye cocked for changes of the weather.
We went down in April, my wife and I, for the opening of the salmon-fishing season. The weather had been so dry that the river was low, and few fish had come up from the estuary, ten miles away. I didn’t care. We had a few days of very cold wind, and I spent my time cleaning the hedges of old wood, cutting out some wayward branches, storing the sawn pieces in the shed. After this I borrowed a chain saw from my neighbour Denzil Davies, and ripped through a couple of useless old apple trees that stood dry and barren in the garden. In no time they were reduced to a pile of neat, odorous logs.
They made marvellous burning. Every night for almost a week I banked my evening fires high with sweet wood, and we’d sit there in the leaping dark, in the low house, until it was time for supper. Then, one morning, the spring came.
I swear I felt it coming. I was out in front of the house when I felt a different air from the south, meek as milk, warm. It filled the fields from hedge to hedge as if they had been the waiting beds of dry ponds. Suddenly everything was newer; gold entered the morning colours. It was a Sunday morning. I walked through the fields noticing for the first time how much growth the grass had made.
From some neighbouring farm, perhaps Ty Gwyn on the hillside, perhaps Penwern lower down the valley, the sound of someone working with stone came floating through the air. I stood listening to the flawless sound as it moved without a tremor, visibly almost, toward me. ‘Chink,’ it came, and again, ‘chink,’ as the hammer chipped the flinty stone. I turned back to the house and told my wife. We had lunch in the garden, and afterward we found a clump of white violets as round and plump as a cushion, right at the start of the road. They grew beside a tumbledown cottage which is also mine, at the edge of my field where it meets the lane. The cottage is called Hebron. It wasn’t so bad when I bought the place – I could have saved it then, had I the money – but the rain has got into it now, and every winter brings it closer to the ground. It had only two rooms, yet whole families were raised there, I’ve been told. We picked two violets, just as tokens, as emblems of the new spring, and walked on down the hill. Ruined and empty though it is, I like Hebron. I was pleased that the flowers grew outside its door.
As we walked along, a blue van passed us, and we stood in the hedge to let it through. Our lane is so narrow that very few people use it – the four families who live there, and a few tradesmen. But we didn’t recognise the van. We heard the driver change down to second gear as he swung through the bend and into the steep of the hill, outside the broken cottage. We had a splendid day. In the afternoon we took the car out and climbed over the Preseli Hills to Amroth, in Pembrokeshire. The sands were empty; the pale sea was fastidiously calm. It was late when we got back.
The next day was every bit as perfect. I got up in the warm first light, made some tea, cleaned the ash from the grate, and went into the field. I took a small axe with me, so that I could break up a fallen branch of sycamore that lay beneath its parent in the bottom field. Beads of few, each holding its brilliant particle of reflected sun, hung on the grass blades. I pottered about, smiling, feeling the comfortable heat between my shoulder blades. Over the sagging rood of Hebron I could see the purple hills of Cardiganshire rising fold on fold into the heart of Wales. I listened idly to my neighbour, whoever he was, begin his work again, the clink of his hammer on the stone sounding so near to me. It took me a little while to realise that it was close at hand. I was unwilling to believe that anyone could be away from his own house on so serene and beautiful an early morning. But someone was. Someone was chipping away inside the walls of Hebron.
I ran through the wet grass, reached the cottage, and looked through a gap where the stones had fallen out of the back wall. I could see right through to the lane. The blue van was parked there, and a thin, blonde girl stood beside it, her long face turned down a little, her hair over her shoulders. The wall was too high for me to see anyone in the house.
‘What goes on?’ I said. I couldn’t believe that my ruin was being taken away piecemeal. The girl didn’t move. It was as if she hadn’t heard me.
‘Who’s there?’ I called. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
A young man stood up inside the house, his head appearing opposite mine through the hole in the wall. He was dark, round-faced, wore one of those fashionable Mexican moustaches. He had evidently been kneeling on the floor.
‘Just getting a few bricks,’ he said, his face at once alarmed and ingratiating. He waited, smiling at me.
‘You can’t.’ I said. ‘It’s mine. The whole thing is mine – cottage, fields, the lot.’
The young man looked shocked.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve had permission from the local Council to take stuff away… They say it doesn’t belong to anyone… I’m sorry.’
‘The Council are wrong,’ I said. ‘This cottage belongs to me.’
I felt stupid, standing there, talking through a ragged gap in a wall three feet thick, but there was no way of getting around to him, except by walking back up the field, through a gate, and down the lane to the front of the house, where the white violets were. The thin, silent girl was standing almost on top of the flowers, which made me obscurely angry. I turned around and hurried off, alongside the hedge. As I went I heard the van start up, and Hebron was deserted when I got back. I opened the door. They’d taken the frames out of the windows, the wooden partition which had divided the little house into two rooms, and an old cupboard I had been storing there. I was incredulous, then furious. I looked down at the
floor. All my marvellous quarry tiles had been prised up and carried away. I could have wept. Nine inches square and an inch thick, the tiles had been locally made over a hundred years ago. They were a rich plum colour, darker when you washed them, and there were little frosted imperfections in them that caught the light. They were very beautiful.
I ran up the road, calling for my wife. She came out and listened to me, her obvious sympathy a little flawed because she was also very amused. She had seen me stamping along, red-faced and muttering, waving aloft the hatchet I had forgotten I was holding.
‘No wonder they vanished so quickly,’ said my wife. ‘You must have looked extraordinary, waving that tomahawk at them through a hole in the wall. Poor young things, they must have wondered what sort of people live here.’
I could see that it was funny. I began to caper about on the grass in an impromptu war dance, and Denzil Davies came up in his new car. As far as Denzil is concerned, I’m an Englishman, and therefore eccentric. Unmoved, he watched me complete my dance.
But I was angry still. I could feel the unleashing of my temper as I told my story to Denzil. ‘They had a blue van,’ I said.
‘It was a good market in Carmarthen last week,’ said Denzil carefully, looking at some distant prospect. ‘Milking cows fetched a very good price, very good.’
‘Took my window frames, my good tongue-and-groove partition’ I mourned. ‘My lovely old cupboard.’
‘I believe the Evanses are thinking of moving,’ said Denzil. ‘Of course, that farm is getting too big for them, now that Fred has got married. It’s a problem, yes it is.
‘A young man with a moustache,’ I said. ‘And a girl with long, fair hair. Do you know them, Denzil?’
‘I might buy one or two fields from old Tom Evans.’ Denzil replied. ‘He’s got some nice fields near the top road.’
‘They stole my quarry tiles,’ I said. ‘Every bloody one.’
Denzil looked at me with his guileless blue eyes. ‘You’ve never seen my Roman castle have you?’ he said. ‘Come over and see it now. It’s not much of an old thing, but professors have come down from London to look at it. And one from Scotland.’ Kitty excused herself, saying she had some reading to catch up on. I sat beside Denzil, in his new blue Ford, and we bumped along the half mile of track that leads to his farmhouse. I’d been there before of course, Denzil’s farmyard is full of cats. After evening milking he always puts out an earthenware bowl holding gallons of warm milk. Cats arrive elegantly from all directions and drink at their sleek leisure.
