by Dai Smith
We left the car in the yard, and climbed through the steep fields to a couple of poor acres at the top of the hill. Although high, the soil was obviously sour and wet. Clumps of stiff reeds grew everywhere, the unformed flowers of the meadowsweet were already recognisable, and little sinewy threads of vivid green marked the paths of the hidden streams. Right in the middle of the field was a circular rampart about four feet high, covered with grass and thistles, the enclosed centre flat and raised rather higher than the surrounding land. I paced it right across, from wall to wall, and the diameter was nearly seventy feet. There was a gap of eight or nine feet in the west of the rampart, obviously a gateway. It was very impressive. Denzil stood watching me as I scrambled about. Everything I did amused him.
I took an old, rusty fencing stake to knock away the thistles growing on top of the bank and forced its pointed end into the thin soil. I didn’t have to scratch down very deeply before I hit something hard, and soon I uncovered a smooth stone, almost spherical and perhaps two pounds in weight. I hauled it out and carried it down to Denzil. It was grey and dense, quite unlike the dark, flaky, local stone used for building my own cottage. And Hebron too, of course. I scored my thumbnail across it, but it didn’t leave a scar. It was incredibly hard. Faint, slightly darker parallel lines ran closely though it, and a small irregular orange stain, like rust, marked its surface on one side. Denzil nodded. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s what they made the walls with. Hundreds and hundreds of those round stones.’ My stone had been worn smooth and round in centuries of water, in the sea or in a great river. We were nine hundred feet high and miles from the sea or any river big enough to mould such stones in numbers, yet the Roman walls were made of them.
‘They’re under the road, too,’ said Denzil. ‘The same stones.’
I looked down from the walls of Denzil’s castle. It was easy to see the road, now that he’d said it. A discernible track, fainter green than the land around, marched straight and true, westward from the Roman circle, until it met the hedge. Even there it had defied nearly two thousand years of husbandry. Generations of farmers, finding that little would grow over the stones, had left its surface untilled so that the road, covered with a thin scrub of tenacious blackthorn, went stubbornly on. We saw it reach the road two hundred feet lower down, halt momentarily, and then continue undeterred until it was out of sight. I knew it well, on the other side of the narrow road. It was the boundary of my fields. I had often wondered why I should have had so regular a strip of difficult and worthless shrubs.
‘Just wide enough for two chariots to pass,’ said Denzil, ‘That’s what one of those London men told me. But I don’t know if he was right.’
We looked with satisfaction at the straight path of the Romans.
‘I’ve got new neighbours,’ Denzil said. ‘Down in Pengron. Funny people, came from Plymouth.’ He looked gently toward Pengron, a small holding invisible in its little valley. ‘They hadn’t been here a week,’ he went on, ‘before they cut down one of my hedges. For firewood.’ He let his eyes turn cautiously in my direction. ‘Young fellow with a moustache,’ he said, ‘and a fair-haired girl.’
‘How interesting,’ I said, with heavy irony. ‘And do they have a blue van?’
‘Strange you should ask that,’ said Denzil mildly. ‘I believe they do.’ We smiled at each other. ‘Can you see,’ Denzil said, ‘that the Roman road must have passed right alongside Hebron? There must have been a house on that spot for hundreds and hundreds of years, I bet.’ He was right. The old cottage sat firmly next to the dark accuracy of the traceable road, its position suddenly relevant. Carrying my stone, I walked back through the fields to have my lunch.
In the afternoon I drove over to Pengron. The house, its windows curtainless, seemed empty, but a caravan stood in the yard. The thin girl came to the door of the caravan, holding a blue plate in her hand. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said, but she didn’t answer.
I’ve never seen anyone as embarrassed as the young man when he appeared behind her. He jumped out and hurried toward me. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You want me to take everything back. I will, I’ll take it all back this afternoon. I certainly will.’
I felt very stiff and upright, listening to him. I could see all my tiles arranged in neat rows, six to a pile, on the ground. He must have taken over a hundred. He’d been at it for days, chipping away with his hammer while I wandered round in happy ignorance.
‘I can understand,’ I said in the most stilted and careful manner, ‘that someone surprised in a situation as you were this morning is likely to say something, as an excuse, which may not be exactly true. But I have to know if you really have permission from the local Council to remove material from my cottage. If this is true, then I must go to their offices and get such permission withdrawn.’
He was in agony, his face crimson with shame. I felt sorry for him as I stood unbendingly before him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t have any permission. It’s just that someone up the village told me that he didn’t think the old place belonged to anyone. I’ll take everything back this afternoon.’
I looked at my tongue-and-groove partition, my window frames. Unrecognisable almost, they formed a heap of firewood in the corner of a yard. Waving a hand at them in hopeless recoginiton of the situation, I said, ‘It’s not much use taking that back, but the tiles, yes, and my cupboard, and anything else you haven’t broken up.’ I walked back to the car, and he followed, nodding vehemently all the way. I was glad to leave him. When I looked in at Hebron later on, the tiles and the cupboard had been returned. I didn’t enjoy myself that day. It’s stupid to be so possessive. The old cottage is unprepossessing mess, not even picturesque. I ought to have been pleased that someone was finding it useful, but I wasn’t. The lingering remnants of my anger pursued me through the night, and I was pretty tired the next day. I took it easy.
I can’t think why I went down to Hebron in the cool of the evening. I walked listlessly down the hill, becoming cheerful without any energy when I found a wren’s nest in the hedge. There never was such a place for wrens. They sing all day, shaking their absurd little bodies with urgent song. It was a good evening, cloudless and blue, a little cool air tempering the earlier warmth. I began to whistle. At quiet peace with myself, aimless and relaxed, I approached the cottage. When a man pushed his head and shoulders through the gaping window I was totally startled.
‘How much for the house, then?’ he said. He withdrew from the window, and stepping carefully, reappeared at the door, closing it slowly behind him. He was a very small man. Despite the mildness of the evening, he wore his reefer jacket wrapped well around him, and its collar high. He couldn’t have been a couple of inches over five feet.
‘It’s not worth much,’ I said. He pushed his tweed cap off his forehead and smiled at me, a sweet, wise smile, but incredibly remote.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not now. Oh, but it was lovely sixty years ago.’
‘Did you know it,’ I asked, ‘all that time ago?’
‘Longer,’ he said. ‘More than sixty years ago. Since I first saw it, that is.’
He stood outside the house, his hands deep in his pockets. He stood very carefully, protectively, as if he carried something exceedingly fragile inside him. His breathing was gentle and deliberate, a conscious act. It gave him a curious dignity.
‘Know it?’ he said. ‘For ten years I lived in this house. My brother, my mother, and me. We came here when I was five years old, after my father died, and I was fifteen when we left. I’m sixty-seven now.’ We turned together to walk down the hill. He moved slowly, economically. We had gone but a few yards when he stopped, bent down, and picked up a thin ashplant, newly cut from the hedge.
‘I’ve been getting bean sticks,’ he explained. ‘I’ve left them along the lane where I cut them, so that I can pick them up as I go back.’
We talked for a long time, and I warmed toward him. He was a great old man. We stood there, the evening darke
ning around us, and he told me of people who had lived along the lane in the days of his boyhood, of his work as a young man in the farms about us, of the idyllic time when he lived in Hebron with this mother and brother.
‘But there’s no water there,’ I said. ‘How did you manage for water?’
‘I used to go up to your place,’ he said. ‘To your well. Times without number I’ve run up this road, a bucket in each hand, to get water from your well. We thought it was the best water in the world.’
Slowly we moved a few yards on, and the old man lifted the last of his bean sticks from where it lay. Then he turned, faced resolutely forward, and prepared to make his way back to the village, perhaps a mile away over the fields.
‘I’ve got to be careful,’ he said. ‘Take things very slowly, the doctor said. I’m very lucky to be alive.’ He placed his hand delicately on the lapel of his navy coat. ‘Big Ben has gone with me,’ he said. ‘Worn out. He doesn’t tick as strongly as he used to.’
‘Let me carry those sticks for you,’ I said, understanding now his deliberate slowness, his sweet tolerance, his other-worldliness. He was a man who had faced his own death, closely, for a long time, and he spoke to me from the other side of knowledge I had yet to learn.
‘I’ll manage,’ he said. He bundled his sticks under one arm, opened the gate, and walked away. It was so dark that he had vanished against the black hedge while I could still hear his footsteps.
In the morning I went into the field below Hebron. It’s not my field, Denzil rents it from an absentee landlord, and keeps a pony or two in it. There’s a steep bank below the hedge, below the old Roman road, that is, and Hebron’s garden is immediately above the bank. As I had hoped, the ground there was spongy and wet, green with sopping mosses. I climbed back up and into the garden, hacking and pushing through invading bramble and blackthorn, through overgrown gooseberry bushes. In the corner of the garden which overhangs Denzil’s field, everything seemed to grow particularly well; the hedge grass was lush and rampant, the hazel bushes unusually tall. I took my hook and my saw, and cleared a patch of ground about two yards square. It took me most of the morning. Afterward I began to dig.
It was easier than I had expected, and I hadn’t gone two spits down before I was in moist soil, pulling shaped spadesful of earth away with a suck, leaving little fillings of water behind each stroke of the blade. By lunchtime I’d uncovered a good head of water, and in the afternoon I’d shaped it and boxed it with stones from the old cottage, and while it cleared I built three steps down to it. It was a marvellous spring. It held about a foot of the purest, coldest water. I drank from it, ceremonially, and then I held my hand in it up to the wrist, feeling the chill spread into my forearm. Afterward I cleaned my spade meticulously until it shone, until it rang like a faint cymbal as I scrubbed its metal with a handful of couch grass.
I knew that I would find water. For hundreds of years, since Roman times, perhaps, a house had stood there: it had to have a spring.
I put my tools in the boot of the car and drove up to the village. If I meet my old friend, I thought, I’ll tell him about my Roman spring. I saw him almost at once. He stood, upright and short, in front of the Harp Inn. There was nobody else in the whole village it seemed. I blew the horn, and he raised both arms in greeting. I waved to him, but I didn’t stop. Let him keep his own Hebron, I thought. Let him keep the days when he could run up the hill with two buckets for the best water in the world, his perfect heart strong in his boy’s ribs. I had drunk from the spring, and perhaps the Romans had, but only the birds of the air, and the small beasts, fox, polecat, badger, would drink from it now. I imagined it turning green and foul as the earth filled it in, its cottage crumbling each year perceptibly nearer the earth.
I drove slowly back. The next day we packed our bags and travelled home, across Wales, half across England.
A VIEW OF THE ESTUARY
Roland Mathias
It was a narrow cul-de-sac set at an angle upwards, with a mere pretence of a turn-round at the top, and I made a poor job of parking, shuttling to and fro feebly for more than a minute and bringing the car only very slowly to point downhill. For once Celia wasn’t there to get worked up about it and my nylon shirt collar didn’t get as sticky as it usually does. Mair sat quite still. And when the gear-pushing was over and the wheel was turned in against the curb, I sat too and looked.
Over against us, and seen haphazardly rather than clearly through the old fly-spots and the oily residue on the windscreen, was a reach of grey water, river broadening indistinguishably into sea. Behind it was the long black shore of Gower, cliffed just high enough to cut off any view of eastwards and beyond. The stacks on the nearer shore tipped and barred the water like organ pipes, dropping to trebles and sizes smaller, it seemed at first sight, as the water broadened away above them in the distance. At an angle lower was the scurry of roofs, slate-grey and slithering after the recent shower. It was a scene not meant to charm. It was full of the commonness of man, rugged, makeshift, tricky, work-stained, attaining any sort of peace only insofar as it avoided self-justification. There was sea if one cared to notice it, but a sea of silted-up harbours and derelict tramp ships. A sea which was one with the red flowers of the tropics only in the sense that there are different months in the same year, and a different moon in each of them. I dwelt on the scene for some minutes, neither expecting beauty nor finding it. The pull was one of verity, of life lived. It was years since I had seen the Llwchwr, as many years as would carry me back to boyhood, and yet there was nothing to wax sentimental about. ‘How’ve you been, mun?’ was the brusque greeting it gave me. And I to it. The question was unanswerable, anyway. ‘Working,’ I might have said. ‘Working’ might have been its nod too. Times were easier but we had long memories: my working day would long be over before the river, in its turn, could show a face that made believe that it too, had, forgotten.
What impression this scene and the odd silence that accompanied it made on Mair I did not enquire. She had been born away and outside the generations of rigour and needed no excuse to continue sitting. At my signal we got out and opened the gate from which paths splayed to both halves of the bungalow which presented its length above. There was a dilapidated terrace with posts and roofing that had not been painted for years, and the door into the leftward half looked little used. On one of the posts to its right it was possible to make out the name GLANABER in a spidery Sunday black, two of the letters weathered away but easy enough to guess. I knocked at the door once: then again after an interval.
‘Uncle’s very deaf these days,’ I said. ‘Or else he’s out in the garden.’ I knocked again, louder and more insistently.
Round the corner of the right-hand bungalow and up onto the covered terrace came a woman on the young side of middle age, plump, bespectacled and a little short of breath.
‘Mr Evans is shaving,’ she said. ‘Besides, he never hears anyone at the door nowadays. You should go round the back.’
She stopped, taking in my rumpled but obviously formal suit. ‘Wait a minute.’ She thought while I could have counted three. ‘I’ll tell ’im.’ Still puffing slightly, she disappeared the way she had come.
After what seemed an infinitely longer count, the woodwork opposite us began to shudder and give inwards at the top. The shuddering increased in dimension: there were sounds of heaving inside. Then the door was flung open with a violence its obstinacy had deserved, and in the gap, half carried away by his own impetus, stood my uncle, once cheekbone shaved but soap still adhering strenuously to all other portions of his face. Over his left arm was a towel which he had obviously meant to apply before the priorities got confused. He was wearing three pullovers, the longest of which left a couple of inches of greyish woolly vest showing above the dark-blue suit trousers, which had wide out-of-date bottoms and were frayed in several places. His braces hung down from the sweat-darkened turned-back tops.
‘Well, well. Couldn’t think who it could be. Dewch i me
wn!’ And again, ‘Well, well.’
He stood, towel now in hand, overcome by the crisis. His hand went up as though to wipe his face, but another thought got there first. He smiled with his eyes and forgot about the soap.
‘Who’s this then, bachan? Which of your daughters is this? Mair, did you say? Mair.’ He rolled the ‘r’ around his tongue and savoured the name as though it were a new word. ‘Never seen you before, have I, Mair? No? I like to be sure.’
He remained standing on the threshold, looking at us, his perfunctory invitation to enter forgotten. ‘Well, well,’ he said again, using the towel now to dab at his eyes. ‘Your aunt will be surprised. She will indeed. Sara!’ he shouted turning at last and disappearing down the passage. ‘Sara, look who’s here!’
Left to ourselves, we made our way into the dark little kitchen, which was plainly the hub of confined life of Glanaber. ‘I was just getting your aunt up when you came,’ Uncle Ben shouted from the next room.
‘I thought you were shaving,’ I said with an amused face that I knew he could not see.
‘Eh, what’s that?’ he asked, coming out. ‘What’s that? What did you say?’ He was watching my face. ‘Oh, chipping me, is it? I always had to watch you, didn’t I? Always up to something you were. I remember! Not changed a bit, have you?’ His dark face, topped with greying scalp-curls as tightly rolled as an African’s and fronted by the great nose that looked as though it had grown up too ambitious for its station, was crinkled with laughing. The flecked brown eyes, which all six brothers (my father amongst them) had had in common, were liquid and friendly. Just to catch a glimpse of them turned the years back and made me a child again.
