Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  Fatal…

  District Commissioner Jones, Bwana Mc’wber Jones, Jones the Gauleiter of Romford had made a cock-up in coming back.

  ‘For Chrissakes, the bogey’s got his shooter out!’ the voice returned.

  As did his mother’s: ‘Figs and pancakes, Bowcott?’

  Yes, by God, he’d done a burster. No wonder he had a mouth like an acrobat’s jockstrap. Perhaps he’d swallowed a fig stone? Perhaps it was the oysters? He must be alive with shellfish. Shake him and he’d rattle.

  ‘You will suffer, my boy. Yes, you will, you’ll live to regret. Thank goodness Colenso isn’t like you.’

  Colenso! That was it! Now he experienced total recall. Colenso, his moody nephew. Pertinent point! As well as his guts and the wogs, the Welshy-Welsh had knackered his holiday. Trust them!

  The Bowcott Joneses had no children of their own. (‘Lack of greens,’ his mother said.) But he had a nephew, Colenso, whom he’d attempted to take under his wing whenever allowed, a small, thin, bespectacled, intellectual boy who had got into the wrong set at one of the lesser Welsh universities and emerged a rabid Welsh nationalist with Honours Welsh and an interest in his country that amounted to fetishism, in Bowcott’s eyes. Despite all the gifts, the golf clubs, the fishing rods, the use of a salmon stretch, the wretch had become one of the interrupters of her Majesty’s judges, a demonstrator, a non-road-tax payer who disappeared for weeks on end to summer schools and folk festivals where they ate, slept, breathed and dreamed Welsh, a way of life and habit which Bowcott found incomprehensible and which irritated him more than he could say. In his aversion to this recently reborn element in his country, Bowcott was quite unreasonable. There was something sickly and introverted about it, he was sure. There was nothing for the people in it, just milk and honey for training college lecturers and the like, another bloody cottage industry from which the few profited and exploited the many. Moreover, it excluded Bowcott entirely, with his long-forgotten Welsh and what he called his international outlook. Fan, who was easy-going, said live and let live, but if it were possible, Bowcott would have been a hanging judge as far as Colenso’s lot were concerned. A number of the young were quite taken with it, even protested a patriotism that made Bowcott into a kind of quisling and that set him off to boiling point. A quisling! After the scraps he’s been in while in the Army, even going so far as to thump a paymaster and risking a court martial after one guest night.

  ‘Welsh bastards,’ the paymaster’d said. That was enough. Bowcott found a right cross that would have made Dancing Jim Driscoll cheer in his grave, and the paymaster had gone down in a heap in the corner by the ornamental-silver cupboard. The Adjutant had made enquiries and Bowcott had told him straight out.

  ‘Can’t have that, sir. It’s not the “bastard” I object to, it’s the slurring use of the adjective!’

  ‘The Adj had told the Colonel, and the Colonel (who was from Abergavenny) had a good laugh about it as it happened and everything had been quite all right, even lent a certain kudos to Bowcott’s reputation and the paymaster’d emerged as a shit anyway. Bowcott had struck a blow for his country, but it didn’t register with Colenso one little bit. When he’d told him with a certain pride, Colenso’s face had kept its intelligent, precious, rabbit look, and then he’d gone off and married a girl who was even more immersed in the Welsh business. They were like a pair of folkweave Ghandis together, often spoke Welsh in front of him, and brought him to the boil more quickly than if they’d taken drugs in public. All through the Investiture (to which, naturally, he’d been invited and now kept his red, ornamental chair in the hall) he’d been on the lookout for violence, but the fact that Colenso’s lot weren’t violent made him dislike them all the more. Roots versus roots… It was a Welsh conundrum.

  But to meet it here in Portugal! That was it, he’d gone into the tavern to find that Matt had left, packed up and gone to Ibiza. A youth stood in his place, a dirty, bearded, London wide boy.

  ‘Trouble wiv the Missus, so he scarpered.’

  ‘Scarpered?’

  ‘I bought him out February.’

  Matt gone… The place was no longer the same. The china beer pumps with their engraved fox-hunting scenes, exact replicas of a pair in the cocktail bar of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, were missing, so were the comic postcards, the cheery publican’s greetings cards from home, the little saucers with crisps and olives in them, even the waiters’ crisp white aprons. Where there had been a jar of the precious beef sandwiches, now there was a machine for dispensing salted peanuts, and, as soon as he found out, in the best lavatory in the Algarve, there was now a contraceptive slot machine and a notice by the management proclaiming, ‘This gum may taste a little rubbery’. Not graffiti; by the management!

  Worse still, there was Hair in the bar, by which Bowcott meant, the young. Previously, it had been the middle-aged who had congregated there, giving the place the atmosphere of a cheerful, senior officers’ mess. But now girls in hot pants and semi-naked boys, looking like aborigines in Bermuda shorts, draped themselves about the place and the girls. There was not a soul in there his own age.

  ‘What’ll it be then, Chief?’

  ‘A pint,’ Bowcott said, fragile suddenly.

  ‘Sagres?’ the new proprietor said, referring to the local beer.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I keep a few Guinesses for the old boys.’

  The old boys… For some reason, the first phrase that came into Bowcott’s mind was a Welsh one, Bechgyn y Bont, one of the few he knew. Translated, it meant ‘Boys of the bridge’, referring to a group of old soldiers from his home town, survivors of near-decimated regiments who had congregated together after the First War. They met once a month, growing older over the years, finally attending each other’s funerals until they were virtually non-existent. Each of the boys of the bridge had a touching habit of leaving a tenner in their wills, a tenner ‘for behind the bar’, when the survivors would raise a number of solemn pints in memory of the departed. But the time had come when they could not exhaust the tenner and the change was stuffed into a charity box. In the end, the change exceeded the money spent. Farewell the Bechgyn y Bont.

  Now Bowcott felt like one of them, and once again, seemed to hear the Last Post sounding in his ears.

  ‘I’ll have a large scotch,’ he said in his most cultivated voice.

  ‘Right you are, guv. Old Matt had all the big spenders here, eh?’

  The big spenders… Bowcott sat dismally upon a stool. No one paid any attention to him. A young couple, draped around each other at the end of the bar, changed hands soulfully. Why they had to feel themselves in public, Bowcott would never know.

  ‘Drop of splash, mate?’

  Mate… But he nodded. It looked like a morning on the scotch, a morning of silent reverie seated at the corner of the bar. He felt like a colonial planter, recently returned home and completely out of things. But it was not in his nature to sit maudlin anywhere, and he soon struck up a conversation with the new proprietor, only to find there was another blow to the stomach.

  ‘I thought you was Welsh.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Iacky Da, I gotta few Taffees comin’ here.’

  Bowcott did not reply.

  But he was to have no peace. Like a light-skinned negro passing as white, he had been spotted, and when he had downed another scotch in stony silence, a newcomer entered the bar, nodded at the proprietor who promptly sidled up to Bowcott and made the unwanted introduction.

  ‘Major Bowcott Jones,’ Bowcott said grimly.

  The newcomer was young, with dark, curly hair, a pale, nondescript face, and a slight stoop, unmistakeably Welsh.

  ‘It’s hardly possible, but I don’t suppose you’re related to…’

  Colenso, of course. Anything was always possible with bloody relatives! But to come a thousand miles to Portugal to have the dismembered limb of the family regurgitated. Bowcott could not supress a dismal nod.

&
nbsp; ‘I have a very great admiration for him,’ the young man said.

  Bowcott would have said, ‘Good chap!’ not, ‘a very great admiration.’ It sounded so fawning.

  ‘Why?’ Bowcott said sharply. His temper had risen immediately.

  ‘His general militancy.’

  ‘On whose behalf?’

  ‘Why, the Welsh people.’

  ‘He’s never met any of ’em,’ Bowcott said unreasonably. ‘But for Christ’s sake, let’s not go into it, I’m on holiday.’ He felt so annoyed at this extraordinarily unlucky encounter that he was in danger of letting himself go. Questions of Welsh nationalism affected him in the same way as a wholly English counterpart might be similarly provoked by encounters with advocates of illegitimate birth, CND, or permissive television. He cut short the conversation as soon as he could.

  ‘Young man, if you don’t mind… Look here, why don’t you have a drink?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ the young man said. He turned away, but did not go.

  Bowcott sighed. It was absurd to be standing in a Portuguese bar in the presence of obvious riff-raff, boiling about Aberystwyth University and its environs. He was on holiday, and now it was as if two worlds had collided in one person, and back his thoughts went like tired homing geese to the perennial open sore – Wales. It was a country of permanent ills, four countries rolled into one, and if you didn’t get away from it now and again, you choked in the backbiting and rancour. Thanks God he was a South Walian anyway. Thank God for coal and the Marquis of Bute. And a pox on the Ychafi Welsh and their road sign campaigns and eternal bleating.

  He ordered another whisky and, by habit, asked for the morning paper, but when it came, it was in Portuguese.

  ‘Haven’t you got the Express?’

  But they had not, and the young man smiled, Bowcott thought. He could not see, but he was sure he was smiling, smiling a young Welsh smile, and it was dark and foreboding, Bowcott was sure. Unreason leads to unreason, misunderstanding to further misunderstanding. Where prejudices foster, rancour is rife, and Bowcott now felt a wave of self-pity as he recalled that, sitting on this very stool the previous year, he’d felt like a proconsul. He and Matt had gone shark fishing with a drunken Dutchman, and with the wind in their faces, the rolling Biscayan swell beneath them off St Vincent, they had drunk whisky and eaten meat and recaptured a piratical feeling of freedom that had lasted a year. They’d brought in an ebony black Mako shark, its jaws snapping as they gaffed it, and later proudly laid it on the beach where the peasants came to inspect the day’s catch. Bowcott had insisted on its being given away for fertilizer and then they’d drunk late into the night, wearing cowboy shirts and cutting slices of dried cod with sheath knives. It was a holiday of holidays, a reversion to primal living that had given him a new image of himself as an international outdoorsman.

  All to crumble if he didn’t shake off this Welsh depression. The young man had moved to another corner of the bar so Bowcott finished his drink, and with a curt nod to the proprietor, wandered out into the street where he bumped into an acquaintance of the year before.

  ‘Jake!’

  ‘Bowcott!’

  ‘My God, that place has gone off since Matt left.’

  ‘How long are you over for? When are you going back?’

  They soon found another bar. Jake was large, sad and dyspeptic, a remittance man, odd-jobbing for the tour operators, an ex-professional wrestler with a villainous broken nose but with the temperament of an obliging spaniel, an expert hanger-on. He had gone native in Singapore when the Japs got in, had stayed out of captivity, a valuable workhorse worth hiding. But now he was ulcerated and hungry, occasionally delivering new cars from Lisbon, picking up what he could here and there. But an old soldier down on his luck could not wish for better company than Bowcott.

  ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘So, so…’

  ‘You don’t say?’

  ‘Place has got too full of people from home. Got very tight, it has. You haven’t eaten by any chance, have you?’

  Jake wanted a meal. Nothing but the best then. Jake had been around, that was the cardinal point.

  ‘You had to get around,’ Bowcott said happily, the moment they seated themselves in a restaurant.

  ‘All over,’ Jake said. ‘All over.’

  They ate through the afternoon and into the early evening. They ate oysters and clams, the fruits of the sea, and then gorged themselves on spiced meats and oiled salads. And they had to have a swallow with it, didn’t they? And after the wine, the brandy – a ’tween course pick-me-up – they started on the fruit and figs. Bowcott had a passion for figs, as Jake had for Crêpes Suzette, so that they did themselves proud, ‘going round the buoy twice’ whenever there was a course or a glass that took their fancy. By the time they lit cigars, Bowcott had shaken off his depression. Once you got a drop inside you, the world was a different place, no matter whether the drop included the anti-Romford gins, the War Memorial beers, the anti-Welsh whiskies, or the old soldier’s litres, it was all a drop taken, and by the evening, he felt he just could not leave without a final pint at the English Tavern. Just to show there were no hard feelings. Jake did not mind, had looked wistfully at the tip which Bowcott left in the restaurant, but no matter, they’d have a chaser at the bar and drink to the vanished Matt.

  But when they got there, the tourists had given way to the locals, including a uniformed Army picket from the fort. The proprietor had his eye on the winter custom and encouraged the locals whereas Matt had closed in the winter, but a whisky drinker was a whisky drinker, and he greeted them cordially. Bowcott responded with a nod, at the same time aware of a certain tension in the air. Was it sixth sense that warned him of an atmosphere amongst the Portuguese? Jake and he were the only two foreign customers and it seemed as if people had stopped talking when they entered. Bowcott gave Jake a wink, lowered his District Commissioner’s ear and raised Special Agent Bowcott’s other antennae. He ordered two whiskies and chasers, sized up the bar.

  The army patrol were standing uneasily in the corner, their glasses empty, but on the other side of the room by the panelled mantelpiece, there sat a large muscular young man with the stump of an arm protruding from his sports shirt. He was dark and thick-necked with an insolent flushed expression that separated him from the two nervous youths who were drinking with him. He wore his hair short, and from the way he put his good arm to the side of his head, seemed to have suffered a head injury as well. He kept tapping his head with his fist, a sombre demonstration indicating that there might be something inside which had gone wrong, and which he could not forget. But for the stump of his arm, his heavy, dark face might have protruded from the back row of a Welsh pack, Bowcott thought. It was absurd, but many of the larger Portuguese looked South Walian. They had the same quality of brooding, not quite surliness, but an air of threat. There were even waiters in the hotel with aggrieved Tonypandy walks, hacking ‘dust’ coughs, and bad feet. But here no one spoke. There was definitely an imposed silence, but the bar was so small, it was impossible to say anything without being overheard. Insanely, Bowcott wished he could mutter a few words in Welsh to Jake because no one else would have understood. The fixed glances of the army patrol in the corner left him in no doubt that their arrival was an embarrassment. There were so many things that it was better the tourist did not see.

  The proprietor switched on the taped music and an ancient pop number came up loudly.

  ‘Quizas! Quizas! Quizas!’

  The atmosphere seemed to lighten momentarily.

  ‘A situarzione?’ Bowcott whispered inquisitively.

  Jake shook his head nervously as if to compel Bowcott to say no more.

  But Bowcott was curious.

  ‘Punch-up, d’you think?’

  Jake leaned forward and whispered with a convict’s side-of-the-mouth grimace.

  ‘The guy with one arm’s loco.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Mozambique.’


  ‘What?’

  ‘Caught one in the head. Bullet. I shouldn’t say anything if I were you. Now he breaks up bars for a living.’

  Bowcott looked around him with a distinct unease, and suddenly, the afflicted Portuguese rose unsteadily and wandered over to Bowcott who rose instinctively.

  ‘Engleesch peoples very good peoples,’ the Portuguese said.

  His eyes were troubled, perhaps unfocused. His breath was sour. He was very drunk and swayed once more, ‘Naice peoples, no?’

  ‘Well,’ Bowcott said. It seemed a little inappropriate to insist on ‘Pays de Galles’ as he often did.

  The Portuguese put his only arm on Bowcott’s shoulder and leant heavily upon him. He spoke with difficulty.

  ‘Engleesch peoples fair peoples,’ he nodded and smiled with all the air of definitive scholarship of an extremely drunken man.

  Across the bar, the proprietor and the soldiers were tense, but Bowcott put his arm around the young man, gulping as his eyes met the obscene stump of the amputated arm. The flesh was red and puckered and strangely disturbing, a real wound beside all those phoney memorials.