Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  ‘He tried to put a pig in the charra,’ Will Sentry said.

  ‘Live and let live,’ said my uncle.

  Will Sentry blushed.

  ‘Sinbad the Sailor’s Arms. Got to keep in with him. Old O. Jones.’

  ‘Why old O. Jones?’ said Will Sentry.

  ‘Old O. Jones always goes,’ said my uncle.

  I looked down at the kitchen table. The tin of sardines was gone. By Gee, I said to myself, Uncle’s wife is quick as a flash.

  ‘Cuthbert Johnny Fortnight. Now there’s a card,’ said my uncle.

  ‘He whistles after women,’ Will Sentry said.

  ‘So do you,’ said Mr Benjamin Franklyn, ‘in your mind.’

  My uncle at last approved the whole list, pausing only to say, when he came across one name: ‘If we weren’t a Christian community, we’d chuck that Bob the Fiddle in the sea.’

  ‘We can do that in Porthcawl,’ said Mr Franklyn, and soon after that he went, Will Sentry no more than an inch behind him, their Sunday-bright boots squeaking on the kitchen cobbles.

  And then, suddenly, there was my uncle’s wife standing in front of the dresser, with a china dog in one hand. By Gee, I said to myself again, did you ever see such a woman, if that’s what she is. The lamps were not lit yet in the kitchen and she stood in a wood of shadows, with the plates on the dresser behind her shining – like pink-and-white eyes.

  ‘If you go on that outing on Saturday, Mr Thomas,’ she said to my uncle in her small, silk voice, ‘I’m going home to my mother’s.’

  Holy Mo, I thought, she’s got a mother. Now that’s one old bald mouse of a hundred and five I won’t be wanting to meet in a dark lane.

  ‘It’s me or the outing, Mr Thomas.’

  I would have made my choice at once, but it was almost half a minute before my uncle said: ‘Well, then, Sarah, it’s the outing, my love.’ He lifted her up, under his arm, on to a chair in the kitchen, and she hit him on the head with the china dog. Then he lifted her down again, and then I said goodnight.

  For the rest of the week my uncle’s wife whisked quiet and quick round the house with her darting duster, my uncle blew and bugled and swole, and I kept myself busy all the time being up to no good. And then at breakfast time on Saturday morning, the morning of the outing, I found a note on the kitchen table. It said: ‘There’s some eggs in the pantry. Take your boots off before you go to bed.’ My uncle’s wife had gone, as quick as a flash.

  When my uncle saw the note, he tugged out the flag of his handkerchief and blew such a hubbub of trumpets that the plates on the dresser shook. ‘It’s the same every year,’ he said. And then he looked at me. ‘But this year it’s different. You’ll have to come on the outing, too, and what the members will say I dare not think.’

  The charabanc drew up outside, and when the members of the outing saw my uncle and me squeeze out of the shop together, both of us catlicked and brushed in our Sunday best, they snarled like a zoo.

  ‘Are you bringing a boy?’ asked Mr Benjamin Franklyn as we climbed into the charabanc. He looked at me with horror.

  ‘Boys is nasty,’ said Mr Weazley.

  ‘He hasn’t paid his contributions,’ Will Sentry said.

  ‘No room for boys. Boys get sick in charabancs.’

  ‘So do you, Enoch Davies,’ said my uncle.

  ‘Might as well bring women.’

  The way they said it, women were worse than boys.

  ‘Better than bringing grandfathers.’

  ‘Grandfathers is nasty too,’ said Mr Weazley.

  ‘What can we do with him when we stop for refreshments?’

  ‘I’m a grandfather,’ said Mr Weazley.

  ‘Twenty-six minutes to opening time,’ shouted an old man in a panama hat, not looking at a watch. They forgot me at once.

  ‘Good old Mr Cadwalladwr,’ they cried, and the charabanc started off down the village street.

  A few cold women stood at their doorways, grimly watching us go. A very small boy waved goodbye, and his mother boxed his ears. It was a beautiful August morning.

  We were out of the village, and over the bridge, and up the hill towards Steeplehat Wood when Mr Franklyn, with his list of names in his hand, called out loud: ‘Where’s old O. Jones?’

  ‘Where’s old O?’

  ‘We’ve left old O behind.’

  ‘Can’t go without old O.’

  And though Mr Weazley hissed all the way, we turned and drove back to the village, where, outside The Prince of Wales, old O. Jones was waiting patiently and alone with a canvas bag.

  ‘I didn’t want to come at all,’ old O. Jones said as they hoisted him into the charabanc and clapped him on the back and pushed him on a seat and stuck a bottle in his hand, ‘but I always go.’ And over the bridge and up the hill and under the deep green wood and along the dusty road we wove, slow cows and ducks flying by, until ‘Stop the bus!’ Mr Weazley cried. ‘I left my teeth on the mantelpiece.’

  ‘Never you mind,’ they said, ‘you’re not going to bite nobody,’ and they gave him a bottle with a straw.

  ‘I might want to smile,’ he said.

  ‘Not you,’ they said.

  ‘What’s the time, Mr Cadwalladwr?’

  ‘Twelve minutes to go,’ shouted back the old man in the panama, and they all began to curse him.

  The charabanc pulled up outside The Mountain Sheep, a small, unhappy public house with a thatched roof like a wig with ringworm. From a flagpole by the Gents fluttered the flag of Siam. I knew it was the flag of Siam because of cigarette cards. The landlord stood at the door to welcome us, simpering like a wolf. He was a long, lean, black-fanged man with a greased love curl and pouncing eyes. ‘What a beautiful August day!’ he said, and touched his love curl with a claw. That was the way he must have welcomed The Mountain Sheep before he ate it, I said to myself. The members rushed out, bleating, and into the bar.

  You keep an eye on the charra,’ my uncle said; ‘see nobody steals it now.’

  ‘There’s nobody to steal it,’ I said, ‘except some cows,’ but my uncle was gustily blowing his bugle in the bar. I looked at the cows opposite, and they looked at me. There was nothing else for us to do. Forty-five minutes passed, like a very slow cloud. The sun shone down on the lonely road, the lost, unwanted boy, and the lake-eyed cows. In the dark bar they were so happy they were breaking glasses. A Shoni-Onion Breton man, with a beret and a necklace of onions, bicycled down the road and stopped at the door.

  ‘Quelle un grand matin, monsieur,’ I said.

  ‘There’s French, boy bach!’ he said.

  I followed him down the passage, and peered into the bar. I could hardly recognise the members of the outing. They had all changed colour. Beetroot, rhubarb, and puce, they hollered and rollicked in that dark, damp hole like enormous ancient bad boys, and my uncle surged in the middle, all red whiskers and bellies. On the floor was broken glass and Mr Weazley.

  ‘Drinks all round,’ cried Bob the Fiddle, a small, absconding man with bright blue eyes and a plump smile.

  ‘Who’s been robbing the orphans?’

  ‘Who sold his little babby to the gyppoes?’

  ‘Trust old Bob, he’ll let you down.’

  ‘You will have your little joke,’ said Bob the Fiddle, smiling like a razor, ‘but I forgive you, boys.’

  Out of the fug and babel I heard: ‘Come out and fight.’

  ‘No, not now, later.’

  ‘No, now when I’m in a temper.’

  ‘Look at Will Sentry, he’s proper snobbled.’

  ‘Look at his wilful feet.’

  ‘Look at Mr Weazley lording it on the floor.’

  Mr Weazley got up, hissing like a gander. ‘That boy pushed me down deliberate,’ he said, pointing to me at the door, and I slunk away down the passage and out to the mild, good cows. Time clouded over, the cows wondered, I threw a stone at them and they wandered, wondering, away. Then out blew my uncle, ballooning, and one by one the members lumbered after hi
m in a grizzle. They had drunk The Mountain Sheep dry. Mr Weazley had won a string of onions that the Shoni-Onion man raffled in the bar. ‘What’s the good of onions if you left your teeth on the mantelpiece?’ he said. And when I looked through the back window of the thundering charabanc, I saw the pub grow smaller in the distance. And the flag of Siam, from the flagpole by the Gents, fluttered now at half mast.

  The Blue Bull, The Dragon, The Star of Wales, The Twll in the Wall, The Sour Grapes, The Shepherd’s Arms, The Bells of Aberdovey: I had nothing to do in the whole, wild August world but remember the names where the outing stopped and keep an eye on the charabanc. And whenever it passed a public house, Mr Weazley would cough like a billygoat and cry: ‘Stop the bus, I’m dying of breath!’ And back we would all have to go.

  Closing time meant nothing to the members of that outing. Behind locked doors, they hymned and rumpused all the beautiful afternoon. And, when a policeman entered The Druid’s Tap by the back door, and found them all choral with beer, ‘Sssh!’ said Noah Bowen, ‘the pub is shut.’

  ‘Where do you come from?’ he said in his buttoned, blue voice.

  They told him.

  ‘I got a auntie there,’ the policeman said. And very soon he was singing ‘Asleep in the Deep’.

  Off we drove again at last, the charabanc bouncing with tenors and flagons, and came to a river that rushed along among willows.

  ‘Water!’ they shouted.

  ‘Porthcawl!’ sang my uncle.

  ‘Where’s the donkeys?’ said Mr Weazley.

  And out they lurched, to paddle and whoop in the cool, white, winding water. Mr Franklyn, trying to polka on the slippery stones, fell in twice. ‘Nothing is simple,’ he said with dignity as he oozed up the bank.

  ‘It’s cold!’ they cried.

  ‘It’s lovely!’

  ‘It’s smooth as a moth’s nose!’

  ‘It’s better than Porthcawl!’

  And dusk came down warm and gentle on thirty wild, wet, pickled, splashing men without a care in the world at the end of the world in the west of Wales. And, ‘Who goes there?’ called Will Sentry to a wild duck flying.

  They stopped at The Hermit’s Nest for a rum to keep out the cold. ‘I played for Aberavon in 1898,’ said a stranger to Enoch Davies.

  ‘Liar,’ said Enoch Davies.

  ‘I can show you photos,’ said the stranger.

  ‘Forged,’ said Enoch Davies.

  ‘And I’ll show you my cap at home.’

  ‘Stolen.’

  ‘I got friends to prove it,’ the stranger said in a fury.

  ‘Bribed,’ said Enoch Davies.

  On the way home, through the simmering moon-splashed dark, old O. Jones began to cook his supper on a primus stove in the middle of the charabanc. Mr Weazley coughed himself blue in the smoke. ‘Stop the bus,’ he cried, ‘I’m dying of breath!’ We all climbed down into the moonlight. There was not a public house in sight. So they carried out the remaining cases, and the primus stove, and old O. Jones himself, and took them into a field, and sat down in a circle in the field and drank and sang while old O. Jones cooked sausage and mash and the moon flew above us. And there I drifted to sleep against my uncle’s mountainous waistcoat, and, as I slept, ‘Who goes there?’ called out Will Sentry to the flying moon.

  MATCH

  Roland Mathias

  The night had been uncertain of rain or moon and the grass in the longer patches on the slope towards the pill showed silver and green impartially, as though it had been dewed and combed then, roughly and to and fro. It would be a wet ball for a while, no doubt of that. On the lower touch three boys in wellingtons who had completed their office with the flags were beginning to chase each other, ducking under the grabs that went for tackles. Up the hill there was whistling and a workman or two behind the rising walls of the craft block, Saturday-happy and lost. Apart from these, Wynford Hughes was the first on hand. From where he stood the farther posts, barely safe from a sudden fall-away of ground to the thorn bushes at the pill bottom, masted into the full grey waters of the reach. Tide was up, and the calm envelope of morning seemed at pressure.

  A hubbub at the field gate told of the arrival of the bus, and as the players, hooped with black and yellow and blue and gold, spread like a hot breath outward on the slope, Wynford knew that he needed to come to a sort of understanding, and that with himself. He had made the effort, he had come out early deliberately in the hope of being cheered up. It would be nonsense now to be girding round and round upon his bitterness when for an hour at least he could be caught up in a fight not his own. No, not his own narrowly. But he had always accustomed himself to loyalty, to being inside the skin of the bodies he belonged to, to enthusing when his enthusiasm was asked for and expected. Some members of the staffroom, he knew very well, regarded this weakness of his with silent pity. Others were not so silent. ‘Adolescent,’ Garro Davies would no doubt remark if he had the chance. His intentionally audible asides from Intellectual Corner had been a trial for years. Adolescent. Well, what of it? He was a member of the School. Why not shout for it? It was just this self-regarding falsity, this lofty absence of loyalty, that so infuriated him in every walk. Was it only boys, working in a house system without houses, playing for a team ideal that was talked up too much, who would undertake to suffer inconvenience, exhaustion and injury? Who cared if the ideals didn’t go much beyond the physical? It was something to have an ideal, wasn’t it, and to work towards it? Damn Garro and all his spawning superiors! His very being at Bush this morning was his answer. To hell with them! He couldn’t help it and why should he? He was born to enthusiasm as the heart pumps faster. To hell with Garro!

  But this was the very thing he had come out not to do, to get bitter again. Look at the game, Wynford boy. Whistle blowing now. Its shrill peep ran round the edge of the plantations, sounded warningly against the quarry, and came back in a huff from the reach, where the morning still waited for a wind. The mudflats were well covered. It was surely high tide.

  When Wynford switched back from long sight he was still in time to see Gethin standing, hands on hips before the referee, watching the quick ceremony of the toss. Gethin, small, black, barely five foot two and smiling the more because of it. Gethin Du he would have been in the Welsh parts. But here just Gethin. Or Geth. Or even Wait, or Weight (no one would care to produce a definitive spelling), presumably from some half-forgotten middle school joke about Geth your Weight. Possibly too a tribute to the bulging muscles of Gethin’s thighs and the thickening pillar of his neck. None of his friends and equals called him Weight. Only perpetual up-and-comers like Ceffyl Collett, who was just the sort of feeble middle-school crackpot to have stuck together such a joke in the first place. Ceffyl Collett. A silly name Ceffyl. But he had been one of those who for rugby’s sake had wanted to learn Welsh, and the sound of it had been for him the noise of his zeal. ‘Ceffyl, ceffyl, ceffyl a horse,’ he went when older boys were about. And Ceffyl he had become and went on becoming, the great sandy mane and twitching ears growing a hand or two higher every time one looked. Running the line today was Ceffyl, an expert whose own play, some rearing and bucking in the tight excepted, rarely went beyond whinnying the side from a yard or two back. No peace on the field if Ceffyl had the flag and wind left.

  Well, there it was, Wynford reflected. Ceffyl on the lower touch meant peace, comparatively, till half-time. Ah, there was Sam Toogood of the Staff in sight now, pegging along at speed, afraid of missing a minute. He would be no trouble. The world was well lost to Sam once the game started. A column of mist, barely distinguished at its base from the plinth of wood and misted hill beyond the quarry, stood up like the morning-sign of prophecy over Monkton Cave. In that half-world of heights and shapes it seemed no great step from the hyena bones under the rock and the middens of the gnawed-at ages. Perhaps only additional physique and a stripier jersey.

  But to attend. Gethin had kicked off, downhill towards the reach. The fresh hide of the ball as it fle
w was lost for a moment in the stealing water greys behind. A clean catch from one of the Gwendraeth lumps in the second row, and a boot to touch. Regulation so far. A deal of rucking and mauling followed, all on the lower side over against Ceffyl, whose voice made raucous encouragement. But it soon appeared that of the two packs, that of Gwendraeth was much the heavier and harder. Ben Thomas, their captain, muscles squared-off and head shaven, was worth two men at close quarters, and his up-shouldered, angular form came through again and again like an auger through lath. Once he ran clear and was pulled down more by luck than judgement. Then a stoppage. And out. Out it came, the ball thudding from hand to hand. Roberts, the tall red-headed centre, went streaming out into the open spaces beyond the hands of Ogley and Russ in the middle of the home line. The long stride lengthened, short-cut red-gold hair seeming to balance and helmet the figure as it ran. Roberts was away. But no. No. Gethin Du was coming. Across, across short thick black legs cutting into the arc of danger. The full back challenged. Roberts thought to dummy and did not, feeling Gethin’s breath. Out went the ball to the wingman, left, up the hill. Out, up the hill came the short legs, quick steps calculated, converging on the wingman running blind, head back, for the line. A sudden bulge of spectators shut Wynford out of view. There was a thud and a cheer. ‘Good boy, Weight,’ came clear across the field from Ceffyl. The ball was now passing high over Wynford’s head at an angle into touch. Gethin was up already, had played the ball and cleared. As the spectators stood back, the wing was slowly getting up.

  Exaltation shuddered up Wynford’s spine. He was involved and fully, as he had not been for more than odd minutes in the past year. ‘School!’ His voice tingled out from the top of the spine with a primitive volition of its own. He was the black and yellow, jersey and man and heart.