The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  There was a long sigh at the other end of the line, and Rotheram felt how he’d failed Hawkins. But when the CO spoke again he sounded brusquely hearty.

  “No need to hurry back, my boy. There’ve been some new orders, as a matter of fact. The POW department want someone to visit their camps up in North Wales. Something to do with screening and the reeducation program. Denazification and all that. Thought you’d be just the fellow to liaise. Anyhow, the orders should catch up with you there later today, or tomorrow at the latest.”

  “What—?” Rotheram began, and stopped, silenced by the sound of his own cry in the still house as much as by Hawkins’s steely jocularity.

  Gripping the receiver, Rotheram told him stiffly that he understood, and he did, although dully, as if his head were still ringing from the blow. The CO had been flattering him with this mission, he realized; more than that, it was a consolation prize. The decision had already been made, but not by Rotheram. Hess would be going to the trial, but Rotheram wouldn’t. The closest he’d come to Germany, any time soon, was the image on the screen.

  “You will be missed,” Hawkins said. He was the one whispering now. “It’s just that there’s a sense that Jews ought not to be a big part of the process. To keep everything aboveboard, so to speak. To avoid it’s looking like revenge. Can’t stick a thumb on the scales of justice and all that. And really, that stunt at Dover.” He laughed ruefully. “That’s what you get for playing silly buggers.”

  Rotheram was silent and the CO filled the pause by asking, “By the way, how is Rudi, the old bastard?”

  “Probably as sane as you or I,” Rotheram said, and Hawkins laughed again.

  “Well, that’s not saying much, dear boy. That’s not saying very much at all.”

  ROTHERAM HELD the receiver long after it had gone dead, reassured by the weight in his hand, until he heard a floorboard creak overhead, and finally set it gently back in it’s cradle. He wondered who else might be awake, whom he might have woken. Hess’s room was on the second floor, and suddenly he hoped the Nazi might appear, escaping, any excuse for Rotheram to take him by the throat. On the landing, he peered down the corridor. There was Hess’s guard, the corporal who’d served them Scotch, slumped in his chair, giving off a series of soft, flaring snores. Rotheram only meant to wake him, but as he stood before the guard, it seemed as easy to step over his outstretched legs and lay an ear to the door.

  Nothing. Rotheram wondered if he was listening to an empty room, if Hess had already fled (but no, the key was still in the lock) or thrown himself from his window (surely it was barred). Still nothing, except Rotheram’s own pulse, like a wingbeat in his ears. Perhaps all he’d heard before was a particularly stentorian snore from the corporal. And yet he couldn’t quite shake the conviction that the room was empty—not as if Hess had left it, precisely, but as if he’d never been there. Rotheram must have leaned closer, shifted his weight, for the floor beneath him gave a dry groan. He stifled his breath, counted the seconds. Nothing stirred, and yet the silence seemed subtly altered now, the silence of another listener, as if Hess were behind the door or under the covers or crouched in a corner listening to him, Rotheram, wondering about his intentions.

  Rotheram felt his legs start to tremble, as if a chill had risen from the cold floor through his bare feet, and he stepped away. He was halfway to the stairs before he thought to turn back and aim a kick at the sleeping corporal.

  One

  IT’S A CLOSE June night in the Welsh hills, taut with the threat of thunder, and the radios of the village cough with static. The Quarryman’s Arms, with the tallest aerial for miles around, is a scrum of bodies, all waiting to hear Churchill’s broadcast.

  There’s a flurry of shouted orders leading up to the news at six. Esther, behind the lounge bar, pulls pint after pint, leaning back against the pumps so that the beer froths in the glass. She sets the shaker out for those who want to salt their drinks to melt the foam. Round the corner to her right, her boss, Jack Jones, has his hands full with the regulars in the public bar. At five to six by the scarred grandfather clock in the corner, he calls across for Esther to “warm ’er up.” She tops off the pint she’s pouring, steps back from the counter and up onto the pop crate beneath the till. She has to stretch for the knob on the wireless, one foot lifting off the crate. Behind her, over the calls for service, she hears a few low whistles before the machine clicks into life, first with a scratchy hum, then a whistle of it’s own, finally, as if from afar, the signature tune of the program. The dial lights up like a sunset, and the noise around her subsides at once. Turning, the girl looks down into the crowd of faces staring up at the glowing radio, and it seems to her for a moment as if she has stilled them.

  The men—soldiers, mostly, in the lounge—sip their beers slowly during the broadcast. She looks from face to face, but they’re all gazing off, concentrating on the prime minister’s shuffling growl. The only ones to catch her eye are Harry Hitch, who’s mouthing something—“me usual”—and Colin, who winks broadly from across the room.

  Colin’s one of the sappers with the Pioneer Corps building the base near the old holiday camp in the valley. They’ve been bringing some much-needed business to the Arms for the last month, and for the last fortnight Esther and Colin have been sweethearts. Tonight she’s agreed to slip off with him after work—he’s got “something special” to tell her, he’s promised—a date that seems destined now. She says the English word in her mind, “sweethearts,” likes the way it sounds. She listens to Churchill, the voice of England, imagines him whispering it gravely, swallows a smile. She concentrates on the speech, thinks of the men on the beaches, and feels herself fill with emotion for her soldier like a slow-pouring glass of Guinness. There’s a thickening in her throat, a brimming pressure behind her eyes. It’s gratitude she feels, mixed with pride and hope, and she trusts that together this blend amounts to love.

  The broadcast ends and the noise builds again in the pub. It’s not quite a cheer—the speech has been sternly cautious—but there’s a sense of excitement kept just in check and a kind of relief, as if a long-held breath can finally be released. All spring the whispered talk has been about an invasion, and now it’s here, D-day, the beginning of the end. The suspected secret the whole country has silently shared for months can be talked about openly at last. Everyone is smiling at the soldiers and calling congratulations, even the locals clustered behind the public bar. Constable Parry, the blowhard, goes so far as to mention the huge floating harbors glimpsed off the coast to the south (“Now we know what they was for”), raising a glass, clinking it sloppily with one of the sappers, who winks back (“No pulling the wool over your eyes, ossifer”). And the constable, egged on, launches into the rumor about Hess being held in Wales. Esther steps up on the crate once more and turns the radio dial through the catarrhal interference until it picks up faint dance music, Joe Loss and His Orpheans, from the Savoy in London. She hears something like applause and, looking round, sees with delight that it’s literally a clapping of backs.

  There’s a rush for the bar again. People want to buy the men drinks. They’re only sappers—road menders and ditch diggers, according to her father—but they’re in uniform, and who knows when they could be going “over there.” Suddenly, and without doing a thing, they’re heroes, indistinguishable in their uniforms from all the other fighting men. And they believe it, too. Esther can see it in Colin’s face, the glow of it. She stares at him and it’s as if she’s seeing him for the first time; he’s so glossily handsome, like the lobby card of a film star.

  The crowd in the lounge is three deep and thirsty, and she pulls pints—“Yes, sir? What can I get you? Yes, sir? Who’s next, please?”—until her arm aches, and froth fills the air like blossom. But when she turns to ring up the orders, she sees the public bar is emptying out. It’s shearing season, after all. Invasion or no, farmers have to be up early.

  She glimpses her father, Arthur, shouldering his way to the door, shru
gging his mac on over the frayed dark suit (Sunday best before she was born) and collarless shirt he wears when out with the flock. Cilgwyn, their smallholding, lies a couple of miles above the village; he’ll be sound asleep by the time she gets in, milking the cow by the time she rises. He jams his cap on his head, fitting it to the dull red line across his brow, and gives her a nod as he goes, but no more.

  She’s been working here for almost three months now, since she turned seventeen, but she’s never once served him. He sticks to the public bar, the Welsh-speaking half of the pub, while she, with her proper schoolroom English, works in the lounge serving the soldiers, locals like the constable who mix with them, and the motley assortment of other new arrivals. Not that her father’s English, his spoken English at least, is so bad for all his thick accent; it’s just beneath his dignity to use it.

  She would stand Arthur a pint or two if he ever ventured into the lounge (Jack wouldn’t mind), but that too would be beneath him. She’s been in charge of the housekeeping money in the old biscuit tin ever since her mother died four years ago, but only since she started working has he shown her the books, the bank account, the mortgage deeds. Of course, she had her own ideas of how bad things were all along, but guessing and knowing are different and now she knows: knows why they’ve taken in their young English evacuee, Jim (for the extra ten-and-six billeting allowance); knows why they’ve been selling off ewe lambs as well as wethers the last two seasons. Between the national subsidy and the demand for woolen uniforms, the war is quite simply holding them up. Her father is a proud man, the kind who stands straighter in hard times than good, and she’s grateful that poverty in wartime is a virtue, something to be proud of. It reminds her of the epic stories he tells of the Great Strike at the quarry, though he was only a boy then. But she wonders sometimes, also, what it’ll be like when the war is over, and it crosses her mind that the same thought has sent him out into the night early.

  Still, she’s not sorry to see him go, not with Colin here too. She doesn’t want to face any awkward questions, from Arthur or anyone else (she knows how local tongues wag), and she doesn’t want to tell the truth, that she’s stepping out with an Englishman—a Londoner! she reminds herself. Beneath the national betrayal is an obscurer one to do with her pride at taking her mother’s place beside her father, a sense of being unfaithful somehow. She catches sight of Colin through the crowd, the tip of his tongue tucked in the corner of his mouth as he dips his shoulder to throw his darts—one, two, three—then strides forward to pluck them from the board. He catches her looking, puckers up for a second, and she turns away quickly.

  Colin says he loves her English, and she’s flattered, though when she asked him once what it was he loved about it, he said, “You know, it’s so proper. We all reckoned you were stuck up at first. You talked like an actress, a toff almost.” He laughed, but she must have frowned because he tried to take it back—“apart from the accent, I mean”—though that had only made it worse, of course. He likes it, he’s insisted—“sounds like singing”—but she’s been trying to use more contractions of late, to flatten her enunciation, even asking him to teach her some slang.

  “No need to call us ‘sir,’ for one thing. Makes like we’re in the officers’ mess.”

  “Well, what should I say?”

  “I don’t know. Try, ‘What’s yours, luv? What’s your pleasure? What’s your poison?’ And if someone’s hurrying you, tell him, ‘Hold your horses, keep your hair on!’”

  She’s used the phrases when she remembers, though she can’t quite bring herself to say “luv” without blushing. “It don’t mean anything,” Colin reckons—when she looks for him now he’s chalking up scores, grimacing over the sums—but it still feels funny to her.

  PRETTY SOON the pub is down to just soldiers and die-hards, the Welsh voices behind her wafting over with the smell of pipe tobacco. They’re quieter tonight, slower, sluggish as a summer stream. The talk for once isn’t politics. This is a nationalist village, passionately so. It’s what holds the place together, like a cracked and glued china teapot. The strike, all of forty-five years ago, almost broke the town, plunging it into poverty, and it’s taken something shared to stick back together the families of men who returned to work and those who stayed out.

  The Quarryman’s Arms is the old strikers’ pub—the hooks for their tankards, her grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s included, still stud the ceiling over the bar—a bitter little irony, since most of it’s regulars, the sons of strikers, are sheep farmers now. Their fathers weren’t taken back at the quarry after the strike, blacklisted from the industry, and for a generation the families of strikers and scabs didn’t talk, didn’t marry, didn’t pray together. “Robbed our jobs,” Arthur always says, though he never worked a day in the quarry himself. Even now the sons of scabs are scarce in the Arms, only venturing up the high street from their local, the Prince of Wales, for fiercely competitive darts and snooker matches, games the soldiers have cornered since they arrived.

  To Esther the old scores seem like so much tosh, especially after the cutbacks at the quarry, where barely one in ten local men work now. But the old people all agree that the village would have died if not for the resurgence of Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, in the twenties and thirties, reminding them of what they had in common, their Celtic race, reminding them of their common enemy, the English. Dragoons were stationed here to keep order during the strike, and in the public bar the sappers are still called occupiers by some. It’s half in jest, but only half. The nationalist view of the war is that it’s an English war, imperialist, capitalist, like the Great War that Jack fought in and from which he still carries a limp (not that you’d know it to see him behind the bar; he’s never spilled a drop).

  Arthur, a staunch nationalist, still speaks bitterly about his one and only trip to England, to a rally in Hyde Park in ’37 to protest the conviction at the Old Bailey of “The Three,” the nationalists who set fire to the RAF bombing school at Penrhos. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” he’s fond of quoting the reverend who addressed the rally, “and unto Wales the things which are Welsh!” Esther heard her father give the speech most recently to Rhys Roberts, the gap-toothed lad who helped out at Cilgwyn the past two summers. Rhys turned seventeen in the spring and promptly joined up, much to Arthur’s disgust (his work on their farm would have qualified him for reserve status), though Esther is relieved he won’t be around pining for her any longer.

  Tonight, however, the success of the invasion has stilled such nationalist talk. The few Plaid sympathizers who remain nurse their beers, suck their pipes, and steal glances down the passage to where Esther is serving. She takes a fickle pleasure in standing between the two groups of men, listening to their talk about each other. For she knows the soldiers, clustered round the small slate tables, crammed shoulder to shoulder into the narrow wooden settles, talk about the Welsh, too: complain about the weather, joke about the language, whisper about the girls. Tonight they lounge around, legs splayed, collars open, like so many conquerors.

  She tells herself that most of the locals are as filled with excitement as she is, even if they’re reluctant to admit it. She yearns to be British, tonight of all nights. She’s proud of her Welshness, of course, in the same half-conscious way she’s shyly proud of her looks, but she’s impatient with all the talk of the past, bored by the history. Somewhere inside her she knows that nationalism is part and parcel of provincialism. She has her own dreams of escape, modest ones mostly—of a spell in service in Liverpool like her mother before her, eating cream horns at Lyons Corner House on her days off—and occasionally more thrilling ones, fueled by the pictures she sees at the Gaumont in Penygroes.

  This corner of North Wales feels such a long way from the center of life, from London or Liverpool or, heavens, America. But nationalism, she senses, is a way of putting it back in the center, of saying that what’s here is important enough. And this really is what Esther wants, wh
at she dimly suspects they all want. To be important, to be the center of attention. Which is why she’s so excited as she moves through the crowd—“’Cuse me!”—collecting empties, stacking them up, glass on teetering glass, by the presence of the soldiers, by the arrival of the BBC Light Program a few years ago, by the museum treasures that are stored in the old quarry workings, even by the schoolage evacuees like Jim. They’re refugees from the Blitz, most of them, but she doesn’t care. If she can’t see the world, she’ll settle for the world coming to her.

  She’s sure others in the village feel this. The sappers are a case in point. No one quite knows what the base they’re hammering together is for, but speculation is rife. The village boys, Jim among them, who haunt the camp, watching the sappers from the tree line and sneaking down to explore the building at dusk, are praying for the glamour of commandos. There’s whispered talk of Free French, Poles, even alpine troops training in the mountains for the invasion of Norway. And the sappers listen to all this speculation looking like the cat who ate the canary. Jack is hoping for Yanks and their ready cash.

  American flyers, waiting to move on to their bases in East Anglia, do occasionally drop in for a drink. But they’re always faintly disappointing. Each time they’re spotted sauntering around Caernarvon, getting their photos taken under the Eagle Tower, rumors start that it’s James Stewart or Tyrone Power, one of those gallant film stars. But it never is. For the most part the Yanks are gangly, freckle-faced farm boys, good for gum but insufferably polite (in the opinion of the local lads), with their suck-up “sirs” and “ma’ams,” and ineffably ignorant, calling the locals “limeys” and thinking Welsh just a particularly impenetrable dialect of English. Once, though, one of them, a navigator from “Virginny,” pressed a clumsily wrapped parcel of brown paper and string on Esther, and when she opened it she saw it was a torn parachute. There was enough silk for a petticoat and two slips. He’d been drinking shyly in a corner for hours, summoning up his courage. She was worried he’d get into trouble, tried to give the bundle back, but he spread his hands, backed away. “Ma’am,” he told her, and he said it with such drunken earnestness, she pulled the parcel back, held it to her chest. He seemed to be hunting for the words. “You...,” he began. “Why, you’re what we’re fighting for!” She’s dreamed of him since, getting shot down, bailing out, hanging in the night sky, sliding silently to earth under a canopy of petticoats.