The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  “All right, Ess?” her mother called.

  “Pick me and I’ll give you the other one,” Eric whispered.

  He didn’t take his eyes off her hand until it closed into a fist. “Mam,” Esther called over her shoulder. “What about this one?”

  He’d been as good as his word the next day when they’d found themselves alone in the kitchen. “A deal’s a deal,” he said. “I’m no welsher.” He grinned to let her know he was joking. “Don’t tell your mother, mind,” he made her promise. “Mum said they were supposed to be for her, a gift like, only...” He paused and then Esther started to giggle, unable to imagine her mother ever wearing such things, and slowly his grin widened.

  Later, he said, “Will you wear them for me one day?” and she stared at him.

  They were inseparable that spring. Rhys had tried to befriend Eric too, but he could never keep up with their rapid exchanges in English. When he kept asking her what they were saying, Eric would bleat at him, “Baa-aa!” To her parents she said Eric was teaching her English (though she was perfectly fluent, thanks to Mrs. Roberts and all her time at the pictures). In fact, he was teaching her to kiss—teaching himself, she realizes now, since they never got as far as French kissing. Her parents seemed to turn a blind eye, although in retrospect Esther knows that summer was the start of her mother’s illness. She has felt guilty for the way her preoccupation with Eric caused her to ignore the early signs of decline, the weariness and lack of appetite, and for the comfort she drew from him in the final, wasting days. And maybe that guilt, she thinks now, is why, the month after the funeral, when his own mother wrote from Coventry to say that she wanted her Eric back, that she was missing him so much, Esther told him, “You should go.” He hadn’t wanted to. He still resented his mum for sending him away in the first place. On the train to Wales he’d reached into his pocket and pulled out his brown school cap—his name stitched along the headband by his mother—and sailed it out the window, watching it curve up and back over the line of the train. But Esther made him go. He should be with his mother, she said, feeling selfless, and he didn’t know how to argue with her on that score.

  She’d seen him off on the sooty platform at Caernarvon station, listening to the carriage doors clattering shut around them—bang bang bang bang bang—like a firing squad. She remembers the engine coming to life: wisps of steam floating up, twisting towards the station’s glass and iron roof, and then a stream of smoke, like a kettle coming to the boil. They waited together for the rip of the whistle, holding hands through the lowered window, and then she stepped back to join her father and watched the train move off, the couplings taking up the slack and the carriages jolting forward one by one, just like the toy set she’d seen with Eric in the window of Nelson’s the Christmas before. And then the last clacking carriage twisted out of sight.

  Two months and six letters later, she heard from an aunt of his that he and his mother had died together—their shelter had received a direct hit—and more than anything she had envied them.

  She finds herself turning onto the path to Cilgwyn now, the house a dim shadow before her in the darkness, her steps ringing back off the stone walls of the lane.

  They’d kissed first in the last row of the cinema one Saturday morning, she and Eric, but all she can think of now is a joke of Harry’s:

  —I hear they’re putting a swimming pool in the back of our picture palace.

  —A swimming pool?

  —’Sright. On account of everyone back there’s always doing the breaststroke!

  The pedal catches against the back of her calf and she winces, loses her grip, the bike clattering to the ground, it’s bell clinking dully. Frozen for a moment, praying the commotion hasn’t woken Arthur, she stares at the bike lying there dumbly, lets herself down beside it, and weeps dry, choking sobs. He was her first, she thinks fervently. Him. Eric. Her first love.

  It takes her long minutes to collect herself, and then she clambers to her feet, pulls the bike upright. Having brought it so far, it seems she’s going to keep it after all. I earned it, she thinks viciously.

  She heads first to the privy at the bottom of the garden—she hates to sit there in the dark, but she’s suddenly desperate—then lets herself in by the kitchen door, tiptoes to her room, holding her breath, and crawls under the covers fully clothed.She hugs herself, panting softly, listening to the house, the rise and fall of her father’s steady snores.

  HOW MUCH LATER she doesn’t know—she seems to wake and yet to have barely caught her breath—there’s a knock at the door, a pounding, and she presses her back to the wall. It’s Colin, she’s sure. He’s come for her, and it’s only the sound of her father’s cursing that stops her crying out. “I’m bloody coming!” he shouts, and it thrills her, the prospect of him turning his rage on Colin. She hears him shuffling down the passage, the rattle of the matchbox, the rasp as he strikes a light, followed by the slosh of the paraffin lamp. And then he’s calling out in Welsh, “Who’s there?” and the answer, in English, “It’s me, Evans, and you can keep a civil tongue. I’ve brought you something of yours.” For an insane moment, she thinks, The constable, thank God, he can arrest Colin! and then it dawns on her: Colin isn’t here, never was.

  In her relief, she misses the start of the exchange, climbs out of bed, and makes her way on trembling legs to the glowing frame of her door.

  “—wouldn’t tell them where he lived,” Parry is saying, “so they dumped him on me.” She peers into the passage, sees her father, his back to her, at the front door, Parry before him with his hands on Jim’s shoulders. “Wouldn’t tell them anything, as a matter of fact—just his name, over and over, to all their questions.”

  “I’d have given them a rank and serial number if I had one,” Jim tells them, and Esther, coming forward and catching his eye, puts a finger to her lips. He’s in enough trouble already, and for a moment the thought of someone else’s problems steadies her, and she smoothes a hand down the front of her rumpled skirt.

  She should have known, of course. The disturbance at the camp, the interruption that drove Colin off. It must have been the local boys. They’d been watching the camp ever since the sappers first pecked out the perimeter of the site with mallets and surveying stakes—stakes that had started showing up thrust through boys’ belt loops like cutlasses, brandished in high-street duels (“Errol Flynn!” “Douglas Fairbanks!”). The boys were the ones who’d kept the village informed of the sappers’ progress, fueling speculation about the base’s purpose, growing more and more impatient with the mystery. “It’s top secret,” Esther told Jim when he begged her to ask one of the sappers at the pub, but the way his face fell, you would have thought it was the top secret, out of all the many adult things he wasn’t old enough to hear or understand. Parry, with whom the boys have a running feud (their favorite trick: reporting a naked light during blackout and, when he comes running, mooning him, the gang of them, arses hanging out of their drawers), had said they were up to something. And she should have known Jim would get mixed up in it. He isn’t well liked by the local lads—few of the evacuees are, but Jim is small for his age, and his fiery temper makes him easy to goad (his last name, Leadbetter, has earned him the nickname Bedwetter)—but it doesn’t stop him from trying to ingratiate himself by getting into trouble.

  “They thought he was Welsh,” Parry is saying now, shaking his head, though Esther can believe it; Jim’s picked up a bit of the language in his time with them. “An arsonist, if you please!” the constable goes on, chuckling, but Arthur is stone-faced. He’s never been fond of the constable, on account of his insistence on doing all his official business in English.

  “What happened to his head?” Arthur asks, still in Welsh, and coming into the light she sees a welt on Jim’s forehead, the bruise already turning waxy like spoiled meat.

  “Kept putting his hands up, apparently. Surrendering. One of them thought he was taking the piss, gave him a little clout.”

  “On
e of them ‘heroes’?”

  The constable is silent.

  “Well, obliged to you for fetching him back,” Arthur says, reaching for the doorknob.

  Parry leans in a moment. “Just so long as it doesn’t happen again, eh? He’s your responsibility—”

  “Nos-da, now.” Arthur swings the door to.

  “And good night to you,” Parry says from the other side, his tone perfectly conversational, as if he can see right through the wood. Jim starts to say something, but Arthur raises a finger and the boy flinches. They listen to the scrape of the policeman’s feet in the yard, the creak of the gate.

  “POWs!” Jim bursts out as soon as it’s quiet. “That’s who it’s for!” He looks at them triumphantly, as if the news somehow excuses everything.

  “What happened?” Esther asks.

  “We broke in,” he says, “and we found a cellblock. You know, for solitary confinement. That’s how we knew the secret!”

  She tries to look suitably surprised, but she can see he’s disappointed. He looks over her shoulder. “POWs, Mr. Evans.”

  “But how did you get caught?” Esther insists.

  His face clouds for a second. “Oh, the others,” he says, trying to sound breezy. “They locked me in one of the cells for a joke and forgot to come back.”

  “Duw!” She crouches down to get a better look at his head, but he twists away.

  Behind her, Arthur has started to laugh thinly and she stares at him.

  “Prisoners of war,” he says, and she knows it’s taken him a moment to work it out in English, too proud to just ask. “And all those happy fools down the pub,” he goes on in Welsh, “hoping for some glorious part in the English war. What a slap in the face!” He shakes his head. “Glad you could join us,” he adds, looking her up and down, taking in her rumpled clothes.

  “I thought I should be decent,” she tells him awkwardly.

  He’s in slippers and a nightshirt himself, his calves below the hem corded with muscle, the veins binding them like blue twine. The nightshirt is so old it’s gone grey, and Esther, so rarely up in the morning before him, can’t remember the last time she’s seen him in it.

  “I could boil that for you,” she blurts out, and he gives her a puzzled look.

  “You just see to his head,” he tells her, suddenly weary, pushing past on his way back to bed. “That’s your job.”

  She sits Jim at the table, puts water on to warm, fetches a towel, then sets the lamp beside him. “It doesn’t hurt,” he tells her, but pulls back when she reaches for him.

  “Hold still.”

  She lifts the matted hair off his forehead—“Ow!”—and clucks her tongue. It’s not a bad wound, he’s come back with worse from the schoolyard, but there’s a nasty-looking scrape at the center of the bruise where the skin is broken—by a ring? she wonders, a watch?—and moving his hair has opened it again. She stands swiftly, drawing in her breath as a dotted line of blood begins to well up. She feels her tears brimming, turns quickly and stretches for the shelf above the sink, for bandages and the bottle of Mercurochrome.

  “Do we have to?” he asks as she drapes the towel round his neck. Then, picking up on her solemnity: “I’m wounded, aren’t I?”

  She nods, unable to speak. The boy eyes the bottle warily, takes the corner of the towel, and draws it across his mouth.

  “For the pain,” he says, biting down as she begins to clean the cut.

  She hadn’t wanted another evacuee when the Blitz had started and there’d been a second wave of them, though Arthur had said they could use some help around the place. She’d resisted until the summer of ’41, after Liverpool had been shattered and a belated trickle of kids began to arrive. Arthur had shaken his head in disgust when she’d come back from the station with Jim in tow. At nine, he was too small to be much use on the farm (the reason why Rhys had been hired the next summer), but at least Arthur wasn’t hardhearted enough to make her take him back. “Don’t know what you were thinking. He’s like a stray,” he told her. “If you want to take pity on him, well and good, but he’s your lookout. You’ll have to see to him and make up for what he can’t do about the place.”

  She pauses in her cleaning and tells Jim to stop pulling faces. “It can’t hurt so badly. I’m being very gentle.”

  He opens his eyes. “Shows how much you know,” he says. “It’s agony.” Then, hopefully, “Is it finished?”

  She shakes her head, reaches for the Mercurochrome, and he bunches his face again. And all the time she’s tending his wound and wrapping his head, she wants to ask, Which one? Which one did this to you?

  But when she’s done and pinning the bandage, he says, “I didn’t tell on the other lads. The constable kept asking who was there, but I’m no rat.” His eyes are alight beneath the white strip, as proud to have kept a secret as uncovered one.

  “You might as well have,” she snaps, suddenly as angry at the other boys as at the sappers. “That lot!”

  His face falls, and when she asks him at last—“Now, Jim”—which of the sappers hit him, she sees his face close. He couldn’t tell, he says stubbornly, and when she presses him, “But you must know,” he raises a fist to his eyes, a gesture that always makes her think he wants to punch himself for crying, and she tells him quickly, “Hey, hey. I almost forgot. I’ve got something for you.”

  “What?” he asks grudgingly.

  “Only if you stop crying. It’s only for a brave boy.”

  “I wasn’t crying.”

  She leans forward and puts her mouth to his ear.

  “A bike,” she whispers, and he looks at her with amazement, and then with such joy that for a second she thinks it’s almost been worth it. He throws his arms around her, and she finds herself standing abruptly, brushing him off, saying lamely, “Your bandage will come loose.”

  Later, when she tucks him in, she tries to make up for it, bending down to kiss him, but he struggles up under the sheets. “Hey,” he says. “Does this mean I’m the camp’s first prisoner?” And she nods, and leaves him, although a part of her thinks the title rightly her own.

  Before she blows out the lamp, she’ll hurry to the privy again, sit on the cold wooden seat, drowsing to the fizzing drone of a bluebottle. She’ll look out the half-moon in the door and then down at her drawers in the yellow oil light and see a thin exclamation mark of blood. By the time she goes back inside, the clock over the hearth will read two o’clock, and she’ll wonder dully what they call the day after D-day.

  Five

  LOOKING OUT the window the morning after the invasion, she sees it’s just another day, only a pale sickle moon in the blue-white sky to betray there’d even been a night before. Esther forces herself to get up to prepare Arthur’s breakfast. Just like normal, she tells herself, if a little sluggish. She sets out the chipped plates with deliberate care, then the yellowing bone-handled cutlery, the bread and butter. Everything in it’s place. She thinks herself through the movements, conscious of them for the first time in years, as if she’s never done them before.

  But then, the loaf still clutched in her hand, a slice half sawn, she has to sit, her legs rubbery, shaking. It must be the unaccustomed exercise of the bike ride, she thinks, suddenly breathless.

  When Arthur comes in from milking, he takes one look at her and asks if she’s all right.

  Fine.

  “You’re as pale as milk.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He knows it’s a lie, she’s sure, but something in the way she says it—so flatly, without appeal—leaves him unable to challenge her, as if the lie is so nearly naked that to uncover it would be cruelty. He slurps his tea, crams down a slice of bread and butter, and stamps out. At the door, he pauses. “Boy all right?” he asks, and she can only nod. “Quite a night he had.” She just shrugs, not trusting herself to speak. She watches him go then, feeling an urge to call him back, but instead shouts for Jim to get up, at once grateful and oddly resentful for the distraction he provi
ded her the previous night. Besides, he’s been late to school the last few days and she’s newly determined to put an end to it.

  There’s a scuffle of feet in the corridor, and Jim stumbles into the kitchen, disheveled and bleary from his late night, the bandage a bright halo around his head.

  She butters a slice for him, and for a treat scatters half a teaspoon of rationed sugar over it, watches out of the corner of her eye as he gobbles it down, the smile spreading on his face. She’s never seen him in such a hurry to get to school, but he has stories to tell. Absently, he strokes the dressing at his temples as he chews.

  “Let me change that for you,” she says, and he submits, still chewing, but once she unwinds the bandage, and he sees the coppery bloodstain like a penny at it’s center, he insists on keeping it, and she has to settle for washing the wound, gently dabbing around the scab. He’s cheerful, fidgety with happiness, and when she wants to know why, he wonders shyly—not quite sure if he’s dreamed it—whether he can see his bike now.

  “You’re sure you can ride one?” she asks, and he nods so emphatically she worries the bandage will slip.

  Course!

  At first, watching him weave across the yard on the bike, she can’t believe he knows how to ride one, is sure he’ll end up with another knot on his head or worse, half raises her arms to catch him. But he refuses to let her adjust the seat or the handlebars. He loves the height, though it means he has to mount the bike from the bottom rung of the gate. He wobbles back and forth and then gets the measure of it, swooping around her, laughing gleefully, the dogs racing after him, barking, even Arthur coming to the barn door to watch. “See!” Jim cries. Then he’s gone, flying down the lane, legs spread, feet off the pedals, his bandaged head a blur. Fearless, she thinks as the echo of the last bark dies away, and she suddenly wishes she’d kept the bike, could throw herself headlong down the hillside.