The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  “What’re they on about now?” Harry wants to know.

  “They’re feeling cheated,” Esther mumbles.

  “Cheated! Ha! That’s a good one. Hey, hey,” he calls gleefully, “don’t tell me you lot are feeling welshed on?”

  “Welshed on!” Arthur thunders from the other bar. It’s one expression in English he’s always quick to pick up on. He looks furious, but Esther can see he’s relishing this. Harry, without realizing it, has ended up as her father’s straight man, setting up one of his favorite speeches.

  “Do you think he even knows where that perfidious phrase comes from?” Arthur asks the rest of them in Welsh, dismissing Harry, who sits back and flaps his fingers and thumb together at Mary like a gabbing mouth. It’s true, though, Esther thinks; her father, so taciturn in English, is a different man in Welsh, especially with an audience.

  “You won’t find it in the dictionary,” Arthur is saying. “Not even your Oxford English Dictionary.” He says the last in English, rolling the r, drawing it out to four mocking syllables so it sounds like Dick-shun-Harry. And in fact, Esther knows this to be true. She asked in class once where the phrase came from, and Mrs. Roberts went to the huge volume she kept on her desk like the Bible, poring over it for long moments, until she had to admit, blushing even, that the derivation was obscure. It was the first time Esther had ever seen her teacher stumped, the first time she’d glimpsed that there might be a limit to what was known, not just by her, but by adults, and it worried her. She brought it up with Arthur and he grimaced. “Typical! Stands to reason your English dictionary don’t explain it.” “But—” she began, and he clapped his hands together under her nose. “It’s their language,” he said. “Theirs, see!” He has his own theory, of course, which is what he’s regaling them with in the bar.

  It goes back to the last century, Arthur explains, when the use of Welsh was forbidden in schools by the English authorities. The rule then was that if a boy was caught speaking Welsh, a placard would be hung around his neck saying, “Spoke Welsh”—“bit like a dunce’s cap”—and at the end of the day the headmaster would strap him. The real devilishness, though, was that if the boy caught another lad speaking Welsh, and informed on him, he could hand the sign on. The placard would be passed from Welsh speaker to Welsh speaker, the one betraying the next, until a last unfortunate was left wearing it at the final school bell. “So, your bloody English, see here,” Arthur concludes, “they call us welshers, cheaters, deceivers, make like the very word ‘Welsh’ means to lie, to betray, when all along they was the ones, with their vicious rule, made our boys act like that.”

  It’s an old story, and Esther’s sure others know it as well as she, but there’s something about Arthur’s unveiling of the inexorable English logic that’s still compelling. She sees heads nodding along the bar, watches Arthur, satisfied, light a cigarette. He should have been a reverend, she thinks. When he first told her the story, she was doubtful. “Why wouldn’t Mrs. Roberts know that?” she asked, and he looked at her as if she were a fool. She saw then that Rhys’s hope of their parents marrying was fantasy; Arthur was betrothed to the country. “Maybe she does,” he sneered. “Maybe your English teacher wouldn’t want to tell you that truth, eh?” And Esther thought, That’s why she blushed. Her teacher had lied to her.

  His own father, Arthur is saying now, completing the lesson, fell afoul of the rule on his very first day at school, told on another boy, and escaped his beating. “Or so he thought,” Arthur notes with relish. “When my grandfather heard of it, he gave him the thrashing of his life, called it a ‘Welsh hiding.’” And here he glances at Bertie, offers him an opening, and the little man volunteers, as if on cue, “They corrupted our bloody children.” And Arthur nods, draws deeply on his cigarette.

  Bertie is starting up a chorus of “Mae hen Wlad fy nhadau,” the Welsh anthem, and Esther translates to herself: “Land of my fathers.”

  The moral of Arthur’s story, she supposes bleakly, is that there’s no reason to fear the English, at least not when the Welsh can do worse, and she knows, as if a door has closed in her face, that she’ll never be able to tell Arthur about Colin now.

  THERE’S ONLY ONE brief scuffle, later that night, when a few of the sappers—not Colin, Esther sees with relief—try to defy the ban, but Constable Parry bars the door and sends them packing. “Did your duty there,” Jack tells him, giving him one on the house, and Parry grins and tells him, “But I’m off-duty, Jackie,” and takes a long draft.

  “Can’t take a joke!” the sappers call from the street, over the jeers of the locals. “Don’t go forgetting who the real enemy are!”

  “You are!” Bertie bellows back, and Esther, despite herself, flinches.

  Arthur, she sees, never leaves his stool during the melee, a fixed grin on his face. Jack glances into the half-deserted lounge. “Might as well have an early night, Esther.” He raises his eyebrows, and she nods. “Arthur! Walk your lovely daughter home, won’t you?”

  They walk in silence, Arthur setting one foot in front of the other with such deliberate dignity, it reminds her of the news-reel of the coronation she’d seen as a child, almost her first memory: the new king pacing steadily up the long nave of Westminster Abbey.

  She must have seen it with her mother, she thinks.

  Arthur’s performance in the pub reminds her he’s always been sniffily suspicious of her English, as if she were putting on airs. He’s never seen any reason for her command of the language to be more than “good enough”; it was her mother who always wanted it to be proper. Her hero was George Eliot—real name Mary Ann Evans, she told Esther, a Welsh girl made good (“as an English man!” Arthur scoffed)—and her prized possession a massive copy of Middlemarch, which she seemed to have been reading all of Esther’s life. Towards the end of that last summer, while Eric sweated over her chores, Esther sat on the bed and read it to her. Her mother hadn’t managed more than a couple of pages a day, stealing the moments when her work was done, while the floors dried or supper simmered on the stove, and now they were flying, covering twenty, thirty, fifty pages at a time. “Slow down,” her mother used to beg, gripping the sheets as if they were handlebars. “Are you sure you’re not skipping?” But Esther knew she was proud. There were fewer than a hundred pages left at her death, and Esther had rationed them out, a page a night, then a paragraph, a sentence, reading them silently to herself for the rest of that autumn until, impossibly, they were all gone.

  She hasn’t missed her mother so much in years, she thinks as Cilgwyn comes in sight, and she finds herself hating Colin for reviving that old hurt almost more than for the new one.

  Seven

  DEAR MUTTI, Karsten writes, and stops, wondering what to tell her. Since my last letter, his pencil sighs, I have been captured by the British. He looks at the words on the page and they seem baldly ridiculous, a bad joke. Both banal and implausible, even to him.

  Someone walks past the mouth of the tent and reflexively he curls an arm around the page laid out before him on the bunk. He watches the man’s shadow cross the canvas. The tent must be Great War issue. His first night under it, sniffing the musty air and peering up at the blotchy continents of mildew, the parchment-colored walls rising to the long ridge above, he’d felt he was sleeping under a water-stained book.

  One with blank pages, he thinks now, returning to the letter before him. He’s writing in the back of the pamphlet of German phrases and their English equivalents that the Red Cross passed out to them yesterday. Some of the men threw theirs away immediately, but Karsten has kept his, not to learn the phrases—he’s glanced at them and knows most—but for the paper. The Red Cross representatives, in their dark, mournful suits and plummy Swiss German, had also explained that they’d shortly be issued official postcards to notify their next of kin. Karsten, the back cover of the phrase book folded open before him, is trying to work out what to write his mother.

  He starts over. Dear Mutti, It has been a week now since I
surrendered to the British.

  More truthful, at least. He looks at the thick, dark pencil marks against the white. They’re not allowed pocketknives, so he sharpens the lead by furiously rubbing the blunt point at an angle against the paper, steadily obliterating what he has written.

  He expects the Red Cross cards will be plain, like the coarse army-issue stationery he’s used to. But he finds himself wishing he could send her a picture postcard like the kind she sent him from home, something that might convey more than mere words. He might have wished for longer letters—she was always too busy, if not with the pension, then with her patriotic activities, food drives, clothing drives, scrap-metal drives—but he loved the scenes she sent, pinned them to the wall above his bunk in barracks like so many narrow windows. In his last letter to her he’d complained about the spring heat in France, and she’d sent back by return mail a postcard of the Brocken draped with snow: Hoping this will cool you down!

  As a boy, one of his jobs around the pension had been to carry the guests’ mail to the post office. He liked to practice his reading skills with the cards, trying to recognize the town and the landscape, which he took for granted, in the exuberant descriptions. Glorious weather. Spectacular views. Charming locals. He wondered if he would see his world this way if he was at leisure. Wish you were here, they wrote, and he did. There was something so cheering about postcards. When the odd injudicious or arrogant guest complained about the pension or his mother’s cooking, he had no compunction about throwing the card away, less out of loyalty to her than a sense that such grousing somehow failed the form.

  He’d only sent her one postcard himself, from Paris, where he’d gone on a two-day pass shortly before his promotion. He’d bought two cards—unable to decide which to send—the first of the Ritz, the lobby of which he’d sat in for thirty reverent minutes. If asked about his ambitions, he might have admitted to hopes of a modest addition to the old pension, perhaps a bar, so that they might call themselves an inn, but privately he dreamed of managing a grand hotel with liveried staff and a ballroom. And a suite for his mother. But he couldn’t confess that to her. Instead, he sent the other card, of the Arc de Triomphe. They’d seen it together four years earlier in newsreels, and she’d applauded as the long grey column of troops passed beneath it. “That’s that,” she’d told him, leaning over. “The war will be over now.” His own teenage dejection at the thought of missing his chance to fight had been in such contrast to her relief. It was the first time he’d ever seen her clapping, the soft beat of her gloved hands (she still dressed for the cinema) keeping time with the marching. He wrote that he’d walked through the arch himself, though he’d done it shyly, hands in pockets.

  He wonders what he would send her now—a picture of the white cliffs of Dover, he thinks, and at once rejects it. As if he were on holiday, as if he were a tourist!

  Dear Mutti, he tries again. Dear Mutti. Dear Mutti. Then, I am safe.

  And after a moment that seems all there is to say. The one thing that will bring her comfort. He lays his pencil down, exhausted.

  IN TRUTH, he had been relieved to see the white cliffs looming over the hold of the landing craft. More grey than white, they were the first sight of land over the high metal sides of the boat since the ramp had been drawn up, dripping, on the shore at Normandy, and the men welcomed it with a thin cheer, those few of them not bent over and heaving on their boot tops.

  They’d sat in the beachhead stockade in France for two long days until, on the evening of the seventh, a lone Messerschmitt, the first they’d seen since the shelling began the previous dawn, dipped out of the twilight and strafed the beach. The slumped prisoners leapt to their feet with a roar, watching the twin plumes of cannon fire stitch across the sand, baying themselves hoarse, until the neat dotted lines had begun to leap towards them. The plane had pulled up at the last moment, only the fine grit thrown up by it’s fire pattering over them, but not before the cheers had died in their throats and they’d flung themselves to the ground.

  The near miss had galvanized the British into getting them off the beach. They’d been reluctant to waste manpower on the prisoners, but it wouldn’t do to have them die in Allied hands, whatever the poetic justice of deaths under German fire.

  So on the morning of the eighth, they were assigned to one of the empty landing craft that had already disgorged it’s men. They started gathering their few remaining possessions, but then a column of Tommies carrying stretchers came over the dunes and made for the ramp. “Hey, we saw it first,” some wag called, but then they noticed the arm of one of the men on the stretchers swing free, a grey uniform sleeve appearing from the blankets, and they pressed forward to the wire, calling names. A couple of the prone figures stirred, and one raised his bandaged head. The figure seemed to study them for a second, the gaps for his eyes the only dark spots amid the white bandages, and then lay back, silencing them. Karsten, watching from over another man’s shoulder, suddenly wanted to find Heino, who’d long since melted into the crowd, find him and shake him. That could have been us, he’d tell him fiercely, squeezing the boy’s bandaged hand until he yelped.

  They had to wait most of the rest of the morning until another landing craft lurched onto the beach, and they looked on impassively as barbed wire was strung around the edge of it’s hold and the machine-gun mountings altered to allow them to overlook the cargo space.

  “Off to invade England, lads,” someone quipped, but none of them laughed. A newsreel crew hurried up as they were embarking, and Karsten watched the men ahead of him, Heino among them, bow their heads. He nudged those on his left and right, coaxed them into wheeling round, marching backwards up the ramp to spoil the shots. “They won’t know whether we’re coming or going.” Only a few—the most exhausted and dazed—went along; Schiller, when Karsten called to him, just shook his head, less in refusal than disappointment, it seemed. Still, Karsten felt a small flush of victory as the cameraman threw up his hands. But then he was inside the stinking landing craft, the floor awash with the days-old vomit of the invasion troops. Gulls pecked at it, flying up screaming only when the men kicked them away.

  “What guts!” someone cried, to laughter. But elsewhere, Karsten saw, the men were disgusted and fearful. He looked up at the machine guns. “We could all be slaughtered here and our bodies dumped at sea,” a man next to him whispered, and Karsten, reminded of their own hot guns pouring fire down the yawning throats of these craft, told him to shut up. “Oh, yes, sir!” the man mocked.

  And then the ramp swung closed on the littered beach, and the engines churned into life, sucking the craft back off the sand and starting it’s slow, wallowing turn, the waves slapping against the steel. With no view of the horizon from within the deep hold, their own vomit was soon mixing with that of their enemies, washing in and out of the oily bilges. They’d been too sick to be afraid after that. A queasy blessing, Karsten thought, a welcome distraction from the guns leering down at them.

  The fear had returned soon enough on dry land. They’d been marched up from the docks under heavy guard, and for the first time Karsten felt himself truly in enemy territory. This was England. The guards even seemed more foreign than those in Normandy. There, at least, they had all, German and British alike, been strangers to France. Outside their bunker, the medic who had come to bandage Heino’s hand had passed around his canteen—the water tasting like champagne, so glad were they to be alive—but Karsten couldn’t imagine sharing a canteen with these guards, couldn’t think of anything he had in common with them. And beyond them he felt the crushing, suffocating sense of a whole nation’s hatred. he’d felt the raw edge of French resentment for les Boches before, of course—that insolent blankness—but there had been a place for them in France, albeit one made by money, in the cafés he’d frequented, or in the warmth of Françoise’s arms. Here he couldn’t imagine any place for himself, felt that each step he took into England was making him more hated.

  After they’d disembarke
d, on the march up from the docks, he had seen figures in the distance, on rooftops, on ships in the harbor, walking the ragged cliff tops. They were just specks really, distant, barely distinguishable figures, but he’d hunched over at the sight of them as if they were snipers, flinching from walking sticks and raised arms. As they passed through the steep, narrow streets, there was some booing, and he found himself looking down, unable to meet the eyes of those watching.

  The transit camp they were marched to was ten trudging miles outside the town, at an old racetrack. Rows of tents had been set up in the infield, and barbed wire laced around the rails. Jeeps circled the course where horses had once run, and instead of the flash of binoculars in the grandstand, there was the glint of fixed bayonets.

  They had been herded into a long barn, divided into pens for the horses, judging by the stink of manure. Karsten was separated from Schiller and Heino, shoved into an enclosure with an assortment of men from other units. He’d kept himself to himself, squatting in one corner, ignoring the rest, but after a while one of them sank down cross-legged in the dusty straw beside him.

  “What I’d give for a smoke,” the fellow muttered. “Don’t suppose you’ve got one?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just as well, probably. I’d burn this whole shambles down, if I had a light.”

  “How’d they get you?” Karsten asked. It was the inevitable, ever-present question; he’d already learned to ask it first.

  Except this time the other fellow said, “Surrendered.” He ran a hand over his close-cropped head. “Never would have thought it.”

  Karsten nodded miserably.

  “You too, then?”

  “Me? No. Knocked cold by a chunk of masonry during the shelling. Woke up with a gun in my face.” He could barely recall whose story it was, just how much he’d envied the fellow who told him.