The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  “Hallo, luv,” he calls, as her eyes adjust to the gloom. The only light in the barn is the sun coming through the door and the gaps in the plank walls. “Can’t understand how these lost their edge,” he says, running a finger down one blade. Esther’s overheard Parry down the pub saying the boys snipped through the wire fence at the camp with shears, but she keeps her mouth shut.

  “So, what’s the palaver?”

  “Better come see. The upper pasture’s turning into a grandstand.”

  “No!”

  She nods, and behind him she hears more running, sees the shadows of hurrying figures flowing along the back wall of the barn, flickering through the chinks in the wood.

  “Bugger,” Arthur swears—in English, as is his habit. He rises from the shearing bench he’s been straddling, yanks his cap off the nail behind him, and calls for the dogs. They’ll be in the hay somewhere, napping in the heat, and sure enough, a moment later they trot into the yard, yawning pinkly. Arthur is already past the gate when he turns and looks for Esther, who is hanging back. “Come on, then.” It’s the same brusque tone he uses on the dogs, and she finds herself following automatically. He sets a fast pace, making a beeline for the ridge, kicking up sparks of dew. Esther weaves a less direct path behind him, picking her way around the rough ground. Mott, the older dog, stays close to her, leaping from tussock to tussock, while Mick, the youngster, scurries ahead of Arthur, glancing back anxiously. This is how they work—one dog to push the sheep, one to steer them. She can feel Mott trying to press her on, tacking back and forth behind her, but she’s in no hurry, only putting one foot in front of the other out of alarm for Jim, the mischief he might get into.

  She wonders whether she’ll see Colin, what it’ll be like. He’s become almost an abstraction to her lately. She can barely recall his face, but then the moist brush of his tongue comes back to her—not his lips, not the prickliness of his mustache, just his flickering, probing tongue filling her mouth. She has seen a few of his mates in the street, sappers she recognizes from the pub, and felt their eyes, heavy, on her. He’s talked, she’s sure, but she’s less certain what he might have said. Not the truth, she thinks. Something more colorful, boastful. And if he’s told his friends, she wonders how long before someone in the village hears something. It’s this she fears more than anything, dimly sensing that what he did to her can’t in the end be rape if no one else knows. She suspects that what kills the poor girls raped in films and books, finally, is shame. All those hands over mouths, all those horrified looks. But the sappers will leave soon—today, tonight. Everything will be in the past then, able to be forgotten, provided no one else knows.

  Above her, she makes out Jack by his limp, picking his patient way along the crest and then gone, down the other side. A moment later Arthur crosses the ridge. There’s a sharp gust from the valley below, and she sees his jacket billow like black wings, hears the cloth snap, and then he, too, is down off the edge and out of sight until she crests it herself, minutes later, hair flying in her face. The wind has blown the sky clear, and from this height she can see the Llyn Peninsula angling away all the way to Caernarvon, the old castle walls shining palely in the sunlight. But then another gust batters her legs, pressing her light summer dress against her. She feels a sudden ache in her breasts and pulls her cardigan, an old one of her mother’s, tighter around her as she descends.

  Half the village seems to be scattered below—everyone from butcher Williams, still in his starched white coat, to Blodwyn Parry, the constable’s dowdy daughter (“Blod Plod” to the local boys), even the Reverend Morris, who must be wondering what he has to do to get this kind of turnout of a Sunday. Esther notices her father slowing as he reaches the crowd, reassured to see the flock farther down the slope, perfectly content, drifting over the lower pasture. Arthur nods to some on the fringe of the crowd, shakes hands with others. People move out of his way—it’s his land, after all—and his progress reminds Esther of how the dogs part a flock. Sheepish, she thinks. The villagers feel sheepish. The word appears before her in her own flowing copperplate. She’s been having these spells lately when words, English words, seem newly coined, as if they’re speaking to her alone, as if she’s seeing the meanings behind them. She’s conscious of her lips, her tongue, forming them. It makes her feel like a child again, learning the words for the first time.

  Entering the crowd herself, she finds it still, quiet. The villagers stand around, the men smoking, the women with their arms folded on their aproned chests, some of them still breathing heavily from the climb, and the children nudging each other as if at chapel—everyone looking, but no one pointing, downhill, beyond the quietly grazing flock, to the men behind the fence.

  It is the first time any of them have seen the enemy.

  The Germans—the very word means something different now, something more, Esther thinks—are standing in loose ranks. The only ones she’s seen before have been at the pictures, in newsreels—the famous ones, like Hitler and Goring, Goebbels and Hess, and then the others, marching by like so many extras. The makeshift parade ground where they’re gathered fifty yards below includes the former holiday camp’s playing fields, and from the hillside the touchlines of the old football pitch are still faintly visible, like scars. To Esther the fences around the camp look like the markings for some new game.

  A Union Jack—twin to the tiny one flickering from the turret of the distant castle—crackles from the blazing new flagpole rising above the camp, like one of the pins in Jim’s map.

  Beneath it a British officer, the light flashing off his glasses like a semaphore, is standing on a box calling names from a list—“Schiller. Schilling. Schmidt, Dieter. Schmidt, Hans. Schneider”—and the Germans are barking “Ja,” one by one, the words, clear but distant, carried up the hillside by the crisp breeze. Ja, she whispers to herself experimentally. Once in a while one of the Germans will repeat his name, and she realizes with a little start that they’re correcting the pronunciation.

  “Weber?”

  “Veber! Ja!”

  She glances at the new soldiers, the guards. They have the black-and-white armbands of MPs, and their officers wear smart red bands around their caps that distinguish them from the sappers. A group are walking the perimeter fence, checking the wire, pulling on the posts with all their strength. She sees them stop at one point for several minutes, and a stocky private throw himself against the fence, bounce off, throw himself again. To her left and lower down, some of the lads are pointing to the MPs. This must be where they cut through the wire, she thinks; the MPs are inspecting the repairs. She sees Jim in the knot of boys and starts to make her way down to him. He’s standing next to one of the ringleaders, Stan Robinson, one of the few evacuees to hold his own among the locals and a nasty piece of work, though he’s not much to look at. A skinny albino who goes by the nickname Pinkie, he seems as breakable as china, and Esther wonders whether this is why boys submit to his bullying without fighting back.

  Jim is rapt when she stops beside him, his eyes wide as if they can’t take enough in. “Come on,” she tells him quietly. “Come and see Mott.” The dog, curled up and panting at Arthur’s feet, is a favorite of the boy’s, although her father doesn’t like him making a fuss over a working dog. But Jim doesn’t even turn to her, just nods downhill and whispers, “Nasties.” He must have picked up the pronunciation from her father.

  Pinkie makes a sharp gesture. “Nazis,” he hisses, and there’s such roughness to his voice that the smile dies on Esther’s face.

  “Don’t talk to him like that.” But Pinkie just pushes past with his cronies, and after a glare at her, Jim follows. She hears him muttering, “Nat-sees, nat-sees, nat-sees,” with precisely the same air of impatience.

  The boys drift down the hillside, hanging around the lower fringe of the crowd, then are led away by Pinkie until they form a little island of their own below the adults. To get to Jim now, Esther sees she’d have to cover open ground, and she moves back
towards her father.

  She looks into her neighbors’ faces as she slips by them, wonders how they’re feeling. The Lewises have a son, Denny-Jon, in the desert, and their expressions are flinty. Lona Lewis claws the air, swiping at a fly. But in the eyes of others Esther sees something else. Mrs. Roberts, for instance, who waves her over.

  “I can’t help thinking,” she whispers. “Perhaps these fellows were captured by my Rhys, do you reckon?”

  “You’ve heard from him, then? He’s over there?”

  She shakes her head in disappointment, just like in class. “Not a word. But he must be over there, don’t you think? Where else would they send him? He couldn’t tell me even if he did write, but I’d still like to know if he’s looking after himself, getting enough food, if it’s cold.”

  “I’m sure it’s summer there too,” Esther says, confused.

  “Oh, I know, I know. Only I was thinking of knitting him a scarf and gloves, and I should make a start now if he’s going to have them by the autumn, allowing for the pace of the mails over there.” She says this last with a hint of disdain. They stand side by side, staring silently at the Germans. “I bet they know,” Mrs. Roberts says after a second, and Esther could swear she’d like to go down and quiz them.

  The older woman sighs heavily.

  “And they call it the fatherland,” she says, as if to herself. “I wonder how the mothers feel about that. How did they ever let the men get away with that one?” She laughs wryly, turns to Esther. “You know, when I watch the newsreels, I keep thinking I’ll catch sight of Rhys in a parade or something. Wouldn’t that be a turn-up for the books. Our Rhys on the silver screen.” She grins at Esther. “You’d like that, I bet. He was always saying what a film fanatic you are.”

  Esther keeps her eyes on the Germans. There’s a trace of disapproval in the older woman’s voice, but whether it’s to do with Esther and Rhys, or whether it’s just that Mrs. Roberts thinks Esther should be reading more and going to the pictures less, she can’t be sure. She still has the copy of Tess that Mrs. R loaned her when she left school. Esther was supposed to borrow a book every few weeks, to keep up her reading, but she’d never finished Tess, sensing within twenty pages that it’s tale of rural poverty would grate on her, and Mrs. R eventually stopped asking about it. Since then, all Esther’s read is Margaret Mitchell and Daphne du Maurier. “Escapism!” Mrs. R would say.

  “I should get back to my father,” Esther says after a pause, and Mrs. R nods absently.

  When Rhys proposed and Esther said no, he’d looked nonplused for a long, slack moment. “Mam would love it,” he tried, and she’d snapped, “You’ve never told her!” He shook his head mournfully. “Wanted to surprise her.” Esther forced herself to maintain a stony silence until he added, “Everyone else already thinks we’re walking out together.” As if that were an argument! Wishful thinking, more like. Besides, she’d told him, she didn’t care what everyone thought, though now she wonders, did she really say that?

  She finds Arthur at last, waits beside him for the roll call in the camp to stutter to it’s end. A clipped English voice calls, “Dis-missed,” followed by a sharp command in German, and the ranks, so orderly a moment before, dissolve. There’s a rush towards what Esther guesses is a mess hut, where a queue begins to form. She studies the Germans—a crew of submariners captured in port, if the rumors are to be believed. They’re not what she’s imagined; many are young, as far as she can see, some so fair they seem to gleam in the sun. Mostly, though, they look thin and a little tatty, their uniforms the color of wet sky.

  “A sorry shower,” Arthur sighs.

  It’s odd, she thinks, to see the enemy like this after years of hearing their planes droning high overhead. She’s seen the concrete blockhouses built as shore defenses. She’s seen the ribbed wreckage of one of their bombers on the beach like a dead whale. But it wasn’t like when the training aircraft from the local base went down last year and she cried for the three young crewmen burned to death who had drunk at the pub. She hadn’t been able to imagine the men who’d died in the German plane. Even after Eric’s death she couldn’t feel anything towards the pilots who dropped the bombs; they seemed so far above her, beyond the range of her emotions. She tries to decide how she feels about Germans now. It seems important. She ought to hate them, she thinks, and she supposes she does, but she can’t quite muster the heat of anger. She doesn’t know them, after all; whatever they’ve done, it doesn’t feel like they’ve done it to her.

  She catches sight of Colin suddenly. He’s coming along the lane, kit bag over his shoulder. She’s actually surprised she still recognizes him, that he hasn’t grown a beard or gone gray, that he looks the same. She watches him join another of the sappers she knows from the pub—Sid, she thinks his name is. The two of them carry their bags out of the gates, toss them up into a waiting lorry. They loiter, chatting, Colin throwing a glance, then another, up the slope before they set off, strolling along the wire, peering in at the men they’ve built the camp for. She feels an almost overpowering urge to spit, the tiny ball of saliva fizzing and bubbling on her tongue, forces herself to swallow it. Whatever she feels about the Germans, she realizes, seems pale compared to what she feels about Colin.

  A thin blue cloud of cigarette smoke rises above him, and Sid dips his head to take a light. A group of Germans waiting in the breakfast queue notice them and the straggly line drifts towards the fence. She sees Colin and Sid pause; one of the Germans calls something, but she can’t make it out. Colin plucks the cigarette from his mouth, seems to wave it for a second, twirling his wrist like Basil Rathbone, then tosses it over the fence. There’s an almighty scramble among the prisoners before a stocky man leaps out of the pack. He holds his prize aloft, like a salute, before pulling it down for a deep drag. Sid flips his fag over the fence too, snapping it off his fingertips, and the same thing happens. The unlucky Germans start shouting and gesturing, and after a moment Colin and Sid light up again, take a puff, and flick another pair of cigs over the top.

  “Like feeding ducks,” Bertie Prosser cries from somewhere in the crowd, and there’s laughter. The joke passes down the hillside until the boys pick it up and start quacking. Esther sees Jim flapping his elbows and then hurrying after Pinkie and the rest as they creep downhill, through the starved-looking newly shorn sheep, into the copse of trees across the lane from the camp. Their laughter and shouts of encouragement begin to mingle with those of Colin and Sid. Don’t! she wants to call to Jim, but she knows it wouldn’t do any good. The crowd of scurrying, diving prisoners has swelled now, but the whole affair is brought to an abrupt end by a tall fellow who comes flailing into the scrum of prisoners, knocking them down, shoving them out of the way. He’s shouting something, and Esther sees him raise his arms, waving the others back, smacking the cigarette from one man’s happy face, stamping it into the soft mud.

  “Come on,” she hears. It’s Colin’s voice, suddenly quite clear. “Play the game.” Perhaps it’s the breeze carrying his voice—the appeal in it, whiny, demanding—that chills her, makes her hug herself.

  The boys are at the fence now too, forming a loose circle behind the sappers, and they take up Colin’s cry until the lanky German turns and begins to stride towards them as if the fence weren’t there. Colin lights another cigarette, holds it out to him as he advances, then throws it over the wire, but whether as a peace offering or a taunt, Esther can’t tell. She sees the boys fall back a yard. Arms are pointing from the nearest tower, a whistle blows, and then she sees, trotting from between the huts on the other side of the compound, a group of MPs in two short columns, their white truncheons drawn, pulled along it seems by a pair of huge dogs at their head.

  At the last second, the big man bends and scoops up one of the cigarettes, flings it back over the fence in a wobbly arc. But before it lands, he’s surrounded by MPs and prodded back with truncheons, the dogs snapping and leaping against their leashes whenever he raises his arms to gesticulate tow
ards the fence. Colin and Sid, she sees, have made themselves scarce, but the boys are still there, scrabbling for the cigarette thrown back their way. She sees Jim squirm his way clear and run off down the wire, whooping, holding up the still-smoking fag like the Olympic torch.

  Within the fence, the faces of Germans and MPs turn up the slope to where the villagers stand. Hands are angled to shield eyes against the sun; arms are lifted, pointing. Esther finds herself blushing, embarrassed to be caught staring, but even as she turns away, Mott, at her feet, lifts his head and offers a long howl of reply to the snapping dogs below.

  MPs are hustling down the lane toward the gang of boys, and the crowd starts to melt away, the villagers—the reverend, Bertie Prosser—not running, exactly, but drifting off over the ridge towards the village, as if on some just remembered business. Even Mrs. Roberts is beating a retreat back to her post office counter. Esther looks at Arthur, but her father has his feet planted. It’s his land, and he’ll be damned if he’s chased off it, but he does send Mick and Mott down to move the sheep, whistling and calling commands, as if this has been his intention all along. She’s conscious of the men in the camp watching the dogs’ work with interest. The boys are scattering before the soldiers, and she looks anxiously for Jim, runs down a little way until she spots him, heading uphill.

  She waves and waits as he hurries towards her, beaming, while behind him the guards pull up and return to the camp. “Did you see?” he says breathlessly when he reaches her. “Did you see?” He brandishes the smoldering cigarette, puckers his lips around it for a moment, and pulls it away with a smack, and Esther, before she can think to stop herself, gives him a wallop that sends the glowing butt flying and makes him stumble to one knee. “Haven’t you got into enough mischief down that camp?” she begins, but then she stops. There’s a faint cheer—from the other boys, she thinks—but when she looks round wildly, she sees it’s from the men below.