The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  There’s been no mention of the absent planes, for instance, he realizes as he stands at the fence one morning and stares up at the high hillside, watching the flock drift across it like a cloud across a clear sky. He’s been fascinated by the sheep ever since he saw the shepherd gather them once, marveling at the way he whistled commands to his dogs, sending them racing in long curving arcs to flank the flock, head it off. Like a general running a campaign, he told himself at the time, almost picturing the arrows of attack and retreat laid over the grass. And then he understands why the men don’t talk about the planes: they know what it means. The lines are being pushed east; the front is moving farther and farther from them. They’re falling out of range of their own air force.

  Now when he watches the shepherd working the sheep, the flock pressing together, rippling over the hillside, he can’t help thinking of a great white flag. He tries to call the dogs himself, putting two fingers in his mouth to whistle, others around him taking it up, but even the nearest dog only stops for a moment, cocking it’s head, and then, with a flick of the ears, dismisses them, races on.

  Eleven

  CONSTABLE PARRY sternly warns them all at the pub the week after the Germans arrive that they’re not to gawp at the prisoners. He’s paid a courtesy visit to the camp, met with the CO. “Prohibited by the Geneva Convention,” Parry tells them, swelling with pride. It’s not every day he gets to enforce international law. “The major’s required to protect the men in his custody from violence, vigilantism, and injurious public curiosity such as might serve to make them subject to scorn or ridicule.” The grave effect is reduced by the constable’s smile of triumph at the end of this speech, like a child who’s just recited a lesson from memory.

  “Bloody hell,” Harry says. “Hear that, Mary? The buggers have only gone and written a law against making fun of someone.”

  Parry ignores them, asks Jack to lift the ban on soldiers and invite the major and his men to the pub. “This is a new bunch, after all. Got to let bygones be bygones.”

  Esther’s resigned to it. She knows that Jack needs the cash.

  “They’re still English,” Arthur points out.

  “I’ll vouch for these,” Parry tells him. “They’re policemen themselves, after a manner of speaking. Brother officers.”

  “Just so long as the long arm of the law reaches into their pockets,” Jack says.

  Parry ushers the major and a captain, the camp medical officer, into the lounge the very next night. The doctor is a rumpled heap of a man, but it’s the major who draws the eye. He’s missing an arm, his right, below the elbow, a polished swagger stick clamped under the stump, the brass ferrule at it’s tip winking in the lamplight. Jack, the constable is politely explaining to this personage, was also wounded in service of his country, and Jack slaps his leg.

  “Where was it, Jackie?” Parry calls, and Jack tells him, “The Somme.”

  “How about you, Major?”

  “County Mayo,” the major says flatly, and the bar stills, the long silence measured in the drip of the pumps.

  “He’s a Black and Tan,” Esther hears someone murmur behind her in Welsh. Even she’s heard of their bloody exploits in Ireland. Arthur and some of the other nationalists, she knows, have a grudging admiration for the IRA, some of whom were held in Welsh prisons in the twenties.

  “What can I get you, gentlemen?” she asks stiffly.

  The major glances past her at the bottles lined up against the wall. “Would you happen to have a drop of Madeira?”

  There’s a faint ripple of laughter through the bar, and he glares around balefully while Esther glances at Jack in confusion, mouths, “Madeira?”

  “Somewhere round here,” Jack tells her, feeling under the bar and pulling out a dusty bottle. He waves her over, whispers, “I only keep it for the ladies on Boxing Day.”

  Esther sets out two glasses, starts to pour, but the major holds up a finger—“If I might”—lifts the bottle in his one good hand, and carries it over to the corner table, the captain following with the glasses. They proceed to drink their way through the entire bottle, the locals looking on with mounting interest, less at the stolid captain, who seems unaffected, than at the major, who rapidly becomes the worse for wear, red-faced and listing, and yet never relinquishes his hold on the swagger stick tucked in his armpit. “It’s like a death grip,” Harry marvels. Even when the major, having called for another bottle and been told apologetically by Jack that he’s just drunk the only one, staggers to his feet and calls for their driver, the swagger stick stays impressively erect, as Mary notes.

  It’ll be the last time they see him in the Arms. “Drunk us dry,” Jack laments when he hears the major’s taken to frequenting the Prince. By the end of the week, the story has gone the rounds and is already a local legend. Esther even sees Jim marching around the yard with a sawn-off broomstick under his arm.

  “Good riddance. Bloody Black and Tans,” Bertie grumbles.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Harry twinkles. “He seemed ’armless enough.”

  The major’s absence is a boon for business at least, since his men make it a point to steer clear of their officers when drinking. They’re all right, Esther supposes, but it’s odd to have the pub full of strangers again, to hear so many English voices drowning out the Welsh. She serves them with lowered eyes. They seem to press upon her, arms stretching for their pints or proffering their money (she prefers them to leave it on the counter rather than have their fingers paddling in her palm). The lacquered oak bar seems suddenly flimsy—she can even smell them across it, the pong of Brylcreem—and the passage behind it feels narrow as a pen. At least on the walk to and from the pub she still has the reassuring weight of the scissors bumping against her hip, though the point has worn a hole in the lining of her coat pocket. She takes to standing behind the pumps, or near Mary when she’s around, even if that means spending time with Harry, too.

  Actually, she’s been grateful for his blowzy presence on a couple of occasions. She’s become uncharacteristically clumsy of late, slopping drinks, letting the pumps overflow, fumbling with glasses, twice in one night letting full pint mugs slip through her fingers, shattering on the slate flagstones behind the bar. What she hates is the moment of stillness after the smash when everyone turns to her, the stares of the men, and then the outbreak of catcalls and whistles. But Harry somehow makes it all right, turning it into a joke, raising a long stiff arm (she thinks for a second it’s a Heil Hitler salute, until he puts a curled fist to his lips), pretending there’s a bottle hidden behind it. The idea is she’s sneaking a few in the back, but at least everyone turns to look at Harry. Except Mary, who’s probably seen the act a thousand times. Mary, in fact, is the one she’s most afraid of, Mary raising her plucked eyebrows quizzically.

  “What’s up, luv?” she asks one night in late July, when Harry’s in the gents. “You can tell your Auntie Mary.”

  And in truth Esther has thought of telling Mary—she’s a woman of the world, after all, she won’t be shocked—but there’s never a chance with Harry around. Esther sits up Monday nights listening to the radio for the opening bars of “There’ll Always Be an England,” the signature tune of their show, The Finest Half Hour. They have a recurring skit, a bawdy little routine called “Lil and Bill,” in which Bill keeps pursuing Lil and she keeps fending him off. When Bill brags about his manhood or his romantic exploits, Lil drops into a Churchillian growl: “Nev-ah have so many heard so much about so lit-tle!” Bill even told her once “to think of England,” and, holding her breath, Esther heard Lil come back, “I am, I am. No surrender!” It made her yearn to tell Mary about Colin, blurt it out, but now, facing her, something about the way Mary leans a little drunkenly across the bar makes Esther stop, fearful of being laughed at: You what, luv? With who? Col-in-out-shake-it-all-about!

  Mary sees her hesitation now, wags a long finger. “That’s no way to keep a secret!”

  “Secret?” Harry asks, coming back.
He always has a banty little bounce to his stride after going to the gents, ready for action again. “What secret’s that, then?”

  Esther holds her breath, but Mary gives her a wink.

  “Yours,” she tells Harry. “Esther was just asking where you’re really from.”

  “Where I’m from?” Harry splutters. “You know, I think I’ve forgotten. Twenty years on the music-hall circuit will do that for you. Anyway, best way to keep a secret is that. Forget it! Besides,” he says, leaning closer, “my big secret is the Secret of Comedy.” He looks left and right. “Be honored to share that with you. You just have to ask. Go on!”

  “All right,” Esther says gamely. “What’s the secret of—”

  “Timing!” Harry bawls in her face, and starts laughing so hard he begins to cough. The punch line smells of hops.

  “Sorry, luv.” Mary pats her hand. “Let you walk into that one. But how else you gonna learn? Listen,” she whispers when Harry’s distracted again. “The only way to keep a secret is not to let on you’ve got one, see. Soon as someone knows you’ve got one, pretty thing like you, they’ll come up with all kinds of ideas! Like about you and that nice young Rhys.” Esther flinches, and Mary laughs. “And the moral is, choose your secrets carefully.”

  Mention of Rhys makes her think of Mrs. R. It’s been almost two months since she’s heard anything from her son, and at the post office she tosses others’ letters back and forth across the counter brusquely, as if touching them offends her. For her own part, Esther has noticed couples fall silent when she joins the end of the queue for the cinema. It infuriates her. Rhys is just failing again, she thinks, the way he failed all through school. He should be ashamed of himself. But all the same, she stops Jim from asking Mrs. R about him at every chance.

  Rhys’s silence may be why Jack has been so decent about Esther’s clumsiness in the bar, all the breakages. he’d be within his rights to dock her wages, but he’s patient for the first couple of weeks, happy to see the pub full again.

  “Chalk it up to busyness,” he tells her when another glass slips through her hand, and Harry roars, “Bombs away!” Jack bends down to help her pick up the pieces, plucking the shards out of the foam as she stammers an apology. She smiles then, and he tells her, “There’s a sight hasn’t been seen around these parts for a while.” He winks and inclines his head towards the bar. “And I know a few other folks wouldn’t mind seeing it, I bet. Smile never hurt in this business.”

  She knows then she’s been letting him down, and she stands up, tucks the hank of hair that has fallen forward behind her ear, and decides to make an effort.

  There’s been a young, hangdog American flyer nursing a beer at the corner of the bar all night, chewing gum between drinks, his jaw working away as if in angry conversation with himself. When he orders another, she sees his hands shaking and he makes a wretched face. “Steady as a crock.”

  She sets the beer before him gently, and asks him about himself. He’s a belly gunner in a B-something-or-other, waiting to fly on to a base in East Anglia. What’s that like? she wants to know, and he tells her morosely, “You know what they say about not looking down when you’re scared of heights? Well, I can only look down.”

  “A flyboy afraid of heights!” She laughs, and he mumbles glumly, “Among other things.”

  She asks him why he’s there alone, and he explains that his crew aren’t much interested in him. “There’s no percentage in it. Belly gunner’s average life expectancy is two and a half missions.”

  She thinks he’s joking. “You can’t have half a mission, silly,” and then he looks over and it dawns on her. “Oh.” She’s been hanging around Harry and Mary too long, she thinks. Everything seems like a gag.

  It touches her, his loneliness, and to change the subject she asks where he’s from, and he says, “Rhode Island,” and she leaps on this. “Where the chickens come from!” she cries, excited to recognize the name. They have a half dozen of the rusty pullets with their rumpled feathers at the farm. But Harry, beside her, bursts into laughter—“Oh, you’re learning, girl!”—and the airman grimaces: “Funny.” She’s instantly sorry, the more so because Harry has started clucking and crowing on his stool, and the guards, jealous she’s never given them the time of day, are laughing uproariously.

  Harry takes it as his cue to launch into a joke about a fellow who goes into a bar and orders three pints every night. “One for himself and one each for his two brothers, fighting in Burma and France, see.”

  But Esther can’t take her eyes off the poor young American, his furious chewing. She begins to explain the misunderstanding, imagining that if she can just ask him about the chickens seriously—how did they get that name? they are awfully red, aren’t they?—she might convince him of her sincere interest in poultry. But then she stops, simply astounded that she can hurt him, this fighting man.

  Harry prattles on beside her: “And then one night he just orders the two pints, and the barmaid says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss, sir. Can I ask, was it your brother in Burma or your brother in France?’”

  It seems so unlikely, the stricken look on the American’s face, almost a joke, that she smiles to herself. She sees him swallow hard, and even this is funny, and she starts to laugh out loud, watching him pull his cap on and flee, his beer unfinished.

  “You’ve heard it,” Harry says in a hurt voice, looking round. But she shakes her head, waves him on.

  “Well, he just looks at her and says, ‘Neither, luv. I’m just on the wagon.’”

  And Esther laughs even harder.

  “There you go,” Jack says, slipping past her down the bar, and she understands that as far as he’s concerned she can break any number of glasses, and hearts too, so long as she keeps her own intact.

  She isn’t much friendlier to the guards afterwards, but at least she stops dropping drinks. She tries to feel guilty about the airman, but she can’t. Any hurt she could have caused him seems so trivial, yet she also finds herself feeling the smallest thrill when she recalls it.

  Twelve

  AT CILGWYN, Esther and Jim are barely talking since she slapped him. Arthur looks from one to the other, more baffled by their silence than their previous chatter in English. The boy’s bike lay in the yard where he dropped it for two days, before Esther picked it up one night, late for work, and rode it to the pub. He doesn’t need it anyway, she tells herself, now that the school holidays have started. She uses it whenever she goes to work now, or to the pictures—always riding it as fast as she can, pell-mell up and down the hills.

  A few nights later, Jim doesn’t appear for supper. They wait for five minutes, then ten. Esther asks Arthur if he’s seen him since the afternoon, and he shrugs—“He’ll come when he’s hungry”—spears a floury potato, starts to eat. She sits still, as if she were a part of the table setting along with the knife and fork. Jim’s made himself scarce since school ended, but she knows where he is. She’s seen the white glow of the camp lights over the ridge each evening, like a moon that never quite rises.

  She leaves Arthur at the table, his mouth full, shaking his head, and she strides over the hill in search of the boy, calling Mott for company. On the climb, she imagines all the trouble he could get into; on the way down, all the trouble she’ll give him. She gets as far as the trees above the camp, slipping into them unobserved in the deepening dusk, before she spots the boys on their bellies in the ditch running alongside the lane. Something about their wariness makes her slow and then stop, leaning up against a tree. It takes her a moment to find Jim at one end of the line. He has his fists pressed to his eyes, and for a moment she assumes he’s crying, starts from her hiding place, but then she realizes, Binoculars, he’s pretending they’re binoculars. And she finds herself turning to look where he’s looking, at the men behind the fence.

  They seem so aimless at first, drifting across the parade ground. Then gradually she sees others scattered around the buildings, sitting or standing, talking or writ
ing letters. A group squat in the dust—playing cards, she guesses from the way they move their hands. Some are even dozing in the heat. Perhaps it’s their idleness—a novelty to her, brought up around farmers who always have too much to do—but she finds it oddly peaceful watching the men, her heart slowing after the steep climb. She feels so observed behind the bar, it’s a relief to watch for once. It’s the same way that the darkness of the pictures relaxes her, and from the gloom of the trees the men moving across the still, bright square of the parade ground seem like figures on the screen.

  They’ve all surrendered, so she’s overheard the guards saying, their contempt barely concealed. “No danger of any of you lot doing that,” Mary had teased them, and they’d bristled at the dig. “Have you know, I’ve seen action,” one of them retorted. “In Malaya. Be there now if it weren’t for the malaria!” Harry had slapped his neck resoundingly, “Ugh! He got me!” and feigned a swoon. “It’s a wound, too!” the guard blustered, but by then the laughter was general. “Blokes!” Mary whispered to Esther. “Sensitive about their bloody honor as any girl about her virtue.”

  The boys Esther notices now out of the corner of her eye are pointing at the men, one after another—counting? she wonders—but then she sees Jim blow on his fingertips and she realizes he’s miming shooting, picking them off one by one.

  She should go down and fetch him home, but now that she’s here she doesn’t have the nerve to creep closer to the fence. She sees the flash of a match, and the face of the guard in the nearest tower is momentarily lit up against the fading sky, and she holds her breath.

  Soon the boys grow bolder—or perhaps, in the way of boys, simply restless with keeping still. They start to sing, of all things, Pinkie leading them, crouching and waving his hands like a choirmaster. She cranes forward to catch the words. “Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,” they trill, “don’t fence me in.” She recognizes the Gene Autry tune from the Saturday morning serials. They break up in giggles before they can get much further. The dog beside her stirs, and she says softly, “Settle.”