The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  She thinks of the constable’s warning, of the Geneva Convention, but suspects the boys relish the idea of breaking the biggest rules they can.

  One of the guards in the tower finally rakes his searchlight along the tree line, and the boys fall silent. It’s barely dusk, but in the gloom of the trees the leaves flare green, as if a breeze has turned them. Esther blinks, the light dancing before her, and when she can see again, the boys are flat to the ground. She thinks of Jim’s washing, the grass stains on his clothes. The searchlight swings back for one more desultory pass and then tips up against the sky, reminding her suddenly of the Twentieth Century—Fox icon. In the echoing silence after it snaps off, she can almost hear the brassy trumpet fanfare.

  The Germans for the most part ignore the boys—they mustn’t understand the words of the song, she thinks, and it seems like a mercy—though a couple stare hard into the trees. The rest start up a game of football. Do Germans even play football? she asks herself. It seems so mundane and yet intimate to see them at play. She almost expects the guards to intervene. Surely prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to play games. She studies them intently, wondering if she can tell anything about the kind of soldiers or sailors they might make from the way they dribble the ball, slide in for a tackle, but all she can think of is how young they look. The thudding of their boots on the hard earth as they chase the ball carries to her clearly.

  Below her, Pinkie starts up in a hoarse stage whisper, like a commentator on the radio: “Fritz now, playing the ball forward to Fritz on the wing, he cuts inside, crosses to the big center forward, Fritz, who sends a header into the arms of the keeper—”

  “FRITZ!” the other boys chorus.

  Esther shakes her head. She looks at the guard in his tower, but he’s hanging over the railing watching the game, his back to the dark drum of the searchlight.

  It’s a warm night, pleasant in the shadow of the trees, and she finds a dry spot, dusts it of leaves, and sits, hugging her knees to her chin. One team has taken their shirts off, or knotted the arms of their overalls at their waists, their chests glowing pale in the dusk beneath tanned faces and necks. She watches one fellow—fair-haired, so different from the dark-haired local boys—barge another off the ball, then dribble it away. He’s a strapping lad, but his flying hair makes him look delicate somehow.

  After the roughness of the collision, he’s surprisingly graceful with the ball at his feet. It looks to her as if he’s dancing with a partner. She pictures each step-over and turn as if it were printed on a sheet from Arthur Murray. And then he shoots, destroying the illusion, and the ball flies wide of the goal, skidding off the hard earth and rolling up against the fence. He stands with his hands on his hips for a moment, then trots towards it, pausing at a thin line of wire a few yards inside the fence and glancing up at the guard tower. “Yes, yes,” someone calls impatiently, and the German steps over the wire, gathers the ball, and kicks it back into play. He stops at a water bucket on the sideline on his way back, drinking from a tin cup, pouring the dregs over his head until his hair darkens. A breeze steals up the slope from the camp, ruffling Mott’s coat as he dozes, and Esther strokes the dog as she watches the men run back and forth.

  She doesn’t know where the time goes—the ball runs up against the fence over and over—but suddenly it’s nine, the men turning towards their barracks. She waits for the boys to leave first, so that at home Jim gets to ask where she’s been. “Never mind me,” she says, slamming a cold plate of food in front of him. “You’ve been at that camp.” He begins to deny it, and she tells him, “Don’t lie. You’ve been bothering those prisoners.” And he tells her scornfully, “They are the enemy, you know.”

  THE MAJOR, the constable announces to the pub, has complained about the boys’ shenanigans, threatened to send his men after them. Esther feels a fleeting fear for Jim, and yet some part of her thinks he might deserve to be caught this time. By the end of the week, the constable has extended his own rounds to include the camp. “The major appreciates the benefits of greater cooperation between the military and civil authorities.”

  “Means it’s beneath our dignity chasing kids,” one of the guards mutters.

  Parry just shrugs. He has no intention of driving the boys off himself. “They’ll only be back in the village making mischief,” Esther hears him confide to Jack. “No, I’ve got other fish to fry.” He means the Germans. He reckons they’ll think twice about escaping now they’ve seen him on his rounds.

  “Escaping!” another guard scoffs. “This lot? Not likely.” He waves his white hankie. “Don’t have the balls, do they?”

  “Ladies present,” Parry coughs, and Esther lowers her eyes.

  “Wouldn’t have surrendered if they did.” The guard sets his elbows on the bar. “You only have to look at them—one half thanking their lucky stars, the other too ashamed to look you in the face. Hardly know which to pity more.”

  Still, the constable’s not to be put off. He makes a point of conducting his rounds promptly each night, proud of his punctuality, as if it shows backbone. “I might not know German, see, but I’m speaking their language. Look at their trains, man.”

  Arthur rolls his eyes. “He’s just jealous. There the army is with five hundred prisoners, and what’s he got? One little cell, not much bigger than a pantry, and all he’s ever locked up in there is taters.”

  “It’s me duty, I reckon,” Parry tells them pompously. “Protecting the local citizenry.” There’s been talk of the Germans working on local farms, like prisoners in the last war, he confides. “And if that’s so, I want ’em to know I’ll be keeping my eye on them.”

  Esther can hardly imagine the idle men she saw the other night working.

  “Work!” Harry says grimly. “Shooting’s too good for them.” And there’s an odd silence while they wait for a punch line. (Esther doesn’t hear it until the next radio show: “Saw Heinz herding cows, and I says to him, ‘Were you a farmer back home, then?’ and he goes, ‘Nein, but it’s easy for a German soldier to herd cattle. I’m just following udders!’”)

  ON HER NEXT NIGHT OFF Esther tells Arthur she’s going to the pictures, cycles to the bottom of the lane, then doubles back on foot, up the slope. She tells herself it’s to catch Jim, to make sure he doesn’t get into any more trouble, but she crouches behind a tree when she hears the metallic grind and rattle of the constable’s bike and sees Parry ride into view. Seven o’clock, she thinks; he’ll be off home soon for the tea Blodwyn’s making him. She watches him cycle by slowly, his eyes on the camp. A couple of the Germans give him a wave, but Parry just glares at them.

  Before he’s even out of sight down the lane, Esther sees the boys, Pinkie leading them, saunter out of the trees below her. On another of their “recce missions,” as they call them. Jim brings up the rear, swinging from trunk to trunk as he hurries down the steep slope, yodeling like Tarzan.

  Most of the men ignore them as before, but she sees a small knot—three or four of the younger Germans—advancing on the fence and finds herself standing, as if to run. Pinkie has his fists up and is bouncing around, throwing out shadow punches. “Wanna fight?” he calls. “You don’t look so tough.” He jabs the air in front of him, his stark white fists shining in the dusk.

  Little coward, she thinks. She hears Jim’s thin voice: “Seconds out. Ding ding.” And then one of the Germans, a stocky fellow, marches up to the wire, shrugging off his shirt, and the boys fall back a step. He grins, pops his muscles, warms up with a few swift combinations, bobbing his head and shuffling his feet, then drops into a stance, fists raised. He beckons impatiently, and Pinkie, after a second, takes a tentative swing, but the prisoner just slaps at his cheek like he’s been bitten by a flea, shakes his head.

  There’s a burst of laughter from his friends, and she can see Pinkie blushing from here. He starts to windmill his arm, winding up for a haymaker, but the German’s lost interest in him. He walks along the wire, feinting at the boys, making some of them
jump, and stops in front of Jim, the smallest, and crooks a finger. The boy looks down the line at the others, some of whom are waving him on, and she sees him throw out a small fist. The German reels, falling back into the arms of his comrades, who hoist him up, push him forward. Esther watches, perplexed by the performance, and then it occurs to her that they’re humoring the boys, playing with them. Jim seems puzzled himself, but throws out a combination to the gut, and the big man doubles over, sags to his knees, amid laughter from both sides of the fence. One of the boys holds Jim’s hand up. The winner.

  The light is fading, but the evening is still warm, the slate hillsides radiating the heat they’ve been absorbing all day. A wasp brushes her ear, it’s loud buzz making her flinch, and she shakes her hair violently. She leans against a trunk, it’s cool and rough against her neck and cheek, and studies the boys. They’re trying to talk to the Germans now, Pinkie thrusting himself close to the wire, pointing at himself, then the Germans. She slips a little lower through the trees, trying to make him out. He seems to be hurling curses at the fence, but as she listens more closely she hears a grotesque kind of English lesson taking place.

  “This’ll help you talk to the guards,” Pinkie is saying, but all the words offered for simple greetings are obscenities. “Alfweed-er-sane,” Pinkie enunciates, waving goodbye, “means ‘Bugger off!’” A man’s voice repeats the words slowly after him, to the accompaniment of giggles. “And when you meet someone, you say, ‘Pleased to fuck you!’” Pinkie says cheerily. Esther feels herself redden, with embarrassment then anger, and swats at the wasp, which has found her again. Another man, she sees, is urgently miming eating. “Oh,” Pinkie says. “What do we say when we’re hungry?” He grins at the others. “What you ask is, ‘May I have some cock, please?’ Go on, try it. ‘More cock, please!’” The German repeats it and the boys howl with laughter. It’s suddenly too much for Esther. She can’t bear to see it go on, and she finds herself pushing through the undergrowth, the brambles pulling at her legs.

  “Stop it!” she shouts, stumbling into the midst of them, arms raised, and they scatter like sheep. For a moment she has Jim’s arm, and then he breaks free and she chases them into the trees, listens to them crashing through the brush.

  “Hey,” she hears Pinkie call in the darkness. “Was that your mam, Bedwetter?” And Jim howling, “No!”

  She stares after them, stung by their laughter, but when she turns, the men at the wire are watching her silently, their eyes wide. Somehow she imagined that they’d bolt too. They’re not laughing at least, but after a second this makes her more, not less, uncomfortable.

  She looks from one to another, quickly turns.

  “Don’t go,” someone blurts in accented English, and she stops for a second as if she can’t quite believe it, as if it’s some trick. She searches their faces in the gloom, then starts to back away once more.

  “Thank you,” the voice calls, and this time she sees it’s the tall, sandy-haired one at the edge of the group who has spoken. She thinks she might have seen him playing football.

  “You’re welcome,” she responds automatically.

  There’s a hurried exchange in German, and she looks from man to man until the tall one raises a hand like a boy at school. She nods, curious about what he could want to ask her.

  “What’s your name?”

  She stares at him open-mouthed, finally shakes her head, staggers back into the trees, stands there for a long moment in the deep shade. She’s out of sight, but the men stay where they are, searching the shadows, and she keeps still, her breathing shallow.

  “Come back,” the tall one calls, and she looks at his beseeching face, marveling at it. One of his comrades tries to pull him away, and as he turns something occurs to her, and she calls softly, “If you know so much English, why don’t you tell your friends they’re not learning what they think they’re learning!”

  “I will,” he says quickly, nodding towards her voice. “I will. We were just playing with the boys. I’m sorry for any offense.”

  And he is sorry, she sees, with a kind of wonder—he actually blushes—and what’s more, he’s afraid of her leaving. She sees the fear on his face, the disappointment as she stays silent, sees his hand on the wire, and she thinks, He can’t touch me. And the thought warms her through.

  Thirteen

  HIS CONVERSATION with the girl—his tête-à-tête, as the others start to call it in coarse French accents, his rendez-vous—brings Karsten a new notoriety in the camp. A better one, he supposes. At least the men are talking to him again. They all want to know what she said to him there at the fence, what he said to her, and when he hesitates—he knows the truth will disappoint them, and besides, he’s embarrassed, ashamed to admit he kept silent while the boys mocked them—they tease him, call her his “Welsh girl” and him her “lover-boy.”

  Karsten denies it all, of course, knowing as he does so that this is part of the game, part of being a good sport. He recognizes this taunting—they’re the same ribald jokes he endured about Françoise—knows his role.

  “You’re learning,” Schiller tells him with a little nod.

  Karsten stands at the fence the next evening, hoping for a glimpse of her. Pure foolishness, he knows. It was hardly a romantic encounter, nor is the girl precisely a prize. She’d not even been wearing a dress, but rather breeches and a bulky sweater; the guards had probably mistaken her for one of the boys. A tomboy, and young, too, seventeen or eighteen. Françoise had been seventeen, or so she’d told him over dinner, but he’d never believed her. In her makeup and experience she seemed so much older. And yet there was something about this girl. The way she’d looked at him, with anger, contempt, pity even, but also as if she expected something better of him.

  It’s the first time in almost two months that he hasn’t cursed his knowledge of English, wished in fact that it were better, quicker.

  Still hoping forlornly for her to appear again, he hears a rustle in the trees on the last day of July, and as he watches, a stray sheep emerges from the undergrowth, daintily leaping across the ditch. She ambles across the lane and begins nosing in the sweet, lush grass on the other side of the fence. A crowd of men gradually gather beside Karsten to watch, drifting along with her as she crops her way back and forth. For the first time in a fortnight or more, they actually respect the warning wire, line up along it, not wanting to scare the animal, as if they are watching in a zoo.

  Karsten ignores the whispered jokes about his “girlfriend.” Someone runs to the mess, comes back with a handful of furred carrots, a greenish potato.

  “It’s not a goat,” Karsten hisses. But he creeps towards the fence, proffering the vegetables as if they are a peace offering. The ewe wisely ignores him and the food, nibbling at the grass. The tearing sound of her teeth is so loud it makes Karsten flinch. He reaches out a slow hand, touches the wire, and then stretches through to stroke her back, and for a moment she submits to it. The wool is tightly sprung and, as he pushes his fingers into it, greasy with lanolin. But what astonishes him is how warm it is. He looks back at the others with a smile of wonder, but that sets the men hopping over the wire, and the sudden movement makes the ewe shrug him off and jump away, breaking into a loping trot.

  The men watch her go.

  “You could use some work on your technique, lover-boy!” someone drawls, and Karsten shrugs, grins lopsidedly. He can still feel the wiry warmth of her fleece, the trembling tick of her heart. He can’t remember when he last touched another live thing.

  It makes him ache for escape. But when he asks Schiller if he’s heard any more rumors about a tunnel, the other rolls his eyes. “Only tunneling around here,” he says, making a pumping gesture, “is fellows into their fists.”

  By the end of the week, the girl seems an apparition, too improbable to believe in. Karsten must have imagined her. Still, he lies in his bed and thinks of her stepping out of the trees like a spirit, touches himself, guessing many of the others are doi
ng the same. But at least in his dreams, he can speak to her.

  HE WONDERS what his mother would think of his talking to the girl. He has not written to her since her letter, nor she to him. Fraternization, she’d probably call it. Of course, he hadn’t told her of Françoise either, but then they’d never talked about girls, his mother and he. He supposes that fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, have such awkward conversations, but mothers and sons? What could they say to each other?

  Perhaps she thought he’d simply absorb what he needed to know. It was hard to be an innocent in a guesthouse, especially a cheap one, not with all those bedrooms overhead. His mother never turned away business, not even those couples who, the next morning, when addressed by name, “Herr Schmidt, Frau Schmidt,” blinked at her in bafflement across the breakfast table. They used to make him burn with anger, these people lying to his mother. Sometimes he would try to catch them out, addressing them by other names, just to see if, confused, they would answer. Other times he would use their false names to their faces over and over, drilling them sarcastically. He wanted them to know he knew they were lying. Once, though, when the couple in question had hurried to check out, his mother had slapped him a ringing blow, slapped the smile of triumph right off his face. “It’s not your business,” she told him. “Learn to look the other way.” He’d stood there dumbfounded. Why, she’d known all along. “But they’re lying,” he’d begun, and she’d raised her hand again. “If I can put up with it, so can you!”

  He learned after that to recognize a slight change in her tone when she talked to these couples. He could be sitting in their cramped kitchen and hear her welcoming guests in the hall, and even without seeing them—their stiff faces with the twitchy smiles they gave each other when they thought they were unwatched—he’d know, just from the way his mother said “Wilkommen, Herr und Fran.” There was a hollowness to it, a kind of resignation—not a welcome, truly, just a weary acknowledgment. Every time such a couple checked in, more so even than the married couples, the families with children, he thought of his father. He missed him for himself, of course, though he could hardly remember him, thought of his father more as a role, an empty place at the head of the table, than as a person. But those were the moments when he felt his mother’s loss most keenly.