by Owen Sheers
“Why have they gone? Why now, Maggie? And where? You said it’s t’do with the invasion. How?”
All three of the other women looked up at Sarah in surprise. Maggie let out a heavy sigh. She recognised the falling.
“Well?” Sarah asked again, looking at the other women, her voice urgent, “Where d’you think they’ve gone? Hereford? Brecon?”
Menna began crying again and Mary’s face was drawn with worry. Sarah stood up and paced to the window. Looking out onto Maggie’s yard, she half expected to see a German troop carrier coming up the lane.
“What do you know, Maggie?” she asked, her back to the room.
“Nothing, bach,” Maggie replied. “Only … I suppose … well, that it must be to protect us.”
Sarah turned from the window. “Protect us? What d’you mean? They’ve gone. Tom, William, Jack, Hywel, The Court boys. They’ve all bloody gone.”
Mary raised her eyebrows at Sarah’s cursing.
“Well, maybe that’s it, isn’t it?” Maggie said, fixing Sarah with her eye. “Maybe we’re safer with them gone. For now.”
Menna lifted her head from her hands and turned to look at Maggie. But she said nothing more, just looked up at the dark beams, her own eyes pricking with tears, as if she’d said too much already.
“What d’you mean?” Mary said, her voice hard-edged again.
“Well,” Maggie said, speaking slowly. “It’s usually the men they want, isn’t it? In the other places they’ve been. The men they’re worried will cause them trouble. With the men gone, there’s nothing here to worry them, is there? Just us.” She broke off, removing her glasses. She looked at the faces of the three women looking back at her, all of them frowning. A thin smile lifted and fell across her lips. “But we’re not going to see any Germans here anyway, are we? I mean, what would they want here? The tractor? Some eggs? We’ve hardly got anything ourselves, and for once that’s a good thing, because it means we haven’t got anything for them either. They’re not going to bother coming all the way up here. Not in winter they won’t. No,” she continued, looking round at all of them, warming to her theme, “the only thing we should worry about is carrying on ’til they get back. And we can do that. We’ll need to help each other, of course. Like we always do, just a bit more, that’s all. Bethan can help with your two, Menna. Can’t she, Mary?”
Mary looked uncertain but gave a curt nod. “Yes, I suppose she can.”
“What about Edith?” Sarah said from the window.
“Well,” Maggie said. “Nothin’s changed for her has it? We’ll just carry on as usual with Edith, just like we always have.”
Edith Evans lived up at The Gaer, the highest house in the valley. A low-lying stone cottage with a broken-backed roof that took its name from the Iron Age hill fort that once occupied the ridge above it. Like most of the houses in the valley, The Gaer had been whitewashed, and when Sarah first moved to Upper Blaen she remembered seeing it on bright mornings, shining above the Black Hill’s shadow line thrown across the steep wall of the ridge. Its position meant that over the years she’d come to use it as a crude barometer. If she came out into the yard and The Gaer was obscured by low cloud, she knew the day was set in rain. If she could see its whitewash, bright against the hill’s tawny canvas, she knew the sun would be strong all morning.
The hill fort itself was now no more than a series of faint concentric rings buried beneath centuries of soil and grass. It was as subtle a feature on the ridge as the banks and dips of Tom’s body had been in the horsehair mattress of Sarah’s bed. Like Tom’s outline, the missing physical presence of the fort, its ramparts and defences, could be traced only by someone who knew the place intimately, who could still see what was no longer there in the earth echoes underfoot. A careful eye, sensitive to the landscape, could make out where a gate once stood or the foundations of huts where men had once slept and fought and loved and cooked. To the casual observer, however, there was nothing there, just a toothless gap in a long grassy jawbone of earth and a few faint humps beneath a tangled mass of bracken and gorse.
Edith had lived at The Gaer alone with her son ever since her husband was killed in an accident in Longtown. A motorbike skidding on black ice, him unsteady on market-day legs, his arms full with a box of groceries, still talking to the shopkeeper over his shoulder. This was before Sarah moved into the valley, but Maggie had told her how at one time there’d been a hope that after an appropriate period Edith might marry Reg at The Court. There’d even been an awkward attempt at courting, Reg stooping through the low doorway of The Gaer, a bunch of wildflowers in one hand, a leg of lamb in the other, the residue of carbolic soap cracking in the creases around his neck. But neither was made for romance. Both had only ever known their dead spouses, and their capacity for companionship had been formed and died with them. Reg might have lived at The Court, but he was of the same stock as the other men in the valley: spare of speech, tender as a wet nurse with a newborn lamb, clumsy as a schoolboy with a woman. And Edith wasn’t interested anyway. She was too busy for love or anything like it. As well as keeping The Gaer going, she had her son, Roderick, to raise. Edith had high hopes for Roderick. Tending sheep about a wind-whipped cottage on the prow of a ridge wasn’t for him. No, she wanted university for her boy, an education. Every Monday morning she’d see him off on the ten-mile walk down to Pandy, where he’d catch the train to the grammar school in Hereford. He’d won a scholarship as a weekly boarder, one of only two in the district. During the week he lodged in the town with a spinster and her brother, whose house Edith had checked over thoroughly first, running her damp finger over every lintel and door jamb. Her son would be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer even. His health must be protected. Roderick became the focus of Edith’s life, as if her husband’s death, having amputated one channel of her love, left the one still flowing to her son doubled in force to the point of breaking its banks. Which is exactly what happened when Roderick went to war and was killed in a training accident before he’d ever fired a shot in anger.
The blackout regulations had stopped them all whitewashing the outside walls of their homes, but in the years following Roderick’s death Edith stopped cleaning hers too. The Gaer’s brightness dulled with mildew and mould. The little garden of rhododendrons and azaleas, fenced in from the sparse hillside, grew wild. The slates slipped and skewed in the gales, leaving the roof a crossword puzzle of dark square gaps. Edith’s defences, once as strong and deeply rooted as those of the fort above her, collapsed under the weight of Roderick’s death, just as those of the fort had disintegrated under the weight of time.
One day William was bringing his flock off the mountain when he found Edith wandering through the bilberry bushes, barefoot, her hair wild and her hands black with the peaty soil. She’d been following Roderick’s voice, she told him. He was out on the mountain and she had to find him. She had to bring him home. Ever since then they’d made sure someone visited Edith every day. She was still fiercely independent and wouldn’t hear of moving down into the valley. With her boys gone Maggie would have had room for her. And Mary too. But Edith wouldn’t leave The Gaer. They were retreating into the hillside together, she and the cottage, sinking back into the soil. She still managed to feed herself, tended her small flock, kept a sow she offered to William’s boar every autumn. But she’d become wild in other ways. One night a couple of days after William found her ranging the hillside, Sarah took her turn to stay over at The Gaer. In the middle of the night she’d been woken by Edith’s voice drifting up the stairs. When she’d gone down to investigate, feeling her way through the dark cottage with her hands along its walls, she’d found Edith in her nightdress in the living room, a single candle throwing a weak, flickering light over the lettered board on the table in front of her. When Sarah had spoken her name, “Edith?” she’d knocked the upturned glass to the floor and started like a frightened pony, white-eyed and ready for flight. To this day none of them could work out how she’d got that boa
rd. Maggie said it must have always been there, in the cottage, that there was a lot of that stuff around after the Great War. She told Sarah that after the Somme she remembered sermons being preached down at Longtown discouraging a rash of desperate forays into the occult. It was the devil’s work, the minister had told them, knuckles white over the edge of the pulpit, this twisting of grief. But still, Maggie said, she’d known of young women all over, up all night using boards, cards, even psychics, trying to speak to the ghosts of their dead husbands, sons, and fathers.
“What’s to say they won’t be back tonight? They’ve only been gone a few hours, haven’t they?”
And now here they were, holding their own kind of séance for their own lost men; trying to conjure a reason for their leaving from the spaces they’d so suddenly left in their lives.
“Well, Maggie?” Mary continued. “What makes you so sure? Did William say anything?”
“No,” Maggie replied, shaking her head and sighing again. “No, he didn’t say anything.”
There was something in Maggie’s tone, the slightest of inflexions over the way she’d said “say” that made the other women expectant. Mary stopped her questioning and all of them looked at Maggie, silently asking her to carry on. Maggie looked back at each of them in turn as if making a calculation, weighing their responses. Eventually, under the weight of their shared gaze, she stood and went over to the dresser once more. This time she pulled a pamphlet from the middle drawer.
“But I did find this. Just now when I came back to milk the cows.”
She dropped the pamphlet on the table in front of Mary. Sarah came over from the window and looked over Menna’s shoulder, her hands on the back of the chair. The pamphlet had a dull brown cover with the same typeface as the “Stand Fast” leaflet. The title, which they could just make out under smears of mud and a hole torn at its centre, curved around some illustrations of tools; a hoe, a plough, and a spade: “The Countryman’s Diary—1944.”
“It was in the milking shed,” Maggie said. “On the floor. I only saw it because one of the heifers was standing on it.”
Mary opened the cover and turned the first few pages. Maggie sat back down. She looked beaten, deflated. Whatever had been holding her firm from within had buckled and sagged.
“Stupid bugger must have dropped it. What chance has he got if he can’t even keep hold of that?” she said, looking out the window.
As Mary turned the pages Sarah caught glimpses of headings, diagrams, and snatches of text:
SILENT KILLING … insert the knife an inch below the ear and twist … DELAY MECHANISMS I. The Time Pencil.… The Time Pencil looks rather like a propelling pencil. One end is copper, the other brass.… TARGETS I. Shell and Bomb Dumps.… IV. Semi-Tracked Vehicles.… Fix a charge of 2lb Gelignite at any of the following points.… I. The Pull Switch.… The pull switch is designed so that when a wire fitted to the eye at the end is pulled, a cap is fired.… OB Maintenance … ensure to keep all vents clear of debris.… Escape Routes.… In the event of hostile intrusion …
All of them were silent as Mary carried on turning the pages. It was not a thick pamphlet and she soon came to the last one, closing it to reveal the innocuous cover once more: “The Countryman’s Diary—1944.”
Maggie spoke first. “That’s why I think they might not be back today. Or tomorrow.”
“How …?” was all Menna could manage.
Sarah sat down at the table again. “It isn’t possible. Tom never had the time.…”
“I know, bach,” Maggie said. “I know. But there it is.” She looked at the other three women. Each of them looked as if they’d been slapped. The blood was shallow beneath their cheeks and they looked numb, lost in their thoughts, retracing days, nights, any scrap of time their husbands hadn’t been home or on the farm.
“I thought he had a woman,” Mary said at last, looking straight ahead, her eyes unfocused. “Over in Llanthony or down in Longtown. That barmaid at The New Inn. I thought it might be her.”
Maggie gave Sarah a beseeching look. Come on, girl, help me now. Now you know. Help me with this. But Sarah’s eyes were also distant, staring out the window.
“I’ll get some cake,” Maggie said, standing from her chair and wiping her eyes. “Why don’t you put the kettle on, Sarah? Mash us some more tea, bach?”
It was well into the afternoon when the women left Maggie’s kitchen, each of them walking back to their farmhouses, loosened by the resonance of that pamphlet dropped onto the table like a pebble thrown into the still waters of their lives. Their husbands had not been who they thought they were. At least, not this last year. Or had it been for longer than that? They didn’t know. All they did know was that the men had left; that they had been left. That if “The Countryman’s Diary” was anything to go by, the men had left the valley because of the invasion edging north from the southern coast. They had left to perform their duties, their secret duties. To sabotage, to kill (Sarah remembered the first time she’d seen Tom stick a pig, the resolute way he’d worked the knife into its throat … insert an inch below the ear …), and then to disappear. It was unthinkable. None of them were fighting men. William was in his late fifties and Hywel and Reg couldn’t have been far behind him. Malcolm walked with a limp, dragging his club foot like a ball and chain. Jack, Tom, and John were younger, it was true, but they’d been farmers all their lives. They’d hardly ever left the valley except for the market or the occasional farm sale. Sarah could count on one hand the nights Tom had spent away from the farm. They were not soldiers.
And yet this is what the handbook would have them believe. This is what Maggie would have them believe, and that’s why they’d agreed to tell no one about this. No one. If their husbands had kept this secret from them, their wives, then they must keep that secret too. Until the men returned they’d say nothing of their going. They’d stay in the valley and keep the farms running. There was no need to leave. Between them there was plenty of food. Maggie’s cows produced enough milk for butter and cheese for all of them. The potatoes were newly dug and the Ministry hadn’t yet collected their share. They had enough salted pork and bacon hanging in their larders to see them through the winter. Some lamb too. It would still be hard work though. Impossible, maybe, to keep all the farms going as they should, to manage the flocks. Maggie, ever the organiser, was already working out a routine, a weekly diary of mutual help. But that was nothing new. The valley had always run on a basis of cooperation. Everyone gathered one another’s hay, picked one another’s potatoes. William lent his tractor whenever it was needed. Tools, implements, horses, ploughs, all of them were shared. The only difference now was that it was just the women who were left to handle them. But still, everything would be shared. The work and the results of the work, everything. At least, everything that could be. This, this returning to empty homes, was something each of the women had to experience alone. The sitting in quiet rooms that were somehow quieter than yesterday when they knew their husbands were out in the fields. Turning your head to catch the shadow of a movement and finding nothing, again. The intimate silences of their loss, each unique and individual, shaped by the man who had gone, these each woman suffered alone. But it was best to go to their homes, that is what they’d decided. In case the men came back. In case they left a message. It was best to be there, where the men could find them.
For Sarah that first day ended as it began. All the way back up the track to Upper Blaen, she heard the dogs and their chains. Scenting her approach they’d come out of their shelter and were straining on them again, pulling and barking, taut with unspent energy. As she came back into the yard they let the chains slacken and sat back on their haunches, nudging the air with their noses.
“Hello, girls,” Sarah said.
When she let them off they spun and turned about her, slick and supple as two freshly landed fish.
Unsure what else to do, Sarah bridled Bess the pony in the back paddock and rode out bareback to check on the flock. S
he also wanted to look on the hill again. She was sure there’d be some kind of a sign up there, that Tom couldn’t have left without making some kind of mark indicating where he’d gone. She took Fly and Seren with her, weaving ahead of the pony, trotting back now and then, their heads low. She wanted them for the company but she also thought there was the chance they’d pick up Tom’s scent and somehow lead her to him.
Halfway up the slope Sarah eased Bess to a halt and turned to look back down the long V of the valley. If she were to follow her mother’s description of the Black Mountains Hand, then where she rode now was in the hollow between the thumb and forefinger. The Hatterall ridge, on her right, was the forefinger, a long slice of land pointing southeast towards Pandy with Offa’s Dyke running the length of its knuckles. The Black Hill, meanwhile, or Crib Y Gath, The Cat’s Back, as her mother would have called it, was the thumb; shorter, thicker, the last bulk of earth before Herefordshire’s patchwork of farmland. Between the thumb and the forefinger ran the river Olchon, after which the valley was named.
Just like a thumb, the Black Hill opened at a wider angle than the other hills, making the valley broader at its mouth. From where Sarah was sitting, this gave it the illusion of accessibility, a stadium view right down to the distant hill islands of Skirrid Fawr and Mynydd Merddin, rising from the lowland fields. Viewed from this lowland, however, Sarah knew the Olchon actually appeared more secluded, more secretive than the other valleys. There was something about the severity of its slopes, as if a cleaver had been driven into the soil and wrenched out with no movement from side to side. And the roads. The roads didn’t turn here naturally, warded off by the depth of the valley’s shadow. The one lane that did pass around its long bowl petered out into a track and doubled back on itself just below their farm as if retreating at the last moment from the hill in its path. No one ever came into the valley by accident. You only ever came here if you needed to, and apart from those who lived here few people ever did.
