Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  Sarah moved into the valley herself four years ago when Tom brought her to live with him at Upper Blaen, his late uncle’s farm.

  “The last valley in Wales,” her mother had said the evening before their wedding. “You’ll be living in the last valley in Wales, bach.” She’d shaken her head, her eyes glazed with tears, enjoying the small drama of the moment.

  “More like the first in England,” her father had retorted from behind his paper. “May as well live in Hereford itself as in the Olchon.”

  Her parents had spoken as if she were to travel across the country, and yet the next evening Tom only had to drive the pony and trap from Llanthony around the tip of the Hatterall ridge’s forefinger to bring his new bride home.

  It was Sarah’s first move. She’d been born in the Llanthony valley and lived there all her life. She’d gone to school in the valley, had her first kiss there, known her first death there. It was even where she’d courted Tom, taking long walks with him along its upper slopes. Llanthony was where her life was shaped and where she’d come to terms with its boundaries and borders. Her mother had been born in the valley further west again between the middle finger of Tal Y Cefn and Gadir Fawr, while her grandmother was born outside the hand altogether at a farm beside Llangorse Lake, beyond Allt Mawr. Generation by generation the women of the family had moved eastward. Like pieces of driftwood floated loose from a shipwreck, they’d been drawn towards the shallower waters of the English plain. It was a journey Sarah could trace on the inside cover of her family Bible. Along with their birth, marriage, and death dates, all of her mother’s family were there, a copperplate roll call with spots of ink dotting the facing page where the book had been closed too soon after writing. It was these names that told the story of her family’s eastward movement. From the Welsh names of her ancestors, drawn from the myths of the Mabinogion: Branwen, Olwen, and Rhiannon, to her grandmother’s Megan, her mother’s Ruth, and finally her own Sarah. With each new wave hill that rolled them nearer England, with each man that took them east, their names were smoothed in the wash of the tide. The Mabinogion was replaced by the Bible and the ornate Welsh was rounded and buffed to the simpler shapes of English.

  Every name in the Bible above Sarah’s and those of her two older brothers was matched with a complete set of dates. Some of them were pitifully similar, with only one or maybe two different numbers to set their years apart. Others, like those next to the sister she’d never known, were echoed by the same year altogether:

  Mary Lewis, April 13, 1916–May 10, 1916

  Sarah’s was the last birth date on the page.

  Sarah Lewis, March 15, 1918–

  She’d often looked at that dash leading nowhere and wondered who would write the pairing date. Whose hand at some moment in the future would pick up the pen and seal her life with carefully written numbers.

  Gathering up the reins Sarah gave Bess a tap with her heels and began riding on up the slope towards the rest of the flock, scattered about the rocky crevice of the river and over the higher ground. Three hundred hefted ewes, yearlings to wethers, their inherited borders instinctively wired within them, passed on over the generations from mother to lamb.

  As the pony picked its way along the narrow sheep tracks through the bracken, Sarah scanned the ground on either side of her, checking for sick ewes. A healthy sheep will graze with the flock but a sick one would often break away to lie on its own. The bracken was still thick at this time of year despite the hints of rust on the stems and edges of the leaves. You could pass a ewe by a couple of feet and still not know it was there. Even Tom often found them too late, when it was just the squawking of crows fighting with a buzzard that eventually led him to the carcass, already thick with maggots.

  She wondered what else she should be looking for. This was Tom’s job. This is what he did when not seeing to the lower fields. Tend and guide the flock through its annual cycle of tupping, lambing, weaning, shearing, dipping. At least they’d be staying on the upland for a few more weeks. But then the lambing ewes would need to be brought down to the meadows for flushing. It seemed impossible to Sarah that Tom wouldn’t be back by then, but what would she do if he wasn’t? She’d often watched him work the dogs, but she’d never worked them herself. With him they’d lie on either side of him, ears cocked, ready to move on his slightest instruction. Sometimes he didn’t even have to speak; the timbre of an intake of breath was enough for them to know the command he was about to give. A nod, the slightest of sounds in the back of his throat. Then, as they fanned out on either side of him, still bodies over their quick legs, he’d switch to a palette of whistles, playing the dogs at a distance as if they were tethered to his fingers by invisible lengths of string. And they were good dogs too. Even William had to admit that. Never drove the flock too fast. Could bring them all the way off the mountain just by standing, poised, in the exact positions where Tom placed them. How could she ever hope to replicate that? With her the dogs associated the hill with rides like this, or when she went picking bilberries, when they could loop out and back to her in a loose pattern of coming and going. With Tom the hill was their place of work, a tight map of pressure and release, of give and take as the flock flowed before them like a shoal, three hundred animals moving as one.

  The pony worked hard against the slope beneath her and as she leant forward on its withers she felt its shoulder muscles slipping over the bone. They came out of the bracken and the land levelled off into the mosaic of moorland and heathland of the hilltop. The last high clouds had dissolved, leaving the sky a deep evening blue. To her left the Black Mountains ranged out into the distance, buckled and shadowed, the coarse wire grass, still bleached from the summer, catching the unhindered low sun. As she rode on the view on the other side of the Black Hill revealed itself from under the ridge. A wide expanse of undulating fields, crossed and divided by hedges, punctuated by houses and hamlets, stretching out far below her, as if viewed from a low-flying aeroplane. She’d lived here for four years and yet it still managed to catch her unawares, somewhere under the ribs, every time. This contrast, from the claustrophobic view of the valley, its steep walls framing the sky, bringing your head back all the time, to this: an entire country laid out before her, tangible, open, and yet so out of reach.

  But Tom wasn’t down there, she was sure of it. He was a hill man. They all were. She remembered one of the diagrams she’d glimpsed in “The Countryman’s Diary.” A cross section of a deep underground burrow stocked with supplies, rudimentary bunk beds, a thin tunnel leading horizontally from one end, another leading up vertically from the other. A disguised entrance covered with grass and leaves. She looked back over the moorland behind her again. It was bare and massive, shot with spring flushes and pitted with dark pools filling the peaty hollows. Maybe they were here, right now, under that sparse, empty ground. Maybe they could hear Bess’s hooves above them. Maybe they could even see her. An electric thrill ran through her at the thought of Tom emerging from that tuft of deergrass there, or from under those bushes of heather. Still half turned on the back of the pony, she shouted his name to the hill again.

  “Tom!”

  She listened but again there was nothing. Just the wind, hushing and rushing in her ears, rising and falling like her own blood, like distant waves, endlessly folding against a stubbornly silent shore.

  That night Sarah tried to sleep with the dogs in the bedroom, but it was no good. Tom rarely let them into the house, let alone upstairs. They turned and whined at the side of her bed, their claws scraping on the wooden floor until Sarah took them back outside and chained them in the yard. She returned to the bedroom alone, a single candle lighting her way up the narrow staircase. Getting under the heavy layers of blankets, she stretched her hand across the sheet to feel for the impression of Tom once more. He was still there, just, but growing fainter all the time. The mattress was expanding back into his shape, like water seeping into those hollows on the hill, steadily rising up the banks until there
was no hollow, just an undisturbed surface reflecting the blankness of a cloud-covered sky.

  It was around midnight, suspended somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, that the thought came to her. If Tom was going to be away, then she wanted him to know she’d managed the farm without him; that everything was ready for him to carry on as usual when he came back. What she’d done each day, how many animals were ill when, how many eggs, how many lambs even, if he was away that long. She’d write it all in the back of the accounts book they kept in the dresser downstairs. She would write it every day so that when he returned he could read it. And once he had, he’d know how she’d spent these weeks without him. He’d know everything, just as if they’d never been apart at all.

  October 12th

  The first frost this morning. We didn’t expect that.

  Fed the pullets warm mash and gave some to the pig too. Three of the pullets laid today. Only one hen still laying.

  Helped Menna Probert pull Hywel’s field of mangels. Menna and me pulled and docked. Bethan did the cart and Mary loaded. Maggie looked after Menna’s two.

  Gone five when we finished.

  Took Bess around the flock. The cut above her fore off knee is healing good.

  Drove a batch of ewes off the heavy grazing on the top marsh.

  Maggie came and we made supper here. Still no news from her wireless today.

  Maggie said she’ll take eggs and cheese into market tomorrow.

  The leaves are turning fast. The birch is all yellow and the sycamore is browning. I saw a thrush this morning, hammering a snail shell on the wall. That tawny owl is back, calling all through the night.

  The pen felt awkward in Sarah’s hand. Her fingers were stiff from picking and docking the mangels and it slipped in her grip. It felt too thin, too fragile. She’d been writing this diary every night for two weeks now, but she still wasn’t used to it. She hadn’t written like this since school. She’d always kept the accounts, but that was different. That was numbers, dates, lists of words. The money they got from an auction of lambs, the coins she spent in the village, the stuffed sacks of freshly sheared wool, they all translated onto the pages of the accounts book. The numbers and dates she wrote represented what happened. But this diary, written at the other end of the book, the other way up, was different. She still couldn’t make her days translate onto these pages. She looked at the words she’d just written. Helped Menna Probert pull Hywel’s field of mangels. That didn’t describe how they’d spent the day at all. How they’d gathered in Menna’s kitchen for a breakfast of oatmeal and tea before tramping down to Hywel’s lower meadow. How the valley was still dark in shadow as the cart trundled and bucked over the frost-hardened ruts behind them. How they’d started at the top of the field where the sun first touched and followed that line, that border of shadow, as it steadily moved down the slope. How they’d followed it all day, a couple of feet behind, giving it time to warm the mangels and soften the earth so the waterlogged roots wouldn’t bruise when they eased them from the soil. How Bethan didn’t speak to any of them yet whispered and coaxed the old cart horse all day, scratching at its withers, geeing it on with sharp clicks of her tongue against her teeth. How that early sun caught the frost on the ploughed ridges, transforming the crop into a field of diamonds. How when Menna cut her finger with the curved blade of the docking knife she’d cursed then laughed at herself right after, hand over her mouth, shocked at her own profanity. How the blood curled around her finger like a molten wedding ring. How this evening her own fingers are sore and cramped, how her back aches after hours of bending to pull at the mangels, shaking them free of the earth. How she never thought it would be for this long. How she wants Tom back. How she wants all of them back. How she wants it to be like before.

  The men have been gone for two weeks now and all the women agree the best dreams are the nightmares. The worst are the good ones, the ones that give them what they want, the ones that make them forget. They have all been surprised how cruel the mind can be in this way. How willing the imagination is to put them through the mill again and again. For Sarah it’s when she dreams of sleeping beside Tom, knowing that his warm weight is just inches away from her. When she dreams of waking and going downstairs to light the fire to heat the water for his wash; of hearing his tread on the floorboards above her, him coming down and appearing at the bottom of the stairs pulling on his waistcoat, doing up the buttons with his thick thumbs. Him telling her what his plans for the day are, or asking her how much butter they have left, or maybe just sitting at the table and taking his tea from her with a creased smile. When she dreams of all this and then wakes, to the creaking house, to the dull static of the river, to the empty bed beside her, it is like losing him all over again as her stomach swings away from her and she has to let all she remembers to be true come flooding back.

  So far this truth has been a silent one. None of them has heard anything from or about their husbands. Mary and Bethan rode over into Llanthony a few days afterwards and found nothing changed. The farmers were still there, working their land. Everyone was worried, of course, and the Ministry hadn’t been to collect the potatoes, but otherwise nothing had changed. The valley, they said, had felt as busy as ever, its through road to Hay-on-Wye lending it a subtle flow of life unlike their own dead end, which invited no travellers, no passers through. They’d said nothing of the missing men to anyone. Menna suggested they should tell the police or even the Home Guard, but Maggie had quashed that idea. Sarah was surprised when Mary had agreed with her, as if this was something the two older women both knew was right, simply because of their age. And so they’d all waited instead. For a word, a message, or for the men just to come back, as suddenly as they’d left.

  Maggie’s wireless was of little help. Every now and then it picked up transmissions, giving them a piecemeal idea of what was happening elsewhere in the country. The fighting continued. There had been calls for peace, for surrender from politicians the Home Service called “traitors.” Civilian men along the south coast had been deported. No one knew to where. There was one report of a massacre at a village in Cornwall. “A reprisal,” the announcer had called it. A whole village shot. The women and children. Maggie had flicked the switch and cut off the report midspeech. Since then every time they’d tried to tune in to the news they’d got nothing but the whine and snow of white noise, the crackle of disconnection.

  Through it all, they worked. In some ways with the men gone there were fewer jobs to do each day. Fewer meals to be cooked, clothes to wash, plates to clean. But there were new jobs to take the place of these. Harder, heavier, unfamiliar tasks. They decided to break the flock at The Court and divide it between their farms. The new sheep weren’t hefted to their grazing areas and often drifted back towards The Court’s land. Over the past fortnight Sarah had been out three times driving her portion of the broken flock back to Upper Blaen. As well as keeping the flock and the chickens and the pig, Sarah also set about the other jobs Tom usually left for this time of year, the round of mendings and preparations that filled the last weeks of October as the days steadily grew colder towards winter. So she began trimming the hedges around the lower fields, anxious to finish them before the first frost while there was still sap in the wood. She checked and fixed the hurdles, cleaned out the pens, patched the thatch on the hay ricks, laid down poison for the rats, and fixed the broken slates on the little barn beside the house, musty with piles of potatoes and sheaves of straw glowing in the dark. There was also work to be done on the farms of the others. All-day jobs like the pulling of Hywel’s mangels or the winter ploughing of William’s meadows down by the river. In line with Ministry guidelines, William had decided to give over his best alluvial land to oats. Maggie was determined this should still be done, that they should carry on as usual, so at the end of that first week Mary and Sarah found themselves sitting in her kitchen once more, booted and scarved, ready for work.

  None of them had ever driven the tractor and Maggie t
hought the fuel should be saved anyway, so they resorted to the horse-drawn plough, the two big-hoofed cart horses from The Court, their heads nodding like pistons, lifting their knees high out of the cloying soil, drawing Jack’s single plough. The first furrows of the day were a mess. Maggie insisted on driving the plough, leaving Mary to follow with the presser drawn by her own elderly horse. “Don’t you think I’ve watched them do it all my life?” Maggie said when Mary questioned why she should drive the plough. “Every year we’re down at Pandy for the match. Four times William’s won, that he has. An’ him a valley farmer too. Four times mind,” she added, as if William’s skill with the ploughshare would somehow reflect upon her.

  Sarah helped Mary with the presser, and from that position, following the plough, soon saw that, however accomplished a ploughman William might have been, his wife had learnt little in all her years of observation. Maggie couldn’t hold the blade deep enough and it often skidded over the field’s stubble or only nicked at its surface. When she did manage to engage the share, the earth turned away clumsily, breaking into clumps rather than folding over like a wave from the prow of a ship as Sarah had seen it do the few times Tom ploughed or when she’d also gone down to the ploughing match herself.

  After five uneven, crooked furrows and four awkward, mud-churning turns, Maggie finally gave over to Mary. She joined Sarah on the presser, breathing heavily, a dew of sweat on her forehead despite the bitter day. Together they drove the machine behind Mary’s steady, straight furrows, the clods bowing away neatly, glinting in the weak morning sun.

  Mary was a slight woman compared to Maggie, and yet she was able to handle the balance of the heavy plough, to ride its bucking and swinging, bringing the blade in deep and true on each turn. They were not the furrows of a regular ploughman, but they were sufficient.