And he found himself standing there, shouting it out at them: sick, shuddering, staggering as he stood, shouting it out at them. ‘She wasn’t a bitch! Don’t you call her a bitch! Don’t you dare to say one bloody word against her…’
They all sat petrified, staring; staring at the great, raw, ragged scar where the hook had torn through his unavailing hand.
How Green Is My Valley!
A LITTLE WHILE AGO I was walking down Bond Street when suddenly my heart turned over; and I seemed to see in my mind’s eye a rider silhouetted against the sky and, all at once, like milk tipped out of a bucket, a tide of white sheep flowing down a mountainside. And I glanced down and saw that a man was standing waiting to cross the road; and by his side a sheep-dog, a Welsh sheep-dog, motionless, crouching—waiting for his word…
How green is my valley: my belovèd little valley tucked away in the sheep-farming mountain country of Carmarthenshire!
The cottage is very old and its walls are very thick. The little road winds up to it and further on there are a couple of small farms: within trudging distance perhaps half a dozen farms—not more. Outside, the land is so steeply rising and falling that just to find a place for a table and a bench, we had to level a little bit of the field on the other side of the lane. Here I sit in summer with my typewriter: an electric typewriter, its flex of necessity trailing across the road. I put a chair there to stop the cars and when anything comes I get up and move the chair and disconnect the flex. That’s how heavy the traffic is in my green valley in Carmarthenshire.
These are not the high, grand mountains of the north but their foothills: bare-topped, their flanks clothed with the age-old forests that were there when the Romans came: small, twisted oak trees whose leaves in autumn are the self-same colour as the bracken beneath their boughs. Rounded mountains, not steeply peaked with looming cliff faces, but easy and friendly, mile upon mile upon mile of rough grassland, cleft through by narrow valleys and the little twisting roads that seem to lead nowhere, for, over vast expanses of moorland, no human habitation is in sight.
Here the farms are small and remote, the houses to a single pattern, hare-houses with a front-door nose, and window eyes and two chimneys sticking up for ears. The people speak no English among themselves: a little perhaps on mart days in the neighbouring towns. The children in the little village schools are taught in Welsh and speak nothing else until they go to their big schools in the town.
These are to me a lovely people: not simple but leading simple lives, hard working and knowledgeable, husband and wife alone—with perhaps a bit of help from the children out of school time—running the farms on their own. Small farms, a few hundred sheep, a dozen cows perhaps or a few store cattle—with the green fields all about them which for generations their families have tilled, and the great hump of the mountain behind them where for generations their sheep have grazed. A farm must never lose all its flock for there is nothing to keep the boundaries on the mountains but the handed down knowledge of generations of sheep.
And this is a lovely land: soft and fair is my valley as an Umbrian landscape, the green fields running down to the little winding river and only an occasional frowning crag to remind us that nature who smiles so sweetly, rules also with an iron hand. For all the countryside is farming country and dependent upon the whims of weather and wind. Too much rain and the crops won’t ripen, too much heat and the moisture dries up in the bare soil; snow prolonged and the sheep must be brought down from the mountain and artificially fed. And foodstuffs are expensive and in the remoter parts the sheep so wild and free that they would sooner starve than eat what man offers them.
For in these parts the sheep live all the year round up on the mountain and come down to the farm only four or five times in the year—for washing, for dipping, for shearing and for the lambing. The grazing for the ewes and their lambs around the farm, controls the number that may be kept on the mountain.
How to gather them in?—sheep scattered over acres and acres of rolling mountain. Up goes the farmer on his rough little, sure-footed pony and with him go his friends and only servants, the dogs, the indispensible dogs. Most farmers will use dogs bred with a careful mixture of Scotch and Welsh. The Scotch dog is keen and clever but so eager to please that he may lose his head and dart and snap, over-exciting the sheep; so he does the work within sight of his master—it is the Welsh dog that goes off all by himself and gathers in the flock. Gathers them in; holds them, working now with his mate, in a single, restless mass while the experienced eye looks them over, counts and checks: and then at a signal, moves them forward, tipping the white tide over the mountainside, down to the farm.
Across these mountains, you may see a great swathe of green, never yet obliterated by the over-growth of more than a century. This was the secret way where, long ago, the drovers took their beasts to the great cattle market at Smithfield in London—half a dozen men, perhaps, with their long stock whips, driving a hundred store-cattle gathered in from the scores of little farms. Thus they avoided the roads with their toll gates—at a penny for each beast, an important sum of money must be paid over, at gate after gate. So they drove the beasts across the mountains, slowly, letting them graze as they went, hoping only to reach the Wye when the water was low and they need not have the cattle ferried across, two by two, and pay again. Once on the English roads, the creatures must be shod. If geese went with them, they were driven across tar and then across gravel so that little gritty sandals formed on their yellow, webbed feet. But the geese usually went only on shorter journeys than this.
The way home, laden with anything up to a thousand pounds in gold, was fraught with dangers from foot-pads and highwaymen, and my valley and those about it must have echoed many a time with the ancient cry, ‘Your money or your life!’—with pistol shots and the sound of galloping hooves. On a peak a few miles distant, called now by his name, ‘Twm Shon Catti’s peak’, the most famous of all of them had his hide-out. The place is brilliantly chosen, moated by the dividing of a tumbling river and with a clear view down three valleys, so that whichever way they came for him, Twm could escape by another. Everybody believes that he knows which was Twm Shon Catti’s cave; your guess is as good as mine if you care to go there and search for it. An amusing villain he was: married well in the end and finished up as a magistrate—so they say.
Further west than that, and to the north lies the great Bog of Tregarron and here is a new beauty, all its own. Five miles long, a mile broad—covered over with a tall, wild grass, ever softly moving, which turns in sunshine to a pinky gold as though a vast sheet of metallic tissue had been flung down in the broad valley between the low hills. And to the west again, lies the huge sweep of Cardigan Bay with its multitude of little bays under low cliffs, where the sea sucks out and comes tumbling back, a million, million mermaid hands playing a piano roulade as they finger their white way up the sand. Narrow lanes lead down to them, sweet-scented in summer, with the high banks of Cardiganshire brushing their wild flowers against you as you pass by: or no roads at all—to get to many of them you must walk over the headlands, blowing with sea-pinks, and scramble down, often hazardously, to the rocks and sand below: to be rewarded perhaps by the mild, incurious face of a seal popping up to ask you what you are doing there so far away from the everyday herd of holidaying men; or a chain of dolphins, spray-hidden, tumbling by.
How green is my valley! The great dark areas of the coal mines come not near, throwing their black slag into great, pointed mounds magnificent against an evening sky but blackening the countryside, death to the springing green and the delicate flower, to fern and tree, to the very coming of the seasons; so that spring and summer and autumn and winter are a matter only of light and dark, of warmth and cold. The great steel works with their splendour of blast furnaces against the winter’s grey, are far away: the neat new biscuit-box factories, the rash of houses for all these urban workers—they come not near. Spring comes to us late in our mountains but there are primros
es in the hedgerows and pale little violets and bluebells in their time; and in summer our trees are fresh and green and the little river runs gaily through the green fields and a trout or two plops up after a fly; and the kingfisher holds for a moment all the world’s blue in his darting flash down the river bank. And autumn is tawny with bracken and the turning oak leaves on the little scrub oaks; and winter thins the hedgerows and bares the boughs—‘a slender landscape and austere’. But…
But spring, summer, autumn, winter—for the washing, the dipping, the shearing, the lambing, in grey weather, in sunshine or in snow—just now and again you will glance up and see that sight that in Bond Street suddenly filled my heart with its loving and longing—up on the ridge a rider, silhouetted, the dogs running, creeping, petrified at a sign into that long, crouching stillness—and all at once, like milk tipped out of a bucket, the white tide of sheep coming tumbling down the bare mountain to the meadows below.
How green is my valley! Long may we keep it so.
Bless This House
THEY WERE BEAUTIFUL; AND even in that first moment, the old woman was to think later, she should have known: should have recognised them for what they were. Standing there so still and quiet in face of her own strident aggression, the boy in the skin-tight, worn blue jeans, with his mac held over his head against the fine drizzle of the evening rain—held over his head like a mantle; the girl with her long hair falling straight as a veil down to the pear-shaped bulge of her pregnancy. But though suspicion died in her, she would not be done out of her grievance. ‘What you doing here? You got no right here, parking outside my window.’
They did not reply that after all the street did not belong to her. The girl said only, apologetically: ‘We got nowhere else to sleep.’
‘Nowhere to sleep?’ She glanced at the ringless hand holding together the edges of the skimpy coat. ‘Can’t you go home?’
‘Our homes aren’t in London,’ said the boy.
‘You slept somewhere last night.’
‘We had to leave. The landlady—Mrs. Mace—she went away and her nephew was coming home and wanted the place. We’ve been hunting and hunting for days. No one else will take us in.’
‘Because of the baby,’ said the girl. ‘In case it comes, you see.’
Suspicion gleamed again. ‘Well, don’t look at me. I got nothing, only my one bed-sit here in the basement—the other rooms are used for storage, all locked up and bolted. And upstairs—well, that’s full.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said the girl. ‘We didn’t mean that at all. We were sleeping in the car.’
‘In the car?’ She stood at the top of the area steps peering at them in the light of the street lamp, shawled, also, against the rain. She said to the boy: ‘You can’t let her sleep in that thing. Not like she is.’
‘Well, I know,’ he said. ‘But what else? That’s why we came to this quiet part.’
‘We’ll move along of course,’ said the girl, ‘if you mind our being here.’
‘It’s a public street,’ she said illogically. But it was pitiful, poor young thing; and there was about them this—this something: so beautiful, so still and quiet, expressionless, almost colourless, like figures in some dim old church, candle-lit at—yes, at Christmas time. Like figures in a Christmas crêche. She said uncertainly: ‘If a few bob would help—’
But they disclaimed at once. ‘No, no, we’ve got money; well, enough, anyway. And he can get work in the morning, it’s nothing like that. It’s only… Well,’ said the girl, spreading slow, explanatory hands, ‘it’s like we told you. The baby’s coming and no one will take us in. They just say, sorry—no room.’
Was it then that she had known?—when she heard herself saying, almost without her own volition: ‘Out in the back garden—there’s a sort of shed…’
It was the strain, perhaps, the uncertainty, the long day’s search for accommodation, the fading hope; but the baby came that night. No time for doctor or midwife; but Mrs. Vaughan was experienced in such matters, delivered the child safely, dealt with the young mother—unexpectedly resilient despite her fragile look, calm, uncomplaining, apparently impervious to the pain—settled her comfortably at last on the old mattress in the shed, covered over with clean bedclothes. ‘When you’re fit to be moved—we’ll see.’ And to the boy she said sharply: ‘What you got there?’
He had employed the waiting time in knocking together a sort of cradle out of a wooden box; padded it round and fitted it with a couple of down-filled cushions from their car. Taken nothing of hers; all the things were their own. ‘Look, Marilyn—for the baby.’
‘Oh, Jo,’ she said, ‘you always were a bit of a carpenter! You always were good with your hands.’
Joseph. And Marilyn. And Joseph a bit of a carpenter, clever with his hands. And a boy child born in an outhouse because there was no room elsewhere for his coming… She got down slowly on to her thick, arthritic knees beside the mattress and, with something like awe in her heart, gathered the baby from his mother’s arms. ‘I’ll lay him in the box. It’ll do for him lovely.’ And under her breath: ‘He won’t be the first,’ she said.
The boy left money with her next day for necessities and went out and duly returned that evening with news of a job on a building site; and carrying in one scarred hand a small, drooping bunch of flowers which he carefully divided between them, half for Marilyn, half for Mrs. Vaughan—‘till I can get you something better’—and one violet left over to place in the baby’s tiny mottled fist. ‘And till I can get you something better,’ he said.
They gave him no name… Other young couples, she thought, would have spent the idle hours trying to think up ‘something different’ or christened him after a pop-star, some loose-mouthed, long-haired little good-for-nothing shrieking out nonsense, thin legs kept jerking by drugs in an obscene capering. But no—it was ‘the baby’, ‘the little one’. Perhaps, she thought, they dared not name him: dared not acknowledge, even to themselves…
For the huge question in her mind was: how much do they know?
For that matter—how much did she herself know? And what?—what in fact did she know? The Holy Child had been born already, had been born long ago. Vague thoughts of a Second Coming wandered through her brain, but was that not to be a major, a clearly recognisable event, something terrible, presaging the end of all things? The End. And the other had been the Beginning. Perhaps, she thought, there could be a Beginning-Again? Perhaps with everything having gone wrong with the world, there was going to be a second chance…?
It was a long time since she had been to church. In the old days, yes; brought up the two girls to be good Catholics, washed and spruced-up for Mass every Sunday, convents, catechism, the lot. And much good it had done her!—married a couple of heathen G.I.s in the war and gone off to America for good—for good or ill, she did not know and could no longer care; for years had heard not a word from either of them. But now… She put on her crumpled old hat and, arthritically stumping, went off to St. Stephen’s.
It was like being a schoolgirl again, all one’s childhood closing in about one; to be kneeling there in the stuffy, curtained darkness, to see the outlined profile crowned by the black hump of the biretta with its pom-pom a-top, leaning against the little iron-work grill that was all that separated them. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost… Yes, my child?’
In the name of the Father; and of the Son… She blurted out: ‘Father—I have the baby Jesus at my place.’ He talked to her quietly and kindly, while waiting penitents shifted restlessly outside and thought, among their Firm Purposes of Amendment that the old girl must be having a right old load of sins to cough up. About chance, he spoke, and about coincidence, about having the Holy Child in one’s heart and not trying to—well, rationalise things… She thanked him, made of old habit the sign of the cross, and left. ‘Them others—they didn’t recognise Him either,’ she said to herself.
And she came to her room and saw the quiet face be
nt over the sleeping baby lying in its wooden cradle; and surely—surely—there was a light about its head?
On pay day, Jo brought in flowers again. But the vase got knocked over almost at once and the flowers and water spilt—there was no room for even the smallest extras in the close little room, now that Marilyn was up and sitting in the armchair with the wooden box beside her and the increasing paraphernalia of babyhood taking up so much of the scanty space. The car was being used as a sort of storage dump for anything not in daily use. ‘During the week-end,’ said Jo, ‘I’ll find us a place.’
‘A place?’ she said, as though the idea came freshly to her. But she had dreaded it. ‘Marilyn can’t be moved yet.’
‘By the end of the week?’ he said.
‘You’ve been so good,’ said Marilyn. ‘We can’t go on taking up your room. We’ll have to get somewhere.’
But it wasn’t so easy. He spent all his evenings, after that, tramping round, searching; but as soon as he mentioned the baby, hearts and doors closed against him. She protested: ‘But I don’t want you to go. I got none of my own now, I like having you here,’ and she knelt, as she so often did, by the improvised wooden-box cradle and said, worshipping: ‘And I couldn’t lose—Him.’ And she went out and bought a second-hand bed and fixed that up in the shed, brought Marilyn in to her own bed, was happy to sleep on a mattress on the floor, the box-cradle close to her so that if the child stirred in the night, it was she who could hush it and croon to it and soothe it to sleep again. Is He all-knowing? she would wonder to herself, does He understand, even though He’s so small, does the Godhead in Him understand that it’s I who hold Him? Will I one day sit at the right hand of the Father because on this earth I nursed his only begotten Son…? (Well, His—second begotten Son…? It was all so difficult. And she dared not ask.)
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