2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  It’s not so far fetched, she tells herself. Hasn’t she already had one proposal this spring, albeit from moony Rhys, one wet Sunday after chapel? She’d been mute, not knowing where to begin. She and Rhys had known each other their whole lives, grown up next door. His mother, now the village postmistress, had formerly been Esther’s teacher. But marry! We’ve never even kissed, she wanted to cry. Oh, she’d allowed Rhys to take her to the pictures, even let him spend the modest wagelier father paid him on her tickets, but they never once sat in the back row together. Rhys had pressed on, pointing out how good he was with the flock, how this would keep the farm in the family. She’d had a sudden recollection of him reading in chapel, intoning the passage about the Good Shepherd as if he were interviewing for a job, and asked pertly, “Who are you proposing to, me or the sheep?”

  The next month, the day after his birthday, he’d caught the bus to Caernarvon and signed up. She might have felt bad if he hadn’t had the gall to ask if she’d wait for him.

  She looks for Colin now, finds him leaning into one of his fellows, cocking his head as the other whispers something in his ear. Colin smirks beneath his moustache like Clark Gable, taps the side of his nose. She could have easily got him to tell her what the camp is for, she thinks proudly, but she hasn’t. He’s even dared her to ask, tempted her with the big secret. But she wouldn’t take advantage of their love like that. Besides, everyone knows it would be unpatriotic to’ ask the sappers what they’re building: disloyal to Britain (they all know the slogans—loose lips, etc.), but also, more obscurely, disloyal to Wales. It wouldn’t do to give the English an excuse to call the Welsh unpatriotic. But whatever the purpose of the new camp, with its long, low barracks and staunch wire fences, there’s been a swelling, puffed-up sense in the village over the last month of being part of something (although it’s strange, she thinks, that here’s the invasion itself, and the camp not occupied). “We used to burn their bases,” Arthur has lamented. “Now we’re pleased as punch just to have the buggers about, banging in a few nails.”

  And it occurs to her suddenly: Colin and I will have to elope! A word she’s only ever heard at the pictures. And terrible as it is, it sounds so glamorous. Elope, she mouths, tasting the odd English word on her tongue. For a second she imagines she and Colin loping into the sunset, almost giggles. She’s not even sure if there’s an equivalent in Welsh, if the Welsh ever elope.

  Colin, propped against one of the stained wood beams, is still chatting with’his mates. The dark cropped hair at the nape of his neck shows almost velvety below his cap. He laughs at something and throws a glance over his shoulder to see if she’s heard, and they grin at each other. Heads turn towards her, and she looks away quickly. She is wearing one of her parachute-silk slips tonight beneath her long skirt; she likes the feel of it against her legs, the way it slides when she stretches for a glass, while her soldier is watching.

  The moment is interrupted by Harry Hitch. “Girlie?” he croons. “Mother round, eh? There’s a good girl.” He’s trying to wind her up, and she ignores him as she pours. Harry’s with the BBC. He’s a star, if you can believe it, a comic with the Light Programme. “Auntie,” as she’s learned to call the corporation from Harry and the others, has a transmitter tower on the hillside above the quarry; the radio technicians discovered the Arms when they were building it, and they’ve been coming up of an evening with their ‘chums’ ever since, six or seven of them squeezed into a muddy Austin Princess.

  Harry watches her set a Scotch before him and then a pint, what he calls a ‘little and large’, the glasses sitting side by side like a double act. “Cheers, big ears,” he tells her dutifully, his catchphrase. “Nice atmosphere tonight, eh? Lovely ambulance.”

  It’s a joke of some kind, Esther knows; when no one laughs, Harry chuckles anyway. “I kill meself.” He’s already half gone, she sees, must have had a skinful before he arrived. Esther has listened to Harry on the radio, laughed at his skits, but in the flesh he’s a disappointment, a miserable, moody drunk, skinny and pinched looking, not the broad, avuncular bloke she imagined from his voice.

  “Ta,” he tells her, raising his glass. “See your lot are celebrating tonight too.”

  “My lot?” she asks absently, distracted by a smirk from Colin.

  “The Welsh,” he slurs. “The Taffs, the Taffies, the boyos!” He gets louder with each word, not shouting just projecting, and as soon as he has an audience he’s off, as if on cue

  “‘Ere, you know the English have trouble with your spelling. All them l’s and y’s. But did you hear the one about Taffy who joined the RAF? Meant to join the NAAFI, but his spelling let him down.” Esther barely smiles, but there’s a smattering of laughter at the bar. Harry half turns on his stool, rocking slightly, to take in the soldiers, their shining faces. “You like that one, eh? On his first day the quartermaster hands him his parachute and Taff wants to know what happens if it don’t open, and the quartermaster, he tells him, ‘That’s what’s called jumping to a conclusion’.”

  More laughter, not much, but enough, Esther sees with a sinking feeling, for a few more heads to turn. She catches the eye of Mary Munro, the actress. “Here we go,” Mary mouths, rolling her eyes. Mary’s thing is accents; she can do dozens of them. Once she did Esther’s, just for a laugh, and listening at home, the girl had blushed to the tips of her ears, more flattered than embarrassed.

  “Oh, but they’re brave, the Taffs,” Harry goes on. “Oh, yes. Did you hear about that Welsh kamikaze, though? Got the VC for twenty successful missions. But he’s worried, you know. His luck can’t hold. Sure he’ll cop it one day, so he goes to the chaplain and tells him what he wants on his headstone.” He slips into the nasal North Walian twang.

  “‘Here lies an honest man and a Welshman.’ And the chaplain says he doesn’t know what it’s like in Wales, but in England it’s one bloke to an ‘ole.”

  The men are all laughing now, stopping their conversations to listen. The snooker players straighten up from the table, lean on their cues like shepherds on crooks.

  “Come on, ‘Arry,” Mary calls, “it’s supposed to be our night off.” But she’s booed down by the soldiers and Harry rolls on unfazed.

  “Reminds me of the Tomb of the Welsh Unknown Soldier. Didn’t know there was a Welsh unknown soldier, did ya?” He winks at Esther. “Nice inscription on that one an’ all: Here lies Taff So-and-So, well known as a drunk, unknown as a soldier.”

  “Takes one to know one,” someone heckles from the public bar, but the delivery is halting, the accent broad and blunt. It’s water off a duck’s back to Harry.

  “That reminds me,” he cries happily, and gestures for Esther to refill his Scotch.

  “Haven’t you had enough?” She’s aware of the silence behind her, the listening locals.

  “As the sheep said to the Welshman?”

  “Very funny,” she tells him.

  “Oh, you Welsh girls,” he says, wagging his finger. “You know what they say about Welsh girls, dontcha, girlie?”

  “No,” she says, suddenly abashed.

  “Give over, Harry.” It’s Mary again, her voice lower this time, warning.

  “‘S only a bit of fun. And she wants to know, don’t she? You want to know?”

  Esther is silent.

  “Well, what they say is, you can’t kiss a Welsh girl unexpectedly.” He pauses for a second to sip his pint. When he looks up his lips are wet. “Only sooner than she thought!” There’s a stillness in the bar. Harry shoots his cuffs, studies his watch theatrically. “I can wait.”

  He looks up and Esther throws his Scotch in his face.

  There’s a second of shock, and then Harry licks his lips with his big pink tongue, crosses his eyes, and the laughter goes off like a gun. A cheer rises from the public bar, and she’s suddenly conscious of Jack standing in the passage behind her.

  “Steady on,” Colin is shouting over the din. He’s shouldered his way to the bar. “You all right?” h
e asks, and Esther nods.

  “No hard feelings,” Harry is telling her. “Just a bit of wordplay. Don’t mean nothing.” He holds out his hand for a shake, but when she reaches for it, he raises his empty glass and tells her, “Cheers, big ears! I’d love one.”

  “Come on, mate,” Colin says. “Leave it out now.” He lays a broad palm on the dented brass bar rail in front of Esther.

  Harry looks at Colin’s hand for a long moment and then says, flatly: “Did you hear this one, mate? Do you know it? About the Welsh girl? Her boyfriend gave her a watch case? Tell me if you’ve heard it before, won’t you?”

  Colin sighs. “I haven’t. And I don’t care to.”

  “Really? You might learn something. She was right chuffed with that present, she was. I asked her why. A watch case? Know what she told me? ‘He’s promised me the works tonight’.”

  Colin shakes his head, puts down his pint. Esther sees his moustache is flecked with foam.

  “Colin,” she says softly.

  “The works, sunshine. D’you get it? Penny dropped, ‘as it? Tickety-tock. I can wait. All night, I promise you.”

  “You’re asking for it, you are.”

  “All we’re doing is telling a few jokes. Asking for it? I don’t think I know that one. Is there a punch line to it? Is there?”

  Jack is there (limp or no, he’s quick down the length of a bar), his huge arms reaching over to clamp round Colin before he can swing, but somehow Harry still ends up on the threadbare carpet. He leans back on the stool, trying to anticipate the blow, and he’s gone, spilling backwards. It’s a pratfall, and after a second the bar dissolves in laughter again. Jack squeezes Colin once, hard enough to drive the breath out of him. Esther hears him say “Not here, lad, nargois,” and then he releases him. Colin rolls his shoulders and takes a gulp of air. He gives Esther a questioning glance, and when she shrugs, joins in the general laughter.

  Harry is helped up by Mary and Tony, one of the sound engineers. “Up you come,” Mary tells him. “And they say you can’t do slapstick. You’re wasted on radio, you are.”

  “Always told you Scotch was my favourite topple,” Harry mutters.

  Mary leans across to Esther and says softly, “Sorry, darling. They don’t let him do that blue stuff on air, and it just sort of builds up in him like spit.” For the rest of the bar, she adds more loudly, “Never mind, luv. All you need to know about Englishmen, Welshmen, or Germans, for that matter, is they’re all men. And you know what they say about men: one thing on their minds…and one hand on their things.” There’s a round of whistles from the crowd. She grins at Esther. “Always leave ‘em laughing.” Tony turns Harry towards the exit, but at the door he wheels round and lunges over, almost taking Tony and Mary down in a drunken bow.

  “Ladies and gentlement, I thank you.” There’s a smattering of sarcastic applause, and when it dies out only Colin is clapping, slowly.

  “Piss off,” he calls. Esther wishes he’d drop it now. In his own clumsy way, he’s trying to be chivalrous, she knows, but there’s an edge of bullying to it.

  Harry tries to shake himself loose, but Mary and Tony cling on. “I did see a bloke in here once,” he says, “with a terrible black eye.”

  “Looking in the mirror, was you?” Colin shouts.

  “Told me he’d been fighting for his girlfriend’s honour. Know what I said to him?”

  “Bloody hell!”

  “I said,” Harry bawls over him, “it looked like she wanted to keep it.”

  He’s redfaced and suddenly exhausted, and Mary and Tony take their chance to frogmarch him out. Over Mary’s shoulder he gives the room a limp V-for-victory sign, and over Tony’s arm he flashes a quick two fingers at Colin. And then he’s gone, dragged out into the darkness.

  “Sorry about that,” Colin says, and Esther tells him quickly it’s fine. She needs the job. When Jack hired her, he told her not to take any nonsense: “In this business, the customer isn’t so often right, as tight.” But she doesn’t need them fighting over her. Her English is supposed to be good enough to talk her way out of situations.

  “You shouldn’t have to put up with it,” Colin goes on, but she shrugs. Jack’s still keeping an eye out. It’s a small village. She doesn’t want talk.

  “Anyhow,” she says, “thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t mention it, miss,” he tells her, getting it finally, but still a little peeved.

  She wipes down the bar, drops Harry’s dirty glasses in the sink. She finds herself feeling a little sorry for the old soak. Mary has told her he’s lost his wife. “Songbird, she was. Big, warm voice. They met on the circuit, but you could see she was always going to be a star. Got her first top billing for a tour of the Continent in ‘39, but then the war come and she never made it back. You wouldn’t think to look at him, but it was true love.” It makes Esther wonder. She’s heard Harry telling jokes about his wife on the show: the missus; ‘er indoors; the trouble-and-strife. “Show biz!” Mary told her with a grim, exaggerated brightness. “The show must go on and all that.”

  The clock strikes ten-thirty. “Amser, boneddigion. Amser, diolch yn fawr,” Jack cries, clanging the bell, and Esther chimes in, “Time, gents. Last orders, please.”

  Two

  She rinses glasses while Jack locks up, pouring the dregs away, twisting each glass once around the bristly scrub brush. They come out of the water with a little belch and she sets them on the rack. Normally she’d stay to dry and polish them, but Jack says it’s enough. “Only gonna get dirty again tomorrow.” He reaches over her to switch off the radio, and she realises with a little flush that she’s been swaying to the muted band music.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “I’ll see to these.” But he takes the towel from her and nods at the door. She wonders if he knows.

  In the porch, she pauses to check her reflection in the leaded panes, pats the curls that have loosened in the damp air of the pub, reties her scarf around her neck. Colin likes to tease her about the national dress, the scarlet shawl and tall black hat that Welsh women wear on all the postcards. “Where’s your topper?” he asks. “Why don’t you put on that nice red cloak, give us a twirl?” She likes the attention, but she wouldn’t be caught dead in such an outfit—the women on the cards look like severe dolls to her, part Red Riding Hood, part Puritan. As a girl she’d asked her father with shy earnestness what the men’s national dress was, and he’d snapped there wasn’t one. The asymmetry still bothers her obscurely.

  She catches herself frowning in the glass, forces a smile and immediately relaxes it. They called her ‘big mouth’ at school, mostly for speaking up, she knows, but she’s always been self-conscious about her strong jaw and too-wide grin. She once begged Mary to show her how to use make–up, but the actress shook her head gently. “Not with the bloom on you, luv.” It had made Esther blush more than any compliment from Colin or Rhys, and she clings to it now for confidence as she plucks the colour into her cheeks before leaving the porch.

  Outside, the threatened storm has blown out over the Irish Sea, and the night is clear, blue-black and speckled with stars above the denser dark of the mountains.

  Colin is waiting for her round the corner.

  “Eh up!” he calls softly, appearing from the shadows of the hedge and pulling her to him.

  He’d been waiting for her here one night last month, when they’d kissed for the first time. He’d lit a cigarette when she’d appeared, his face blooming in the darkness. She started towards him, towards the redness of his cigarette. “Give us one, then,” she asked, and he offered the pack, pulled back when she reached for it, held it out again, then lifted it almost beyond reach so that she had to jump a little to snatch it from his hand. They’d smoked together in silence then, watching each other’s pursed lips ‘flushing and fading as they breathed in and out. She’d been glad of the grown-up feel of the cigarette’s light, fragile cylinder between her fingers, and then all too quickly he’d finished his, flicking the gl
owing stub over his shoulder, and she’d drawn on hers hurriedly, sucking herself into a coughing fit until he had to pat her back. She could still feel the imprint of his hand, the ringing shudder of his slaps. There’d been an awkward moment when he could have offered her another but didn’t, and then they’d been kissing. He tasted exactly like the cigarette, except for his moustache, which smelled damp, muddy even. But she’d liked it. They’ve met here every night since. Tonight she’s promised to go somewhere more private with him.

  She’s been kissed before, of course, though the only boy she’s kissed lately is little Jim, a soppy smooch to make him blush on his twelfth birthday. Just seventeen, but she reckons she’s acquitted herself well with Colin, even surprised him a little. She was wary of his questions about her age at first, tried to be mysterious and mock-offended—“You can’t ask a girl that! I’ve my own secrets to keep”—but the way he’d laughed had made her feel small, childish. “I pull your pints, don’t I?” she told him. “There’s laws, you know. Can’t have kids serving in a pub.” But he wasn’t convinced, and so she kissed him back, the way she’s learned from the pictures, lips crushed together. It had been just as she’d imagined, until she’d felt Colin’s tongue slipping against her own and she’d pulled back in surprise. He’d laughed and called it French kissing. “More like English cheek,” she’d told him tartly, sticking her own tongue out for good measure, but then she’d smiled, leaned into him again, pushing up on her toes and opening her lips as if for a morsel.

  “Mmm!” Golin says now as they separate. “There’s a girl. You just hold that pretty thought.” He puts a cigarette between his lips, lights it and passes it to her. “So’s I can find you in the dark,” he tells her, stepping back into the gloom.