2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  She levers it off the plate finally, allows herself to cry only until she’s sure the kettle must be cool, so that she can fill it again without risk of cracking the cast iron. Then she washes every piece of linen in the house—the sheets, the tablecloth, Arthur’s nightshirt, her drawers—boiling them with soda. She works them against the zinc washboard in the scarred wooden tub, just as her mother would have, her hands red as berries in the sudsy water, and then she puts them through the mangle, watching with grim satisfaction as the grey water wells up around the rollers and falls away. She hauls the load up to the garden above the house, shakes the linens out piece by piece until they snap, hangs them on the line. It’s a good day for it, bright and blustery, though the wind makes her eyes run. The cold corners of the damp tablecloth lick her ankles in the breeze, and once a whole sheet rises up before her, pressing itself to her lips and nose until she can smell the faint tang of soap, but she holds on tight, pegs clenched in her teeth, and waits for the wind to drop. Arthur, spying the wagging white sheets from the yard, calls, “Who are we surrendering to?” And she yells down to him fiercely that the clothes are filthy.

  The kettle’s rarely off the hob the rest of the day. She scalds the table, scrubs the slate floor, then the whitewashed walls, even the ceiling, losing herself in work. She shuts the doors and windows and swats every fly in the house.

  “Bit late for spring cleaning, isn’t it?” Arthur asks her at supper, as if she’s lost track of the seasons. When she ignores him, he nudges Jim. “Never mind D-day, lad, it’s wash day!” She gives him a sharp look, and he tells her quickly the place hasn’t looked cleaner since…he doesn’t know when.

  Although she does, she thinks: since her mother passed. Arthur used to tease his wife for keeping the house spotless in case her old mistress came for inspection, and she’d tap her heart: “I’s me own mistress now.” Esther has to clutch the back of one of the chairs for balance, so overwhelmed is she by the memory.

  “Declared war on dirt,” she hears Arthur whisper to Jim. “And she’s not taking any prisoners, mind.” It’s rare that he deigns to speak English, let alone joke with the boy, but Arthur’s been in an odd, giddy mood ever since Jim told them that the local lads haven’t wasted any time spreading the word of the camp’s purpose, and the village is in an uproar. She can’t remember when Arthur’s paid as much attention to Jim’s prattle.

  “You keep away from those lads,” she tells him, but he just smiles tightly. “They’re all right,” he says. She passes him her portion of meat, and he wolfs it down as if she might change her mind, before belatedly thanking her.

  “How’s your head?” she asks.

  “Good! I mean sore. But I can take it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it knocked much sense into him,” Arthur tells her in Welsh.

  “What did he say?” Jim demands, and Esther looks at her father steadily and tells him, “He said you’re a brave lad.”

  At a quarter to seven Arthur pulls on his mac and offers to walk her down to the village. It’s not his usual evening for the pub, but he gives her a wintry smile. “I’d not miss tonight for the world.”

  “I was thinking of stopping in with Jim,” she says, “keeping an eye on him. Jack can manage for one night.” She puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder, but he shrugs it off.

  “Don’t mollycoddle him,” Arthur tells her. And to Jim, “You’re not her baby, are you?”

  Looking down, she sees the plea in Jim’s face, and understands that if she stays now, she’ll shame him. Her hand is shaking when she takes down her coat, and she makes Arthur wait while she hurries back to her room to pocket the scissors from her sewing kit.

  He’s leaning on the wall when she comes out, peering at the sheep. He’ll start the dipping tomorrow, and the shearing as soon after as the weather allows. She looks at the placid sheep and wonders if they know what’s coming. It doesn’t hurt them, the men say, yet every year she sees them buck and roll their eyes as her father pulls them to him. She has a sudden image of herself sorting fleeces, her job each year, the occasional bloodstains on the wool where the shears have nicked flesh.

  Arthur starts to warn her about Jim as they walk down the lane. “Don’t get too attached to him. He’ll be off soon enough now if this invasion goes right.” It reminds her of what he used to tell her as a girl about the orphaned lambs they hand-reared. Arthur’s never warmed to the boy, but he’s always been reluctant to punish him, too, unwilling to step into the shoes of his absent father.

  The closest he’s come to laying a hand on Jim was after Rhys joined up. Arthur had pronounced him a fool over supper one night—“more sheep than shepherd”—and Jim flew to his defence. “I only hope the war lasts long enough for me to join up and fight alongside him.” He called Arthur a pacifist, which made her father strike the table so hard the salt had leapt from the cellar. “Pacifist I might be,” he said in his deliberate English, “but with the accent on ‘fist’, mind!” He’d heard that somewhere, she thought. His grasp of English was rarely so subtle, but she could see why the phrase would have been memorable to him, the way the English word contained its own rebuke.

  Afterwards, he’d turned his anger on her, hissing in Welsh, “Can’t you do anything with him?”

  “You never liked him,” she says now, which ends the conversation, the truth sometimes stumping him this way, as if it’s a dead end. She wants him to be quiet so she can think about what she’ll do if Colin’s at the pub, but as soon as the silence falls between them she regrets it. This might be the last chance to tell him, she thinks. To tell him herself, not have him find out. But she can’t conceive of the words. She doesn’t even know the Welsh for rape, wonders fleetingly if there is a word. Even in English she can’t quite bring herself to call it rape, what Colin did to her, not now, not even to herself. In the midst of it, yes, the word had filled her mind, buzzing and crackling like a lurid neon sign in a gangster picture. But not afterwards. Rape, as she understands it, is a particular form of murder, when a man kills a woman. It’s connected to sex, but the main thing is the murder. No one—in the films she’s seen, the books she’s read, the whispered stories she’s heard at school—no one survives rape. She is still unclear if the sex itself is so violent that it just kills you on the spot, or if the man has to actually strangle you or shoot you or stab you afterwards, and she had thought in the midst of Colin’s roughness, the blunt, searing pressure of him between her legs, that she was about to find out. But then he left her, and she felt such relief. She had survived, clambered out of the pool as if from a grave. And this is how she knows she hasn’t been raped. The idea of being forced doesn’t enter into it—hadn’t she gone along willingly enough? Besides, what was it to be forced to do something she didn’t want to do? She’d been forced all her life by one circumstance or another—by poverty, by her mother’s death, by the needs of the flock. Being forced to do things is such a part of her daily life, and as for this, she’d at least wanted some part of it—the kissing, her hand in his. If she’s been raped, she thinks, then she’d wanted it more than most things in her life, although that isn’t saying much. And as for the pain, it hadn’t been much worse than the time she’d been pinned against the stall wall and the cow had crushed her foot. The blood made her think of a wound, but only a small one, a barked knuckle, a scraped knee.

  If she had to call it anything, she thinks now, groping for the word, she’d call it a misunderstanding. He meant one thing, she meant another.

  Beside her, Arthur stops for a second, his boots grating in the lane, and when she glances back, she sees him cupping a match to his face, lighting up. In the brief flare his eyes are hooded beneath his cap, and then he shakes the match out. He’d never think to offer her a smoke, reckons it unladylike. As if she were ever going to be a lady! Her, a farmer’s daughter. After her mother’s death, she’d started to nag him with all manner of questions about the flock. She’d thought Arthur knew everything she’d ever need to know—about
lambing, about tupping, all the business of breeding—and she took it in solemnly, not giggling as she might have a year earlier in school, even as Arthur blushed scarlet to explain it. And then in the midst of all this information, which seemed so male to her, he told her about cynefin, the flock’s sense of place, of territory.

  She’d heard the word before, of course, but the importance of the concept had escaped her as a child. Now Arthur spelled it out. How it would be impossible to farm on the open mountain if the flock didn’t know its place. The sheep would scatter to the winds otherwise. It was why farms hereabouts were only ever sold along with their flocks. No one would buy a patch of land alone. What use would it be? You could try to put new livestock on it, but they’d be gone in a season. “They’re not as dumb as they’re made out, sheep,” Arthur likes to joke, but mostly he speaks of cynefin with a kind of reverence, with pride even—not least, as he’s told her several times, because the English don’t have a word for it. As if it’s an essentially Welsh quality.

  But how, she demanded, did the sheep know where they were supposed to be? “It goes back to olden days,” he began (though each subsequent time he tried to explain, it became ‘medieval times’ or ‘the Stone Age’, so she knew he wasn’t really sure). “Back then, shepherds stayed with their flocks all year—there were more of them or better paid. They even followed the sheep up into the mountains in winter. And those shepherds kept their beasts in a certain patch, until over the years the flocks learned where they belonged.”

  But how do they still know, she asked, and Arthur had shrugged. “They remember,” he said awkwardly (he hated humanising the flock, thought it soft). “They teach each other, I suppose. From generation to generation like. This flock, our sheep, are connected all the way back to those sheep in past times.”

  She didn’t say it, but she knew what that meant. The male lambs, the wethers, were sold off for meat each year; only the females, the future ewes, were kept. Whatever was passed down, then, however cynefin was preserved, it was from mother to daughter.

  And the thought of that had been enough to make her, at thirteen, burst into tears. She had to tell the startled Arthur that she was just scared about what it would mean for a flock to be destroyed. He could believe that easily enough—they had both seen, dotted here and there on the hillsides, the shattered empty stone cottages of failed farms—and in his panic at her tears he launched into a bleak tale of the scabies epidemic in ‘34, how he and several neighbours had helped Dewi Thomas destroy his own flock to stop the spread. “He shot them, one by one, in the head like, and then he burned them with kerosene. The stink hung about for days. But before that, he had us shear them. He wanted to make what he could, so we took their wool. Not that it was much, you know, it being only November. But you could see the beasts knew something was wrong. They shivered so. I’d have preferred to do the shooting.”

  He’d looked at her expectantly, as if this terrible story were somehow meant to make her feel better. And, in his gruff male way, it was, she thinks now, as they trudge down the lane side by side. He’d been so embarrassed for her tears, ashamed for her really, that he’d told a story that he thought justified them. At least he’d not suspected that she’d been crying for her mother. That very month she had her first period, and she managed to get through it without breathing a word to him. (She did appeal to Mrs Roberts, though only after she’d sworn her to silence.)

  The thought reminds her that she’s had some practice keeping secrets from Arthur. But also of the secrets her mother might have passed on to her, had she the time. All Esther has now are scattered memories. A freckled arm flashing in and out of a beam of sunlight as her mother churned butter, or tipping an old beer bottle filled with milk for a slavering calf. Once they found a lamb snagged on the wire of the fence, its mother bleating fiercely at a crow that had settled itself on a nearby wall waiting for the lamb to tire. The bird had already pecked out one of the lamb’s eyes. The crow had been insolent, flashing its oily black wings at them, until a resounding clap from Esther’s mother saw it off. Esther, with her small fingers, had had to tease the lamb’s short, soft coat off the barb—although she quailed from the ruined socket—and she recalls her mother’s stern “Go on, Ess!” and cluck of approval when the fleece came free.

  Esther still sees the lamb, now a full-grown ewe, among the flock. The animal stands out, her head cocked to one side, her good eye looking forward. She turned four that spring, ‘broken-mouthed’, as they called the older ewes, an age when she might not survive a winter or reliably bear a lamb, but Esther had already persuaded Arthur to keep her another season. “She’s a survivor,” she told him, and he nodded.

  She thinks of the ewe now as the pub comes into sight. With one hand she grips the scissors in her pocket, presses her thumb to its point. With the other she takes her father’s hand and squeezes it.

  “What’s that for, then,” he asks, flustered.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Just be kind to the boy. For me?”

  In reply, he flicks his cigarette into the lane ahead, grinds it out without breaking stride.

  Six

  It feels like a reprieve when she looks into the pub and there’s no sign of the sappers. But it’s early yet. Many of them don’t get off duty until nine. The lounge is quiet, just the BBC gang (Harry putting on a brave face, despite looking a little the worse for wear), but the public bar, where she sees Arthur forging through the crowd, is seething with resentful locals.

  “PO bloody Ws,” Bertie Prosser is fulminating. “It’s an insult, is what it is.”

  “All right, luv?” Mary asks over her gin and tonic. “You look like you could use one of these. Put a little rose in your cheeks.”

  “What?” Esther is staring past her, towards the frosted glass doors.

  “She’s just a bit anxious, ain’t you, girl,” Harry chips in, and for once she’s almost glad for his interruption. He raises his voice to carry down the passage. “No need to be scared of POWs. They’re all innocent men, after all, locked up for something they didn’t do.” He pops his eyes. “Didn’t run away fast enough!”

  “We’re not bloody scared of them!” Bertie hoots, craning over Jack’s bar to jab a stubby finger at Harry.

  “Maybe you ought to be,” Harry says moodily into his drink. Esther wonders if he’s thinking of his wife. But Bertie doesn’t hear him.

  “We don’t give a toss about no Germans. It’s bloody English liars we’re on about here. I swear, Jack, I don’t know why you’re even serving these English.”

  Jack shrugs; Harry has deep pockets.

  “And just whom, my good man, are you calling English?” Harry cries, rallying.

  “Well, what is you if you ain’t?” Bertie wants to know.

  “Why,” Harry says, dropping into brogue, “I’m your Celtic cousin, to be sure be sure. Isn’t that so, our Mary Kate?”

  “Aye and begorra.” Mary crosses herself. “Irish as stew!”

  “Codswallop!”

  “Och! But we’ve a wee doubting Thomas here, lassie!”

  “Fair dinkum, ocker,” Mary agrees, slapping the bar.

  They’re all laughing now, except for Arthur, who sips his pint. Even Esther smiles, and Harry leans in and confides, “Can’t be the butt of a joke if they don’t know where you’re from, see. Only your straight man has a country; patriots got no sense of humour.”

  “Very bloody funny,” Bertie calls, shaking his head. “All right! The League of blooming Nations can stay.” He slips into Welsh. “I’m serious, though, Jack. You shouldn’t let those bloody sappers in here again.”

  There are murmurs of agreement and Esther looks over at Jack, sees him weighing it: the cost of breakages if there’s a bar fight, against the thirsty business of outrage.

  “They’ll not be here long enough for another payday,” Esther offers, dropping into Welsh herself, but when Jack glances over, she goes back to drawing her pint. “So they say.”

  “Oh,
what the heck,” Jack says finally. “Let ‘em go to the Prince of Wales. They’re banned!” And Esther feels herself go weak with relief, clings to the beer pump.

  Bertie leads a little cheer, thrusts his chin out. “Enough of the English buggers.”

  “Not to mention a few Welsh fools,” Arthur calls drily.

  Bertie whips around like a dog after its own tail. “Well, Arthur Evans,” he sneers, “I’m surprised at you taking their part.”

  “I’m just saying they never actually told you what that base was for.”

  “They led us on, man! They led us up the bloody garden path.”

  “They might have left the gate open,” Arthur tells him. “But I’d say you strayed through it yourself, Bertie.” There’s some laughter at Bertie’s expense and he colours, and Esther feels a twinge of pity for the old windbag. Arthur turns to the room at large. “I thought we should have learned our lesson by now. This is what comes of trusting the English!” He sees Esther staring, gives her a thin smile of triumph, but she turns away.

  “What’re they on about now?” Harry wants to know.

  “They’re feeling cheated,” Esther mumbles.

  “Cheated! Ha! That’s a good one. Hey, hey,” he calls gleefully, “don’t tell me you lot are feeling welshed on?”

  “Welshed on!” Arthur thunders from the other bar. It’s one expression in English he’s always quick to pick up on. He looks furious, but Esther can see he’s relishing this. Harry, without realising it, has ended up as her father’s straight man, setting up one of his favourite speeches.

  “Do you think he even knows where that perfidious phrase comes from?” Arthur asks the rest of them in Welsh, dismissing Harry, who sits back and flaps his fingers and thumb together at Mary like a gabbing mouth. It’s true, though, Esther thinks; her father, so taciturn in English, is a different man in Welsh, especially with an audience.