2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  At the last, though, it isn’t Hess that Rotheram thinks of when in years to come he looks back on the end of the war. It’s a lonely Welsh pub—the name forgotten, if he ever knew it. He’d stopped there one night while investigating an escape, the only one he’d ever work on, though one he thinks he’d recall among hundreds, if only for the prisoner in question.

  He’d got a frosty reception from the camp commandant, who seemed to think Rotheram had been sent to investigate him as much as the escape—the man had lost an arm somewhere along the way, sheared clean off, Rotheram couldn’t help thinking, by the chip on his shoulder. The commandant’s self-serving theory was that the fellow had had help. “Quite possibly,” Rotheram told him; he had begun interviewing other prisoners already. “No,” the commandant insisted. “Not them. I run a tight ship here.”

  ‘Tight’ being the operative word, Rotheram thought, judging from the man’s red-webbed complexion. “No. I mean he had help from the locals, the Welshies. They’re as bad as the Micks.” It had seemed preposterous, but Rotheram saw that he was going to have to humour the man to get any cooperation. Besides, the theory had the virtue of suggesting the prisoner might still be close by, not miles away, and Rotheram persisted in the faint hope that if he could only recapture the fellow, Hawkins might yet reconsider his assignment.

  At any rate, he drove to the village pub late one night by way of introducing himself to the locals and in case any of them had seen something that hadn’t already been reported. It’d been a long day of interviews—first the prisoners, then the equally sullen guards—and when a violent rainstorm overtook him, the water rushing down the narrow lane as if it were a streambed, Rotheram began cursing the commandant for sending him on a wild goose chase. He’d have turned back if he hadn’t been desperate for a drink. He pulled up under the swaying sign, plucked his cap off the seat beside him and jammed it low over his eyes against the rain.

  He’d been so weary, he was relieved at first to be ignored in the pub. The place was almost deserted in any event; there’d be precious little to learn here. He took a seat at the end of the bar, glanced at the menu chalked up behind it, lost himself in thought, staring out of the window at the rain, feeling the fire behind him warm his wet woollen uniform jacket. Only slowly did he realise that he hadn’t been served, that the conversation among the few locals had stilled. He looked up and smiled and called, “Pint of your best bitter, please,” and the barman, a burly old fellow, had limped down the bar towards him, a damp rag in his hand, pushing crumbs and shreds of tobacco over the polished wood. He’d brushed them right past, making Rotheram sit back and almost lose his balance. Someone laughed behind him. “Excuse me?” Rotheram called, and when the fellow ignored him, he might have knocked on the bar. “My good man!”

  There was a murmur from the other patrons, and beside him a florid bloke said, “That’s torn it.”

  The barman stopped at the end of the bar and dried his big hands on a green apron.

  “We don’t have to serve your kind in here, you know.”

  Even here, Rotheram thought with dull rage, even in this uniform. There was a policeman in the corner, and Rotheram looked to him for a moment, but the other just raised his glass as if to his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and Rotheram realised he was alone. He looked the bartender up and down and felt a bitter satisfaction that he was so solid. He slid off his stool and took the first step towards him. It seemed so simple suddenly, and he almost rushed towards the fight, but as he closed the distance he thought something else was required, some final insult, and then his line came to him, as if in a film.

  “What kind is that?”

  And the man spat, “English.”

  Rotheram stopped.

  “English?”

  “That’s right. We don’t serve no English here.”

  There was a little ripple of pleasure through the crowd.

  The barman crossed his arms on his broad chest, threw back his shoulders, and Rotheram began to laugh—It wasn’t so much the ridiculous pettiness of Welsh-English antipathy compared to his own experience, but the combination of the man’s certainty—his bullish, pugnacious conviction—and his utter inaccuracy.

  “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

  And Rotheram bent over now, one hand on the bar for support, held up the other, and after a second said, “You don’t know who I am, do you? You’ve no idea.” The man stared at him, wanting to strike him, Rotheram could see, but somehow unsure, as if the idea of striking a laughing man was unfair. “I’m not English,” Rotheram managed to cry at last, through his laughter.

  He could see the man didn’t believe him, didn’t know what to believe. Beside him, the florid fellow was shaking his head, wide eyed.

  “What are you, then?”

  Rotheram shook his head, coughing out, “Would you believe German!”

  “Well, I think you’d better go, whoever you are,” the barman told him with icy propriety. And Rotheram was too delighted with him, too choked with laughter, to object. He just waved, unable to get out another word, and stumbled outside to the car.

  The rain had stopped, the air smelling fresh, as if washed, and he sat for several minutes, bent over the wheel, wiping the tears from his eyes while the stern locals watched him from the windows of the pub.

  Of course, it occurred to him, catching his breath, that it was only funny because he wasn’t German—or English or Welsh, for that matter. And for the first time since he’d run, he felt free, as if he’d finally arrived somewhere, and even after he started the engine, he couldn’t imagine anywhere he’d rather be.

  He’d felt a perverse fondness for the Welsh ever after, so when the commandant brought up his theory again, Rotheram asked blandly, if there was any reason to think the locals and the Germans had come into contact. He knew, of course, from the prisoners that the village boys had been in the habit of hanging around the wire, but if so, it was in contravention of standing orders, and the commandant knew well enough to keep his mouth shut. Besides, within a couple more days the escapee had been brought in, at the end of a farmer’s shotgun. “So much for the natives being friendly,” Rotheram observed.

  Still, he had meant to press the prisoner about a local connection—if nothing else, he assumed the fellow guilty of petty larceny, just to keep body and soul together. Only he’d not had the chance before the man was beaten up by his own side, and afterwards, staring into his ruined face, Rotheram didn’t have the heart. Besides, there was something about the fellow, something he recognised, even if the fellow swore they’d never met, something that had made it possible for Rotheram to tell him he was Jewish.

  At first Rotheram had taken his question as a challenge, refused to run from it, as he had with Hess. But afterwards, looking back, it was the fellow’s’ lack of shame at having surrendered that he remembered. It had never occurred to Rotheram that he could be unashamed of fleeing, of escaping, of living. Of being Jewish—if that was what he was. And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism. That’s what he had glimpsed at the pub, what had sent him into that fit of laughter. The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimisation, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.

  He’d seen the escapee once more, too. He came through the same region in the summer of ‘45—the war done, but the prisoners expected to be held for many more months, until the situation in Germany stabilised—screening men for a labour programme. A prisoner who’d attempted escape wouldn’t normally be approved, but Rotheram had never forgotten the fellow, sought him out and graded him ‘white’, fit for work, over the commandant’s objections. The major was a short-timer by then, a month from being demobbed, and besides, as Rotheram pointed out, the man had been beaten by his fellow prisoners, and if that didn’t qualify him as an anti-Nazi, he didn’t know what did.


  In fact, though, it was Karsten’s despair that had persuaded him. He’d seen the newsreels recently, like the rest. “To be fighting for that,” he shuddered. “And I was ashamed of surrendering.” Rotheram had been moved to see him imprisoned again by shame. He’d hoped that the work on the open hillsides might be good for him. His own transfer came through shortly thereafter—he’d finally taken a posting to Nuremberg when offered by someone other than Hawkins—but he made a point of requesting at least one report from the new commandant, and heard that Karsten had been a great help on a local farm in the bitter winter of ‘46, digging sheep out of the snow.

  He’d not given him much thought beyond that, but in late ‘47 he’d been back in Wales a final time. Rotheram hadn’t lasted long in Nuremberg: he couldn’t stand the stink of damp, charred wood which seemed to cling to everything still. But he had been lucky enough to make some contacts among the French delegation and get seconded to a unit in Paris assigned to sift through captured documents in order to build more war crimes cases. It was grim work, but at least the city was whole, and he stuck with it for almost a year until he found a pair of names he knew. All this time he thought he’d been hunting for evidence against the Nazis, and really he’d been looking for his grandparents. He’d submitted his last transfer request that day, and since Paris was an attractive posting, he’d been replaced and on the ferry back to Britain within a week. His own demobilisation wouldn’t be far off, he knew—he’d already outlasted Hawkins, who’d retired to the south coast for the bird watching—but he had no idea what to do with himself after the army. In the meantime, he toured the remaining work camps and wrote reports that he was convinced no one but historians would read. There were no interrogations, of course, no investigations, but from time to time he was called in to assess the cases of men who had petitioned to stay in Britain permanently. Several he interviewed had met women, and wanted to marry.

  One such case brought him back to Snowdonia that autumn. The Welsh village’s name, that jumble of consonants, hadn’t rung any bells, but he recalled the pub as he drove past it, and recognised the constable in whose ‘station’—the parlour of his little house—he conducted the interview.

  The constable offered him tea, and they reminisced about the escape. “Always wished I’d caught the blighter myself,” the policeman said. “You know, done my bit, so to speak. Too young for the first war, too old for the last one. Story of my life.”

  Rotheram thought doing one’s bit was overrated, but he nodded, asked about the couple. “Girl know what she’s doing?”

  “Reckon so,” the constable said mournfully. “Won’t be talked out of it at any rate.”

  “And the fellow—?” But they were interrupted by a bustling in the hallway, and the constable jumped to his feet with a whispered, “You tell me.”

  Rotheram had half expected to recognise the prisoner when he met the applicants, but the man was a stranger to him: a brawny, thick-necked Thuringian, marrying a roly-poly called Blodwyn. Rotheram had no illusions about the role of love in these unions—they owed more to desperation and loneliness—but he was inclined to approve them anyway—he couldn’t quite say ‘bless’ them—provided they seemed founded in equal need. Why not after all? Who was he to judge? If he couldn’t be sure who was lying, how was he to know who was in love?

  The Thuringian and his Blod weren’t much different from the rest he’d vetted. He saw them separately and then together, and they sat on the polished wooden bench in the policeman’s hall and clutched each other’s fat little hands. “Oh, thank you, sir,” they’d chorused when he’d signed the paperwork. He asked the Thuringian if he didn’t miss home, and the other frowned and told him, “Yes, sir. Only it’s not there anymore, is it?” And Rotheram nodded. “If I’m going to start all over, might as well begin here as there,” the big man added, warming to his theme. “You love him?” Rotheram had asked the girl, and she’d blushed deeply, which he took for a yes. Afterwards he heard the pair of them chattering away in a language he didn’t understand—Welsh, it dawned on him at last.

  Only when he handed over the paperwork did he realise that the constable and the girl shared the same name.

  “Your daughter?”

  The other gave a slight nod. “When they started working, I wanted to keep an eye on them, stand guard, in a manner of speaking, and she used to bring me my lunches.” He shook his head. “Looks like we caught a Jerry after all.”

  Rotheram offered a cigarette, and they smoked in silence for a while.

  “He’s all right.”

  “Better bloody be, if he knows what’s good for him.”

  Rotheram left him then. He’d parked outside the pub, and he walked that way now with a thought of getting a drink, but when he reached the door, he found it was closed. Not yet opening time. He asked around instead for the farm he’d heard Karsten had been assigned to, the same one he’d been captured on. Cilgwyn. The name had stayed with him. It meant ‘white hill’, apparently, though to Rotheram’s eye it seemed as green as the rest. Still, it had struck him as an appropriate spot for surrender.

  There’d been a girl there too, Rotheram thought, but when he knocked on the door, an old woman answered and told him the German was ‘gone home’. Not ‘surprising, really, he told himself. Most of the prisoners had been repatriated by then, but still, it disappointed him somehow.

  There was a small child staring at him from the barn when he turned around, and he smiled and gave her a little wave. She took an uncertain step forward and he called, “Hello there!” which only made her run back into the shadows. He was deciding whether he should follow when a woman—it was immediately apparent she was the mother—emerged from the barn, one hand raised against the light, to squint at him.

  Rotheram began to apologise for startling the child, but she told him it wasn’t his fault.

  “She thought you were someone else at first.”

  The woman was wearing an embroidered blouse, tucked into men’s trousers, cinched at the waist with a broad belt, a combination that seemed to accentuate her figure.

  “Can I help you?”

  “You had a German prisoner here,” he said. “I wonder if you have an address for him?”

  “You knew him?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” She searched his face, took in the uniform. “Do you have an address?”

  “Why do you want it?”

  “I’m going over there,” Rotheram told her, and as he said it, he thought, Why yes. That’s what he must do next. “To help with the reconstruction. I thought I might have a job for him. Heard he was a good worker.”

  “Oh, he is!” And she recited the address there and then, her accent flawless. “His mother’s place. I’m not sure it’ll do you any good, though,” she said sadly. “He’s not replied to anything we’ve sent.”

  It was the East, he knew. Soviet control.

  “I’ll make some enquiries.”

  She nodded.

  “Well…” He shifted his weight.

  “If you do contact him…”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you tell him, Esther said…that the flock’s well.”

  “The flock?”

  “Only, he put his heart into saving them. After that winter we had. We lost a lot, too many, really, to keep going. But he told us to beg and borrow stock from other farms—pastured them in return for the lambs—and then he stayed with them on the mountain. They’d have strayed, new sheep, if someone didn’t go up”—she jerked a finger over her shoulder to the jagged hilltop—“and shepherd them. And he did that, almost eighteen months, in all weathers, until the new ones knew their place.” Her voice wavered slightly, and Rotheram didn’t know what to say.

  The child had crept out of the barn and now ran to her mother, rubbing her face against her leg, but then looking up at Rotheram with a boldness that seemed beautiful to him.

  “It’s all right, cariad. Mam’s fine.” She smoothed a hand over the chil
d’s silky head. “My guardian,” she told Rotheram.

  He smiled, and she swiped her eyes.

  “Sorry. Only, there’ve been sheep here for hundreds of years, and it’d have been a shame to let them die out.”

  Rotheram nodded slowly. “I’ll tell him.”

  “In truth, I think he rather liked it up there,” she said, turning to stare up at the hillside, and Rotheram looked with her to where the sheep were drifting across it like a white cloud.

  “My sheep,” the child whispered, and her mother laughed and pulled her close.

  Later, in the pub, he heard her story: the father fallen to his death in the quarry, and the lover who never came home from the war. “Local hero,” the chatty barmaid told him. “Tragic, really, though the boy’s mother’s been a great help to Esther. Don’t know what they’d have done without their German, mind.”

  The barmaid was a big, blowsy girl, friendly in an oblivious way, and he was happy to listen to her. Down the passage, in the public bar, he could see a man’s back moving to and fro, the same man, he guessed, who’d refused him service three years earlier. But when the old fellow limped past him to ring up an order, he looked at Rotheram without a flicker of recognition.

  The couple from earlier in the day were at a corner table, and as Rotheram finished his pint, the barmaid asked, “Another? It’s on them.” Rotheram nodded to them.