Pontypridd 05 - Such Sweet Sorrow

by Catrin Collier

The voice was William’s but there was none of the jauntiness he remembered. ‘Good God, boy, where have you been?’

  ‘Hell and back.’ William pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered them to his uncle before lighting one.

  ‘I can believe it, by the look of you. Come here, sit on the wall for a minute. I can’t imagine what your mother and Diana are going to say to this.’

  ‘Eddie’s dead,’ Will said briefly.

  ‘We had telegrams telling us you were both dead. Trevor said the Guards were fighting the rearguard.’

  ‘We were. Captain gave us orders to surrender. We laid down our arms, the buggers collected them, rounded us up and shot us where we stood. Bloody SS unit, we didn’t stand a chance. They opened fire without warning. Eddie fell right next to me. I couldn’t believe it …’ He closed his eyes and gripped his cigarette so hard it broke in two. ‘Sometimes I still think the whole bloody massacre was a nightmare. All I have to do is wake up and they’ll be alive. But I’ll never see Eddie or the others again, Uncle Huw. None of us will. Eddie was standing right next to me and all I could do was watch him die …’

  The clouds shifted and moonlight fell full on William’s face. It was then Huw saw the bandage on his head.

  ‘You were shot?’

  ‘We all were. The only difference is I’m alive, and they’re dead.’

  ‘How did you escape?’

  ‘The Germans left us where we lay. They ordered the French villagers to bury us. When they realised I wasn’t dead they hid me, then got me to the coast. I waited a couple of weeks before begging a ride on a trawler.’ William dropped the remains of his cigarette and ground it into dust with the toe of his boot. He opened his cigarette packet again with a shaking hand only to discover it was empty.

  ‘Here, have a Player,’ Huw offered.

  ‘When are you going to start smoking a brand I like?’

  ‘These are better?’ Huw looked at the packet in William’s hand.

  ‘Someone gave them to me when I reported to a police station in Devon this morning. You know I haven’t even been debriefed properly. They tried to do it, but I screamed and shouted until they gave me a twenty-four-hour pass. I have to report to base camp tomorrow.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Huw squinted at his watch. ‘By my reckoning it’s somewhere close to three. How about I go up the Graig when I finish my shift at six and prepare your mam by telling her you’re still in one piece. I’ll get Diana and Wyn to go up there too, then, when the taxis start running at seven or so, you can go home and see them for yourself.’

  ‘Everyone really thought I was dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everyone? Di, Tina …’

  ‘Everyone.’

  ‘Oh God what a mess.’

  ‘You need some sleep, boy, and across the road there’s a young lady who might give you a hot drink, some comfort and a bed for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Tina’s in the café?’

  ‘She’s living there now.’

  ‘But how …’

  ‘This is no time for explanations, boy. Go on, off with you.’

  ‘You’ll see Mam and Diana?’

  ‘I promise.’

  William rose to his feet, straightened his dirty jacket and ruefully rubbed the stubble on his chin as he crossed the square. When he reached the café he knocked lightly on the door.

  ‘You’re going to have to bang louder than that, boy,’ Huw advised as he turned his steps towards the town.

  William knocked again. A sleepy voice shouted, ‘Whoever you are, we’re not open, so go away.’

  ‘I’ve got a present to deliver.’

  The blackout blind lifted, a head appeared in the window and Tina looked down, blinking at the moonlight. Her lips moved, but William didn’t hear a sound. She disappeared. Seconds later bolts grated back and the door opened.

  ‘It’s you,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘It’s really you?’

  ‘It’s really me. Please, love, stop crying. I told you I’d be back.’

  She dragged him inside and switched on the light, for once forgetting all about the blackout regulations.

  ‘You’re filthy, you look as though you haven’t washed in a month …’

  ‘It’s probably nearer two,’ he confessed wryly.

  ‘They said you were dead …’

  ‘Pinch me. I promise I’m not a ghost.’

  ‘… and you promised me a present.’ She was too shocked to realise what she was saying.

  ‘So I did.’ He put his hand inside his battledress and pulled out a handful of cream silk edged with lace. ‘You’re lucky to have them, there were times when I was so bloody cold I nearly put them on myself.’

  She flung her arms around his neck, burying her head in his shoulder so he wouldn’t see her tears.

  ‘In return, I asked you to give me a fashion show, remember?’

  ‘Not down here. Oh damn, the blackout.’

  ‘You’ve learned to swear.’

  ‘And a whole lot more besides. Oh God, Will,’ she pulled the curtain across the door and leaned against it, staring at him. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

  ‘Me? Never!’ He smiled, and the sensation felt strange, as though he hadn’t had anything to smile about in years.

  ‘Come upstairs.’ She took him by the hand.

  ‘I need to hold you.’ He wrapped his arms around her, as though he never intended to let go. ‘Just for a little while.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I’ll love you, for ever.’ He looked down into her dark tear-stained eyes, ‘and ever.’

  Author’s Notes

  The characters in Such Sweet Sorrow are creations of my imagination. The traumatic events they lived through are not. The round-up of innocent Italian-born businessmen in Wales is just one of the infinite number of tragedies and injustices of the Second World War. Prior to the internment of Italian nationals, there were several incidents of looting and affray in Italian-owned cafés across Wales.

  The Pontypridd Observer of 20 January 1940 recounts just such an incident when a haulier tipped furniture over in Marenghi’s Bridge Street Café in Pontypridd. (How we miss it, and its jukebox, since it was demolished to make way for the Taff Street precinct development in the sixties.)

  Forty-nine men born in and around Bardi and the Ceno Valley in Italy (the area from which the majority of Welsh café owners came) died on the Arandora Star. Nearly all of them were arrested in Wales. No one who knew them would believe for an instant that they were Fascist sympathisers. Most had sons and brothers fighting in the British army, or with the Italian Resistance. The Italian home of at least one man was marked as a safe haven on a map (without his permission or knowledge) given to RAF personnel prior to flying missions over Italy.

  It says a great deal for the spirit of the families of the Italians who were interned or killed on the Arandora Star, that practically all of them returned to Wales either during, or after the war. They continued to run their cafés, picked up the threads of their lives, and were gratefully accepted back into the community. I have yet to find a single Italian/Welsh family that bears a grudge or harbours bitterness for what they endured during those difficult years.

  Several families forcibly moved from their Welsh homes at a moment’s notice were forced to hand over their businesses to friends and neighbours. At the end of the war those same friends and neighbours handed the restaurants and cafés back, complete with accurate accounts, and weekly banking sheets.

  There is eyewitness evidence that Welsh Guardsmen, men of the 2nd Norfolk Battalion and other British units were massacred in separate incidents during the retreat from France in May/June 1940 after surrendering their weapons to invading soldiers of the SS Regiments of the army of the Third Reich.

  Only one SS officer, Oberstürmfuhrer Fritz Knoechlein of the 4th Company, 2nd Totenkopf Infantry Regiment of the SS, was tried and found guilty of committing the war crime of massacring unarmed, surren
dering British troops (principally on the evidence of French civilian eyewitnesses who saw the incident at Paradis, Pas-de-Calais, France on or about 27 May 1940).

  He was subsequently hanged at Hamburg in 1949. Knoechlein was involved in the killing of about ninety disarmed POWs, members of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Norfolk Regiment, and other British units. Despite eyewitness evidence and a television documentary which named him, as well as detailing his crimes, the SS officer commanding the troops who massacred the disarmed Welsh Guards during the retreat from France in 1940 has never been brought to trial. He lives in comfortable retirement in Germany to this day.

  An excerpt from

  PAST REMEMBERING

  Book Six in the Hearts of Gold series

  by

  CATRIN COLLIER

  Chapter One

  ‘Soon be in Pontypridd.’ The corporal shouted to make himself heard above the roar of the lorry’s engine as he glanced across at the passenger huddled into an army blanket in the corner of the cab. If the request to take the shady-looking traveller had come from anyone other than a wing commander he would have told the hiker to shove off and use shanks’s pony to get from the south coast to Wales. He not only looked disreputable, but foreign, and in the eleven months since France had fallen, the corporal, like most of the population of beleaguered Britain, had learned to look on all foreigners as Hitler’s henchmen.

  His passenger’s accent had the lilt of the valleys but there was something odd about it that suggested other, stronger influences, and on the few occasions he hadn’t been able to avoid answering questions, his speech had been slow as though he’d had to carefully consider every word before he said it. The man’s dark eyes and black hair were common enough in Wales, but his skin looked as though it had been burned by a hotter sun than the one that had shone in the south of England during the last few fine April days. He was thinner and taller than most locals; drawn and wasted as though he hadn’t eaten properly in a year. And then there were his clothes – his linen shirt was more hole than cloth, and his black trousers had been bled grey by wear and washing. Both were too thin for early spring. He had no jacket or coat, and no luggage. Not even a haversack. Only the blanket, and the corporal had seen a sergeant hand him that. It was all very well the wing commander vouching for him, but then the wing commander might be a spy too. The newspapers were full of stories of German agents infiltrating all ranks, high and low, in the services as well as civilian life.

  His passenger could have come in by boat, shipwrecked even, which would explain the state of his clothes and his injured leg. After all, Dover was just across the Channel from France, and a man in the Home Guard had told him they could see the German guns trained on the English coast on a clear day.

  ‘You know anyone in Pontypridd?’ The driver tried to make the enquiry casual, wanting to hear the man’s voice again just in case he could pick up on a trace of an accent. German or Italian? That was it! His passenger resembled the Mussolini Fascists he had seen on the newsreels. To think he’d carried a potential saboteur to Pontypridd, slap bang in the middle of one of the largest concentrations of munitions factories in the country.

  ‘A few people,’ came the guarded reply.

  ‘You haven’t been there for a while?’

  ‘Over four years.’

  ‘Well, the town isn’t what it used to be since the war broke out. God forgive me for saying so, but it’s better. More money about. Every spare room in the place is packed to bursting with evacuees and war workers,’ he added cautiously, giving away nothing that wasn’t already common knowledge. ‘You got somewhere to stay?’

  ‘There’s a few houses I can try.’

  ‘You haven’t written to tell anyone you’re coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A lot have moved on since the war started, what with the call-ups and labour shortages. There’s no saying whether your friends will still be in the town. We won’t be pulling in much before midnight. If you don’t want to disturb anyone, you could try Jacobsdal,’ he suggested slyly, knowing the house was under the direct supervision of the police.

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Big house up by the boys’ grammar school. It was bought back in ‘37 by German Jews. Rumour has it they intended to make their home there but they returned to Germany to pick up their furniture… or perhaps it was their relatives … either way they didn’t come back. Council took it over last year. They use it as a hostel for foreigners. Refugees and immigrants and those sorts of people,’ he hinted heavily, hoping to spark a revelation.

  ‘You think I’ll get a bed there?’

  ‘Bound to. Don’t mind me asking, but have you been overseas?’

  The man’s lips twisted into a parody of a smile, and the driver concentrated on the road. His passenger’s smile held more menace than the scowl he’d worn for most of the journey.

  ‘Of course I know Ponty inside out,’ the driver continued nervously, keeping an eye on the sturdy wooden crutch the man had jammed between the bench seat and the passenger door. If he was a foreigner there was no saying what violence he was capable of. ‘My missus was born in Hopkinstown. We live in Aberdare now, which is why I’m driving through, but her mother’s still in Ponty, and we like to go down for tea on the Sundays I’m home to catch up on all the news. My wife’s four brothers are in the army. My three sisters too.’

  ‘We should win, then.’

  ‘I should bloody well think so,’ the corporal retorted hotly, missing the intended irony. ‘Anyone special you thinking of visiting?’ he hazarded another question.

  ‘No one special.’ The bitterness in the man’s voice finally silenced the driver. Peering into the blackout he rolled the heavy wagon to the end of Broadway before sliding back his window to check for oncoming traffic at the Tumble crossroads. Ahead loomed the blackout-shrouded centre of the town.

  ‘You can drop me off here.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ The corporal lifted his foot from the accelerator to the brake, grinding to a halt outside the New Theatre in the narrowest part of Taff Street.

  ‘Thanks for the lift.’ His passenger opened the door.

  ‘You know the forces: the officers shout, the squaddies jump. What the wing commander says, goes on that particular base. You good friends?’

  ‘Not really.’ The stranger offered his hand and the driver took it briefly. ‘You ever in the town?’ he asked as he lowered his wooden crutch out of the cab.

  ‘Now and then.’

  ‘Eat in any of the cafés?’

  ‘Used to. They shipped out most of the Italians back last year, about the time of Dunkirk. They said they were enemy aliens. Couldn’t see it myself. After all, most of them have lived here for donkey’s years.’

  ‘Know the Ronconis?’

  ‘Who doesn’t? A couple of the girls are still in town. They married local fellows so they were allowed to stay. Look, I can’t stop here any longer. If a copper comes he’ll nab me for blocking the road.’ The driver revved his engine as the man lowered himself gingerly from the cab, clutching the door until he could ease his weight on to the crutch. ‘Say, you’re not one of them, are you?’ the corporal asked suddenly, taking his foot off the accelerator.

  ‘A Ronconi or an enemy alien?’ he asked as he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. The night air was fresh and chilly after the close, petrol-ridden atmosphere of the cab.

  The driver had the grace to remain silent.

  ‘It’s all right, I am on your side.’

  ‘You’ve hardly said a bloody word in all the fifteen hours we’ve been on the road, and now you want to talk?’

  ‘Not really. Thanks for the lift.’

  The driver stared into his rearview mirror, watching the shadowy figure limp through the darkness back up towards the Tumble and Ronconi’s café. Finally he released the handbrake. He’d seen enough Sherlock Holmes films to put together a description if the police wanted one.

  The traveller stood outside
the café until he could no longer hear the thunder of the lorry’s engine as it rumbled on down Taff Street. The building was in darkness, but then, courtesy of the blackout, so was the entire Tumble. He walked to the door and knocked.

  ‘We’re closed.’

  He leaned against the café window in relief. There was someone he knew in Pontypridd after all. ‘Open up, Tina, it’s me.’

  ‘Who’s me?’ The bolts were drawn back before he had time to answer. A face peered out, then the door opened a crack. He pushed aside the curtain.

  ‘Careful, the blackout …’ Tina stared in bewilderment. ‘Ronnie?’ she ventured tentatively.

  ‘I used to go by that name.’

  ‘You look awful.’

  ‘Trust me to have a sister who always tells the truth.’

  ‘But you do. That blanket’s filthy and your clothes … you look as though you haven’t seen a square meal in years.’

  ‘Has anyone, since this war started?’ Untangling his crutch from the curtain he stumbled inside, locking the door behind him. As he turned Tina flung herself into his arms. He lost his balance and crashed backwards into the wall.

  ‘Ronnie, it’s so good to see you … We didn’t know if you were alive or dead… I have so much to tell you … Gina is going to be out of her mind when she sees you … You’ve hurt your leg … How did you do it? Come here, sit down. I’ll get you something to eat …’

  Scarcely hearing Tina’s babbling, he scrutinised the deserted café, automatically checking that the linoleum that covered the floor had been swept and washed and the wooden chairs cleaned before they’d been lifted on to the tables. Old habits died hard, he reflected grimly.

  ‘You run this place by yourself now?’ he interrupted.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But Tina, it’s the roughest …’

  ‘So? You want me to put Gina in charge?’

  ‘Gina run a café? Don’t be ridiculous, she’s a baby.’

  ‘She’s managing the restaurant we opened in Taff Street, and managing it well.’