How Green Was My Valley

by Richard Llewellyn

  I went inside our house to take plates outside and found my father giving Clydach Howell the letter, but flat in the pages of a bound book of Christian Heralds.

  “A frame of the best wood you will find, Clydach, my little one,” my father said. “And I will have a crown set above it, see, and it shall hang on this wall all the days of my life.”

  “Leave it to me, Gwilym,” said Clydach, serious, and carrying the book as though it was his pass through the Gates, “I will make a job of this to bring tears to the eyes, indeed to God. And no cost to you, either.”

  “Cost to me,” said my father, “or no frame.”

  “We shall see,” said Clydach. “I do know where there is a bit of mahogany that the old devil himself would be glad to have his old claws on, if he knew where to find it. For years I have wanted to see it put to good use, but there was not enough for a chair, and too much to spoil for a stool. But now, a frame. You shall see a bit of wood, now, Gwilym, my little one, aye, by God, you shall.”

  “Drink up,” said my father, and round went the pots.

  There is a night that was, with everybody going home in groups round the roads and over the mountain, with one group over here singing a line of a chorus, and listening for a group over there to sing the next, back and fore, till the sound fell in the depths of the miles between and the wind was too tired to do any more carrying.

  And the mountain lying awake on his side, smiling in the quiet darkness, happy to have us about him.

  “Huw,” Ceinwen said, in the playtime, “where is this nightingale, with you?”

  “Plenty on the mountain,” I said, “these weeks, now.”

  “When am I going to hear them?” she asked me, and looking from the sides of her eyes, as though anything I said would be lies, so save breath to blow tea.

  “When you come over in our Valley,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “The men are going to London for Saturday, so on Saturday afternoon I will come, is it? Then we can stay up the mountain late, and I can come back any time I like with the trap.”

  No use to make an excuse, and I had given a promise, so there it was.

  “You will have trouble with your father,” I said.

  “He will know nothing,” she said, and winked, and I blushed like a fool.

  We had talked little since the night of the weddings, and only a nod before school, for she was often late, and never in much of a temper in the mornings, and Mervyn was always near, so a note across the desk or a touch of the fingers as she passed, was all we had been able to have.

  Whatever is said to the contrary, I am ready to swear that green and red lights are set in the brain, and you will have a flash of red when you are going into danger. The red inside me was set stone still at danger whenever I thought of Ceinwen. Why, I cannot say, but it was. I was sure something was going to happen.

  And I have never been so right.

  Only a few of us were kept on at our age to take examinations. Mr. Motshill had told us that he was determined to push us through University. Nine of us, there were, and Ceinwen one of us, for she was gifted, and no doubt about it. Years in her father’s business, and making out bills, and doing sums, had made her first class in arithmetic, and she could quote Shakespeare till Christmas came again, so there was nothing wrong with her English.

  We had an easier time than the other boys and girls who were leaving at fourteen, and some before that. Not easier in work, mind, for Mr. Motshill was strict, but in coming in and going out. Monitors, we were, but only to see that the boys and girls behaved themselves. But we let them do as they liked, and never once brought them up even for speaking Welsh in school.

  Friday night, when the village turned out to see Ivor and the men from our Valley go over the mountain to sing for the Queen, was soft with rain, a little cold, and a lovely blue.

  The brake they went in was covered with leeks, and the horses wore three white ostrich feathers in their head straps, and more leeks on their blinkers, and red blankets. A prouder team of horses you never saw, and no use to say that horses cannot tell when they are dressed for show, for if you had seen them, and their little dancings, and half a neigh, and a couple of coughs, and restless with the hoof, and swish with the tail, good gracious, it was so plain that they wanted you to look at them, and pat them, and make those sounds through the teeth that horses love to hear from friendly men.

  Up with the boxes with the best clothes, first, then two casks of beer and crates of bottles from the Three Bells, to see them as far as Paddington Station, and parcels of food, and then the men climbed up, my father among the last, with Ivor.

  Mr. Gruffydd had shaken hands with all of them, and every one of them had asked him again, making a hundred times, to go with them. But Mr. Gruffydd smiled and shook his head. He would not, for he had Chapel on Sunday, and sick to go to before that. So the choir he had started went to Windsor without him, with enough noise from everybody to sound like the departure of the Persian hordes.

  All the way up the mountain we watched them, and then Mr. Gruffydd turned about and went to the little house with the sea-shell porch, with a nod and a smile for us, and a pat on the head for me.

  “Breaking his heart,” Bron said. “If he had the money, he would be with them.”

  “They could have passed the hat,” I said.

  Bron looked at me with pity to burn.

  “For him?” she said, and said no more.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  MR. GRUFFYDD had changed a little, but I think I was the only one in the village to know how much. He seemed tired, and yet restless, and somehow older, not with lines in the face, or white coming to his beard, but something dark in the eyes made him so. The furniture took a long time, for only I was working on it, and then with gaps of days. He had a lot of work to do, with more men coming to the Valley, and labour troubles to preside over, and meetings in Chapel. He was reading less, too. I could tell from the set of the books, and the length of the candles. As to the furniture, he would start to work, and then sit, staring, and then shake his head, and give me a bit of a smile, and get up and go out to make tea. But he came a lot more to our house, and sat by the fire for a long time, night after night, smoking his pipe, and my mother glad to have him and always sorry when he said good night.

  I was sorry to tell him that I would not be working with him on Saturday afternoon, but he asked no questions, and only looked at me, and smoothed his hair, and nodded. And that was worse, for I felt bound to tell him what I was going to do, if only to put myself right with him, but I lacked the courage, for it sounded so silly. Please, Mr. Gruffydd, I must leave the polishing on Saturday because I am going with Ceinwen up the mountain to listen to the nightingales.

  So I left him, and there seemed to be a hole in the air that nothing would fill.

  Round the mountain, by the beeches, I met Ceinwen. After three o’clock, it was, with the afternoon just coming heavy, and the sun hot, with the wind gone to hide up in the trees at the mountain-top. She pulled up by the stone I was sitting on, and took out a couple of rugs and a red straw basket and handed them down to me.

  “What is this for, then?” I asked her, dull that I was.

  “To eat, boy,” she said, and jumped down to unharness the mare. “Are we going to be up there all night with nothing in our bellies but old sounds and screeches?”

  “All night?” I said, and hot with fear. “I have got choir practice at seven o’clock.”

  “Let seven o’clock come,” Ceinwen said, and gave the mare a smack to send her up to the grass. “Help to push the trap in by here, now.”

  So we put the trap tidy, and I led the way, loaded like a donkey, up the mountain to the trees near where the nightingales sang. Ceinwen was in a dress striped in grey and white, with a white cap with flowers and cherries in the lace round the edges, and red velvet ribbons drawing her dress tight at the neck. Heavy in the chest and hip she was, but long from hip to the ground, and inches taller than
me, of course, and from behind, more a woman than a girl.

  And my danger light giving me flash, flash, flash, all the way up, and putting my tongue in a clamp.

  In and out of the sunlight, under the shadows of the trees, into their coolnesses, where leaf mould was soft with richness and held a whispering of the smells of a hundred years of green that had grown and gone, through the lanes of wild rose that were red with blown flower, up past the flowering berry bushes, through the pasture that was high to the knees, and clinging, and that hissed at us with every step, up beyond the mossy rocks where the little firs made curtseys, and up again, to the briars, and the oaks, and the elms, where there was peace, and the sound of grasshoppers striking their flints with impatience, and birds playing hide and seek, and the sun blinding hot upon us, and the sky, plain bright blue.

  “Well,” Ceinwen said, when I stopped.

  “Not too near,” I said, “or you will hear nothing.”

  “Let us have a bit of shade, then,” she said. “I am cooking.”

  We put down the rugs among the twisted legs of an oak, and Ceinwen lay flat, puffing, with her handkerchief over her face.

  “How long to wait?” she asked me.

  “Hours,” I said.

  “Good,” she said, “I will sleep.”

  I watched an ant running over the oak’s leg. On my back, with my hands going dead under my head, I watched him, so near to my eyes that he might have been as big as a horse. Hard, shiny, and brittle, he was, with a good polish on his back, and legs bent like wire. I wondered if he saw me as I saw him, if he had the same feeling about his home and his people as I had, and if he was as scornful of me as I was of him. I have always wondered what is inside the skull of an ant, and what is the feeling to be an ant, if it is like the feeling to be a man, if he sees, and thinks, or knows his friends, and calls them by name, and can be happy.

  This one looked to be in a hurry about something, and then forgetting what it was, and stopping every couple of steps to try and think what it was, and putting his feet in his pockets to see if he had everything and going on a bit, and turning back. Silly, it was, but no sillier than some of us. Old Owen the Mill often stopped in the streets feeling in his pockets for something and then sending a boy back to the house to ask Mrs. Owen what he had forgotten, and standing there empty in the face and scratching himself till the boy came back, and often it was nothing at all.

  So there was no blame to the ant, and I watched him for a long time, seeing Ceinwen’s shoes, with the dust half wiped off by the grass, just beyond the edge of the oak’s leg, and purposely lying still not to wake her.

  Then I slept, and woke with Ceinwen shaking me, and shivering with cold I was, stiff and damp, and surprised by the darkness.

  “O, Huw,” she said, in a little voice, and her teeth chopping, “light a fire, or I will die of cold or freeze to the death or perish of fright. Not sure I am, which is best to come first.”

  “Wait you,” I said, and put my hand in the squirrel’s hole and pulled out pieces of bark and dry leaves. There is a fire I made, too, with stuff from under the briars that burnt with a yellow flame, and gave lovely warmth.

  So we took the eating from the basket and I filled the little saucepan from the rill, and made tea to go with the pie.

  “Did you cook this?” I asked her, for something to say.

  “Well,” she said, with big eyes, yellow from the fire, “who else? Is it poison?”

  “No, no,” I said. “You are a cook.”

  “Well, thank God, now,” she said, with laugh. “I wondered when I made it what you would say. Not very good, it is. A bit heavy in the pastry and not enough thyme with the meat. Not good.”

  “Good,” I said, “I like it, and I will have more.”

  “A flattery,” she said, opening and closing her eyes slowly, and each time she opened them, making them bigger.

  “If it was bad,” I said, “I would leave it.”

  “Spoilt at home,” she said. “There is a job your wife will have with you.”

  “Only as good as I get now,” I said, “no more, no less.”

  “You would drive the girl mad,” said Ceinwen, “and she would throw a couple of dishes at you, and you would smash every pot on the dresser with temper. If you did it to me I would wait for you to sleep, and kill you with one hit.”

  “There is no hope of that, anyway,” I said, and went to cut more tart.

  She was quiet for minutes, and the fire cracked his whip to send up sparks and I looked at her a couple of times, but she was watching the fire without seeing it, with her arms stiff behind her, and her head buried between her humped shoulders, and her feet pointing straight, one foot crossed over the other.

  “There is good,” she said, with quiet, “to marry and have a little house.”

  I said nothing.

  “A little house of your own,” she said, “like your brother and sister. A new little house, fresh with new paint, and your own furniture where you want to put it, and no old nonsense from anybody else.”

  Nothing from me, again.

  “With a little bit of garden, and a couple of hens to scratch,” she said, “and babies.”

  “It will be long before any old babies are near me,” I said. “I have had a house full with our family.”

  “Different if they are yours, boy,” she said, and laughing wide.

  “Plenty of time to think about it, any rate,” I said.

  “Would you marry me, Huw?” she asked, very shy, with a look sideways, and a small voice.

  “No,” I said, “there is dull you are, girl. Not from school yet, and marry?”

  “My mother married from school,” she said, “and four of us, still home, and me the youngest, and like a sister instead of Mama. Let us be married, Huw, and have a little house, is it?”

  “To hell, girl,” I said. “I will have to earn before marrying.”

  “Come to work with my father,” Ceinwen said, and came nearer. “Learn the business while you are working and have good wages, then we can marry and have our own little house, is it?”

  “Look you,” I said, “no more silliness, to-night. To hear the nightingales we came up here. So listen.”

  “Well, give me a kiss, then,” she said.

  “Go from here,” I said, and put more tart in my mouth. “Nightingales, not marrying, or kissing.”

  “Speaking with the mouth full,” she said. “There is manners for you.”

  “Leave me to eat in peace,” I said.

  “I wish I had cooked nothing,” she said, and angry. “You would be starving.”

  “We would have gone from here the sooner, then,” I said, and glad to have a change of subject.

  “O, Huw,” she said, and pulling her handkerchief from her belt, “there is nasty you are to me.”

  And she cried.

  With her legs curling under her, and hidden in the whiteness of her dress, and her hair like new hay fallen about her and spreading on the grass, and the white handkerchief in both her hands pressed to her eyes almost hidden among her hair, and her voice coming in little swords of sound at the end of each breath, O, there is a soreness inside me now to remember Ceinwen as she cried up there on the mountain and the nightingales sang about us, and the firelight was bright upon her, for the fire is out, the nightingales are quiet, and she has gone.

  The man is made of stone who will see a woman in her tears and keep voice and hands to himself. So I went to her, and put an arm about her, and took her hands from her face and kissed the salt from her cheeks, and she lay heavily upon me, shaking, but finished with tears.

  “Listen,” I said, “there are the nightingales for you.”

  Fat and sweet is the song of the nightingale. A good, full singer, he is. No pinching of the throat or nonsense with half-opened mouth, or shakiness through lack of breath.

  A good big chest full of breath, him, and a chest to hold it, too, and up with his head, and open with his mouth, thinking it
no shame to sing with the voice that God gave to him, and singing with fear for none, true on the note, sharp at the edge, loud, fat with tone, with a trill and a tremolo to make you frozen with wonderment to hear. A little bird, he is, with no colour to his feathers and no airs with him, either, but with a voice that a king might envy, and yet he asks for nothing, only room to sing. No bowing, no scrapes, no bending of the knee, or fat fees for Mr. Nightingale. A little bough, a couple of leaves, and nightfall, and you shall have your song with no payment other than the moments of your life while you listen. Such voices have the Cherubim.

  Many sang for us that night, and long we sat to hear them, till ash was grey upon the fire, and the wind was waking to do his work for the day to come. Ceinwen was sleeping with her head heavy on my knees, and her breath coming soft, slow, and no sound.

  There is beautiful is sleep, and to see somebody soft asleep. So still, and the hands so pretty with quiet, with sometimes a little sound in the breathing, or an instant tremble, and in the face a calmness of pink; and the mouth in an easy innocence of rest, and gentleness a scent in the air about them.

  So Ceinwen slept as I watched, and she woke, eyes wide, empty for moments and then filling with memory, showing teeth in a smiling yawn and her eyes full with a sleepy smile.

  “It is late,” I said. “There will be trouble.”

  “O, Huw,” she said, in a voice to melt stones, and stretched her arms far above her head and brought them slowly down to put about me, and her body went from soft to coiling steel under me, and we kissed, and she laughed in the middle of it, and clicked her teeth at me.

  A gentle madness comes of kissing, yet even so gentle, there is hot wish to hurt, though only to delight. To bite, to hold with force, to press the mouth with fury, to show strength that is male to softness that is female. Yet while I lay beside her and she was smiling quiet to let me cup my palm about the mystery of warmth and firmness that pushed up the stripes of her dress into ploughed hills, and my fingers knew the satin slither of her flesh under the coarse topsoil of fabric, and brought wrinkles to her forehead and sweet wryness to her mouth when I squeezed the tender stalks, I saw yellow of a lamp shining on the green of bush below us, and sat, cold, and my heart going big inside me and beating to stop breath.