How Green Was My Valley

by Richard Llewellyn

  “Huw,” Ceinwen said, and felt for my hands.

  “They are after us,” I said, and pulled the rugs in a pile, and started putting the dishes in the basket. The fire was low, barely red, and the drainings of tea spat it out with a blowing of ash. I had the basket and Ceinwen had the rugs, and I pushed her before me up toward the top of the mountain and away from the many lights, that we could see so plainly now, working up to us.

  We went up in an arc, through bush and gorse, pasture and briar, over hedges, and through herds of cows, when Ceinwen feared and hid her face and gripped my arms to push me in front of her, and down the steepness through the trees and on to the road. Good it felt to have the feet on hard stones again.

  “Stay here,” I said, “I will catch the mare and bring the trap here.”

  She nodded, and I found her dearer to me in her helplessness and fear, and kissed her cheek, but she stared in front, with her knuckles to her face, and a paleness of fear lighting her eyes.

  “O, Huw,” she said, in whispers, “if they find me they will put me in jail.”

  “Jail, girl?” I said, and so surprised as to be in another world. “What for, then?”

  “Or they will call me in Chapel,” she said, and tears taking her breath.

  “I will get the mare,” I said. “We will build bridges when the river wets our feet. Wait, you.”

  Off I went, round the road, running on the grass, with the talk of the brook louder than my footfalls, to the place where we had left the trap, but I was heavy with fright long before I got there, for fires were alight there, and men’s shadows black against them, and tobacco smoke going up above their heads like the ghosts of babies.

  The trap had been pulled out of the space by the side of the road with the shafts in the dust, and another trap, just the same, near it, and the mare and another tied to the branch of a tree near them.

  I knew what had happened while I made my mind firm that Ceinwen would go free of hurt.

  The mare had run home and told them.

  What to do, now, what to do and quickly.

  I wonder where the thoughts do come from that help you to do what you do, when seconds before your mind was an empty ache, and you watched it working, like somebody else inside of you, crooking its fingers in helpless search of a notion.

  Out with the matches and closer to the horse. I untied him and turned him to face the fire down the road. Then I struck a match and held it for a moment against his hock, telling him in the spirit that I was sorry for the hurt, but Ceinwen was staring in the darkness down the road and thinking of faces and voices in Chapel, and away he went with screams in a storm of hoof and dust, and I fell backwards and pushed myself up, with dust and burnt hair sharp in the nose, and jumped for the mare’s head to untie her and lead her to the trap.

  The men were shouting to one another and the horse’s rump was orange in the fire-light, and then gone in the darkness on the other side, and the men running up the mountain to head him off when he turned the bend on the other side.

  Into the shafts with the mare, with cursing for the weight of thought behind her careful hoofs, up with the shafts to slip through the harness, a pulling of straps on one side and a run round to the other, a tearing at the tangle of rein tied through the brass rings on her back pad, a jump at the iron step and the springiness of the trap under me, and off went the mare with the flip of the reins to send her.

  So glad I was to see the whiteness of the striped dress in the darkness that I could have shouted to skim the bushes from the mountain, but I pulled the mare almost to sit, and jumped down to give the reins to Ceinwen and throw up the rugs and basket after her.

  “Five minutes’ start, no more,” I said. “Good-bye, now.”

  “I will love you while I live,” she said, with trembling. “See you Monday. Good-bye, now.”

  Queen of the Brythons never swung her war chariot with more skill. The whip whispered and cracked, the mare plunged with her fores, and gathered herself to open her wings, and was still, caught in a moment of surprise to find four hairy roots holding her to earth, and almost in regret, threw up her head to see spaces that she might have flown, drew the mighty muscles under her, and jumped from sprung haunches to stretch-neck gallop, with Ceinwen standing black against the sky bearing on the reins.

  I waited until the hush of the trees was the loudest noise to be heard, and went down to the river and walked round through the fields, to the bridge by the Three Bells, and up home. Nobody was in the streets, and no lights anywhere, but I could see many a yellow spark up on the mountain.

  I came in round our back and climbed the shed to get in this window.

  The candle was lit as soon as I was in, and the window closed for me.

  Ianto, Owen, and Gwilym were sitting on the beds that used to be over there, in their clothes, with their hats and coats on this chair by here.

  “Well,” Ianto said, straight in the face.

  “Hullo,” I said.

  “Where have you been?” Owen asked me, serious.

  “Up the mountain,” I said, and a bit of pride coming.

  “With who?” Ianto asked me, and looking at me with his head down and his eyes gone to points.

  “My business,” I said, with emptiness coming inside me.

  “Ceinwen Phillips, is it?” Owen said.

  “My business,” I said.

  “Listen to me, you fool,” Ianto said, with a whisper that might have been a shout, so big a jump it made me give, “do you want the men of the other Valley round here to burn the village? Is it a fight you want to cause?”

  “No, no,” I said, and a coldness of surprise in me. “Who is going to burn the village, then?”

  “Every man here is waiting for it to start,” Owen said. “Not a man is in bed. Those lights have been on the mountain these hours. If you had been caught they would have skinned you.”

  “Would you have sat here to let them?” I asked Ianto.

  “We only knew it was you when we came up here, now just,” he said. “Frightened sick in case Mama found out, we were. Lucky for you she have gone to sleep with Bron for the night.”

  “Your supper is on the table,” Gwil said. “Have it, and sleep, for the love of God.”

  “I will go and tell them to stop looking,” I said.

  “Have your supper,” Ianto said, “before I will skin you myself. If you go to them now, there will be murder certain. We want to save Mama worry. Supper, quick.”

  So down I went, hang-dog, to mix a couple of tears with the mint sauce. But when I came back up here, my brothers had gone to warn everybody it was safe to go to bed, and the lights had gone from the mountain.

  But before I went to sleep I lay again beside Ceinwen and cursed with blackness the men who had carried the lamp that took her from me, the mare that had run home to tell them, and the lack of thought that let her go to graze without a shackle, and so ended in cursing myself, a blessed state, indeed.

  “Fifteen feet of rope,” Ianto said to me next morning, “and a picket stake. That is what you are wanting. Good God, what is next, I wonder? A boy and a bit of a girl up on the mountain till all hours. No more, understand?”

  “Why not?” I asked him, with a rebel shouting inside me.

  “Because,” he said, “if it happens again we will have four hundred men over here. Think fortune to yourself that nobody knew who was with her. You would be good for a box instead of Chapel this morning.”

  “Listening to nightingales, we were,” I said.

  “I know, boy,” Ianto said. “I have done a bit myself.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  THE TALK OUTSIDE CHAPEL all that day was split between the choir coming home and the search on the mountain. Some of the men wanted a deputy to go round to the other Valley and find out what the trouble was, but Ianto and Owen spoke against it, saying it would be better to let it die its death in peace. I was going over myself to find out what had come to Ceinwen, but my mother had use f
or me all day long, preparing food and drink for the choir, and I lost my worry in the clatter of pots.

  Long after midnight it was when we heard the bands coming over the mountain, and good to hear in the dark quiet. Nothing is better to the ear, and nothing to raise the spirits more, than the boom of the big drum and the rasping voice of brass and silver swelling and dying as the wind takes his breath.

  The beacons had been lit a long time to tell us the men were coming, so we were all ready for them. My mother went to get her cloak as though The Trump had sounded and the last boat was leaving the quay for Paradise. Bron had been wearing hers for hours, bonnet and all. They knew it would take the men a good hour to reach the Square from up the top there, and only a minute for us to get to the same place, but never mind, cloak, bonnet, mittens, and bottle of something to warm, quick, no stopping, all hurry, all haste, as though hope of glory to come depended on their getting down to the Square without another moment’s loss.

  Out in the street we joined in with everybody else on the hill, all going down together, and as we passed the little house with the sea-shell porch, Mr. Gruffydd came out, and went to the middle of the street to conduct us. We were singing when the procession got inside the village, and singing still when the wain stopped by Mr. Gruffydd, and the band and choir all singing with us.

  Then the shouting of cheers, and my father looking all round to find my mother, and she crying so much she could see nothing of him, and he crying so much, he could see nothing of her.

  “Take me to him, my sons,” my mother said, and Owen and I made a way through the crowd.

  My father was standing against a flat wooden crate about four feet square and a foot deep, looking as though he had found all of Ophir’s treasure.

  Owen and Ianto lifted it down, and I helped them to carry it up to the house, and my father shouting to us to put it in our front till he came and to take care, or if we dropped it he would kill us twice. It took us a long time to get that old crate up the Hill, for there was a thickness of people going up and coming down, and stopping to talk, and asking the choir what Windsor was like, and if the Queen was in gold, and if they had their food from diamond plates, and those who stayed home trying to look as though they would give a fig to go to Windsor to see the Queen, and old Silas Tegid the Maltster saying that he had never enjoyed a Sunday more than that day, so peaceful it had been, such resolution had appeared in Chapel, so beautiful the weather. Foolish are such people, for the lie is in their faces, in their voices, in their smiles.

  I went out in the back to get the tool-box ready to unpack the crate, and Bron came in with wet tears and put her arms about me to cry for a bit, and warm and full of softness she was.

  “There is a fool I am,” she said, “washed away with crying, but nobody knows why, not even me. The Queen has given Ivor a baton, and a picture of her. Signed with her own hand, Huw. With her own writing.”

  Shouts for the tool-box inside, then, and me going in with it, and hammering, and prising, and splintering to get the cover off, between my brothers and me, for whoever had nailed the crate was at pains to show that he had nails and to spare.

  My father was on tacks all the time, with my mother trying to make him drink a drop of hot broth, and Mr. Gruffydd putting an arm on his shoulder, and the crowd all round and in the doorway and looking through the open window, counting the nails as we threw them out. Then we took the lid off, and bayonets could not have kept him back from pulling out the wool flock packing.

  “Now then,” he said, “has every one of us got a good pot of beer?”

  “Yes,” we all said, and up with them.

  “Good,” said my father, and pulled a couple of pegs from the inside of the crate, and opened wide his arms to lift out the picture, with a red brocade back, and a wide gilt frame, made, every inch of it, and singing to you, by a craftsman who loved his work.

  My father turned it and put it to stand on the sideboard, with not even a whisper from my mother about scratches.

  “Now then,” he said, and without a voice, from pride and lifting the weight of it, and taking his glass from my mother, and the beer shaking out, “Beth, from the Queen of Britain to your son.”

  Head and shoulders in black and white, with the background gone to mist, and almost as she was on a penny, the noble Queen looked out across her Empire as untroubled as my mother. But that prow of a nose could have cut through any sea, that chin would keep the shake from a mouth half as firm again, and the trouble never came to light that would bring a flinch to those austere, yet tranquil, eyes. The hard disciplines of a thousand generations of greatness sat lightly upon her, and yet left their subtle marks in the squareness of her shoulders, and the carriage of her head.

  And upon the head, the Crown, and under it, to enrich its maleness, the mark of woman, a veil.

  “Victoria, R.I.,” said my mother, with my father’s finger pointing to the writing. “O, there is proud I am.”

  Up on tip-toe to kiss Ivor on the cheek, and Ivor trying to smile, but gulps having the better of it.

  “Up high,” said my father, “drink, and not a drop to be left. The Queen.”

  “The Queen,” said we all, and throats making sounds of joy in their own language to have the beer go down.

  “She is smaller even than you,” my father said to my mother, and kissed her cheek.

  “Go on, boy,” my mother said, from the kiss, and in doubt.

  “She is, Mama,” Ivor said. “She came up to by here, with me.”

  “Did you see her close, then?” my mother asked him, with wonder.

  “She shook hands,” Ivor said, and holding out his hand, as though still in a dream.

  “Gracious Goodness, boy,” my mother said, in whispers. “You shook hands with the Queen?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Ivor said. “Ask.”

  “The Queen shook hands,” my father said, “and she asked who trained the men to sing, and if they were all coal miners, and if they were comfortable in the Castle.”

  “And then she gave me a baton,” Ivor said, “not herself, but she told me it would come, and one of the soldiers brought it to me.”

  “With his name,” my father said, “and the day and where, and for what. And it shall go in a special case under the picture on that wall. Beautiful, it is.”

  And beautiful it was. Of ivory, with silver and gold inlays, and a gold plate with the inscription on, and resting comfortable in red plush, in a long leather case of black crocodile, with two little silver hooks to close it.

  Long it was before the house was quiet that night. Hundreds of people came in to see the picture, stepping on tip-toe to come in, not to make a mess, and standing to look with big eyes, and “Ehs” and “Ohs” from them all. And my mother sitting, like a queen herself, and all the women telling her what a credit Ivor was to the family, and what a time she would have in the morning when she washed the floor. But my mother would have washed the valley, and whitewashed the skies above it, for the happiness of those few hours.

  That was one of the few nights I ever saw my father drunk, and then only on beer that others pressed upon him. And no man shall refuse a good drink of beer offered in good feeling. So when the boys carried him back, my mother only looked at him and smiled, and clicked her tongue, and sent them upstairs with him. If a man cannot get drunk on the night his eldest son comes back home with his hand warm from the touch of a queen, and her picture making the house into a shrine for pilgrims, well, Goodness Gracious, let us all go into the earth, and be quick about it.

  Drunk again, he was, on the night our Davy scored a try against Scotland at Cardiff Arms Park, but so was the whole Valley. There was another night to remember, with my father dancing in the middle of the street wearing Davy’s red jersey over his coat, and so much dried mud on it you could barely see the the crest. And Davy carried on the shoulders up and down the street time and time again. Everybody in the Valley got drunk that night, and if tea had been beer, the women would have bee
n on the floor, too, for it was Open House all over the village and Davy was king of the world.

  I made a glass case for that jersey, and another one for the cap. The jersey was put to hang opposite the picture of the Queen in our front, and Davy had the cap for himself. It was always a pleasure to see my father smoke his pipe in our front when somebody called, for there he was, like a king, with rare treasures all round him, conscious of it, and proud of it.

  And there was a night when he got drunk because of me.

  Only four of us were left in the special class at school by the time examinations were due to start. All the rest had left to go to work. There was John Dafydd, Llewelyn Rhys, and Emrys Tudor, with me in the little room next to Mr. Motshill’s study. It had been a storeroom, but he had it cleaned out for us, and there we worked under him, or studied by ourselves.

  Ceinwen had left after that Sunday without a word or sound. I saw her a couple of times with her father, in the coalyard, but we never spoke for we had no chance, and her eyes, although they gave me welcome and sore good-bye, warned me to give no sign that I knew her. So I knew there had been hard trouble there, and I was sorry for my part in it. And yet not sorry. For I often thought of her, and think now, of her warmth, and softnesses, and the dearnesses that women have that are so sweet to man. Mervyn had no notion that I had been with Ceinwen and I never told him. So I could only ask him questions that had to go all round the world before coming to the matter, and answers to that kind of question are never any use, so I stopped to ask them.

  So four of us worked in that little room, and then went home to more work, and all day Sunday, too, except when we went to Chapel.

  But the other boys had it harder than me, for I was strong in English, and thankful for it. I knew the great Dr. Johnson from his friend Mr. Boswell. There is a friend for you. To sit down and rack the brain to remember every word, and then the glad toil to write it all down. I am thankful to Mr. Boswell for many a peaceful hour, indeed. There is a marvel, hundreds of years after the spirit has gone to new life, that men will bless a name that once had flesh, and laughed, and had good food, and loved to hear good talk.