‘I’ll get my dad,’ she said, whirled away into the shadowy forge and shouted to him over he hammer blows. Davy Davitt followed her into the sunshine, still wearing his thick leather farrier’s apron and when he saw the motor car by his petrol pump his face lit up.
‘Twelve horse power, Rover, nice cars, six hundred pounds new,’ he murmured to himself. Then aloud, ‘What’s the trouble then, sir?’
‘Blessed axle gone,’ the red-faced man said. ‘These roads are an insult to motor cars, not a yard of tarmac in the last twenty miles.’
‘Come far, have you?’
‘Far enough,’ said the tall young man. ‘We started from Pontypridd.’
His voice was Welsh too, bright and dancing. The red-faced man gave him a hard look.
‘Doesn’t matter to him where we started, Sonny. Question is, can he do something so we can get where we’re going to?’
‘Where’s that then?’ Davy asked.
‘London. And we’re in a hurry.’
Even though the red-faced man’s voice was impatient, they were some of the sweetest words in the language to Davy. In seconds he was horizontal under the car, with the man bending himself double to try to see what was happening. Nobody was paying much attention to the other young man who’d been in the driving seat. He’d got out and was sitting, calm and contented in the sunshine, on the low stone wall between the house and the yard, looking at Molly. And Molly was staring enchanted at the man called Sonny because she’d just heard from his lips some of the sweetest words in the language to her.
‘Would there be anywhere here with a telephone I could use?’
Proudly she led him to the kiosk and sat on the step of the war memorial to watch. She always liked to watch, on the very rare occasions when people used the telephone, grieved by their hesitations and fumblings. Sonny was different. He didn’t pause to read the card of instructions, or drop coins on the concrete floor or fidget with doubt or embarrassment. He simply picked up the receiver and spoke into it as if it were a thing he did every day, easy as washing your hands. She saw a smile on his face and his lips moving and knew he must be giving a number to the distant operator then he must have been connected to his number because his lips were moving again though she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
* * * *
‘Blessed car’s broken down, back of beyond. No sign of them though. Didn’t guess we’d be going this way.’
He was speaking to his father, who ran a boxers’ training gymnasium in Pontypridd.
‘That’s where you’re wrong, boy. They’re right behind you. Left Cardiff early this morning in a black Austin 20, heading same way as you.’
‘How did they know, then?’
‘Never mind that. Fact is, they do know. Tell Enoch. You at a garage?’
‘Blacksmith’s with a petrol pump.’
‘Can’t miss you then, can they?’
‘They can’t do anything to him, not in broad daylight.’
‘Only takes a little nudge, you know that. Elbow in wrong place, oh dear so sorry, damage done.’
‘Enoch and me wouldn’t let a flea’s elbow near him, let alone theirs.’
‘You look after our boy.’
Molly watched as he came out of the kiosk looking worried.
‘Have you had bad news?’
It didn’t strike her that she had no right to ask this of a stranger. He answered her with another question.
‘Your father good with cars, is he?’
‘Very good.’
‘We need to be moving, see? Quicker than I thought.’
She caught his urgency and they practically ran back to the yard. By then her father was out from under the car and delivering his verdict. Beam axle gone and rear axle just holding together but wouldn’t make it to London. Both of them would need unbolting and welding.
‘How long?’ the red-faced man asked.
‘Two or three hours, with luck.’
‘Make it two hours or less and, whatever your bill is, I’ll give you ten pounds on top of it.’
Davy’s jaw dropped at the prospect of more money in two hours than he usually earned in a week. Then he went under the car with a spanner and Sonny, in his good suit and shiny shoes, went under too. Davy called out to Molly to go and tell Tick to make sure the fire in the forge was hot as he could make it. Tick was the apprentice, a large and powerful sixteen-year-old. Molly found him in the forge along with the other young man who’d been in the driving seat of the car and for an angry moment thought the two of them were fighting. Then she saw it was no more than play, the man dodging and dancing on the trodden earth floor among the scraps of metal and old horse-shoes, feet moving no more than an inch or two at a time, but enough to avoid the light punches Tick was aiming at him. A furious bellow came from behind them.
‘Rooster, are you bloody mad, boy? Come away from there.’
It was the red-faced man.
‘Sorry, Uncle Enoch.’
Obediently, the young man followed him out to the yard. Molly tried to give Tick her father’s instructions but could hardly get the boy to listen. His face was shiny with excitement.
‘Did you hear what he called him? I thought he might be, then I said to myself it couldn’t be. I’d only see’d him from a good way off and he looks different in his clothes. So I put my fists up, joking like, and he…’
‘What are you saying, Tick boy?’
‘The Rhondda Rooster, that’s all. He’s only the Rhondda Rooster!’
‘What’s that?’
‘Only the next British middleweight champion, that’s all. He’ll be fighting for the title in London the day after tomorrow and the money’s on him to win it.’
‘A boxer?’
‘Then he’ll take on the Empire champion after that. Could be world champion. When I see’d him at Cardiff he won by a knockout in three rounds against a heavier man even though there was so much blood pouring down his face he could only see from one eye.’
Molly was a country girl, not squeamish.
‘If he’s as good as you say, how come he’d got so much blood on him?’
‘He’s got a glass eyebrow.’
‘A what?’
‘That’s what they call a weak spot. Hard as iron all the rest of him, only he’s got an old cut over his left eyebrow and if that opens up it pours with blood so the referee would have had to stop the fight if he hadn’t knocked the other chap out first.’
* * * *
It turned out that her father had heard of the Rhondda Rooster too because he got his head out from under the car just long enough to tell Molly to make the gentlemen comfortable in the front parlour and get something to eat. She rushed round making tea in the good china pot, putting bread, cheese and cold beef on the best tablecloth. Sonny had come out from under the car by then and she was conscious all the time of his eyes on her. The Rooster’s eyes were just as admiring if she’d noticed, but he was nothing beside Sonny – shoulders and chest too broad for the cut of his suit, one ear a bit skew-whiff, big hands that he kept bunching and flexing all the time they weren’t occupied with knife and fork. Under the stern eye of the red-faced man, Uncle Enoch, he had the clumsy good manners of a schoolboy, while Sonny seemed a man of the great world. Occupied with serving them, she missed another milestone in the speeding up of life in Tadley Gate. Another stranger went into the phone kiosk and picked up the receiver. It was the first time since the kiosk was built that it had been used more than once in a day.
* * * *
The new stranger was small, dark-haired, and twentyish, in a dark suit and cow-dung smeared shoes that hadn’t been designed for country walking. He looked round to see nobody was watching and slid quickly into the box as if glad of its protection from the country all around him. The number he wanted was at an East London exchange.
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