Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

She’s been kissed before, of course, though the only boy she’s kissed lately is little Jim, a soppy smooch to make him blush on his twelfth birthday. Just seventeen, but she reckons she’s acquitted herself well with Colin, even surprised him a little. She was wary of his questions about her age at first, tried to be mysterious and mock-offended—“You can’t ask a girl that! I’ve my own secrets to keep”—but the way he’d laughed had made her feel small, childish. “I pull your pints, don’t I?” she told him. “There’s laws, you know. Can’t have kids serving in a pub.” But he wasn’t convinced, and so she kissed him back, the way she’s learned from the pictures, lips crushed together. It had been just as she’d imagined, until she’d felt Colin’s tongue slipping against her own and she’d pulled back in surprise. He’d laughed and called it French kissing. “More like English cheek,” she’d told him tartly, sticking her own tongue out for good measure, but then she’d smiled, leaned into him again, pushing up on her toes and opening her lips as if for a morsel.

“Mmm!” Colin says now as they separate. “There’s a girl. You just hold that pretty thought.” He puts a cigarette between his lips, lights it, and passes it to her. “So’s I can find you in the dark,” he tells her, stepping back into the gloom.

“Colin?” she whispers.

He leans his face back into the faint light of the cigarette. “Hang on a sec, luv. Got to fetch the magic carpet if I’m going to whisk you away from all this, ain’t I?”

She puffs on her cigarette, imagining she can taste him, exhales. The local girls have started calling her “the youngest old maid” behind her back, but she’s suddenly relieved she’s never had much to do with the village boys. The ones her age are mostly off now, joined up or making good money in factories or in the coal mines down south. Even before they left, though, her mother’s death had isolated her from the other young folk in the village. She’d had to leave school to help her father — over the pleas of her teachers, who’d always told her she was destined for better things, secretarial college perhaps — and made up for the loss of her childhood by priding herself on being grown up, an air the other girls had been quick to pick up on and resent. In truth, though, she’d never been much drawn to the local boys — her one youthful dalliance had been with Eric, their first evacuee — even when they’d been interested in her. Rhys Roberts was a case in point.

He and Esther had been born within a month of each other, and their mothers had become fast friends, though Arthur viewed Rhys’s father, Mervyn, a rockman at the quarry, with a mixture of jealousy and suspicion. The two women had both worked in service in Liverpool during their youths. “Though Viv was an upstairs maid, on account of her fine English,” Esther’s mother always acknowledged (her own pronunciation being marred by occasional slips— umberella for umbrella, filum for film).

When Mervyn had died in a quarry accident ten years earlier, the families had become even closer, Arthur going out of his way to help the widow of the man he’d snubbed, until Mrs. Roberts was able to find work at the school. Rhys’s mother had always been grateful for the help — Esther was sure it was one reason the famously fierce teacher had favored her. And Rhys, too, had apparently felt in her debt, protecting her from the taunts of the other children who called her a teacher’s pet, even when he was the one, the slow son of the schoolmistress, who suffered worst in comparison. After Esther’s mother’s death, Mrs. Roberts had been at Cilgwyn every day for a week, quietly seeing to their meals and keeping the place going. Rhys had been solicitous too, in his clumsy way, as if he thought the loss of a parent connected them more. But Esther had resented the way he talked about Arthur, saying the words “your father” reverently, as if in a prayer (“Your father who art in sheep pen,” she used to whisper to herself), and he was always on about his mother, my mam this and my mam that, as if he were dangling Mrs. Roberts before her like a carrot. The fact that Esther was fond of her teacher, thrilled by her approval, only made Rhys’s insistence, with it’s reminder of the lingering girlish crush she had on his mother, the more embarrassing. Once, Rhys asked her if she thought his mother and her father might marry, a suggestion she recoiled from, even more so than she recoiled from his more recent plan to unite their families.

The ratcheting tring of a bell announces the return of Colin, wheeling a bicycle before him. “Your carriage awaits!” She’d been hoping for a jeep, but he is only a corporal. “Better than shank’s pony,” he tells her with a grin, clambering onto the saddle and wrestling the bike around for her to perch on the handlebars. She feels self-conscious raising her bum onto the frame, aware of him watching, but then they’re off.

Colin pedals firmly. She can feel the bike vibrating with his effort as they near the brow of the hill behind the pub, and then her stomach turns over as they start to coast down the far side. Soon they’re flying, laughing in the darkness. The wind presses her skirt to her legs, then catches it, flipping the hem up against her waist. Her slip slides up her legs, billows in the breeze as if remembering it’s past life as a parachute, and her knees and then one white thigh flash in the starlight. She wants to lean down to fix it, but Colin has her hands pressed under his on the handlebars, and when she wriggles he tells her, “Hold still, luv. I’ve got you.”

She has never been to Sunnyvale, the old holiday camp, but she remembers, as a child before the war, seeing posters showing all the fun to be had there: pictures of cheerful tots and bathing beauties by the pool. Arthur recalls when the camp was the site of finishing sheds for the quarried slate, when the lane leading to it was a track for freight wagons bringing the great slabs off the mountain. The rails had still been visible farther up, beyond the camp, until ’39, when they’d been hauled away for scrap. They’re probably part of a tank now, Esther thinks, or a battleship, miles away from where they started. The camp itself had opened in the twenties as a hiking base — a favorite pastime in these parts since the Ladies of Llangollen popularized it in their diary — and enjoyed a brief boom after Mallory stayed there while training in Snowdonia. But his disappearance on Everest, coupled with the Depression, had ended the camp’s first period of prosperity, and the war had put paid to it’s second, after it reopened in the late thirties with much-trumpeted improvements, like a children’s playground and the swimming pool.

On hot summer days, gathering the flock from the hillside above, running to keep up with her father’s long, loose stride, Esther would steal glances at the faceted blue gem of water below her and imagine it’s coolness. But such places aren’t for locals. Even in better days, the most her father could afford was the odd day trip on a growling charabanc to Rhyl or Llandudno. Besides, as he used to tell her, “Who needs a pool when there’s the ocean for free?” But she hates the sea, the sharp salt taste, the clammy clumps of seaweed. She’s only ever seen swimming pools at the pictures, but for her that other Esther, Esther Williams, is the most beautiful woman in the world (Welsh to boot, judging by her name). She’d seen Bathing Beauty three times that spring.

So as soon as Colin coasts through the back gates of the old camp, she asks him to show her the pool. He looks a little surprised — probably has one of the empty, mildewed chalets in mind — but something in her voice, her eagerness, convinces him. He props the bike in the shadows behind a dark hut and leads her through the kids’ playground. She clambers up the slide and swishes down on her backside, arms outstretched.