Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Her mother nudged her ahead, but she was too nervous to look at any of the strange boys in their brown blazers and corduroy shorts. She hurried down one row after another and only halted when a boy knelt down in front of her to tie his shoelace. She stopped and waited, and he whispered, “Pick me,” so softly she thought he was talking to his shoe. “Pick me,” he said again, looking up and meeting her gaze. He reached out and grasped her hand, and when he released it, left a balled-up stocking in her palm. She turned crimson when the crumpled nylon began to spring open like a grey flower and she saw what she was holding.

“All right, Ess?” her mother called.

“Pick me and I’ll give you the other one,” Eric whispered.

He didn’t take his eyes off her hand until it closed into a fist. “Mam,” Esther called over her shoulder. “What about this one?”

He’d been as good as his word the next day when they’d found themselves alone in the kitchen. “A deal’s a deal,” he said. “I’m no welsher.” He grinned to let her know he was joking. “Don’t tell your mother, mind,” he made her promise. “Mum said they were supposed to be for her, a gift like, only…” He paused and then Esther started to giggle, unable to imagine her mother ever wearing such things, and slowly his grin widened.

Later, he said, “Will you wear them for me one day?” and she stared at him.

They were inseparable that spring. Rhys had tried to befriend Eric too, but he could never keep up with their rapid exchanges in English. When he kept asking her what they were saying, Eric would bleat at him, “ Baa-aa! ” To her parents she said Eric was teaching her English (though she was perfectly fluent, thanks to Mrs. Roberts and all her time at the pictures). In fact, he was teaching her to kiss — teaching himself, she realizes now, since they never got as far as French kissing. Her parents seemed to turn a blind eye, although in retrospect Esther knows that summer was the start of her mother’s illness. She has felt guilty for the way her preoccupation with Eric caused her to ignore the early signs of decline, the weariness and lack of appetite, and for the comfort she drew from him in the final, wasting days. And maybe that guilt, she thinks now, is why, the month after the funeral, when his own mother wrote from Coventry to say that she wanted her Eric back, that she was missing him so much, Esther told him, “You should go.” He hadn’t wanted to. He still resented his mum for sending him away in the first place. On the train to Wales he’d reached into his pocket and pulled out his brown school cap — his name stitched along the headband by his mother — and sailed it out the window, watching it curve up and back over the line of the train. But Esther made him go. He should be with his mother, she said, feeling selfless, and he didn’t know how to argue with her on that score.

She’d seen him off on the sooty platform at Caernarvon station, listening to the carriage doors clattering shut around them — bang bang bang bang bang — like a firing squad. She remembers the engine coming to life: wisps of steam floating up, twisting towards the station’s glass and iron roof, and then a stream of smoke, like a kettle coming to the boil. They waited together for the rip of the whistle, holding hands through the lowered window, and then she stepped back to join her father and watched the train move off, the couplings taking up the slack and the carriages jolting forward one by one, just like the toy set she’d seen with Eric in the window of Nelson’s the Christmas before. And then the last clacking carriage twisted out of sight.

Two months and six letters later, she heard from an aunt of his that he and his mother had died together — their shelter had received a direct hit — and more than anything she had envied them.

She finds herself turning onto the path to Cilgwyn now, the house a dim shadow before her in the darkness, her steps ringing back off the stone walls of the lane.

They’d kissed first in the last row of the cinema one Saturday morning, she and Eric, but all she can think of now is a joke of Harry’s:

— I hear they’re putting a swimming pool in the back of our picture palace.

— A swimming pool?

—’Sright. On account of everyone back there’s always doing the breaststroke!

The pedal catches against the back of her calf and she winces, loses her grip, the bike clattering to the ground, it’s bell clinking dully. Frozen for a moment, praying the commotion hasn’t woken Arthur, she stares at the bike lying there dumbly, lets herself down beside it, and weeps dry, choking sobs. He was her first, she thinks fervently. Him. Eric. Her first love.

It takes her long minutes to collect herself, and then she clambers to her feet, pulls the bike upright. Having brought it so far, it seems she’s going to keep it after all. I earned it, she thinks viciously.

She heads first to the privy at the bottom of the garden — she hates to sit there in the dark, but she’s suddenly desperate — then lets herself in by the kitchen door, tiptoes to her room, holding her breath, and crawls under the covers fully clothed.She hugs herself, panting softly, listening to the house, the rise and fall of her father’s steady snores.

HOW MUCH LATER she doesn’t know — she seems to wake and yet to have barely caught her breath — there’s a knock at the door, a pounding, and she presses her back to the wall. It’s Colin, she’s sure. He’s come for her, and it’s only the sound of her father’s cursing that stops her crying out. “I’m bloody coming!” he shouts, and it thrills her, the prospect of him turning his rage on Colin. She hears him shuffling down the passage, the rattle of the matchbox, the rasp as he strikes a light, followed by the slosh of the paraffin lamp. And then he’s calling out in Welsh, “Who’s there?” and the answer, in English, “It’s me, Evans, and you can keep a civil tongue. I’ve brought you something of yours.” For an insane moment, she thinks, The constable, thank God, he can arrest Colin! and then it dawns on her: Colin isn’t here, never was.

In her relief, she misses the start of the exchange, climbs out of bed, and makes her way on trembling legs to the glowing frame of her door.

“—wouldn’t tell them where he lived,” Parry is saying, “so they dumped him on me.” She peers into the passage, sees her father, his back to her, at the front door, Parry before him with his hands on Jim’s shoulders. “Wouldn’t tell them anything, as a matter of fact — just his name, over and over, to all their questions.”

“I’d have given them a rank and serial number if I had one,” Jim tells them, and Esther, coming forward and catching his eye, puts a finger to her lips. He’s in enough trouble already, and for a moment the thought of someone else’s problems steadies her, and she smoothes a hand down the front of her rumpled skirt.

She should have known, of course. The disturbance at the camp, the interruption that drove Colin off. It must have been the local boys. They’d been watching the camp ever since the sappers first pecked out the perimeter of the site with mallets and surveying stakes — stakes that had started showing up thrust through boys’ belt loops like cutlasses, brandished in high-street duels (“Errol Flynn!” “Douglas Fairbanks!”). The boys were the ones who’d kept the village informed of the sappers’ progress, fueling speculation about the base’s purpose, growing more and more impatient with the mystery. “It’s top secret,” Esther told Jim when he begged her to ask one of the sappers at the pub, but the way his face fell, you would have thought it was the top secret, out of all the many adult things he wasn’t old enough to hear or understand. Parry, with whom the boys have a running feud (their favorite trick: reporting a naked light during blackout and, when he comes running, mooning him, the gang of them, arses hanging out of their drawers), had said they were up to something. And she should have known Jim would get mixed up in it. He isn’t well liked by the local lads — few of the evacuees are, but Jim is small for his age, and his fiery temper makes him easy to goad (his last name, Leadbetter, has earned him the nickname Bedwetter) — but it doesn’t stop him from trying to ingratiate himself by getting into trouble.