Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“They thought he was Welsh,” Parry is saying now, shaking his head, though Esther can believe it; Jim’s picked up a bit of the language in his time with them. “An arsonist, if you please!” the constable goes on, chuckling, but Arthur is stone-faced. He’s never been fond of the constable, on account of his insistence on doing all his official business in English.

“What happened to his head?” Arthur asks, still in Welsh, and coming into the light she sees a welt on Jim’s forehead, the bruise already turning waxy like spoiled meat.

“Kept putting his hands up, apparently. Surrendering. One of them thought he was taking the piss, gave him a little clout.”

“One of them ‘heroes’?”

The constable is silent.

“Well, obliged to you for fetching him back,” Arthur says, reaching for the doorknob.

Parry leans in a moment. “Just so long as it doesn’t happen again, eh? He’s your responsibility—”

“ Nos-da, now.” Arthur swings the door to.

“And good night to you,” Parry says from the other side, his tone perfectly conversational, as if he can see right through the wood. Jim starts to say something, but Arthur raises a finger and the boy flinches. They listen to the scrape of the policeman’s feet in the yard, the creak of the gate.

“POWs!” Jim bursts out as soon as it’s quiet. “That’s who it’s for!” He looks at them triumphantly, as if the news somehow excuses everything.

“What happened?” Esther asks.

“We broke in,” he says, “and we found a cellblock. You know, for solitary confinement. That’s how we knew the secret!”

She tries to look suitably surprised, but she can see he’s disappointed. He looks over her shoulder. “POWs, Mr. Evans.”

“But how did you get caught?” Esther insists.

His face clouds for a second. “Oh, the others,” he says, trying to sound breezy. “They locked me in one of the cells for a joke and forgot to come back.”

“ Duw! ” She crouches down to get a better look at his head, but he twists away.

Behind her, Arthur has started to laugh thinly and she stares at him.

“Prisoners of war,” he says, and she knows it’s taken him a moment to work it out in English, too proud to just ask. “And all those happy fools down the pub,” he goes on in Welsh, “hoping for some glorious part in the English war. What a slap in the face!” He shakes his head. “Glad you could join us,” he adds, looking her up and down, taking in her rumpled clothes.

“I thought I should be decent,” she tells him awkwardly.

He’s in slippers and a nightshirt himself, his calves below the hem corded with muscle, the veins binding them like blue twine. The nightshirt is so old it’s gone grey, and Esther, so rarely up in the morning before him, can’t remember the last time she’s seen him in it.

“I could boil that for you,” she blurts out, and he gives her a puzzled look.

“You just see to his head,” he tells her, suddenly weary, pushing past on his way back to bed. “That’s your job.”

She sits Jim at the table, puts water on to warm, fetches a towel, then sets the lamp beside him. “It doesn’t hurt,” he tells her, but pulls back when she reaches for him.

“Hold still.”

She lifts the matted hair off his forehead—“Ow!”—and clucks her tongue. It’s not a bad wound, he’s come back with worse from the schoolyard, but there’s a nasty-looking scrape at the center of the bruise where the skin is broken — by a ring? she wonders, a watch? — and moving his hair has opened it again. She stands swiftly, drawing in her breath as a dotted line of blood begins to well up. She feels her tears brimming, turns quickly and stretches for the shelf above the sink, for bandages and the bottle of Mercurochrome.

“Do we have to?” he asks as she drapes the towel round his neck. Then, picking up on her solemnity: “I’m wounded, aren’t I?”

She nods, unable to speak. The boy eyes the bottle warily, takes the corner of the towel, and draws it across his mouth.

“For the pain,” he says, biting down as she begins to clean the cut.

She hadn’t wanted another evacuee when the Blitz had started and there’d been a second wave of them, though Arthur had said they could use some help around the place. She’d resisted until the summer of ’41, after Liverpool had been shattered and a belated trickle of kids began to arrive. Arthur had shaken his head in disgust when she’d come back from the station with Jim in tow. At nine, he was too small to be much use on the farm (the reason why Rhys had been hired the next summer), but at least Arthur wasn’t hardhearted enough to make her take him back. “Don’t know what you were thinking. He’s like a stray,” he told her. “If you want to take pity on him, well and good, but he’s your lookout. You’ll have to see to him and make up for what he can’t do about the place.”

She pauses in her cleaning and tells Jim to stop pulling faces. “It can’t hurt so badly. I’m being very gentle.”

He opens his eyes. “Shows how much you know,” he says. “It’s agony.” Then, hopefully, “Is it finished?”

She shakes her head, reaches for the Mercurochrome, and he bunches his face again. And all the time she’s tending his wound and wrapping his head, she wants to ask, Which one? Which one did this to you?

But when she’s done and pinning the bandage, he says, “I didn’t tell on the other lads. The constable kept asking who was there, but I’m no rat.” His eyes are alight beneath the white strip, as proud to have kept a secret as uncovered one.

“You might as well have,” she snaps, suddenly as angry at the other boys as at the sappers. “That lot!”

His face falls, and when she asks him at last—“Now, Jim”—which of the sappers hit him, she sees his face close. He couldn’t tell, he says stubbornly, and when she presses him, “But you must know,” he raises a fist to his eyes, a gesture that always makes her think he wants to punch himself for crying, and she tells him quickly, “Hey, hey. I almost forgot. I’ve got something for you.”

“What?” he asks grudgingly.

“Only if you stop crying. It’s only for a brave boy.”

“I wasn’t crying.”

She leans forward and puts her mouth to his ear.

“A bike,” she whispers, and he looks at her with amazement, and then with such joy that for a second she thinks it’s almost been worth it. He throws his arms around her, and she finds herself standing abruptly, brushing him off, saying lamely, “Your bandage will come loose.”

Later, when she tucks him in, she tries to make up for it, bending down to kiss him, but he struggles up under the sheets. “Hey,” he says. “Does this mean I’m the camp’s first prisoner?” And she nods, and leaves him, although a part of her thinks the title rightly her own.

Before she blows out the lamp, she’ll hurry to the privy again, sit on the cold wooden seat, drowsing to the fizzing drone of a bluebottle. She’ll look out the half-moon in the door and then down at her drawers in the yellow oil light and see a thin exclamation mark of blood. By the time she goes back inside, the clock over the hearth will read two o’clock, and she’ll wonder dully what they call the day after D-day.

LOOKING OUT the window the morning after the invasion, she sees it’s just another day, only a pale sickle moon in the blue-white sky to betray there’d even been a night before. Esther forces herself to get up to prepare Arthur’s breakfast. Just like normal, she tells herself, if a little sluggish. She sets out the chipped plates with deliberate care, then the yellowing bone-handled cutlery, the bread and butter. Everything in it’s place. She thinks herself through the movements, conscious of them for the first time in years, as if she’s never done them before.