Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Arthur starts to warn her about Jim as they walk down the lane. “Don’t get too attached to him. He’ll be off soon enough now if this invasion goes right.” It reminds her of what he used to tell her as a girl about the orphaned lambs they hand-reared. Arthur’s never warmed to the boy, but he’s always been reluctant to punish him, too, unwilling to step into the shoes of his absent father.

The closest he’s come to laying a hand on Jim was after Rhys joined up. Arthur had pronounced him a fool over supper one night—“more sheep than shepherd”—and Jim flew to his defense. “I only hope the war lasts long enough for me to join up and fight alongside him.” He called Arthur a pacifist, which made her father strike the table so hard the salt had leapt from the cellar. “Pacifist I might be,” he said in his deliberate English, “but with the accent on ‘fist,’ mind!” He’d heard that somewhere, she thought. His grasp of English was rarely so subtle, but she could see why the phrase would have been memorable to him, the way the English word contained it’s own rebuke.

Afterwards, he’d turned his anger on her, hissing in Welsh, “Can’t you do anything with him?”

“You never liked him,” she says now, which ends the conversation, the truth sometimes stumping him this way, as if it’s a dead end. She wants him to be quiet so she can think about what she’ll do if Colin’s at the pub, but as soon as the silence falls between them she regrets it. This might be the last chance to tell him, she thinks. To tell him herself, not have him find out. But she can’t conceive of the words. She doesn’t even know the Welsh for rape, wonders fleetingly if there is a word. Even in English she can’t quite bring herself to call it rape, what Colin did to her, not now, not even to herself. In the midst of it, yes, the word had filled her mind, buzzing and crackling like a lurid neon sign in a gangster picture. But not afterwards. Rape, as she understands it, is a particular form of murder, when a man kills a woman. It’s connected to sex, but the main thing is the murder. No one — in the films she’s seen, the books she’s read, the whispered stories she’s heard at school — no one survives rape. She is still unclear if the sex itself is so violent that it just kills you on the spot, or if the man has to actually strangle you or shoot you or stab you afterwards, and she had thought in the midst of Colin’s roughness, the blunt, searing pressure of him between her legs, that she was about to find out. But then he left her, and she felt such relief. She had survived, clambered out of the pool as if from a grave. And this is how she knows she hasn’t been raped. The idea of being forced doesn’t enter into it — hadn’t she gone along willingly enough? Besides, what was it to be forced to do something she didn’t want to do? She’d been forced all her life by one circumstance or another — by poverty, by her mother’s death, by the needs of the flock. Being forced to do things is such a part of her daily life, and as for this, she’d at least wanted some part of it — the kissing, her hand in his. If she’s been raped, she thinks, then she’d wanted it more than most things in her life, although that isn’t saying much. And as for the pain, it hadn’t been much worse than the time she’d been pinned against the stall wall and the cow had crushed her foot. The blood made her think of a wound, but only a small one, a barked knuckle, a scraped knee.

If she had to call it anything, she thinks now, groping for the word, she’d call it a misunderstanding. He meant one thing, she meant another.

Beside her, Arthur stops for a second, his boots grating in the lane, and when she glances back, she sees him cupping a match to his face, lighting up. In the brief flare his eyes are hooded beneath his cap, and then he shakes the match out. He’d never think to offer her a smoke, reckons it unladylike. As if she were ever going to be a lady! Her, a farmer’s daughter. After her mother’s death, she’d started to nag him with all manner of questions about the flock. She’d thought Arthur knew everything she’d ever need to know — about lambing, about tupping, all the business of breeding — and she took it in solemnly, not giggling as she might have a year earlier in school, even as Arthur blushed scarlet to explain it. And then in the midst of all this information, which seemed so male to her, he told her about cynefin, the flock’s sense of place, of territory.

She’d heard the word before, of course, but the importance of the concept had escaped her as a child. Now Arthur spelled it out. How it would be impossible to farm on the open mountain if the flock didn’t know it’s place. The sheep would scatter to the winds otherwise. It was why farms hereabouts were only ever sold along with their flocks. No one would buy a patch of land alone. What use would it be? You could try to put new livestock on it, but they’d be gone in a season. “They’re not as dumb as they’re made out, sheep,” Arthur likes to joke, but mostly he speaks of cynefin with a kind of reverence, with pride even — not least, as he’s told her several times, because the English don’t have a word for it. As if it’s an essentially Welsh quality.

But how, she demanded, did the sheep know where they were supposed to be? “It goes back to olden days,” he began (though each subsequent time he tried to explain, it became “medieval times” or “the Stone Age,” so she knew he wasn’t really sure). “Back then, shepherds stayed with their flocks all year — there were more of them or better paid. They even followed the sheep up into the mountains in winter. And those shepherds kept their beasts in a certain patch, until over the years the flocks learned where they belonged.”

But how do they still know, she asked, and Arthur had shrugged. “They remember,” he said awkwardly (he hated humanizing the flock, thought it soft). “They teach each other, I suppose. From generation to generation like. This flock, our sheep, are connected all the way back to those sheep in past times.”

She didn’t say it, but she knew what that meant. The male lambs, the wethers, were sold off for meat each year; only the females, the future ewes, were kept. Whatever was passed down, then, however cynefin was preserved, it was from mother to daughter.

And the thought of that had been enough to make her, at thirteen, burst into tears. She had to tell the startled Arthur that she was just scared about what it would mean for a flock to be destroyed. He could believe that easily enough — they had both seen, dotted here and there on the hillsides, the shattered empty stone cottages of failed farms — and in his panic at her tears he launched into a bleak tale of the scabies epidemic in ’34, how he and several neighbors had helped Dewi Thomas destroy his own flock to stop the spread. “He shot them, one by one, in the head like, and then he burned them with kerosene. The stink hung about for days. But before that, he had us shear them. He wanted to make what he could, so we took their wool. Not that it was much, you know, it being only November. But you could see the beasts knew something was wrong. They shivered so. I’d have preferred to do the shooting.”

He’d looked at her expectantly, as if this terrible story were somehow meant to make her feel better. And, in his gruff male way, it was, she thinks now, as they trudge down the lane side by side. He’d been so embarrassed for her tears, ashamed for her really, that he’d told a story that he thought justified them. At least he’d not suspected that she’d been crying for her mother. That very month she had her first period, and she managed to get through it without breathing a word to him. (She did appeal to Mrs. Roberts, though only after she’d sworn her to silence.)