Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

It’s an old story, and Esther’s sure others know it as well as she, but there’s something about Arthur’s unveiling of the inexorable English logic that’s still compelling. She sees heads nodding along the bar, watches Arthur, satisfied, light a cigarette. He should have been a reverend, she thinks. When he first told her the story, she was doubtful. “Why wouldn’t Mrs. Roberts know that?” she asked, and he looked at her as if she were a fool. She saw then that Rhys’s hope of their parents marrying was fantasy; Arthur was betrothed to the country. “Maybe she does,” he sneered. “Maybe your English teacher wouldn’t want to tell you that truth, eh?” And Esther thought, That’s why she blushed. Her teacher had lied to her.

His own father, Arthur is saying now, completing the lesson, fell afoul of the rule on his very first day at school, told on another boy, and escaped his beating. “Or so he thought,” Arthur notes with relish. “When my grand father heard of it, he gave him the thrashing of his life, called it a ‘Welsh hiding.’” And here he glances at Bertie, offers him an opening, and the little man volunteers, as if on cue, “They corrupted our bloody children.” And Arthur nods, draws deeply on his cigarette.

Bertie is starting up a chorus of “ Mae hen Wlad fy nhadau, ” the Welsh anthem, and Esther translates to herself: “Land of my fathers.”

The moral of Arthur’s story, she supposes bleakly, is that there’s no reason to fear the English, at least not when the Welsh can do worse, and she knows, as if a door has closed in her face, that she’ll never be able to tell Arthur about Colin now.

THERE’S ONLY ONE brief scuffle, later that night, when a few of the sappers — not Colin, Esther sees with relief — try to defy the ban, but Constable Parry bars the door and sends them packing. “Did your duty there,” Jack tells him, giving him one on the house, and Parry grins and tells him, “But I’m off-duty, Jackie,” and takes a long draft.

“Can’t take a joke!” the sappers call from the street, over the jeers of the locals. “Don’t go forgetting who the real enemy are!”

“You are!” Bertie bellows back, and Esther, despite herself, flinches.

Arthur, she sees, never leaves his stool during the melee, a fixed grin on his face. Jack glances into the half-deserted lounge. “Might as well have an early night, Esther.” He raises his eyebrows, and she nods. “Arthur! Walk your lovely daughter home, won’t you?”

They walk in silence, Arthur setting one foot in front of the other with such deliberate dignity, it reminds her of the news-reel of the coronation she’d seen as a child, almost her first memory: the new king pacing steadily up the long nave of Westminster Abbey.

She must have seen it with her mother, she thinks.

Arthur’s performance in the pub reminds her he’s always been sniffily suspicious of her English, as if she were putting on airs. He’s never seen any reason for her command of the language to be more than “good enough”; it was her mother who always wanted it to be proper. Her hero was George Eliot— real name Mary Ann Evans, she told Esther, a Welsh girl made good (“as an English man!” Arthur scoffed) — and her prized possession a massive copy of Middlemarch, which she seemed to have been reading all of Esther’s life. Towards the end of that last summer, while Eric sweated over her chores, Esther sat on the bed and read it to her. Her mother hadn’t managed more than a couple of pages a day, stealing the moments when her work was done, while the floors dried or supper simmered on the stove, and now they were flying, covering twenty, thirty, fifty pages at a time. “Slow down,” her mother used to beg, gripping the sheets as if they were handlebars. “Are you sure you’re not skipping?” But Esther knew she was proud. There were fewer than a hundred pages left at her death, and Esther had rationed them out, a page a night, then a paragraph, a sentence, reading them silently to herself for the rest of that autumn until, impossibly, they were all gone.

She hasn’t missed her mother so much in years, she thinks as Cilgwyn comes in sight, and she finds herself hating Colin for reviving that old hurt almost more than for the new one.

DEAR MUTTI, Karsten writes, and stops, wondering what to tell her. Since my last letter, his pencil sighs, I have been captured by the British. He looks at the words on the page and they seem baldly ridiculous, a bad joke. Both banal and implausible, even to him.

Someone walks past the mouth of the tent and reflexively he curls an arm around the page laid out before him on the bunk. He watches the man’s shadow cross the canvas. The tent must be Great War issue. His first night under it, sniffing the musty air and peering up at the blotchy continents of mildew, the parchment-colored walls rising to the long ridge above, he’d felt he was sleeping under a water-stained book.

One with blank pages, he thinks now, returning to the letter before him. He’s writing in the back of the pamphlet of German phrases and their English equivalents that the Red Cross passed out to them yesterday. Some of the men threw theirs away immediately, but Karsten has kept his, not to learn the phrases — he’s glanced at them and knows most — but for the paper. The Red Cross representatives, in their dark, mournful suits and plummy Swiss German, had also explained that they’d shortly be issued official postcards to notify their next of kin. Karsten, the back cover of the phrase book folded open before him, is trying to work out what to write his mother.

He starts over. Dear Mutti, It has been a week now since I surrendered to the British.

More truthful, at least. He looks at the thick, dark pencil marks against the white. They’re not allowed pocketknives, so he sharpens the lead by furiously rubbing the blunt point at an angle against the paper, steadily obliterating what he has written.

He expects the Red Cross cards will be plain, like the coarse army-issue stationery he’s used to. But he finds himself wishing he could send her a picture postcard like the kind she sent him from home, something that might convey more than mere words. He might have wished for longer letters — she was always too busy, if not with the pension, then with her patriotic activities, food drives, clothing drives, scrap-metal drives — but he loved the scenes she sent, pinned them to the wall above his bunk in barracks like so many narrow windows. In his last letter to her he’d complained about the spring heat in France, and she’d sent back by return mail a postcard of the Brocken draped with snow: Hoping this will cool you down!

As a boy, one of his jobs around the pension had been to carry the guests’ mail to the post office. He liked to practice his reading skills with the cards, trying to recognize the town and the landscape, which he took for granted, in the exuberant descriptions. Glorious weather. Spectacular views. Charming locals. He wondered if he would see his world this way if he was at leisure. Wish you were here, they wrote, and he did. There was something so cheering about postcards. When the odd injudicious or arrogant guest complained about the pension or his mother’s cooking, he had no compunction about throwing the card away, less out of loyalty to her than a sense that such grousing somehow failed the form.

He’d only sent her one postcard himself, from Paris, where he’d gone on a two-day pass shortly before his promotion. He’d bought two cards — unable to decide which to send — the first of the Ritz, the lobby of which he’d sat in for thirty reverent minutes. If asked about his ambitions, he might have admitted to hopes of a modest addition to the old pension, perhaps a bar, so that they might call themselves an inn, but privately he dreamed of managing a grand hotel with liveried staff and a ballroom. And a suite for his mother. But he couldn’t confess that to her. Instead, he sent the other card, of the Arc de Triomphe. They’d seen it together four years earlier in newsreels, and she’d applauded as the long grey column of troops passed beneath it. “That’s that,” she’d told him, leaning over. “The war will be over now.” His own teenage dejection at the thought of missing his chance to fight had been in such contrast to her relief. It was the first time he’d ever seen her clapping, the soft beat of her gloved hands (she still dressed for the cinema) keeping time with the marching. He wrote that he’d walked through the arch himself, though he’d done it shyly, hands in pockets.