Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Along with his pajamas, his spare vests, and his Sunday best, his mother had packed the boy off with gifts for his host family—“swaps,” she called them, for their love. But as soon as the train had pulled out of the station, Jim rummaged through his dented cardboard suitcase until he came upon the hard chill of a pint of J & B and the stiff angles of a Players carton. Esther pictured him drawing these treasures out like rabbits from a hat and turning to the others in his compartment: “Who’s got a light, then?” They’d had a time of it, all right, he’d told her, half boastful, half querulous, until one by one they’d lurched to the door, as the train hammered through the wet green countryside, let down the window, gulped a lungful of the burnt air billowing back from the engine, and heaved over the side. Jim had had the misfortune to throw up as they entered a mountain tunnel, covering himself, the window, and the dusty livery of the GNWR in puke.

When Esther arrived he was glaring through the steamy portholes of his mask, as the local women worked their way down the rows, asking questions: What’s your name? How old are you? Where are you from? The last answer, whether Liverpool or Toxteth or Bootle, gave them pause. “Slum kids,” the women complained. “No better than urchins.” It was taking an age for them to pick, a few even leaving alone, shaking their heads at PC Parry, the billeting officer. Mrs. Lloyd, moving down the aisle ahead of Esther, asked her daughter, Hattie, “What do you think, cariad? Shall we take this one?” The girl, so spoiled she was known round the village as the Princess of Wales, examined the tear-stained child in front of her and crinkled her nose. “Crybaby.” She shook her head. “And, she pongs.”

Jim was refusing to answer any questions, letting the women finger the little luggage label pinned to his lapel. All the children had them, their names and addresses on one side, and on the reverse, “Further Information”: faith, date of birth, ailments. When Mrs. Lloyd and Hattie stopped in front of him, the girl seemed puzzled by his gas mask.

“Take it off,” she commanded, but Jim shook his head, the snout of the mask swinging back and forth, the charcoal granules rustling inside.

“Why not?”

He leaned towards her, lifted the rubber seal. “Your mam farts poison gas.”

There was a bark of laughter from the other evacuees, and Esther covered her mouth. But then the constable appeared, peeling the mask off Jim’s head, the straps yanking at his hair, giving him a clip around the ear hole.

“You’ll be last if you’re not careful, sunshine. By then the only bed will be in my cell at the station.”

The Lloyds hurried out and Esther found herself standing beside Jim, close enough to smell him — the sugary scent of boys’ sweat that she recalled from the schoolroom, mixed with the chemical odor of the rubber mask.

She looked at his label and saw, beside “Mother,” the word “None,” scored in heavy black letters, and took his hand.

They’ve never been close, though, despite her best efforts. His mother wasn’t dead, in fact; he just wished she were. He’d never known his father, knew only that he was a sailor his mother had met on shore leave—” Sure to leave,” as she put it. She’d been seeing a new fellow lately, “Uncle” Ted, her boss at the factory, a civilian who called him Jim-lad and sneeringly referred to his father as “the seaman,” despite Jim’s assertions that he was probably a lieutenant or a captain by now. “Come to think”—Ted winked—“seems I did hear he was first mate.” Jim had prayed Jerry would get Ted, but when they’d come out of the shelter one morning, it was Ted’s house that was in one piece, and their place that was a hole in the ground. “So she moved in with him,” the boy told Esther, “but there weren’t room for me.” As if he were a giant, Esther thought, and not a tiny boy. Esther’s heart had gone out to him, of course, but he’d always resented her mothering, submitting to it under duress at best. It had been that way from the start. She took one look at the bedraggled boy in her kitchen and insisted on a bath. She’d made up the bunk in the box room just that morning, and she wasn’t having him put himself between her clean sheets without a good scrubbing.

He declined, gruffly at first, “Not likely,” and then, as she went about filling the kettle from the pump in the yard, with increasingly desperate politeness: “I’d not want to be a bother.” Finally, thinking perhaps she didn’t understand his English, he tried being firm, as if talking to a dog: “Missus? No, missus. No!” But she ignored him, carrying in the sloshing kettle and easing it onto the stove. Beads of water skittered over the hot plate. “You can’t make me,” he yelled, taking a step back down the passage as Esther pushed her sleeves up. He’d fought her tooth and nail, but she’d grappled with too many oily sheep, helping strip them of their fleece, for him to have a chance. The steam was billowing from the kettle when she marched him back into the kitchen in just his vest and drawers. She poured a steaming, silver stream into the tub, added cold from a jug, and told him to hop in, turning away demurely, though not without catching a glimpse of his bone-white flanks before he sat down with a quick splash.

She started to move towards him with a brush and he flushed, cupped his hands between his legs, and bawled, “You’re not my mother!” and she stopped as if slapped.

Instead, she scooped up his clothes where he’d thrown them and bent over the fireplace, feeding them to the flames as he yelled from the tub, half rising and then sinking back beneath the water. “ In-fes-ted, ” she shouted, turning back to him. “I can hear their little bodies popping in the flames. Uckavie! ” She gave a shudder. How dare he bring lice into her mother’s house!

TONIGHT, AFTER a chapter of Dickens, she reads the newspaper with him, helping find the towns and villages on the map of Europe tacked to his bedroom wall.

“Caen,” she says. “Cherbourg.” She points them out and he bats her hand away. “I can see.” She lets him use the pins from her sewing kit, moving them east across the map with the Allied advance. She’s always forgetting who they represent — Monty, Patton, Bradley? — or pretending to, at any rate, because he enjoys telling her.

“Who’s this, then?” she asks, pointing to a pin still stuck near London.

“Rhys,” he says, with an edge of accusation, and for a second she wonders, Who?

It’s been less than three months since his proposal, but it seems a lifetime ago. Esther went along with Jim to see Rhys off at the station after his last leave despite, or perhaps because of, turning him down. The village was too small for hard feelings. His mother was there, fussing about, picking lint off his uniform collar, then smoothing it down. “Quite grand, isn’t he?” Mrs. Roberts asked Esther, speaking in English, as if they were still in class. “I thought I’d always have to iron and polish for him.” She gave a wobbly smile. “At least until he found a wife. And here the army’s gone and taught him how.” Esther and Rhys both glanced down, and his mother followed their eyes. “And would you look at his boots, ” she breathed in wonder, but when she looked up, Esther saw the tears standing in her eyes, like pearly pinheads, and it occurred to her that his mother was terrified for him. Rhys was so placidly confident about returning, Esther had never imagined him not, and even when she considered it now, it was almost impossible to imagine anything as interesting as getting killed ever happening to him. And yet the sudden fear of it must have made her weaken, because when Rhys leaned out of the train window and whispered, “Can I at least hope?” she nodded slightly and promised to write.