Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Harry takes it as his cue to launch into a joke about a fellow who goes into a bar and orders three pints every night. “One for himself and one each for his two brothers, fighting in Burma and France, see.”

But Esther can’t take her eyes off the poor young American, his furious chewing. She begins to explain the misunderstanding, imagining that if she can just ask him about the chickens seriously — how did they get that name? they are awfully red, aren’t they? — she might convince him of her sincere interest in poultry. But then she stops, simply astounded that she can hurt him, this fighting man.

Harry prattles on beside her: “And then one night he just orders the two pints, and the barmaid says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss, sir. Can I ask, was it your brother in Burma or your brother in France?’”

It seems so unlikely, the stricken look on the American’s face, almost a joke, that she smiles to herself. She sees him swallow hard, and even this is funny, and she starts to laugh out loud, watching him pull his cap on and flee, his beer unfinished.

“You’ve heard it,” Harry says in a hurt voice, looking round. But she shakes her head, waves him on.

“Well, he just looks at her and says, ‘Neither, luv. I’m just on the wagon.’”

And Esther laughs even harder.

“There you go,” Jack says, slipping past her down the bar, and she understands that as far as he’s concerned she can break any number of glasses, and hearts too, so long as she keeps her own intact.

She isn’t much friendlier to the guards afterwards, but at least she stops dropping drinks. She tries to feel guilty about the airman, but she can’t. Any hurt she could have caused him seems so trivial, yet she also finds herself feeling the smallest thrill when she recalls it.

AT CILGWYN, Esther and Jim are barely talking since she slapped him. Arthur looks from one to the other, more baffled by their silence than their previous chatter in English. The boy’s bike lay in the yard where he dropped it for two days, before Esther picked it up one night, late for work, and rode it to the pub. He doesn’t need it anyway, she tells herself, now that the school holidays have started. She uses it whenever she goes to work now, or to the pictures — always riding it as fast as she can, pell-mell up and down the hills.

A few nights later, Jim doesn’t appear for supper. They wait for five minutes, then ten. Esther asks Arthur if he’s seen him since the afternoon, and he shrugs—“He’ll come when he’s hungry”—spears a floury potato, starts to eat. She sits still, as if she were a part of the table setting along with the knife and fork. Jim’s made himself scarce since school ended, but she knows where he is. She’s seen the white glow of the camp lights over the ridge each evening, like a moon that never quite rises.

She leaves Arthur at the table, his mouth full, shaking his head, and she strides over the hill in search of the boy, calling Mott for company. On the climb, she imagines all the trouble he could get into; on the way down, all the trouble she’ll give him. She gets as far as the trees above the camp, slipping into them unobserved in the deepening dusk, before she spots the boys on their bellies in the ditch running alongside the lane. Something about their wariness makes her slow and then stop, leaning up against a tree. It takes her a moment to find Jim at one end of the line. He has his fists pressed to his eyes, and for a moment she assumes he’s crying, starts from her hiding place, but then she realizes, Binoculars, he’s pretending they’re binoculars. And she finds herself turning to look where he’s looking, at the men behind the fence.

They seem so aimless at first, drifting across the parade ground. Then gradually she sees others scattered around the buildings, sitting or standing, talking or writing letters. A group squat in the dust — playing cards, she guesses from the way they move their hands. Some are even dozing in the heat. Perhaps it’s their idleness — a novelty to her, brought up around farmers who always have too much to do — but she finds it oddly peaceful watching the men, her heart slowing after the steep climb. She feels so observed behind the bar, it’s a relief to watch for once. It’s the same way that the darkness of the pictures relaxes her, and from the gloom of the trees the men moving across the still, bright square of the parade ground seem like figures on the screen.

They’ve all surrendered, so she’s overheard the guards saying, their contempt barely concealed. “No danger of any of you lot doing that,” Mary had teased them, and they’d bristled at the dig. “Have you know, I’ve seen action,” one of them retorted. “In Malaya. Be there now if it weren’t for the malaria!” Harry had slapped his neck resoundingly, “Ugh! He got me!” and feigned a swoon. “It’s a wound, too!” the guard blustered, but by then the laughter was general. “Blokes!” Mary whispered to Esther. “Sensitive about their bloody honor as any girl about her virtue.”

The boys Esther notices now out of the corner of her eye are pointing at the men, one after another — counting? she wonders — but then she sees Jim blow on his fingertips and she realizes he’s miming shooting, picking them off one by one.

She should go down and fetch him home, but now that she’s here she doesn’t have the nerve to creep closer to the fence. She sees the flash of a match, and the face of the guard in the nearest tower is momentarily lit up against the fading sky, and she holds her breath.

Soon the boys grow bolder — or perhaps, in the way of boys, simply restless with keeping still. They start to sing, of all things, Pinkie leading them, crouching and waving his hands like a choirmaster. She cranes forward to catch the words. “Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,” they trill, “don’t fence me in.” She recognizes the Gene Autry tune from the Saturday morning serials. They break up in giggles before they can get much further. The dog beside her stirs, and she says softly, “Settle.”

She thinks of the constable’s warning, of the Geneva Convention, but suspects the boys relish the idea of breaking the biggest rules they can.

One of the guards in the tower finally rakes his searchlight along the tree line, and the boys fall silent. It’s barely dusk, but in the gloom of the trees the leaves flare green, as if a breeze has turned them. Esther blinks, the light dancing before her, and when she can see again, the boys are flat to the ground. She thinks of Jim’s washing, the grass stains on his clothes. The searchlight swings back for one more desultory pass and then tips up against the sky, reminding her suddenly of the Twentieth Century — Fox icon. In the echoing silence after it snaps off, she can almost hear the brassy trumpet fanfare.

The Germans for the most part ignore the boys — they mustn’t understand the words of the song, she thinks, and it seems like a mercy — though a couple stare hard into the trees. The rest start up a game of football. Do Germans even play football? she asks herself. It seems so mundane and yet intimate to see them at play. She almost expects the guards to intervene. Surely prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to play games. She studies them intently, wondering if she can tell anything about the kind of soldiers or sailors they might make from the way they dribble the ball, slide in for a tackle, but all she can think of is how young they look. The thudding of their boots on the hard earth as they chase the ball carries to her clearly.

Below her, Pinkie starts up in a hoarse stage whisper, like a commentator on the radio: “Fritz now, playing the ball forward to Fritz on the wing, he cuts inside, crosses to the big center forward, Fritz, who sends a header into the arms of the keeper—”