Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Apart from the near miss with the flock, he’s kept his foot on the gas ever since, turning north and continuing to rise through a layer of cloud, and yet ahead of him now, as the mist shreds, he sees night is starting to fall. The steep grassy slopes to the west are already a velvety black, just the white flecks of sheep like faint stars in the dark. The thought of more sheep in his path makes him ease up at last, slacken his breakneck pace. Where is the escaped man going to go, after all, he asks himself. What chance does he have with hundreds of miles of hostile ground between him and home?

IT’S A CRISP FRIDAY, the first in September, and she’s washing eggs, cleaning the muck off them with a stiff little brush. After the heat of August, September has come in damp and blustery. Jim went back to school two days earlier, his face as overcast as the skies, and the night before, Arthur came in off the mountain, his eyes teary from the wind, grumbling that the dampness was going to hold up the haying. Only Esther welcomes the cool weather, pulling on heavy sweaters, swaddling herself in her long winter coat when she ventures out. Arthur set the rams to the flock earlier in the week, and each morning, looking up at the hillside, she can count more of the ewes, their rumps smeared red from the raddle. She’s scrubbing the last egg as if she’d scour the speckles off it, wondering what she’s going to do, when Arthur bangs out of the bedroom, his hair rising in wispy flames, and snatches his shotgun off the hook above the door.

For a pale second — such is her guilt — she thinks it’s for her, that he’s guessed her secret. She fumbles the wet egg in her hand, catches it, heart thudding, then watches silently as Arthur cracks the breech of the gun, jams the bright red shells into the barrel. Their brass firing caps stare at her owlishly and then wink shut as Arthur snaps the stock to.

“Loose dog,” he bites out, grim-faced. “What are you, deaf?” She must have been so lost in her thoughts. But now she can hear the distant barking and, following him to the door, see the flock flying across the fields, rippling over the uneven hillside in the morning sun.

It’s happened before, she knows, drying her hands and watching her father hurry uphill. Hikers’ dogs have gotten in among the sheep. “Worse than foxes,” according to Arthur. But she hasn’t seen hikers in years, not with the war on, and the only local dogs are working animals — like Mott and Mick, now snapping at their chains — who know better than to worry sheep, and the guard dogs she’s heard baying from the camp. But she can’t recall ever seeing them loose before.

And then she’s running too, waving and shouting after her father, but her cries must be whipped away by the wind because Arthur keeps surging upwards, alternately dwindling and growing as he crosses ridge after ridge, until he vanishes over one rise and doesn’t reappear.

She struggles on, bracing for the sound of the shotgun blast, but there’s nothing, just a lone seagull, strayed in from the coast, floating across the grey sky.

At last she comes sweating and panting over the brow and there’s Arthur in the hollow below her, leaning into his shotgun as if into a gale, and facing him two guards from the camp, one with his own rifle raised, the other with both hands clenched around the leash of the dog, which lunges and snaps between them.

The guards and the dog all seem to be barking at once; it takes her a moment to make out that one of the guards is shouting at the dog, “Down!” the other at Arthur, “Drop it!” By contrast her father is still, intent, only the muzzle of his gun drifting slightly with the bucking of the dog in his sights.

“Stop!” she cries, but it comes out as a croak, so winded is she from the climb. She has to put a hand to her chest to summon her breath, and when she looks up, her throat tensing to try again, they’re turning their weapons on her. Arthur flinches away as if scalded, but the guard’s aim lingers. She feels her hands rising before her, buoyant as the gull floating overhead, and then she clenches her fists, forces them down, nails biting into her palms. Instead, she calls out in English, calls their names. She knows them from the pub: George, the Malaya veteran, hunched over his rifle; and Les, who waved his hankie when he told them about the Germans surrendering, hauling on the dog’s leash. Finally George’s head lifts off the sight.

One of the prisoners has escaped, Les explains when Esther joins them — all three men, even the dog with it’s lolling tongue, somehow calm, abashed — and she can’t help twisting her head as if the German might be watching them, just as she might have watched him from the hillside. But which one? she wonders.

“Thought they weren’t supposed to have the gumption to escape,” Arthur says.

Les is blotting his brow. “Dog had his scent before you stuck your oar in.”

“He had a scent, all right.” Arthur gestures towards a clump of gorse in the deepest part of the hollow. The ground around is torn up and muddy, raddle smeared on the grass; the rams have been busy. Then Esther sees the tufts of wool, snared and fluttering on the low branches; makes out the spindly legs tangled in the brush, still and twisted as branches themselves; finally recognizes the familiar face with it’s one ruined eye. Not raddle, it comes to her, but blood.

THERE’S NO SIGN of the prisoner, that day or the next, though the countryside is crawling with guards. “Poking bayonets into every hedge, and noses into everyone’s business,” as Arthur puts it, with a contemptuous smile. Esther had feared trouble after the confrontation on the hillside, especially when her father loudly asserted his right to shoot any dog on his land during tupping season, but in fact the guards have given in without a fight. The dogs are likely useless for tracking, too easily distracted by sheep spoor and the occasional rabbit ricocheting uphill, but Arthur considers it a triumph, as if he’s driven the invader off his land (though soldiers can still be seen climbing to and from the uplands along the brow of the hill). He sits in the pub that night, answering Bertie Prosser’s questions about the standoff, like a king in his court.

He’s fortunate the guards are all out on the mountains, Esther thinks, breathing on a glass to polish it in the deserted lounge. Even Constable Parry is lending a hand, flying up and down the local lanes on his bicycle, dark cape whipping behind him in the wind as if he hopes to run the escapee down — though he does stop off for a quick pint, and to report that the camp commandant has sent for an investigator — from London, no less.

At the end of the evening, Jack tells her she doesn’t have to come to work for a few days. “Not with this desperate fellow about.”

She thinks she might creep down to the camp again instead. She’s curious which prisoner has escaped, wonders if it might be the one she spoke to. He seemed bold enough, and with his English he might have more of a chance than most. If she dared go back to the camp, she’d look for him. But the closest she gets is the ridgeline, ducking below it when the searchlight reflectors on the guard towers catch the sun, as if she’s the hunted one. Besides, she hears the boys have been warned off: the guards are trigger-happy now, according to the constable. Whichever prisoner it was, he apparently scaled the fence while the guards were chasing off the boys.

“Found a blind spot and took advantage of the distraction,” according to Parry. “Slipped away with the crowd in the dark when the guards ran them off.”

“See!” she tells Jim later, a little too pleased that the taunting of the prisoners has backfired.