Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The men — soldiers, mostly, in the lounge — sip their beers slowly during the broadcast. She looks from face to face, but they’re all gazing off, concentrating on the prime minister’s shuffling growl. The only ones to catch her eye are Harry Hitch, who’s mouthing something—“me usual”—and Colin, who winks broadly from across the room.

Colin’s one of the sappers with the Pioneer Corps building the base near the old holiday camp in the valley. They’ve been bringing some much-needed business to the Arms for the last month, and for the last fortnight Esther and Colin have been sweethearts. Tonight she’s agreed to slip off with him after work — he’s got “something special” to tell her, he’s promised — a date that seems destined now. She says the English word in her mind, “sweethearts,” likes the way it sounds. She listens to Churchill, the voice of England, imagines him whispering it gravely, swallows a smile. She concentrates on the speech, thinks of the men on the beaches, and feels herself fill with emotion for her soldier like a slow-pouring glass of Guinness. There’s a thickening in her throat, a brimming pressure behind her eyes. It’s gratitude she feels, mixed with pride and hope, and she trusts that together this blend amounts to love.

The broadcast ends and the noise builds again in the pub. It’s not quite a cheer — the speech has been sternly cautious — but there’s a sense of excitement kept just in check and a kind of relief, as if a long-held breath can finally be released. All spring the whispered talk has been about an invasion, and now it’s here, D-day, the beginning of the end. The suspected secret the whole country has silently shared for months can be talked about openly at last. Everyone is smiling at the soldiers and calling congratulations, even the locals clustered behind the public bar. Constable Parry, the blowhard, goes so far as to mention the huge floating harbors glimpsed off the coast to the south (“Now we know what they was for”), raising a glass, clinking it sloppily with one of the sappers, who winks back (“No pulling the wool over your eyes, ossifer”). And the constable, egged on, launches into the rumor about Hess being held in Wales. Esther steps up on the crate once more and turns the radio dial through the catarrhal interference until it picks up faint dance music, Joe Loss and His Orpheans, from the Savoy in London. She hears something like applause and, looking round, sees with delight that it’s literally a clapping of backs.

There’s a rush for the bar again. People want to buy the men drinks. They’re only sappers — road menders and ditch diggers, according to her father — but they’re in uniform, and who knows when they could be going “over there.” Suddenly, and without doing a thing, they’re heroes, indistinguishable in their uniforms from all the other fighting men. And they believe it, too. Esther can see it in Colin’s face, the glow of it. She stares at him and it’s as if she’s seeing him for the first time; he’s so glossily handsome, like the lobby card of a film star.

The crowd in the lounge is three deep and thirsty, and she pulls pints—“Yes, sir? What can I get you? Yes, sir? Who’s next, please?”—until her arm aches, and froth fills the air like blossom. But when she turns to ring up the orders, she sees the public bar is emptying out. It’s shearing season, after all. Invasion or no, farmers have to be up early.

She glimpses her father, Arthur, shouldering his way to the door, shrugging his mac on over the frayed dark suit (Sunday best before she was born) and collarless shirt he wears when out with the flock. Cilgwyn, their smallholding, lies a couple of miles above the village; he’ll be sound asleep by the time she gets in, milking the cow by the time she rises. He jams his cap on his head, fitting it to the dull red line across his brow, and gives her a nod as he goes, but no more.

She’s been working here for almost three months now, since she turned seventeen, but she’s never once served him. He sticks to the public bar, the Welsh-speaking half of the pub, while she, with her proper schoolroom English, works in the lounge serving the soldiers, locals like the constable who mix with them, and the motley assortment of other new arrivals. Not that her father’s English, his spoken English at least, is so bad for all his thick accent; it’s just beneath his dignity to use it.

She would stand Arthur a pint or two if he ever ventured into the lounge (Jack wouldn’t mind), but that too would be beneath him. She’s been in charge of the housekeeping money in the old biscuit tin ever since her mother died four years ago, but only since she started working has he shown her the books, the bank account, the mortgage deeds. Of course, she had her own ideas of how bad things were all along, but guessing and knowing are different and now she knows: knows why they’ve taken in their young English evacuee, Jim (for the extra ten-and-six billeting allowance); knows why they’ve been selling off ewe lambs as well as wethers the last two seasons. Between the national subsidy and the demand for woolen uniforms, the war is quite simply holding them up. Her father is a proud man, the kind who stands straighter in hard times than good, and she’s grateful that poverty in wartime is a virtue, something to be proud of. It reminds her of the epic stories he tells of the Great Strike at the quarry, though he was only a boy then. But she wonders sometimes, also, what it’ll be like when the war is over, and it crosses her mind that the same thought has sent him out into the night early.

Still, she’s not sorry to see him go, not with Colin here too. She doesn’t want to face any awkward questions, from Arthur or anyone else (she knows how local tongues wag), and she doesn’t want to tell the truth, that she’s stepping out with an Englishman— a Londoner! she reminds herself. Beneath the national betrayal is an obscurer one to do with her pride at taking her mother’s place beside her father, a sense of being unfaithful somehow. She catches sight of Colin through the crowd, the tip of his tongue tucked in the corner of his mouth as he dips his shoulder to throw his darts — one, two, three — then strides forward to pluck them from the board. He catches her looking, puckers up for a second, and she turns away quickly.

Colin says he loves her English, and she’s flattered, though when she asked him once what it was he loved about it, he said, “You know, it’s so proper. We all reckoned you were stuck up at first. You talked like an actress, a toff almost.” He laughed, but she must have frowned because he tried to take it back—“apart from the accent, I mean”—though that had only made it worse, of course. He likes it, he’s insisted—“sounds like singing”—but she’s been trying to use more contractions of late, to flatten her enunciation, even asking him to teach her some slang.

“No need to call us ‘sir,’ for one thing. Makes like we’re in the officers’ mess.”

“Well, what should I say?”

“I don’t know. Try, ‘What’s yours, luv? What’s your pleasure? What’s your poison?’ And if someone’s hurrying you, tell him, ‘Hold your horses, keep your hair on!’”

She’s used the phrases when she remembers, though she can’t quite bring herself to say “luv” without blushing. “It don’t mean anything,” Colin reckons — when she looks for him now he’s chalking up scores, grimacing over the sums — but it still feels funny to her.

PRETTY SOON the pub is down to just soldiers and die-hards, the Welsh voices behind her wafting over with the smell of pipe tobacco. They’re quieter tonight, slower, sluggish as a summer stream. The talk for once isn’t politics. This is a nationalist village, passionately so. It’s what holds the place together, like a cracked and glued china teapot. The strike, all of forty-five years ago, almost broke the town, plunging it into poverty, and it’s taken something shared to stick back together the families of men who returned to work and those who stayed out.