Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

AT THE LAST, though, it isn’t Hess that Rotheram thinks of when in years to come he looks back on the end of the war. It’s a lonely Welsh pub — the name forgotten, if he ever knew it. He’d stopped there one night while investigating an escape, the only one he’d ever work on, though one he thinks he’d recall among hundreds, if only for the prisoner in question.

He’d gotten a frosty reception from the camp commandant, who seemed to think Rotheram had been sent to investigate him as much as the escape — the man had lost an arm somewhere along the way, sheared clean off, Rotheram couldn’t help thinking, by the chip on his shoulder. The commandant’s self-serving theory was that the fellow had had help. “Quite possibly,” Rotheram told him; he had begun interviewing other prisoners already. “No,” the commandant insisted. “Not them. I run a tight ship here.” “Tight” being the operative word, Rotheram thought, judging from the man’s red-webbed complexion. “No. I mean he had help from the locals, the Welshies. They’re as bad as the Micks.” It had seemed preposterous, but Rotheram saw that he was going to have to humor the man to get any cooperation. Besides, the theory had the virtue of suggesting the prisoner might still be close by, not miles away, and Rotheram persisted in the faint hope that if he could only recapture the fellow, Hawkins might yet reconsider his assignment.

At any rate, he drove to the village pub late one night by way of introducing himself to the locals and in case any of them had seen something that hadn’t already been reported. It’d been a long day of interviews — first the prisoners, then the equally sullen guards — and when a violent rainstorm overtook him, the water rushing down the narrow lane as if it were a streambed, Rotheram began cursing the commandant for sending him on a wild goose chase. He’d have turned back if he hadn’t been desperate for a drink. He pulled up under the swaying sign, plucked his cap off the seat beside him, and jammed it low over his eyes against the rain.

He’d been so weary, he was relieved at first to be ignored in the pub. The place was almost deserted in any event; there’d be precious little to learn here. He took a seat at the end of the bar, glanced at the menu chalked up behind it, lost himself in thought, staring out the window at the rain, feeling the fire behind him warm his wet woolen uniform jacket. Only slowly did he realize that he hadn’t been served, that the conversation among the few locals had stilled. He looked up and smiled and called, “Pint of your best bitter, please,” and the barman, a burly old fellow, had limped down the bar towards him, a damp rag in his hand, pushing crumbs and shreds of tobacco over the polished wood. He’d brushed them right past, making Rotheram sit back and almost lose his balance. Someone laughed behind him. “Excuse me?” Rotheram called, and when the fellow ignored him, he might have knocked on the bar. “My good man!”

There was a murmur from the other patrons, and beside him a florid bloke said, “That’s torn it.”

The barman stopped at the end of the bar and dried his big hands on a green apron.

“We don’t have to serve your kind in here, you know.”

Even here, Rotheram thought with dull rage, even in this uniform. There was a policeman in the corner, and Rotheram looked to him for a moment, but the other just raised his glass as if to his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and Rotheram realized he was alone. He looked the bartender up and down and felt a bitter satisfaction that he was so solid. He slid off his stool and took the first step towards him. It seemed so simple suddenly, and he almost rushed towards the fight, but as he closed the distance he thought something else was required, some final insult, and then his line came to him, as if in a film.

“What kind is that?”

And the man spat, “English.”

Rotheram stopped.

“English?”

“That’s right. We don’t serve no English here.”

There was a little ripple of pleasure through the crowd.

The barman crossed his arms on his broad chest, threw back his shoulders, and Rotheram began to laugh. It wasn’t so much the ridiculous pettiness of Welsh-English antipathy compared to his own experience, but the combination of the man’s certainty — his bullish, pugnacious conviction — and his utter inaccuracy.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

And Rotheram bent over now, one hand on the bar for support, held up the other, and after a second said, “You don’t know who I am, do you? You’ve no idea.” The man stared at him, wanting to strike him, Rotheram could see, but somehow unsure, as if the idea of striking a laughing man was unfair. “I’m not English,” Rotheram managed to cry at last, through his laughter.

He could see the man didn’t believe him, didn’t know what to believe. Beside him, the florid fellow was shaking his head, wide-eyed.

“What are you, then?”

Rotheram shook his head, coughing out, “Would you believe German!”

“Well, I think you better go, whoever you are,” the barman told him with icy propriety. And Rotheram was too delighted with him, too choked with laughter, to object. He just waved, unable to get out another word, and stumbled outside to the car. The rain had stopped, the air smelling fresh, as if washed, and he sat for several minutes, bent over the wheel, wiping the tears from his eyes while the stern locals watched him from the windows of the pub.

Of course, it occurred to him, catching his breath, that it was only funny because he wasn’t German — or English or Welsh, for that matter. And for the first time since he’d run, he felt free, as if he’d finally arrived somewhere, and even after he started the engine, he couldn’t imagine anywhere he’d rather be.

HE’D FELT A PERVERSE fondness for the Welsh ever after, so when the commandant brought up his theory again, Rotheram asked blandly, if there was any reason to think the locals and the Germans had come into contact. He knew, of course, from the prisoners that the village boys had been in the habit of hanging around the wire, but if so, it was in contravention of standing orders, and the commandant knew well enough to keep his mouth shut. Besides, within a couple more days the escapee had been brought in, at the end of a farmer’s shotgun. “So much for the natives being friendly,” Rotheram observed.

Still, he had meant to press the prisoner about a local connection — if nothing else, he assumed the fellow guilty of petty larceny, just to keep body and soul together. Only he’d not had the chance before the man was beaten up by his own side, and afterwards, staring into his ruined face, Rotheram didn’t have the heart. Besides, there was something about the fellow, something he recognized, even if the fellow swore they’d never met, something that had made it possible for Rotheram to tell him he was Jewish.

At first Rotheram had taken his question as a challenge, refused to run from it, as he had with Hess. But afterwards, looking back, it was the fellow’s lack of shame at having surrendered that he remembered. It had never occurred to Rotheram that he could be unashamed of fleeing, of escaping, of living. Of being Jewish — if that was what he was. And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism. That’s what he had glimpsed at the pub, what had sent him into that fit of laughter. The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.

HE’D SEEN THE ESCAPEE once more, too. He came through the same region in the summer of ’45—the war done, but the prisoners expected to be held for many more months, until the situation in Germany stabilized — screening men for a labor program. A prisoner who’d attempted escape wouldn’t normally be approved, but Rotheram had never forgotten the fellow, sought him out, and graded him “white,” fit for work, over the commandant’s objections. The major was a short-timer by then, a month from being demobbed, and besides, as Rotheram pointed out, the man had been beaten by his fellow prisoners, and if that didn’t qualify him as an anti-Nazi, he didn’t know what did.