Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The child had crept out of the barn and now ran to her mother, rubbing her face against her leg, but then looking up at Rotheram with a boldness that seemed beautiful to him.

“It’s all right, cariad. Mam’s fine.” She smoothed a hand over the child’s silky head. “My guardian,” she told Rotheram.

He smiled, and she swiped her eyes.

“Sorry. Only, there’ve been sheep here for hundreds of years, and it’d have been a shame to let them die out.”

Rotheram nodded slowly. “I’ll tell him.”

“In truth, I think he rather liked it up there,” she said, turning to stare up at the hillside, and Rotheram looked with her to where the sheep were drifting across it like a white cloud.

“ My sheep,” the child whispered, and her mother laughed and pulled her close.

Later, in the pub, he heard her story: the father fallen to his death in the quarry, and the lover who never came home from the war. “Local hero,” the chatty barmaid told him. “Tragic, really, though the boy’s mother’s been a great help to Esther. Don’t know what they’d have done without their German, mind.”

The barmaid was a big, blowzy girl, friendly in an oblivious way, and he was happy to listen to her. Down the passage, in the public bar, he could see a man’s back moving to and fro, the same man, he guessed, who’d refused him service three years earlier. But when the old fellow limped past him to ring up an order, he looked at Rotheram without a flicker of recognition.

The couple from earlier in the day were at a corner table, and as Rotheram finished his pint, the barmaid asked, “Another? It’s on them.” Rotheram nodded to them.

“Young love,” the barman, who’d lingered, sighed, and Rotheram wondered what he disapproved of — the generosity, perhaps, or something more?

On the ceiling, Rotheram noticed a line of hooks screwed into the wood.

“Must have lost a lot of men hereabouts.”

“Just that one to the war,” the fellow said. “Other lads never came back from the factories or the coal fields. Lost ’em to work, you might say. Been losing them that way for fifty years. Gotten so bad that now the girls are running after them.”

“Jack!”

“Well, it’s true, Hattie.”

“You make it sound like it’s not decent,” she cried. “I’m engaged,” she said to Rotheram. “Met him when he was an evacuee during the war. Now he’s working in Liverpool.” She gave the barman, Jack, a stern look and busied herself at the other end of the counter.

“Looks like you’ve one fellow who’s staying here,” Rotheram said.

“Who? Jerry? He ain’t so bad.” The barman dropped into a whisper. “Told me he never even got a shot off. Said he was on the shitter when he got captured. Didn’t know whether to put up his hands or pull up his drawers.”

Rotheram grinned with him.

“What are you two whispering about?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Jack cried, retreating down the passage.

“Congratulations,” Rotheram told her, raising his glass.

“Thanks!”

“You think she’ll marry?” He bobbed his head towards the hills.

“Esther?”

The other shook her head. “That’s another story. Dead man’s a hard act to follow, I reckon. None of the boys around here have the gumption to marry a hero’s widow.”

She wiped the bar down, working in decreasing circles.

“Ashamed, isn’t it? What did they do during the war, after all?”

“What about her German?”

The barmaid gave him a narrow look. “Not that there wasn’t talk, mind. Even went to the pictures together once before he left. But how would it have looked? And her with the dead man’s daughter on her apron strings. Dead man’s mam in her home. Besides, he was a right respectful bloke, that Karsten. Handsome and all.” She giggled, then went on more soberly as Jack approached. “Hard worker, too, by all accounts. Lads used to call him ‘the German shepherd’! Said he took to it because it was just like guard duty. But he never liked that, said he’d rather be a bad shepherd than a good guard any day.”

“You don’t mind serving them, then?”

“Not if they’re good-looking!” Hattie cried, but Jack gave her a look and she drew back, miffed.

“Frankly,” Jack confided, “I need the business. Besides, they can drink, you know!” He waggled his eyebrows. “And they keep the English away, to boot.”

He stared at Rotheram for a beat.

“No offense.”

“And none taken,” Rotheram told him, holding the barman’s eye over the rim of his glass as he drained it.

“Another?”

Rotheram shook his head. He set his glass down in the wet circle it had made on the bar, and made sure to wish the young couple luck on his way out.

I’d like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Department of English at the University of Michigan for their generous support during the writing of this book. I’m lucky to have wonderful colleagues at Michigan, in particular Eileen Pollack and Nicholas Delbanco, who read drafts of this book, as did Marshall Klimasewiski, who’s been my sure sounding board for many years now.

I’m also indebted to the various editors who published portions of this work in journals and annuals: Ian Jack at Granta, Don Lee and guest editor Gish Jen at Ploughshares, Katrina Kenison and guest editor Barbara Kingsolver at The Best American Short Stories, and Ted Genoways at Virginia Quarterly Review.

My editors, Janet Silver at Houghton Mifflin and Carole Welch at Sceptre, in the United Kingdom, have been great champions of this work, and their colleagues at the respective companies have made those publishing houses real homes for the book. Janet’s patience and faith over the years, in particular, have sustained me more than I can possibly say.

I owe, too, an enormous debt to my wonderful agents, Maria Massie and Arabella Stein. Over the years of writing, Maria especially has performed that vital service so essential in an agent-author relationship: unwavering belief in the book and it’s author, even when I doubted both. This would be a lesser book without her.

Various sources for this work are listed in the Author’s Note, but I want to single out my debt to my father, Thomas Enion Davies, for his vivid memories of Wales in wartime, and to my mother, Sook Ying Davies, for helping to draw those memories out and faithfully recording them.

Finally, I couldn’t have written this book, or any other, without the surpassing support of my wife, Lynne Raughley, my first, ideal, and essential reader.

Many books were consulted in the course of writing this book. What follows is only a partial listing.

On sheep farming in North Wales, I owe a great deal to Thomas Firbank’s I Bought a Mountain, where I first encountered the concept of cynefin. Small Scale Sheep Keeping by Jeremy Hunt, Snowdon Shepherd: Four Seasons on the Hill Farms of North Wales by Keith Bowen, and Welsh Sheep and Their Wool by John Williams-Davies, were also valuable sources.

On German prisoners of war, their attitudes, conditions, and treatment, I’m indebted to the following: The London Cage by A. P. Scotland, Group Captives: The Re-education of German Prisoners of War in Britain, 1945–1948 by Henry Faulk, The War for the German Mind: Re-educating Hitler’s Soldiers by Arthur L. Smith, Jr., The Barbed-wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States During World War II by Ron Robin, Thresholds of Peace: Defiance and Change Among German Prisoners of War in Britain Between 1944 and 1948 by Matthew Barry Sullivan, Paper Hero: “At His Majesty’s Pleasure”: An Account of Life as a Manx Internee During World War II by L. N. Giovannelli, They Will Rise Again by R. M. Zammit, Enemies Become Friends by Pamela Howe Taylor, For Führer and Fatherland by Roderick de Normann, Prisoners of England by Miriam Kochan, and Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Kramer.