Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The next month, the day after his birthday, he’d caught the bus to Caernarvon and signed up. She might have felt bad if he hadn’t had the gall to ask if she’d wait for him.

She looks for Colin now, finds him leaning into one of his fellows, cocking his head as the other whispers something in his ear. Colin smirks beneath his mustache like Clark Gable, taps the side of his nose. She could have easily got him to tell her what the camp is for, she thinks proudly, but she hasn’t. He’s even dared her to ask, tempted her with the big secret. But she wouldn’t take advantage of their love like that. Besides, everyone knows it would be unpatriotic to ask the sappers what they’re building: disloyal to Britain (they all know the slogans — loose lips, etc.), but also, more obscurely, disloyal to Wales. It wouldn’t do to give the English an excuse to call the Welsh unpatriotic. But whatever the purpose of the new camp, with it’s long, low barracks and staunch wire fences, there’s been a swelling, puffed-up sense in the village over the last month of being part of something (although it’s strange, she thinks, that here’s the invasion itself, and the camp not occupied). “We used to burn their bases,” Arthur has lamented. “Now we’re pleased as punch just to have the buggers about, banging in a few nails.”

And it occurs to her suddenly: Colin and I will have to elope! A word she’s only ever heard at the pictures. And terrible as it is, it sounds so glamorous. Elope, she mouths, tasting the odd English word on her tongue. For a second she imagines she and Colin loping into the sunset, almost giggles. She’s not even sure if there’s an equivalent in Welsh, if the Welsh ever elope.

Colin, propped against one of the stained wood beams, is still chatting with his mates. The dark cropped hair at the nape of his neck shows almost velvety below his cap. He laughs at something and throws a glance over his shoulder to see if she’s heard, and they grin at each other. Heads turn towards her, and she looks away quickly. She is wearing one of her parachute silk slips tonight beneath her long wool skirt; she likes the feel of it against her legs, the way it slides when she stretches for a glass, while her soldier is watching.

The moment is interrupted by Harry Hitch. “Girly?” he croons. “’Nother round, eh? There’s a good girl.” He’s trying to wind her up, and she ignores him as she pours. Harry’s with the BBC. He’s a star, if you can believe it, a comic with the Light Program. “Auntie,” as she’s learned to call the corporation from Harry and the others, has a transmitter tower on the hillside above the quarry; the radio technicians discovered the Arms when they were building it, and they’ve been coming up of an evening with their “chums” ever since, six or seven of them squeezed into a muddy Austin Princess.

Harry watches her set a Scotch before him and then a pint, what he calls a “little and large,” the glasses sitting side by side like a double act. “Cheers, big ears,” he tells her dutifully, his catch phrase. “Nice atmosphere tonight, eh? Lovely ambulance.”

It’s a joke of some kind, Esther knows; when no one laughs, Harry chuckles anyway. “I kill meself.” He’s already half gone, she sees, must have had a skinful before he arrived. Esther has listened to Harry on the radio, laughed at his skits, but in the flesh he’s a disappointment, a miserable, moody drunk, skinny and pinched-looking, not the broad, avuncular bloke she imagined from his voice.

“Ta,” he tells her, raising his glass. “See your lot are celebrating tonight too.”

“My lot?” she asks absently, distracted by a smirk from Colin.

“The Welsh,” he slurs. “The Taffs, the Taffys, the boyos!” He gets louder with each word, not shouting just projecting, and as soon as he has an audience he’s off, as if on cue. “’Ere, you know the English have trouble with your spelling. All them l ’s and y ’s. But did you hear the one about Taffy who joined the RAF? Meant to join the NAAFI, but his spelling let him down.” Esther barely smiles, but there’s a smattering of laughter at the bar. Harry half turns on his stool, rocking slightly, to take in the soldiers, their shining faces. “You like that one, eh? On his first day the quartermaster hands him his parachute and Taff wants to know what happens if it don’t open, and the quartermaster, he tells him, ‘That’s what’s called jumping to a conclusion.’”

More laughter, not much, but enough, Esther sees with a sinking feeling, for a few more heads to turn. She catches the eye of Mary Munro, the actress. “Here we go,” Mary mouths, rolling her eyes. Mary’s thing is accents; she can do dozens of them. Once she did Esther’s, just for a laugh, and listening at home, the girl had blushed to the tips of her ears, more flattered than embarrassed.

“Oh, but they’re brave, the Taffs,” Harry goes on. “Oh, yes. Did you hear about that Welsh kamikaze, though? Got the VC for twenty successful missions. But he’s worried, you know. His luck can’t hold. Sure he’ll cop it one day, so he goes to the chaplain and tells him what he wants on his headstone.” He slips into the nasal North Walian twang. “‘Here lies an honest man and a Welshman.’ And the chaplain says he doesn’t know what it’s like in Wales, but in England it’s one bloke to an ’ole.”

The men are all laughing now, stopping their conversations to listen. The snooker players straighten up from the table, lean on their cues like shepherds on crooks.

“Come on, ’Arry,” Mary calls, “it’s supposed to be our night off.” But she’s booed down by the soldiers and Harry rolls on unfazed.

“Reminds me of the Tomb of the Welsh Unknown Soldier. Didn’t know there was a Welsh unknown soldier, did ya?” He winks at Esther. “Nice inscription on that one an’ all: Here lies Taff So-and-So, well known as a drunk, unknown as a soldier.”

“Takes one to know one,” someone heckles from the public bar, but the delivery is halting, the accent broad and blunt. It’s water off a duck’s back to Harry.

“That reminds me,” he cries happily, and gestures for Esther to refill his Scotch.

“Haven’t you had enough?” She’s aware of the silence behind her, the listening locals.

“As the sheep said to the Welshman?”

“Very funny,” she tells him.

“Oh, you Welsh girls,” he says, wagging his finger. “You know what they say about Welsh girls, dontcha, girly?”

“No,” she says, suddenly abashed.

“Give over, Harry.” It’s Mary again, her voice lower this time, warning.

“’S only a bit of fun. And she wants to know, don’t she? You want to know?”

Esther is silent.

“Well, what they say is, you can’t kiss a Welsh girl unexpectedly.” He pauses for a second to sip his pint. When he looks up his lips are wet. “Only sooner than she thought!” There’s a stillness in the bar. Harry shoots his cuffs, studies his watch theatrically. “I can wait.”

He looks up and Esther throws his Scotch in his face.

There’s a second of shock, and then Harry licks his lips with his big pink tongue, crosses his eyes, and the laughter goes off like a gun. A cheer rises from the public bar, and she’s suddenly conscious of Jack standing in the passage behind her.

“Steady on,” Colin is shouting over the din. He’s shouldered his way to the bar. “You all right?” he asks, and Esther nods.

“No hard feelings,” Harry is telling her. “Just a bit of wordplay. Don’t mean nothing.” He holds out his hand for a shake, but when she reaches for it, he raises his empty glass and tells her, “Cheers, big ears! I’d love one.”

“Come on, mate,” Colin says. “Leave it out now.” He lays a broad palm on the dented brass bar rail in front of Esther.