The Welsh Girl (15 page)

Sincerely / Love,

He's furious at these words, thrust in his mouth like a gag. But then, he realises, he's hardly been able to think of much more to say for himself, despite his agonising. He's reminded again of those postcards of his mother's guests--
delightful, lovely, charming
-- their repetitious, interchangeable sentiments, and he's suddenly relieved by the anonymity of the card before him, the impersonality.

He looks down the row of tents, over their yellowing peaks and ridges, in the direction Schiller has gone, towards the drilling men, still going through their paces. He does want to join them, feels the pull, like gravity, yet he's not sure he belongs. Too ashamed? he wonders. Perhaps also too proud, in his own stiff-necked way. Not ready to be forgiven.

And it comes to him then that he had noticed a change in the guests' postcards as the years went by. The views were no longer lovely or charming, but
awesome, imposing, majestic
. The Brocken was an 'indomitable peak', according to one

guest, a comment that puzzled Karsten mightily since he'd led the fellow up it not two days earlier. More baldly, one young man, who'd appeared at breakfast on his first morning in shining, squeaking lederhosen, wrote that it was 'a truly Aryan landscape'. Karsten had actually held that one up, studying its glossy picture, then staring at the familiar slopes above him, straining to see it.

sther steers clear of Arthur as much as possible in the days following the invasion. It's not so hard. June is a busy time

on the farm, between the dipping and the shearing, and during the days he's mostly on the hillside with the flock. As for the evenings, she keeps out of his way by spending more time with Jim, helping him with his homework--he's slogging his way through
Great Expectations
-- chatting with him at supper in the quick slangy English her father has trouble following.

The boy's generally impatient with her concern, but he tolerates her checking his wound each evening with preening stoicism. When, after a couple of days, she tells him he's healed and doesn't need the dressing any more, he tugs it back down firmly. Arthur says he looks a proper fool, but Esther indulges him, studies the small scab carefully, and says, well, yes, maybe they'd better keep it covered for one more day. "In case of gangrene," she says, po-faced. And so it goes for a week. Somehow the shared fantasy has brought them together. She knows Jim reckons his bandage a badge of honour, a reminder of his bravery, but to her it's a token of her care for him, however frayed and dirty. It slips off when he's sleeping, but she smiles watching him fiddle with it in the mornings, settling it at a rakish angle over one eyebrow.

"Who are you supposed to be," Arthur asks, "the Mummy?"

And for a moment Esther blushes, not sure whom he's talking to, until he raises his arms before him and does the stiff-legged walk.

Arthur's always thought her a fool for bringing Jim home,

but she knows why she did it. She'd been late to the station that time, reluctant to go, as if she were somehow being asked to replace Eric. When she arrived other families were already leaving with their evacuees, the children's faces bright as new toys.

"You missed all the good 'uns," Jim said later with a grimace.

He'd hated all the picking and choosing, he told her, the pointing fingers, and 'I'll take that one'. He took one look at the purse-lipped women lined up to receive them and pulled his gas mask over his head. "All the pretty girls went first, then the plain ones, then the boys who combed their hair, who stood up straight and answered 'sir' or 'missus'."

When Esther got there, all that was left were what Jim called the 'liquorice allsorts'--the spotty kids, the snotty kids, the fat ones who looked like they ate too much, the ones who scratched, the ones who smelled of piss or sweat or, in Jim's case, fags and booze.

Along with his pyjamas, his spare vests and his Sunday best, his mother had packed the boy off with gifts for his host family--'swaps', she called them, for their love. But as soon as the train had pulled out of the station, Jim rummaged through his dented cardboard suitcase until he came upon the hard chill of a pint of J & B and the stiff angles of a Players carton. Esther pictured him drawing these treasures out like rabbits from a hat and turning to the others in his compartment: "Who's got a light, then?" They'd had a time of it, all right, he'd told her, half boastful, half querulous, until one by one they'd lurched to the door, as the train hammered through the wet green countryside, let down the window, gulped a lungful of the burnt air billowing back from the engine, and heaved over the side. Jim had had the misfortune to throw up as they entered a mountain tunnel, covering himself, the window and the dusty livery of the GNWR in puke.

When Esther arrived he was glaring through the steamy portholes of his mask, as the local women worked their way down the rows, asking questions: What's your name? How old are you? Where are you from? The last answer, whether Liverpool or Toxteth or Bootle, gave them pause. "Slum kids," the women complained. "No better than urchins." It was taking an age for them to pick, a few even leaving alone, shaking their heads at PC Parry, the billeting officer. Mrs Lloyd, moving down the aisle ahead of Esther, asked her daughter, Hattie, "What do you think,
cariadt
Shall we take this one?" The girl, so spoiled she was known round the village as the Princess of Wales, examined the tear-stained child in front of her and crinkled her nose. "Crybaby." She shook her head. "And, she pongs."

Jim was refusing to answer any questions, letting the women finger the little luggage label pinned to his lapel. All the children had them, their names and addresses on one side, and on the reverse, 'Further Information': faith, date of birth, ailments. When Mrs Lloyd and Hattie stopped in front of him, the girl seemed puzzled by his gas mask.

"Take it off," she commanded, but Jim shook his head, the snout of the mask swinging back and forth, the charcoal granules rustling inside.

"Why not?"

He leaned towards her, lifted the rubber seal. "Your mam farts poison gas."

There was a bark of laughter from the other evacuees, and Esther covered her mouth. But then the constable appeared, peeling the mask off Jim's head, the straps yanking at his hair, giving him a clip around the earhole.

"You'll be last if you're not careful, sunshine. By then the only bed will be in my cell at the station."

The Lloyds hurried out and Esther found herself standing beside Jim, close enough to smell him--the sugary scent of

boys' sweat that she recalled from the schoolroom, mixed with the chemical odour of the rubber mask.

She looked at his label and saw, beside 'Mother', the word 'None', scored in heavy black letters, and took his hand.

They've never been close, though, despite her best efforts. His mother wasn't dead, in fact; he just wished she were. He'd never known his father, knew only that he was a sailor his mother had met on shore leave--"
Sure
to leave," as she put it. She'd been seeing a new fellow lately, "Uncle' Ted, her boss at the factory, a civilian who called him Jim-lad and sneeringly referred to his father as 'the seaman', despite Jim's

assertions that he was probably a lieutenant or a captain by now. "Come to think"--Ted winked--"seems I did hear he was first mate." Jim had prayed Jerry would get Ted, but when they'd come out of the shelter one morning, it was Ted's house that was in one piece, and their place that was a hole in the ground. "So she moved in with him," the boy told Esther, "but there weren't room for me." As if he were a giant, Esther thought, and not a tiny boy. Esther's heart had gone out to him, of course, but he'd always resented her mothering, submitting to it under duress at best. It had been that way from the start. She took one look at the bedraggled boy in her kitchen and insisted on a bath. She'd made up the bunk in the boxroom just that morning, and she wasn't having him put himself between her clean sheets without a good scrubbing.

He declined, gruffly at first, "Not likely," and then, as she went about filling the kettle from the pump in the yard, with increasingly desperate politeness: "I'd not want to be a bother." Finally, thinking perhaps she didn't understand his English, he tried being firm, as if talking to a dog: "Missus? No, missus. No!" But she ignored him, carrying in the sloshing kettle and easing it on to the stove. Beads of water skittered over the hot plate. "You can't make me," he yelled, taking a step back down the passage as Esther pushed her sleeves

up. He'd fought her tooth and nail, but she'd grappled with too many oily sheep, helping strip them of their fleece, for him to have a chance. The steam was billowing from the kettle when she marched him back into the kitchen in just his vest and drawers. She poured a steaming, silver stream into the tub, added cold from a jug, and told him to hop in, turning away demurely, though not without catching a glimpse of his bone- white flanks before he sat down with a quick splash.

She started to move towards him with a brush and he flushed, cupped his hands between his legs, and bawled, "You're not my mother!" and she stopped as if slapped.

Instead, she scooped up his clothes where he'd thrown them and bent over the fireplace, feeding them to the flames as he yelled from the tub, half rising and then sinking back beneath the water. "
ln-fes-ted
," she shouted, turning back to him. "I can hear their little bodies popping in the flames.

Uckavie!
" She gave a shudder. How dare he bring lice into

her mother's house!

Tonight, after a chapter of Dickens, she reads the newspaper with him, helping find the towns and villages on the map of Europe tacked to his bedroom wall.

"Caen," she says. "Cherbourg." She points them out and he bats her hand away. "I can see." She lets him use the pins from her sewing kit, moving them east across the map with the Allied advance. She's always forgetting who they represent--Monty, Patton, Bradley?--or pretending to, at any rate, because he enjoys telling her.

"Who's this, then?" she asks, pointing to a pin still stuck near London.

"Rhys," he says, with an edge of accusation, and for a second she wonders,
Who?

It's been less than three months since his proposal, but it seems a lifetime ago. Esther went along with Jim to see Rhys

off at the station after his last leave despite, or perhaps because of, turning him down. The village was too small for hard feelings. His mother was there, fussing about, picking lint off his uniform collar, then smoothing it down. "Quite grand, isn't he?" Mrs Roberts asked Esther, speaking in English, as

if they were still in class. "I thought I'd always have to iron and polish for him." She gave a wobbly smile. "At least until he found a wife. And here the army's gone and taught him how." Esther and Rhys both glanced down, and his mother followed their eyes. "And would you look at his
boots
," she breathed in wonder, but when she looked up, Esther saw the tears standing in her eyes, like pearly pinheads, and it occurred to her that his mother was terrified for him. Rhys was so placidly confident about returning, Esther had never imagined him not, and even when she considered it now, it was almost impossible to imagine anything as interesting as getting killed ever happening to him. And yet the sudden fear of it must have made her weaken, because when Rhys leaned out of the train window and whispered, "Can I at least hope?" she nodded slightly and promised to write.

And she has. Only a couple of brief, dutiful notes, to be sure, but Jim has written too, and all they've had back is a measly picture postcard of the Empire Cinema in Leicester

Square, addressed to 'Mr Evans, Esther, and Jim', saying how friendly the English were, how dingy London was, and that

he'd been assigned to the kitchens--news that managed to disappoint or annoy all three of them.

Not that his mother has heard much more herself. "It's embarrassing," Mrs Roberts confided to Esther with a little laugh, over the counter at the post office. "Here I am, the postmistress, and my own son a poor correspondent. Not that he was ever much good at his English when I was his teacher, as you know. And it's because he has to write in English, you see. The censors can't read Welsh." She shook her head.

"Can you imagine! Strangers reading a boy's letters to his mother."

It's just as well that Mrs Roberts is a talker, Esther thinks.

She's always a little tongue-tied around her former teacher (still scared that Mrs R, as they called her in school, will criticise her grammar), but more so when the subject is Rhys. The first time she saw his mother after the rejection, she kept her hands clasped behind her back, as if afraid she'd get a rap across the knuckles with a ruler. Thankfully, though, it seems Mrs R doesn't know of the proposal.

"Last known location," Jim is saying now, resting a finger on the head of the pin representing Rhys, twisting it back and forth to press it home. Esther's eye wanders to Rhys's postcard of the picture palace, propped up between two lead soldiers on the deep windowsill that serves as Jim's desk.

The last word Mrs R had from him, over a fortnight ago, was that he was awaiting orders. But to Esther, it's almost as if he might still be inside the grand cinema, sitting in the stalls.

It miffs her, that one postcard. She's wanted to share Rhys's escape somehow, or better yet, have it instead of him, if he's too cloddish to enjoy it. (He told her when he left he'd be back just as soon as the war was over. "But why?" she asked crossly, thinking him a mother's boy, and he blinked and coughed and told her, "For you.") Esther has promised Mrs R, good student that she is, that she'll write regularly--faithfully, she almost said. But whenever she starts another letter, her own news about the village or the farm--the gathering, the washing, everything the same as every other year--seems so drab she can't go on. Besides, it makes her feel foolish, as though she's encouraging him, or worse, chasing him.