Her Ladyship's Girl (6 page)

The schoolhouse was big and looked down on little me with a frown and I didn’t want to stay there when my mother left me. I wanted to run after her and tell her to take me home because I
was afraid of all the words I didn’t understand and everything was a jumble – a stumbling fumbling bumble in my brain. The other kids laughed at my apprehension and I had no older
sisters or brothers to keep them at bay. But once I got used to it and the bullies found more frightened kids to pick on, I actually liked school – particularly reading. Which seems strange,
considering there wasn’t much to read in our house at any time. But I took the books home whenever I could and I went from looking at the pictures to being able to understand the printed
words and I read them in the gaslight downstairs and the candlelight upstairs and later by the light of the stolen electricity, until I was as good with the English language as anyone in the
village.

I was six and going to school for a while when my sister Bronwyn was born and my mother sold her milk to make ends meet. Gwyneth and Walter were already in the world, and, as we got older, we
climbed up the black hills and down the deep glyns and in between the coeden in the wild ffridds
¹²
, calling to one another so as not to get lost and
eaten by the
Dreigiau
.
¹³

Maesteg was a big town to us, with lots of shops, and we’d go there to spend some of the money we made from selling the sheep-droppings. We bought hardboiled sweets and fudge and humbugs
and marzipan and butterwelsh, even though we were told not to. And the young years were all much alike, in the shadow of the slag heaps and the steeply sloping streets and the small, back-to-back
terraced houses and the occasional patch of blue in an otherwise slate-grey sky. And the low mumble of adult voices of an evening in their lilting, swaying accents, as if they were going to break
into a song at any second. And the pale sun in summer and the pale snow in winter and the shortness of the seasons in between.

All the days rolled away from us children – some took a long time to go and others disappeared in seconds. They looked back at us before dissolving into the coal-dust sky and shook their
heads, as if to say a time will come when you’ll regret the wishing of us away. School holidays were the favourites of most of the village children and they’d gad about like spring
lambs, so happy to be free from the restriction of the stone school-walls. But sometimes they made me sad – they were too long if I was working to help bring in some money for my poor mother
and too short if I was reading the books the school allowed me to take home with me. The last page always came long before the holidays were over and I’d read them again – and again.
Dickens, with his eccentric characters with equally eccentric names, and Emily Brontë with her dark-hearted, handsome hero, and Barrie with his enchanted children, and Thomas Hardy’s
Tess who reminded me of myself and Alice’s wonderfully satirical adventures – and many, many more. They took me to other worlds, where I could be someone else, not Anwyn Moyle, the
winsome waif of South Wales.

At chapel on Sundays, the preacher led us all in prayer and hymns and warned us about the practice of witchcraft that was widespread in Cymru and that we should always be on our guard against
it. I thought he was talking about the Mari Lwyd and I wondered why he wasn’t able to stop the grey mare from coming round every January and causing chaos. The witches, he said, could use
spells and the evil eye to seduce us children away from our god-fearing parents and I would imagine the glass-green eyes in the white skull as it hacked around the houses.

The minister’s voice fell to a whisper when he told us the witches would make puppets in our images and stick needles into their hearts to harm us and then we’d be doomed for all
eternity. The adults hung horseshoe amulets outside the houses to ward off such evil, but they didn’t stop the Mari Lwyd or the Merryman or Punch and Siwan, and maybe it’s just as well.
Personally, I preferred what my grandmother told me about – the old collaboration between a female god and a male one, who both followed the natural seasons and celebrated them – to a
vengeful Christian god who killed and burned and tortured to have his way. But I was only very young, so what did I know about anything?

Worse than any witch were the feral cats that plagued the village. They brought them to the mines to kill rats to begin with, but the buggers bred and bred and bred and there were hundreds of
them all over the place. They’d kill everything in sight, birds and bees and rabbits and fleas, and my father would try to shoot them through his coughing convulsions if they came into our
garden. Us children would chase them with sticks and stones and catapults and snowballs in winter and chestnuts in autumn, but they were clever, with springs for legs and rubbery bodies that could
fall backwards from a twenty-foot wall and still land on their feet. They spat and snarled at us and threatened us with unsheathed claws and even the dogs wouldn’t go too near them, for fear
of losing an eye or suffering a split nose.

And it was such a long time ago, as I remember, that time when there were witches in Wales and I was so young, like a little coal-smeared bird that flew across the corrugated hills. And I sang
this song to myself sometimes –

– in memory of the Maid of Cefn Ydfa. And we played hide-and-seek under the desecrated slopes and waited out the young years until some of us decided to leave – to
get away from the smell of scarcity and the soul-destroying days of unemployment that were to come and drive us all down into the coal dust. And we scavenged for lumps of coal with chapped red
fingers in the wintertime, in the wheel-rutted snow, amongst the ghosts of previous generations who did the same and died of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Their cold voices called to me from the
fading distance as I trudged uphill to my house, a hessian sack across my shoulders and my younger sisters and brother trudging behind.

At night the haunted streets stood still, like the inside of dark train tunnels and I was often afraid to look out my bedroom window, in case a grinning witch with an Anwyn puppet and a pin
might be looking back at me. The wind through the trees made noises like a wheezing banshee that whispered to the trolls that lived in secluded places and around street corners. I said my prayers
to my Druid gods and asked them to keep me safe from the Christian god and the mine-owning speculators and to deliver me from all evil.

Amen.

Because my father couldn’t work, my mother had to. No one in the village had much money to spend, so sometimes she worked for food – a few vegetables if the growing in the garden
wasn’t good, or a scrawny chicken or a leg of mutton or a brace of rabbits or a poached duck. She would distemper people’s walls and they always used dark colours so the dirt and
coal-dust wouldn’t show. As the eldest, I used to help her when I wasn’t at school or reading, and at twelve I got my own cleaning job for which I was paid a little pocket money. I gave
it all to my mother, to help ease the burden of her heavy life. She also took in washing and I helped her hang and fold for them who were too feeble or too foolish to do it for themselves. So, it
was no easy life, but us children didn’t complain too much, because we thought everyone else was in the same boat – we didn’t know until later, when we grew a little older, that
there were other children who had everything they wanted – and the reason they had everything they wanted and didn’t have to do anything to get it was because they were riding on our
scrawny backs.

When I finally turned fourteen, I was able to leave school, even though I was sad to do so. I missed the books and the learning, and my grandmother had died, so there were no more stories about
Rhiannon and Pryderi, or Gronw and Blodeuwedd, or Culhwch and Olwen. After working part-time in the pub and on the cow farm, I got a job in Maesteg as a dogsbody in a hat shop. I wasn’t
allowed to serve the customers or anything like that. I had to stack and sweep and make tea for the saleswomen and run errands to other shops and milliners and people who mended and repaired the
feather pillboxes and wide-brimmed wools and felt skulls with Bakelite badges and cherry-black straws and brimmed flappers.

Maesteg was two and a half miles from Llangynwyd and I had to walk it every day in hail, rain or snow – and all for 1s/6d. But they had a long low table in the shop for the ladies who were
waiting to be fitted and the gentlemen who were waiting for the ladies who were waiting to be fitted. And the table was always stacked with the latest magazines.
Vogue
and
Women’s Sphere
and
Le Petit Echo de la Mode
and
Harper’s Bazaar
and
Marie Claire
and
Collier’s
and
La Femme Chez Elle
and
Hemmets
and
Life
.

And the hat-buying ladies would shimmy in looking like Jean Harlow or Greta Garbo in bias-cut slip dresses and cap sleeves and ruffles and maxi lengths and crêpe silks and shoulder pads. I
studied the magazines every chance I got and could soon identify Grecian styles and bolero jackets and high-fronts and low-backs and I soaked it all up and wished that someday I, too, would wear a
Schiaparelli or a Maggy Rouff or a Lucien Lelong or a Robert Piguet. But how would that ever happen for a rag-tailed girl from the valleys who liked to read books and dream the impossible?

And that brings me to the Henry Pollak, which was a green wool supra felt hat with a wide ribbon and an artificial beige spray. I found it in a fitting room I was cleaning out one day. I knew it
wasn’t one of the shop’s hats, because we didn’t sell that particular design. I took it to the shop manageress and she remembered the woman who came in wearing it.

‘That’s Mrs Reynolds’ s hat.’

Mrs Reynolds was the wife of Arthur Reynolds, a very rich man who made his money exporting coal to America. The manageress fished out Mrs Reynolds’s address and handed the hat back to
me.

‘You better run it round to her, Moyle.’

She said that as if it was just round the corner. So off I went on my tired feet, traipsing all the way out to the financially correct side of the suburbs. The address was a big two-storeyed
house out in Mount Pleasant, with six red-brick steps leading up to the large green front door that had an arched fanlight and a gold knocker. The outside walls were also red brick with a frontal
arch supported by four Corinthian columns. The roof was gabled and hipped and two prominent exterior chimneys stood either end, framing tall casement windows with green shutters. I’d seen
houses like that before – in the magazines.

I was half afraid to trudge up the gravelled driveway, for fear I might be taken for a tramp and the dogs set upon me. But I had no choice. I knocked as softly as I could and waited for the
barking – but there wasn’t any. So I knocked again, harder this time. Still no answer. I didn’t want to have to come all the way out here again, so I left the hat in a bag by the
front door. I was halfway down the steps when the door opened. A woman of about forty stood there with the reddest hair I’d ever seen and a figure that rivalled Mae West’s and a set of
pearly white, smiling teeth. She was wearing a dress I recognised from
Vogue
as a Madeleine Vionnet and she was smoking a cigarette in a long, black holder.

‘What’s up, honey?’

Her accent was American and friendly. I took the hat from its bag and held it out to her.

‘You left this in the shop.’

She laughed.

‘Oh, that old thing! Don’t tell me you came all the way out here to bring it back?’

‘Yes, Madam.’

‘Why, you must be exhausted. Come in.’

She opened the door wider and I didn’t know whether to go inside or make a run for it. She smiled her American smile again.

‘Come on, honey, I won’t bite.’

I shuffled my way past her and into a big reception room. She closed the door and walked ahead of me into what looked like the National Library of Wales. I’d never seen so many books in
one place. She saw my surprise and was amused by my awe.

‘You like books?’

‘I love books!’

‘Have one.’

I thought she said ‘Have one’, but that couldn’t be right. I must have misheard.

‘Have two . . . or three. We got plenty.’

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met anyone like her before.

‘Oh no, Madam, I couldn’t . . .’

‘Why not? Nobody in this goddamn house reads them, they’re just for show.’

I tentatively approached the shelves and looked along them, running my fingers across the spines. They felt so exotic – so seductive.

‘Go ahead, honey, pick three or four.’

Row upon row, title after title – some of the authors I’d heard of before and some I hadn’t. I stopped at
Mathilda
by Mary Shelley and she urged me to pick some more.
I ended up with
Self-Made Woman
by Faith Baldwin and a translation of
The Songs of Bilitis
by Pierre Louÿs.

She was drinking something from a stemmed glass that had a green berry on a stick floating in it.

‘You want a cocktail? No, I guess you’re too young. What about a soda?’

I didn’t know what a soda was, so I thought I’d better not accept her offer in case it was something I didn’t like.

‘No thank you, Madam. I’d better get back.’

She looked at the hat as if it was something nasty that had blown in on the wind.