How Green Was My Valley (49 page)

Up on tip-toe to kiss Ivor on the cheek, and Ivor trying to smile, but gulps having
the better of it.

“Up high,” said my father, “drink, and not a drop to be left. The Queen.”

“The Queen,” said we all, and throats making sounds of joy in their own language to
have the beer go down.

“She is smaller even than you,” my father said to my mother, and kissed her cheek.

“Go on, boy,” my mother said, from the kiss, and in doubt.

“She is, Mama,” Ivor said. “She came up to by here, with me.”

“Did you see her close, then?” my mother asked him, with wonder.

“She shook hands,” Ivor said, and holding out his hand, as though still in a dream.

“Gracious Goodness, boy,” my mother said, in whispers. “You shook hands with the Queen?”

“Yes, Mama,” Ivor said. “Ask.”

“The Queen shook hands,” my father said, “and she asked who trained the men to sing,
and if they were all coal miners, and if they were comfortable in the Castle.”

“And then she gave me a baton,” Ivor said, “not herself, but she told me it would
come, and one of the soldiers brought it to me.”

“With his name,” my father said, “and the day and where, and for what. And it shall
go in a special case under the picture on that wall. Beautiful, it is.”

And beautiful it was. Of ivory, with silver and gold inlays, and a gold plate with
the inscription on, and resting comfortable in red plush, in a long leather case of
black crocodile, with two little silver hooks to close it.

Long it was before the house was quiet that night. Hundreds of people came in to see
the picture, stepping on tip-toe to come in, not to make a mess, and standing to look
with big eyes, and “Ehs” and “Ohs” from them all. And my mother sitting, like a queen
herself, and all the women telling her what a credit Ivor was to the family, and what
a time she would have in the morning when she washed the floor. But my mother would
have washed the valley, and whitewashed the skies above it, for the happiness of those
few hours.

That was one of the few nights I ever saw my father drunk, and then only on beer that
others pressed upon him. And no man shall refuse a good drink of beer offered in good
feeling. So when the boys carried him back, my mother only looked at him and smiled,
and clicked her tongue, and sent them upstairs with him. If a man cannot get drunk
on the night his eldest son comes back home with his hand warm from the touch of a
queen, and her picture making the house into a shrine for pilgrims, well, Goodness
Gracious, let us all go into the earth, and be quick about it.

Drunk again, he was, on the night our Davy scored a try against Scotland at Cardiff
Arms Park, but so was the whole Valley. There was another night to remember, with
my father dancing in the middle of the street wearing Davy’s red jersey over his coat,
and so much dried mud on it you could barely see the the crest. And Davy carried on
the shoulders up and down the street time and time again. Everybody in the Valley
got drunk that night, and if tea had been beer, the women would have been on the floor,
too, for it was Open House all over the village and Davy was king of the world.

I made a glass case for that jersey, and another one for the cap. The jersey was put
to hang opposite the picture of the Queen in our front, and Davy had the cap for himself.
It was always a pleasure to see my father smoke his pipe in our front when somebody
called, for there he was, like a king, with rare treasures all round him, conscious
of it, and proud of it.

And there was a night when he got drunk because of me.

Only four of us were left in the special class at school by the time examinations
were due to start. All the rest had left to go to work. There was John Dafydd, Llewelyn
Rhys, and Emrys Tudor, with me in the little room next to Mr. Motshill’s study. It
had been a storeroom, but he had it cleaned out for us, and there we worked under
him, or studied by ourselves.

Ceinwen had left after that Sunday without a word or sound. I saw her a couple of
times with her father, in the coalyard, but we never spoke for we had no chance, and
her eyes, although they gave me welcome and sore good-bye, warned me to give no sign
that I knew her. So I knew there had been hard trouble there, and I was sorry for
my part in it. And yet not sorry. For I often thought of her, and think now, of her
warmth, and softnesses, and the dearnesses that women have that are so sweet to man.
Mervyn had no notion that I had been with Ceinwen and I never told him. So I could
only ask him questions that had to go all round the world before coming to the matter,
and answers to that kind of question are never any use, so I stopped to ask them.

So four of us worked in that little room, and then went home to more work, and all
day Sunday, too, except when we went to Chapel.

But the other boys had it harder than me, for I was strong in English, and thankful
for it. I knew the great Dr. Johnson from his friend Mr. Boswell. There is a friend
for you. To sit down and rack the brain to remember every word, and then the glad
toil to write it all down. I am thankful to Mr. Boswell for many a peaceful hour,
indeed. There is a marvel, hundreds of years after the spirit has gone to new life,
that men will bless a name that once had flesh, and laughed, and had good food, and
loved to hear good talk.

But the great Dr. Johnson was one in a century, and I count myself honoured to have
tasted the wine of his speech, even though put to my mouth through the goodness of
his friend. For that Englishman is not to be read with the eyes alone, but read out,
as with the Word, with a good voice, and a rolling of the tongue, so that the rich
taste of magnificent English may come to the ears and go to the head, like the perfumes
of the Magi, or like the best of beer, home brewed and long in the cask.

Never will I forget the night my father read out the great man’s letter to the Earl
of Chesterfield.

We sat still when he put down the book, and the room was still, as though in fear,
and the very air seemed filled again with the stinging silence there might have been
in that house off Fleet Street, on the night when a quill scratched, and eyes looked
down at the writing with that calmness and distant cold that comes of prodigious fury
long pent and gone to freeze in a dark corner of the mind, yet always kept alive by
prodding memory in the volatile spirits of dignity, and now loosed as from the topmost
heights of Olympus, each word a laden fire-boat, each sentence a joy of craft, the
whole a glory of art, this mere rebuke of a lordling, written by the hand that through
long, hungry years, had wielded its golden sickle in the chartless wilderness of Words.

“If Ellis the Post brought me a letter like that with my name on it,” my father said,
with his eyes in slits, “I would go down from the house and come back feet first and
blue as the drowned.”

“There is a temper that old Earl was in,” Gwilym said, with a long face, and far away.
“I will bet he smashed every pot and stick in the house. And so would I. And send
out for more, too.”

So with Dr. Johnson and John Stuart Mill, and Spencer, and William Shakespeare, and
Chaucer, and Milton, and John Bunyan, and others of that royal company of bards, thanks
to my father and Mr. Gruffydd, I was acquainted, more than plenty of other boys, and
thus had a lasting benefit in school.

English grammar and composition is difficult even for the English, but worse and worse
for a Welsh boy. He speaks, reads, writes, and he thinks in Welsh, at home, in the
street, and in Chapel, and when he reads English he will understand it in Welsh, and
when he speaks English, he will pronounce the words with pain and using crutches.
So stupid are the English, who build schools for the Welsh, and insist, on pain of
punishment, that English is to be spoken, and yet, for all their insistence, never
give one lesson in the pronouncing and enunciation of the spoken word.

And Good God in Heaven, if you cannot read English aloud and in the English of the
King, half the beauty is taken from you. O, and what pity, to hear a noble tongue
chewed, and besmirched, and belittled by such monkeys in the form of men as our Mr.
Jonas-Sessions. Poor Elijah. Even of you I can think with pity now, for you are in
dust these years, and thank God.

I will remember that morning, even in the vineyards of Paradise, when Mr. Motshill
sent me from the school for the last time, and so left a blank on the wall where the
board should have gone with my name upon it in gold.

I was walking in the playground with James Dafydd, and we were quoting from
King Lear
to have it strong in our minds for the examination.

The lilac tree in the garden next door was lighting its lamps with blue coming to
purple, and primroses, with faces of the innocent, were still fresh in the moss on
top of the wall.

I heard crying in the infants’ school, as though a child had fallen, and the voice
came nearer and fell flat upon the air as a small girl came through the door and walked
a couple of steps toward us, and stopped, with her hands, that were dimpled in the
knuckles, and with bracelets of fatness about the wrists, spread before her face for
shame.

In a pinafore starched to stiffness and shining with the weight of her mother’s iron,
with red socks fallen to nothing in the smallest clogs you ever saw, bright with polish,
and gay as poetry with little studs of brass all round the soles, and a bit of ribbon
in her hair, and with sobs to rend the heavens and shake her little bit of ribbon
off.

About her neck a piece of new cord, and from the cord, a board that hung to her shins
and cut her as she walked. Chalked on the board, in the fist of Mr. Elijah Jonas-Sessions,
“I must not speak Welsh in school.”

And Mr. Jonas coming to stand in the porch with Miss Cash and smile, with his hands
in his pockets.

And the board dragged her down, for she was small, an infant, and the cord rasped
the flesh of her neck, and there were marks upon her shins where the edge of the board
had cut. Loud she cried, with a rise and fall in the tone, holding her breath until
you wanted to breathe for her, with her tongue between her teeth and spit falling
helpless, and in her eyes the big tears of a child who is in hurt, and has shame,
and is frightened.

But as I went to her, and she looked up at me as though fearing something more to
hurt her, I saw her eyes, that were the eyes of one not long from the cot and the
tears that ran and shone in the sunlight swelled to crystal in mine, and in my blindness
I saw, as through the mist of a morning, the grass upon a field torn, and a spewing
forth of earth and stones, and men coming to stand before me who wore their steel
as I wear tweed, in ease and comfort, and their swords were bright. And I heard a
note in the infant voice as of trumpets sounding for battle, and drums beat, and men
were shouting, chariots raced and dragon banners streamed, and bowmen plucked strings
while steel spoke in the ranks and lance heads glittered in the sun.

And battle lust was in me, with blood running red about my feet and my hands red with
it, and slippery, and the smell of it hot near me.

Then the mist went thin, and I saw Mr. Motshill looking at me, white, with his tie
out, and pulling his side-whiskers, and Mrs. Motshill behind him holding a jug. I
found that I was dripping wet and my throat raw with shouting. And a policeman looking
at me, sitting beside me, with his helmet on the floor, one side of his moustache
bent down and his hair untidy with him. Blood on my fists, not much, drying, it was.

“Having his sense, he is, now,” the policeman said. I often saw him in town.

“Morgan,” said Mr. Motshill, kind, but doubtful. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and sat.

“I suppose you know what you did?” Mr. Motshill asked me.

“No, sir,” I said, and fright coming grey about me. “What, then?”

“You have nearly killed Mr. Jonas-Sessions, you wicked boy,” Mrs. Motshill said.

“Not as bad as that,” said the policeman, “but tidy, I will admit.”

“Am I going to jail, sir?” I asked Mr. Motshill.

“That will depend on Mr. Jonas,” Mr. Motshill said. “Do you feel well enough to go
home?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Then go,” said Mr. Motshill, tired, and making a move with his hand to Mrs. Motshill,
“I shall write to your father when I have seen Mr. Jonas.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Come you, my son,” said the policeman, and put on his helmet, and saw his moustache
in the glass of the picture, and pulled a face in shock, giving the dying end a good
pull to put all straight again.

Down the street I went with the policeman, with crowds about the gate to see me go,
but I saw only their feet.

“What did I do to him?” I asked the policeman when we had got almost to the bridge.

“Tidy,” the policeman said. “If I never move another step from by here. A couple of
fat eyes, I will be bound and still picking up his teeth. When I pulled you off, you
were at him on the floor.”

“What do you think I will have for it?” I asked him, and in fear for his answer.

“Nothing,” he said, and smiled. “And when Mrs. Stephens tells her old man what his
little daughter have had round her neck, I will be wanted again.”

“Will he die?” I asked him.

“Die, man?” he said, and a good laugh. “Good God, you have got to put poison down
to kill rats, boy. No, no. A warning that is all. But I thought they had stopped to
use the cribban. I had my knuckles hit bloody for talking Welsh in school, but no
matter.”

“So did my father,” I said. “It was the cribban, round her little neck. I went mad,
I think.”

“No worry, and no matter,” said the policeman. “Off home, and mind that temper and
those fists. They are ripe to have you in trouble. Good-bye, now.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

That night all the family were round the table, and Mr. Motshill’s letter in front
of my father, brought by Ellis the Post after tea.