The Gift (7 page)

“Indeed it is,” said Dadda. “Drowning good valleys to make a reservoir for Manchester. Whole farms have been lost, you see, where Welsh families have lived for ten generations. It is not a joke to try to stop behavior of that sort.”

“But what about the private armies and blowing up power stations?” said Penny. “That sounds pretty stupid.”

“Yess,” said Dadda. “But every time a Welshman does some little stupid thing, you must remember that a hundred Englishmen in London have done a hundred big stupid things. Look in the dresser, Davy bach. In the third box are some books. Isn't there a Shakespeare there?”

There was. Davy took it to bed with him and read carefully through
Henry the Fourth, Part I
. The pages were much more thumbed than those of any other play in the book.

Davy knew too much to try again at breakfast. He wasn't going to get much time with Ian, so it was stupid to waste it starting conversations that were only going to produce that rasping note of scorn. It's no fun to be hurt by people you're fond of. So it was a surprise when Ian looked up from his buttered eggs and said, “By the way, Dave, I found someone who can tell you about this Glyn Dwr bloke. I'll run you down after breakfast.”

“After Chapel, you are saying,” said Granny.

“Sure,” said Ian. “Everything okey-doke with the deacons? I hope we get a couple of decent hymns.”

They did. On the other hand the Minister had decided to prove that industrial pollution was the lesser beast in
The Book of Revelation
, Chapter Thirteen, verses eleven to eighteen. This took twenty-eight minutes by Penny's watch and was so dull that pictures kept swimming into Davy's mind, mostly thoughts that some of the men were having about Nancy Owen, the local beauty who had sung the solo anthem just before the sermon.

They have torn up the railway line that once ran from Llangollen westward along the valley of the limpid Dee. Davy had been blinking forward over Ian's shoulder, his eyes full of tears from the rush of wind, so at first he thought he was looking at some sort of bright bungalow at the bottom of the tilted lane down from the main road to the railway. But when the tears cleared, he saw that it was indeed a railway carriage, standing lonely on its siding, blazing with green and gold paint and with its name, Morfudd, lettered ornately on the side. It looked more like a gypsy trailer than a railway coach. As they walked down the steep timber steps toward it, he saw that the embankment on either side had been carefully cultivated and was planted entirely with leeks.

By the time they reached the last step the door of the coach was open, and in the doorway stood a stout little man wearing an old brown dressing gown as if it were a monk's habit; his beard and hair stood out an equal distance all around his head; it was mostly gray but tinged in places with an ugly yellow which might have been its original color but looked more likely to be nicotine stains from the large curved pipe the man was smoking. He took this from his mouth and called a robust good morning in Welsh. Ian answered him and introduced Davy in the same language.

“This is Doctor Huw Hughes-hughs,” he said. “He can tell you all you want to know about Glyn Dwr, as well as all you don't.”

The Doctor frowned fiercely at the sound of English, but led the way into the coach. Most of the interior partitions had been ripped out, leaving a narrow, many-windowed room which contained a bed and a stove as well as ordinary living-room furniture. Books covered much of the floor in mounds and pyramids and tottering columns. Through the far windows Davy could see the Dee, brown and glassy, slide by. It was Sunday morning, so no one was fishing.

The Doctor turned to him with a snarl.

“Speaking no Welsh, indeed to goodness, and you wish to know of Glyn Dwr, whateffer?”

“Come off it, Huw,” said Ian.

The Doctor laughed and spoke in ordinary English.

“Tell me how much you know,” he said, “and I'll tell you the rest.”

“We've only got an hour,” said Ian. “Gran's got a leg in the oven.”

He moved farther up the coach, opened the padded lid of a bench seat, took out some pieces of metal, and settled down at the table, where he started to rub them with fine emery paper.

“I know Glyn Dwr was the last Prince of all Wales,” said Davy. “And I've read
Henry the Fourth
. But what I really want to know is something about a Welsh poem my Dadda taught me.”

“I was under the impression your father had gone Saxon,” said the Doctor.

“This was my grandfather. I'm afraid my accent isn't very good.”

Nervously Davy repeated the strange, familiar lines.

“Your accent is better than that of many who think well of their own,” said the Doctor. “That is an interesting fragment if it is genuine. I'll take a tape of it, if you don't mind.”

He fetched a little cassette recorder, fiddled with the microphone, and made Davy recite the poem again. Finally he played it back.

Davy watched Ian assemble three of his bits of metal into a vaguely familiar shape while he listened uneasily to a voice that he knew to be his own but sounded like a stranger's.

“Well,” said the Doctor. “I expect you want to know whether it's a true story. Of course I can't tell you that.”

“No, I know. But I thought you could tell me whether it
might
be true—I mean whether it sounds old enough, and whether there might have been a battle like that, and about Glyn Dwr's magic and things like that.”

The Doctor listened once more to the tape, then nodded.

“Certainly it could be genuine,” he said. “Most poetry of the period was more complicated than that, and about other themes. Your poem restricts its complexity to an elaborate pattern of alliteration, but there's no reason why it should not be genuine. Equally there is no reason why it should not be fake. It could, for instance, have been written somewhere in the eighteenth century, inspired by Macpherson's publication of his supposed Ossianic fragments, to account for a phenomenon of second sight running in one family. Is there such a thing in your family, Ian?”

“Not that I know of,” said Ian, snapping his assembled bits of metal onto a tube so that it all became, instantly and obviously, the front end of a small machine gun.

“This thing's going to blow like fury, Huw,” he said. “But I don't think it'll jam anymore.”

Doctor Hughes-hughs rattled Welsh at him. Ian glanced at Davy, shook his head, and laughed. Doctor Hughes-hughs sucked at his pipe, making the very bubbling of it sound doubtful.

“Why didn't you tell me about this poem earlier?” he said to Ian. “You know it's the sort of thing that interests me.”

“Never heard it before,” said Ian, not looking up from fastening butt to barrel. “Dadda didn't tell me, and if he had I wouldn't have bothered with it much. The trouble with our movement, Huw, is that there's too many of us dreaming about the past and not enough thinking about the future.”

“They are all one,” said Doctor Hughes-hughs smugly. “One continuing process. You and I, Dafydd, will explore the past glories of the Welsh struggle while your brother prepares for its coming ones.”

He fetched books from various mounds, most of them in Welsh, and patiently translated bits about Glyn Dwr, and second sight, and the bardic tradition until Ian had completely assembled the gun. Davy found it hard to listen with proper attention while his brother loaded and unloaded several times, made a few adjustments, and finally took the thing apart and stored all the bits in separate little plastic bags, as though he were going to deep-freeze them. But the Doctor paid no more attention than if Ian had been doing the washing up.

At the top of the wooden steps Ian stood scowling back at the dark hills and the peaceful river and the gaudy coach. The cultivated plot on either side of the steps seemed especially to displease him.

“Leeks!” he muttered. “He doesn't even eat them—he grows them for the flower. What can you do with a movement full of that sort of joker?”

“Where did you get the gun?” whispered Davy.

“Huw bought it. We've got five. What are you going to do about that, huh?”

“Nothing. It's not my business. I mean … do you suppose you'd ever use it?”

Ian shrugged.

“Depends what you mean,” he said. “We're using it now, in a way. Just the possibility of using it changes the situation. I want a free Wales—absolutely free, as separate from England as France is from Germany. Most of our idiot citizens would probably think I was a bit of a joke. But, for instance, if I took that gun and wrote ‘Free Wales' in bullet holes across the front of the Town Hall, they'd think I was a different kind of joke, huh?”

“I suppose so.”

“Don't you worry, kid. The point is, we
are
a serious movement, and that means keeping the cowboys out.”

He waved to the Doctor, who had been watching them through a window that still bore its No Smoking notice, though his pipe was going like a chimney. The engine caught and revved, and they growled up to the main road.

In fact Davy did do something about the gun. He told Penny.

On the last day of every holiday they had always climbed to the top of Moel Mawr to repair the cairn that the three of them had built that first visit, and to add one more stone each. It was a sort of farewell to the hills. This time they had a poor day for it, with heavy masses of low cloud trundling slowly out of the west and the air so soggy with unfallen rain that all the other hills were hidden. The grasses up there were too coarse even for sheep, and now they were yellow and hissed thinly as they waited for the winter. The patches of bracken on the flanks of the hill were already darkening from gold to brown.

Penny and Ian both felt that they were really too old for this sort of ritual, and that it was sentimental of them to keep it up. But it was a good excuse for a walk, and it would have been just as sentimental, in a different way, to stop it. Still, Penny smiled awkwardly as she wedged a third stone into place.

“That's for Ian,” she explained. “He began it. It was great to see him—he hasn't changed much, really.”

“He's joined a group of Welsh Nationalists who've got machine guns,” said Davy, trying to make it sound like an ordinary little bit of news.

“Stupid nits,” said Penny. “I've seen them on telly, drilling and that. They're just like the kids in the Lower Third playing Normandy Invasion.”

“Ian says he's serious.”

“Like hell! What he's serious about is that England means Dad to him and Wales means something else—probably Mum, deep down. The book I read says all boys really want to bump their Dad off. Anyway, Ian can't put up with him anymore.”

“But if Dad's really going to settle down …”

“You can't tell. That might make it worse. Anyway, I'm not sure Dad is.”

“Oh, forget it,” said Davy. “We can't
do
anything about any of them—Dad or Ian—and it's too cold to stand around psychoanalyzing our relations.”

5

MR. BLACK HAT

Sonia Palozzi was a boisterous dark girl whose father was the steel erectors' foreman on the biggest new building site in Spenser Mills. At first Davy was irritated when he was paired off with her for the individual local geog projects for the second half of the term. The trouble was Sonia's love life, which was very intense, but purely imaginary. She was always in a passion of ecstasy or despair, either for the new guitar teacher or for the drummer in some pop group, or perhaps a young policeman or a star footballer. Davy didn't want to have to listen to all that.

But then Sonia told him that her father said they could do the building site as their project, go wherever they liked on it and ask any questions. Davy knew Mr. Palozzi slightly, a serious, silent man who seemed to believe that the whole evolutionary process, from the amoebas through the dinosaurs and pithecanthropi, had been ordained solely in order to bring Sonia into existence. Dad, who worked for the same firm, said that Mr. Palozzi was a sort of genius at his job. He spoke very little, perhaps because his English was erratic, but he could get his great metal spiderwebs into the air more quickly and safely than anybody else. If there was some snag in a job, Mr. Palozzi would spot it when everything was still on the ground; with other foremen snags show up when they've got a ton of girder swaying fifty feet in the air with the whole erection gang yelling and gesticulating from their perches. Mr. Palozzi was a valuable bloke, Dad said.

On the first Friday after half term Davy met Sonia at the site entrance. Mr. Palozzi with a referee's whistle clamped in his teeth came grinning over to lead them to a little hut where half a dozen men were drinking tea. He took the whistle out to explain as best he could that this was his daughter and she was a sacred object. One of the men winked at her. She turned as pink as a flamingo. Mr. Palozzi looked murderously at the man and hustled her out of the hut.

Being a sacred object is difficult. For instance, Mr. Palozzi thought it quite improper that his daughter should climb ladders, so it was Davy who made his way up to a little platform on the girderwork while Sonia went off through the churned mud to measure and sketch the different strata of earth where the site had dug most deeply into the ground.

One day this was going to be the main shopping complex of Spenser Mills, but all Davy could see as he began his preliminary sketch was that the men and machines had dug a vast, rectangular wound in the clay; half of the wound had grown a scab of concrete, from which the web of girders was now rising; the other half was still hummocked mud, scored with crawler marks and littered with grids of reinforcing rods among which the blue glimmer of welding torches flared and vanished. A crawler crane was balancing a thin, immensely tall structure which dropped a grab twenty feet into the ground and brought it back carrying a quarter of a ton of clay which it dropped into a waiting spoil truck. A dozen other machines were grumbling away in the mud, champing or heaving. It was all a busy mess.