The Hills and the Valley (36 page)

Or would it? He knew now – but he still loved her. Knowing it was wrong, knowing it could not be, did not stop him loving her.

The day he received her letter telling him that Marcus Spindler had asked her to marry him he shot down an Me109, tailing it until the wings overlapped the outer ring of his gunsight circle, then destroying it with burst after burst from his canon and Browning. As it fell in an explosion of canon shells and ruptured fuel tanks Huw felt a swell of elation as if the burning German plane could also burn Barbara out of his heart. But the respite was shortlived. Back at the aerodrome with the trampled grass beneath his feet again, he discovered she was still there, an ache which could explode at any moment into an agony of pure jealousy when he thought of her with Marcus Spindler. He walked back across the airfield, unzipping his flying jacket, ignoring the banter of the men who had returned with him.

‘You gave him what for didn't you, Huw? Christ, you made sure of that poor bastard!'

He made no reply for he was feeling ashamed that he had taken it out on some unknown German, given him no chance at all, when really it was Marcus Spindler he had been gunning for.

Amy's letter had arrived the following week with the news that Barbara and Marcus were engaged and he had sunk further into depression. Only one sentence had given him consolation – ‘I shall not agree to them marrying for quite a while, of course. The whole thing has been much too sudden for my liking and she needs a year at least to get to know him and be certain she is doing the right thing. Thank heavens she is under twenty-one and still needs my permission.'

So there was a respite, at least. Then he remembered that a year or ten years even would make no difference to the situation as far as he was concerned. Whether or not Barbara decided in the end that Marcus was ‘the right thing', he would never again be able to give her any inkling of the way he felt about her and the depression descended once more.

When he first learned he was going to St Athan it crossed his mind that it was odd that he should be returning to within a few miles of the place where he had been born and he wondered briefly if perhaps it was an omen. He had been lucky to escape unscathed so far, perhaps his luck was about to run out. There would be some sort of poetic justice if he should die, as he had been born, in Wales.

But Huw had little time for brooding and it was only when he crossed the Severn for the first time in fifteen years that he realised how deeply he had missed his native land. It was odd the way it affected him, as if the Welsh air was somehow different to English. Breathing it in started a strange poignant nostalgia and half forgotten memories came flooding back. The grass was so green, the sky so blue above the rolling hills, more green, more blue than he had ever noticed it to be elsewhere. In his mind's eye he saw Pontypridd again, the steeply rising terraces of cottages with the black slag heaps which in Somerset were known as ‘batches', the market place, the deep slow-running river. Thinking about it he seemed to hear the lilting Welsh accents, too, and the soaring voices raised in hymns of praise which floated out of every chapel in the valley on a Sunday morning so that they could have been mistaken for a thousand male voice choirs.

He had been happy here in those far off days, roaming the streets and the woods, sliding down the waste tips on an old tin tray, playing at war beneath the kitchen table with a bicycle pump for a gun with the man he had called Dad, stealing handfuls of sweets from the counter in ‘Jones the Sweets' ' shop when the old man was not looking, fighting – rolling, gouging and kicking – sometimes alone, sometimes as one of a gang, getting up to all kinds of mischief. It was years now since he had thought about it for the carefree pleasures of those days had been replaced, after a period of utter misery, by a new happiness with Amy's family. The changed circumstances had become his life so that Pontypridd seemed like a distant dream which had happened to someone else, not to him at all.

Now, however, it all came back to him as clearly as if it had been yesterday and Huw knew that while he was here, so close to where it had all happened, he had to go back.

He went on an afternoon when the sun was hot and bright in a cloudless sky, getting a train to Pontypridd station, and at first he was disappointed. The streets were much as he remembered them yet subtly different, altered not only by time but by his misted recollection of them. ‘Jones the Sweets' ' shop was gone now, replaced by a small café; Huw went in and bought himself a cup of tea and a slab of bread pudding, sitting at an oilcloth-covered table near the window to eat it and watching the faces of the passers by in the hope that he might recognise one of them as a face from long ago. He did not and he felt oddly let down.

Was there anyone here in Ponty who still remembered him? Anyone who just once in a while when they were reminiscing asked: ‘I wonder whatever happened to Huw James – Idris's boy? Remember Idris? He got killed underground – a stone fell on him and crushed him.' Probably not. Memories can be short and it was all so long ago.

He had been wrong to come, he thought. Better to have left his memories intact. But now that he was here he felt oddly driven to press on with his odyssey.

He left the café and went for another walk through the streets. And then, almost without meaning to, he found himself heading towards the pit where Idris had used to work, past it, and up the steep slope towards the cottage where he had spent the early years of his life. The cobbles felt comfortably familiar beneath his feet and he saw that here, at least, nothing much had changed. The stone with which the cottages had been built was blacker, if anything, than he remembered, for another fifteen years'coal dust and smoke had spewed onto them, the paintwork a little more faded from neglect that the war years had spawned. But the doors still stood ajar; in some of them a woman or an old man sat enjoying the summer sunshine, and the voices calling to one another had that wonderful lilt that he only now realised he had missed so much.

Two children were sitting outside the house where he had been born, squabbling over a bowl of soapy water and a clay pipe they were using to blow bubbles. He smiled to himself and stopped to speak to them.

‘Live here, do you?'

They looked up in surprise at this tall stranger in uniform and the smaller of the two, a girl, gave up her struggle for the bubble pipe and ran indoors. The other, a boy, gazed at him with a shrewd and oddly worldly-wise expression on his grubby face.

‘Who are you?'

‘Oh, I used to live here a long time ago,' Huw said.
The door of the neighbouring house, which was ajar, swung fully
open and a woman came out.

‘All right, you two? What's the matter? Where's our Mary?'

‘Gone in,' said the boy.

‘Oh, all right is she?' She fixed Huw with a suspicious eye. ‘I'm watching out for them while their Mam's gone down to shop. You're wanting her, are you?'

‘No,' Huw said. ‘I was just looking around. I don't suppose you remember me, do you?'

‘Should I?' Her eyes were small and bright in her round face.

Huw smiled. He had recognised her the moment he saw her, though her hair, crimped across her head in neat corrugated waves, was now iron-grey and she had an extra chin and a few deep creases to mark the passage of the years. Win Williams. She had lived next door then and she still lived next door now.

‘It's been a long time, Mrs Williams,' he said. ‘I'm Huw – Huw James.'

Her eyes went round and waves of surprise chased one another across her face.

‘Huw! I don't believe it! Little Huw James – Sibyl's boy!'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh duw, duw! Yes, it is! I can see it now! But – you've grown!'

‘I suppose I have,' he said, smiling. ‘It's fifteen years since I was playing along this rank.'

‘Oh Huw – come in, come in do! Come in and have a cup of tea!' The Welsh hospitality was taking over now. ‘You behave yourself now!' she said severely to the child with the bubble pipe. ‘Your Mam will be back in a tick and if you two keep quarrelling I shall have to tell her all about it.' She winked at Huw. ‘That's my grandchildren, you know. Our Olwyn's children. You remember our Olwyn. She'd be older than you by a bit. Been married now five years and her hubby is off somewhere in the Atlantic on the convoys. Went down to Barry, he did, soon as war broke out, and signed on with the Merchant Navy. I ask you! And a good job here in the pit and two little ones … I don't know …' She shook her head sadly. ‘Still, never mind our troubles now, Huw. Come in, bach. Sit down now. Make yourself at home.'

Huw followed her into the kitchen and she fussed around making tea from the kettle that was boiling on the open fire.

‘Now, Huw, tell me all about yourself,' she instructed him. ‘You're in the air force, I see. Where are you stationed?'

‘I'm at St Athan at the moment.'

‘St Athan, is it? Well, well! The last I heard you were in Somerset.'

‘Yes, that's right.' Huw filled in the details of his life and Mrs Williams kept his cup topped up with thick sweet tea made the way only the Welsh knew how, Huw thought. Drinking it he had a sudden longing for chunks of bread and jam or that special treat, drop scones made on the griddle.

‘Well, Huw, I just can't get over what a fine lad you've grown into!' Mrs Williams said at last. ‘I can hardly believe it! It seems like only yesterday you were no bigger than Olwyn's two. And a proper little scamp you were, too. Led your mother a proper dance.

And your poor father – oh, that was a sad thing to be killed like that and after all he'd been through, too.'

Huw looked at her sharply, wondering suddenly just how much she knew. Quite a bit, no doubt. There were few secrets in the closely packed ranks in the Welsh valleys.

‘Of course, things weren't quite what they seemed, were they?' he said.

He saw the wary look come into her eyes – and knew she knew.

‘Oh – weren't they?'

‘You know very well they weren't,' he said lightly, though suddenly he felt much the same way as when he sighted enemy fighters. ‘It's all right Mrs Williams, you don't have to keep any secrets from me. I know all about it.'

She relaxed visibly. ‘Well, that's all right then, isn't it? You see, I always promised your Mam that I wouldn't breathe a word to a living soul. And I never have – no, not even when there's been talk. I buttoned my lip up and said I wasn't interested in gossip. And I wasn't. Never have been – it's not my way. We're none of us as white as the lilies of the field, are we? That's why your Mam talked to me, I expect. She had to have someone to confide in, poor soul, and she knew she could trust Win Williams to keep it to herself.'

‘That's very good of you,' Huw said awkardly. ‘I'm sure she would be very grateful.'

‘Well, who was I to lay blame? She was so lonely, see, your Mam, when your Da was away. And she wasn't the only one to make a mistake, not by a long chalk. She was just unlucky enough to get caught out. Not that I should call it unlucky when I look at what a fine young man you've grown up to be! Oh, she'd be proud of you, she would. I only wish she could see you now …'

‘Did you know him too – my real father?' Huw asked. The tea was beginning to taste bitter in his mouth now, but he felt driven to continue the conversation.

‘Oh, I did that. Did well for himself, so I've heard.'

‘Yes, he had a transport business. Llew Roberts Haulage. He's dead now too, though.' She stopped in the act of pouring more tea.
‘Llew
Roberts?'

‘Yes. He was killed by one of his own lorries.'

‘No – no, I didn't mean that. Did you say
Llew
was your father?'

The cup rattled in the saucer as he set it down too quickly. ‘What?'

‘Oh no, she did have a bit of a fling with Llew, it's true. But he was only a boy really. His mother soon put a stop to that. But then his brother picked up where he left off. Eddie, his name was. Bit of a sly one. Sharper than Llew and not so soft-hearted. When there was trouble he didn't want to know. Would have left her high and dry and never thought twice about it.'

‘But I thought
Llew
…'

‘Llew helped out. She told me all about it. I suppose he felt guilty himself after the way that he had – well, been like friendly with her. And sorry that his brother could just wash his hands of his responsibility. After Idris was killed she wrote to him and he used to send her money. Then – well, the money stopped coming. She went off to Somerset to see him, and try and sort things out. Desperate, she was. But she never came back. She died there, poor soul. And I suppose you know the rest.'

‘Yes.' He could hardly think straight, yet it was as if a great weight had lifted off his heart. ‘Are you sure about all this?'

‘Oh yes, how could I be mistaken? Nights I've had your poor Mam in this very kitchen beside herself with not knowing what to do. Oh, Eddie was your father all right, not Llew. Make no mistake about that.'

‘Thank you,' he said. ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Williams.'

‘Nothing to thank me for now is there? Anyway, it's all so long ago now I don't suppose it makes much difference to anything.'

‘Don't you believe it, Mrs Williams,' Huw said. ‘It makes all the difference in the world.'

He bid her goodbye and went back along the rank without a backward glance. It was all part of his past now, these houses, the pit, the towering slag heaps. And the past no longer mattered. Everything about it had changed. Nothing was quite the way it had seemed.

Now it was the future and only the future that was important.

A future in which there was no barrier to his love for Barbara.

There was no way he could get a pass immediately. He was being posted to a new base in Essex as he had suspected, the posting to take effect immediately he left St Athan, the station commander told him. He would have to sort things out when he got there. Huw argued but it was useless. Unless there were very pressing personal reasons the station commander was not prepared to countermand the instruction.