The Welsh Girl (10 page)

All these men, he thinks, and yet if he could, if he'd had the ammunition, if the pillbox could have held out, he'd have slaughtered them all, wouldn't he? Hundreds, thousands. For as long as they'd have kept coming. Until their bones covered the beach like rocks. The thought makes him sway with exhaustion, and for the first time he feels a flicker of relief to have been captured, shudders as if to shake it off.

Yet another landing craft disgorges its men. His eyes follow them up the beach, past the stockade, towards the dunes, and he feels an odd pull, a tug towards the horizon. All those men flowing in one direction. He yearns to look over the dunes, as

if he has no idea, no recollection, of what's there. It comes to him that he's behind enemy lines, but the shifting geography seems unreal, as if the earth has turned under his very feet. This was German territory and now it's British, but he can't see how it has changed. He pictures the maps he's seen, imagines the fields beyond the dunes tinged the faint dawning

pink of empire. And he wishes he could follow that column of men, feels powerfully as if he's falling behind, he who could march faster and farther than anyone.

er father's acreage includes the steep slope above the camp, but by bike it's a long ride round the mountain and

through the village to the farmhouse. Esther pedals hard for the first mile, keen to put the camp behind her, but before long she's labouring. She makes it up the slope to the pub, her breath coming in short, hard pants, but leans over the handlebars, spent, to coast through the quiet village. At the foot of the last long hill home, she squeezes the brakes in

defeat, steps down and wheels the bike. Its spokes tick quietly beside her, holding the rushing silence of the night at bay. Her father turns in early, but tonight she wants to be sure he's asleep. She doesn't want to face him, to answer any questions, at least not until he comes stumping into the

kitchen with the morning's pail of milk and she can put his breakfast, two thick 'doorstep' slices of bread and butter, in front of him.

She tries to think about Colin, to order her thoughts, make sense of what's happened, but finds each time her mind darting off, turning instead to Eric, their first evacuee. He'd just turned fourteen when he arrived in 1940, a year older than she, but a townie, so clueless in the ways of the country (the first time he watched the milking, he blanched, asked her shakily, "Milk is cow's
piss?
") that she felt his equal. An only child, she'd been thrilled at the prospect of another youngster about the place--even a boy, as her father insisted it must be, "so he can earn his keep'. She pulled on her mother's arm all the way down to the station, only to grow shy when they

entered the waiting room, where the new arrivals were lined up as if for inspection.

Her mother nudged her ahead, but she was too nervous to look at any of the strange boys in their brown blazers and corduroy shorts. She hurried down one row after another and only halted when a boy knelt down in front of her to tie his shoelace. She stopped and waited, and he whispered, "Pick me," so softly she thought he was talking to his shoe. "Pick me," he said again, looking up and meeting her gaze. He reached out and grasped her hand, and when he released it, left a balled-up stocking in her palm. She turned crimson when the crumpled nylon began to spring open like a grey flower

and she saw what she was holding. "All right, Ess?" her mother called.

"Pick me and I'll give you the other one," Eric whispered. He didn't take his eyes off her hand until it closed into a fist. "Mam," Esther called over her shoulder. "What about this

one?"

He'd been as good as his word the next day when they'd found themselves alone in the kitchen. "A deal's a deal," he said. "I'm no welsher." He grinned to let her know he was joking. "Don't tell your mother, mind," he made her promise. "Mum said they were supposed to be for her, a gift like, only..." He paused and then Esther started to giggle, unable to imagine her mother ever wearing such things, and slowly his grin widened.

Later, he said, "Will you wear them for me one day?" and she stared at him.

They were inseparable that spring. Rhys had tried to befriend Eric too, but he could never keep up with their rapid exchanges in English. When he kept asking her what they were saying, Eric would bleat at him, "
Baa-aa!
" To her parents she said Eric was teaching her English (though she was perfectly fluent, thanks to Mrs Roberts and all her time at the

pictures). In fact, he was teaching her to kiss--teaching himself, she realises now, since they never got as far as French kissing. Her parents seemed to turn a blind eye,

although in retrospect Esther knows that summer was the start of her mother's illness. She has felt guilty for the way her preoccupation with Eric caused her to ignore the early signs

of decline, the weariness and lack of appetite, and for the comfort she drew from him in the final, wasting days. And maybe that guilt, she thinks now, is why, the month after the funeral, when his own mother wrote from Coventry to say that she wanted her Eric back, that she was missing him so much, Esther told him, "You should go." He hadn't wanted to. He still resented his mum for sending him away in the first place. On the train to Wales he'd reached into his pocket and pulled out his brown school cap--his name stitched along the headband by his mother--and sailed it out the window, watching it curve up and back over the line of the train. But Esther made him go. He should be with his mother, she said, feeling selfless, and he didn't know how to argue with her on that score.

She'd seen him off on the sooty platform at Caernarvon station, listening to the carriage doors clattering shut around them--bang bang bang bang bang--like a firing squad. She remembers the engine coming to life: wisps of steam floating up, twisting towards the station's glass and iron roof, and then a stream of smoke, like a kettle coming to the boil. They waited together for the rip of the whistle, holding hands through the lowered window, and then she stepped back to join her father and watched the train move off, the couplings taking up the slack and the carriages jolting forward one by one, just like the toy set she'd seen with Eric in the window of Nelson's the Christmas before. And then the last clacking carriage twisted out of sight.

Two months and six letters later, she heard from an aunt of his that he and his mother had died together--their shelter had

received a direct hit--and more than anything she had envied them.

She finds herself turning on to the path to Cilgwyn now, the house a dim shadow before her in the darkness, her steps ringing back off the stone walls of the lane.

They'd kissed first in the last row of the cinema one Saturday morning, she and Eric, but all she can think of now is a joke of Harry's:

"I hear they're putting a swimming pool in the back of our picture palace."

"A swimming pool?"

"Sright. On account of everyone back there's always doing the breaststroke!"

The pedal catches against the back of her calf and she winces, loses her grip, the bike clattering to the ground, its bell clinking dully. Frozen for a moment, praying the commotion hasn't woken Arthur, she stares at the bike lying there dumbly, lets herself down beside it, and weeps dry, choking sobs.
He
was her first, she thinks fervently.
Him
. Eric. Her first love.

It takes her long minutes to collect herself, and then she clambers to her feet, pulls the bike upright. Having brought it so far, it seems she's going to keep it after all. I
earned it
, she thinks viciously.

She heads first to the privy at the bottom of the garden--she hates to sit there in the dark, but she's suddenly desperate-- then lets herself in by the kitchen door, tiptoes to her room, holding her breath, and crawls under the covers fully clothed.

She hugs herself, panting softly, listening to the house, the rise and fall of her father's steady snores.

How much later she doesn't know--she seems to wake and yet to have barely caught her breath--there's a knock at the door, a pounding, and she presses her back to the wall. It's Colin, she's sure. He's come for her, and it's only the sound of

her father's cursing that stops her crying out. "I'm bloody coming!" he shouts, and it thrills her, the prospect of him turning his rage on Colin. She hears him shuffling down the passage, the rattle of the matchbox, the rasp as he strikes a light, followed by the slosh of the paraffin lamp. And then he's calling out in Welsh, "Who's there?" and the answer, in English, "It's me, Evans, and you can keep a civil tongue. I've brought you something of yours." For an insane moment, she thinks,
The constable, thank God, he can arrest Colin!
and then it dawns on her: Colin isn't here, never was.

In her relief, she misses the start of the exchange, climbs out of bed and makes her way on trembling legs to the glowing frame of her door.

"--wouldn't tell them where he lived," Parry is saying, "so they dumped him on me." She peers into the passage, sees her father, his back to her, at the front door, Parry before him with his hands on Jim's shoulders. "Wouldn't tell them anything, as a matter of fact--just his name, over and over, to all their questions."

"I'd have given them a rank and serial number if I had one," Jim tells them, and Esther, coming forward and catching his eye, puts a finger to her lips. He's in enough trouble already, and for a moment the thought of someone else's problems steadies her, and she smooths a hand down the front of her rumpled skirt.

She should have known, of course. The disturbance at the camp, the interruption that drove Colin off. It must have been the local boys. They'd been watching the camp ever since the sappers first pecked out the perimeter of the site with mallets and surveying stakes--stakes that had started showing up thrust through boys' belt loops like cutlasses, brandished in high-street duels ("Enrol Flynn!"--"Douglas Fairbanks!"). The boys were the ones who'd kept the village informed of the sappers' progress, fuelling speculation about the base's

purpose, growing more and more impatient with the mystery. "It's top secret," Esther told Jim when he begged her to ask one of the sappers at the pub, but the way his face fell, you would have thought it was
the
top secret, out of all the many adult things he wasn't old enough to hear or understand. Parry, with whom the boys have a running feud (their favourite trick: reporting a naked light during blackout and, when he comes running, mooning him, the gang of them, arses hanging out of their drawers), had said they were up to something. And she should have known Jim would get mixed up in it. He isn't well liked by the local lads--few of the evacuees are, but Jim is small for his age, and his fiery temper makes him easy to goad (his last name, Leadbetter, has earned him the nickname Bedwetter)--but it doesn't stop him from trying to ingratiate himself by getting into trouble.

"They thought he was Welsh," Parry is saying now, shaking his head, though Esther can believe it; Jim's picked up a bit of the language in his time with them. "An arsonist, if you please!" the constable goes on, chuckling, but Arthur is stone faced. He's never been fond of the constable, on account of his insistence on doing all his official business in English.

"What happened to his head?" Arthur asks, still in Welsh, and coming into the light she sees a welt on Jim's forehead, the bruise already turning waxy like spoiled meat.

"Kept putting his hands up, apparently. Surrendering. One of them thought he was taking the piss, gave him a little clout."

"One of them 'heroes'?" The constable is silent.

"Well, obliged to you for fetching him back," Arthur says, reaching for the doorknob.

Parry leans in a moment. "Just so long as it doesn't happen again, eh? He's your responsibility--"

"
Nos-da
, now." Arthur swings the door to.

"And goodnight to you," Parry says from the other side, his

tone perfectly conversational, as if he can see right through the wood. Jim starts to say something, but Arthur raises a finger and the boy flinches. They listen to the scrape of the policeman's feet in the yard, the creak of the gate.

"POWs!" Jim bursts out as soon as it's quiet. "That's who it's for!" He looks at them triumphantly, as if the news somehow excuses everything.

"What happened?" Esther asks.

"We broke in," he says, "and we found a cell block. You know, for solitary confinement. That's how we knew the secret!"

She tries to look suitably surprised, but she can see he's disappointed. He looks over her shoulder. "POWs, Mr Evans."

"But how did you get caught?" Esther insists.

His face clouds for a second. "Oh, the others," he says, trying to sound breezy. "They locked me in one of the cells for a joke and forgot to come back."

"
Duw!
" She crouches down to get a better look at his head,

but he twists away.

Behind her, Arthur has started to laugh thinly and she stares at him.

"Prisoners of war," he says, and she knows it's taken him a moment to work it out in English, too proud to just ask. "And all those happy fools down the pub," he goes on in Welsh, "hoping for some glorious part in the English war. What a slap in the face!" He shakes his head. "Glad you could join us," he adds, looking her up and down, taking in her rumpled clothes.

"I thought I should be decent," she tells him awkwardly.

He's in slippers and a nightshirt himself, his calves below the hem corded with muscle, the veins binding them like blue twine. The nightshirt is so old it's gone grey, and Esther, so rarely up in the morning before him, can't remember the last time she's seen him in it.

"I could boil that for you," she blurts out, and he gives her a

puzzled look.

"You just see to his head," he tells her, suddenly weary, pushing past on his way back to bed. "That's your job."

She sits Jim at the table, puts water on to warm, fetches a towel, then sets the lamp beside him. "It doesn't hurt," he tells her, but pulls back when she reaches for him.