by Nick Perry
‘You’ll learn soon enough how life is lived up here,’ he said. ‘And remember, good boundary walls make good neighbours.’ This was delivered as a commandment to be obeyed at all costs, accompanied by a severe look from hooded eyes, and spoken in a solemn tone. He had got it off his chest, for this was really what he had come to say.
Then, putting his signature on this little get-together, he pulled down his cap, tapped his dog with his crook, and walked away. No handshake, no goodbye.
‘A few barriers to be broken down there,’ said Jack.
‘Was he being friendly?’
‘With a double-edged sword.’
Late in the afternoon we walked the length of the stream that ran through our land. It needed to be dredged, the banks trampled down where cattle and sheep had crossed. Water overflowed into the fields in several places, causing boggy swamps. The stream, never more than two feet wide, was partially blocked with clumps of reeds and water grasses, reducing the flow to no more than a trickle. I wondered what our neighbour below us, Hughie Catchpole, thought about it. Surely it reduced his supply? Why had it been allowed to get into such a state of neglect?
Jack and I stood in front of the bathroom mirror putting the finishing touches to our appearance, wanting to create the right impression for Eryl. If there was one thing I knew about my mother-in-law, she liked people coming for supper properly dressed.
Our shirts were still creased from lying unpacked in a suitcase, so we covered them under V-neck pullovers, minus ties. I had found a pair of corduroy trousers. Jack, as he had done when we went to the solicitors, rubbed Brylcreem into his hair. It was the best we could do.
Eryl met us at the front door with a look of cold indifference. I thought she was going to tell us that the tradesmen’s entrance was round at the back.
We all sat at the dining room table, watching Gwyn expertly carve the roast pork. Eryl made no eye contact with me, simply pushing the mustard and gravy in my direction when required, but Gwyn was relaxed and friendly and keen to hear about our first impressions of Dyffryn. He was well aware of the scale of our undertaking, and said he admired our sense of adventure. Eryl kept her conversation as much as she could with Ros, speaking in her mother tongue, but after Gwyn whispered something to her she switched to English, asking Jack if he had any farming experience, making the point that she knew I hadn’t. She shook her head when Jack said absolutely none, murmuring under her breath, ‘How are Ros and the children going to survive?’
Gwyn tried to lift the mood, making light of it, saying that the challenges ahead would excite any young man. The idea did nothing to put a smile on Eryl’s face, and she turned her full attention to her grandchildren.
After we had eaten, Jack and I sat in the sitting room with Gwyn.
‘Your enterprise is something I would have relished years ago,’ he said. There was about him a self-assuredness gained through his own journey. It was good to know he would be close by.
I didn’t mention our meeting with Gethin Hughes, or the letter that Daphne Musto had left. Both made me feel uneasy. Maybe Gethin was setting the tone, making it clear that in our future dealings with him it would be he who had the upper hand.
When we were leaving, Jack gave Eryl a kiss on the cheek and Ros whispered in my ear, ‘I’ll be glad when we’re sleeping together again.’ I saw in Eryl’s eyes a disapproving look for the affection I was showing her daughter.
Three weeks later, with various designs of Laura Ashley wallpaper in every room, we brought in the last of the furniture. Ros and the twins were moving into the house at last. Happy as I was, I realised that I was going to have to make some adjustments. I’d slipped back into living as a single man. Old habits had resurfaced in areas that required self-discipline, such as personal cleanliness, shaving every day, changing my clothes, not being lazy. You don’t have one more glass of wine, one more roll-up last thing at night, when your wife is there to remind you.
I was glad it was all over, that Jack and I had actually managed to get the wallpaper on the walls. From time to time the whole thing had become a slapstick comedy, but the house finally felt like a home.
Gwyn and Eryl carried the twins across the threshold, while Ros rode me piggy back into the sitting room. A log fire blazed in the hearth. Jack brought in a bottle of champagne, and we toasted ‘a happy future’. It was the first time I had seen Eryl with a smile on her face; maybe she was beginning to believe in us.
The only major job left was the installation of the coal-fired Aga. Ros and the twins had gone to Harlech for the day, where Gwyn and Eryl had a house close to the golf course, overlooking the sea. Ros was uneasy about leaving me to oversee the operation; they were going to have to remove the kitchen door and some of the wall to get the thing on to a concrete platform that had been laid directly behind the fireplace in the sitting room. They had to get a flue through a two-foot thick wall and push it halfway up the chimney to get the necessary draw. I told her not to worry; I always did, being the habitual optimist.
The Aga Team, for that’s what was printed on the back of their overalls, were actually four Liverpudlians, three of them obese, the fourth a diminutive chap known as the Think Tank. He had a high academic forehead and heavy black-rimmed National Health spectacles, and was as bald as a university intellectual. I could tell he was the mastermind of Aga installation. In a reassuringly soft voice he told me why a brain was needed as well as brawn for the successful fitting of these hernia-inducing monsters.
Think Tank, actually called Malcolm, was someone you could put your trust in. So Jack and I let them get on with it. We had bought a chicken coop out of Exchange & Mart and now had to go to Pant Glas to pick up six point-of-lay Rhode Island Red pullets.
‘Do you think they know what they’re doing?’ I asked Jack, as I lowered the back seats of the Traveller, chucking in a wooden crate to carry the chicks.
‘Yes, I’m sure. They’re registered, aren’t they?’
When we came back down the drive a couple of hours later, the team were in a huddle in front of the house. Not many things in the universe move more slowly than an Aga making its way along a low-loader, held tight by a steel cable. We watched this tedious unwinding inch by inch, the alignment critical, rolling across a series of scaffolding poles which had to be positioned precisely at the end of the sloping ramp. Finally they pushed the thing towards the kitchen by moving poles from stern to bow as it moved forward, eventually managing to dock the leviathan. It took nearly an hour. There was an eruption of cheers and backslapping followed by cans of beer and a well-earned fag break.
Malcolm maintained his aloofness, and rather like a priest leading a couple to the altar beckoned Jack and me to stand in front of him so he could read aloud to us from the instruction book as if it were the Bible, taking us painstakingly through the workings of the Aga, giving emphasis to the dos and don’ts in the way one could imagine Moses delivering the Ten Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not use any other coal but anthracite.’
Later that evening, as the sun set over the Irish Sea, Malcolm with dustpan and brush tidied up behind them. He shook my hand, and off they went to begin a new job in Chester the next morning.
When Ros returned I told her there was no need to be concerned. The whole thing had been completed without a hitch.
Every day since Gethin’s visit we had made time to walk the boundary walls, the size of the undertaking soon coming home to us. Every few yards there were gaps where stones had fallen. So began the work of rebuilding. Our hands were still soft and blistered easily; torn fingernails were patched with strips of Elastoplast. The biggest headache was finding the right stone to sit comfortably next to another. We carried on regardless of the weather, determined to see the job done. We were single-minded, and Hughie Catchpole, seeing us buffeted in a force eight gale, staggered across his fields shouting to us, ‘You’re fools. Pneumonia can take a man at any age.’
Hughie had, I’m sure, not a hair on his body. Certainly not on h
is head, and this was of his choosing, for he was clean shaven, his smooth face glowing not from Welsh summers but from harsh winds and sea air. He had a gold tooth and eyes the colour of walnuts. A once broken nose made an uneven ridge down the middle of his face. After years on the Old Holborn he spoke as if constantly needing to clear his throat, guttural and hoarse. He was tall, lean as a javelin, and married to a porcelain doll several inches shorter called Myfanwy. She compensated for her lack of height by wearing dresses with large floral patterns and lots of make-up. Wellington boots did not compliment her or raise her stature. But there was a glint in her eye; a strange sexiness oozed from her. She had a naughty look, and wore her hair in an old-fashioned style with curls that flicked back upon her shoulders. They were indeed a strange couple.
Once, when I was talking to Hughie, he told me one of his cows had just tested positive for brucellosis. ‘You know, it’s a big loss to bear. Cows don’t grow on bloody trees.’
Midway through this sentence Myfanwy came over and handed him a chicken, and without giving it a second look he wrung its neck.
‘I’m on a short fuse today. One down with mastitis too,’ he said, passing the dead bird back to his wife. And in what seemed like a long embrace, she held it to her breast until its wings quietened down, its broken neck flopping over the crook of her elbow. She stayed with us, plucking the still warm body, feathers floating around her head. She seemed short of some of the vital ingredients, but Hughie showed affection towards her, picking feathers from her hair.
‘I’ll be in my pocket again, having to buy in another heifer. You never get ahead in this game.’
They had a son, Bryn, a dishevelled teenager who liked sitting in hay barns or leaning against gates, spitting into the wind and aiming his catapult at the arses of any livestock within range. He wasted his time grievously, targeting the geese and chickens in the yard. Jack and I watched him as we repaired the boundary walls. After asking us three times for a roll-up, which we refused, he stomped off, unaware that the catapult had dropped from his back pocket. We hid it in a stone wall, pleased that this small act would prevent some pain in the animal world.
Of the many people who turned up at the door in those early days, all claiming to have skills we needed, Harry Thomas proved to be our man. In his late twenties, he had a muscular build. Under a denim jacket he wore only a T-shirt even in midwinter. He had thick dark hair undulating from a high wave that fell to the back of his head. It was neatly combed, and I imagined some time was spent on it, especially first thing in the morning before he made a public appearance. He had the looks of an American pop singer, showing himself off by removing his jacket to reveal a tattooed forearm: He who dares wins. Jack and I liked him; he was easy-going, and seemed left over from the 1950s. He could have been Tony Curtis; somehow his Welsh accent didn’t go with his American looks or tight jeans with six-inch turn-ups. He had the light, agile step of a ballet dancer or featherweight boxer.
‘On the cheap and for cash’ was his motto. ‘Of course, I can give a written estimate if that’s what you prefer.’ He dismissed the competition by simply saying, ‘To be fair to the man, he’s not really an electrician’ – or plumber, or mechanic – ‘but to be fair to the man he only does it part time,’ and decent as they were, he would not recommend them. That’s how he convinced us, by diminishing those who had come before. ‘Oh, him,’ he would say, ‘but to be fair to the man, he’s not got the accreditation.’ But Harry was, as he put it, an all-rounder. After we asked him what exactly an all-rounder was, he gave us a long list of trades he had mastered, including tractor driving, roofing, carpentry and plumbing, and assured us that he was a ‘bloody good sparky’ and a butcher as well. ‘Also, I breed sheepdogs in my spare time.’
Having biked up from the village, he replaced his cycle clips, dragged a comb once more through his hair, leant over the drop handlebars of his multi-geared racer, raised his arse out of the saddle and with the flashiness of a good-looking cyclist riding in the Tour de France disappeared up the drive and out of sight.
‘What did you think of him?’ I asked Jack.
‘Well, to be fair to the man, let’s give him a chance to prove he’s as good as he says he is.’
Gradually, at the end of each day, jobs were being completed and Ros would announce, usually at the supper table, that the house was now nearly finished. Yet she always found something that still needed to be done, bagging Harry as he dismounted at eight in the morning, before he had even removed his bicycle clips, and cornering him with a list.
‘Just want him for a few finishing touches,’ is how she put it.
I thought she meant no more than putting on a final coat of paint here and there, but one of the ‘finishing touches’ led to a row between us. No matter how much she asserted that we had discussed it, I could not recall any conversation about opening up the fireplace in the sitting room. As far as I was concerned it was a unilateral decision. It took Harry three days to chip away the plaster and reveal the old stone hearth, big enough to roast a pig in. It was almost a room in itself, a huge gaping hole, but Ros wanted log fires to warm the long winter nights. We had to get a steel lintel to bear the weight of stone. Then Harry was off to Groeslon, to the blacksmith, to order a dog grate, and none of this was cheap. Ros and I argued. ‘We’ve got five thousand pounds in the bank. That’s to start a farm,’ I barked at her. After a week I slipped Harry a hundred pounds in cash. He told me Ros wanted draught excluders fitted to the doors, and the flagstones in the kitchen to be pointed.
We thinned out the larch trees, stacking a pile of logs in the hovel opposite the house. We disinfected all the outbuildings, and Harry, having at last finished all the work Ros wanted done, now began hanging doors, replacing tiles on the barn roof, and putting glass into the empty frame of a steel building where I hoped to house sows and rear piglets. Meanwhile we took delivery of fencing posts that would protect the vegetable garden behind the house. Armed with a crowbar which we speared into the topsoil, we hammered in our posts to a depth of nine inches. We had tossed a coin, for the law of averages dictates the inevitability of the odd mis-hit, that the one on the receiving end of the sledgehammer would not be able to avoid the excruciating pain as a pool of blood slowly congealed like black ink under a fingernail. The hit was followed by damning, cursing, and running round in circles after the brain had sent out its agonising message. I am sure our yells carried on the wind to Gethin Hughes, telling him those English brothers were at it again. It was only after Harry came over and threw us a pair of protective gloves that we realised some of the pain could have been prevented.
Each night, as the blood pulsed in our swollen fists, we sank our hands into a basin of cold water and Dettol. But the real inconvenience of these self-inflicted injuries was the difficulty in rolling a cigarette. We had worn away our fingerprints and so had to resort to a rolling machine, something we hadn’t done since we first started smoking.
However, the job was only half done. Now we had to staple on yards of rabbit-proof fencing, below a single strand of barbed wire. Harry started us off, reassuring us we’d soon be experts.
‘Duw, boys, after you’ve done it once, you’ll have the knack.’
Jack and I watched him as a cold rain swept in across the fields. In a matter of moments he had secured wire mesh to the first post, using staples he held in his mouth, banging them in rhythmically, a hard hit at first, then a second to see each one home. Rapid, neat movements expending a minimum of energy.
‘There,’ he said, unrolling the whole length of the mesh and holding it against the posts. ‘Three staples to each post working from the top down. It’s child’s play.’
So Jack filled his mouth with staples, I knelt beside him, pushing the mesh against each stake and off we went, at a snail’s pace to begin with, but moving up a gear when we found it easier handing each other staples rather than having a mouth full of metal. By lunchtime we were bent double, walking into the house as if heavily constipat
ed, our backs completely seized. After we had eaten we massaged each other with Deep Heat, which loosened us up enough to believe we should at least try to finish the job.
It took us five days to fence round the vegetable garden. Gwyn gave us the once over, deciding that torn muscles and exposure to the cold wind had done the damage. He thought we should each wear a corset, to add strength to the lower back. Jack and I agreed to this in the strictest confidence; we both thought it wasn’t quite the right image for two young men to be wearing undergarments associated with middle-aged women.
Yet another job was added to the list: to put flues in the chimneys on each end of the house. Whenever there was heavy rain, water would run down into the fire, causing the logs to spit and hiss. If someone opened the door, creating a through draught, a huge cloud of smoke and steam engulfed us, as if we had suddenly become a family of Norwegians sitting in a sauna. We seemed to be on a treadmill of running repairs. This was the price you paid for living up here, exposed to the elements.
We either learned from experience or got Harry to sort things out, but we were reluctant to do the latter too often. One reason was money, but also what the hell were we doing here if we couldn’t take charge of such matters? We were half asleep by eight in the evening, flopped in chairs like a couple of puppets. Every night I asked Ros to massage the small of my back. Must be some genetic weakness.
‘This farming is a hard lark,’ I told her.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and you haven’t even got any livestock yet, apart from the chickens.’
Gethin Hughes came over one morning, ‘A quiet word in your ears, boys.’ I wondered what problem he had uncovered. He put me on edge; every time his name cropped up I thought of Daphne Musto’s note. I was ready for the veiled warning, the barbed comment. But no, I was wrong. He’d come to give advice, telling us to take advantage of an opportunity that had arisen.