Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  ‘Not a word,’ I promised.

  Later, when I caught up with Jack and Ros, I told them everything and swore them to secrecy. We agreed that it would have been a terrible embarrassment for Dafydd if word ever got out. He might even have lost his job, so the secret stayed between the three of us.

  That night we listened to The Band, drinking whisky; we were all celebrating in some way. Jack was sitting with Meg on his lap, Hank Jones having brought her over from Waen Fawr that afternoon. She was mostly grey, with white circles around her eyes. Now my brother had what he wanted I wondered what changes we’d see in him.

  At nine thirty the phone rang. It was Harry, saying we should fatten up some turkeys for Christmas.

  ‘There’s money in fresh turkeys,’ he said. When I reminded him it was only June he replied, ‘Forward planning, to be fair to you, you’ve got to have them in by August.’

  He went on about free range prices, building a run. He would slaughter and pluck them. But I didn’t have a conversation in me. I kept seeing that lamb somersaulting into the front of the Imp.

  ‘Tomorrow, Harry,’ I said, and left it at that, while everyone around me was singing ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’.

  4

  Gilts, Vindaloo and Dave

  We finished haymaking at Dyffryn in the traditional way, propped up against the last remaining bales in the heat of a big bright July sun. Dehydrated, shirtless, our arms and shoulders scratched from lifting hay bales onto the trailer to be driven away and stacked in the barn.

  Ros joined us, bringing cold beers and lemonade, sandwiches and cakes. The twins toddled around throwing grass at everyone, while Myfanwy produced sweets with a sleight of hand that left them mystified. Even Hughie entertained them with strange noises, I’m sure helped by loose-fitting dentures, sounding like a drum roll, quietly at first, then reaching a climax. Jobber barked incessantly until Hughie had completed his party piece, which he finished by sticking his tongue out and licking the end of his nose.

  Gethin had cut the hay on our Massey, hiring us his baler. We owed him £120. We had rented Hughie’s trailer for two days, which squared the deal with him, as Jack and I had done at least that much to help him over at Llwyndu Canol. There was a friendly atmosphere, and for the first time I felt relaxed with our neighbours. It made me even more curious about why Daphne Musto had left that note. Today, with the work done, they engaged in long conversations with Ros, broken by swathes of laughter. Jack and I hadn’t a clue what was being discussed, but Ros translated snippets about the men’s childhoods, haymaking with their fathers before the machine age, the working horses, men stacking the hay with pitchforks. Even now, the hay on the steep slopes where you couldn’t take a tractor was scythed. Suddenly their conversation dropped in tone as they swigged down more beers, becoming serious.

  ‘What are you all talking about?’ I asked Ros.

  ‘Arfon, how distant he is since his wife died.’

  It was Ros they wanted to talk to, so Jack and I swung the children over our shoulders and walked with Meg to the far gate, where Jack was going to show us the progress she was making. After he told her to stay, she lay down obediently, watching us walk away. With ears pricked, not moving a muscle, she waited as the distance grew; surely at any moment she would rush forward to join us. But not until Jack called did she scramble to her feet and break into a lolloping stride. Then, on the command ‘Lie down’, she stopped instantly.

  ‘God, Jack,’ I said, ‘that’s impressive. And she’s only six months old.’

  We left her there and walked on, not looking back until we were out of sight. Then Jack summoned her and again she came rushing to his side.

  In the morning, Dewi Hughes, the ‘flying postman of Penygroes’, one of the sarcastic nicknames bestowed upon this likeable man, pulled up outside the house, sounding his horn to announce his arrival. His post office van was caked in dry mud and in the dirt across the back doors someone had written Speedy Gonzalez, for Dewi was not noted for punctuality and it was impossible to predict when the post would be delivered. Also known as the ‘singing monk’, he had a heartiness about him, an abundance of good humour. He had a bald pate, fringed with a fine band of white, floaty hair, like the hem of a frayed curtain. His voice seemed to roll out of him, coming from the deep. It was not hard to imagine him in a habit, singing psalms in a monastery. He reminded me of Friar Tuck. His eyesight was poor, but he didn’t wear glasses, holding the envelopes close to his eyes and scanning them slowly before putting them in your hand. He was a member of the eisteddfod committee, dedicated to the preservation of the Welsh language. The postman’s alter ego kept a few Welsh blacks on the undulating slopes above Llanllyfni. Unable to make hay, he liked to buy off the field as early as possible and pay in cash. He drove a hard bargain, backed up with a wad of notes: ‘Instant bliss!’

  He could smell our hay on the wind, said we should talk about my selling him a couple of tons. I shrugged my shoulders to show my indifference, a mannerism that now came naturally.

  ‘I’ll be back to take this up with you again, my boy,’ he said, passing me a hand-written letter and an official-looking envelope: my driving licence – thankfully I’d passed the test in Caernarfon a week ago. ‘And besides, I’ve put in a good word for you to join the FUW [Farmers’ Union of Wales] on preferential rates. We don’t allow just anybody in, you know. You’ll owe me favours, you know, all these doors I open for you.’

  That said, he was off, with only one thought in his mind: he was softening me up to get the best price he could. Dewi was a staunch Plaid Cymru man, a party activist who passed among the community putting over his point of view not only on politics, but on the arts as well. He held forth sitting in the kitchens on his round, drinking tea and eating cakes, hence the size of his girth and irregularity of the post.

  Jack, who was never without Meg at heel, told me he had seen an advert in the newsagent’s offering a Land Rover for sale, £750 o.n.o., over in Nebo. We needed one urgently, for the Traveller had come to its final resting place, wedged between a lean-to and the old milking parlour. Harry said it still had some value, that we should get a few quid for spare parts.

  ‘Put it in Exchange & Mart, see who bites.’

  I had always thought it a woman’s car; in all our time in Wales I had never seen one on the roads being driven by a man. So we paid for a couple of inserts. ‘There’s always someone out there wanting something,’ was Harry’s optimistic take on things.

  He had persuaded us to rear two dozen turkeys for the Christmas market, certain there was good money to be made from free range and fresh.

  ‘Good God, man, your father-in-law could sell them all to his friends.’

  I hadn’t thought of Gwyn as a turkey salesman.

  ‘Use your assets, man.’

  It didn’t take me long to realise that all Harry’s new ideas required capital expenditure. We needed to build a run, which involved buying in rolls of fox-proof wire and eight-foot posts that would have to be creosoted, all up front. The birds would also need to be housed, so Harry was on the look-out for a second-hand shed. We were spending more money than we were making.

  I found in my pocket the letter Dewi had delivered earlier as we drove over to Nebo to meet Tom Felce, who was selling the Land Rover.

  ‘Open it, Jack.’

  It was from Rob Marshall, a friend of ours we hadn’t heard from in over two years. He was one of those who, following the life-changing experiences of LSD, had gone east to India. I had known a few who’d gone that way, who’d travelled the spiritual highway, opened Huxley’s Doors of Perception, been influenced by Alan Watts and Herman Hesse, and changed their lives. To help Rob get the money together, I had bought the contents of his single room in Shepherd’s Bush.

  ‘I won’t be needing any of this where I’m going.’

  I gave him fifty quid for the lot. After raising a couple of hundred from his family, he was off. I hadn’t thought we would see him again.
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  ‘What’s he up to?’ I asked as we pulled into a driveway populated by gnomes peeping out through the Leylandii. Others were holding fishing rods around a garden pond.

  ‘He wants to come and see us.’

  A little woman made her way from the bungalow holding a rolling pin covered in flour, wearing a plastic apron with a picture of Bambi splayed out on ice.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to see Tom. He’s expecting you – he’s around the back, smoking,’ she said.

  Behind the house was a black-timbered shed surrounded by rows of herring, hanging from coat hooks on aluminium rails. Smoke billowed from the chimney, spiralling upwards to merge with the low cloud that drifted over the hills. We knocked on the door and eventually a figure appeared. It could have been Count Dracula walking out of a pea-souper fog. He was completely dressed in black: black raincoat, black bobble hat and a black roll-neck pullover, finished off with black plastic gloves and black wellingtons. Smoke engulfed us as he introduced himself.

  ‘I’m Tom,’ he announced. He was English, but I couldn’t determine the accent. He smelled of kippers, which wasn’t surprising, and wood. He was very woody, and nearby in what used to be an old railway wagon were piles of wood shavings. Tom proved to be an interesting man: self-employed, having taken over his father’s enterprise. Every Wednesday he drove to Birmingham fish market in his Land Rover, leaving at two in the morning and bringing back his ‘catch’, which he’d bid for amongst a crowd of fishmongers. On Thursday he gutted and filleted it, and on Friday sold what he didn’t keep back for smoking to the restaurants and hotels around Llandudno. He was doing well, so had bought a Transit van and decked it out with shelves to give it the look of a professional business.

  ‘The heater doesn’t work,’ he said, handing us the keys to the Land Rover, ‘but she’s steady and reliable.’

  Jack put Meg in the back and we set off for a run down to Dinas Dinlle beach. The steering was heavy as I crunched through the gears, having to push the clutch to the floor. She took up the width of the narrow lanes and when we met a tractor head on it took several attempts before I could get her into reverse.

  At Dinas I put her into low ratio and slowly drove over the stones and pebbles along the beach. I could feel her sinking into the loose shingle, but she kept going, not stalling once.

  ‘Hey, Jack, now we really are a couple of farmers,’ I said, as Meg stood with her front legs on the tailboard, having her first sight of the sea. ‘Have a go.’ I stopped a few yards from where the waves rolled in over a thick band of seaweed. Meg was off before we even noticed she was gone, chasing after a pair of cormorants. With the noise of the crashing sea and the wind, Jack couldn’t bring her back. Not until he put two fingers to his mouth and whistled, a piercing note that would have shattered a wine glass.

  ‘Wow.’ I was astonished. ‘How did you learn to do that?’

  ‘With a little help from Gethin and a lot of practice.’

  ‘Show me,’ I said.

  ‘It’s simple, once you know how. You just roll your tongue back till it touches the top of your mouth, then put these two fingers either side and blow.’

  But I couldn’t. All I managed was a hissing sound like a kettle boiling. I remembered how I used to mock Jack’s attempts to emulate the shepherds on One Man and His Dog and felt slightly guilty, but fortunately Jack was more interested in reprimanding Meg than in raking over old grievances.

  ‘No . . . do you hear me? No,’ as Meg sat looking up at him.

  ‘She knows,’ I said. ‘Those eyes are asking to be forgiven.’

  After Jack’s ten minutes at the wheel, I opened the throttle and sped along the beach road, my foot flat to the boards, managing to reach fifty m.p.h., but that was her limit.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked. ‘Shall we buy it?’

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty’s a bit steep . . . let’s knock him down a hundred.’ It was now ingrained in us never to offer the asking price.

  Tom stood his ground on seven hundred. Jack and I stuck our hands in our pockets, casting dubious glances. We turned to walk away, Jack saying, ‘We can’t meet you on that.’

  We’d only taken a few steps when Tom said, ‘Are you paying cash?’

  Jack and I looked at each other. ‘Yes, we can do cash, but hold on a minute. You’ve got to allow us something on the heater not working.’

  So we got her for £625. Not a bad deal, and Tom, having already splashed out on his Transit, had recouped some of his outlay. We got on well with Tom, and as he searched for the log book we were joined by his mother in the bungalow. She it was who collected the gnomes that were dotted around the house, sitting on either side of the fireplace, perching on windowsills, some acting as door stops.

  ‘It’s my hobby,’ she said. ‘Once you start collecting you can’t stop. I’ll do anything for a gnome.’ I asked her what attracted her to them in the first place. ‘Oh, I think the likeness to my husband.’ That I couldn’t believe: the things were eighteen inches high and made of concrete.

  As Tom showed us the paperwork we talked about the deals we could do; swapping eggs and vegetables for fish seemed like a good idea. There was no fishmonger in Penygroes, and the Coop only sold frozen cod. So we agreed that on Fridays he would call in on his way back from Llandudno, bringing what was left in his van in exchange for our home-grown fresh vegetables. The idea of bartering goods always appealed to me. There was more character to it than handing over money. Ros was delighted that she could add fresh fish to our diet.

  ‘We need to find a bee-keeper next.’

  ‘That’s it, all done,’ announced Harry, having completed the last of the farrowing pens.

  We were ready to take the six gilts from Josh Hummel. We had decided to house them together for a month in one building that had a large exercise area, to let them acclimatise. Then, as they came on heat, we’d take them to the boar, and during pregnancy move them to wooden pig arks in the lower fields. Most of the land down there was rough scrub, boggy with a lot of gorse, ideal for pigs. Meanwhile, Josh had selected a young boar with an outstanding pedigree. I didn’t doubt him; why should I? He was the man with the reputation to lose. He recommended Crosfields as a supplier of concentrates and asked the local rep to get in touch to set me up as an account customer. At last, we were there. The pigs were coming.

  ‘Hey! Isn’t that Rob?’ I shouted to Jack.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Opening the gate.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He was carrying a rucksack on his back, looking as if he had walked from India.

  ‘Why don’t the Welsh pick up hitchhikers?’ he said, throwing his arms around us.

  ‘You look like a tramp,’ I said.

  ‘More like a beggar, all tattered and torn.’

  ‘Hey! I never thought we’d see you again!’

  ‘Well I’m back. What a journey. Things were fine leaving London – two lifts got me to Capel Curig. Nothing after that, just farmers in pickups and tractors. Sheep on the road slowed us down. Then the chap who gave me a lift from Betws-y-Coed kept stopping and talking to everyone we passed. The only thing I overtook was the guy pulling a freezer down your farm track.’

  And sure enough, as we spoke, a lone figure struggled through the gate, pushing a two-wheeled trolley and bumping along the drive with the freezer Ros had ordered.

  ‘Duw, boys, I hope I haven’t buggered it up. The motors on these things are bloody sensitive. They gave me a seven-tonner. It doesn’t have the lock to turn down your track,’ he wheezed, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea? I turned fifty last week.’

  As we sat in the kitchen he poured out the woeful story of his life (a failed business, a collapsed lung, a painful divorce); meanwhile Rob rummaged through his rucksack and handed round beedis, little Indian cigarettes wrapped in a leaf.

  ‘Can you get stoned on it? I’m Cledwyn Ap Jones, by the way.’

  ‘It’s herbal,’ said Rob.
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  It was an unsatisfying smoke. It burned down to your lips in one drag. It didn’t seem to have a nicotine hit, the only thing that makes smoking worthwhile.

  ‘Thanks, Rob, but I think I’ll stick to Golden Virginia.’

  Ros walked into the kitchen, her hands thick with earth, holding a tray of seedlings, her hair wild under a loose scarf.

  ‘Rob! Oh, how wonderful to see you. Sorry I can’t put my arms round you, but give me a kiss. Let me go and get cleaned up. I want to hear everything. I’ll be back; wait for me.’

  ‘Anyway, as I was saying . . .’ Cledwyn would have continued on his lamentable monologue, but then from his rucksack Rob produced a collection of miniature brass figures engaged in Kama Sutra gymnastics, which immediately distracted him. ‘That’s not possible,’ he said, examining one of the trinkets from every angle. ‘No, that’s not possible. For a start, the chap’s got three legs. It is a leg, isn’t it?’

  But before this mystery could be untangled, an orange Marina pulled up. Meg jumped onto the windowsill, barking, letting us know a stranger had arrived.

  Cledwyn told Rob he could sell his figures in the pub. ‘How many have you got?’

  ‘I’m not interested. They’re gifts for friends.’

  A man appeared at the door wearing a trilby hat, and a Gannex raincoat of the type made famous by Harold Wilson. He introduced himself with a floppy handshake and a smile that showed a missing tooth.

  ‘I’m Evan Evans.’

  ‘Good heavens, it’s Evan Evans,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t heard that before.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . who are you?’

  ‘I’m the rep from Crosfields. Josh Hummel asked me to pay you a visit.’

  So Evan Evans joined our little soirée. As he removed his hat and coat he looked at me suspiciously, his nose twitching like a rabbit. ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘A blend of Indian herbs,’ said Rob.