Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  ‘Do you have a deep freeze?’

  ‘Yes, half empty at the moment. Why?’

  Twenty minutes later the deal was done. I’d got a reconditioned Bosch with a year’s warranty, he a whole porker for his freezer. Another successful transaction, bartering at its best, pleasing both of us. As Lysta and I drove home, after she had given up trying to play ‘Frère Jacques’ on her recorder, for the road was bumpy, she brought up the subject of her pocket money, telling me that twenty pence was a lot less than some of the other girls got. She didn’t ask for more, not directly, but if she did extra work, could she be paid for it?

  ‘I want to get a pound a week, Dad.’

  ‘That’s quite a lot, Lysta.’

  ‘I know, but I need to save up.’

  ‘What are you saving up for?’

  ‘Dad, it’s a secret. Don’t make me tell you.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure we can arrange something. Let me talk to Mum.’

  Coming into Dyffryn when the sun was setting you could not help but stop and stare at the opaque cloud formations folding over one another, like high waves tumbling in a sea of sky, while the mind’s eye invented the faces of Greek gods, or stampeding animals rushing across a blue desert. Lysta knew this game well.

  ‘What can you see?’ I asked her.

  ‘I can see Taid’s face. He’s looking down on us.’ Maybe she could, but we didn’t talk about it. She got excited as Moss came running towards us.

  Mrs Mathias at Banc-y-Celyn thought she was trying her luck until I agreed to swap a shoulder of lamb for her old cast-iron bath. She wanted a leg, but it wasn’t worth it. I knew she would have to pay someone to take it away. It was just what we needed to cure the lamb skins in. It was another idea that I’d come up with. I’d researched it in a book from the library called The Curing of Sheepskins, and although there seemed to be a lot to it, Ros agreed that we should give it a go. We were wasting an asset. We currently got no more than a few pence for skins from FMC, who sold our fleeces to a woollen mill for a pittance. Jack wasn’t interested in the idea at all. After he had done the shearing, backbreaking work even for a young man, he told me to forget about it. ‘Look at the state of them,’ he said, all torn and knotted with burrs and dirt, caked-in dried dung around their rear ends.

  ‘Stop always looking for ways to make more money, when it’s best to get rid of them with as little effort as possible.’

  That was the difference between me and my brother, he contented as a shepherd, me always sniffing an opportunity. When I brought the cast-iron bath back in the Land Rover it took four of us to carry it into the barn.

  The first thing to do was to scrape away the actual muscular layer on the underside of the skin using a serrated knife. After nearly an hour Seth needed a feed so Ros left me to it. It was laborious work, but eventually it was done. The fleece was pretty dirty, so as Ros wasn’t around to see me I ran the Hoover up and down it. One has to improvise; there was no mention of this in the book. I then soaked the sheepskin in alum, covering it completely and, returning to the instructions, left it for six days.

  Harry disapproved of this latest venture, saying it was time-consuming, and none of the locals would buy a sheepskin. I told him that the real potential lay in finding someone who could make sheepskin jackets. There was a huge market for them in London, down the Portobello Road. We could dye them purple, sell them to the hippies.

  Dewi sat in the kitchen eating a slice of bara brith. His new spectacles, which magnified his eyes, gave him the look of a bushbaby. He was passing Sam and Lysta photographs of himself dressed as a druid, sitting on a golden throne. A far cry from being a postman who drove a mud-splattered van. Other photos showed him white-robed, at the Llangollen Eisteddfod, followed by a procession of acolytes. It was then he told me that Arfon had been taken to the cottage hospital in Caernarfon. ‘All collapsed in and fatigued’ was how Dewi described him. ‘The man can’t weigh more than a sack of grain.’

  ‘Who will look after the livestock at Henbant?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a cousin over in Beaumaris; he’ll be the one who tidies up the mess.’

  I couldn’t imagine Arfon recovering; his days were done with. It saddened me to think of him facing a lonely death. I knew that day at Henbant would remain with me for ever.

  Rob interrupted us, telling me to come with him, that he had made a remarkable discovery.

  I was about to follow Rob up the drive when I noticed that Frieda was not leaning over the gate. She was always there, keeping an eye on things. So I went to look for her and found her licking her bull calf, which had slithered out into the grass, a dull grey colour with patches of white on its flanks. She gave out a series of gentle moos as I stroked her back. She had just got on with it, not needing help from anyone. ‘Well done, girl.’

  Rob was waiting with a weaned sow standing quietly beside him. ‘Watch this.’ In his hand he held a rope, secured by a slipknot to one of the sow’s back trotters. ‘If only we had found this out years ago. The misery it would have saved us.’

  He whacked her ham and she walked on, not bolting or charging away as they usually did, but with a steady stride that was easy to keep up with.

  ‘See what I mean? It’s amazing, all controlled by just a tug on the rope.’

  ‘How do you turn round?’ I asked.

  ‘I haven’t worked out that bit yet. But watch, I can stop her.’ He tugged back on the rope, keeping it taut, and she stopped in an instant. ‘What do you think of that?’

  All that energy we had spent chasing after pigs, when they could be subdued by a single piece of rope round a trotter.

  ‘Rob, I don’t know what to say. I want to kiss you.’

  ‘You can, but not on the lips.’

  My mother telephoned, inviting herself up for supper. We were enjoying a spell of weather when we were hardly in the house. Even at twilight the air was warm, a song thrush giving its all in a larch tree.

  Dinah, with her Cypriot experiences now behind her, had brought some wine. It was Thursday and Harry joined us before he butchered the meat.

  ‘We’ve got three more days of this, then the heavens will open,’ he said.

  We carried a rug out into the field in front of the house. Jack, who could see us through his army binoculars, came down with Meg, and there we lay sprawled out in our shirtsleeves, watching the abstract forms, random shapes of clouds, floating like a white hedge across the horizon. Black-tipped birds scribbled a signature along a ribbon of light. We ate our home-grown salad, savoured the taste of Ros’s bread, beetroot and mayonnaise, the home-made pâté, baked potatoes with melting butter. Seth sat on Ros’s lap like a baby Buddha, while Sam and Lysta ran around in circles, throwing dandelion heads, holding buttercups beneath our chins.

  ‘You like butter.’

  We chatted on, our heads in the grass, carefree, as the evening slid away, feeling that the night would be for ever fixed in the memory. Maybe it was because we were all together, friends and family. But my heart was low as I thought of Gwyn.

  As the colours darkened a great splodge of sunlight glowed on the sea, theatrical but muted, as if curtains were about to close over the whole scene.

  We could hear the telephone ringing in the house.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Lysta.

  ‘No, I’ll go,’ said Sam.

  And they raced one another to answer it. Rob, still basking in his amazing discovery, teased Harry, asking him if he was aware of the ‘pig on a rope trick’.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s impressive, Harry, although I don’t think Rob will get a worldwide patent on it.’

  Harry was baffled, not having a clue what we were talking about.

  ‘Don’t worry yourself, we’ll show you tomorrow.’

  ‘Mum, it’s Nain [Grandmother] on the phone, she wants to talk to you,’ Lysta shouted.

  ‘I’ll ring her back in half an hour.’

  So we stayed until night fell, no one in a
hurry to go back into the house. My thoughts drifted to the continual interplay of life and death. Ros having brought a new life to us, Arfon who would not be around much longer. Frieda with her calf at foot. This is it, I thought, all of us stepping in and out, guests for a while here on this earth. As I gazed at the darkening sky, I started to sing Don McLean’s ‘Vincent’ while the day’s last light faded across a rippled sea.

  11

  Price Fixing

  Some friendships are like Guinness, they just don’t travel; where they were made is where they taste best and should always remain. Through the years at Dyffryn many people had come to stay with us, and waving them goodbye I knew they wouldn’t be returning. For who we were then was certainly not who we were now. We’d taken different roads, and the closeness formed in the 1960s at all-night parties, stoned in London bedsits, rock ’n’ rolling, was in the distant past.

  They came and hung around, wanting to smoke and listen to music into the early hours. Even long after we had gone to bed, they raved on downstairs. I resented it, because they had not moved on. We did smoke, but it never stopped us getting on with what needed to be done. For them it was a way of life. In the end I put a stop to the visits, and after five years at Dyffryn everyone we had known in our London days had faded away.

  This is what I said to Rob when he read out a letter from an old friend, a Scotsman who had lent him a kilt in Liechtenstein, as they hitchhiked around Europe back in ’67. Hamish had tracked him down, and wanted to come and stay for a few days. Rob remembered the hours stuck on lonely roads as the cars whizzed by ignoring him, no doubt because of his long-haired appearance. Hamish never waited more than a few minutes before he got a lift, putting this down to the kilt and sporran he wore. To prove his point he lent Rob his kilt for a day. It was Rob who was picked up, the talk in the car always about the kilt. So they became friends, travelling for three months from country to country, kilt-swapping as they went.

  ‘Long time ago,’ I said to Rob.

  In the letter was a telephone number for Rob to ring. In two weeks Hamish would make the journey from Fort William down to the mountains of North Wales.

  Meanwhile Tom and Agnetta were hatching plans, sounding us out about inviting people to come and camp for a long weekend to see what we were up to regarding self-sufficiency, our organic garden, my interest in bartering. I hadn’t realised how much this way of living interested them. The idea of forming a community of like-minded people appealed to them both, and when Agnetta inherited a large amount of money she started to get serious about it. She wanted to buy a farm, following the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. What did we think, would we have anything to offer? We shared the same philosophy, she said. I was noncommittal, whereas Ros was enthusiastic, keen to pursue the idea.

  When the Seaview Hotel in Llandudno ordered fifty pounds of sausages from us, the largest order we had ever taken, I dressed up for this special delivery, putting on a shirt and tie. Ros, who cut everyone’s hair, gave me a trim, and I had a shower before I left. It would be a disaster if I turned up smelling of pig.

  The hotel was fully booked for three days, with fifty-odd psychiatrists attending a conference on mental health in the family. Tom ’Tatoes had dropped our name, saying we produced the best quality meat in the whole of North Wales. It presented us with the opportunity to break into the hotel market. The margins were not as good as selling door to door, but they were still way above what we got on our meat contract with FMC.

  I had been told the owners of the Seaview, a husband and wife team called Graham and Wanda, were prompt payers but wanted a discount. So I gave them five per cent and they handed over a cheque for thirty-eight pounds there and then. I produced a leg of lamb free of charge, telling them that it was from our own flock, fattened on organic land in the hills above Penygroes. It did the trick; they were on the phone by the end of the week. I knew this breakthrough would lead to supplying other hotels in Llandudno.

  Off I went to pay my annual visit to Winford Hook. This time, with Ros’s help, I had sent the accounts on ahead of my appointment. When I entered his office, I was confident that I could deal with him. I had finely tuned my defence mechanisms, and only hoped I could stop myself from drifting off while listening to his dreary talk of accountancy. All was just the same in this timeless zone. The cat hadn’t aged, or moved from the fire grate, and the delicate one with the nervous disposition traipsed across the carpet in her slippers, holding the teacups with an expression of intense concentration. I emptied my saucer back into the cup. Old Winford Hook, with a weight of eyebrow, raised a look as if lifting up two giant caterpillars.

  ‘It has, I have to admit, been a good year for you,’ he said grudgingly.

  I let the pleasure wash over me, almost saying, ‘Sorry I couldn’t hear you. Could you say that again?’ As self-satisfaction welled up inside me, I stretched out my legs and folded my arms. All of a sudden I had become terribly relaxed. Was it because the tables had been turned?

  ‘Well, I’m not going into the nitty-gritty . . .’ but before he could finish I said, ‘Winford, please do. I want to hear the fine detail. Why has it been such a good year?’

  He sighed, not once but twice, and went back to sipping his tea, a long noisy sip, from the very edge of the cup.

  ‘Your margins have risen considerably, and of course you have reduced your overheads.’

  ‘Ah, that’s what I wanted to hear.’

  ‘But be careful, boy, more than ever have fallen by the wayside. The cock doesn’t crow for long.’ Slamming shut the ledger, he said, ‘You have made a profit of eleven thousand two hundred and eighty pounds.’

  ‘Hmm. Pretty good, don’t you think, Winford?’

  Then, predictably, he said, ‘The tax man cometh, my boy, the tax man cometh.’

  After leaving, I did what I always did when I found myself in Porthmadog. I went into the Cob record shop, this time knowing I could afford to spend a few quid, and bought LPs of JJ Cale, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton and Cat Stevens.

  When Ros came into the sitting room after saying goodnight to the children, I knew she had been crying.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘It’s Lysta, and that extra pocket money she wants.’

  Our daughter was saving up to buy her grandfather a pair of walking boots for his birthday. Gwyn had told her he needed some new ones, had jokingly said that since his retirement he would have to save up. The sadness of it was he was unlikely to see his next birthday.

  It had been arranged with Eryl that I could go and see him the following Sunday. He was now very tired, spending most of his time in his bedroom, reading between long periods of sleep. Eryl protected him from visitors and apart from relatives he saw no one. Ros, taking Seth with her, went to sit with him every day. We decided now to break the news to Sam and Lysta. Gloom hung over the house. The twins talked about their dying grandfather touchingly, asking those big questions about life after death, and what part Jesus was playing in the whole affair.

  ‘Surely,’ Lysta said, ‘he will be with Jesus, and will get well again, even though we won’t be able to see him?’

  Hamish arrived from Fort William, wearing not a kilt but tartan trousers. He had an abundance of red hair and heavily freckled skin; one could imagine that too much sun would burn him to a crisp. He did not have a harsh Glaswegian accent, but the soft lilt of a Highlander. On his back he carried a bulging rucksack and a rolled-up sleeping bag. He’d been on the road for three days, sleeping out under the stars.

  ‘This is a grand place,’ he said. ‘Rob’s given me the lowdown, and I want to muck in. I’m ready to work.’

  The following day Jack and I had arranged to drive over to a farm sale in Garndolbenmaen. Another farmer gone bankrupt, with all the equipment laid out in a field. As we arrived, the auctioneer’s hammer came down on £11,000, sold to Gwynthor Jones, who would apply for planning permission to add a wing to the house, put in a nice front lawn and sell it to someone looking for a holiday h
ome. A group of farmers walked around eyeing up the lots, agreeing not to bid against each other to keep prices low. One man’s loss was another man’s profit in these sell-offs. We knew many of the faces around us, most from our visits to Bryncir market. It was the first time we’d seen Gethin Hughes for months. He was there with others to fix the prices, but they kept their distance from Jack and me.

  We were after some troughs to feed the sheep, rather than sprinkling concentrates on the fields. We fed them only in the winter, after lambing. We had noticed how much food was lost through being trampled into the snow and mud. There were six troughs and we had put a ceiling price of three pounds on each. When the auctioneer eventually came to the lot, asking if he could hear ten pounds for six metal feed troughs, there was a stony silence before he said, ‘Come on, surely eight, come on, boys, who’ll start me at eight?’

  ‘Eight pounds,’ I said, and why not as an opening bid? But it didn’t go down well with Gethin and his crowd. They encircled Jack and me, letting us know that these troughs were theirs for ten pounds.

  ‘Back off, boy,’ one of them said, so close to my ear I could feel his breath.

  ‘Ten pounds,’ another shouted as they pushed against us, not using their hands but with the weight of their bodies, jostling us away.

  ‘Twelve pounds,’ I yelled but I could hear Gethin shouting in Welsh, and the auctioneer knocked down the lot to one of them. Then they broke away, moving on, bidding for certain lots, leaving others to fail to make a price at all.

  ‘I’m not going to let them get away with that. We can’t let them bully us and do nothing about it,’ I said to Jack.

  ‘We’re outnumbered.’

  Back in the Land Rover I was shaking so much I couldn’t put a roll-up together. I told Jack I was too angry to drive away.

  ‘Calm down. They’re not worth it, and besides, what good will come of it?’

  But I didn’t calm down, and before Jack knew it I was gone, charging through them as they counted out the cash, passing bundles of notes between them, settling side deals they had made with each other. I grabbed Gethin Hughes by the collar and threw him over the bonnet of a parked van.