Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  He was a conscript. Naturally. He didn’t believe in volunteering. And he didn’t like the Army, its drills and orders, and its insistence on a smart appearance. Smartness he disliked. Appearances he distrusted. Orders he resented. He was ‘wise’ to things. No sucker.

  Taffy felt a warm little feeling under his skin, relief more than anything else, to see Nobby again. He hadn’t to pretend with Nobby. Fundamentally they shared the same humanity, the unspoken humanity of comradeship, of living together, sharing what they had, not afraid to borrow or talk or shut up. Or to leave each other and stroll off to satisfy the need for loneliness.

  Nobby was surprised so much that he flung out his delight in a shout and a laugh and a wave of his arms. ‘Taffy, lad!’ he said. ‘Back already, eh? Boy!’ Then he became normal.

  ‘Can’t keep away from this bloody sannytorium for long, can we?’ he grumbled.

  Taffy stood looking at him, then at the ground, then he turned away and looked nowhere.

  ‘What’s wrong, kid?’ Nobby asked, his voice urgent and frightened, guessing. ‘Anything bad? Caught a packet, did you?’ He said the last two phrases slowly, his voice afraid to ask.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Taffy said, his voice thin and unsteady. ‘I didn’t. I’m all right. I’m healthy.’

  Nobby put his hand on his shoulder and turned him round. He looked at the white sucked-in face and the eyes looking nowhere.

  ‘Did she get it?’ and he too turned his head a little and swallowed. ‘She did,’ he said, neither asking a question nor making a statement. Something absolute, the two words he said.

  Taffy sat down, stretched out. The grass was dead; white, wispy long grass; Nobby sat down, too.

  ‘They came over about eight o’clock the first night,’ Taffy said. ‘The town hadn’t had a real one before. I’ve told you we’ve only got apartments, the top rooms in an old couple’s house. The old ones got hysterics, see, Nobby. And then they wouldn’t do what I told them, get down the road to a shelter. They wouldn’t go out into the street and they wouldn’t stay where they were. “My chickens,” the old man was blubbering all the time. He’s got an allotment up on the voel, see? Gwyneth made them some tea. She was fine, she calmed them down. That was at the beginning, before the heavy stuff began. I went out the back to tackle the incendiaries. The boy next door was out there, too. He had a shovel and I fetched a saucepan. But it was freezing, and we couldn’t dig the earth up quick enough. There were too many incendiaries. One fell on the roof and stuck in the troughing. The kid shinned up the pipe. It exploded in his face and he fell down. Twenty-odd feet. I picked him up and both his eyes were out, see?’

  He had gone back to the sing-song rhythm and the broad accent of his home, the back lanes and the back gardens. He was shuddering a little, and sick-white, sallow.

  Nobby waited.

  ‘I took him into his own house,’ he said, controlling his voice now, almost reflective. ‘I left him to his sister, poor kid. Then I went in to see if Gwyneth was all right. She was going to take the old couple down the road to the shelter. She had a mack on over her dressing gown. We’d intended going to bed early, see? So I said she was to stay in the shelter. But she wanted to come back. We could lie under the bed together.

  ‘I wanted her back too, somehow. Then some more incendiaries fell, so I said “Do as you like” and went at them with a saucepan. I thought sure one would blow my eyes out. Well, she took them down. Carried their cat for them. Soon as she’d gone the heavy stuff came. Oh Christ!’

  Nobby let him go on; better let him go on.

  ‘It knocked me flat, dazed me for a bit. Then I got up and another one flattened me. It was trying to stop me, see, Nobby. I crawled out of the garden, but it was dark as hell and buildings all down, dust and piles of masonry. Then he dropped some more incendiaries and the fires started. I knew she must be somewhere, see? I knew she must be somewhere. I began pulling the masonry away with my hands, climbed on to the pile of it in the fire. I couldn’t see with the smoke and I knew it wasn’t any use, only I had to do it, see?’

  ‘Then suddenly the masonry fell downwards. The road was clear on the other side. I thought it was all right after all, then. I thought she’d have reached the shelter… but she hadn’t.

  ‘I found her about twenty yards down the road.

  ‘She wasn’t dead. Her clothes were gone. And her hands. She put them over her face, I reckon.

  ‘She couldn’t speak, but I knew she knew it was me. I carried her back in my arms. Over the fallen house. The fire wasn’t bad by then. Took her home, see, Nobby. Only the home was on fire. I wanted her to die all the time. I carried her over a mile through the streets. Fires and hoses and water. And she wouldn’t die. When I got her to the clearing station I began to think she’d live.

  ‘But they were only playing a game with me, see?’

  He stood up, and made himself calm.

  ‘Well, there it is.’ He rubbed his face with the palm of his hand, wiping the cold sweat off.

  ‘I knew she was going to die. When they told me she was – I didn’t feel anything, Nobby…

  ‘But she died while they were messing her body about with their hands, see?… And she never said anything. Never said anything to me. Not that it makes any difference, I suppose. We never did speak about those things much. Only, you know how it is, you want a word somehow. You want it to keep.’

  ‘Sure, I know,’ Nobby said.

  ‘What’s it all for, Nobby?’ he said in a while. He looked so tired and beat. ‘I used to know what it was all about, but I can’t understand it now.’

  ‘Aw, forget all about that,’ Nobby said. ‘You’re here, aincher, now?’

  He put his hands on his mate’s shoulders and let him lean against him for a bit. ‘I reckon you belong to each other for keeps, now,’ Nobby said.

  ‘You believe that, Nobby?’ he asked, slow and puzzled, but with a gathering force as his uncertainty came together.

  ‘Yes. For you and ’er, I do. It wouldn’t be true for me, or the sergeant in there, but for you two it is.’

  Taffy was still against his shoulder. Then slowly he straightened himself, moved back on to himself, and lifting his face he looked at the milky-white fields and the sentinel pines and the stars.

  ‘I knew it was so, really,’ he said. ‘Only I was afraid I was fooling myself.’

  He smiled, and moved his feet, pressing on them with his whole weight as if testing them after an illness.

  ‘I’m all right, now, Nobby. Thank you, boy.’

  ‘I’ll go, then,’ Nobby said. He slipped his rifle over his shoulder and as he moved off he hesitated, turned back, and touched his mate’s arm lightly.

  ‘Two’s company, three’s none,’ he said, and stumped off slowly to the lambing shed through the dead straw-grass.

  And the soldier was left alone on the flat upland ridge.

  Below him the valleys widened into rich, arable lakes on which the moonlight and the mist lay like the skeins which spiders spin round their eggs. Beyond the pools another chain of downland lay across the valleys, and beyond those hills the coast. Over him, over the valleys, over the pinewoods, blue fingers came out of the earth and moved slanting across their quarters as the bombers droned in the stars over his head and swung round to attack the coastal city from inland. The sky over the coast was inflamed and violent, a soft blood-red.

  The soldier was thinking of the day he received his calling up papers, just a year ago. Sitting on the drystone wall of his father’s back garden with Gwyneth by him; his ragged little brother kneeling by the chicken run, stuffing cabbage stumps through the netting for the hens to peck, and laughing and pulling the stumps out as the old hen made an angry jab; his father riddling the ashes and the ramshackle garden falling to bits, broken trellis and tottering fence; his mother washing her husband’s flannel vest and drovers in the tub, white and vexed. He had taken Gwyneth’s hand, and her hand had said, ‘In coming and in going you are mine; now, and fo
r a little while longer; and then for ever.’

  But it was not her footsteps that followed him down the lane from the station.

  Now over his head the darkness was in full leaf, drifted with the purity of pines, the calm and infinite darkness of an English night, with the stars moving in slow declension down the sky. And the warm scent of resin about him and of birds and of all small creatures moving in the loose mould in the ferns like fingers in velvet.

  And the soldier stood under the pines, watching the night move down the valleys and lift itself seawards, hearing the sheep cough and farm dogs restlessly barking in the farms. And farther still the violence growing in the sky till the coast was a turbulent thunder of fire and sickening explosions, and there was no darkness there at all, no sleep.

  ‘My life belongs to the world,’ he said. ‘I will do what I can.’

  He moved along the spur and looked down at the snow-grey evergreen woods and the glinting roofs scattered over the rich land.

  And down in the valleys the church bells began pealing, pealing, and he laughed like a lover, seeing his beloved.

  BOYS OF GOLD

  George Brinley Evans

  The steamer was a small, thirty year old, coal-burning cargo/passenger boat, that until Pearl Harbour had plied her trade quietly between the ports on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. Now with a number in place of a name, painted fleet grey, she was steaming as part of a battle group.

  He had been brought back from Akyab with the rest; a week in Calcutta and Captain Belton had asked for volunteers. Two trucks took them to a hot empty plain, miles from anywhere, just seven tents set alongside a sparkling river. Most of the next day was spent swimming, until the medics arrived, along with the ammunition. It was jabs all round.

  The evening was spent charging Bren magazines with ball, tracer and incendiary bullets. The following morning they were aboard ship, on their way. Two days out, under the bluest of blue skies, they were ordered to check their kit. They had handed their pay books to the QM before embarking. He had handed them proxy forms, for the coming parliamentary elections, back home. Not one of them had been old enough to sign. Belton’s kindergarten, someone mocked. He felt for his dog tags; they were there, one red, one black, strung on his army issue cord necklace. Thomas Samuel. 11741178. C of E. The armourer at Brecon had punched on the information. He had stopped thinking of himself as a Samuel. Now, when people called his name, he automatically answered to Taff. He sat down on the deck next to Bagley, closed his eyes and listened to the rhythmic slap-slap of the bow wave; not long now.

  The Afon Pyrddin gleamed and shimmered as it slid over the smooth stones, swirled, spun, and turned, then bent itself over the Sgwd Fach, the first of its three waterfalls. On and over, headlong down the one hundred foot drop of the Horseshoe Falls, into a dark, dank gorge, filled with the sound of angry, hissing water, breaking and splitting itself into a grey boiling mist; only to fall back into the iron grip of the millstone grit. Raging in its narrow channel, it rushed for the freedom of the smooth, wide shelf above the Lady Falls, to billow out like clouds of white silk, into the sun-filled pool below.

  What a wonderful place for a body to live, he thought. He looked over Mrs Strong’s garden to Ianto the Farm’s big field. It shone a warm buttercup yellow in the morning sun. Almost in the centre stood a nursery, a stand of some thirty to forty full-grown Scots firs. A hideaway place that could turn into a steaming jungle, if you wanted it to. Where every shadow was an envelope for some new terror and so frightening, warned Billy Whitticker, ‘It would give you lockjaw right enough! Right!’

  Or if you held your head on one side and looked through the cobweb of your eyelashes, it would become a desert fort. Standing in the long shadow of an Arabian sunset, with white capped legionnaires standing sentinel. Once it was the Metz Wood they had read about in The Wizard. They had become the heroic, defiant men of the Welch Regiment. Up from their young souls had surged the craving of an ancient inherited valour; through their milk white teeth they had cried the cry, ‘Stick it the Welsh!’ and they had meant it.

  ‘Sammy! Sammy! Sa…mmy!’ His mother’s voice sang out. He hated people calling him Sammy, except his mother, and that best of all when they two were alone together. He liked everyone else to call him just plain Sam.

  ‘Come on then, if you’re going with Owen to pick whinberries. Sit in your place.’ He looked at his brother, two years older than himself, who said without malice, ‘Won’t wait for you mind, if you can’t keep up.’

  ‘Mammy! Owen’s going to leave Sammy on the mountain,’ his sister piped up. She was sat in their father’s chair, still in her nightdress; her hair tied up in rag curlers. She was the youngest and only girl, so could do and say what she liked.

  ‘If they only dare!’ his mother had said. The clean scent of her skin close to him, a wisp of her hair brushed his cheek and a small voice inside him whispered, ‘I love you, and I’ll bring you back more whinberries than anybody’s ever seen.’

  She gave him one of his father’s old tommy boxes, burnished to a bright pewter by the emery rough hands of a collier. To Owen she gave the Christmas biscuit tin and the bottle with the home-made pop. They bought the ginger pop off a girl called Dolly, who brought it around, on a Friday, in a handcart, that ran on an old set of pram wheels and bore on its sides the words ‘Polar Ajax Explosive’, from the days when it was a box that carried gelignite to the colliery.

  Alan was ready and came around.

  ‘You mind Sammy, now!’ their mother called after them.

  The sound of her voice made Mr Gay, the Frenchman who lived opposite, lift his head from the storm of colour that was his flower garden. The tough old peasant from the Ardennes raised his hand in greeting to the boys.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Gay!’ they shouted back respectfully. He was the only foreigner they knew and hadn’t he shown them the merry-go-round he had made for his grandson, with its painted, prancing horse?

  ‘Takes a Frenchman to make something like that,’ Alan had said.

  ‘And where are you away to, Sam?’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Strong,’ he smiled at the kind eyes that looked down on him. ‘Going to pick whinberries, I am,’ he announced his impending venture to the tall figure leaning against the gate. ‘I’ll bring you some if you like,’ realising that perhaps he had found a way of repaying the soft-spoken lady for all the sprigs of mint she’d passed over the fence to little Mrs Thomas, as she called his mother, every time they had lamb for dinner. And every St David’s Day since he had started school she’d brought him the best leek in her garden, the one with the greenest leaves and the whitest root, to pin on his coat; and one for Owen.

  Mrs Strong laughed. Her life had begun in a small village outside Whitehaven that stood right in the way of the North Atlantic wind as it came in like ice off the Solway Firth and took its spite out on the half a dozen cottages that some insolent Cumberland miners had built right in its path. She accepted and forgave his extravagances with the natural compassion bred into those born in such places.

  When they reached the bridge by the Pant, Rafferty was waiting for them.

  ‘Got money for your permits? MacDermitt the shepherd is up by the Bwthin,’ warned Rafferty.

  He felt in his pocket for the silver thrupence his mother had given him. MacDermitt lived alone in a small valley hidden high on Mynydd Cefn Hir, tending a flock of sheep and guarding that part of the estate that belonged to the Williams family of Aberpergwm. He had only ever seen MacDermitt once, when the man had been making his monthly trip down to the village to shop. The memory of him came flooding back, as he lengthened his stride to keep up with the others. How could such a small pony carry such a big man? He was as wide as a piano.

  They went down over the quoit pitch and behind Hopkins’ shop. He looked across the colliery horse’s field to Banwen colliery, the world’s biggest anthracite mine. Owned by David Martin Evans Bevan, one thousand, two hundred men worked there. His father was one and he
would be another.

  ‘Do you know how MacDermitt do disbaddy young rams?’ Rafferty was asking ‘Just tips them up and bites their balls off!’ Liar, he thought. But winced all the same.

  The Bwthin was nothing more than a ruin. When David Thomas, a fireman at Banwen colliery, lived there with his family, it was called Ty-yr-heol (The Road House), for this was no ordinary road. The road they walked on was Sarn Helen, built on the orders of the Emperor Maximus and the road, it was said, along which St Patrick was led to slavery by Irish raiders, from his home at Banwen.

  This time the raider was a massive Scot, sat on a pile of stones. And although the sun had already made the stones warm to the touch, MacDermitt was wearing a heavy tweed shepherd’s coat, a tweed hat, leggings and half-sprung boots. The hair that showed from under his hat was snow white, as were his bushy eyebrows and the stubble of his moustache and beard. His eyes were light blue and clear like a boy’s and shone out over the weather-raw skin that covered his cheekbones.

  ‘Can my brother and me pick on the same permit, Mister?’ asked Owen.

  ‘No. One picker, one permit, laddie.’

  He gave his brother his thrupence. Owen handed over the sixpence. ‘Thrupence each,’ Owen said.

  ‘What do you call the wee boy?’

  He stepped out from behind Owen to show himself. MacDermitt smiled at him. At the sight of those long tobacco-stained teeth, he stepped back, and was sorry he had thought Rafferty a liar.

  The second part of the climb up Cefn Hir was steep and could only be made on hands and knees. Owen kept looking back at him; he was sorry he was making Owen feel guilty. But the windburnt grass was making the bottoms of his boots shine and chafing the skin between his fingers.

  ‘Not much further now, Sam,’ Owen encouraged from a little higher up. The tone of his voice regretting the earlier hard looks.

  Alan got to the wall first, and was standing on top of it. They had reached the top of the mountain. Owen held out his hand.