Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  My poor old father used to cut the laurels and tidy up the trees in the autumn, and he had one or two days a week in the season shooting with Lord Mum. Old Mr Robert had a few decent coverts where nothing lived but fat pheasants, till he turned it over to a syndicate. Then there was the County Council and every other sort of Council, and the Vestry Meeting and the Cricket Club.

  Mother found plenty to do, she was so interested in other people. A man, I often thought, might build himself a replica of Blenheim Palace in the prairies.

  No one seems to live here at all. And the gentle haze hovered. No one in the fields moved about the fields. No dogs barked, nor hens crowed nor crows cawed. ‘Hoot your horn man and open the gate and have a look where the Roberts lived and look at Devereux Brain’s coat of arms if that’s all that’s left of him.’

  With very modern methods I could farm these bits of pasture, but I’d be cramped. On Committees I could not sit for ever. Nor on the Benches, sending the poor away to prison and discriminating according to the unreformed Law. Nor indeed, remembering the stations of everyman according to his neighbours’ opinion, or who is better than who.

  My mother used to cry ‘too too’ like an owl after the dogs, and shouted after them in a very threatening way, and sat up with them all night when they were sick giving them teaspoonfuls of white of egg and brandy.

  My eye travelled over the little rounded hills and the small sunny valley where the river flashed sudden silver patches, but my thoughts were on the evening of childhood with my face leaning out of the friendly window of home just before my supper, when the sky was an aquarium green and the rooks flew cawing home in the green sky, and the blackbirds called and chaffered in the darkness of the laurels, and the sky melted into the hills of the night. I sniffed away the tears that collected in my nose, and on my heart lay the ache of dear childhood lost, and on my heart also the images of girls smiling who’d have shared my life as they say, but dear, dead images of faces lost in the stream of past years.

  Hannah.

  I looked down through the haze, and in tangled recollection looked for traces of her cottage. There was a turnpike cottage with the falling chimney: that was in the middle of my eye when as a child I gazed up the valley towards the glorious future of my advancing life.

  When I looked over the hills the whole gleaming, glittering world was beyond the hills for me to tread.

  Hannah.

  My mother said when she left us and married, she’d be broken up by the life, rearing chickens, running a smallholding, as poor Evan’s wife. I saw her greying hair, my beautiful Hannah whom I kissed and hugged when she kissed me lovingly goodnight; I saw her gapped teeth and the tired skin falling about her bones.

  What is she now?

  Can I bear to see Hannah broken, and an old woman, like my mother said?

  I have no one to bring back with me, as I’d pictured. That I’d re-enter my country with a glorious partner by my side. The years slip by very quickly, and people slip out of them, and you have no one. I come back to my country as I left it, alone, barring this long, rich car. How could I give away my heart to a woman, and throw it down before her, when it was buried here among the woods and damp pastures and the little rounded hills?

  Or if I close my eyes and up the road she comes swinging and walking like she did, and holding her arms out to me.

  But whose face?

  Hannah’s?

  Mother’s?

  I opened my eyes and they opened on the same view of the same valley.

  ‘Practically speaking,’ I began thinking, but no practical speaking was possible sitting here at this old gate. I ought to be looking instead at the old cow-house which they made our home into. I remember the stream that Mother swore ran under the house summer and winter.

  I ought to be visiting Hannah, however old she is, and I ought to help her, not sit here with tears in my nose. Its a fact that I can get this place very cheaply from what I’ve been told, and what have I then? A house called Llwyn-y-brain and my name contained in it. And a bigger house than I lived in as a child. And no child of mine to bring up in it.

  As I walked the distant cities I thought of other resting places. Rest, I wanted: to rest like I rested in loving arms where I could cry out my heart and bury my face in their loving arms.

  Hannah.

  My poor old father knew. ‘You’ll never live here,’ he used to say sadly to me when I was a boy, ‘Everything’s going.’ And I was very sad. But he was right; the roof fell in and I went away, and what little I left behind has vanished like grass. You carry a huge heritage about with you, as you think, and rich memories and visions, and smiling faces, and many people. And now when my eyes are shut I see it all, and when I open them I see only the empty beautiful valley, empty for me, beautiful for every one, through my wretched tears.

  Young Mr Robert had enough sense never to come back. Or if he did, no one ever knew. I doubt if he ever came and sat at his own drive gate to sniff tears.

  It isn’t my drive gate.

  Our gate fell off its hinges and rotted and an old bedstead probably blocks up the hole. In one of her last letters I remember my mother writing to me half across the world, and she said, Why don’t you write? I am so very lonely. I never see anyone. The gate fell off its hinges and there’s no one I’m afraid to put it up.’

  I pressed the starter to start up the engine, thinking: If I go away what have I but the two pictures? The old ones I had with me all these years, and the new one of the beautiful empty valley, smiling no more for me than for any spectator.

  ‘And I’m no spectator,’ I said, ‘if I inherited a country, and this valley with it. And my inheritance fastened to me like a chain, pulling me back across the world.’

  I looked down at the empty road, as the engine purred, and nobody walked on it.

  ‘What is the future?’ I thought, and thought how the future rushed on you like a river and left you suddenly old and lonely like an old stone standing unwanted in the land of your fathers.

  A WHITE BIRTHDAY

  Gwyn Jones

  With their next stride towards the cliff edge they would lose sight of the hills behind. These, under snow, rose in long soft surges, blued with shadow, their loaded crests seeming at that last moment of balance when they must slide into the troughs of the valleys. Westward the sea was stiffened to a board, and lay brown and flat to the indrawn horizon. Everywhere a leaden sky weighed upon land and water.

  They were an oldish man and a young, squat under dark cloth caps, with sacks worn shawl-like over their shoulders, and other sacks roped about their legs. They carried long poles, and the neck of a medicine bottle with a teat-end stood up from the younger man’s pocket. Floundering down between humps and pillows of the buried gorse bushes, they were now in a wide bay of snow, with white headlands enclosing their vision to left and right. A gull went wailing over their heads, its black feet retracted under the shining tail feathers. A raven croaked from the cliff face.

  ‘That’ll be her,’ said the younger man excitedly. ‘If that raven—’

  ‘Damn all sheep!’ said the other morosely, thinking of the maddeningly stupid creatures they had dug out that day, thinking too of the cracking muscles of his thighs and calves, thinking not less of the folly of looking for lambs on the cliff face.

  ‘I got to,’ said the younger, his jaw tensing. ‘I got reasons.’

  ‘To look after yourself,’ grumbled the other. He had pushed his way to the front, probing cautiously with his pole, and grunting as much with satisfaction as annoyance as its end struck hard ground. The cliffs were beginning to come into view, and they were surprised, almost shocked, to find them black and brown as ever, with long sashes of snow along the ledges. They had not believed that anything save the sea could be other than white in so white a world. A path down the cliff was discernible by its deeper line of snow, but after a few yards it bent to the left, to where they felt sure the ewe was. The raven croaked again. ‘She’s in trouble
,’ said the younger man. ‘P’raps she’s cast or lambing.’

  ‘P’raps she’s dead and they are picking her,’ said the older. His tone suggested that would be no bad solution of their problem. He pulled at the peak of his cap, bit up with blue and hollow scags of teeth into the straggle of his moustache. ‘If I thought it was worth it, I’d go down myself.’

  ‘You’re too old, anyway.’ A grimace robbed the words of their brutality. ‘And it’s my ewe.’

  ‘And it’s your kid’s being born up at the house, p’raps this minute.’

  ‘I’ll bring it him back for a present. Give me the sack.’

  The older man loosed a knot unwillingly. ‘It’s too much to risk.’ He groped for words to express what was for him a thought unknown. ‘I reckon we ought to leave her.’

  Tying the sack over his shoulders the other shook his head. ‘You leave a lambing ewe? When was that? Besides, she’s mine, isn’t she?’

  Thereafter they said nothing. The oldish man stayed on the cliff top, his weight against his pole, and up to his boot tops in snow. The younger went slowly down, prodding ahead at the path. It was not as though there were any choice for him. For one thing, it was his sheep, this was his first winter on his own holding, and it was no time to be losing lambs when you were starting a family. He had learned thrift the hard way. For another, his fathers had tended sheep for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years; the sheep was not only his, it was part of him. All day long he had been fighting the unmalignant but unslacking hostility of nature, and was in no mood to be beaten. And last, the lying-in of his wife with her first child was part of the compulsion that sent him down the cliff. The least part, as he recognised; he would be doing this in any case, as the old man above had always done it. He went very carefully, jabbing at the rock, testing each foothold before giving it his full weight. Only a fool, he told himself, had the right never to be afraid.

  Where the path bent left the snow was little more than ankle deep. It was there he heard the ewe bleat. He went slowly forward to the next narrow turn and found the snow wool-smooth and waist high. ‘I don’t like it,’ he whispered, and sat down and slit the one sack in two and tied the halves firmly over his boots. The ewe bleated again, suddenly frantic, and the raven croaked a little nearer him. ‘Ga-art there!’ he called, but quietly. He had the feeling he would be himself the one most frightened by an uproar on the cliff face.

  Slowly he drove and tested with the pole. When he had made each short stride he crunched down firmly to a balance before thrusting again. His left side was tight on the striated black rock, there was an overhang of soft snow just above his head, it seemed to him that his right shoulder was in line with the eighty-foot drop to the scum of foam at the water’s edge. ‘You dull daft fool,’ he muttered forward at the platform where he would find the ewe. ‘In the whole world you had to come here!’ The words dismayed him with awareness of the space and silence around him. If I fall, he thought, if I fall now… He shut his eyes, gripped at the rock.

  Then he was on the platform. Thirty feet ahead the ewe was lying on her back in snow scarlet and yellow from blood and her waters. She jerked her head and was making frightened kicks with her four legs. A couple of yards away two ravens had torn out the eyes and paunch of her new-dropped lamb. They looked at the man with a horrid waggishness, dribbling their beaks through the purple guts. When the ewe grew too weak to shake her head they would start on her too, ripping at the eyes and mouth, the defenceless soft belly. ‘You sods,’ he snarled, ‘you filthy sods!’ fumbling on the ground for a missile, but before he could throw anything they flapped lazily and insolently away. He kicked what was left of the lamb from the platform and turned to the ewe, to feel her over. ‘Just to make it easy!’ he said angrily. There was a second lamb to be born.

  ‘Get over,’ he mumbled, ‘damn you, get over!’ and pulled her gently on to her side. She at once restarted labour, and he sat back out of her sight, hoping she would deliver quickly despite her fright and exhaustion. After a while she came to her feet, trembling, but seemed rather to fall down again than resettle to work. Her eyes were set in a yellow glare, she cried out piteously, and he went back to feel along the belly, pressing for the lamb’s head. ‘I don’t know,’ he complained, ‘I’m damned if I know where it is with you. Come on, you dull soft stupid sow of a thing – what are you keeping it for?’ He could see the shudders begin in her throat and throb back the whole length of her, her agony flowed into his leg in ripples. All her muscles were tightening and then slipping loose, but the lamb refused to present. He saw half a dozen black-backed gulls swing down to the twin’s corpse beneath him. ‘Look,’ he said to the ewe, ‘d’you want them to get you too? Then for Christ’s sake, get on with it!’ At once her straining began anew; he saw her flex and buckle with pain; then she went slack, there was a dreadful sigh from her, her head rested, and for a moment he thought she had died.

  He straightened his back, frowning, and felt snowflakes on his face. He was certain the ewe had ceased to work and, unless he interfered, would die with the lamb inside her. Well, he would try for it. If only the old man were here – he would know what to do. If I kill her, he thought – and then: what odds? She’ll die anyway. He rolled back his sleeves, felt for a small black bottle in his waistcoat pocket, and the air reeked as he rubbed Lysol into his hand. But he was still dissatisfied, and after a guilty glance upwards reached for his Vaseline tin and worked gouts of the grease between his fingers and backwards to his wrist. Then with his right knee hard to the crunching snow he groped gently but purposefully into her after the lamb. The primal heat and wet startled him after the cold of the air, he felt her walls expand and contract with tides of life and pain; for a moment his hand slithered helplessly, then his middle fingers were over the breech and his thumb seemed sucked in against the legs. Slowly he started to push the breech back and coax the hind legs down. He felt suddenly sick with worry whether he should not rather have tried to turn the lamb’s head and front legs towards the passage. The ewe groaned and strained as she felt the movement inside her, power came back into her muscles, and she began to work with him. The hind legs began to present, and swiftly but cautiously he pulled against the ewe’s heaving. Now, he thought, now! His hand moved in an arc, and the tiny body moved with it, so that the lamb’s backbone was rolling underneath and the belly came uppermost. For a moment only he had need to fear it was pressing on its own life cord, and then it was clear of the mother and lying, red and sticky on the snow. He picked it up, marvelling as never before at the beauty of the tight-rolled gummy curls of fine wool patterning its sides and back. It appeared not to be breathing, so he scooped the mucus out of its mouth and nostrils, rubbed it with a piece of sacking, smacked it sharply on the buttocks, blew into the throat to start respiration, and with that the nostrils fluttered and the lungs dilated. ‘Go on,’ he said triumphantly to the prostrate ewe, ‘see to him yourself. I’m no damned nursemaid for you, am I?’ He licked the cold flecks of snow from around his mouth as the ewe began to lick her lamb, cleaned his hand and wrist, spat and spat again to rid himself of the hot foetal smell in nose and throat.

  Bending down to tidy her up, he marvelled at the strength and resilience of the ewe. ‘Good girl,’ he said approvingly, ‘good girl then.’ He would have spent more time over her but for the thickening snow. Soon he took the lamb from her and wrapped it in the sack which had been over his shoulders. She bleated anxiously when he offered her the sack to smell and started off along the ledge. He could hear her scraping along behind him and had time at the first bad corner to wonder what would happen if she nosed him in the back of the knees. Then he was at the second corner and could see the old man resting on his pole above him. He had been joined by an unshaven young labourer in a khaki overcoat. This was his brother-in-law. ‘I near killed the ewe,’ he told them, apologetic under the old man’s inquiring eye. ‘You better have a look at her.’

  ‘It’s a son,’ said the brother-in-law. ‘Just as
I come home from work. I hurried over. And Jinny’s fine.’

  ‘A son. And Jinny!’ His face contorted, and he turned hurriedly away from them. ‘Hell,’ he groaned, reliving the birth of the lamb; ‘hell, oh hell!’ The other two, embarrassed, knelt over the sheep, the old man feeling and muttering. ‘Give me the titty-bottle,’ he grunted presently. ‘We’ll catch you up.’ The husband handed it over without speaking, and began to scuffle up the slope. Near the skyline they saw him turn and wave shamefacedly.

  ‘He was crying,’ said the brother-in-law.

  ‘Better cry when they are born than when they are hung,’ said the old man grumpily. The faintest whiff of sugared whisky came from the medicine bottle. ‘Not if it was to wet your wicked lips in hell!’ he snapped upwards. He knew sheep: there was little he would need telling about what had happened on the rock platform. ‘This pair’ll do fine. But you’ll have to carry the ewe when we come to the drifts.’ He scowled into the descending snow, and eased the lamb into the crook of his arm, sack and all. ‘You here for the night?’

  Their tracks were well marked by this time. The man in khaki went ahead, flattening them further. The old man followed, wiry and deft. Two out of three, he was thinking; it might have been worse. His lips moved good-humouredly as he heard the black-backed gulls launch outwards from the scavenged cliff with angry, greedy cries. Unexpectedly, he chuckled.

  Behind him the ewe, sniffing and baaing, her nose pointed at the sack, climbed wearily but determinedly up to the crest.

  THE MEDAL

  George Ewart Evans

  Peregrine stood on the kerb watching him and at the same time watching himself, and asking: ‘Why should I be here, out of my orbit and out of all reason, waiting for an old man who knows less of me than I of him?’ But he stayed, in spite of his impulse to turn and walk away down the grey street whose flagstoned pavements glistened with a mercy of light after the quick shower of rain. He could not be wrong because of the old man’s colour; but he would have recognised him apart from this. Although the fifteen years had whitened the old man’s hair and bent his knees, the features and the straight back with the head well set on the shoulders were still the same. He wore a white coat; and this with his fringe of white hair and straggle of beard made his colour shout out. But the children he was shepherding over the road clasped his dark hands without hesitation; and kept hurrying across with his great-footed shuffle as they collected in groups on the opposite kerb.