The Life of Rebecca Jones

by Angharad Price

  “Che bello!”

  Angelo belonged to a family which kept vineyards in the Frascati region, near Rome. He was amazed by our tradition of temperance. Indeed, he maintained that the steep slopes of Cwm Maesglasau were ideal for growing vines, were it not for the rain.

  Living at an angle

  On Sundays every Italian prisoner in the district was taken to mass at Newtown. Bob occasionally helped during these excursions. And I believe the rites of the Catholic church filled him with wonder.

  After a few months Angelo was forced to leave us. The authorities did not wish the “enemy” to fraternize too much with their hosts.

  After Angelo came Piero. He was a rather different creature, with a fiery temper. From his mouth came a stream of religious oaths—Dio! and Maria!—and when the children were tucked up in bed at night they’d imitate his blasphemous utterances. Piero was an angry man, and who could blame him?

  Piero was taken away when, in a fit of temper, he pulled a knife on Father. So the Italian had to go.

  Next to arrive was Ernesto. A lanky man, good-natured with not much fighting in his blood. He hailed from Naples and showed the wit of that maritime city. A carpenter by trade, he was hardly seen without a piece of carved wood in his hands. He produced offerings for us every day: wooden spoons for the kitchen, a plate, a large bowl; a wooden boat for Evan, to be sailed in Maesglasau stream; and for Kate, his favorite, an egg cup, simply adorned, and a wooden dolly, which I clothed. Every day was Christmas Day with Ernesto, the carpenter from Naples.

  *

  On the first of May 1943 another Angelo came among us.

  I remember that May Day well. A sunny, cloudless day, with a warm breeze caressing the valley. The leaves of late spring were shining, and the hill above the farmhouse was covered with bluebells.

  It was, in my memory at least, a day of freshness and energy, one of those rare days when the whole of creation seems to breathe into the depths of its own being.

  I see myself coming out of the house that day. In my arms a bundle of newly washed bedclothes. The door behind me is open.

  I raise my eyes. In front of me, at my brother’s side, there is a man in prisoner’s clothing.

  He turns to look. I return his gaze. But I see nothing. All I do is feel. I sense a tremor running through me. Sapping me. Taking my breath away.

  I notice Bob staring. I return to my work and walk away. But the land beneath my feet, between the front and the back of Tynybraich farmhouse, seems to sway with every step.

  I peg the white linen onto the line, watching it move in May’s tender breeze. Then I steady myself and return to my work, as befits a woman approaching forty.

  I bow into the machine and work away. The handle on the Singer’s wheel keeps slipping; I undo the seams and sew again.

  Later, I join my family at the table to welcome the guest.

  *

  We enjoyed four months in Angelo’s company. Four months of joy, a sort of happiness I had never experienced before. Everything shone in the glow of my feelings; the pewter plates on the dresser, the brass fender, even the farm’s rusty implements.

  They were four months of learning, also. Learning about someone I could laugh with, be solemn and joyous with, in a natural way. Learning also to hide my feelings; to modulate emotion and subdue the body. I learned how to live a lie; keeping a flood of emotions behind a dam of pride, hesitation and anxiety.

  And I learned Italian, though the words were often so close to those of my own language:

  “Ponte,” said Angelo.

  “Pont,” I answered.

  Finestra.

  Ffenest.

  Corona.

  Coron.

  Corpo.

  Corff.

  Credere.

  Credu.

  Celare.

  Celu.

  In naming the world again, it came into existence anew. And this rebirth happened in the summer of 1943.

  Only to die again, when Mussolini was overthrown and Italy’s new government yielded to the Allies. The time came to release our prisoners. Angelo was summoned away.

  Yes, the end of summer was death itself that year. Each day slipped away. The nights were sleepless, full of memories, full of tears. I could tell no-one.

  On the day before he left, Angelo asked to visit the waterfall at the end of Cwm Maesglasau. I went with him.

  I do not remember that journey to Maesglasau, walking past the field at Cae Dolau, through Llidiart y Dŵr, the sheep turning to us, the birds falling silent, the river slowing down. All I remember is my hand in his, walking to the end of the world.

  And then we reached the light-filled end of the valley. The old ruin stood in silence. The stream glittered in a cascade, a jumble of stones formed a path across the flow. We went upward, through reeds and nettles, higher and higher up the ravine, quickening our step, losing our breath, to arrive, at last, at the foamy base of the waterfall.

  I can see us still, in my mind’s eye, as we hesitated before he pulled me under the powerful flow, Maesglasau’s quicksilver water shattering around us.

  I shall never forget the three hundred yards back toward my home. Clothes soaking wet. Late evening sunshine bathing the world in gold. Each second priceless. Each step painful.

  As we approach Tynybraich farmhouse I stop and look at him. And I see the understanding between us which is so easy to feel, so hard to understand.

  We return to Tynybraich separately.

  I see Angelo saying his farewells, shaking hands with my parents, William and Bob, hugging the children. Hugging me, in the same way.

  I see him turn. I see his back. I see the thickness of his hair, his familiar gait.

  I did not see him depart. I fainted on the doorstep of Tynybraich. Bob and my father carried me to bed.

  Behold, the days have grown shorter and the sun doth rise with no purpose; he hoves into view through the dark and foggy air, giving Earth the merest glance with his weak and pallid rays; for he stays but a short time, and shies away soon enough, as if no joy could be had in viewing the world.

  Hugh Jones

  I yielded to something that September. I fell into a fever, and was ill for weeks. And when the fever went, it left in its wake a debilitation. I could neither read nor sew nor write a single word.

  Everyone was concerned. But no-one—not even my mother—knew the cause.

  How could I explain? I could not explain it to myself. The pride. The hesitancy. The fear. And how could one explain the truth of a feeling, when that feeling never really got to exist?

  Bob married for a second time in March 1944. His new wife had come to Dinas Mawddwy from Cwm Nant yr Eira—the valley of snow—to stay with her cousin, Mairwen. Her name was Olwen.

  As the years passed by she became a dear sister to me and a second daughter to my mother. Another Olwen.

  It wasn’t easy for Olwen to arrive as a young wife at Tynybraich, and to step into the role of stepmother to Evan and Kate. Yet, she achieved it all with ease. She was that kind of woman. She adapted without fuss to the ways of the family, and we all warmed to her sunny, quiet ways.

  My parents and William moved back to the bungalow.

  Great joy was felt at the birth of Olwen and Bob’s first child in February 1946.

  Kate, the little sister, was allowed to choose the name: Mair.

  A brother to Mair, called Wyn, was born the following year.

  It was the coming of Olwen—her part in shouldering so many household duties—which enabled me to come to a decision regarding my own life. I asked my parents and Bob for permission to go and live in my grandmother’s old home at Maesglasau Bach.

  The time had come for me to have my own home. I was over forty years old.

  Everyone stared in disbelief.

  Why live in that remote spot at the end of the valley, keeping company with old ghosts?

  I insisted, and the men gave way. They knew me well enough: there would be no turning.

 
; By the spring of 1948 the old house had been made homely. My few possessions were moved by cart from Tynybraich to the far end of Maesglasau valley: a bed, a table, two chairs and a book case; a small gas stove; the Singer sewing machine; my clothes, books, pen and paper, all in a small chest.

  There was neither electricity nor running water at Maesglasau Bach. But I had a roof over my head, four walls around me, and a door which could be shut on the world. There was silence. A defined space for me alone.

  I had light from the sun by day and from a candle by night. I had water, always, from Maesglasau stream, in which I could both quench my thirst and cleanse my body.

  In the old days, before the coming of the lowland roads, people used these highland tracks in their daily lives. The upland causeways were the country’s backbone. It was easier to cross the heights than to ascend and descend the hills of Mid-Wales, and they were safer than the lowlands’ treacherous roads. “Our ancestors were people of the heights,” writes the historian R. T. Jenkins, “they were people who lived ‘on high.’ And it can be said of the old Welshman that he was someone who walked from one summit to the next.”

  I’ve heard it said that the monks of the middle ages used these trackways as they moved between the abbeys at Strata Florida and Cymer; that Cwm Glan Mynach and Cae’r Abaty above Bwlch y Siglen both got their names from these mendicant monks. And what church, I wonder, gave its name to Cwm yr Eglwys? There’s an old tradition, which contradicts academic opinion, that the “clas” which forms the second part of the name “Maesglasau” was a hostel for monks. It must have been this story that inspired a Victorian rhymester to compose the following poem on the empty page of one of our family’s old books:

  In Dinas Mawddwy parish stands a monastery alone,

  Where once upon a time a burdened monk did moan.

  A far off lonely spot, loved by holy wight,

  Wondrous romantic, below a fountain white.

  Now the monastery rooms and walls lie starkly bare,

  Though bearing witness to a former grandeur rare.

  My ancestors, too, walked “from one summit to the next,” taking the high road when they went to harvest the peat with their cutting irons, dragging their peat sledges behind them, piled high with black bricks—the rotted remains of ancient forests, now our winter fuel. They walked these high pathways too when they went to worship every Sabbath, walking all the way from Cwm Maesglasau to the old church at Mallwyd.

  It was a poet, not a road-builder, who changed all that. Almost two centuries ago Hugh Jones, the hymnist and translator who was born and brought up at Maesglasau, returned from London to his native home, fired by Calvinism. Swayed by his words, the families of Tynybraich and Maesglasau became nonconformists. Their path toward faith took a different direction: the hike over the hills to Mallwyd church was abandoned; in its stead came the walk along a lowland lane to chapel at Dinas Mawddwy.

  The hymns of Hugh Jones continue to ring out from that chapel, though weaker year by year. But the pilgrims’ pathways of old have disappeared. “As Man’s highland existence fell away,” wrote the historian, “so did his pathways fall with him.”

  There is no doubt that the uplands were once busier than they are today. Indeed, this high plateau on the border between Merioneth and Montgomery was frequented by the Red Bandits of Dugoed. Five centuries ago these outlaws tracked and robbed their victims without mercy. A cluster of billhooks was lodged in the chimney at Maesglasau to prevent their sudden attack, and remains there to this day. But the Red Bandits’ caves remain hidden in the hills; their ghosts come alive in the low mists, and the wailing of women and orphaned children haunts the bitter wind of the Oerddrws Pass. And when sunset fires the moorland on a summer’s evening the memory of spilled blood seems to color the land itself.

  I stand and listen. Nothing is heard except the bleat of a sheep, the croak of a crow, or the harpistry of a lark as it flits from the heather under my foot. The lark rises, borne higher and higher by the fluency of its own wings, and I follow its flight. I see the forked-tailed silhouette of a kite, hovering. Beyond the kite, the wing-shadows of two peregrine falcons in dance. It is pairing time: the smaller male feigns an attack on the female. Soon we shall see the falcon’s mottled eggs on the cliff-face at Maesglasau, away from other nests and human habitation.

  Falco peregrinus: the most rapid of all pilgrims, reaching its end with a missile’s speed and precision. Detested by gamekeepers and egg thieves, it lived on the edge of extinction. Today it is still rare, in these parts at least. A sublime bird, dark of cheek, blue-gray of body and wings, its belly a speckled white. Its clear, repetitive cry is electrifying.

  Only once did I see it hunt. That sky-chase is imprinted on my memory. It was in Cwm yr Eglwys one morning. A falcon hovered high in the air.

  Suddenly a grouse flew out of the forest into open ground. I stood and watched the drama unfold. There was no hope for the grouse. Paralyzed with fear and awe I watched as the falcon swept back its wings and plummeted at whistling speed; two hundred miles per hour, they say.

  Then came the strike. An explosion of brown feathers. The grouse’s backbone snapped in two. A single strike finished it.

  It’s a merciful death, they say, that of the prey of the peregrine falcon. But for me, an old woman in her nineties, staring death in the face and willing my own continuance, no death is merciful.

  Yet, I know that on that day I rejoiced in the clean kill of a steel bullet sheathed in feathers.

  4

  He fashions a chariot from the clouds and flies on the wings of the wind.

  Hugh Jones

  What is family? An anchor which holds us in place. It holds us secure in a storm. It holds us back in fair weather. It is a blessing and a burden—for the young, especially, and for those who seek freedom.

  One of life’s astonishing moments is when we realize that we have suddenly become that anchor. This sudden shift is shocking and instantaneous. It is the shift of generations. We are flung without warning into the air, then plummet the depths of salt water. Then the anchor takes hold. Everything settles.

  For some people, this happens at the birth of the first child, when they learn the skill of holding someone tight without holding them back.

  For me, it was the death of my father which propelled me from one generation to the next. Strange, for I was then already a woman approaching fifty years of age, strands of silver multiplying in my dark hair. But until then I had been a girl. Father’s girl. And he was the head of the family. It had nothing to do with age.

  None of us was ever “close” to Father. For him I was a woman, a younger version of Mother, helping her to fulfill the duties of a farmer’s wife. Preparing food. Cups of tea. Submitting. Comforting.

  For years I suffered in silence. This detestable tradition of woman as maidservant! But as I grew older, acceptance became easier. Father weakened as he grew old. His need for the anchor of home grew more apparent. I came to understand him; learned not to fear his judgment. I finally saw how dependent he was.

  What I see now is a man who needed some rest after a hard day’s labor. He did not have the time to succor his children. He would leave the house in the small hours to complete his work on the mountain, taking his lunch with him, parceled in his pocket. He’d be away all day. Only in the setting sun would we see him again. He needed tea, supper, his pipe and silence on the hearth. There wasn’t the time to indulge in fatherhood.

  Bob had most to do with him, of course. But they were so different. Father was a conversationalist; Bob a reasoner and debater. Father loved the pithy remark, Bob the paragraph. Father loved farming, Bob hated it. My father was a countryman, Bob a politician.

  Gruffydd, William and Lewis had had little chance to get to know their father. Estranged from the beginning by a physical chasm, the distance between them widened with the boys’ “gentlemanly” education at Worcester College. And Father wasn’t the type to seek a compromising route between two different n
atures. To reach him, you had to do the walking: up and down every hill and dale. He was there to be accepted.

  I believe now that his distance from us was part shyness, part impatience. This was the temperament that prompted him, each time we had English visitors, to take to his bed midafternoon, or to send away their children with the macaronic command: “Go ffordd acw! Away!”

  It was Mother who translated Father’s needs and wishes, even to us, his own children. It was she who read and interpreted him. Her task was to explain his moods, his brusque answers and outward indifference. She was the mediator. She told us of his exhaustion after work; his right to peace. It was Mother who told Gruffydd, William and Lewis about their father, explaining what was important to him, so that they might understand. It was she who stressed his strengths. His kindness. His stubborn loyalty. His care. His love. With tears in her eyes, she would remind us of his pain when the boys went to school; his bitterness when our unbaptised baby sister, Olwen Mai, could not be buried until the sun had set. She made sure we remembered how he’d cared for Ieuan in his illness, chewing bits of meat into digestible morsels for “the little boy,” placing them in his mouth in the hope that meat would give him strength.

  I think of these accounts, and hear—somewhere in my head—always my mother’s voice. Her grace and natural intelligence impressed me then. It astounds me now.

  I spent countless evenings with my parents around the big chimney at Tynybraich, and in later years at the fireside in their new bungalow. There would be no sound except the occasional rustle as the fire settled in the grate; the ticking of the carriage clock; Mother’s knitting needles clicking. Father would stare into the flames or snooze. He never read. I would work on a patchwork quilt or repair some item of clothing, before getting up and taking my leave, walking home in darkness to the end of the cwm.

  During those evenings I never dared to start a conversation with Father. My role was to be by his side and to say nothing. He was my father. I was his daughter. That was the end of it.