The Life of Rebecca Jones

by Angharad Price

  Yet, during those long silent hours together by the hearth our quiet relationship developed into fullness. The silence we shared grew as a bond between us: white and warm, like pure linen. And when Father died that fabric went with him, as a shroud; in its place came a colder silence.

  Thus, in 1950, a stitch was unpicked in the fabric of my own existence.

  But Evan Jones of Tynybraich did not die alone. As one of those who paid tribute to him said, a whole way of life went with him. A way of life which allowed a man to keep a vial of strychnine and a set of false teeth in the same waistcoat pocket. He’d been a true “character” of rural life and a wonderful talker. Was it not said that a fence had to be raised between him and his fellows on shearing day, for his ceaseless talk slowed the shearers’ work?

  I remember smiling on hearing this tribute to the man of field and farmyard. This great talker was a man of silence when he came indoors. And for me, his death was that of a father, not of a type.

  Bob became head of the family. I became sister to the head. And I heard the rattle of a chain as it unwound, the silence as the chain fell, the strike of the anchor against land.

  This was the shift of generations.

  The children came to us more often, no longer in fear of their grandfather’s dark moods. Evan and Kate were “big children” now, going to Dolgellau on their own, soon to finish school. It was Mair and Wyn who kept us company, entertaining me and Mother.

  There wasn’t a minute’s peace and we were interrogated daily by the two dark-headed children whose favorite words were how and why—followed by who, when and where. They amazed us with the responses to their own questions, though Mother was often shocked by their unorthodox minds.

  Why are there clouds in the sky?

  Because God has been shearing the angels.

  Why are the clouds moving?

  So that God can get to Dolgellau.

  Why is the sky blue?

  So we can see the clouds.

  Why is the sun yellow?

  Because God churned the moon.

  Why do all women knit?

  Because they can’t shear.

  Why is night dark?

  So that we can be like William.

  Why does the wind blow?

  To keep itself warm.

  Why is it raining?

  Because God’s river is leaking.

  Why do waterfalls drop down?

  Because it’s lonely at the top of Maesglasau.

  Why are William and Lewis and Uncle Gruff blind?

  Because they can see better in the dark.

  They played passionately: hide and seek in the cowshed or around the pigsty and hen hut; playing “house” in the roots of the oak tree; playing school, which delighted Mair; playing bows-and-arrows until the makeshift arrows went astray.

  They’d rush headlong toward us, blaming each other, recounting their adventures, quenching their thirst with water from the well at the back of the bungalow. There was a year between them, just like me and Bob. I loved their daily exploits. It was a reminder of our own play decades earlier. Mair would command. Wyn would obey … momentarily—until he got tired of his role as pupil to the teacher, patient to the nurse, baby to the mother—and ran away to seek his father at work, tracing him by the barking of dogs. In tears, Mair would come to her aunt for comfort and a Rich Tea biscuit, moistened in a cup of tea. Wyn was too young for tea.

  I delighted in their company, my middle-aged flesh soothed by the touch of their hands. I wondered how it might have felt to have children of my own. To this day I thank the generosity of their mother Olwen, who never once showed any possessiveness. She allowed me many memorable hours with her growing children.

  Both children were intrigued by my sewing machine. How amazing, to create a pencil case, a tool bag, a teddy, a rag doll, merely by linking a few rags and turning a wheel. For Mair and Wyn the Singer was a magical instrument, its needle a golden wand. They’d stare in wonder at my fingers daring to approach the needle. And once, as I pricked my finger, they stared in dismay at the sight of red blood flowing from the flesh of adults.

  This awe of technology was nothing new. My mother had a story about a godly old man who had seen the first steam train in mid-Wales. As it disappeared into a tunnel the man exclaimed that God himself had swallowed the infernal chariot. Similarly awed, my great-uncle, the poet J. J. Tynybraich, had written a strict-meter poem about “Steam.” Composed at the peak of Victorian industrial optimism, the poet saw the technology of steam as a magical substance that demanded respect and fear:

  Is it an angry fiend—escaped

  From the fearful furnace of destruction?

  No! It’s the impish spirit of fluidity,

  The soul of water on its way.

  Terrible power! But it must be bound—before

  It does any work for you.

  Freedom will destroy it—

  In frightful bondage lies its power.

  Steam makes the wide world—a place

  To play tricks with space;

  For steam, it’s just a jaunt

  Across the Globe’s wet face.

  How amazing is science,

  What feats it attains!

  As it powers ever onwards

  With its mighty gains.

  What will it do—what will it not!

  Seeing is believing, witness we must!

  I wonder what J. J. would have said about the technologies that came to play an increasingly important part in our farming life after the Second World War. His delight in modern science suggests that the old bard would have appreciated the coming of our water turbine, for example. This was built by Bob and Evan to generate electricity for Tynybraich, and they, in turn, were advised by a man called Roland Evans, a self-taught electrician and owner of the Turnpike Garage at Dinas Mawddwy.

  At the bottom of the hill, where the road to the farm crossed Maesglasau stream, a shed was built, and in it Bob, Evan and Roland Evans assembled the machine which could turn water into light.

  Some time later we were all called down to the shed to witness the “miracle” of hydroelectric power. It was an amazing sight, as the flow of the stream moved the turbine. Unceremoniously the equipment was switched on. We held our breath. Very slowly a faint yellow light glowed in the bulb at the end of a cable. Slowly strengthening, within a few seconds it shone brightly.

  I stared, dazzled, words failing me. This was the birth of a new age, here, in a lowly shed on the narrow bank of Maesglasau stream.

  Thus, the waters of Maesglasau, you might say, brought light to the world. In yet another way, the stream gave of her own energies to help us. It is the stream—and the trusty turbine—which provides electricity for Tynybraich to this day.

  After the turbine came two other devices to lighten our workload in the house: an electric oven and a washing machine. The first was useful; its heat was clean and constant. The second was nothing less than an emancipation—a maid to a maid. It did away with the crushing labor of the weekly wash; the red raw knuckles caused by rubbing and scrubbing, and calluses caused by mangling; the hard, rough hands of soda soap and hot water. All we had to do now was put the clothes into the machine and keep an eye on it while doing the rest of the housework. It was no longer necessary to allocate the whole of Monday to do the dreaded washing.

  Bob and Evan and the water turbine

  On Wednesday mornings I would take the washing from the bungalow up to Tynybraich farmhouse, looking forward to a cup of tea with Olwen. A half-hour of leisure. Chatting and laughing. Exchanging recipes and patterns. Discussing the weather or the produce at the show. Talking of the children’s progress. These half hours were free time in which we could be sisters.

  Toward the beginning of the 1950s, if I remember correctly, Cwm Maesglasau heard the sound of its first telephone, a new apparatus which allowed Lewis and Gruffydd to phone home once a week. We’d be there without fail to answer their calls. I think the ring of the telephone meant
as much as the voice of an angel to my mother during her last few years.

  Television came late to Tynybraich. Radio waves could not reach the far end of the cwm, and a new receiver was raised on the side of Cwm yr Eglwys—and raised again and again after every storm.

  As a matter of fact, Tynybraich went to television, rather than vice versa. In 1964 the journalist John Roberts Williams came to interview us for the BBC’s Heddiw news program. He’d heard an amazing story about the “three blind brothers” from Tynybraich and wanted to make a short film.

  The cameras came to record the journeys of my three brothers, away from Cwm Maesglasau into the world. Starting with their education at Worcester their stories were followed up to the present, with Gruffydd an Anglican minister at Little Marcle in Herefordshire; Lewis working as a telephonist with the Ministry of Labour at Nottingham, and William acting as a braille copyist and multilingual editor at Tynybraich.

  We went to see the film’s showing at a friend’s house in Dinas Mawddwy.

  It opens with a panoramic shot of Tynybraich farmhouse, nestling in a fold of land like an infant in a mother’s arm. The title of the program is stamped in white letters over this scene—“O! Tyn y Gorchudd,” “Oh, pull aside the veil”—the opening line of the hymn by Hugh Jones of Maesglasau. In the background the Mawddwy male voice choir is heard singing T. Llew Jones’ strict-meter poem to Cwm Maesglasau.

  Then comes the narrator, Aled Rhys William’s voice declaring that Tynybraich had once been home to the famous Harpist of Mawddwy. He recounts an anecdote about my grandfather, Robert Jones, “who turned the cart over because he was reading his Bible instead of looking where he was going.” There are camera shots of our stream flowing between bracken and rushes, a sheepdog running hither and thither, black cattle grazing, then raising their heads to look inquisitively into the camera. We see Wyn raking the hay, a cockerel crowing on a gate, and Bob and Evan in a sheep-fold, grasping the animals and sending them splashing through the dip. William is pictured with a bucket in his hand, walking uphill from the bungalow to fetch buttermilk. His head is aslant, as if he could sense the eye of the camera.

  The narrator recites the history of the three blind brothers. There is a picture of Gruff in his clerical collar on the lawn of his Georgian rectory in Herefordshire. In his formal Welsh, Gruff tells the story of his ordination at Southwark in London. With his dry humor he recounts further anecdotes: his first baptism when he held the child upside-down; that time he bathed his infant daughter in total darkness—and the little girl did not say a word. He is seen with his wife Christine and the three children, Elizabeth, Richard and Hugh. He is seen walking with his white stick to the ancient church at Little Marcle—a thousand years old—“almost exactly the same age as Tynybraich.” He is shown reading from his braille Bible, pronouncing the words in his formal English accent, his supple fingers gliding over the pages: Here endeth the first lesson.

  Lewis is next, filmed at his work at a telephone exchange in Nottingham. He mentions the fact that he had some sight as a child; how grateful he is for having seen the color of bluebells, the wild rose in the hedge, the sun in the sky. He talks about his work with the Samaritans, and how he’d helped a man on the brink of suicide by asking him what he’d like Lewis to see, should he ever regain his sight. Slowly, as he described a particular scene, hope came to the man’s voice. Finally, Lewis is pictured with his wife Rachel, together with their three children, Isobel, Bronwen and Dominic. And the camera follows him as he walks toward a telephone box in Nottingham.

  A phone rings in the kitchen at Tynybraich. William answers. And now his tale is told. He is shown at work, editing braille texts in a dozen languages, including works such as the Hebrew-English Lexicon. Mother is seen knitting socks in her chair by the dresser, the willow pattern plates in rows behind her. Then Mother and William are seen working together in complete harmony on a braille version of the novel, O Law i Law, by T. Rowland Hughes. Mother reads the original; William compares, then copies.

  This film, so full of familiar images, was also a revelation. We had never before seen the daily lives of Gruff and Lewis in England, so far from Cwm Maesglasau.

  It was so sad when the film ended, as if a dream had ended abruptly. It lasted a mere fifteen minutes, though filming had gone on for days.

  William sat between myself and Mother throughout, holding our hands. I remember looking at him afterward. He had contributed to something—a visual representation of himself—which he could not partake of. His life had been celebrated in a medium which was, in the context of his own existence, largely meaningless.

  It was a bittersweet experience for me, then, a quarter of a century later, when I received a videotape copy of the program from the B.B.C. Archives. Wyn had the necessary equipment to play the film, and we all met in the parlor at Tynybraich to watch the “old fashioned” black-and-white film. It was with terrible longing, mingled with a painful joy, that I saw Mother resurrected on the small screen; Gruff alive too, and William. Our old life came flooding back. There were moments when I felt myself drowning.

  I did not weep much. I stubbornly kept the tears in, not wanting to detract from my family’s enjoyment.

  But when I returned to the privacy of my home, knowing that the babble of the stream would drown my own sound, I could barely shut the door before the tears came. I wept as I had never wept before. I wept through the night—until my bony body weakened.

  The greatest pain was the lie perpetrated by the film. It seemed to say that nothing changed, yet showed clearly that nothing lasted. It “immortalized” the visible world. Yet, I—who had been invisible in the film—was the only one who still lived. And more than anything, I resented the way my own multi-colored memories had been obscured by searing images in black and white.

  Back in the 1960s, when that short film was broadcast, and when the miracle of television was still new, it created quite a stir. Gruff, William and Lewis became local celebrities. I agreed with the general opinion that Bob, the eldest of the four brothers, should have received more attention. After all, it was the blindness of his three brothers which had decreed his fate, obliging him to stay on the farm.

  He had dreamt of a life as a doctor. And it was true that he had saved his own life and that of others many times by knowing how to treat a life-threatening wound. There were many miles between Tynybraich and the nearest hospital. There was that time he fell while rescuing a sheep on the rocks above Maesglasau. He tore a large vein in his wrist and the blood poured from this wound. He was alone in a remote place. But Bob stemmed the flow of blood by tying a length of baling twine around the top of his arm. He struggled down to the valley floor and dragged himself to the farmhouse, and was only then rushed to hospital.

  Bob was an unwilling farmer. He was most happy reading and reasoning. His great love was history books, political biographies and the memoirs of great men. He had no time for literature, and retained a Calvinist distrust of the novels I read.

  He learned to escape from the confines of the hill farmer’s life by becoming a county councillor and a magistrate. He was an uncompromising Labourite, and was dismayed—to say the least—by his wife’s instinctive support for Plaid Cymru. I remember accompanying Olwen in the car at election times, and the minute Tynybraich had gone out of view Olwen would stop the car—with mischief in her eyes—and place a large Plaid Cymru banner on the side window of the car. She’d drive over the Oerddrws Pass to Dolgellau, park it on the Marian where everyone could see it, then drive back over the Pass at the end of the afternoon, still waving the nationalist flag. The moment we passed Ffridd, almost within sight of Tynybraich, Olwen would stop the car and remove the banner, carefully folding it and putting it away in the glove compartment, ready for next Friday’s trip to Dolgellau. Bob was never the wiser about the political duplicity of his Morris Marina.

  I myself felt quietly envious of their daughter, Mair, who was by now a student at Bangor University, because she lived amid t
he excitement of the 1960s Welsh-language protests, rather than following a nunnish life in a remote cwm like I did.

  As a result of his work with the National Farmers’ Union in Merioneth, Bob got to see the world beyond Maesglasau, going to meetings in London, and later Brussels. He loved traveling, returning with many stories. One of his favorites concerned a visit he made to London with one of his acquaintances, a man who had never traveled far from Dinas Mawddwy. Arriving in Trafalgar Square, this man was amazed by the tumult of people and cars. Thinking of the Annual Fair at Dolgellau, or the August Show at Dinas, he walked up to a nearby policeman and asked: “What’s going on here today, then?”

  Only once did I accompany Bob and Olwen to London. I was amazed: the unbroken traffic, the huge buildings, the Babel of peoples. What astonished me most was the noise, deafening, muddling me. I closed my ears to it and did not open them again until I got home.

  *

  Soon after the film about “the three blind brothers” was broadcast, Mother’s mind began to cloud over. That was to be expected, perhaps, in a woman over eighty years old. Yet, it made me uneasy. On the day she broke the rule of a lifetime by reaching for her knitting on a Sabbath, I knew something was wrong. Olwen also noticed.

  Mother began to show signs of increasing confusion. Uncharacteristically, she’d give a prickly response to a question. She’d contradict. Pretend she couldn’t hear. She often disappeared into her own world. This from a woman known for her gentleness and care.

  She declined rapidly. Before long it was clear to us that she suffered from that terrible disease, Alzheimer’s. She was moved from the bungalow back to the farmhouse at Tynybraich to be cared for.

  It was nightmarish to hear her call in the small hours, thinking it was time to get up. Wyn, who slept in the bedroom next door to her, would go to her and ease her back toward sleep.

  Mother’s illness was more troubling for William than anyone. Since the death of my father, the needs of “Wil Bach”—“Little Will”—had been at the center of Mother’s life. She provided for him, did everything she could to smooth his way. He in turn came to depend on her, as the rest of us depended on the clock. Now—aged over fifty—he had to cope without her.