by Peter Murphy
‘Difficult position, tight-head,’ Trevor commented.
‘Did you play?’
‘Inside centre for my school, not that I made much impression. But tight-head is another story. That’s a very physical position. You don’t come out of that without a few cuts and bruises, do you?’
‘It’s the worst of all, man,’ Dai agreed.
‘What kind of level did you play?’
‘I played a few games for the university when I was at Aberystwyth, and I’ve played a few for the club here, but I’m a bit past my prime now. Put on a bit too much weight, see, a few too many pints.’
‘I bet you could still make a loose-head’s life a misery.’
Dai smiled happily. ‘Aye, I bet I bloody could, too.’
‘You’d need to knock off the beer for a week or two,’ Caradog said. ‘He needs a wife to take charge of him, keep him under control.’
‘Aye,’ Dai said. ‘Perhaps I do. Anyway, I won’t ever pull on the red jersey myself, I’ve resigned myself to that now. But I’m always there at the Arms Park for the home games, and I can still give the under-15s a few tips.’
‘I’m sure you can,’ Trevor smiled.
‘Come on,’ Caradog said, finishing his pint. ‘Drink up. We should go. We don’t want to keep supper waiting. Trevor is coming home with us.’
‘Right you are, then,’ Dai Bach said.
9
She was genuinely pleased to see him. Trevor noticed that at once. He made an apology for taking her by surprise, but she waved it aside. She had made a lamb stew, and she always made enough to have some left over. Caradog brought Dai Bach home often enough without warning, she explained, and she was used to having to cook for at least one more than expected.
The house on Rhês Pretoria – Pretoria Terrace – was the last in a row of terraced houses. Pretoria Terrace itself was just outside the town wall, a comfortable five-minute stroll from the Tywysog. It was set above the main road leading from the town to Victoria Dock, and each of the well-kept houses had a small garden in front, on an incline leading down to the road. He noticed that the rooms seemed heavy in tone, dark wallpapers, dimly lit by floor lamps covered with grey shades with tassels, and cumbersome old furniture. On the mantelpiece stood china figurines, a motley collection of people and animals with no obvious theme. A Welsh grandmother clock, eighteenth century by John Roberts of Wrexham, gave the house its heartbeat with its soothing rhythmic tick, and chimed lightly on the hour.
‘We have three bedrooms upstairs,’ she said. ‘This is the living and dining room, and the room at the back is my music room.’
He had heard music playing, a fugue for cello, when they had entered the house.
‘Oh, was that you? Do you play cello?’
‘Does she play?’ Dai Bach asked. ‘That’s like asking Cliff Morgan whether he played rugby.’
She laughed. ‘Hardly.’
‘She’s played for an orchestra, man. You should hear her. Marvellous, she is.’
‘I played with the orchestra when I was at University at Bangor,’ she said, ‘and for a short while with an orchestra in Cardiff after I graduated. But the travelling was too much. I teach now. I have my own pupils, cello and piano. They come to the house. School children, mostly, but some adults as well.’
‘But do you still play?’ he asked. ‘Publicly, I mean?’
‘Not much any more,’ she replied, and he sensed a sadness in the reply. ‘I play for the children’s carol services and things like that, but there’s not much call for it in Caernarfon.’
‘I’ve encouraged her to audition,’ Caradog said. ‘We have other good orchestras in Wales. You don’t have to go all the way to Cardiff. But she won’t, and she’s as good on the cello as anyone I’ve ever heard.’
‘He hasn’t heard many people,’ she was saying in a stage whisper, smiling.
She placed Trevor on her left during supper, and he noticed that the beautiful formal Welsh in which she had spoken to him in the shop came naturally to her. If it was for his benefit, she was prepared to continue for as long as he wished. After they had eaten, she excused herself, saying that it was time for her nightly practice. After a few moments, the soft sound of scales and arpeggios on the cello, and then a suite for solo cello, percolated into the dining room. Caradog had produced a bottle of whisky.
‘I will answer your question about the basement, Trevor,’ Caradog said, pouring for everyone. ‘But please try to understand, I may go around the houses a bit. It’s not as simple as you might think.’
‘Ask him the time,’ Dai Bach said, ‘and he will give you the history of clock-making. Born lecturer, he is. At the university he should be, not the Ancient Monuments.’
Caradog laughed indulgently.
‘Take your time,’ Trevor said, smiling.
Caradog finished his pouring of whisky.
‘Nationalism in Wales,’ he began, ‘is a unique creature. It is very different from nationalism elsewhere. Take Ireland, for example. Ireland is a divided nation. So nationalism in Ireland has a tangible goal – the uniting, or re-uniting of the country.’
‘A rather unlikely one,’ Trevor suggested.
‘Do you think so? The Irish Free State was a compromise, a temporary solution at best. It got the British Government out of a difficulty at the time, but it was no basis for a permanent solution. The Government can never be quite sure how far the Free State supports nationalists in the Six Counties, or how far they would go in that support if push came to shove. That was all the doing of our local MP, as you know – dear old David Lloyd George. Not his finest hour.’
They were sitting close together at the end of the table by the front window, Caradog at the top of the table, Dai Bach to his right and Trevor to his left. Caradog had placed the open bottle in the middle between them.
‘There is the religious question, too, of course. I don’t see any permanent solution until someone finds a way to make the Catholics and Protestants at least tolerate each other.’
‘I don’t think they’ll ever do that,’ Dai Bach observed, with a shake of his head. ‘Too extreme about it, they are, that’s the problem. No sense of compromise about them at all.’
‘Then you have the social structure. The English have spent centuries taking land away from the Catholics and giving it to the Protestants, so the Protestants see themselves as a different social class, and look down on the Catholics accordingly.’
Trevor smiled. ‘The legacy of Oliver Cromwell.’
‘It started long before Cromwell,’ Caradog replied. ‘The only Englishman ever to be Pope – Adrian, his name was – purported to give Ireland to the English 500 years or more before Cromwell, and that shaped the English attitude. The idea that England owned Ireland lock, stock and barrel, was firmly entrenched long before Cromwell. No, it’s an historic grievance, and from time to time it spills over into violence. It has before, and it will again.’
He poured himself another large glass of whisky and pushed the bottle across the table to Dai Bach.
‘But my point is that Wales is different. We are not a divided nation, and there is no religious divide between us and the English. We have an historic grievance, of course. Edward I invaded our country and annexed England in the thirteenth century, and ever since then Wales has been part of England, politically speaking.’
‘He bloody deceived us too,’ Dai Bach jumped in. ‘Told us that he would never make a man Prince of Wales who spoke English, didn’t he? Then he shows off his infant son at our own Castle here in Caernarfon, before he’s old enough to speak any language at all, and says, “Look, here’s your Prince. I kept my word. He doesn’t speak a word of English.” He didn’t speak a word of anything. In our own castle, right under our bloody noses. Duplicitous bastard.’
Caradog smiled tolerantly.
‘Yes, Dai Bach, as you sa
y: a duplicitous bastard. But he was also a powerful bastard, and there was nothing we could do to stop him. Much later, there was Owain Glyndŵr.’
‘Aye, we had a leader in those days,’ Dai Bach said.
‘Yes,’ Caradog agreed. ‘But what you have to understand about Glyndŵr is that he didn’t set out to be a rebel.’
He paused to refill his glass.
‘He was a country gentleman, a prosperous farmer, and a soldier who had served in an English army. He had no enmity towards the English. He lived among the English. He had English family. He even went to London to study at the Inns of Court. I don’t think he wanted conflict. But his blood was his undoing, you see. He had the blood of the two princely houses in his veins – Gwynedd and Powys. He was a lightning rod. There were those who did want conflict, and Glyndŵr was forced into the role of leader because of who he was, and what he represented. Once his hand was forced, he did his best to throw off the English yoke. To no avail. Henry IV was too strong for him, just as Edward I had been too strong for us in his day. But anyway… since then we have never tried to take up arms, and now there has been so much inter-marriage, so much day-to-day commerce, so many Welsh men like Lloyd George taking up important positions in public life, that people don’t even think about it. We have become one country.’
Trevor smiled.
‘And the basement?’
Caradog returned the smile. ‘I’m coming to the basement. I told you we would go round the houses, but I am coming to it.’
It had started to rain earlier. The rain was beating more persistently on the windows now. Caradog turned round briefly, looked out of the window, and turned back.
‘The fact that there has been no violence in Wales in modern times doesn’t mean that there is no Welsh nationalism. But the roots of Welsh nationalism have never been in political independence. If you look back to 1925, when Plaid Cymru was founded, they weren’t concerned with that. They were concerned with preserving the language, cultural questions. They knew that it’s cultural independence that makes sense for Wales.’
‘Plaid Cymru backs political independence now,’ Trevor pointed out.
‘Yes, now they do, and there have always been those who have advocated it. But they know it’s not going to happen – not unless there is a shake-up of Great Britain as a whole, and there’s no sign of that. On the other hand, they also know that the survival of the language, the survival of our culture, is possible. That’s what Madog always believed.’
The whisky bottle made another circuit.
‘That is what the Tywysog has always been about. Madog believed that if the language and culture are to survive, two things have to happen. One, our language, literature and history must be taught in our schools, and two, there must be book shops and libraries which make them available to the people. He saw the Tywysog as part of that.’
‘All right, I see that,’ Trevor said. ‘But, as I said before, most of the stuff Madog had in the basement ought to be upstairs on public display. I mean, if you want to reach the people, why not have it out on the shelves, where the people can see it? That’s what I would do. In fact, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not sure quite where I will put it all. I may have to squeeze another bookcase in upstairs somehow, but that’s just a detail.’
He paused.
‘But the other stuff…’
‘The other stuff is there,’ Caradog said, ‘because there are some people who haven’t totally rejected the idea of armed resistance.’
There was a silence for some time.
‘Bunch of bloody comedians, most of them, if you ask me,’ Dai Bach said. ‘No idea what they’re doing. Bloody fools.’
‘Bloody fools they may be,’ Caradog replied, ‘but they have to be reckoned with. Madog knew that. Every once in a while, one or two of them would come into the Tywysog and start asking for materials – the kind of materials that would be useful for violent resistance. Madog had no interest in getting that kind of material for them and he had no way of getting his hands on it even if he wanted to. But after a while, something rather strange happened. People started coming in, not to buy, but to donate materials.’
Trevor raised his eyebrows.
‘You’ve seen it for yourself. Some of it is idiotic nationalist ranting. Some of it is smuggled military output – there have always been members of the military with nationalist sympathies. Some of it is – well, God only knows where it comes from – but it gives home-made designs for bombs.’
‘You’re saying they brought this stuff to Madog?’ Trevor asked.
‘Exactly. They asked Madog to store it for them, and he did. And no doubt other people would come in from time to time and look at it. Perhaps he shouldn’t have done it, but he did. Perhaps he was afraid of them, or perhaps he agreed against his better judgement. Or perhaps there is a part of Madog that believes that the day may come when the culture is so threatened that violence becomes justifiable, or even inevitable. I don’t know the answer to that, Trevor. I’m speculating. But that was what happened.’
‘So, the Tywysog became an information exchange, as well as a book shop?’
‘Yes, that’s one way of putting it. And now you have to decide what to do with it all, because it is not going to go away, and neither are the people who brought it.’
‘He might have warned me,’ Trevor mused.
‘He may have thought you would run a mile, and the deal would fall through, if he did. In any case, you were bound to find out for yourself at some point. I’m glad you have had the sense to ask me before one of them turns up at the shop one fine day.’
‘I could just make a bonfire of it all,’ Trevor suggested. ‘Then, when the nationalists come calling, I can just say I have no idea what they are talking about.’
‘That would be one way,’ Caradog agreed. ‘But whatever you do, don’t forget one important thing. The urge to resort to violence is getting stronger, not weaker. It’s going to become an issue.’
‘Look around you, Trevor. We’re in the sixties now. We’ve stopped looking backwards to the War, and we’ve started to look forward to the kind of world we want to inhabit in the future. The War was a great leveller. A lot of people who were ignored and looked down on and discriminated against before the War suddenly became indispensable to the War effort, and now it’s over, those people want recognition. They want the rights they were denied before their country needed them. It was a fight they postponed in the interests of winning the War. But how long do you think black people in America will put up with being treated as second class citizens now? And in Europe, the students – the new generation of students who weren’t part of the War and who resent the political system that could inflict two world wars on their continent, and want to bring it down – what about them? They are the people you really need to watch, if you’re the government. They’re the ones with new visions, who will carry the fight forward. They have causes of their own, and some of those causes are to do with changing the political landscape forever, and some of that landscape will have to do with nationalism.’
‘Oh. Come on,’ Trevor replied. ‘Students are always protesting about something or other. It’s a right of passage for students to give the authorities a hard time. Then they graduate and join the club, as we all do. It’s a fad; it will pass, like everything else.’
‘Will it? I’m not sure. I see a new desire to recreate the world in their own image, a new willingness to embrace political protest, and even political violence, as a means to an end. America certainly won’t be able to escape it, but neither will Europe and neither will Britain. Ireland has unfinished business, and so does Wales. Wales will come under the same pressure, which means that eventually we will all have to decide where we stand. Just like Owain Glyndŵr.’
As Trevor stood to leave, he heard the dying notes, sweet and confident, of the piece which marked the end of Arianwe
n’s practice. She left the music room and came into the hall just as he was putting on his coat. She saw him to the door, pressing an umbrella into his hand against the pouring rain. As he left, she kissed him on the cheek.
10
November 1962
‘There is a Welsh custom,’ she said, without raising her head from his chest, ‘according to which women are just as entitled to propose marriage to men as men are to women.’
‘Really?’ he replied, also without moving. ‘I never knew that.’
‘Oh, yes. It goes back to the laws of Hywel Dda, so it’s many centuries old. Under Hywel Dda men and women were equal, or at least, women had many more rights than they do now.’
‘No wonder Welsh women are so forward,’ he smiled.
They had first made love at the house on a cold night earlier in the year, in March, when Caradog and Dai Bach were away, attending a meeting of Plaid Cymru supporters in Carmarthen. The meeting was expected to end late, and they had arranged to stay away overnight. By that time, Trevor had become a friend of the family and a regular visitor to Pretoria Terrace. Often he came for dinner, but sometimes he would drop in just to listen when she played her cello in the evening. Sitting in an armchair, closing his eyes, and allowing the smooth tones of her music to wash over him, he could go far away in his mind to a place where the stresses of the day no longer bothered him. Sometimes, he was so far away that he did not even realise she had finished playing; she would come and touch him on the shoulder, laughingly accusing him of falling asleep during her recital, although to Trevor, it did not feel like sleep.
He started to take her out, at first for a meal or a drink, or to see a film locally, but then to other events, classical concerts in Bangor and further afield. But that night in March was a simple supper on a work night, and by that evening, the friendly kisses at the end of their times together had taken effect, and there was no doubt in either of their minds that they would make love. It was simply that there was no reason to delay it any longer. Yet he still felt nervous as they kissed at the bottom of the stairs.