I Came, I Saw

by Norman Lewis

  The finish of the meal, joined by two more neighbouring aunties, was spoilt by the arrival of the ferry boat, bringing the miners and their families. They came unexpectedly, as the jetty had been put out of action by the villagers in the preceding week. But the villagers had underestimated the miners’ determination to enjoy themselves, as with tremendous effort they dragged the heavy boat clear of the water and onto the sand.

  Until this calamity, the three Llanstephan aunties, hard to tell apart with their round country faces and polished cheeks, had been full of smiles, and by Uncle Williams’ gestures and noises he too had seemed brimful of good humour. Aunt Li, whose vacant expression signified for me that for once she was not actually unhappy, was teasing a small crab she had found in a pool. Now, suddenly, as the mining families climbed down from the boat and advanced towards us, a great change came over our family gathering. The miners’ children, shrieking with delight, scampered ahead, and the miners and their wives trudged in the rear over the wet sand, carrying their boots and shoes, their little parcels of food, and two bulky packages. Watching this advance, the Llanstephan aunties’ kindly, homely faces became those of different barely recognizable people. My Carmarthen relations laughed and wept in their meaningless way, or — in the case of Polly — were unable to produce a facial expression of any kind, but they had at least spared me the spectacle of anger, which was frighteningly new. The soft singsong Welsh voices had lost their music and fallen flat, as they talked of the wickedness of miners. It was a local theory, supported by the chapels, that poverty was the wages of sin — and the miners looked poor enough. Their women, it was thought, who often worked alongside their men, were driven into the mines not by hunger but shamelessness, and discussing this aspect of the mining life the Llanstephan aunties made the loading up and manoeuvring of coal trucks in near darkness a thousand feet under the earth seem a carnal indulgence.

  Uncle Williams went into the house and came back with a placard, which he fixed to a post by his wall. It said, ‘Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it Holy’, but the miners ignored it. Their children were everywhere, screaming with glee. They threw wet sand at each other, dug up cockles, dammed the little streams flowing on the beach, and even came to stare open-mouthed over the garden walls. When no one was watching I sneaked away to try to join forces with them, but we did not easily mix. Immersed in their games, they ignored me, and I was too shy to speak.

  Presently a miner beckoned to me. He and his wife were setting out their picnic on a cloth spread over the dry sand. The man was short but very strong-looking, with bowed legs, and a snake tattooed on each forearm. He asked me my name, and I told him, and his wife looked up and smiled and gave me a slice of cake. ‘Sit you down,’ she said, and I was just going to when Auntie Williams spotted me and let out a screech. ‘Come you back by here.’

  I went back and Auntie Williams said, ‘What she give you, then?’ I showed her the cake and she took it away and threw it to the pigeons. Wanting to get away from her I went over to Li, but she was no longer blank-faced as she had been when I left her, and for me that meant that something had upset her. She had lost her crab, and I thought it might be that. ‘Like me to find you another crab, Auntie?’ I asked, but she shook her head.

  On the beach, sandwiches had been passed out to the children. The man who had spoken to me opened a bottle of beer. He drank from the neck, and passed it to his wife. The couple who had been carrying the two brown paper parcels untied the string and unwrapped them. One of the parcels had held the box part of a gramophone, and the other the horn, and these they fixed together. We watched from our chairs under the apple tree while this was going on. No one spoke but I could feel the astonished horror. The people who had brought the gramophone wound it up and put on a record and soon a little thin, wheezing music reached us between the soft puffs of breeze, and the squawking of the herring gulls flopping about overhead.

  The people in the cottage next door had come out into the garden to watch what was going on and one of them, a man, shouted a protest. Uncle Williams stood up, picked an apple and threw it in the direction of the couple with the gramophone, but with so little force that the apple hardly cleared our low wall. His example gave great encouragement, though, to the others, and the man who had shouted from the garden next door threw a small stone. My feeling was that he never really intended to hit anything, and the stone splashed in a beach puddle yards from the nearest of the miners, who gave no sign of realizing what was happening and went on eating their sandwiches and drinking their beer, never once so much as looking in our direction. Next a bigger stone thudded on the sand, and there were more shouts from the cottages, and two or three children who had gone off to collect shells gave up and went back to join their parents.

  More shouts and more stones followed — all the stones thrown by men whose aim was very bad, or who otherwise weren’t trying. After a while the miners began to pack up, taking their time about it, and paying no attention at all to the villagers who were insulting them. The gramophone was taken apart and parcelled up as before, and everything they had brought with them packed away; then, without looking back, they began to move towards the ferry boat, and within half an hour they had managed to push the boat into the water and that was the last of them.

  Uncle Williams took down the placard and put it away, and his wife put on the kettle for tea. Nobody could find anything to say. The weather experts who could tell by the look of the seaweed had promised them a fine afternoon, but the miners had ruined their day. Li suddenly got up and said she was going home. ‘We got an hour still to wait for the bus, Auntie,’ I said. ‘Never mind about the bus,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving now,’ and she was off, marching down the path, and I could see by the way she was walking, with her head thrown back and slightly to one side, that something had upset her, although there was no way of saying what it was. I’d seen enough of her by then to know that it wasn’t the miners being there that bothered her — in which case it could only be something one of the Llanstephan relations had said or done that was to blame. But what was it? I couldn’t guess. There was no telling the way things took Aunt Li.

  I ran to catch her up. It was six and a half miles to Carmarthen but she was a fast walker, and I expected we’d beat the bus.

  Chapter Two

  IN THE AUTUMN I was sent to local day school, the Pentrepoeth at which my father had suffered some thirty-five years before. He had been there in the days when the Welsh had decided to anglicize themselves, and he was caned for speaking the native language in a master’s presence. By my time a swing of the pendulum had occurred, and some lessons were conducted in Welsh of which I was unable to understand a word. For this I received a mild cuffing, not only to cure me of idiocy, but to punish what was suspected as stubborn muteness or malice. The fact was that life in Wellfield Road had had the effect of practically silencing me in the presence of adults. The master was a fourth or fifth cousin of mine, as he mentioned to me reproachfully, but this had no effect on his treatment of me. He would appeal to the schoolchildren. ‘Not understanding a word I say to him, he is. What do you call a boy that cannot even respond when spoken to? What is the name for him?’ All the children would shout with delight, ‘Dickie Dwl, sir’ (stupid Dick). ‘That’s right, boys, and that is what his name shall be, Dickie Dwl.’ I was then sent down to the infants’ school in the effort to force a little Welsh into me. This was quite unsuccessful.

  The harsh winter that year was a good time for me. In South Wales the winters are expected to be mild and wet, but this was an arctic exception, throwing out challenges and imposing strains, and many people — as did my family — found it wholly beneficial to battle with the elements, distracted in this way from other troubles. Where the floods had been, vast sheets of ice covered the fields. Most of the services gave in, the electricity failed, and the water mains froze up. Farmers snowed up in their hill farms were unable to bring food to the market, and Pen-lan loomed over us like a Himalayan ice-pea
k, the sheep dying in snowdrifts on its slopes.

  It was an emergency that had a tonic effect in Aunt Polly’s case too, and she bustled about endlessly organizing supplies of fuel and food and badgering reluctant workmen to trudge through the snow up to the house to repair the damage done by storm and flood.

  I soon noticed a slackening in the severity of her fits, and although she still continued to suffer one a day, she was much quieter, and the attacks were of shorter duration. Some time in the afternoon the inevitable symptoms, the silence and the withdrawal would appear, and Annie and Li would set about putting in hand the usual security precautions, which included locking the door of any room in which a fire was burning. Fits happened once in a while in Polly’s bedroom, or in the bathroom — but more often either the kitchen or the breakfast room was chosen. I went in mortal fear of seeing Aunt Polly’s face when she was having a fit. Before entering any room I would push open the door, inch by inch, until I could see what was going on, and it always happened that if Polly was there and in trouble, I soon spotted her feet which were small and neat sticking out from behind the sofa or an armchair, whereupon I silently closed the door and slipped away.

  My grandfather had arranged for two layers of underfelt for the breakfast room carpet and well-padded furniture to help break the almost routine fall. There was little to be done to minimize the dangers of the kitchen, and it was here that Polly had fallen twice into the fire. I was astonished that she had not been burned to death, for as far as I could judge a fit could last up to a half hour, and during this time she was left to lie where she was. When a fit was in progress she made no sound, although after it was over she sometimes screamed. This final scream, when it occurred, was a good sign for Grandfather, for it meant that for two or three days afterwards the seizures would be less violent, and Polly would be active about the house and garden, able to discuss family matters in her damaged, whispering voice. The long, hard winter muffled this outcry, but with the thaw, the putting-out of candles and oil lamps, the water running through the taps, and the goods delivered again to the door, my good times were over and tensions began to build up once more.

  As soon as the town came out of the coma of that winter my grandfather embarked on his last romance, a disaster involving the Parisian modiste who had opened up in business a few yards from his King Street establishment. Of the facts of the case I knew nothing until told by my mother some years later. I was aware of a family upheaval but there was nothing unusual in that apart from its magnitude, and that for the first time I saw my grandfather under physical assault by his daughters. The modiste, according to my mother, was thirty-five years younger than the old man, and turned the head of every male in town, and what my mother could not understand — and I heartily agreed with her — was what such a creature would be doing in a grey little, milk-swilling, psalm-singing place like Carmarthen? Her story was that my grandfather had picked the girl up on Paddington Station on one of his trips to London, and had let her persuade him to set her up in business.

  The luckless young modiste, said my mother, was harried by Annie and Li from pillar to post. I was able to describe to her an episode I had witnessed of this persecution when, in King Street, my Aunt Li had once left me to rush at a woman passer-by, tear the hat from her head and trample it under her feet.

  I was to see this same woman once more on the day she called at the house. My grandfather was at his business and she had come for a meeting with Aunt Polly, in the hope, perhaps, of winning her over. She was kept waiting in the hall where, with long practice at self-concealment, I had placed myself out of sight. Polly had had a fit an hour or so before, and was given time to get over it before being told about the visitor. Then — half the girl’s size — she came into sight, still twitching a little and eyes staring, walked straight up to her and struck her in the face.

  It was the last I ever saw of the girl from Paris, but her presence and the guilt and shame the liaison generated must have been manna to the congregations of the town’s many chapels. There had been some talk of my grandfather becoming mayor, but little more was heard of this, and when I brought the matter up with Aunt Polly I was told that there had been some trouble over his refusal to join the Church of England. After that even his position in his chapel seemed on the wane where, probably because of a voice of irreplaceable power, he remained precentor, but ceased to be deacon. His friend and protector had been Lord Kilsant, with whom he had conducted certain discreet business transactions, and who had encouraged him when he applied for a grant of arms and advised him on his choice of emblem (which included a teapot emblazoned on a shield). Now the man with whom Grandfather had been seen walking arm and arm with down King Street on his way to the Liberal Club turned out to have master-minded a financial swindle in the City of London for which he was tried and sent to prison. And worse was to follow when there were widespread allegations that the origins of an outbreak of the ‘bad sickness’ (as gonorrhoea was always known), soon reaching epidemic proportions, had been tracked down to the presence of the French girl in the town.

  My grandfather turned for solace to his game cocks, encouraged perhaps to do so by an exceptionally successful breeding season in the previous year, before Li had had the idea of parboiling the eggs. This had produced a king of which he was very proud, and though I had good reason to detest game cocks, I had to admit that this was a handsome if terrifying bird. I had never seen a cock before with such beautiful plumage, with shining wine-coloured feathers, streaked and shot, according to the light, with the deepest of blue. Grandfather had mentioned to someone when I happened to be in the room — he never in all the months that I lived in the house addressed a word to me — that he had been penalized at the Carmarthen show for breeding birds with legs that were too long. This one, although it reached to my waist and could comfortably peck me in the face, was a little shorter, exactly as demanded at this time by the changing fashion in poultry. It was fed on chopped up fillet steak, barley sugar, aniseed, ginger, rhubarb and yeast mixed with ‘cock bread’ made from oatmeal and eggs to which a little cinnamon was added.

  The bird’s great moment arrived when it was ‘dubbed’. While Aunt Polly held the king by the legs, my grandfather opened its beak with one finger in its mouth and the thumb at the back of the head, then with a single cut removed the comb, very close to the skull. Next the ear-lobes and wattles went, the whole process timed by a stop-watch to last not longer than a minute. My grandfather claimed that the king felt no pain. As soon as the operation was over a few grams of corn were thrown to it, and now came the supreme moment, for a future champion would show ‘eagerness’ at this point — as did Grandfather’s bird — by swallowing its own comb.

  This bird showed an inexhaustible energy that caused it to break into a skip as it strutted round its pen, and it was this skipping, its swaggering walk, its fiery red eye and the way it hurled itself at the wire when provoked which entranced the experts that came to see it. My grandfather completed the entertainment by throwing it a sizeable rat, only partially disabled, which it soon despatched. A bird of this calibre, someone told me, could drive a spur right through a quarter-inch-thick wooden board, and had been known to kill weasels, and even a fox. The opinion was that my grandfather had bred a winner, and he was advised to bypass the local shows and groom the king for the Royal Agricultural Hall, London, or the Crystal Palace, where it was certain to receive the award for the best in its class, if not the show.

  With the coming of spring Aunt Polly’s condition worsened, as if the sickness she suffered from was bent on making up for time lost in the calm of the winter. She locked herself in her bedroom for more than a week, and made no reply to appeals by my grandfather, shouted through the keyhole, or the messages — to which a decorative biblical text was sometimes pinned — pushed under the door. Sometimes I was awakened in the night by the sound of a lavatory flushed, the faint crunch of boards, and the squeak of the door of the kitchen, over which I slept. The doctor was
called in and he and my grandfather sat together in the drawing room under floating turbans of cigar smoke, while the old grey parrot crawled over the furniture making its farting noises, and a number of tall clocks ticked the wrong time. Our doctor was another cousin, and inbreeding had given him and my father almost identical faces. I wandered into the room out of curiosity and neither man bothered to look up. On a previous occasion, the doctor had shaken his head out of sympathy when I had had nothing to say in reply when spoken to, and probably assumed that I was deaf and dumb.

  ‘What do you suggest?’ my grandfather asked.

  ‘You’ll have to put her away, for your sake as well as her own.’

  Grandfather shook his head.

  ‘There’s no telling what could happen. Nothing I can give her will do any good. If she stays here don’t hold me responsible for whatever happens.’

  He put down a paper to be signed, but my grandfather pushed it away.

  There was a long discussion about the worsening relationship between Polly and Li, and the doctor said that it was impossible for the two women to go on living under the same roof together.