by Norman Lewis
My grandfather told him that if anybody had to go, it would be Li. Polly was his first born, and his favourite — although he did not admit to this.
The only person in the world whom Polly claimed to love, and who could bring her to her senses at times like this, was my mother, but for some weighty reasons of her own, this was an occasion when my mother was unable to leave the family home in Enfield and come to the rescue. In the last resort, and taking the view that even should the attempt fail there was nothing to be lost, my grandfather persuaded his only married daughter, Charlotte, who lived in Cardiff, to come and do what she could.
Charlotte — Aunt Lalla as she was known to me — was regarded as the brilliant member of the family. She had taken a degree in art, and held an exhibition of her paintings in the Guild Hall, Carmarthen, but promise had been destroyed by her meeting with David Bennett, a tall, mild schoolteacher on holiday from England, and they had immediately married and set up house in Cardiff.
Lalla arrived with her husband and their fourteen-year-old son, who proved to be severely handicapped, although his mother, who was dark and intense and spoke in an excited and passionate way, refused to accept that this was the case. Apart from this staggering delusion, I thought she was a clever woman, and that my uncle was a clever man, too. I could not understand how it was that these exceptional people could have a son with a vocabulary limited to about a dozen words, which he pronounced with difficulty. Apart from this lack of communication between us, we got on well enough together. He was tall, strong and active and addicted to very long walks, which I enjoyed, too, so long as they were restricted to quiet country lanes out of view of the town. My Uncle David was a dedicated golfer, accustomed to take his son with him when he went golfing. In this way Dai, also, had become deeply involved in golf. Unable to master the skills the normal game demanded he had invented a version conducted in his imagination with a phantom opponent. He carried a golf club wherever he went, perpetually on the look-out for objects lying in the road — small branches fallen from trees, cigarette packets and the like — to substitute for the ball. My uncle always carried a reserve of empty matchboxes on these outings for use in the case of the failure of other suitable objects to be found.
In my public relationship with the Bennetts I had to proceed with extreme caution. I was accepted on sufferance by the boys of the Pentrepoeth School who at best regarded me as harmless although not overbright, and above all I was anxious not to be associated in any way with eccentric behaviour. It had been a setback — something I was doing my best to live down — to be sent down to the infants’ school to be taught Welsh. Now the Bennetts had arrived, and my worry was how my school-fellows would view Aunt Lalla, who was inclined to draw attention to herself, to say nothing of Dai with his over-large head and a tongue that was too large for his mouth, busying himself in the streets with his imaginary golf match.
Aunt Li’s unaccountable behaviour in public had been noted and commented upon by my schoolfriends, but here the situation was now well in hand. Whenever we set out on one of our walks I steered clear of the town, and as both our interests lay in the countryside, this was not difficult. May had arrived and a wonderful collection of butterflies fluttered about over the marshy fields and the ponds of Pen-lan. There were white admirals, swallow-tails — never reported from South Wales — which I saw here for the first and last time, fritillaries of all kinds, and one enormous sombre variety, never identified, which a local farmer informed us had been blown across the Atlantic from America, and was occasionally to be seen at the tops of these western hills. My aunt made up an osier trap to catch trout in the roadside streams, and once in a while we caught one. We also trapped a variety of birds, all of which somehow managed to escape, or rather — as I suspect now — were secretly released a few hours after their capture. I always found that I could speak to Li quite easily, and without hesitation, but there was no encouragement to do so, as she preferred a meaningful silence.
Lalla made some progress with Polly and finally got her to come out of her room. After weeping uninterruptedly for half a day, she suddenly calmed down, ate a substantial meal, and gathered up the reins of the household once more into her hands, re-establishing a firm, authoritarian rule.
The proposal on the Bennetts’ last Sunday in Carmarthen was for a bus outing, in which I was to be included — inevitably to Llanstephan. The prospect was a tempting one indeed, offering not only an excursion to the delights of the seashore, but an escape from the shades of the prison house on the gloomiest day of the week. For all that, it was a proposition to be considered with caution. It would entail a half-mile walk down to the bus stop at the Boar’s Head Hotel in Lammas Street, and another risky half-mile to be covered at the end of the return journey. It was a prospect that made me nervous. The alternative was close confinement to the house between morning and evening chapel, with little to do but read, the choice of reading material being Victorian novels that were too old for me, or a manuscript copy of a work by one of my forebears who had kept an eye-witness account at the beginning of the last century of all the numerous public hangings of condemned men from the boughs of the great oaks still standing at Llangunnor, across the river. It was considered irreligious on the Sabbath even to appear in the garden.
In the end I settled for the Llanstephan trip. The sandwiches were made, the empty matchboxes collected and, having given Aunt Polly an undertaking of chapel attendance in Llanstephan, we set out.
We reached the bus stop without incident. There are few people about in the streets in a small Welsh town on a Sunday morning, and I saw no one I knew. Dai, using up energy, cantered along at our side swinging his golf club but abstaining from practising his shots, because my uncle had persuaded him that the finest golfcourse in the world in the form of an endless stretch of golden sands awaited at the end of the trip.
This was a safe time of the year to visit Llanstephan, because it was a good six weeks before the miners and their families would come on the scene at the beginning of August. Much as Lalla disliked and feared them, it seemed possible that she disliked the Williamses even more, and I was grateful that I was not to be exposed once again to the spectacle of Uncle Williams having his food massaged down his throat.
Lalla despised almost everyone outside her immediate family and was angered by the fact that people without artistic talent should spoil the view by their mere presence in a village in which she claimed a kind of proprietorial interest. She and my uncle had lived here for a while after their marriage, and she had been awarded a second prize at the Carmarthen Festival of Arts for her paintings of the sea front, from which all human figures had been excluded. Our family, she said, had had a long association with the place. Some of her memories were dramatic. At low tide a vast and shining sandbank, Cefyn Setyn (Silk Back), appeared in the channel. To this, one Christmas Day in her childhood, she remembered two of her uncles had rowed out, taking a bottle of whisky, to shoot duck and to celebrate, but at the end of a festive day they had shot each other, and only one, with a leg blown off, survived. The practice of infanticide, my aunt claimed, had been common here, and she offered to show me where new-born babies had been buried in the back garden of the next-door neighbour of those days.
Llanstephan, at first, was heaven for Dai as he inspected the treasure trove of miscellaneous objects the tide had deposited on the beach, before hitting out at them with his club. Unfortunately the presence of strangers had alerted the inhabitants of the cottages all along the sea front, and they came out to stare and giggle at his antics, and the argument that arose with his imaginary partner.
Soon, to my horror, Uncle Williams, mask pulled well down and ready to deal with unwelcome visitors, appeared in his garden, but after a vague gesture of dismissal went inside again.
From this time on the day began to go to pieces. Dai demanded ginger beer but only barter transactions were permissible in Llanstephan on the Sabbath, and my uncle had nothing suitable to offer in exchange.
He had brought a shovel with him to dig up cockles, but as soon as he started to do so he was insulted and threatened by the cockle men, who came running from their shack under the cliff to accuse him of taking the bread out of their mouths. My aunt got her feet wet when the tide came in. We were menaced by an aggressive cow that had strayed down to the beach, and when we presented a dog with the remnants of our stale sandwiches, it went off and returned with the gift of the decayed corpse of a large sea-bird, and could not be driven away. Dai complained that the wet sands were unsuitable for golf, and became quarrelsome and morose, and my aunt struck up a tragic attitude, and said, ‘I have sacrificed my life for this.’ When the bus left at four, we boarded it with relief.
The return journey was conducted in silence apart from an occasional moan of frustration from Dai, and Lalla, who anxiously studied and responded to the slightest variation in her son’s moods, announced that he was unhappy because he had been deprived of his proper walk, so at Llangain, to my consternation, three miles from Carmarthen, she stopped the bus, and we were put down.
From Llangain it was two miles to John’s Town and we covered the distance slowly. My uncle got out the matchboxes, and Dai, determined to make up for time lost at Llanstephan, swiped them into hedges from which, often with delay and difficulty they had to be retrieved. At John’s Town the first of Carmarthen’s houses came into sight, and my nervousness increased as the supply of matchboxes ran out, despite repairs carried out by my uncle to boxes not irreparably shattered by the first stroke of Dai’s club. Dai’s recurring frustration showed in pleadings and gestures, and my uncle rushed into the newspaper shop at the top of Lammas Street, and persuaded them, on the promise to pay next day, to hand over a whole packet of a dozen boxes of matches. Dai snatched it from his hands, ripped open the packet, tore out a box, threw it on the pavement outside the shop, and demolished it with an unerring drive, scattering the matches in all directions. He crowed and chuckled with delight at having found a new sport, held out his left hand to shake that of his invisible opponent, then addressed himself to the next box of matches. In this way we progressed slowly towards the town’s social centre, shifting on Sundays from the business and shopping area of the weekdays down to Lammas Street in the vicinity of the Boar’s Head, where people gathered for a chat and a stroll before evening chapel.
The situation here turned out to be even worse than I feared, for not only, and inevitably, were there familiar faces in the crowd, but to my horror Aunt Annie, expecting us on a later bus, was waiting at the bus stop. She wore a feather in her hat, carried a bright parasol, and smiled like a Japanese when we came into sight. I had already discovered that Dai Bennett was the only human being that meant anything in the world to her, and as soon as Dai saw her he rushed forward, waving his club and gabbling with excitement. They fell into each other’s arms. Then Dai had something to show her. A ring of curious bystanders had gathered as he put down a matchbox, took up his stance and swung the club. The moment had come for me to sneak away.
The Bennetts went, leaving Polly, it seemed, miraculously renewed, but there were soon troubles in other directions. For a show bird to be at its best when the time came, it had to be given a ‘walk’, i.e. a separate run, encouraged only by a view of hens, and ideally be permitted to roost at night in the branches of a tree. All these conditions my grandfather provided for his king, although at the expense of security because, having reached the branches of the tree, it was easy enough for the bird to fly down into the garden instead of back into its run. This happened only too often. Aunt Annie, who wore high-heeled, unsuitable boots, rarely went into the garden, and was therefore fairly safe, but whenever Aunt Li and I happened to do so and saw the king skirmishing and parrying through the flower beds, we retreated into the house and stayed there until my grandfather came home in the evening and he and Polly would join forces to get the situation under control. Since the garden beyond the herbaceous borders was a maze of outhouses and chicken runs the time was bound to come when one or another of us was too late in becoming aware that the bird was at large. This eventually happened to Li, and it inflicted a bad wound on her hand before she could escape.
A few days later, happening to look out of his bedroom window shortly after getting up, Grandfather noticed one of the hill farmers’ dogs busy with something that looked like a bundle of feathers on the other side of the high garden fence. Going down to investigate, he found the corpse of his king. The bird had been partly eaten, but there was something about the circumstances of this reverse that aroused his suspicions, which were strengthened when the vet he called in was able to tell him that the cause of death had been a crushed skull through a heavy blow on the head. From overheard conversations it was quite clear to me that my grandfather suspected Li of this crime. I do not believe that he ever forgave her.
Polly had a calm month, and Grandfather brightened up after his second-best bird, sent to the Agricultural Hall, took first prize in its class. These were the quiet days of late summer, long enough for evening outings with Aunt Li, fishing in the ponds and chasing butterflies on the top of Pen-lan.
One day I came home from school to hushed voices, excitement and speculations. A plain-clothes policeman had arrived at the house, and he and Grandfather retired to the drawing room. It was later explained to me that at this time the town was suffering from an outbreak of poison-pen letters. The motives and details of this visit were later disclosed in a long meeting between my grandfather, Annie and Li, when some pretext had been made for removing Polly from the scene. The policeman, said my grandfather, who had been most apologetic, polite and pleasant, had shown him a page of one of the letters that were causing the trouble, and asked him if he recognized the handwriting, to which my grandfather had replied, he did not, and the man had then asked his permission to speak to Polly. To this my grandfather had agreed, and he had gone to fetch her. Polly, he said, had been at her best, very calm and reasonable, and accepting with the best possible grace the assurance that this was nothing more than a routine enquiry.
She told the policeman she had never seen the letter before, that she certainly had not written it. She made slighting reference to the cheap, lined notepaper. Grandfather then said that the policeman had asked Polly if she would have any objection to writing down several words. The obvious intention was to compare these with the same words in the letter. Grandfather, objecting, had told her not to do this, but she had done it all the same. He had asked the policeman if someone had made an accusation and, as the policeman replied in an evasive way, it was to be assumed that this was the case. The thing was, as all agreed, that so much time was spent in Carmarthen schools — which I knew to my cost — in the practising of a hand that came as close as possible to copperplate, that all local handwriting was extremely similar. For example, Grandfather said — pointedly, I thought — that he could hardly tell Polly’s and Li’s handwriting apart.
Next day, or perhaps the day after that, I was amazed to be treated by Aunt Polly with extraordinary kindness. It was a Saturday, with no school. In the morning the jackdaw cake was divided as usual, but before this took place — and it was something that had never happened before — she took me into her room and give me a slice from her share. She then whispered to me to put on my best suit as we were going shopping together. This came as another surprise. The only time she risked going out was when she had had an early-morning fit, leaving her clear for the rest of the day, and I hoped and assumed that this had occurred. We went into several shops where she dealt, and she purchased a few things including a gramophone record I talked her into buying. She chatted in an amiable way to the assistants, cupping her hand to her lips to amplify the sound. An outing for Aunt Polly was a rare treat.
At the chemist’s she wanted perfume, and sniffed at several bottles open for testing before she decided on Jockey Club. I was surprised when she took me into our cousin Morgan’s, the butcher’s, because there had been a quarrel and the family had withdrawn their bu
siness months before. Morgan was there, a burly man, with a face as red as the steak on his chopping block. Aunt Polly bought some meat, shook hands with him, and the quarrel was made up on the spot.
She then told me that she had forgotten to give me a birthday present, so wanted to buy me one now. I was unable to think of anything I wanted, so she took me into the toyshop in Priory Street and bought me a football and a mouth organ. By this time it was about midday, and all I could think of was the possibility that she had not had the morning fit, and she might have one while we were out together.
We reached home without incident, and I breathed again. I was told to take off my best suit and change back into my normal weekday clothes, and Polly removed the hair pieces covering her damaged scalp and washed away the crisp, white mask of make-up, and the bright chequer-board pattern of her cheeks and forehead reappeared.
That afternoon was an exceptionally pleasant one. I kicked the football about the back garden until I was tired, and when I went into the house Polly laid aside the bedspread she was crocheting and put the record on the gramophone which she had been persuaded to buy. It was one I enormously enjoyed, a favourite of the day, said to have been made on the battlefield in the First World War and one of a series that were avidly collected. Aunt Polly’s record, ‘Our Brave Boys at Vimy Ridge’, featured a lead-in of patriotic music; a hymn in this case to Lord Roberts, ‘Good Old Bobs of Kandahar’, then the sounds of battle, the fixing of bayonets, the enthusiastic babel preceding the charge, a sustained rattle of gunfire punctuated with explosions — to which people listened with their heads stuck into the trumpet — and the faint cries either of triumph or anguish, then ‘Good Old Bobs’ once again. It was a record I never tired of listening to. The muscles under the mouth the surgeon had given Aunt Polly moved in what I now understood to be a smile of contentment. Although the day was Saturday she was wearing a Sunday dress, and was fragrant with Jockey Club.