by Stead Jones
‘He never made money,’ Polly said, ‘and he was a master mariner, Tada. Ways and means, dear.’
‘Stealing?’ I said.
Polly sniffed the air. ‘Who knows, dear? But he made it all right.’
I risked the question. ‘But why did they fight?’
Polly’s reply told me I had been too early with it. ‘They fought all the time,’ she said. ‘They even fought in Capel Mawr.’
‘Did they go to Capel Mawr?’ I said. We went to Capel Mawr, too – well, we went to the Mission by the harbour which belonged to Capel Mawr. We didn’t have clothes good enough for the big building itself. The shopkeepers on Hillside set the standard.
‘They went when they were small.’ Polly gave one of her shudders. ‘Marius Vaughan doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t fear God. He doesn’t even fear the Devil, that man.’
‘An atheist?’
‘Well – he threw the Rev A. H. Jones out of his house. Threw him down the steps, they say – put him in bed for a week. That should make him an atheist…’
And that was something else I’d heard, of course. Hadn’t someone – Meira probably – said the Rev A. H. Jones had been too much of a Christian to bring a case against Marius Vaughan? And hadn’t Owen said the Rev A. H. Jones had been too scared of Marius to do so? Owen never went to Capel Mawr or anywhere else. Religion, he used to say, was the dope of the masses.
‘Why did he throw him out?’ I asked.
Polly curled her mouth in the way she did when she wanted to give something full force. ‘Because the minister went to ask him, as a man of God, to mend his evil ways.’
I thought about that for a moment. ‘Do you like the Rev A. H. Jones, Polly?’
‘A snob’s man in a snob’s chapel,’ she said sharply, and without thinking.
‘The kingdom of Heaven is reserved for exclusive draper’s models,’ I said.
Polly was still with shock. ‘Who told you to say things like that?’ she asked, very slowly.
Owen had said it, but I said it was one of the boys at school.
‘The County School!’ she said. ‘Talking like that!’ She looked at me carefully, lowering her eyebrows again. ‘Lew – the Rev A. H. Jones is a man of God. Don’t you ever forget that.’
I’d made a mistake, I realised. I’d shocked her. There would be no hope of getting any more details about the Vaughans from her now. And in any case the Captain was awake and making noises which meant he wanted to go out to the back. I told Polly I had an errand to do, and went out quickly.
Porthmawr was the colour of lead, and wet. It sprawled up Hillside as if shrinking away from the sea, as if it was afraid that a heavy shower might wash it right into the ocean. Everyone was moving back, moving inland – especially the ones with money up there in their big houses on Hillside. The old town near the harbour had been left to the rats, whole streets pulled down. No one wanted the sea, not even the retired sea captains who were inland too, each with a flagpole in his garden. Only Marius Vaughan wanted the waters on his doorsteps.
By now my head was brimming with the Vaughans, although Marius had been there all the time in his big house on the Point. I hadn’t bothered much about him before, except to hate him with rest. But now he was nearer, somehow – like the close-ups at the pictures. I looked across the harbour following the line of the road which ran to his house – a road riddled with Private and Trespassers will be Prosecuted – along the foot of the great bulk of Graig Lwyd. I’d never taken my chance along that road. Dewi said he had – but we didn’t really believe him.
I’d seen Marius Vaughan, of course, many times. Usually at the wheel of his car, very rarely on foot and in the town. I’d seen his house too. From the town there was just a part of it showing, a corner and a chimney, but one day up on Graig Lwyd I’d looked down on the slate roofs and seen a courtyard and a white wall between the house and the sea. There had been a car on the courtyard and a man had limped out of the house to it, and he’d looked up, and Dewi had nearly fallen off the rock where we were perched. ‘Old bastard Vaughan,’ he’d said, and to prove he hadn’t been near to losing his nerve he’d suggested we heave some stones down straight away. But Gladstone had stopped him. ‘The dogs will come,’ he’d warned. All the boys in Porthmawr had heard of Marius Vaughan’s dogs…. The limping man, so stiff and straight, his head of white hair shining in the sun, had carried on to the car and driven off towards the town.
I turned away from the Point and looked across the old fishermen’s hards to where the Moonbeam lay. The tide was in, but it wouldn’t touch the Moonbeam, wouldn’t cause the other Vaughan any trouble. Was he aboard now? There were no lights showing. Why had he come back after so many years, and why had he taken over the Moonbeam as a place to live? Couldn’t he have gone along that road to the Point? But they had fought like savages, that was it. Perhaps on this very spot where I stood, in a heavy shadow which the gaslight made, the knives had slashed the air…. I looked around suddenly, but there was only a couple of visitors, a man and a woman in macs, arm in arm, wishing they were back in Manchester.
The lights were coming on now, all over the town – the lights outside the Palace Cinema brightest of all. Once a week at least, Gladstone and I took a walk along the harbour and through the town, taking in the side streets as well. Gladstone made it an adventure, somehow. Walking the town, he called it, and we would make things out of the names over shops, imagine what was going on behind the squares of lighted windows, wonder what would appear suddenly from the darkness around the next corner. In no time I would feel all my senses suddenly more acute, and our talk was rapid and high and excited. Walking the town after dark. I liked it best of all in winter when there was no one about and the wind was strong and the sea smelled everywhere, and the signs above the shops creaked and groaned, and the town cats went skidding and screeching ahead of you from doorstep to doorstep. We would stand and talk softly in the darkness, talking but half listening for a footfall, a sudden cough, the creak of a shoe, something said somewhere on the wind; and watching all the time for a shadow, the spurt of a match, a sudden light…. We were building it up, making it an adventure, moving towards the point where something was going to happen…. Gladstone said it was like the time when you were young, and you had in your hands the first page of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and that was the best page, he said, because you didn’t want to turn over, because you knew that whatever was to come wouldn’t be, couldn’t possibly be, as good as that feeling of being on the edge of something, of not knowing. ‘I hope nothing happens,’ he used to say. ‘It might spoil everything.’ I watched the lights come on and remembered the sound of his voice, the way he’d looked…. There was a newness about everything that night, and everything had a meaning.
But I kept on turning back to the Moonbeam, and after a while I was walking quickly down the alleyways between the old storage sheds, then along the edge of the harbour towards the hards. I wondered, as I walked, if I’d have the courage to climb aboard and speak to him.
The light was going rapidly and I found it difficult to keep my feet clear of the old ropes and chains that were strung along the hards. It didn’t seem to be such a good idea now. What would I say to Ashton Vaughan, anyway? Did you have a fight with your brother, Mr Vaughan? With knives? Did you win? I stood there and asked myself questions and knew I wouldn’t dare take a step farther.
Then I heard the crunch of feet on the gravel. Someone running towards me, coming from the direction of the Moonbeam. I crouched quickly, screwing my eyes up against the darkness. The runner came into sight, and I knew straight away it was Gladstone. Nobody else ran with his shoulders raised high like that. I stood up and called to him. He halted almost in mid-stride.
‘Lew,’ he cried. ‘Lew the last prince! How did you know I’d gone to see him?’
‘Just out for a walk, that’s all…’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Funny place for a walk. Looks as if you had the same ide
a.’ He gripped my arm briefly. ‘Come on. Martha’s out as usual and I had to leave the children. Come on…’
I ran by his side. ‘See him, then?’
‘Oh, yes – he was glad I’d come.’ We reached the quay. Gladstone stopped to try the drawer of the new cigarette machine they’d put up on the corner of Harbour View Road. ‘Are you the Ashton Vaughan? I said. And he said in person… of course, I knew all the time who he was.’ I tried a cigarette machine farther up, near Market Street, then doubled speed to catch up with Gladstone.
‘Was he – all right?’ I asked.
‘Who’s that? The Emperor of Abyssinia?’
‘Abyssinia to you too,’ I said. ‘Was he nice, then?’
‘Ask the League of Nations,’ Gladstone replied. He increased his pace, so that by the time we got to Lower Hill I was puffed and blown. ‘Wants us to help him,’ Gladstone said.
‘Doing what?’
We reached Gladstone’s door. ‘Blow up Capel Mawr,’ he said.
V
For Martha Davies, Gladstone’s mother, living on Lower Hill was the end of the line. Once, when her first husband was alive, she had lived in a bigger house by the beach and taken in visitors. With her second husband she had gone in for businesses as well, a lot of businesses. But the boarding house had gone to pot, the businesses had all failed, and the second husband had caught the 7.10 one morning. So there was nowhere for Martha except Lower Hill. ‘Such a comedown,’ she would tell us sadly, but Meira said she’d asked for it. ‘I was made for better things,’ Martha would complain, but most people were agreed that she was too fond, by far, of a drop and more of gin…. Martha Davies had big breasts and a very big behind, and a top lip that was only lipstick. She dyed her hair all the time, and there was always a cigarette going, and she was forever cuddling you and kissing. With Martha it had to be either a screech of laughter or a howl of anguish. ‘It’s a bit pathetic, really,’ Gladstone used to say. ‘Her emotions aren’t properly balanced, you see.’
Martha’s house was identical to ours, except that it was never as polished, never as tidy. That night when we walked in, it looked as if a hurricane had struck it. And the children were all up, too – standing in front of the fire in their nightshirts. They were the kind of children who look windblown on a summer’s calm; they could make the finest clothes look like oddments from a jumble sale without any effort at all.
Gladstone ran to them. ‘Naughty! Naughty! All of you,’ he cried. They rushed to him and had him on the floor in no time. ‘Why are you out of bed? Didn’t I tell you Mam wouldn’t be long?’
Martha went out every night, usually to the Harp where she waited on. ‘What have I got to stay in for?’ she used to say.
Gladstone struggled to his feet. ‘No playing about,’ he cried, trying to be stern. ‘What are you doing up, all of you?’
‘Walter wet the bed,’ Dora said.
‘Had to get out, quick,’ Mair added.
‘Nearly had to swim,’ Walter croaked.
‘We pulled the mattress off the bed,’ Dora explained, ‘but it got stuck on the stairs.’ She remembered her lisp and added, ‘thstuck on the thstairs.’
‘You were going to put it in front of the fire?’ Gladstone groaned. ‘Oh, what have I told you about that? What have I said?’ He did his enraged act, falling on his knees, banging his fists on the floor. The children howled with laughter. ‘Haven’t I told you never to go near the fire?’ he cried, and their faces were suddenly stilled, except for Walter who kept on laughing and pulling up his shirt to show all. ‘Lew,’ Gladstone ordered, ‘bring the mattress down.’
I went up the stairs and dragged the mattress to the fire. Martha had one of the bedrooms in the house, the children the other. Gladstone always slept on the sofa in the living room. He never slept much, he used to say. Most of the night he spent reading.
‘It’ll be dry in no time,’ he announced, ‘but never again, mind.’ He took Walter on his knee. ‘Now, everybody sit down – not on the tiles or you’ll have cold bums. Right – now we’ll have a little concert until the mattress is dry. Everybody’s got to do something. All right?’
The children squatted down eagerly.
‘Now then – who’s first?’
There was the usual dead silence. I broke it by saying, ‘What does he want us to do?’
‘Later,’ Gladstone said. ‘Tell you later. Now – who’s first? Dora?’
‘First last time,’ Dora said sharply.
‘Walter then.’
Walter was always a volunteer. He got up and gave us a hymn – which one it was impossible to tell – in a voice like a crow.
‘Lovely,’ Gladstone said. ‘Sings like a beautiful bird. Now – Dora.’
Dora recited ‘Y Sipsiwn’ by Eifion Wyn. It went very well too, so she followed it with ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ – only the first three lines, though, because she got it mixed up with the ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’.
Then Mair tried ‘Calon Lân’, but had to give up because her emotions got the better of her. So we had Walter again, whistling the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, on one note all the way through, but his rhythm was very good.
‘Your turn now Gladstone,’ the children cried. ‘Another poem like on the beach.’
He gave us an old one – a favourite – about Buck Jones riding off the screen at the Palace, and sending the dust flying down Porthmawr Market Street, and all the children cheering, and all the deacons scowling, and how he finished up picking a fight with the man on the war memorial in the Square, and how they had to get a posse out to get him back to the Palace in time for the second house.
As he finished it, Dewi and Maxie came in fresh and whooping from the pictures. They’d been thrown out, as usual.
‘Wasn’t much of a picture, anyway,’ Dewi said. He wanted to swear, I knew, but didn’t dare do so in front of the children, not with Gladstone there.
We persuaded Maxie to tell us about the picture. ‘In China it was,’ he began.
‘Arabia,’ Dewi said wearily.
‘About this man who loved this girl only she was a gypsy, or something.’
‘A narab,’ Dewi said.
‘Anyway, it was slow.’ Maxie scratched his square nose for a moment, thinking deeply. ‘All licking and stuff.’
‘A love story,’ Gladstone explained to the children.
‘Would have been better if they’d had the man tunnel through the sand like a mole,’ Maxie went on.
‘Oh, dear God,’ Dewi said.
‘Get down in the sand and tunnel through like a mole, and come up the other side, and catch them when they weren’t looking…’
‘That never happened, you old fool,’ Dewi said.
‘I know,’ Maxie replied. ‘I was wishing it would, though. Wishing that all through the picture.’
Maxie always wanted the hero to become a human mole. There had been a serial in the Saturday matinee about that once, and he’d never forgotten.
‘Just tunnel through,’ he said. ‘Not choke or anything with the sand. Then come up in the dark and get his knife out and catch them…’
‘Lovely,’ Gladstone said to stop him. He felt the mattress carefully. ‘Now – it won’t be long. Who’s going to be next?’
‘You again,’ the children chorused, so Gladstone settled back with little Walter on his knee to tell us the story of Wuthering Heights of Wales by Emily Brontë. He had books everywhere, Gladstone – used to comb the jumble sales for them. Only rarely did he come to the pictures with the rest of us.
‘Wuthering Heights of Wales, by Emily Brontë,’ he began – and it all happened in the hills at the back of Porthmawr. Heathcliff was Lloyd the gypsy, Catherine was Rhian, Edgar Linton was Lord Caradog Snell (Snell was a favourite villain’s name for Gladstone), and Hindley Earnshaw was Trefor Baring (another villainous name). Gladstone altered the story too. Heathcliff was a great violinist that night – ‘potentially the world’s greatest, perhaps’ – and Rhian was an operat
ic soprano who could hit the highest note in the world. At the end he had Heathcliff playing a violin obbligato while Rhian sang ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’ (Gladstone sang it for us, all the way through) in a concert hall before five thousand people who rose, at the end, in a frenzy of applause. The concert hall was in Bond Street, London, not in heaven or anywhere final like that. In most of Gladstone’s versions the good ones never died.
When it was over they all wanted an encore. Mair wanted the story of Montagu Hughes and Capulet Williams, by William Shakespeare. I liked this one, too – especially towards the end when Romeo captured all of Juliet’s family and took them to the dungeons under Caernarfon Castle, and injected them one by one with a serum called common sense. Once that was done they all realised that, as Romeo explained, he couldn’t marry Juliet because she was under age, and even a bit young for her age too. The ending came with Romeo and the nurse eloping to the South of France, which seemed to me more satisfactory than the version we had just pawed through for the Senior.
Maxie said, ‘What about having the Fall of the House of Cadwallon?’ This was a comic one. If you made everything happen to people, like Edgar Allen Poe did, Gladstone used to say, then it was bound to be comic.
Gladstone shook his head firmly.
‘Can we have Silas Morfa by George Eliot?’ Dora pleaded, but again Gladstone was firm.
‘No more tonight,’ he said, and sent Dewi up with the mattress.
‘Not even Llywelyn Macbeth Williams?’
No. Not even that. The children had a small mutiny straight away, and we had to have a couple of dragging, missionary hymns to get them into the right mood for sleep.
Finally they were marched off, and after a while Gladstone came downstairs, a smile on his face. ‘If I had a Woodbine,’ he said, ‘I’d give it to anybody.’ Dewi gave him a Woodbine. ‘What a struggle,’ he went on. ‘Listen to them laughing up there.’ He stood with his back to the blackleaded fireplace, the cigarette dangling from his lips. ‘Nice though. In about half an hour sleep will have collared them all, and they’ll be lying there like new puppies close together…’