“I don’t know. They’re a funny lot those English people.”
“Tea, Gareth! And bring up some milk for Jake. He’ll be waking up any minute now. In a cup, not a bottle.”
*
Down in the kitchen, Gareth finds that Grace is already curled up on the sofa next to the Aga with Jake sitting very comfortably on her lap drinking a cup of milk. He grins when he sees his dad but makes no move to get off Grace’s lap.
“Got yourself a new best friend there, Grace!”
“I heard him crying in his cot. He wasn’t wailing or anything. Just crying a bit. And I was awake anyway and you and Auntie Rachel were…erm, not up yet…so I brought him down here. I put his milk in the microwave for 40 seconds like Eloise did last night. I checked it first before giving it to him.”
Gareth tries not to think about his niece possibly overhearing the Saturday Shag.
“You’re obviously a natural. Thank you for doing that for him.”
“I think he’s adorable. So giggly and sweet. I like how chunky his legs are.” Grace squeezes Jake’s legs gently and on cue he giggles. Grace giggles too.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Gareth asks
“Yes please. Uncle Gareth, did Eloise talk to you last night about me maybe coming to stay for a while?”
“She did and we’d be delighted to have you.”
“Thank you, thank you so much. I was wondering if it was OK with you and Auntie Rachel whether I could…”
“Go on.”
“If I could get out of going to Pembrokeshire with Mummy and Daddy altogether and just stay here. Their friends are nice and everything but they don’t have children so it would just be me and grown-ups and I’d have to hang around while they drink wine and start talking really loudly about business and house prices and how I’m doing at school and stuff and…”
“It’s boring for you.”
“Very. And if I don’t go to Pembroke with them, then Mum and Dad won’t have to call back here on Sunday to drop me off.” Grace smiles at Gareth, a small, sweet, fleeting smile that says “And then you won’t have to see Jocelyn and Nicholas twice in the same weekend.”
“That is absolutely fine with me, Grace, and it will be with Rachel too. Just need to clear it with your parents. Right. I’m making bacon sandwiches for us all. Want to give me a hand? You can slice the bread. It’s in the pantry over there.”
Grace disappears into the pantry and emerges after a while looking quizzical and holding two large loaves of crusty white bread.
“I couldn’t find any brown bread. Only white. Mummy doesn’t eat white bread.”
“She isn’t eating bread at all, Grace love, so no need to worry about her. Make sure you cut it good and thick now, needs to be able to sustain the weight of the butter.”
The smell of frying bacon slowly draws the rest of the inhabitants of the house to the kitchen. Jocelyn and Nicholas readily agree to Eloise’s suggestion that Grace come stay for a while and skip the visit to Pembrokeshire.
“It would mean we’d get home sooner on the Sunday which would suit Nicholas as he likes to get into work by 6am on Mondays to get a good start on the week,” Jocelyn says.
Gareth notes with satisfaction that she is on her second bacon sandwich – white bread, salty Welsh butter, fried bacon and HP sauce – and hasn’t mentioned low carbing once. Nothing like far too much white wine on a Friday night to make a girl not care less about the evils of carbs. “Are you sure you don’t mind, Rachel?”
“Positive. It will be lovely for us all to spend time with my only niece.”
Once Jocelyn and Nicholas have been waved off, the rest of Saturday is the usual whirl of washing, dog walking and taking Jake to the nearby park where Iris can join in with the never ending football match that is usually being played there. Gareth orders a Chinese takeaway for an early dinner. He orders far too much, the little silver foil and plastic dishes covering most of the kitchen table. They help themselves and take their plates to eat on their laps in the lounge, watching old episodes of Glee which is the one thing that everyone is prepared to watch.
Grace keeps an eye on Jake, making sure that the Chinese chicken balls he is eating with such speed don’t make him choke. She changes his nappy and fetches his bedtime milk and cuddles him as he drinks it, singing nonsense into his ear till he falls asleep.
“Can I go put him in his cot?” Grace asks Rachel
“Of course you can Gracie, thank you. Sorry. Grace. I know Jocelyn doesn’t like pet names.
“I like being called Gracie. It makes me feel like… I don’t know really…like I fit in. I’m going to go to bed now, too, and read for a bit, if that’s OK.”
“Of course it is. I think we’ll all be turning in fairly early tonight. We’re going to Gareth’s parents for lunch tomorrow. They’re called Richard and Carol, Nana and Gramps. And there’s Grandpa Davey too, Gareth’s grandfather. He’s 88 now but still sharp and pretty active. Walks by himself to the Naval for a couple of pints every Thursday night without fail. I hope you’ll come with us.”
“I’d love to. If there’s enough food for me too, that is.”
“Oh, there’ll be plenty enough food, Gracie, don’t you worry,” says Gareth. “My mother caters on the assumption that a dozen extra people might turn up unexpectedly at any moment.”
*
They all drive up to the Rhondda, even Oscar, in the family’s seven seater silver VW Transporter.
“Does your dog usually come out for lunch with you?” Grace asks, politely.
“Whenever he’s invited, yes. He’s a sociable sort is Oscar.”
When Grace sees the rows of small terraced houses for the first time, she cannot disguise her surprise.
“The houses are all so tiny.”
Rachel groans. “Be careful Grace. You’ll set Gareth and his father off talking about King Coal and the industrialisation of the south Wales Valleys.”
“I think that sounds quite interesting.”
The other children groan.
“Believe me it’s not interesting,” says Eloise, authoritatively. “Let me spare you from wasting three hours of your life. South Wales used to be agricultural. Then in the 1800’s they discovered coal mining and tons of people moved here for work which is why all these rows of terraced houses were built, to house them all. Ordinary people worked for the bosses who owned the mines and got treated badly and were paid poor wages and died in accidents down the pits. There were riots and there was a big strike and everyone hates Winston Churchill but nothing changed and the bosses still kept all the money and got fat and rich on the sweat of the brows of all the ordinary people and built fancy buildings in Cardiff and bought Impressionist paintings and stuff. Then the coal ran out when Dad was little and a horrible lady prime minster called Margaret Thatcher closed down the pits and now it’s all nice and green again but no one in the Rhondda has had a job since, except people like Dad who moved away.”
“That’s not quite how it was Grace. Eloise is being flippant.”
“It might have been flippant Dad but it was also flipping short.”
“Yes well, we’re here now so let’s stop discussing coal, shall we, and all have a nice family Sunday dinner together.”
Grace follows behind the Maddox family as they troop without knocking into the little house at the very end of the terrace. They march single file right through to the kitchen at the back. It smells deliciously of roasting meat and the windows are steamed up from all the pans boiling on the stove. Carol Maddox is rolling out pastry on her kitchen counter. She has very dark brown hair and is wearing a blue flowered housecoat. She holds out her arms wide, her hands all floury, to greet them.
“Hello my lovely grandchildren. Come and give your Nana a kiss then.”
The Maddox children, even Eloise, rush to kiss their grandmother.
“And you must be Grace,” Nana says, smiling widely. “How lovely to meet you.”
“Thank you for inviting me.”
“Not at all lovely girl. You’re my grandchildren’s cousin. That makes you family too. Do I get a kiss from my son and daughter-in law too? I do! Wonderful. Now, I’ve just got to finish making these apple tarts but Richard and Davey are out the back already. How about, Gareth and Rachel, you go out and join them and me and the kids will finish up here. Then I’ll make a nice Dubonnet and orange for us all.”
Rachel lets Gareth go ahead and lingers for a few moments to watch as the children gather quietly round Nana.
“Nice hair, Nana,” Eloise says. “Almost the exact same colour as mine.”
“Yes, but mine’s natural of course whereas yours is out of a bottle. Very lucky we are on my side of the family. We never go grey.” Nana pats her dark brown hair and smiles a secret smile at Eloise.
“Now Iris, let me see if I get this right. That’s a Manchester United top you’re wearing today?”
“Yes, Nana.”
“I’ve got a soft spot for Manchester United. Always rather fancied George Best. Badly behaved, but ever so dishy.”
Iris rolls her eyes at her grandmother. “Just finish trimming the apple tarts, Nana, so we can make hedgehogs.”
“Yes, sorry Iris, here we go.” Carol Maddox expertly twirls the apple tarts round in one hand and trims the excess pastry from the edge. The children swoop on the long ribbons of pastry that fall to the table, even Eloise, and start rolling it into animal shapes.
“Uh, uh, Jake, you can’t eat it just yet.” Carol manages to stop Jake before the raw pastry hits his mouth. “Here, you get the currants like this…and you poke them into the pastry like this…and it makes a hedgehog. Nana will put them in the oven and you can eat them for your afters. “
Watching the children all playing with pastry, with not an electronic device in sight, it occurs to Rachel not for the first time that her mother-in-law may not be just a retired teacher but very possibly also a white witch.
Leaving them to it, Rachel goes out to the garden where, as she expected, she finds her father-in-law, Richard, and his father, Davey, sitting in a bubbling hot tub. Gareth is perched on the rim of it, a beer in one hand, his socks and shoes discarded, up to his knees in rolling bubbles.
When Carol and Richard had the hot tub installed the previous year, it had come as a shock. The garden – Gwen’s garden as it was always known – had always been so very important to this family and Richard and Davey spent hours and hours every year working on it. Then, one Sunday, Carol had led Rachel and Gareth out the back and they found that all the plants and the lawn had been ripped out and replaced by decking. At the bottom, where there had previously been rows of bedraggled, ancient raspberry canes and blackcurrant bushes, there now stood a large, wooden clad, hot tub.
“You didn’t expect that, did you!” Carol had clapped her hands in joy at the look on Gareth and Rachel’s faces.
“I didn’t know you even liked hot tubs, Mam,” Gareth had said.
“I love them! Have done ever since your father and I first had a go in one in Tenerife back in 1997. Wanted one ever since and then I saw them on offer at the Royal Welsh. Bargain they were, so I bought one.”
“But what about Gwen’s garden?” Rachel had not been able to stop herself from asking.
“That bloody garden was a pain in the backside from the day I got married. Never even met the famous Gwen. She died when Richard was 17, just before I met him. My poor mother-in-law, Rosie, she was the one doing the gardening then. Got landed with it, having made some foolish promise to Gwen on her deathbed that she’d keep it going. I spent 50 years of my life watching people work their socks off in this garden – Rosie, Davey, Richard. All so as to grow more veg than they knew what to do with and then having to knock on all the neighbours’ doors to get rid of it. Well I always hated gardening and I can buy all the veg we ever want down Morrisons. So I had it decked over and the hot tub put in last week when Richard and Davey were away on a bowling trip.”
“What did Gramps make of that?”
“Oh he blew a fuse and he’s had a cob on ever since. Keeps moaning that he will miss cutting the grass, even though he’d become a liability with the Flymo and in constant danger of cutting his toes off. He’ll come round, you watch.”
Come round he did. From refusing to even look at the hot tub, it had taken Carol a matter of weeks to persuade him to give it a try. Turned out, Davey enjoyed a good hot tub even more than Carol and now the difficulty is getting him out of it. Rachel no longer bats an eyelid at the sight of Davey’s naked old shoulders, his pale, saggy skin translucent almost, as he boils himself lightly on a Sunday afternoon before lunch.
“Did you bring your bathers, Rachel love?” Davey calls out to her.
“Forgot them yet again, Gramps.”
“You’d forget your head if it wasn’t stitched on. You never remember your bathers you don’t. You’re missing out on a real treat. Nothing better than sitting in lovely hot water with the sun on your face. You know, back in the day my mother used to keep a tin bath hanging on the wall, right there. My father and my grandfather had to walk home from the mine – damp, tired, still covered in coal dust – and wash in that tin bath out here in the garden or in front of the fire. In water that my grandmother had to boil in big pans on the fire. Backbreaking work, she said it was. And even after the pithead baths got put in, and the miners came home clean, she kept that tin bath hanging there, to remind her how lucky they all were. She wouldn’t like what Carol has done to her beautiful garden but I reckon she’d be chuffed to bits to see me sitting out in it, aged 88, and up to my neck in hot water that no bugger had to boil.”
“I don’t know about that Dad,” says Richard, taking a swig out his bottle of beer. “Nana didn’t take kindly to anyone sitting around doing nothing for very long.”
“You’re spot on there, son,” Davey chuckles.
“Talking of your mother, Gramps, remind me again about the family connection with Canada. I had a meeting this week with a client from Toronto. Made me think about it.”
“It’s not much of a story and I’ve told you it already.”
“When did having told me a story before stop you telling it again?”
“All right then. My Dad, Tommy, was a twin. An identical twin. His twin was called Idris. The year before I was born, in 1926, not long after the general strike had ended, Idris emigrated to Canada. Flounced off there in a huff my Dad said, because the strike broke and the miners were being starved back to work. It just about broke my grandmother’s heart but then I arrived in the nick of time and took her mind off Idris. Which is just as well because he never came back. Not once. Wrote regular letters for a good few years after he went and then the letters just stopped. No one ever heard from him again after that.”
“Did anybody ever try to find him?”
“I don’t think so. Dad didn’t talk about him very much, reckoned he must have died young, maybe killed in the war. “
“How very sad for Gwen,” Rachel says, “to never see her son again and not know what happened to him.”
“It was a different time,” Davey says, matter of factly. “People died young – of disease or hunger or in pit accidents or fighting wars. That’s not to say that people didn’t love each other the same, just that it was easier to let go back then. To lose touch.”
Davey takes a deep swig of his beer, drains the bottle. “I’ve got some old pictures somewhere. I’ll show you after dinner. Now, are you lot going to help me get these old bones out of here or what? I’m about ready for my Dubonnet and orange.”
Chapter 9
It does not take Idris long to find work in Toronto and it is every bit as backbreaking as mining. He is a construction worker on the new Union Station, or, more precisely, on the viaduct along Toronto’s waterfront that will carry the railway tracks to the new station. The station itself was completed a full six years ago but has yet to open. The building work is hard work and will be harder still as winter approaches but it is above ground and i
n daylight and the wages are decent. Idris is glad to have it.
A grander building than the new station Idris has never seen. He has learned that the colonnaded porch at the front and the high vaulted ceilings and marble floors of the Grand Hall inside mean that it is built in a Beaux Arts style. He particularly likes the carvings of Canadian place names carved high up in the stone walls. Sault Ste Marie, Vancouver, Halifax. Places in this vast new country of his that he hopes to visit someday.
He has secured lodging at a good house on Fairlawn Ave, a few miles north of the station. It is owned by a married couple, Mr and Mrs Williams, who are from Carmarthen. The first question people ask when they meet new people, here, is where are you from. Idris is often mistaken for Irish or Scots but he doesn’t mind. People from the whole of Britain are helpful to him and it was an Irishman who first told him of the Welsh church, Dewi Sant. Not that Idris was ever much of a chapelgoer before coming to Canada, let alone church. He goes because he misses home. It is comforting to hear familiar accents and sing Welsh hymns.
It was at Dewi Sant that he met Mr and Mrs Williams. They had emigrated to Canada shortly after the end of the Great War, which had taken the life of their only son. Mr Williams had lost his appetite for farming with no son to pass it on to, although he is still involved with farming as he works for Canadian Immigration persuading other British farmers to bring their skills to the Dominion. Idris suspects that his being offered lodging with them owed less to his being Welsh and more to the fact that he is of a similar age to their son when he died. He has a large room all to himself and a bed, a chair and a table at which he can sit and read in the evenings after supper. Mrs Williams is a very good cook – much better than Gwen – and he is fed well. Other men he works with complain bitterly about their cold cramped accommodation and the poor quality of their landladies’ dinners. He keeps his own good fortune to himself.
However, he writes to Gwen to tell her of his new job and his new home and she writes back immediately. He has seen no more than a few words of his mother’s handwriting in the past and seeing whole pages of it would be strange if everything else about his new life was not already so strange. Gwen writes that she is pleased he is safe and working and has such kind people looking out for him. But mostly she writes about her excitement about becoming a grandmother. For Maggie is pregnant and will have a baby in late spring.
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