The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  ‘I expect we will, Bethan, bach. Eventually.’ And she wiped her wet eyes with the corner of her apron. She didn’t cry, though, when Brice came home in his smart uniform. I gasped he looked so handsome. But all the blood left her face and she had to be helped to a chair. She made a noise then that was a moan and a sigh all mixed up. She gripped his arms and looked into his shiny, shiny eyes. I don’t know what she saw there but it wasn’t good. She didn’t say anything but I heard her all the same. Don’t go, she begged with her eyes. Don’t go, my Brice, my darling boy, my darling, darling boy. And he grinned and bragged he’d be back on leave before she knew it, with lots of gory stories to make us girls scream. He was my roundabout, spinning me until I didn’t know up from down. Then he complained that I was getting too fat. I scowled at that. No girl wants to be told she’s filling out like a squashy cushion. He winked at my screwed-up face. He said that soldiers got extra rations of chocolate, and if I was good he’d bring back a whole trunk for me.

  My mam, Seren Haverd, is as small as my dad’s tall. Her figure used to be rounded, what you’d call cuddly. And the lines on her face came from having a laugh. Her eyes are green like my brother’s … were, but richer, steadier, you know. She had a mischievous streak that in a blink could turn a sulk into a giggle. Before Brice left she had thick brown hair. Although she tidied it into a bun, it spent the days escaping, tumbling about her face like a waterfall. She threatened to chop it all off she said it was such nuisance. Then Brice joined up and that glorious mane seemed to go grey overnight, the lustre quite gone out of it, so that it lay limp and lifeless wherever she put it. The weight fell off her as well. Now when she enfolds you in her arms she’s all brittle bone. You feel you have to be careful because she may break.

  The day Brice went to war he shook Dad’s hand and said he was sorry he wouldn’t be here to help on Bedwyr. Our farm, Bedwyr Farm, is named for Sir Bedivere. He was a knight of the Round Table, the fellow who returned the sword Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. It’s in Newport, South Wales. Our farmhouse is over a hundred years old, Dad says. That’s why it’s all higgledy-piggledy, with bits fallen down and bits stuck on. It’s white with a slate roof. There’s a small barn, a milking shed, a stable, a sty and a few old outbuildings that Dad is always promising to do up for lodgers. I’m afraid the way things are going it’ll be full of evacuees, not rent-paying lodgers. We keep sheep, a small herd of dairy cows, a few pigs, chickens and a couple of bad-tempered geese that I’d far prefer to see on a plate. We have forty acres laid to corn, wheat, barley, oats and turnips. And then there’s Mam’s vegetable garden, the mainstay of our meals.

  When my brother surveyed the land he looked so worried that I flexed my arm and told him not to fret, as I’d be doing all the chores from here on. We all laughed at that. But I tell you, I wouldn’t have found it half so funny if I’d known how true it was going to be. He said goodbye to Mam upstairs in her bedroom, so I’ll never know what sentiments were exchanged. She didn’t come outside but I saw her curtain twitch. Instead of him arriving home on leave though we got a telegram. Mam read it out, and her face, which was all kind and gentle, set hard as a rock. That was the day she stopped smiling. It won’t ever leave me. It was 22 February 1941. I was suffering with one of those earaches I’m prone to. Mam’s troubled with them as well. A family weakness she says. There were reports on the radio that Swansea had been blitzed by German bombers, that the town was all but gone. They say you don’t value a thing until it’s taken away. So that was when I learned my mam’s smile was more precious than gold.

  The bits and bobs I think I’ll remember about the war are nonsense really. Not what you’d think a girl would store up in her head, while all around her is death and grief, droning planes and marching men. No church bells, see. I warned you. Daft, isn’t it? I think church can be really boring, but I miss those bells. Hearing them on a winter’s morning chiming out in the frosty air, and in the summer ding-danging over fields of poppies. I s’ppose I should be grateful that the bell ringers are idle, because we all know they’d only peal if the Germans were invading, come to take away our beloved Cymru.

  And the dark, that’s another thing. Oh I imagine you think you know what dark is. It’s when the sun goes down and you switch on the lights, get a fire going in the grate, and if you’re in town watch as the street lamps are switched on like blazing sunflowers. But there are no street lamps in war. And if the lights are on in the houses you don’t know, not with the blackout curtains we all have. The night is so dark you think you’ve vanished. You don’t know where you begin or end. Once or twice I’ve pinched myself to make sure I’m real. It’s all so ditchwater dull, too. No colour, see. And how I long for colour, for marshmallow pinks, and minty greens, and marigold oranges and yellows.

  I almost didn’t mention the shops being empty. I miss the shops. I used to like browsing the shop windows in Newport thinking what I’d buy one day. On the bus heading home, I’d recall my favourites, what had tickled my particular fancy. And as I closed my eyes, pulled the eiderdown over my head and felt with my toes for the hot water bottle, I’d flick through my wished-for purchases. A satin dress, a glittery piece of jewellery, a box of chocolates with a big velvet bow on top. But when there isn’t anything in the windows and half the places are boarded up, or have queues outside them a mile long, you have to employ your imagination. I stock up in my head. On the dreariest of days, I look forward to it so much, unpacking my bags and boxes before I drop off to sleep. I’m very well dressed in my dreams you know.

  And I have so many books up here in my imagination, my head might as well be a library. I can’t believe that I was so eager to slam them shut. Who needs books, I used to grumble. Well, I’ve my answer now – I do! I picture my school, too. I want so badly to go back there, chewing a pencil and puzzling out sums. Though I haven’t got a head for numbers and facts. They seem to trickle in and trickle out again, as if there’s a plughole but no plug in my skull. I had such fun playing skipping games in the playground with my friend Aeron Powell, the vet’s daughter, and sharing our lunch pieces. Aeron sat next to me in class and she helped me out with maths when the teacher wasn’t looking. She was clever at maths, Aeron was. She had long red hair that mostly she wore in braids, and she was shorter than me so that I felt protective over her, especially when the boys got stupid and tried to bully her. Oh, what I’d give to be back there, starting again, but without the war.

  After Brice died I became a daughter and a son all in one. I think Dad has forgotten I’m a girl inside these dungarees. Or p’rhaps I should say a woman. Because you see, I developed in the blackness, like a mole in a hole. My body changed while I was digging potatoes. My breasts swelled while I was driving the tractor. My periods started one morning when I was milking. I felt sort of warm and wet down there, like I’d had an accident in my knickers. It wasn’t a shock. I live on a farm for goodness’ sake. Nature’s everywhere.

  ‘Dad?’ I said. ‘Dad, I’ve got go inside for a moment.’

  ‘What you talking about, Bethan Modron? We aren’t nearly done here.’ My dad only uses my middle name when he’s getting impatient with me. Modron is the Celtic goddess of motherhood – a bit grand for me. When I hear it, I know his temper’s stirring and I best be careful. He’s a large man, my dad, Ifan Haverd, very stern. He’s got wild grey hair the colour of Welsh slate, a square face with a big bumpy nose in the middle of it and startling turquoise eyes, deep set, that look out of place, as if they’ve been stolen. Mam says I’ve got my father’s eyes. They’re exact same shade, though I think they suit me with my pale skin and my strawberry-blonde hair. Unlike him, I look like the rightful owner.

  Dad’s skin is wind-burned and craggy. He wears his farm clothes as if they are an army uniform and he’s a Welsh Fusilier moving on the enemy in Belgium. I love him, I do. But I’m a bit scared of him, too. I know how tired he gets, how he’s up nights fretting about yields, and lambing, and ringworm and vegetable blight. I wish I cou
ld control the weather for him, make the rain stop and start with a snap of my fingers, make the sun beat down before the harvest. I wish I could stop the seagulls and crows gobbling up the seed, and prevent the pests from burrowing into the vegetables. But no one can stop nature, that’s plain to see.

  Also, I do try to make up for Brice being gone. We were never told the details of his death but I think about him sometimes at night. He pops up among the satin dresses and the chocolates decorated with candied violets, and in the pages of the books. I think about the Germans blowing him up with a grenade, or shooting him through his lovely heart, or stabbing him dead. I don’t want to but I can’t tie down my thoughts. I try to see the Jerries’ ugly faces, but that’s hopeless as well. As I bring them closer and peer under their helmets, all I discover is other young men like my brother, men whose eyes are shiny, too, but with terror now.

  I did my damnedest to ignore my period when it began, but like the weather it wasn’t going away. So I left off milking and risked Dad’s wrath. ‘I’ve really got to go, Dad. I won’t be long.’ He sighed angrily and squeezed his mouth with a hand, as if that was the only way he could delay giving me a telling-off. I got up then and walked a bit awkwardly to the door of the milking shed. But if I was anxious about him seeing a stain, I shouldn’t have been. It’s gloomy in there. It’s always gloomy, steamy with the breath of the cows and the cold. And besides, he wasn’t even looking at me. I didn’t tell Mam either. What would have been the purpose? She was as busy in the house as Dad was outside it. I coped perfectly well. A bit of a wash down, rags and clean trousers. Soon sorted.

  Dad didn’t even notice I’d changed my clothes. No one guessed what was going on, which seemed unbelievable when I was so acutely aware of it. Some days I could feel my chest swelling and tingling like twin buds opening. Underneath these clothes, I’m a woman, though no one has made the observation. But if you think I’m miffed, that I go about mooning at my face in the bathroom mirror, pouting like a movie star and wiggling my hips, if you think I ferret in the linen cupboard and drape the old curtains around me like a bride, or that I mix coal dust with water and try painting my face, you’d be wrong. Why not? No harm in it, I know. Well, it’s because I’m just too knackered. I get up at six and keep on the go till nine, fall into bed and start the whole rigmarole again. You have a try and see if you have the strength to play at being a fine lady.

  At supper Dad often says furious things about the Germans, about what he’d like to do them, how he wants to make them pay for Brice. He says that Hitler is the devil come to earth to make his hell. He says the SS are his henchmen. He says our brave boys are infiltrating Germany this very second, that a day’s coming soon when one of them will blow Hitler to smithereens. He says he despises the filthy Hun. The way his voice grinds out of him is horrible. It’s like his hands are gripped about the neck of some young German boy, strangling the life out of his thrashing body. But I’ll tell you what bothers me most of all: that boy, he’d have a mam at home as well. And a dad. And maybe even a sister like me. And if you stabbed him he’d bleed the same as Brice. Before the war I used say that I hated things most days, getting up for school, lava bread, going to chapel, the earaches I get. But I don’t think I meant it, really. When Dad’s eyes seem to disappear into his head, and his face pulls all one way so that I don’t recognise him, that’s hate, that’s killing hatred festering inside him looking for an outlet.

  So it’s an especial surprise when one evening sitting about the fire he says he can’t cope no more. He says that he needs as many arms as an octopus. He says that two German prisoners of war are going to be working on the Bedwyr Farm, starting next week.

  Chapter 4

  Harriet, 1947

  THE WORLD WARS have robbed me of both my parents. I was born in 1912, a toddler when the First World War broke out, six years old and motherless by the time it ended. Of course, I recollect nothing whatsoever about it. At the outset of the Second World War, I was twenty-seven, living in Finsbury Park, had been married three years to Merfyn Pritchard, was childless by circumstance not design, and had been employed as a dressmaker and in a munitions factory. And when it was over, I remembered everything about it, though I would have preferred to forget.

  My mother died in a Zeppelin bombing raid on London in September 1915. It raised the house we were living in at the time to the ground. God knows how, but providentially for me I was pulled from the rubble alive. My father took sole responsibility for my upbringing then, with the able assistance of our housekeeper. Papa was a strict parent, a tower of a man, austere in disposition. His features carved into a pale mottled complexion, he reminded me of a Roman bust – but without a scalp of coiled hair. His own, though swept back from his high pleated brow, fell in loose squirrel-grey waves to his starched collar. He lived by the highest moral standards himself and he expected no less of his only daughter. So I’ve got him to thank for my acute sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of sin and virtue. Sadly, he was also taken from me during the Second World War in a car accident in the blackout. So you could say that Germany orphaned me.

  Among his rules was one of total abstinence from alcohol. If this was an irrelevance to a girl accustomed to mugs of milk and water, it came as I grew up to have a significance I could not have foretold. ‘Drinking liquor is a degrading vice, Harriet. It eats into the soul of man like a cancer. It robs him of his self-respect. It teaches him to squander his wages. It leads to domestic violence and crime. It destroys the family. Never doubt that ever since man has trodden the grape and partaken of its fermented poison, chaos has resulted,’ he lectured, as if from the pulpit, shaking a finger in my face. Every night and every morning, he came to my room and we prayed together for temperance, for restraint in all appetites of the flesh, for moderation, for self-control.

  ‘The body is a vessel of debauchery, Harriet. It is a carnal cesspit of greed and lust and bestial depraved urges. It must be cleansed with fervent prayer and constant communion with God. In his infinite mercy may he grant you purity in mind and body and soul. For you can ask no greater gift.’

  We knelt down at the foot of my bed when we petitioned our maker. We said the Lord’s Prayer in unison, his thunderous delivery drowning out my child’s treble. He schooled me that this invocation should be my sunrise and my sunset. ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ he shouted, lifting my sagging arms up to heaven. ‘The devil with his prodigious cunning will place forbidden fruit in your path, Harriet. Most assuredly he will. As a soldier of the Lord you must fast. Put on your suit of holy armour. Leave no chink in it for Satan, that slippery viper, to worm through. Remember evil is crafty and baffling. You must be vigilant, child.’ He laid his hand like a clod of earth on my head and buried me under it, so that my neck ached and my knees wobbled. ‘Do you feel it, Harriet? Do you feel the devil driving into you?’

  I opened my eyes and tears trickled from them. ‘Yes, yes, I do, Papa. Help me,’ I pleaded earnestly. And he called upon the Holy Spirit to wash away any thought of sin. ‘Lord God give us the strength to fend off mortal desires. ‘“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” Proverbs 20, verse 1.’ Though, of course, I was far too young to understand that drink corrodes the mental faculties.

  Sometimes prayer alone could absolve me. Sometimes he needed to beat the badness out of me. ‘I do this to demonstrate God’s love,’ my father would say hoarsely, crouching down before me, his grey eyes meeting mine, his warm stale breath on my face. Seeing his eyes well up along with mine I was moved, so sorrowful was my papa that he must castigate me.

  Unsurprisingly, Papa was not an advocate of the suffragette movement. He held that equality between the sexes, like the unicorn, owed more to myth than reality. ‘Only trouble will come of women having the vote,’ he prophesied. It was his opinion that the fairer sex should be adorned like birds of paradise in pretty dresses and gathered skirts, hemmed to reveal no more than your ankles, in high-necked blo
uses with modest sleeves that hid both elbows and wrists. He was very disappointed to see the war eroding this edict, and more and more females swaggering about in men’s attire. By the way, I abide by his code. And this not simply out of respect to a principled man, but because I have come to share his dictum: ‘Let men be men and women be women.’ You only have to look at Romans 1, verse 26 and 27: ‘For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the women and burned in their desire towards one another.’ I think that clarifies the Almighty’s position on cross-dressing rather succinctly, don’t you?

  Papa did not hold with face painting either. I am not my father’s clone, and yet I have come to share his views. Women seem to have gone mad since the war ended, smearing their faces with anything they can get their hands on. ‘What are they trying to hide, Harriet, with their cow eyes and their mouths all red and greasy?’ Papa used to say with a sneer. ‘Trollops, every one. Soap, water and truth is all you should require. What need of the tricks of Jezebel here?’

  Papa did not encourage friendships with other girls. And socialising with boys was an unbreakable taboo. I was twenty-three before he permitted me to interact with men. I met Merfyn at a church social. I had come, by then, to reconcile myself to the fact that marriage might not be God’s will for me. It certainly did not seem to be my father’s. Perhaps it was my lot to care for him, I reasoned, and not for a husband. But no sooner had I resigned myself to spinsterhood than Merfyn Pritchard, a member of our Baptist church’s congregation, asked my father for permission to court me. The resemblance between them was uncanny. My suitor was scholarly, sober and dependable. An exponent of the Bible, he held it was the only book that repaid regular revision, that publishers of the modern prurient novel were in league with Satan.