The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  ‘Frank and I got married on Christmas Day,’ she says.

  The burned-out remnants of the logs in the grate hiss and spark as they collapse into each other. A single flame shoots up the chimney and dies away, and the charred wood underneath starts to smoke.

  ‘Good to get warm, isn’t it?’ says Frank as he walks into the room. He puts a rush basket full of chopped wood next to the fireplace and flings a couple of logs onto the fire. Each time he lifts a log, Mari sees a muscle bulging through the sleeves of his jumper. He takes a small brush with a long gold handle out of a stand by the grate and brushes away the ash and specks of dirt from the slate slab underneath. When he has finished he slots the brush back into place and shifts the fire-set to one side, out of the way. It has a brass front that gleams as if it has just been polished, its smooth texture interrupted by hammered-in pictures of ships in full sail. Frank stands next to the coal bucket with his hands clasped behind his back.

  Nannon walks over him. They are the same height, like the man and woman in the weathervane in Gwelfor’s glass porch.

  ‘Frank and I met at Pwllbach, like you and Elsa.’

  ‘How lovely,’ Elsa says loudly. ‘Tommy, why don’t you come and help yourself to a Scotch?’

  ‘Because you can bring it to me over here.’

  Elsa lets the baize-coloured cloth fall back into place and everything beyond becomes blurred and indistinct again. There is a ripple in the surface of the chenille, the clink of ice cubes hitting the side of a glass and the sound of liquid being poured over them.

  Elsa has borrowed a pair of Nannon’s house shoes and they are too big for her. On the way back to the table she lifts her heels, so that she looks as if she is paddling through water.

  ‘So you were here working on the farms with the others? The Italians and Germans?’ she says to Frank.

  Mari would like to pull the fringed tablecloth back the way her mother had but she doesn’t want them all to look at her. Through the green fronds she can see four pairs of feet: each time someone speaks, the feet move. Frank’s feet shift as he answers Elsa’s question. He changed his shoes to go and get the wood from the garden, as Nannon told him to; his garden shoes are old and badly mended, and a tongue lolls out from one of them.

  ‘You didn’t fancy going home at the end of the war then,’ Tommy says. ‘Like the rest of us.’ He uncrosses his legs and crosses them again. All Mari can see is the one shoe that’s still on the rug. It is a brand new shoe, bought in London when Elsa bought her gloves. The three of them all have new shoes. Mari’s rub against her toes, and she takes them off whenever she can.

  ‘You took your time, too, didn’t you?’ says Frank.

  ‘There were things to sort out, after the war,’ says Tommy. He says it as if there had been a mess in Hong Kong, and he, Elsa, Oscar and Lin had all set to and tidied up the place, until everything was just the way it had been before. Mari doesn’t remember it like that. Everything was old or broken, it was true, but there were smiles on faces and plenty to eat. She didn’t know what it was like before, in any case. All she knew before that was Stanley, the slow pendulum of night and day, and waiting for something to end, and when she asked her mother what, her mother saying, ‘The war,’ and waving her hand out around her, taking in the turquoise sweep of Stanley Peninsula, the low hills and crags the colour of uncooked dough, and the water’s edge at Stanley beach, which shone white in the morning sun.

  Nannon steps into the centre of the room. She is wearing a pair of sandals that would be better suited to a hot summer’s day in Stanley, worn without socks as they clambered down from the compound to the beach where they were allowed to swim, while the guards watched. But she’s wearing them with nylons to keep warm, and her toenails look as brown as thick coffee.

  ‘I think we should have a toast,’ Elsa says. ‘New Year, new beginnings.’

  ‘You needn’t worry.’ Nannon sounds agitated, as if her eyebrows are flitting up and down again. ‘We’re moving into the flat above Bristol House. You three must stay here. Together.’

  ‘Yes, we haven’t had much time together, have we, Elsa?’ says Tommy.

  He sounds as if he is sitting forward in his chair. Mari listens as a fizzy liquid bubbles into glasses above her head.

  ‘Since I came back from the dead.’

  ‘Oh no, we never thought you were dead, either of you, did we Franz… Frank? We never gave up.’ Nannon rocks her heavy frame back and fore on her ugly toes. They look like the knobbly, undersized potatoes they used to grow in Stanley. Elsa used to make Mari collect them in a basket with ancient newspaper folded over the hole in the bottom so they wouldn’t lose even one.

  ‘To Elsa and Tommy and Mari, and the happy times ahead,’ Nannon says.

  There is a chink of glasses from by the fire, hesitant and out of time with each other.

  ‘And to Nannon and Frank, and a long and happy marriage,’ says Elsa quickly. ‘And as for moving out, I won’t hear of it, not into that pokey little flat. There’s plenty of room for us all here.’

  The woollen loops of the rug press comfortably into Mari’s cheek. Nannon’s voice is fluttering up and down like someone playing loose scales on the piano at one of the parties Elsa and Oscar went to at the Gloucester Hotel; when she reaches the crescendo of the story, Mari is jolted back to herself; then comes a polite ripple of laughter from Elsa and a ‘Ha!’ from Frank, and Mari tumbles back down into a sleepy pool of inner silence again, absorbing unconnected fragments of the conversation. From time to time she hears a pecking sound like a bird tapping its beak against a window, and she sneaks a look out from under the tassels and watches Elsa’s fingers picking away at the surface of the tablecloth.

  Mari lies back on the rug, feeling her shape imprinted deep into it next to the cat, like the hollowed-out dent a body leaves in the sand. They lie curled up facing each other. She remembers swimming with the other children on the beach at Stanley, the sand that was made up of all colours – brown, gold, white – and letting it slip through her fingers grain by grain, watching as they caught the light. Usually, instead of swimming, Mari had spent her allotted half-hour sitting in the sand. It was because she was hungry, Elsa had said. They were all so weak because there wasn’t enough food; there weren’t even enough of the potatoes that pushed their way through the earth in the tennis courts. Elsa had said to Oscar, ‘Look at that. Poor Tommy’s potatoes,’ and Mari had said, ‘Who’s Tommy?’ and Elsa had told her to go and play with the other children. She wonders where they are, all the other children, if they are asleep behind stringy ferns made of green chenille, if they’ve been eating bread-and-butter pudding while people look them up and down, saying ‘And who have we got here?’

  The voices recede into swishing murmurings, someone saying ‘It’s getting hot,’ and pulling the sash up, and the voices becoming indistinct from the swell of the sea below, until they are gone and there is only Mari and the loops that press into the side of her face as she lies washed up on the rug, abandoned.

  4

  Her mother promised her it would get light, and it does, eventually, but it is the noise that wakes her first. Not the sea, although there is that too, but a heavy clopping sound coming up Lewis Terrace. It knocks unevenly as it comes up the rise from Water Street, getting louder and louder until it is right under her window, making the glass shake in its frame.

  ‘The milk cart’s here,’ she hears Nannon calling around the house.

  Mari sits up in bed, her heart beating fast, shivering as the cold air reaches her skin. She hauls herself up and out of bed, tripping over a fold in the rugs. She holds one hand out against the window frame to steady herself. Just underneath the bay window, a horse and cart have come to a halt outside Gwelfor’s porch. The horse has a brown mane and a head that shakes back and fore from time to time. It is huge, with a dark coat almost hidden by a blanket that has been flung over its back and tied round its middle. Spokes of hot breath spurt out of its nostrils. It is attache
d by a pair of reins to a shallow cart with two high wheels, and a metal and brass urn inside.

  Mari pulls on a jumper over her night dress and a pair of long socks, and runs downstairs.

  Nannon is by the hat stand, poking around in a drawer.

  ‘Where’s my purse got to?’

  She looks up and sees Mari.

  ‘You’re up already, there’s a good girl,’ she says. ‘Ah, there it is.’

  She takes Mari’s hand.

  ‘Come with me.’ She is smiling, as if something nice is about to happen.

  The kitchen is full of steam. Clothes hanging off a Sheila’s maid above the range are sending out a warm soapy scent mixed with the smell of percolated coffee coming from a metal jug on one of the rings. Nannon reaches out to a low, open shelf under the dresser and pulls out an earthenware crock.

  ‘There,’ she says, nestling it in the crook of her arm. ‘And for you, this will do.’ She passes a yellow mug over to Mari.

  Mari grips the mug tightly as Nannon whirls her out to the hall and opens the door to the porch. The cold hits her straightaway, and the frozen slate slabs of the floor of the porch hurt the soles of her feet through her socks. The porch has double doors onto the street glazed with coloured leaded glass, a purple tulip dotted with green tips the shape of diamonds. She sees the horse’s rheumy eye looking at her from the other side, shaded green by the stained glass.

  ‘Whip these on,’ says Nannon, pointing to a pair of her own shoes. Mari slips into them and stands behind Nannon as she opens the double doors of the porch.

  ‘Morning, Siôn,’ Nannon says to the man who is standing holding the horse’s reins.

  ‘Cold one this morning,’ the man says, clapping his hands and stamping his feet, making the horse shake his head again.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  They both stand and look over the top of the milk cart at the sea. Mari tries to see through the spokes of the red wheels that stand higher than her head. The cold runs through her body and she shakes involuntarily, like the horse.

  ‘What’s it to be?’ says the man.

  Nannon holds the big crock out and says, ‘I’ll have a quart,’ and the man turns to the cart, leaving the horse’s reins to dangle in mid-air. He reaches out for one of the metal containers that hang off the long hooks at the back of the cart, and takes one of the hand cans. He heaves himself up into the cart and hunkers down in front of the churn, turning the key until the milk hits the bottom of the can. He swings himself back down, holding the can in one hand, and pours it into the dish Nannon is holding. The milk steams out of the crock.

  ‘Still warm, that is,’ he says, looking at Mari. The skin on his eyelids and nose is red and shiny and looks as if it hurts in the cold. He is wearing gloves without fingers that show the blistered skin on the back of his hands and a ring of dirt around each nail. He winks at Mari and says to Nannon, ‘And what will the little lady be having?’

  ‘This is my niece, Mari, back from Hong Kong.’

  ‘Hong Kong, is it?’

  The man takes a good look at her. He has watery, deep-set brown eyes like the horse.

  ‘Could you let her have half a pint in the mug? I’ll give you a ticket extra,’ Nannon says.

  ‘No need for the little lady from Hong Kong to give me a ticket. This is my present to you. A welcome home present.’ One of his runny eyes blinks over and over, as if he can’t help it.

  ‘You are kind. I’m much obliged to you,’ says Nannon.

  He lifts Mari up above the gold-framed paraffin lamps onto the high cart and although she doesn’t like the feel of his hands on her through her jumper she doesn’t say anything. He lets her turn the churn key herself and sit on the low bench against the cart’s curved back and drink her milk. She drains it almost in one gulp, looking at the trees that poke up above the low wall from the houses below and the sea beyond them, layer of grey on grey.

  The man lifts her down again and she says thank you, and he gives her a smile that creases his face up into a crackled glaze.

  ‘Croeso.’

  The horse flicks its tail. The man pats its haunch lightly and they move along up the road to Hedd y Môr next door.

  Nannon says, ‘Quick, quick, let’s get you into the warm,’ and they go back inside. With the rest of the house still asleep and the fire in the range heating her through, Mari sits at the kitchen table, running her fingers over its lined surface, waiting for her breakfast.

  5

  Nannon’s good moods seem to dissipate with the cold of the early mornings. Some days she leaves early to go over to Bristol House; but often she stays in Gwelfor and works her way through a list of tasks she has written up on a piece of slate in the pantry, ticking them off in chalk. As she becomes absorbed in the day’s work she withdraws into herself, as if she can only concentrate if she is absolutely quiet, and if Mari talks to her or asks a question she shakes her head, or waves her away. After breakfast she wraps Mari up in layers of old jumpers and a heavy coat, puts a cheese sandwich packed in baking parchment in one pocket and an apple in the other, and walks her to the front door.

  ‘Where’s Mammy?’ Mari asks. She isn’t used to being away from her mother. She is used to the safe enclosure of the barbed-wire fence at Stanley. If her mother told her to go off and play she meant for her to run around the exercise yard with the other children brandishing a broken bit of wood and a ball made of paper and glue, with Elsa’s shadow in one of the workshops behind her, tall against the window, singing hymns in Welsh that no one apart from Mari could understand, and the man from the quarters down close to the beach, Colonel Jackson his name was, who had a false leg and said that hearing ‘Calon Lân’ so far from home made him cry.

  But Nannon says, ‘Your mam and dad need to rest. We need to let them sleep on a bit.’ And Mari learns that once the leaded porch doors are closed behind her she must get moving, or her fingers and toes will start seizing up in the cold, and she must keep moving and not come back until lunchtime, otherwise Nannon will just send her out again. She looks up at the end of Lewis Terrace, where the road rises sharply off the end of the village so that it looks as if it leads into the sky, and then she glances the other way, down towards the end of the stone pier that curls out and away from the boat sheds on the slipway. The still water has a smooth surface the colour of fresh cream, broken up in places by pale milky lines of tide trails.

  From Gwelfor the place is all chimney pots, made up of three terraces cut through with lanes that run down from the brow of the hill. Mari finds that whichever way she chooses sooner or later she will end up at the shoreline below. She puts an arm out and grasps the metal rail that has been riven into the wall. She listens. There is a scraping sound coming from somewhere, but the acoustics here are refracted by the sea, the walls, the side of the hill.

  When Mari walks down from Gwelfor, she has to brace herself, stretch out with her head leaning backwards and her feet poking away from her, to stop herself from going down too quickly and tripping over her own feet. Everything changes and shifts around her with each elongated step she takes. The grey of the sea deepens. The houses seem to move with her. There is a small patch of light over to the west, over the water below the shallow cliffs, as if there is a sun somewhere behind the clouds.

  As the mornings get lighter, Mari starts to look forward to her walks. She is glad to escape the kitchen table in Gwelfor, watching Nannon, Frank, Elsa and Tommy passing each other the marmalade without being asked. The hedgerows start to send out feathers of light green leaves, and the stream running parallel with Water Street thaws out: Mari can hear it rushing down the terrace to meet the sea. The desperate sound of hungry seagulls is softened by the burbling of the wood-pigeons in the trees behind Gwelfor. On these milder days, she can only hear the sea once she is right above it.

  She sees a red fishing boat coming into harbour from behind the pier, its wake a wrinkle on the surface of the water. There is a rock on the beach that looks like a broken-bac
ked whale, its skin scored through with lines like paper cuts. It sits in a ridge of shattered shells that have been pounded against the back of the pier by the tide and trapped between the rock and the base of the wall.

  The rocky pier is built in two layers: the top level, where Mari has come to a halt, has benches dug into its thick walls, and the next level has uneven ladders of steps cut into it, which means that you can move from one to the other as you please, although there is nothing to hold on to apart from the slippery stair above. Nannon has said they are treacherous and Mari mustn’t go and get herself killed on them. The stone is dark and wet and too cold to sit on.

  Mari turns and looks back at the village from the end of the jetty, and at the patterns of children’s footprints in the sand on the beach. Nannon says that she must go to school. Elsa says they must give Mari time to get settled. ‘Elsa,’ Nannon says. ‘It’s been weeks.’ Mari is afraid of the school building, its bricks wet and oily like the seals who dry themselves off on the rocks down by Cwmtydu. She is nervous about the cruel fairy angel from the party, who has a name, but she can’t remember it. She dreads being on her own with her in the school, having to go to the toilets which she has seen are the other side of the yard. Every time her mother asks her if she wants to play with other children, like she did at Stanley, she shakes her head.

  The scratching sound reaches her again, coming at her from the slipway between the boatsheds and the rocks overhanging the beach. It is a sharp metallic noise, rhythmical and relentless. She lowers herself down the steps, using her hands to stop herself from slipping.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha!’

  It’s a man’s laugh, ricocheting against the sides of one of the upturned boats on the slipway.

  ‘You’re right, there, boy.’

  The slipway is stacked with lobster pots made of metal and rope. There are tufts of sea plants sticking out of some of them, drying off. They have a mysterious series of inner nets like cobwebs. Boats are turned on their bellies so that they look like the broken-backed rock on Penpolion, propped up off the ground by neatly stacked towers of splints and bricks and tyres. They look funny with their hulls up, emptied out somehow.