The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  ‘Tommy?’

  The man in the chair on the other side of the bed is well-built, thick-set around the eyes, with large, sensuous lips, the kind of man that women flock to. He looks well-to-do, sitting back, one leg balanced on the knee of the other leg. His eyes are large, deep blue, and his hair springs up off the top of his head. He is too big for the room. He is wearing expensive clothes, a gold watch. Rolex. Tommy always liked a Rolex.

  ‘No, Mam,’ he says impatiently.

  ‘No, no, no,’ says the older man, his grip tightening on her hand. ‘She’s very confused these days,’ he says across the bed, and then to Elsa in a light, jokey voice that she knows isn’t his, ‘It’s Owen. He’s just got off the plane from Hong Kong.’

  ‘Owie,’ she says. Again, the word is in her mouth before her brain knows what to do with it. She turns it around in her mind, examines it for clues. It brings her a whiff of milk, dark spaces of night-time with nobody there, just her and him, with the streetlight on the corner of Galskarth Road shining through the unlined curtains, Mari and Oscar asleep in the bedroom next door; when she creeps back in she will see both their faces turned towards her. As she gets into bed she can still feel the damp patches on her nightdress where milk spurted out of her breasts when she heard Owie’s cry in her sleep.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself, Mam,’ the young man says. ‘I’ve got lots of nice presents for you.’

  ‘How’s Lin?’ she whispers.

  But he doesn’t hear her, it seems. He’s started now, this nervous, good-looking man, and he carries on as if he’s afraid to stop, about his new job, his office on the twenty-seventh floor in Kowloon, his Chinese wife. She remembers eating ice cream with him in the Italian café on Belmonston Road wearing her good coat, to celebrate something special. A maths exam. With fan-shaped wafers.

  ‘Ice cream,’ she says. ‘Raspberry ripple.’

  He looks put out. Perhaps he was expecting her to say something else.

  The old man pats her hand, and the way he does it makes her afraid.

  ‘Will you tidy up my things, please, dear?’ she says. He starts to pull himself up on his stick, the bones of his knuckles straining against his thin, white skin.

  ‘Sit down, Dad,’ says the younger one. ‘I’ll do it.’

  And he stands over Elsa, blocking out the light. He fiddles with the clasp until it snaps open, and he puts her things into it with the greatest care: the hankie, her passport, the playing cards. As he leans over Elsa she feels it again, that tugging at her insides.

  ‘Lin always loved you two, you and Mari,’ she says as he sits down.

  The man with the white hair looks over the bed at Owen.

  ‘She means Auntie May,’ he says.

  Lin May. Lin. ‘Yes,’ she says. Elsa can see the B&B overlooking Castlemartin Common, near Ealing Broadway, the curtains from Laura Ashley and the lacquered furniture in the dining room. It used to be so genteel, when Lin put down her savings on it with a bit of help from Elsa and Oscar, but now they play garage music day and night in the flats next door, and there are locks on all the windows. Lin employs visiting students from Hong Kong to help her prepare the breakfasts and change the beds. She writes out the bills for her guests at a writing desk covered with framed photographs. She likes it when her guests point at them and ask questions. In the pictures Lam is older, with short hair. She is standing outside a house in Seattle next to two little girls with plaits and gaps between their teeth. The photo of Lin herself was taken by Tommy out on the terrace in Hong Kong, holding Mari in her arms, their faces close together. If people gesture to the picture of Wei, as if they want to round things off, know the full story, Lin hesitates before saying simply, ‘He taught me how to write.’

  ‘Where’s Lin?’ Elsa says. ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘Hold on a minute.’ The older man holds his hand out to Owie for the pack of cards. Elsa watches as he takes them out of the packet and shuffles them.

  ‘Fancy a game?’ he says to her.

  ‘Ooh, yes.’ She sits up in bed, excited, hardly feeling the pain in her back any more.

  ‘What do you fancy?’ He seems happy. She likes to see him happy.

  ‘Whist?’

  ‘What about bridge?’ he says. She looks at the cards, the sheen of their patterned backs, as if they might tell her what to say.

  ‘What a wonderful idea, bridge,’ she says, clapping her hands. ‘It’ll be just like old times.’

  She smoothes the hair down at the sides of her head. They both pull in closer to her, and she smiles at them.

  ‘Now then,’ she says, taking the cards and shuffling them expertly, chip-chopping them, dividing them into two piles on the duvet, flicking them into each other and shuffling them all over again.

  ‘We need a four.’

  When nobody answers she looks up impatiently. A crash from the service kitchen down the corridor makes her think of Marge. When the door opens, she says, ‘Marge, it is you. I was hoping you might come and join us in a game of bridge.’

  ‘Mammy, what nonsense are you talking now?’

  ‘Aren’t you Marge?’ she asks. The woman is the right shape for Marge, well-covered, with her hair a bright colour. But the clothes are wrong. Too expensive and no green overall. And she doesn’t have that piggy look that Marge carries around with her. She looks a bit like Nannon, now Elsa comes to think about it, with her grey eyes and arched eyebrows. Although the big hair is Tommy’s, of course.

  ‘Mari,’ she says, and the woman comes and sits on the bed and puts her arms around her.

  Not one of Nannon’s letters survived, but Oscar’s telegram did. He called at the post office after his shift, just to please Elsa, making sure that Nannon would get the news as soon as possible. Mari Haf Jones, 6lb 13oz, born 12.10 pm 1 March 1941. Mother and baby perfect. It travelled the span of three continents and fifty years, its final destination Nannon’s book of household cooking in the pantry at Gwelfor. Each entry is written in her distinctive writing, with pictures and tips from papers and magazines glued to the lined pages in places, making a swollen carcass of the notebook. It is still there, somewhere in the middle, inbetween recipes for bread pudding and spam hash.

  ‘How have they been treating you, Mammy?’

  Mari’s Welsh reminds Elsa of herself as a young woman, the contracted vowels and mutations, ch dd th, running all over the place, the same accent. Because although the shop on the King’s Road did well, Mari sold up and headed for home, back to New Quay. She took over Bristol House after Nannon died, and turned it into a boutique. Half the houses are holiday homes now, and the fields below the new road are all caravans, but it seems to suit Mari. She likes doing the things that Elsa and Nannon used to do: picking sloes on damp autumn afternoons, and lighting a fire afterwards to dry off; coaxing stringy stalks of tomato plants to grow tall against the back wall of Gwelfor, until they produce heavy red fruit that smells as good as it tastes; and sewing, always at her machine, always making something new out of the old patterns and material she inherited from Nannon. She gathers them about her obsessively, as if they might take the place of Nannon’s enveloping love.

  It had hurt, going round Gwelfor on the day of Nannon’s funeral, seeing her things set out on the walnut dressing table, her flannel in the bathroom, hung up to dry on the towel rail, and a photograph of Frank in the middle of the hat stand. Nannon left the house to Mari, of course, but she never filled it with a husband, or children. She kept everything exactly as it was in Elsa and Nannon’s time, the same earthenware crock on the dresser in the kitchen, the multi-coloured glass lampshade still hanging in the hall. From Piraeus, that was, Elsa told her, brought back not by her own father, but by his father before him. It was Mammy who cleaned it, though, never complaining, fetching a wooden chair with a flat seat that would be easy to climb up on, and jabbing the feather duster back and fore across the top of the lantern’s leaded frame until the dust fell out of it onto her shoulders.

  ‘What will
happen to Gwelfor, do you think?’ Elsa says, letting the cards slips from her fingers into an untidy rainbow shape on the eiderdown.

  The three of them gather round her and shush her and tell her not to worry, Gwelfor’s fine, and she can’t get a word in edgeways to tell them that what she had meant was, what will happen to it once they are all gone? Didn’t another house tip over the cliffs at Traethgwyn, last winter, and aren’t there at least a dozen others with cracks and gaping holes appearing in the garden walls, spreading up the lawns, and eventually to the houses themselves? Once they have all gone over the edge, the remnants of Welsh which are all that Mari and Owie have left between them will be gone too.

  Oscar’s delicate face looks washed out.

  ‘What about that game of bridge?’ Elsa says, gathering up the cards.

  He perks up and does the dealing, and Owen sits opposite her at the end of her bed. ‘Shall we bid?’ he says, and something, the angle of his elbow perhaps, or the way he looks at the backs of her cards, makes her think it might be a Sunday afternoon, in the living room in 38, Galskarth Road. Owen is seven years old, with a good head for figures already. He and she always play in a pair against Mari and Oscar. That is the way it works. Two and two make four. And the noise of rainwater gushing along the gutters and through the downpipe outside the window makes perfect sense too, and the cheese scones hot from the oven, and the hiss of the gas fire.

  ‘Oscar!’ Elsa says, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘Did you turn the fire off before you left?’ She always worries about the gas.

  He gets up painfully, hunched over his stick, and kisses her on the cheek.

  ‘You remember,’ he says in her ear.

  When the door opens she knows who it will be. She prepares herself for the repeated shock of looking at people’s faces and seeing five decades rush to the surface in one ferocious surge.

  ‘Lin,’ she says to the tiny, thin figure coming towards her, holding a bunch of chrysanthemums bought from the shop in the foyer downstairs, still crackling in their cellophane. At the sound of her name, Lin smiles, as if willing all that she was and is to come together and crystallise under the parasol of those three letters. She’s forgotten how to mark the character in Chinese, but it is still her name, and the way Elsa throws it at her like a fisherman flinging out his fine white nets, with a blind faith beyond her pockmarked memory, reels Lin in. She laces her fingers in Elsa’s.

  There is a thud as something heavy hits the base of the door to the corridor, and the tea trolley arrives, just as Elsa hoped it would. They linger over their decisions, whether to have one sugar or two, or to share a packet of bourbon biscuits between them, drawing the whole thing out, and Marge lets them, all of them, even the old girl who’s sitting up in bed giving out orders like she’s the Queen of England, because Marge isn’t in a hurry. She might as well. She’s only just come on shift and there’s ages to go yet before she can get off home.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe thanks to many individuals, most especially John Barnie, Patsy Chan, Stuart Christie, Gwen Davies, Tessa Hadley, Patrick Kavanagh, Jackie Kwan, Jem Poster, John Rhydderch, Melody Rhydderch Emmerson, Enid Stiele, Peter Wilcox-Jones, the late Trevor Wilcox-Jones, and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. I’d also like to thank Literature Wales for the generous bursary which enabled me to get started. Grateful thanks too must go to Seren’s fiction editor, Penny Thomas. Most of all, diolch o galon to Damian Walford Davies, Brychan Rhydderch Davies and Cristyn Rhydderch Davies.

  I consulted many sources in order to build up a picture of Hong Kong and New Quay during and immediately after the Second World War, of which the following proved invaluable:

  Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two (Yale University Press, 2009)

  Gwen Dew, Prisoner of the Japs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1943)

  Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East (Oxford University Press: 1988)

  Geoffrey Charles Emerson, Hong Kong Internment 1942-1945: Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley (Hong Kong University Press, 2008)

  Emily Hahn, China to Me (Doubleday, 1944)

  Susan Campell Passmore, Farmers and Figureheads: The Port of New Quay and its Hinterland (Carmarthen: Dyfed County Council Cultural Services Department, 1992)

  Dorothy Sheridan, ed., Wartime Women: A Mass-Observation Anthology of Women’s Writings, 1937-1945 (Heinemann, 1990)

  Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation (Yale University Press, 2003)

  Julie Summers: Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War (Simon and Schuster, 2008)

  The manual from which Nannon copies out a list of directions for Elsa’s trousseau is Elinor Ames’ Book of Modern Etiquette (Halcyon House, 1935).

  The quotation from Kica Kolbe used as epigraph to this book is taken from Elizabeth Bakovska’s essay ‘Stranstvuvanje and Provincialism’ Transcript Review 35, and is reproduced here with kind permission.

  Elsa’s reflections on Wales’ geographical resemblance to a pig were inspired by Menna Elfyn’s poem ‘Siapiau o Gymru’ (‘Wales – the shapes she makes’, trans. Elin ap Hywel, Eucalyptus, Gwasg Gomer, 1995), and Alix Nathan’s short story ‘Brawn’ (New Welsh Review 81). I’m also indebted to the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who is a powerful contemporary mediator of the Mari Lwyd tradition.

  Finally, I would like to pay my respects to my great-aunt, Menna Wilders, née Gillies, to whom this book is dedicated. The Rice Paper Diaries started out as an attempt to find out more about her wartime experiences, and although the novel is a fiction and not a reconstruction – historians and those who were there will note the extent to which I have made free with historical events, physical locations and proper names – I hope it goes some way towards celebrating Menna’s unquenchable spirit.

  About the Author

  Francesca Rhydderch has a degree in Modern Languages from Newnham College, Cambridge, and a PhD from Aberystwyth University. A former editor of New Welsh Review, her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on Radio 4 and Radio Wales. This is her first novel.

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

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  © Francesca Rhydderch 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-78172-052-3

  The right of Francesca Rhydderch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: Daniel Murtagh / Millennium Images, UK

  Ebook Conversion by Elaine Sharples

  Printed by Bell and Bain, Glasgow

  The publisher works with the financial assistance of The Welsh Books Council