“Young love,” the barman, who’d lingered, sighed, and Rotheram wondered what he disapproved of—the generosity, perhaps, or something more?
On the ceiling, Rotheram noticed a line of hooks screwed into the wood.
“Must have lost a lot of men hereabouts.”
“Just that one to the war,” the fellow said. “Other lads never came back from the factories or the coalfields. Lost ‘em to work, you might say. Been losing them that way for fifty years. Got so bad that now the girls are running after them.”
“Jack!”
“Well, it’s true, Hattie.”
“You make it sound like it’s not decent,” she cried. “I’m engaged,” she said to Rotheram. “Met him when he was an evacuee during the war. Now he’s working in Liverpool.” She gave the barman, Jack, a stern look and busied herself at the other end of the counter.
“Looks like you’ve one fellow who’s staying here,” Rotheram said.
“Who? Jerry? He ain’t so bad.” The barman dropped into a whisper. “Told me he never even got a shot off. Said he was on the shifter when he got captured. Didn’t know whether to put up his hands or pull up his drawers.”
Rotheram grinned with him.
“What are you two whispering about?”
“Nothing, nothing,” Jack cried, retreating down the passage.
“Congratulations,” Rotheram told her, raising his glass.
“Thanks!”
“You think she’ll marry?” He bobbed his head towards the hills.
“Esther?”
The other shook her head. “That’s another story. Dead man’s a hard act to follow, I reckon. None of the boys around here have the gumption to marry a hero’s widow.”
She wiped the bar down, working in decreasing circles.
“Ashamed, isn’t it? What did they do during the war, after all?”
“What about her German?”
The barmaid gave him a narrow look. “Not that there wasn’t talk, mind. Even went to the pictures together once before he left. But how would it have looked? And her with the dead man’s daughter on her apron strings. Dead man’s mam in her home. Besides, he was a right respectful bloke, that Karsten. Handsome and all.” She giggled, then went on more soberly as Jack approached. “Hard worker, too, by all accounts. Lads used to call him ‘the German shepherd’! Said he took to it because it was just like guard duty. But he never liked that, said he’d rather be a bad shepherd than a good guard any day.”
“You don’t mind serving them, then?”
“Not if they’re good looking!” Hattie cried, but Jack gave her a look and she drew back, miffed.
“Frankly,” Jack confided, “I need the business. Besides, they can drink, you know!” He waggled his eyebrows. “And they keep the English away, to boot.”
He stared at Rotheram for a moment.
“No offence.”
“And none taken,” Rotheram told him, holding the barman’s eye over the rim of his glass as he drained it.
“Another?”
Rotheram shook his head. He set his glass down in the wet circle it had made on the bar, and made sure to wish the young couple luck on his way out.
EOF
Table of Contents
Cover
Prologue: September 1944
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Epilogue
2007 - The Welsh Girl Page 33