The pains, when they began, were little more than a twinge in the small of her back. She rearranged her cushions and tried to concentrate on the television. A squeezing sensation alarmed her and she stood up, turned off the television and stood at the door waiting for someone to return. The Goon Show was on the radio at quarter past ten, she’d listen to that. A laugh would settle her nerves. Nerves was all it was, the baby wasn’t due yet. It couldn’t be the baby.
The pains became sharper and she leaned on the back of a chair gasping, sweat pouring down her face. She had to get help. It normally took fifteen minutes to reach the edge of the town and she surely had time even if tonight it took her double. Babies took for ages to come, everyone knew that.
* * *
In Nia Martin’s house in Chestnut Road, Janet and Hywel were standing ready to leave, coaxing their daughter Caroline to come with them. But Nia insisted on them having another drink. Flagons of beer, port and sherry bought for Christmas had been opened early and with some lemonade and a few sandwiches, a party had developed from the visit intended only for Nia to see her grandson.
Caroline and Barry were behaving like the proud parents, although the child was in fact Barry’s nephew. When Joseph had died, Caroline had been in despair and with Rhiannon swearing she would never marry him, Barry had married Caroline, so the baby would have his father’s name. Now, the pride on Barry’s face could have been mistaken for paternal pride and Nia wondered if Caroline was becoming more important than Barry had intended.
Baby Joseph, who should have been in bed hours ago, was lively and entertaining, showing no sign of tiredness, so Janet and Hywel sat again and offered their glasses for ‘just a small one’.
* * *
Basil had intended to stay an hour at The Railwayman’s then go back to Eleri, but the conversation dwelt on the party Gladys Weston was planning and which Jack insisted they attended.
“She’ll never invite us, man,” Frank, Basil’s brother said. “What, ask the Griffithses to mix with the likes of the Westons, and the Jenkinses, and all them fancy lot up at the park? Never.”
“You know how much store Grandmother sets on having all the family together? Well, I’ve told her I won’t be there if you aren’t invited and she wrote your names down on the invitation list.” Jack laughed ruefully. “She rubbed them out again too, mind. But I’ve added them and circled them with mine and the twins. They’ve told her you have to come. Poor Gladys, we lead her a terrible life.”
Suddenly aware of the time, Basil jumped up and reached for his coat. “I’d better get back. Our Mam and Dad are there, but I don’t like being away from Eleri for long with the baby due so soon.”
The others laughed and teased him.
“It’ll be weeks yet, man. We’re still in October. It’s November she’s been told.”
Viv didn’t laugh, he was glad Basil cared so much for Eleri. “I’ll walk with you part of the way,” he said.
Outside the public house there was a knot of people, huddled against the cold weather and gradually drifting off. To Basil’s alarm he recognised his parents. Who was with Eleri?
“We’ve just got off the bus. Barry is taking Caroline and the baby home. Eleri with you, is she?” Hywel said, cheerful from the pleasant evening and from the drink he had consumed.
“Damn it all, Mam! She’s on her own.”
“She’ll be all right, love, the baby’s a long way off due. But we’d better hurry in case she’s nervous there on her own. I thought you were staying in?”
“I thought you’d be at home!” Each looking for someone to blame, they hurried through the dark street, and across the fields towards the cottage. Viv went with them.
* * *
Eleri was staggering by the time she crossed the field and reached the first stile, and as she rested on the wooden rail she heard sounds, muffled sounds as if someone was trying to be quiet. For a moment she thought it might be Basil checking his traps, but he didn’t work this close to the house as a rule. She was about to call out. Whoever it was, they would surely help her; but something made her hold back.
There was a squeal and she knew it was a rabbit’s death cry, and then another. Low, murmuring voices reached her and she tried to climb the stile, slipped and allowed a gasp to escape her lips and at once the sounds ceased. Poachers for sure, but not Basil.
She succeeded in clambering over the stile in a somewhat ungainly manner, fully aware she was being watched by invisible eyes. She wished she had stayed in the house – and locked the doors. Better to be teased than harmed. Janet and Hywel would surely not be long, and Basil was probably on his way home at this very moment. Memories of the attack on Rhiannon returned to add to her fears. Who knew who, or what, was out there, beyond her vision?
More voices, this time loud and accompanied by impatient footsteps crossing the field, it must be Basil and his parents. Thank goodness. She ran blindly towards the sounds and tripped and fell headlong.
What had she fallen over? It seemed like a body. Then figures rose to a crouch all around her and although the light was poor she saw a couple of dogs, held on short leads. The shadows crept further away and moved faster – right into the path of the others. She had fallen over the poachers who had dropped to the ground for concealment.
It seemed as if she were in the middle of a war. Voices threatening, the dull thud of blows and the grunts of the recipients. People running, calling in low voices for their partners to follow, then, at last the night’s confusion subsided and there was Janet’s voice calling for her echoed by the urgent exclamations of Basil.
Eleri answered with a sobbing, “I’m over here,” she was held in strong arms, and the world of sanity returned.
Chapter Six
Eleri’s child was born three hours later. The midwife arrived in time and the doctor admitted that he had hardly needed to be there as it was such a quick and straightforward birth. A little boy, they decided to christen him Ronald but call him Ronnie.
While Eleri was giving birth to Ronnie, the police were searching for the rest of the men she had interrupted at their night’s work. Two had been held firmly by Frank and Ernie, and Basil and Hywel when the police came, but two more had run off. The policemen had spent some time at the cottage where Janet had given them tea and Hywel had sat sprawled on a chair as if giving an audience, refusing to get up and give one of them a seat, insisting he was “worn out, puffed out and fagged out”.
The warren from which the men had been taking rabbits, with the aid of ferrets and a couple of dogs, was in a field belonging to local farmer, John Booker. He was someone from whom Basil and his father had taken many a pheasant, partridge, hare and rabbit, but Basil had never touched the large warren so near his home. John Booker had ferrets of his own and he killed a couple of hundred rabbits once a year and sold them in the local market. With such a small meat ration, many families who had previously refused to try rabbit had become fond of the dark, tasty meat. To Basil, with his odd sense of fair play, rabbits from that warren were the farmer’s personal property, and he never touched them, unless one ran into one of his traps further afield, when he considered them fair game.
John Booker arrived before the police had gone, and he too stayed to drink tea and hear the full story of the capture of the men who had been robbing him. He was a burly man, over six feet tall and several stone heavier than Hywel and he looked flushed and puffy having been woken out of a deep sleep by the police.
“Give the man a seat by the fire, Hywel,” Janet coaxed, giving her husband a push to encourage him but Hywel groaned and said he too had had a disturbed night.
“It’s all right, Mrs Griffiths,” the farmer said. “I wouldn’t want to disturb you further, but I’ll be back in the morning with a gift for the new baby. I owe him a debt, him having brought some of these damned poachers to justice, eh, Hywel?” There was a quizzical look on John’s face as he smiled down at the sprawling Hywel, a look which he transferred to Basil: two of the
men he had been trying to catch for years. “Yes, I’m grateful to the boy and his mother.”
The police told them the men had come in a van and planned to fill it with stolen game and take it to London arriving in time for the markets. They had discovered the van hidden in some trees, already half filled with pheasants. Gleefully, Basil prepared to give evidence against the thieves, assuring the men in blue he had given up his previous bad ways now he had a wife and a child, and denying any knowledge of the traps found in the woods, three fields away.
“What a night, Mam,” he said as, at five o’clock the following morning Janet and Hywel prepared to get a few hours sleep. “Me and our Dad helping the police. That’s the second time I’ve been helpful. They won’t be watching me so close now they believe I’ve become a respectable man who works with the police, will they? Damn me, our Dad, they’ll be asking me to join up soon!”
“Not if they’d found these they wouldn’t!” Hywel lifted the cushion on which he had been determinedly sitting throughout the police and the farmer’s visit, and showed his son three squashed and very dead partridge.
* * *
Gladys Weston usually had to persuade her son-in-law Islwyn to visit, specially since what she referred to as ‘his little lapse’. So when he arrived unannounced and during daylight hours, she at once expected a problem.
Victoria admitted him and called Gladys from where she was filling pages of a notebook with preparations for her party.
“Excuse me, Mrs Weston, but you have a visitor, Mr Islwyn Heath.”
“Show him into the lounge, Victoria, and it’s Heath-Weston. Bring us a tray of tea, will you? Now I wonder what the trouble is? Does he look all right?”
“Smiling he is, Mrs Weston.”
“Good heavens!”
Islwyn insisted on talking to both Arfon and Gladys, so she had to be patient until Arfon finished a phone call and joined them.
“Sian and I have sold the house, Mother-in-law,” Islwyn announced.
“That is downright inconsiderate, Islwyn. Hasn’t your family been through enough without you planning something so ill-considered? How can you think of moving just now? We haven’t any money to spare, so you’ll be looking at something worth far less that your present one. I’m sure Sian won’t like that, and why should she?” Gladys said, before looking at Arfon for him to continue.
But Arfon didn’t add to her blast of words, he simply asked, “Why?”
“We’ve agreed to rent a small house, just for the time being, until things have picked up, and we want you to have the money we make on the house.”
“What?” Gladys and Arfon said in unison.
“I said we’ve rented—”
“We heard what you said! But why are you doing this?”
“We want to pay you back some of the money you lost because of me, and in future I’ll keep Sian on what I can earn. It isn’t much help, I know, but it’s all I can do at present.”
“Keep Sian? You’d have to get a job first!” Gladys said harshly.
“That’s the second thing I wanted to tell you. I’ve got a job.” He looked at Gladys with what Arfon thought was a smile, but which Gladys later described as a smirk. “I’m the new cook at the Fortune fish and chip shop by the beach.”
When Islwyn left, he overheard Gladys say tearfully, “I knew this would happen, Arfon, dear. He’s finally gone off his head.”
Islwyn smiled widely. On the contrary, he felt more sane than at any time since he had married into the Weston family. Marrying Sian had ruined him. He had been offered a soft and easy life and had willingly accepted having to live life their way. He felt drunk with freedom as he walked to the Fortune fish and chip shop to begin his first lesson in cooking the best fish and chips in Pendragon Island.
After discussions lasting well into the night, Arfon decided he wouldn’t, couldn’t accept the money for the house. Early the following morning he and Gladys went to see their daughter, hoping Islwyn wouldn’t be there. It was a Saturday so Jack was sitting reading the paper and commenting occasionally about Father Christmas coming as early as November the seventh, only two days after bonfire night, and there being live bears in the Swansea Pantomime, and yet more rumours that food rationing would end the following year.
When they were settled with coffee before them, Arfon explained the reason for their visit. “Your mother and I wish to thank you for your generous offer, Sian, my dear, but we cannot allow it.”
“But you must, Daddy. I think it’s important to Islwyn that you do.” She didn’t tell her parents it was she who first mooted the idea. Better for Islwyn if they thought it had come from him.
“Tell him we refuse but we are grateful,” Gladys said.
“I’m sorry Mummy, but you must agree. Making this decision was what brought him back from his withdrawn and depressed state, don’t you agree, Jack?” she looked to her son to pull him into the conversation.
“Mam’s right, Grandfather. It took a long time and a lot of guts for Dad to face the facts. Now, with Mam’s help, he has. You mustn’t throw his apology in his face.”
“But where will you live?”
“We’ve signed the rental agreement on a house in Trellis Street,” Sian told them. “We’ll have to sell much of the furniture, it wouldn’t fit anyway and that will be more off the debt he owes.”
Gladys stared at her daughter, searching for regret or dismay and found none. “You are willing to accept this, dear?”
“Mummy, I’m so proud of him for this decision. You can’t take it away from him without destroying him completely and I – wouldn’t want that.” She didn’t add that the Westons had made him the way he was but she thought it. “It’s a chance for him to find out who he really is,” she ended.
Gladys glared at her. That was going too far.
“He is married to a Weston. That’s who he is,” she snapped.
Jack looked at his grandfather and winked.
“We accept and thank him most sincerely, Sian,” Arfon said as he stood to leave. “You have a man with hidden depths in Islwyn and you may tell him I said so.”
“Now…” Gladys said, rising and leaving the coffee she hated but thought smart to drink, “…about curtains…”
Jack and his grandfather exchanged a look and a silent groan. Gladys was off again.
* * *
In late November, Basil and Eleri took their baby back to the flat they rented in Trellis Street, where, a few days later, they watched Sian, Islwyn and Jack Heath-Weston move in.
Sian had been excited about the move, a feeling of sacrifice made her walk tall and the shame of her husband’s stealing was fading fast. What Islwyn was doing was wonderful and it reduced the shame of his behaviour, which she in any case had explained away to her friends with a hushed mention of ‘illness’.
The road was more shabby than she remembered, with a hazy November sun revealing the lack of paint and the scarred walls. She swallowed her qualms and told herself that it was going to be wonderful living among these poorer people and helping them to improve their lot by emulating their betters. A small child was chalking on the pavement, marking out a hopscotch game. Sian frowned at her. “That,” she said firmly, “will have to stop!
The furniture van was pulling up as Sian reached number forty-four. Standing outside their various homes were whole families, gathered preparing to be entertained. They made no attempt to hide their curiosity, but watched with interest and added a light-hearted commentary as the furniture was taken inside.
Sian hurried the men about their work, really she had never imagined such embarrassment. Why had Islwyn insisted on moving on a Saturday when the husbands and children were at home? To her shame the door opposite and to the right opened and the gangly form of Basil Griffiths appeared followed by his wife with the baby carried in a Welsh shawl. Sian almost ran up the pavement and into the house, colliding with one of the removal men, tilting him practically off-balance, then glaring at him until he apo
logised.
“Eleri wondered if you wanted any help,” Basil said, leaning in, a hand on each side of the doorway.
“We’re managing perfectly well, thank you. Now, if you would kindly move out of the way, the workmen will soon be finished. Goodbye.”
Basil turned away and she saw him shrug in the direction of his wife. Sian wondered for the first time if she had made a terrible mistake. Neighbours she could cope with, they could simply be ignored, but one of those awful Griffithses living practically opposite and worse, offering to help? That was an onerous start.
“Islwyn?” she called. “Do hurry up with the curtains. I want them drawn as soon as possible!”
* * *
Determined to be a good neighbour and perhaps lessen the hostility Sian was already creating, Basil offered to clear and dig their garden. In unison, Sian said no, and Islwyn said yes. In his present mood of forgiveness, he was even willing to allow Basil to speak to him. But Sian’s voice was the louder and she repeated her refusal of the offer firmly.
“Heaven’s above, Islwyn, they’ll be asking us to mind that baby as soon as we’re unpacked! These people don’t do anything for nothing you know!”
* * *
Megan and Terry had been out together several times and Gladys was pleased. He seemed such a mannerly young man, and with jewellery as his profession he must be used to the best. He was the type to make sure his wife received nothing but the best too. Such a touch of luck meeting poor old Mr Jenkins with his need for a bib, and then finding out that his grandson was a friend of dear Jack.
Gladys was putting the finishing touches to an orange cake. Made with farm butter Arfon had bought illegally from a customer, and decorated with shredded orange peel, it looked very festive.
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