A Small Country

by Siân James

  ‘I’ll send you some tea, Lieutenant. Nurse Evans may stay with you for half an hour. It was good of you to travel from London to see her.’

  She returned to her office.

  Catrin knocked at the door of the matron’s sitting-room and went in. Told that there was a young officer waiting to see her, she had thought it would be Tom, home on leave because of their mother’s death. When she saw Edward in the room, she stopped abruptly, raising her hands to her throat.

  ‘Dear Catrin,’ Edward said. ‘Is it such a terrible shock?’

  He led her to a fireside chair and sat down opposite her. He felt light-headed with pain and joy; it was only the entrance of a maid bringing a tray of tea that kept him from breaking down completely, from crying at her feet that he loved her.

  The maid poured out the tea and left them.

  ‘I had to see you,’ Edward said. ‘Please say something. Say something, Catrin. Please.’

  For an instant, he had been disappointed at her appearance; she seemed less radiant than his mental image of her. Her face was paler than ever, she looked older and thinner. Within seconds, though, he knew that her essential beauty was unimpaired, was, perhaps, even more formidable; her cheek bones finer, her lovely green eyes more expressive, more tenderly luminous, in her dear, wan face.

  ‘I heard about your mother’s death. I was so sorry. Tom asked me to write to you but I decided to try to see you instead.’

  Catrin nodded her head gravely, and when at last she spoke, her clear, young voice gripped his heart as much as her appearance.

  ‘Tom shouldn’t have troubled you. You must be very busy, very tired. You look tired.’

  ‘I had to see you again, that’s the truth of the matter, I mustn’t pretend otherwise. Oh, don’t be angry. I had to see you again. I felt I had to tell you what happened when I left Hendre Ddu last June.’

  ‘You needn’t tell me. Please. You mustn’t feel you owe me an explanation. I can understand how it must have been for you.’

  ‘Rose was under arrest and frightened.’

  Edward told his story very simply. As he spoke, his eyes never left hers.

  ‘So, you see, it was impossible to do what I intended. I had truly intended to tell Rose, and my parents and hers, about you. But it was impossible to do anything except what I did.

  They sat staring at each other.

  ‘Do you understand, Catrin, what I’m trying to say? Catrin, you must tell me that you understand. I had to see you to tell you that I meant every word I said when I left you at Llanfair, though I can never say those words again. Will you believe me, Catrin?’

  ‘I’ll try. Oh, I’d like to try.’ Catrin’s voice was hardly audible.

  ‘Tell me you believe me, Catrin. Tell me you believe what I can’t say. Please tell me you believe me and it will always comfort me. Wherever I go, whatever happens, I’ll remember that you understood.’

  ‘Yes, I believe you, Edward. I do understand. Thank you for coming to tell me. I’m glad you did. I’ll always be glad you did.’

  ‘Now I must go, I suppose. I’ve seen you again, heard your voice. My dear girl. Remember what was between us for one half-hour. That can never pass away. I must go. Oh, I must go now.’

  Edward got to his feet. He held out his hand, but withdrew it without touching hers.

  ‘You can’t leave me,’ Catrin said, her voice trembling.

  He turned and took her into his arms and for what remained of the short half-hour, they clung together.

  TWENTY

  After their brief meeting in November, Catrin and Edward started writing to each other; their letters, though, containing no references to their bewildering love.

  Catrin wrote about her work in the wards, her desire to excel in the first year examinations, about her colleagues and patients, about her occasional week-ends at home, her delight in her little half-sister. She wrote every night, however tired she was; the letters she actually sent him being only short, carefully chosen extracts from her long outpourings. Through that hard, lonely winter after her mother’s death, writing to Edward seemed the most real part of her life.

  Edward, in his letters, reminisced about his life at Oxford with Tom, and about his summer days at Hendre Ddu, every moment of which seemed engraved on his memory. From time to time he included a fleeting mention of the war; of the first German air raid which had occurred just before Christmas and which had plunged London into darkness; once or twice a hint that France loomed ahead of him.

  Edward was sent to the front line within a week or two of his arrival in France in March 1915.

  After a few weeks of living in a trench, the monotonous food, the scarcity of water, the lack of privacy, the almost continual noise of rifle and shells, no one talked or thought of patriotism or glory. Such abstract ideas seemed absurd, part of another existence, real life shrank to a fight for survival, silent endurance became every man’s aim.

  Edward didn’t mention, in his letters to Catrin, the terrible sights he was witnessing almost daily; dead colleagues who were almost unrecognizable, wounded men even more pitiable because still alive.

  He wrote to her about the larks they could hear singing, still singing, over the dull roar of the heavy guns, about the clusters of bluebells that could be found here and there even on the walls of the trenches, about the books he was reading, paragraph by paragraph, the poetry he was trying to write. He told her his closest thoughts, ‘Life can’t be so frail that it can be quenched by a stray bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Surely it can’t. There must be something more. It has taken a war to make me recognize the eternal in life, the river that flows through us all, so that there is no real end.’

  She knew his letters by heart. They were like a cloak around her. She had no idea whether she would ever see him again, she had no premonition either of his death or his safety; it seemed enough that she was able to write to him and receive his letters. Sometimes there would be an interval of several weeks between them, but then she would receive two or three together and she would keep them unopened all day in the inside pocket of her apron, waiting for the time when she could be alone to read them. On those days nothing was too much trouble for her.

  She also heard from Tom. Tom seemed to be pre-occupied with the past and the future, hardly mentioning the present.

  Do you remember how we got up at four o’clock in the morning to have a last look at the kite’s nest before I went back to school? What year was that? How old were we then? I have a vivid picture of you racing along trying to keep up with me, your hair unplaited and blowing all about your face. Father used to say it was like the mane of a mountain pony, do you remember? Do you remember the day I caught a fourteen-pound salmon in Pwll-y-Graig? What a day that was. When you next go home, will you ride over to Garth to see how the saplings are doing? Tell Glyn to clear the undergrowth if they seem choked. How strange that no one of our family is left in Hendre Ddu now, unless we count the baby. We must count the baby, I suppose. On the whole, I’m quite glad to think of her there with Nano and Lowri. I hope to meet your pretty friend Gwenllian when I come home, I’m sorry she doesn’t feel she can write to me, but I appreciate her sentiments. The war creates enough difficulties without adding to them by forcing relationships which should be slowly and carefully nurtured. I intend to see her, though, when I come home.

  You see, I intend to come home. And when I do, I shall be like old Prosser, never venturing beyond Erw Fach Bridge. I think a man is essentially the product of the area that begets him. I seem to have forgotten Shrewsbury and Oxford. It’s men like old Abiah Prosser and Father I think about, women like Nano. And Mother, too, of course. I had hardly thought of myself as Welsh before – except at the International Rugby matches – had never thought of myself as different from my friends at school, and university. Now, I think of myself as the product of a different society, not better, not worse, but completely different, with a completely different history. Our grandparents, all four of them, spoke only
Welsh, had never been out of Wales. How well worth preserving these differences seem to be. When I think of the civilization we’re fighting for, I can only think about the patch I know best. I like to think of its radical tradition, its passion for learning; all the craftsmen and labourers who tried to make an academy out of the village chapel. I’m sure the sterner religious element was negative and cramping in many ways, that’s why I stress that the society was different, not necessarily better, all the same, something about it was fine and worth preserving. And yet I am here with Welsh chaps whose families in one or two generations in industrial South Wales have completely lost their language and presumably with their language their consciousness of being different, their own special way of life. It seemed so strange that in this place, with all hell’s forces of destruction let loose about me, I should be concerned with things like the language and culture of our unimportant small country: I suppose we must all fix on something to keep us sane.

  Do you remember that Russian play we went to see on our last holiday together? Chekov, wasn’t it? All the characters in it were longing for Moscow, just as you afterwards longed for London, London, London. I suppose it’s some state of grace we really want, some Nirvana. I know I long for Carmarthenshire, for Hendre Ddu. All I want is to stand and watch the green film on the ploughed acres which a few weeks before seemed as hard and dead as cement. And then the ripening wheat. My Nirvana, I suppose.

  In May, Catrin tried and passed her first year examinations. Through the early summer she remained fairly optimistic, happy that time was passing. She was sure the war couldn’t last much longer. Life went on, mornings creeping into afternoons, afternoons sinking into night.

  In August she had a fortnight’s holiday in Hendre Ddu, and when Doctor Andrews proposed to her again she promised to marry him in two years’ time, after she had completed her training. She felt she would make a good doctor’s wife. Besides, she liked him. Besides, no girl wanted to be alone all her life. She received his diamond ring, and before the end of the holiday went with Miss Rees to have tea at his house. He seemed a reassuring presence. As for Doctor Andrews, he was delighted that she seemed far less emotional, far more mature, than during the previous summer. She has, after all, a great deal of her mother about her, he thought. He was by this time convinced of her suitability as a wife. He was also in love with her.

  He knew nothing of the letter she had received at the beginning of July, just after Edward’s death in action. Edward’s wife, Rose, had forwarded the unposted letter to her after receiving it among her husband’s personal effects.

  My dear girl,

  I have found an inch of candle and a quiet corner so that I can write to you again. As always, you are in my mind.

  There is to be an offensive tomorrow. Somehow, I don’t feel frightened once it has begun. Beforehand, though, I feel the need of wine and music – Captain Fielding has a gramophone and some Bach records – and more than either, and more than sleep, and more than prayer, I need this communication with you. The greatest blessing in my life is to have loved you. This morning early I wrote to Rose. She will understand, I know. All the confusion falls away. My candle is flickering, but I don’t need a light. You fill the emptiness around me.

  ‘My dear Catrin,’ Rose had written in a covering letter, ‘Edward was killed in action on the 22nd of June. He was my dear and loving friend. We must both try to be brave.’

  Her room mate had told the sister of their ward that Catrin had received bad news about a friend at the Front, and she was excused duties and allowed to stay in her room. For two whole days she did nothing but look at Edward’s letter and hold it to her cheek. On the third day, she bathed her eyes, burned the letter and returned to her duties. In old age she would still remember Edward, golden and perfect, as the love of her life. She knew that. The letter, like all his letters, was a part of her.

  ‘Yes, he’s a good, honourable man,’ Nano told Catrin when they came home from visiting Doctor Andrews. ‘Your poor mother would be very pleased about your engagement to him, I know that. He was as kind as an angel to your poor mother. Mr Tom’s friend, now, Mr Turncliffe, yes, he was a flower among men, he was indeed, but Doctor Andrews is respected and kind and he leads a lonely life, you can tell that, and your poor mother thought the world of him. No, no, there’s no need to cry. A good, hard-working doctor and a lovely house too.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  All through the winter Josi stayed in Cefn Hebog alone. Miss Rees sent young Dan up every week with a sack of food for him, but each time the boy had to leave it outside the locked door of the little farm house. For over four months Josi saw no one.

  Days and nights passed by, leaving no mark. He walked and worked, usually in snow, during the short days, collecting sticks and chopping wood, and sat at a fire during the long nights without even a dog for company. For weeks he didn’t sleep except in snatches at the fireside. His sweat dried on his body. He worked and sweated again. He never washed.

  He had no bed; no furniture except for a few broken odds and ends the previous tenants had left behind. After his wife’s funeral, his need to escape had been so urgent that he had taken nothing with him but a couple of blankets. Miss Rees sent him clean clothing from time to time, and soap and candles, but except for bare essentials he left everything untouched. He ate bread and cheese, made porridge, until his saucepan burned through, drank spring water.

  He derived a certain satisfaction from the idea of being an outcast; he needed to feel that he was being punished, ostracized from society. If he thought at all, he imagined that he would spend the rest of his life there, alone. But he tried not to think. Collecting enough firewood on that isolated snow-bound moorland was an arduous task that filled his mind. The snow and the wind filled his mind.

  Then, in the second week of March, some spring force, an insistent bird or some green growth, jolted him out of the death-wish of his existence and he began to think again of Hendre-Ddu which he had left to Jâms and Davy Prosser, and of his family. He washed himself and shaved, burned his old clothes and found new, swept out of his kitchen the accumulated debris of months, and decided to return to the work he knew and the familiar faces. In the space of a morning he had realized that his self-imposed exile was nothing but an indulgence; that he had to live, thinking and working, through his guilt and grief.

  When he returned to Hendre Ddu that afternoon, ready to take over the management of the farm, though still determined never to live there again, he found Mari-Elen at ten months old already a little girl, tottering about and looking up at him with Miriam’s clear, unshifting gaze. She had gone to him at once as though aware of the relationship between them, and had clung to him when he had got ready to leave that evening. After that, the one necessity of his life was to find a way to have her with him.

  Even on that first day, he realized that he would have to marry Lowri. She was the one he had – almost sub-consciously – chosen to look after his daughter: it followed that she must be his choice as a wife. A little girl needed a woman to care for her and a poor man couldn’t afford a housekeeper or even a nursemaid. It had to be Lowri, if she’d have him.

  Cefn Hebog had to be renovated; the roof repaired, window panes replaced, papered inside and white-washed out, before anyone could decently live there, and Josi set himself to the task. He worked at Hendre Ddu every morning – he had slipped back with the greatest ease to his old routine – then spent his afternoons at his own small-holding.

  In May, when the weather was warm, he had Lowri bring Mari-Elen up there on the pony so that while he worked he could watch her staggering about the yard or sleeping on the grass in the little walled garden.

  He cleaned out the pond and brought up some ducks and ducklings. After putting the cow shed in order he went to Llanfryn mart and bought two cows and a white heifer.

  Mari-Elen seemed to love being with him, mistress of all. The open moorland was beautiful in late spring and summer; larks sang without ceasing and
the tiny streams were clear and cold.

  He tried not to think how idyllic it could have been. Perhaps it could never have been idyllic. Perhaps Rachel’s illness and death had affected him more deeply than anyone, except Miriam, had understood. He tried to live in the present, tried not to think of how it might have been.

  It was late September when he asked Lowri to marry him; the cottage was ready, the garden dug and planted. ‘Let me know your answer tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can go home to talk it over with your parents tonight.’

  He wished he could make his proposal sound less like a business transaction, but he realized that to kiss her or touch her in any way would be to overwhelm her entirely. Many times he had tried to hint at what was in his mind, but it had obviously been useless; she could not have been more surprised if he had told her that he intended marrying Miss Rees.

  ‘How old are you?’ he had asked her.

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s someone else you’d rather marry? You can tell me, you know. I won’t be offended. Jâms perhaps?’

  ‘No. Oh, no.’

  ‘You’re very fond of Mari-Elen and she thinks the world of you. Being married won’t be too bad. You don’t hate me, I know that.’

  But Lowri looked so miserably embarrassed that he was tempted to let her off the hook, to tell her he could easily find someone else, someone a bit older, perhaps.

  ‘Think about it, anyway,’ he said at last. ‘Let me know tomorrow. I’m much too old for you, I know, and I may have done some things that you and your parents don’t much like, but on the other hand....’