by Anwyn Moyle
Charlotte asked me to go live in America too, but I don’t want to.
I’d rather stay here.
During the 1980s, when I was well into my sixties, I read a piece in one of the upmarket magazines I always kept in the launderettes to remind me of my days as a hat-shop girl and the inspiration and education those 1930s fashion magazines gave to me when I was so young and impressionable. Anyway, it was an article about the Earl and how he’d passed away at the good old age of eighty-nine. He died childless, even though he was married for a number of years to a woman who’d died tragically thirty years earlier. The Earl had been heartbroken and never remarried and now there was no heir to the title and it would expire. The woman fell from the top of the family home in Wiltshire. Nobody knew what she was doing up there and there were rumours back then of suicide. But the coroner returned a verdict of death by misadventure, due to the state of disrepair of the balustrade where she was accustomed to walking. She’d had several names during her short life – Miranda Brandon and Miranda Bouchard and Miranda Fitzroy when she married the Earl.
But never Miranda Harding.
I felt so very sad.
I kept going in the launderette business until I retired in 1990, then I sold the shops and moved out of London to Hertfordshire. The people who bought them turned them into coffee shops, I think – so they’re not there any more. I bought a nice house with a garden and that’s what I do, a bit of gardening. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to see me sometimes when they’re over on holiday from Australia and America and I enjoy having them. I read a lot because I always loved books.
And now I’ve written one of my own.
I hope you like it.
END
Endnotes
1. English trans: bustle, or toil
2. Lit. trans: ‘Earl’s Land’ and traditional name of an area of Glamorgan, which had a long-held resonance in Welsh culture
3. Lit. trans: ‘The Fair Men’. Teachings evolved from an oral Faerie Tradition
4. Spiritual path of the ‘cunning ones’ of Wales
5. monsters that live in lakes and marshes
6. ghosts, spirits or night-wanderers
7. the water-leaper
8. hell
9. Traditional Welsh mummers’ song called a ‘punco’ (“challenge song’)
10. Welsh festival of literature, music and performance
11. Gnome-like creatures said to haunt the mines and quarries of Wales
12. Part of the classic Welsh landscape arising from hill farming
13. Lit. trans: ‘dragons’
14. Lady of the Lake
15. Guinevere
16. eleventh century knight
17. How are you?
18. I am well.
19. body-washer
20. In English, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’
21. ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’
Anwyn Moyle died on 1 May 2013. She was ninety-four.
1 May is the pagan feast day of Belthane – when the Lord has reunited with his Lady and joins with her to beget the new Sun.
On the fragrant plain
On the mountain slopes
From sea to sea
And every river mouth
I am there
In the Circle