by Tom Bullough
“BIRMINGHAM offers well-paid factory work to single women age 21–35; lodgings found, fare paid.”
“NURSES needed at BOTLEYS PARK COLONY to nurse and train men, women and children with undeveloped minds. It’s a grand job and a grand life.”
“Rhyscog. Rev. A. W. Chant, Builth Wells, was the officiating minister at the Methodist Church on Sunday. Mrs. E. Hamer presided at the organ and Mr. I. Hamer was precentor.”
—
FROM THE FAR Top Field, Oliver could see all the way back down into the yard, where the few ewes that Albert and the boss had freed the previous day were huddled round the door of the barn. He could see the trail of manure they had finally used to tempt the cattle down the canyon to the pond, the snow-weighted sycamores circling the graveyard, even the heads of one or two stones, but the Bottom Field, the Banky Piece, the track and the Cae Blaidd, all of these were lost beneath one mighty drift, while Turley Wood was reduced to a few black branches, which scrabbled into the eerie still—their shadows tangled with the prints of rabbits.
There was smoke in a pillar above the kitchen chimney, luminous against the great, dark flank of Llanbedr Hill: the fire stoked by Molly, who never came to chapel, who held instead to the church down in Erwood—at least, when she was able to go.
“Looks like the sea, boss, you reckons?” said Albert.
“Has you seen the sea, Albert?” asked Oliver.
“Have you seen the sea,” Etty corrected him.
“I seen the Channel, boy.”
“What’s the Channel?”
“That’s what keeps us from the Froggies.” He rolled his chaw of tobacco in his mouth. “Frenchies, look.”
“Is they green?”
“Head to toe, boy.”
“Urggh!”
Idris said nothing. Limping along the drift that concealed the boundary fence, he stopped at a point that he judged to be the gate and started to climb towards the common, trying to keep the worst of the snow off his suit. This high up, there was still a little movement in the air. It idled over the colourless hills, silent, as if surveying its destruction, and as Oliver followed his deep-sunk prints it must have carried the same, sharp scent of life that it had found in the Bottom Field the previous morning, since the dogs at his heels began to whimper and shake.
“Boss?” said Oliver.
“I seen the dogs, boy.”
“Is it wethers, is it?”
“Wethers for Llanowen, I expect.” Idris checked the watch in his high-neck waistcoat. “You come along now.”
Oliver remained on the top of the drift where Towser and Nip were throwing up snow in clouds. “He binna so deep, boss,” he said, tentatively. “We could have them from there, easy.”
“What day is it today, boy?”
“The Sabbath day, boss.”
“The Sabbath day.”
“But, boss, we always fodders the creatures of a Sunday. We fodders the ewes, and we milks the beast—”
“Oliver!” hissed Etty.
Idris coloured behind his stubble. “By Gar, boy,” he said, “you’s burning in your shins today!”
Away up the slope was a farm named the Welfrey: a high, hard place alone in the common, where John the Welfrey and Sarah, his wife, were toiling out to meet them on the track. Two dark figures in the glare of the hillside; one raised a hand when Oliver spotted them—in their layers of coats and scarves it was tricky to tell which of them it was, although he recognized Sarah’s voice when she called him her two-note greeting. The snow had erased all trace of the Welfrey fields, flooded Pentre Wood and swept over the ridge of their barn, but still in their yard there were sheep by the score; they might have recovered their entire flock. Oliver heard Idris summon him again. He saw his eyes beneath his low-brimmed hat, but in his mind he saw only the ewes in the Oak Piece and the Bottom Field, the wethers in the quarries or pressed against the wall of the Panneys—shivering, imprisoned—and he had made no decision and he had no plan when he turned abruptly, ducked past his mother and set out back as they had come.
—
THERE WAS LITTLE to be told between Oliver and the dogs, which, like him, were not exactly grown-ups and not exactly animals. They would all of them flinch at Idris’s glance, work or vanish, attend on his whims without a thought—and yet, within the lines and limits of the boss’s rule, they were a band and Oliver was their leader. As he lugged himself back over the gate from the Plock and hurried past the daggy Radnors crowded in the yard, bald in places where, after only a day beneath the snow, they had started to nibble on one another’s wool, he had no need to check that Blackie, Nip and Towser were behind him—bounding through the tracks of the cattle, eager to know what wonders lay next.
“Oliver!”
There were tits and piefinches pecking at crumbs on the trampled path to the house. There were footprints leading from the top of the yard: shadows past the end of the beast-house.
“Oliver!”
Oliver slowed down only at the lychgate, where the prints continued through a crested drift and the rooks, still hunched in the sycamores above him, had dislodged snow into the crystalline whiteness. There was a single snowdrop in the shelter of the wall. Panting, struggling, he climbed into the abandoned churchyard, and since his grandmother had followed the path herself he wound up the tump into the ring of the yew trees, heading for the smothered little cell of the church, whose bell hung exposed against the empty sky.
“Oh!” said Molly. “Oh, you gave me a start!”
“Nana…” He was breathing so hard that he could scarcely speak.
“What is it, love? What on earth’s happened?”
She was sitting in her usual pew at the front, the smoke from her cigarette twining in the light from the door. She flinched when he tripped on a frozen pile of bat droppings, hidden by the snow that had fallen through the roof, and when he reached the end of the aisle she opened her blanket and gathered him under her arm.
“It’s not them blasted ewes again, is it?”
“Nana, can you help me, can you?”
“Olly…Olly, I wish I could, love.”
“Please!”
“Look at me, boy!” She held up her hands. “I can dig the garden, given a good day, but…You heard Idris. Ten foot down or more, he reckons, the most of them, and we don’t so much as know where they are—”
“The dogs’ll mark them.”
“I know—”
“I can mark them too, Nana. I can! With the both of us, and Blackie, and Nip, and Towser…”
As the door grated open, the light grew again over the backs of the pews, which were as old and worn as the chairs in the house, over the pulpit keeling above them, the altar under its blanked-out window and the memorials on the dull white walls. Oliver’s mother must have fallen on the way down the hill. Snow was clinging to her coat and her best black dress. Behind her the dogs were standing in the porch, turned now at nervous, unrelated angles, and when he lifted his eyes to her face Oliver felt a coldness enter the hot, clear purpose in his belly.
“Come by here, girl,” his grandmother murmured.
Etty closed the door and again the church was dark. She stopped in the aisle a few rows back, and for a moment it seemed that she was praying, since Oliver waited for tears or fury and heard no more than the gasps of her breath.
“He should never have dragged you to the chapel today. Not on foot. Not in your condition. It were crazy to try…”
“You don’t want to see him,” said Etty at last.
“I don’t suppose I do.”
“Oliver…”
Oliver shrank inside the blanket.
“I know it’s none of my affair, Etty,” said Molly. “I know that. You must do what you think right. But you just remember, you’re his wife, not some blasted slave—and I know what I’m talking about. I had it for years. If it was up to me, well, it’s not up to me. I’m not saying what to think, like, but this is your farm too. You remember that.”
&nb
sp; —
THE SHEEP WATCHED impassively as Etty sat the blanket and the saddle on the cob, shortened the stirrups and fastened the girth. They bunched together when she returned from the barn with two fat, wire-bound bundles of hay, but they had no strength to scatter or run, and despite the dogs, which waited with Molly as she packed the bait into the baskets and helped her grandson onto Reuben’s back, there was little more to reveal their disquiet than their jingling icicles, their flickering ears, the quickening spurts of their breath.
If Oliver felt his purpose return when his grandmother dragged the top gate open, then Etty felt as if she had torn off her clothes and stood naked before a goggling multitude, as if she had taken a step onto air instead of earth and found that it would hold her weight. As they passed between the old churchyard and the prill beneath Pentre Wood, she looked past her son’s blue woollen hat and the nodding head of the small bay horse, and with every step he broke through the smooth-backed snow she seemed to see again the catkins of the hazels and the long, bowing boughs of the sycamores, where a squirrel was darting—red as her hair.
She almost wanted to cover her eyes.
“Are you cold, Mam?” asked Oliver, looking back.
Etty realized she was trembling. She smiled, tightening her arms on his waist. “Oh…No. No, Olly, I’m fine.”
In the dingle that closed around the climbing track, she slipped from the saddle, held out her arms and took the weight of her oversized boy. With the last of the fields invisible behind them, no trace of a tree, a path or a fence, she could tell only from a flatter passage in the snow that they were on the bank of Conjuror’s Pool, by the hidden gully of the shrinking prill. Stroking Reuben’s steam-blowing nostrils, she took the reins and waded until she had to crawl. Behind her, the horse sank almost to his shoulders. He reared and snorted, snow rolling from his chest, the poles and the shovels clattering on his hips, but she spoke to him softly and again he plunged forwards, and then he was clambering onto the slope—shaking like the dogs, which were scrambling around them.
It was only on the hills and in the shelter of the Bryngwyn track that the snow had seemed to be in any way navigable. The valley beneath them was like some vast snow river: a full half-mile of razor-headed waves and tapering shadows, its occasional trees like pieces of flotsam. Even if they had found a way among the drifts, still they could never have taken the cob, and they could have dug all day in those lightless depths before they found a single sheep. Here, on Llanbedr Hill, the drifts were like hills themselves, but they were divided by spaces blown almost clean in which there were shallow, sporadic quarries—some of them cut to build the Island, the cottage for Dick the gamekeeper and Dilys, his sister, whose smoke spread faintly from a cluster of larches. Other quarries were so ancient that not even Idris seemed to know their purpose. As his mother tied the cob to the little wittan tree at the corner of the New Field, filled the feedbag and drew another blanket over the horse’s buttocks, Oliver set out straight across the unseen lane, shielding his eyes against the ice-bright sun. He knew precisely where the wethers would be, even without the help of the dogs. True, they rarely strayed far from their own patch of common, but still he could picture them, trying to escape the two-day storm, retreating through the wind-scourged fern—like a memory of his own.
At the first pale shadow, the hint of a hollow, he tipped up the pole as his grandmother had shown him and sank it hand over hand. He took two steps and tried again, and again, the six-foot length barely reaching the ground, but beside him Blackie was whimpering softly, and when he tried once more the head of the pole stopped level with his waist.
“Mam!” he called.
His coat made it hard for him to bend his arms. The spade was almost as tall as himself. Mostly he watched as his mother dug, as the hole grew beneath them and the snow begin to shudder and fragment—become a curling horn, the top of a head, a pair of thick-set, vigorous shoulders. She dropped to her knees, seized hold of the fleece and tugged until she was groaning. She tumbled backwards as the wether burst free: a seeming miracle matted with snow, falling, struggling back to his feet—turning light-blinded from the transformed hilltop to the wall of the mountains, which rose to the south like a drift on a new scale again.
“One,” counted Oliver. “Two!”
“I said to you they were tough,” said Etty. Her cheeks were pink under ginger freckles. “Tough old boys! Policemen of the hills!”
“Three!”
In turn the sheep wallowed out of the hole, each allowing the next to escape, and by the time that the snow was still, thirteen of the animals were gathered before them, between the crouching, spring-wound dogs. They stood with their tails to a fresh, faint wind, which whispered in the hawthorns and carried snowflakes twinkling around them, scratting hopelessly for grass with their hooves in spite of a bundle of hay. Picking up his pole, Oliver laughed excitedly and set out in search of another quarry. Sunk to his knees, swollen by his coat and scarf, he looked shorter, plumper, more purposeful than ever. Etty smiled, then turned at a sound to look through the larches—one of them prone with fumbling roots, two more fallen into their neighbours to lean among the cone-spotted branches where a raven croaked and scattered twigs as he launched from his listing nest.
“Hi!” The call came again.
The Island could never have been much of a farm. A five-room hovel of local stone with a few, mean fields mined out of the common, most such places had long since been left to go down. Struggling through the spinney, lifting each foot almost to her waist, Etty crossed the tracks of a hare—the splaying hind feet dwarfing the fore. She slithered down a bank and came to the foxes and weasels on the gamekeeper’s wire, which should have led from the trees to the door of the cottage. But of that, like the fences, the barn, the sheep and the couple of cows, she was able to see nothing at all.
“Dick?” she called. “Dick? Dilys?”
“Ethel! Ethel, is that you, girl?”
“Mam!” shouted Oliver, out beyond the wethers.
“Olly, get yourself here, would you?”
“But I marked another one!”
“We’ll rise him in a minute. Can you bring me a shovel?”
Etty walked a complete circle of the snowdrift, which started gradually by the lip of the hill and tailed into a cliff some fifty yards distant with a brink like a breaking wave. Had it not been for the smoke, you might never have suspected that there was anything inside at all. She tried to climb the slopes at the north and east, but the snow was loose, as fine as flour, and it sank and cascaded from her boots.
Oliver stood with the dogs among the trees, holding a blotchy, blue-green egg in the cup of his thick woollen glove. Her shovel lay in the snow beside him. He looked up at the raven’s nest, down at the wire of ice-caked animals.
“Where’s the Island, Mam?”
“Think you’d get up there, do you, Olly?” Etty asked. “You’re a handy little climber.”
“I am not little!”
She joined her hands to hold his boot and propel him upwards, floundered after him and tried again until at length he crawled onto the back of the drift, moving slowly towards the tail of smoke now snatched and scattering to the west. Oliver slipped the egg into one of his gloves, his fingers braced to keep it safe. It was warm, that was the main thing; it must have fallen from the nest only moments before he arrived. This weather, so Albert had told him, was all the crueller for coming on a few days that might have been spring. He felt the wind on his neck and turned to the slope beyond the vanished barn, to Bryngwyn Hill, to hills whose names he did not know and the distant plain where clouds were ballooning, blazing white. He glanced at his mother, who had already started digging, then lay and peered into a black-fringed hole and beneath him, in the turbulent smoke, saw a pocket of fire, movement in the darkness, the gleam of eyes in a soot-coloured face.
“Dick?” he said. “Is that you, is it?”
“Young Oliver! Is we ever glad to see you, boy!”
/> —
DILYS SAT IN her blanket on the hob, beneath the boy in the square of sky. Snow was falling wet on her face. In the night she had been here, listening to the long, despairing cries of the owls, watching the darkness stretch and tear, the sparks from the fire shrink and mingle with the stars. In the storm she had been here, while her brother smashed another chair for its wood and paced the flagstones, cussing and moithering, and the wind in the chimney made its godless scream.
“We found the coal!” Ethel shouted, on the path outside.
“Good on you, girl!” Dick shouted back, and threw himself again against the door.
The blue became grey. The boy was gone, but the snow kept falling.
He had never once looked at her, Idris—not at school, not even that time when he returned to the Funnon with his hair army-short and the hope extinguished in his face. But then, her hair had been dark and skeiny, and soon flecked with grey, and her breasts had always been hopeless gestures on her chest. Even at twenty she could not have held a candle to that flighty piece, Ethel, with her hair like fire and her morals round her ankles. Dilys had heard the clecking at market. She had done her sums. The girl had arrived at the end of July, which was not six months before her gypsy-looking baby came along. Well, Dick could shrug about it all if he liked—he could burn the last banisters to boil the kettle and welcome these people into their cottage—but she at least had a morsel of pride. She sat in her place by the snow-spitting fire, in the airless, dog-stinking cave of the kitchen, and did not utter a single word.