How Green Was My Valley

by Richard Llewellyn

  My mother made no sound nor did she move, but I was too senseless to be afraid.

  How long it was I cannot tell, but there was a weariness of time before I saw a light, a yellow lantern light swinging near me in the paining dark. I tried to shout but my voice was gone from my throat. Madness was in me to shout, to have that light nearer, to have my mother taken back to the house.

  So my voice came, but the voice was not mine, for there is no voice that will make the sound I made. All the fury of living kind, fighting against useless pain, was in the cry that brought the lantern to us.

  It was Davy, but I had only enough in my eyes to see his cold, blue face, lit with yellow light, and his eyes glistening big and staring, and his hand about the lantern to shield it. I remember falling among the ice when I felt him take my mother from me.

  “Huw, Huw,” I heard him crying. “O, Huw.”

  Chapter Seven

  I WOKE UP in the bed downstairs in the kitchen, and saw the lamplight shining red on the wooden panels. There is funny to wake up and not know yourself to be You.

  Although you are like yourself as you are ordinarily, still there is something missing, and you ask yourself where you are, and who you are, and why. There is a lot missing in your life when you have no notion who you are. You have only a picture in front of your eyes and nothing but emptiness behind them, not even the comfort of knowing your name. Indeed, it is that which makes you so afraid and you will start to shout to keep yourself company. Man is a coward in space, for he is by himself, and if you feel you are alone, with not even yourself, that is fright for you. I wonder where the real You goes to when you are strange like that.

  I started to shout.

  But I had nothing to shout with, and that made it worse. Try as I would, nothing would come.

  You have never been frightened if you have never lost yourself and your voice.

  That is real fright, and awful, too.

  For there you are in pure space, hearing, thinking, and seeing, but speechless and without knowledge, and you begin to cry and tears blind you, and you are frantic to wipe them away to be able to see, but still they come and you are lost in a fog of shining wet.

  Then I heard Bronwen singing, quietly, just near to me.

  Lightning quick I found myself, and blood rushed warm all over me and brought on such pain that I tried to twist. I was held tight in bandage. My face, arms, all my body and legs, all of me was a sausage of soft slippery bandage.

  The smell of goose grease was sweet and fat about me, and I knew then why the bandage was slippery. I was bound up in goose grease to cure cold.

  The memory of holding my mother came back to me, and now I found time to be afraid. I tried to look at Bronwen, but I could not move my head, and it was hurting all over. But Bronwen must have seen me strain to move and speak, for she left her chair quickly as though she had jumped.

  She did smell always of thyme and lavender because she made little bags of it for the sheets, and I suppose she put a couple in with her own wash. So that smell was always with her, and lovelier than that you will never have.

  She knelt by me, whispering, but I could not hear for the bandage. She wiped my eyes for me, and rose up to look down at me.

  Beautiful, beautiful, was Bronwen, indeed.

  “Huw,” she said, as though she ought not to be speaking, “are you hurting with you?”

  I made to nod, and her teeth went fast in her lip.

  “O, Huw,” she said, smiling so kind and crying soft, “little Huw, there is proud I am to have your name. Proud, indeed.”

  She bent to kiss me, quickly and so lightly, it was the touch of a warm moth, and ran then to call my father, who was upstairs here, sitting with my mother.

  Dr. Richards came in first to make a fuss over me and feel my pulse and look at his watch with his eyebrows up, and then my father came to stand by his shoulder and look down at me, with his hands in his jacket pockets.

  “He will do,” Dr. Richards said. “But it is beyond me to say why, indeed. You are breeding horses in this family, Mr. Morgan. This boy should be in his coffin, for my part.”

  “Thank God he is not,” my father said to him. He looked again at me and smiled. “Your mother is doing very well, my son, and so is your new sister. Thanks to you, of course. Your old father is very proud of you, Huw.”

  He bent down to kiss me and left the smell of him near me, of his pipe and himself. My silence seemed to make him afraid for me, but Dr. Richards pushed him out of the room and told him I was sleepy.

  “Mrs. Ivor,” Dr. Richards said to Bronwen when my father had gone, “let us undo the bandage now and see what has gone with him. I am afraid of a fracture.”

  Well, that is the last I remember, for as soon as Dr. Richards pulled back the clothes and put his hand on my leg, I had such a flash of hurt that I suppose I dropped off.

  Strange it is to think back like this and be a small boy again, and talk to people who have been gone these years.

  I had fever in the bones of my legs for nearly five years after that. Five years of lying in the wall bed, and not able to get up, or go out, or move at all.

  I have had plenty of time to think.

  For months, at first, I was not quite balanced because of pain. Then it got better, and at last I was having no pain at all. But still I was not allowed to get up because of the fracture, which kept on having to be broken and set.

  While I was only just living I took no notice of what went on, and indeed I remembered nothing very much about it.

  I only know that it was Bronwen who nursed me night and day, until she had her baby, a little boy.

  They called him Gareth.

  The boys were often in to see me. They all had their meals in the parlour during the time I was bad, and sometimes in the evening they were allowed in for a minute, though I still could not speak to them because of a broken jaw.

  But they were very kind to me, later on, and Davy and Owen took turns to read books, but they had to stop reading Mr. Boswell’s Life of Johnson because it made me laugh, and laughing hurt too much.

  There is a man was Dr. Johnson. Indeed I do wish we had a few of his kind living to-day. Mind, I have heard him called an old busybody and other things, too. But I have always noticed that those who said such things were the very ones whom Dr. Johnson would have had under the table with a look, never mind a word. I owe a big debt to Mr. Boswell, indeed. How happy he must have been to write about so great a man.

  It was during that time that I found out about books. We had not many in the house, but what there were, were good, although a bit solid for me, mind. But my father, and Davy, and Ivor when he had time, were all at pains to explain when hard words came up, and so by easy stages I grew with them.

  But we were in agonies there with Mr. Stuart Mill’s System of Logic. It was so hard that we laughed no end at ourselves. But we got through to the end and all the better for it. There is another man with a head.

  The Bible, of course, my father and Owen read before going to bed, and I knew it in the end as well as Owen.

  It was then that I had thoughts about Christ, and I have never changed my mind. He did appear to me then as a man, and as a man I still think of him. In that way, I have had comfort. If he had been a God, or any more a son of God than any of us, then it is unfair to ask us to do what he did. But if he was a man who found out for himself what there is that is hidden in life, then we all have a chance to do the same. And with the help of God, we shall.

  Indeed, I am going from this house to-night to try and find out what is the matter with me and the people I know, because there is something radically wrong with us all, to be sure.

  Davy used to say the same thing, and if ever a man had cause to question his fellows, that man was Davy. I used to write his letters for him when I got better, not that he was unable to write his own, but because I had all day to write in. So I got to know all about matters concerning the Union and from the first I knew that things
were wrong.

  Mrs. Tom Jenkins used to come up after school with her little girl, and give me the lessons for the day to follow, and take away the work I had done during the day. There is kind of her to come up all that way day after day, just to earn fourpence a week and do her best for a sick boy. And make no mistake, best it was. She got handwriting primers for me, that my father paid for, so that I would have a good hand when I was ready to leave my bed. And I could write beautiful, too. I have never said so, but I cannot put in words what came in me when I won a handwriting competition set by a paper in Town.

  And you should have seen the look in my father’s eyes when he brought in the paper. They were all in the kitchen, for it was reading time, and we were waiting for my father because he was late, and a strange event with him.

  But when he came in, breathing a little extra from the Hill, he had the paper under his arm as he carried his Bible, and we knew from the way he came in and sat down in his chair that there was something serious to be said. So we all sat quiet. We could hear my mother singing to my new sister upstairs.

  My father put on his glasses, and picked up the paper, and looked all round at the boys, but he gave no look to me at all. I thought I had done something wrong, and I was bruising my brains trying to think what, when my father cleared his throat, and then I knew it was nothing bad, but good.

  “Handwriting Competition,” he read, and my heart bumped almost to the roof of my mouth. “Boys under twelve years of age. First prize of Two Guineas is awarded to Master Huw Morgan, son of Mr. Gwilym Morgan, for an entry of great merit.”

  Well, everybody was dumb with it.

  My father put the paper down and took off his glasses and started to tap them on the chair.

  “And that boy,” he said, “have been lying there for going on three years and no sound from him but laughing and no words but cheerful. I am afraid,” he said, looking over at me, “I will have to stop by here to tell you what a good son you are, Huw, my little one, because if I went to you now, I would be acting very silly, I am afraid. Bless you, my son. You are a comfort, indeed.”

  Well, then, they all started. They read the few words in the paper over and over, as though to get more from it each time, or to see if anything was hidden that had been missed. Gwilym ran down to fetch Ivor and Bronwen, and of course that was the cap for the evening.

  “There is clever you are, boy,” Bronwen said, pretending to be fainting and smiling in her own way. “You are making me feel like Red Riding Hood in front of the old wolf. Have you got big, strong teeth with you?”

  She put her finger-tip in my mouth. My jaw was better now, though a little weak, but I gave her finger a good nip and held on and she screamed.

  “O, dammo,” she said, “jaws he has got like an old mule, here. Right, you. I will have you for that. You shall eat your dinner tomorrow by yourself.”

  Davy came and sat down by me when Bronwen went to get supper ready with the girls, and he looked at me for a moment, saying nothing.

  “You are a clever boy, Huw,” he said, “and the first in the family to have your name in the paper. Good. Now then, let us turn this to good account. You shall have twopence every time you write a letter for me. How does that suit you?”

  “I would rather write for nothing for you, Davy,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said. “You shall write for the Union. And the twopences shall pay for your school and for a holiday when you are better. Is it?”

  “Yes,” I said, for to be able to pay for myself was a good thought to me.

  Bronwen gave me my supper that night as usual, but a piece of pie instead of bread and milk. There is good it did taste, too.

  “If you have trouble with the meat,” she said, “tell me, and I will put the old man back on his old baby’s food.”

  She knew I would chew all the more for that, and chew I did, resting back in the crook of her arm, with the smell of lavender and thyme about me, and her warmth near me, and her face made gold in the lamplight and laugh in her eyes. Perhaps it was wrong for a boy to feel in love with a woman ten years older than himself, but nobody ever knew, even Bronwen down to this day. So no harm was done, though she has been a sanctuary to me all through my life. And she would have been seventy-two next month.

  So the years do go.

  But I never knew I was in love, of course, until much later. There is a lot of nonsense talked about love, and most of all by people who have never known it, who have no spirit within them to inspire it in others. Talk of love in such mouths is a grossness, indeed.

  I had my first taste of it when Owen met Marged Evans. Marged was daughter of one of my father’s oldest friends, and she came to us because her mother thought she should learn how to run a house for a family. My mother was still too weak to do a day’s work properly, so she stayed on in bed. My father’s orders, and sensible, too.

  Marged had quiet prettiness with dark blue eyes that would change colour when she laughed, and make you feel so pleased you would want to laugh more than you knew you should. For the first week she was so shy no one would have more than four words from her, and they were yes, please, and thank you. Bronwen tried all ways to have her talking, I tried, and so did my father. But no use. Marged would hold her head down, and if you tried to make fun, you would see tears and then you would be sorry. How is it that people who have shy strangers to stay never think that home sickness and many strange faces, habits, and voices, may put aches in the heart. You are so used to the house and people yourself, you never come to think that what is ordinary to you may be a desert of woeful newness to another.

  She had been with us for four or five days, and she had just got to the stage where she could smile at you quickly and look away in case you spoke, when Owen became her champion.

  Of course, lying there as I had been, I could have told anybody that Owen was in love with her, because I remembered how Ivor had been with Bronwen. And the signs are all the same with the same family.

  My father was carving the chicken and he asked Marged what she would have, leg or wing?

  “Anything, Mr. Morgan, please,” said Marged, still shy, and with eight pairs of eyes upon her, and going red under them.

  “A nice wing,” said Bronwen.

  “How about the parson’s nose, then?” asked Davy.

  “Marged is our guest,” Owen said, and black thunder he was looking at Davy. “If there is any joking, perhaps you will have it out on me.”

  “What is the matter with John Willie, now?” asked Davy, knowing well. “There is a scowl, man. Take it off, quick. You will have a hole in the table-cloth.”

  “Never mind about the table-cloth,” Owen said. “You leave Marged alone.”

  “Owen,” said my father, “if there is any rebuking in this family, I will be the one to do it. Davy may have been forward in his remarks, and he knows that the part he spoke about is never left on a chicken in this house. But there was no wrong in it, and Marged was not offended. Were you, my girl?”

  “No, Mr. Morgan,” Marged said.

  But only I saw the look she gave Owen, except Owen, of course.

  And you should have seen it. I cannot blame poor Owen for falling in love. There was flame in that look, that made you feel as though you had put your eyes too near the fire.

  It was a couple of days after that, at night, when I had proof I was right. My father and the boys and Bronwen had gone down to choir practice, leaving Marged in the house in case my mother called, and Owen was out in the back doing his inventions.

  He was sure he would make a machine to cut coal so that colliers could have an easier time of it, and work less hours, with more pay because the machine would cut more coal to be sold. Every night he was hard at work in the back, hammering and filing, and running down to Howell the Blacksmith to melt and fashion pieces of iron for him, and calling to someone in the house to come and hold something while he hit it, and making a nuisance.

  Well, to-night, Marged was doing her tapestry
by the fire and I was in the wall bed as usual, with the curtains drawn in case I would sleep. I could see her well, and I was having games to count how many stitches with one colour, how many with another. But so fast she used the needle, my eyes got tired and I was just going to sleep when the door opened quietly and Owen came in, black and with a handful of iron.

  “Oh,” he said, and stood.

  Marged smiled at her work and said nothing, but kept her back to him and made plain her face.

  “I had no notion you would be here,” said Owen. There is a liar he was.

  No answer from Marged, but plenty of good stitching, indeed.

  “Have you got any hot water, with you?” asked Owen, nailed to the floor. Nobody knew better than he that the cauldron was brimming with boiling water, as it always was. You could hear it.

  Marged said nothing for a moment, then she put her needle in a part she was coming to, and looked up, though not at Owen.

  “How much do you want?” she asked him.

  “O,” said Owen, as though he thought it was a miracle she could speak. “I would like a wash.”

  “I will fill a bucket,” said Marged, and got up.

  “No, no,” said Owen, as though it was shocking to think she could touch a bucket.

  “How will you have a wash, then?” asked Marged, still with her back to him. “In a cup?”

  I had to stuff a corner of the blanket in my mouth to have quiet from myself.

  “No, no,” said Owen, and very serious. “I will get the bucket myself. There is no need for you to do things like that for me.”

  “Where is the bucket with you?” asked Marged, still not looking.

  “Out by here in the wash-house,” said Owen.

  “Good,” said Marged, and she sat down to stitch again.