I Came, I Saw.
"An Autobiography"
Norman Lewis.
Part One.
I Came, I Saw.
Chapter One.
WHEN I WAS FIRST pushed by my mother into the presence of my Aunt Polly, the bandages had only been removed from her face a few days before to expose a patchwork of skin, pink and white, glazed in some places and matt-surfaced in others, dependent upon the areas of thighs or b.u.t.tocks from which it had been stripped to cover her burns. The fire had reached every part of her and she spoke in a harsh whisper that I could hardly understand. She had difficulty in closing her eyes. Later I found that sometimes while asleep the lids would snap open. It was impossible to judge whether or not I was welcome because the grey stripe of mouth provided by plastic surgery in its infancy could hold no expression. She bent down stiffly to proffer a cheek and, prodded by my mother, I reached up to select a smooth surface among the puckerings, the ridges and the nests of tiny wrinkles, and touch it with my lips.
In the rear, the second aunt, Annie, wearing long white gloves, holding a fan like a white feather duster, and dressed as if for her wedding, waited smilingly. I was soon to learn that the smile was one that nothing could efface.
Dodging in and out of a door at the back of the hallway, the third aunt, Li, seemed like a startled animal. She was weeping silently, and with these tears I would soon become familiar. I was nine years of age, and the adults peopling my world seemed on the whole irrational, but it was an irrationality I had come to accept as the norm. My father, who wanted to be an artist, and failing that a preacher, had been banished to England following irreconcilable personality clashes with my grandfather who feared and disliked such manifestations of the human spirit. Now, after years of an aggrieved silence, there were to be attempts to rebuild bridges. It was my grandfather"s ambition to make a Welshman of me, so my mother had brought me to this vast house, with little preparation, telling me that I was to live among these strangers for whom I was to show respect, even love, for an unspecified period of time. The prospect troubled me, but like an Arab child stuffed with the resignation of his religion, I soon learned to accept this new twist in the direction of my life, and the sounds of incessant laughter and grief soon lost all significance, became commonplace and thus pa.s.sed without notice.
My mother, bastion of wisdom and fountainhead of truth in my universe, had gone, her flexible maternal authority replaced by the disciplines of my fire-scarred Aunt Polly, an epileptic who had suffered at least one fit per day since the age of fourteen, in the course of which she had fallen once from a window, once into a river and twice into the fire. Every day, usually in the afternoons, she staged an unconscious drama, when she rushed screaming from room to room, sometimes bloodied by a fall, and once leaving a menstrual splash on the highly polished floor. It was hard to decide whether she liked or disliked me, because she extended a tyranny in small ways to all who had dealings with her. In my case she issued a stream of whispered edicts relating to such matters as politeness, punctuality and personal cleanliness, and by being scrupulous in their observance I found that we got along together fairly well. I scored marks with her by mastery of the tedious and lengthy collects I was obliged to learn for recitation at Sunday school. When I showed myself as word perfect in one of these it was easy to believe that she was doing her best to smile, as she probably did when I accompanied her in my thin and wheedling treble in one of her harmonium recitals of such favourite hymns as "Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow".
Smiling Aunt Annie, who counted for very little in the household, and who seemed hardly to notice my presence, loved to dress up, and spent an hour or two every day doing this. Sometimes she would come on the scene attired like Queen Mary in a hat like a dragoon"s shako, and other times she would be a female cossack with cartridge pockets and high boots. Once, when later I went to school, and became very sensitive to the opinions of my schoolfriends, she waylaid me, to my consternation, on my way home got up as a Spanish dancer in a frilled blouse and skirt, and a high comb stuck into her untidy grey hair.
Li, youngest of the aunts, was poles apart from either sister. She and Polly had not spoken to each other for years, and occupied downstairs rooms at opposite ends of the house, while Annie made her headquarters in the room separating them, and when necessary transmitted curt messages from one to the other.
My grandfather, whom I saw only at weekends, for he worked in his business every day until eight or nine, filled every corner of the house with his deep, compet.i.tive voice, and the cigar-smoke aroma of his personality. At this time he had been a widower for twenty-five years; a man with the face of his day, a prow of a nose, bulging eyes, and an a.s.syrian beard, who saw himself close to G.o.d, with whom he sometimes conversed in a loud and familiar voice largely on financial matters.
A single magnificent coup had raised him to take his place among the eleven leading citizens of Carmarthen, with a house in Wellfield Road. It was the purchase of a cargo of ruined tea from a ship sunk in Swansea harbour, which he laundered, packaged in bags dangerously imprinted with the Royal crest, and sold off at a profit of several thousand per cent to village shops and remote farming communities scattered through the hills. This had bought him a house full of clocks and mirrors, with teak doors, a wine cellar, and a wide staircase garnished with wooden angels and lamps. After that he was to possess a French modiste as his mistress, the town"s first Model T Ford, and a valuable grey parrot named Prydeyn after a hero of the Mabinogion, too old by the time of my arrival to talk, but which could still, as it hung from a curtain rod in the drawing room, produce in its throat a pa.s.sable imitation of a small, squeaking fart.
My grandfather had started life as plain David Lewis but, swept along on the tide of saline tea, he followed the example of the neighbours in his select street and got himself a double-barrelled name, becoming David Warren Lewis. He put a crest on his notepaper and worked steadily at his family tree, pushing the first of our ancestors back further and further into history until they became contemporary with King Howel Dda. For a brief moment the world was at his feet. He had even been invited to London to shake the flabby hand of Edward VII. But on the home front his life fell apart. The three daughters he had kept at home were dotty, a fourth got into trouble and had to be exported to Canada to marry a settler who had advertised for a wife, and the fifth, Lalla, an artist of sorts, who had escaped him to marry a schoolteacher called Bennett, and settled in Cardiff, was spoken of as "eccentric".
This was Welsh Wales, full of ugly chapels, of hidden money, psalm-singing and rain. The hills all round were striped and patched with small bleak fields, with the sheep seen from our house - as small as lice - cropping the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, and seas of bracken pouring down the slopes to hurl themselves against the walls of the town. In autumn it rained every day. The water burst through the banks of the reservoir on top of Pen-lan, sent a wave full of fish down Wellfield Road, and then, spilling the fish everywhere through Waterloo Terrace, down to the market. What impressed me most were the jackdaws and the snails on which the jackdaws largely lived. The snails were of every colour, curled and striped like little turbans in blue, pink, green and yellow, and it was hard to walk down the garden path without crushing them underfoot. There were thousands of jackdaws everywhere in the town, and our garden was always full of them. Sensing that my mad aunts presented no danger, they were completely tame. They would tap on the windows to be let into the house and go hopping from room to room in search of sc.r.a.ps.
Weekly the great ceremony took place of the baking of the jackdaw cake. For this, co-operation was forced upon my three aunts, as the ingredients had to be decided upon and bought: eggs, raisins, candied peel and sultanas required to produce a cake of exceptional richness. Li did the shopping, because Polly was supposed not to leave the house and Annie was too confused to be able to buy what was necessary, put down her money, and pick up the change.
Each aunt took it in turns to bake and ice the cake and to decorate the icing. While they were kept busy doing this they seemed to me quite changed. Annie wore an ordinary dress and stopped laughing, Li ceased to cry, and Polly"s fits were quieter than on any other day. While the one whose turn it was did the baking, the others stood about in the kitchen and watched, and they were as easy to talk to as at other times they were not.
On Sat.u.r.day mornings at ten o"clock the cake was fed to the jackdaws. This had been happening for years, so that by half past nine the garden was full of birds, anything up to a hundred of them balancing and swinging with a tremendous gleeful outcry on the bushes and the low boughs of the trees. This was the great moment of the week for my aunts, and therefore for me. The cake would be cut into three sections and placed on separate plates on the kitchen table, and then at ten the kitchen windows were flung wide to admit the great black cataract of birds. For some hours after this weekly event the atmosphere was one of calm and contentment, and then the laughter and weeping would start again.
Polly did all the cooking, and apart from that sat in the drawing room, watched over by the parrot Prydeyn, crocheting bedspreads with the stiff fingers that had not been wholly spared by the fire. Li collected the instructions and the money left for her and went out shopping, and Annie dressed up as a pirate, harlequin, clown or whatever came into her head. My grandfather worked incessantly in his tea-merchant"s business in King Street, returning as late as he decently could at night. On Sunday mornings, like all the rest of the community, he was hounded by his conscience to chapel, but in the afternoon he was accustomed to spend a little time with the Old English Game Fowl he bred, showed and - as the rumour went - had entered in secret c.o.c.k fights in his disreputable youth. They were kept in wire pens in the back garden, each c.o.c.kerel, or "king" as it was known, separately with its hens. Show judges used to visit the house to test a contestant"s ferocity by poking at it through the wire netting with a stick to which a coloured rag had been attached; any bird failing to attack being instantly disqualified.
The comb, wattles, ear-lobes and any loose skin were removed from the head and neck of these birds and there was frequently a little extra tr.i.m.m.i.n.g-up to be done. Experience and skill were called for to catch and subdue a king in his prime and sometimes, like a Roman gladiator, my grandfather used a net. Once the bird was tied up and the head imprisoned in a wooden collar, he set to work in a leisurely fashion with a snip here and a snip there, using a special variety of scissors - known as a dubber - designed for this purpose.
The game c.o.c.ks often escaped from their pens and strutted about the back garden on the look-out for something to attack. It was my Aunt Li and I who were their usual chosen victims. They had enormously long legs - so long that they appeared to be walking on miniature stilts. My grandfather and my Aunt Polly knew how to handle them and carried garden rakes to push them aside if necessary, but Li and I went in great fear of them. This they probably sensed, for any king that had managed to break out had the habit of lying in wait well out of sight until either of us came on the scene, when he would rush to the attack, leaping high into the air to strike at our faces with his spurs.
In the end Aunt Li and I formed a defensive alliance, and this brought us closer together. We based our strategy on cutting down the birds" numbers. Unlike normal chickens the game fowl laid only a few small eggs and had a short breeding season. Polly looked after the brooding hens and chicks, kept separate from the kings, and Li"s method was to wait until her sister was out of the way, either while having or recovering from a fit, then take several eggs from the clutch under a sitting hen and drop them into boiling water for a few seconds before putting them back.
This promised to ease the situation in the coming year but did nothing to help us in our present trouble, so my aunt bought a cat of a breed supposed locally to be the descendants of a pair of wild cats captured in Llandeilo forest about a hundred years before. She brought it back in a sack one night, kept it in an outhouse without feeding it for three days, and then let it loose in the garden. At this time there were two or three game c.o.c.ks at large, and the scuffle and outcry that followed raised our hopes, but in the morning the kings were still strutting through the flower beds ready for battle with all comers, and of the cat there was nothing to be seen.
As confidence and sympathy began growing between us, my Aunt Li and I took to wandering round the countryside together. Li was a small woman, hardly any bigger than me. She would wet me with her tears, and I would listen to her sad ravings and sometimes stroke her hand. One day she must have come to the grand decision to tell me what lay at the root of her sorrow. We climbed a stile and went into a field and, fixing her glistening eyes upon me, she said, "What I am going to tell you now you will remember every single day of your life." But whatever she revealed must have been so startling that memory rejected it, for not a word of what was said remains in my mind.
The Towy River made and dominated Carmarthen, and it was always with us whenever we went on our walks, throwing great, shining loops through the fields, doubling back on itself sometimes in a kind of afterthought to encircle some riverside shack or a patch of sedge in which cows stood knee-deep to graze. In winter the whole valley filled up with floods, and people nervously remembered the prophecy of the enchanter Merlin that the floods would eventually engulf the town where he was buried. For my aunt they offered endless excitement, with the drowning sheep and cattle carried away on the yellow whiplash of the river"s current disappearing beneath the surface one after another as it swept them towards the sea, and the coracle men spinning in whirlpools in their black, prehistoric boats as they prodded at animals with their poles, trying to steer them to safety.
In summer the people of Carmarthen went on trips to the seaside at Llanstephan, at the river"s mouth. There was no more beautiful, wilder or stranger place in the British Isles, but the local Welsh no longer saw the beauty, and familiarity and boredom drove all who could afford it further afield for such outings to Tenby, which was certainly larger and jollier. The Normans had built a castle in Llanstephan in about 1250, and there was an ancient church, and a few Victorian cottages, but apart from this handful of buildings, little in this landscape had changed for thousands of years. Here the Towy finally unwound itself into the sea, its estuary enclosed in a great silken spread of sand occupying a third of the horizon, to which our century had added not a single detail but the bones of two foundered ships in the process of digestion by mud.
For the villagers a shadow hung over this scene. On fine Sundays and holidays throughout the summer, miners and their families would descend upon them. The train brought them from the h.e.l.lish valleys to Ferryside across the estuary, and from Ferryside they would cross by boat to take joyous possession of the sands. At first warning of this invasion the people of Llanstephan made a bolt for their houses, slamming their doors behind them, drawing their curtains and keeping out of sight until six hours later the turn of the tide released them from their misery.
The miners were despised and hated by the villagers of Llanstephan just as were field labourers by their more comfortable fellow countrymen in England in those days. To the villagers they were no better than foreigners, people whose habits were beyond their understanding, in particular the frantic pleasure they showed, and their noisily offensive good humour released into the calm and sober environment of Llanstephan on a Sunday afternoon. When I saw my first miners come ash.o.r.e in Llanstephan, I asked my aunt if they were dwarfs, so reduced in size had these Welshmen - identical in stock with those of Llanstephan - become after three generations of lives spent underground.
In Carmarthen and its surrounding villages people were obsessed with relationships, and practically everyone I met turned out to be a cousin, four, five or even six times removed. Cousins who were old - say over thirty - were respectfully known as aunties or uncles, and one of the reasons for our trip to Llanstephan was to see an Auntie Williams who lived in the first of the line of cottages along the sea front. All of these were like little houses from a child"s picture book, with old-fashioned gardens full of rosemary and honeysuckle, tabby cats everywhere, and fantail pigeons on the roofs.
Auntie Williams was a little Welsh woman of the kind they still showed on picture postcards, wearing black, steeple-crowned hats, and although the old witch"s hat had gone she still wore the shawl that went with it in all weathers. She was famous for her "early-red-apple" tree, perhaps the last of its kind, which bore its ripe, brilliantly red fruit as early as August, and also for her husband, once a handsome man - as proved by the large coloured photograph in her front room, taken in uniform shortly before the battle of the Somme in which most of his lower jaw had been shot away. These days he wore a mask over the lower part of his face, and a tube protruding from his right nostril was fixed behind his ear. On my first visit he was with us for lunch, dressed in a jaunty check jacket. Auntie Williams had boiled a sewin, mixing a sc.r.a.p of pink fish well chewed by her into the gruel she fed her husband through the tube, and gently ma.s.saging his throat as it went down. Everybody in Llanstephan admired him for the cheerfulness with which he had suffered his disability, and he had published a little philosophical book designed to help others to bear with such handicaps.
The finish of the meal, joined by two more neighbouring aunties, was spoilt by the arrival of the ferry boat, bringing the miners and their families. They came unexpectedly, as the jetty had been put out of action by the villagers in the preceding week. But the villagers had underestimated the miners" determination to enjoy themselves, as with tremendous effort they dragged the heavy boat clear of the water and onto the sand.
Until this calamity, the three Llanstephan aunties, hard to tell apart with their round country faces and polished cheeks, had been full of smiles, and by Uncle Williams" gestures and noises he too had seemed brimful of good humour. Aunt Li, whose vacant expression signified for me that for once she was not actually unhappy, was teasing a small crab she had found in a pool. Now, suddenly, as the mining families climbed down from the boat and advanced towards us, a great change came over our family gathering. The miners" children, shrieking with delight, scampered ahead, and the miners and their wives trudged in the rear over the wet sand, carrying their boots and shoes, their little parcels of food, and two bulky packages. Watching this advance, the Llanstephan aunties" kindly, homely faces became those of different barely recognizable people. My Carmarthen relations laughed and wept in their meaningless way, or - in the case of Polly - were unable to produce a facial expression of any kind, but they had at least spared me the spectacle of anger, which was frighteningly new. The soft singsong Welsh voices had lost their music and fallen flat, as they talked of the wickedness of miners. It was a local theory, supported by the chapels, that poverty was the wages of sin - and the miners looked poor enough. Their women, it was thought, who often worked alongside their men, were driven into the mines not by hunger but shamelessness, and discussing this aspect of the mining life the Llanstephan aunties made the loading up and manoeuvring of coal trucks in near darkness a thousand feet under the earth seem a carnal indulgence.
Uncle Williams went into the house and came back with a placard, which he fixed to a post by his wall. It said, "Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it Holy", but the miners ignored it. Their children were everywhere, screaming with glee. They threw wet sand at each other, dug up c.o.c.kles, dammed the little streams flowing on the beach, and even came to stare open-mouthed over the garden walls. When no one was watching I sneaked away to try to join forces with them, but we did not easily mix. Immersed in their games, they ignored me, and I was too shy to speak.
Presently a miner beckoned to me. He and his wife were setting out their picnic on a cloth spread over the dry sand. The man was short but very strong-looking, with bowed legs, and a snake tattooed on each forearm. He asked me my name, and I told him, and his wife looked up and smiled and gave me a slice of cake. "Sit you down," she said, and I was just going to when Auntie Williams spotted me and let out a screech. "Come you back by here."
I went back and Auntie Williams said, "What she give you, then?" I showed her the cake and she took it away and threw it to the pigeons. Wanting to get away from her I went over to Li, but she was no longer blank-faced as she had been when I left her, and for me that meant that something had upset her. She had lost her crab, and I thought it might be that. "Like me to find you another crab, Auntie?" I asked, but she shook her head.
On the beach, sandwiches had been pa.s.sed out to the children. The man who had spoken to me opened a bottle of beer. He drank from the neck, and pa.s.sed it to his wife. The couple who had been carrying the two brown paper parcels untied the string and unwrapped them. One of the parcels had held the box part of a gramophone, and the other the horn, and these they fixed together. We watched from our chairs under the apple tree while this was going on. No one spoke but I could feel the astonished horror. The people who had brought the gramophone wound it up and put on a record and soon a little thin, wheezing music reached us between the soft puffs of breeze, and the squawking of the herring gulls flopping about overhead.
The people in the cottage next door had come out into the garden to watch what was going on and one of them, a man, shouted a protest. Uncle Williams stood up, picked an apple and threw it in the direction of the couple with the gramophone, but with so little force that the apple hardly cleared our low wall. His example gave great encouragement, though, to the others, and the man who had shouted from the garden next door threw a small stone. My feeling was that he never really intended to hit anything, and the stone splashed in a beach puddle yards from the nearest of the miners, who gave no sign of realizing what was happening and went on eating their sandwiches and drinking their beer, never once so much as looking in our direction. Next a bigger stone thudded on the sand, and there were more shouts from the cottages, and two or three children who had gone off to collect sh.e.l.ls gave up and went back to join their parents.
More shouts and more stones followed - all the stones thrown by men whose aim was very bad, or who otherwise weren"t trying. After a while the miners began to pack up, taking their time about it, and paying no attention at all to the villagers who were insulting them. The gramophone was taken apart and parcelled up as before, and everything they had brought with them packed away; then, without looking back, they began to move towards the ferry boat, and within half an hour they had managed to push the boat into the water and that was the last of them.
Uncle Williams took down the placard and put it away, and his wife put on the kettle for tea. n.o.body could find anything to say. The weather experts who could tell by the look of the seaweed had promised them a fine afternoon, but the miners had ruined their day. Li suddenly got up and said she was going home. "We got an hour still to wait for the bus, Auntie," I said. "Never mind about the bus," she said. "I"m leaving now," and she was off, marching down the path, and I could see by the way she was walking, with her head thrown back and slightly to one side, that something had upset her, although there was no way of saying what it was. I"d seen enough of her by then to know that it wasn"t the miners being there that bothered her - in which case it could only be something one of the Llanstephan relations had said or done that was to blame. But what was it? I couldn"t guess. There was no telling the way things took Aunt Li.
I ran to catch her up. It was six and a half miles to Carmarthen but she was a fast walker, and I expected we"d beat the bus.
Chapter Two.
IN THE AUTUMN I was sent to local day school, the Pentrepoeth at which my father had suffered some thirty-five years before. He had been there in the days when the Welsh had decided to anglicize themselves, and he was caned for speaking the native language in a master"s presence. By my time a swing of the pendulum had occurred, and some lessons were conducted in Welsh of which I was unable to understand a word. For this I received a mild cuffing, not only to cure me of idiocy, but to punish what was suspected as stubborn muteness or malice. The fact was that life in Wellfield Road had had the effect of practically silencing me in the presence of adults. The master was a fourth or fifth cousin of mine, as he mentioned to me reproachfully, but this had no effect on his treatment of me. He would appeal to the schoolchildren. "Not understanding a word I say to him, he is. What do you call a boy that cannot even respond when spoken to? What is the name for him?" All the children would shout with delight, "d.i.c.kie Dwl, sir" (stupid d.i.c.k). "That"s right, boys, and that is what his name shall be, d.i.c.kie Dwl." I was then sent down to the infants" school in the effort to force a little Welsh into me. This was quite unsuccessful.
The harsh winter that year was a good time for me. In South Wales the winters are expected to be mild and wet, but this was an arctic exception, throwing out challenges and imposing strains, and many people - as did my family - found it wholly beneficial to battle with the elements, distracted in this way from other troubles. Where the floods had been, vast sheets of ice covered the fields. Most of the services gave in, the electricity failed, and the water mains froze up. Farmers snowed up in their hill farms were unable to bring food to the market, and Pen-lan loomed over us like a Himalayan ice-peak, the sheep dying in snowdrifts on its slopes.
It was an emergency that had a tonic effect in Aunt Polly"s case too, and she bustled about endlessly organizing supplies of fuel and food and badgering reluctant workmen to trudge through the snow up to the house to repair the damage done by storm and flood.
I soon noticed a slackening in the severity of her fits, and although she still continued to suffer one a day, she was much quieter, and the attacks were of shorter duration. Some time in the afternoon the inevitable symptoms, the silence and the withdrawal would appear, and Annie and Li would set about putting in hand the usual security precautions, which included locking the door of any room in which a fire was burning. Fits happened once in a while in Polly"s bedroom, or in the bathroom - but more often either the kitchen or the breakfast room was chosen. I went in mortal fear of seeing Aunt Polly"s face when she was having a fit. Before entering any room I would push open the door, inch by inch, until I could see what was going on, and it always happened that if Polly was there and in trouble, I soon spotted her feet which were small and neat sticking out from behind the sofa or an armchair, whereupon I silently closed the door and slipped away.
My grandfather had arranged for two layers of underfelt for the breakfast room carpet and well-padded furniture to help break the almost routine fall. There was little to be done to minimize the dangers of the kitchen, and it was here that Polly had fallen twice into the fire. I was astonished that she had not been burned to death, for as far as I could judge a fit could last up to a half hour, and during this time she was left to lie where she was. When a fit was in progress she made no sound, although after it was over she sometimes screamed. This final scream, when it occurred, was a good sign for Grandfather, for it meant that for two or three days afterwards the seizures would be less violent, and Polly would be active about the house and garden, able to discuss family matters in her damaged, whispering voice. The long, hard winter m.u.f.fled this outcry, but with the thaw, the putting-out of candles and oil lamps, the water running through the taps, and the goods delivered again to the door, my good times were over and tensions began to build up once more.
As soon as the town came out of the coma of that winter my grandfather embarked on his last romance, a disaster involving the Parisian modiste who had opened up in business a few yards from his King Street establishment. Of the facts of the case I knew nothing until told by my mother some years later. I was aware of a family upheaval but there was nothing unusual in that apart from its magnitude, and that for the first time I saw my grandfather under physical a.s.sault by his daughters. The modiste, according to my mother, was thirty-five years younger than the old man, and turned the head of every male in town, and what my mother could not understand - and I heartily agreed with her - was what such a creature would be doing in a grey little, milk-swilling, psalm-singing place like Carmarthen? Her story was that my grandfather had picked the girl up on Paddington Station on one of his trips to London, and had let her persuade him to set her up in business.
The luckless young modiste, said my mother, was harried by Annie and Li from pillar to post. I was able to describe to her an episode I had witnessed of this persecution when, in King Street, my Aunt Li had once left me to rush at a woman pa.s.ser-by, tear the hat from her head and trample it under her feet.
I was to see this same woman once more on the day she called at the house. My grandfather was at his business and she had come for a meeting with Aunt Polly, in the hope, perhaps, of winning her over. She was kept waiting in the hall where, with long practice at self-concealment, I had placed myself out of sight. Polly had had a fit an hour or so before, and was given time to get over it before being told about the visitor. Then - half the girl"s size - she came into sight, still twitching a little and eyes staring, walked straight up to her and struck her in the face.
It was the last I ever saw of the girl from Paris, but her presence and the guilt and shame the liaison generated must have been manna to the congregations of the town"s many chapels. There had been some talk of my grandfather becoming mayor, but little more was heard of this, and when I brought the matter up with Aunt Polly I was told that there had been some trouble over his refusal to join the Church of England. After that even his position in his chapel seemed on the wane where, probably because of a voice of irreplaceable power, he remained precentor, but ceased to be deacon. His friend and protector had been Lord Kilsant, with whom he had conducted certain discreet business transactions, and who had encouraged him when he applied for a grant of arms and advised him on his choice of emblem (which included a teapot emblazoned on a shield). Now the man with whom Grandfather had been seen walking arm and arm with down King Street on his way to the Liberal Club turned out to have master-minded a financial swindle in the City of London for which he was tried and sent to prison. And worse was to follow when there were widespread allegations that the origins of an outbreak of the "bad sickness" (as gonorrhoea was always known), soon reaching epidemic proportions, had been tracked down to the presence of the French girl in the town.
My grandfather turned for solace to his game c.o.c.ks, encouraged perhaps to do so by an exceptionally successful breeding season in the previous year, before Li had had the idea of parboiling the eggs. This had produced a king of which he was very proud, and though I had good reason to detest game c.o.c.ks, I had to admit that this was a handsome if terrifying bird. I had never seen a c.o.c.k before with such beautiful plumage, with shining wine-coloured feathers, streaked and shot, according to the light, with the deepest of blue. Grandfather had mentioned to someone when I happened to be in the room - he never in all the months that I lived in the house addressed a word to me - that he had been penalized at the Carmarthen show for breeding birds with legs that were too long. This one, although it reached to my waist and could comfortably peck me in the face, was a little shorter, exactly as demanded at this time by the changing fashion in poultry. It was fed on chopped up fillet steak, barley sugar, aniseed, ginger, rhubarb and yeast mixed with "c.o.c.k bread" made from oatmeal and eggs to which a little cinnamon was added.
The bird"s great moment arrived when it was "dubbed". While Aunt Polly held the king by the legs, my grandfather opened its beak with one finger in its mouth and the thumb at the back of the head, then with a single cut removed the comb, very close to the skull. Next the ear-lobes and wattles went, the whole process timed by a stop-watch to last not longer than a minute. My grandfather claimed that the king felt no pain. As soon as the operation was over a few grams of corn were thrown to it, and now came the supreme moment, for a future champion would show "eagerness" at this point - as did Grandfather"s bird - by swallowing its own comb.
This bird showed an inexhaustible energy that caused it to break into a skip as it strutted round its pen, and it was this skipping, its swaggering walk, its fiery red eye and the way it hurled itself at the wire when provoked which entranced the experts that came to see it. My grandfather completed the entertainment by throwing it a sizeable rat, only partially disabled, which it soon despatched. A bird of this calibre, someone told me, could drive a spur right through a quarter-inch-thick wooden board, and had been known to kill weasels, and even a fox. The opinion was that my grandfather had bred a winner, and he was advised to bypa.s.s the local shows and groom the king for the Royal Agricultural Hall, London, or the Crystal Palace, where it was certain to receive the award for the best in its cla.s.s, if not the show.
With the coming of spring Aunt Polly"s condition worsened, as if the sickness she suffered from was bent on making up for time lost in the calm of the winter. She locked herself in her bedroom for more than a week, and made no reply to appeals by my grandfather, shouted through the keyhole, or the messages - to which a decorative biblical text was sometimes pinned - pushed under the door. Sometimes I was awakened in the night by the sound of a lavatory flushed, the faint crunch of boards, and the squeak of the door of the kitchen, over which I slept. The doctor was called in and he and my grandfather sat together in the drawing room under floating turbans of cigar smoke, while the old grey parrot crawled over the furniture making its farting noises, and a number of tall clocks ticked the wrong time. Our doctor was another cousin, and inbreeding had given him and my father almost identical faces. I wandered into the room out of curiosity and neither man bothered to look up. On a previous occasion, the doctor had shaken his head out of sympathy when I had had nothing to say in reply when spoken to, and probably a.s.sumed that I was deaf and dumb.
"What do you suggest?" my grandfather asked.
"You"ll have to put her away, for your sake as well as her own."
Grandfather shook his head.
"There"s no telling what could happen. Nothing I can give her will do any good. If she stays here don"t hold me responsible for whatever happens."
He put down a paper to be signed, but my grandfather pushed it away.
There was a long discussion about the worsening relationship between Polly and Li, and the doctor said that it was impossible for the two women to go on living under the same roof together.
My grandfather told him that if anybody had to go, it would be Li. Polly was his first born, and his favourite - although he did not admit to this.
The only person in the world whom Polly claimed to love, and who could bring her to her senses at times like this, was my mother, but for some weighty reasons of her own, this was an occasion when my mother was unable to leave the family home in Enfield and come to the rescue. In the last resort, and taking the view that even should the attempt fail there was nothing to be lost, my grandfather persuaded his only married daughter, Charlotte, who lived in Cardiff, to come and do what she could.
Charlotte - Aunt Lalla as she was known to me - was regarded as the brilliant member of the family. She had taken a degree in art, and held an exhibition of her paintings in the Guild Hall, Carmarthen, but promise had been destroyed by her meeting with David Bennett, a tall, mild schoolteacher on holiday from England, and they had immediately married and set up house in Cardiff.
Lalla arrived with her husband and their fourteen-year-old son, who proved to be severely handicapped, although his mother, who was dark and intense and spoke in an excited and pa.s.sionate way, refused to accept that this was the case. Apart from this staggering delusion, I thought she was a clever woman, and that my uncle was a clever man, too. I could not understand how it was that these exceptional people could have a son with a vocabulary limited to about a dozen words, which he p.r.o.nounced with difficulty. Apart from this lack of communication between us, we got on well enough together. He was tall, strong and active and addicted to very long walks, which I enjoyed, too, so long as they were restricted to quiet country lanes out of view of the town. My Uncle David was a dedicated golfer, accustomed to take his son with him when he went golfing. In this way Dai, also, had become deeply involved in golf. Unable to master the skills the normal game demanded he had invented a version conducted in his imagination with a phantom opponent. He carried a golf club wherever he went, perpetually on the look-out for objects lying in the road - small branches fallen from trees, cigarette packets and the like - to subst.i.tute for the ball. My uncle always carried a reserve of empty matchboxes on these outings for use in the case of the failure of other suitable objects to be found.
In my public relationship with the Bennetts I had to proceed with extreme caution. I was accepted on sufferance by the boys of the Pentrepoeth School who at best regarded me as harmless although not overbright, and above all I was anxious not to be a.s.sociated in any way with eccentric behaviour. It had been a setback - something I was doing my best to live down - to be sent down to the infants" school to be taught Welsh. Now the Bennetts had arrived, and my worry was how my school-fellows would view Aunt Lalla, who was inclined to draw attention to herself, to say nothing of Dai with his over-large head and a tongue that was too large for his mouth, busying himself in the streets with his imaginary golf match.
Aunt Li"s unaccountable behaviour in public had been noted and commented upon by my schoolfriends, but here the situation was now well in hand. Whenever we set out on one of our walks I steered clear of the town, and as both our interests lay in the countryside, this was not difficult. May had arrived and a wonderful collection of b.u.t.terflies fluttered about over the marshy fields and the ponds of Pen-lan. There were white admirals, swallow-tails - never reported from South Wales - which I saw here for the first and last time, fritillaries of all kinds, and one enormous sombre variety, never identified, which a local farmer informed us had been blown across the Atlantic from America, and was occasionally to be seen at the tops of these western hills. My aunt made up an osier trap to catch trout in the roadside streams, and once in a while we caught one. We also trapped a variety of birds, all of which somehow managed to escape, or rather - as I suspect now - were secretly released a few hours after their capture. I always found that I could speak to Li quite easily, and without hesitation, but there was no encouragement to do so, as she preferred a meaningful silence.
Lalla made some progress with Polly and finally got her to come out of her room. After weeping uninterruptedly for half a day, she suddenly calmed down, ate a substantial meal, and gathered up the reins of the household once more into her hands, re-establishing a firm, authoritarian rule.
The proposal on the Bennetts" last Sunday in Carmarthen was for a bus outing, in which I was to be included - inevitably to Llanstephan. The prospect was a tempting one indeed, offering not only an excursion to the delights of the seash.o.r.e, but an escape from the shades of the prison house on the gloomiest day of the week. For all that, it was a proposition to be considered with caution. It would entail a half-mile walk down to the bus stop at the Boar"s Head Hotel in Lammas Street, and another risky half-mile to be covered at the end of the return journey. It was a prospect that made me nervous. The alternative was close confinement to the house between morning and evening chapel, with little to do but read, the choice of reading material being Victorian novels that were too old for me, or a ma.n.u.script copy of a work by one of my forebears who had kept an eye-witness account at the beginning of the last century of all the numerous public hangings of condemned men from the boughs of the great oaks still standing at Llangunnor, across the river. It was considered irreligious on the Sabbath even to appear in the garden.
In the end I settled for the Llanstephan trip. The sandwiches were made, the empty matchboxes collected and, having given Aunt Polly an undertaking of chapel attendance in Llanstephan, we set out.
We reached the bus stop without incident. There are few people about in the streets in a small Welsh town on a Sunday morning, and I saw no one I knew. Dai, using up energy, cantered along at our side swinging his golf club but abstaining from practising his shots, because my uncle had persuaded him that the finest golfcourse in the world in the form of an endless stretch of golden sands awaited at the end of the trip.
This was a safe time of the year to visit Llanstephan, because it was a good six weeks before the miners and their families would come on the scene at the beginning of August. Much as Lalla disliked and feared them, it seemed possible that she disliked the Williamses even more, and I was grateful that I was not to be exposed once again to the spectacle of Uncle Williams having his food ma.s.saged down his throat.
Lalla despised almost everyone outside her immediate family and was angered by the fact that people without artistic talent should spoil the view by their mere presence in a village in which she claimed a kind of proprietorial interest. She and my uncle had lived here for a while after their marriage, and she had been awarded a second prize at the Carmarthen Festival of Arts for her paintings of the sea front, from which all human figures had been excluded. Our family, she said, had had a long a.s.sociation with the place. Some of her memories were dramatic. At low tide a vast and shining sandbank, Cefyn Setyn (Silk Back), appeared in the channel. To this, one Christmas Day in her childhood, she remembered two of her uncles had rowed out, taking a bottle of whisky, to shoot duck and to celebrate, but at the end of a festive day they had shot each other, and only one, with a leg blown off, survived. The practice of infanticide, my aunt claimed, had been common here, and she offered to show me where new-born babies had been buried in the back garden of the next-door neighbour of those days.
Llanstephan, at first, was heaven for Dai as he inspected the treasure trove of miscellaneous objects the tide had deposited on the beach, before hitting out at them with his club. Unfortunately the presence of strangers had alerted the inhabitants of the cottages all along the sea front, and they came out to stare and giggle at his antics, and the argument that arose with his imaginary partner.
Soon, to my horror, Uncle Williams, mask pulled well down and ready to deal with unwelcome visitors, appeared in his garden, but after a vague gesture of dismissal went inside again.
From this time on the day began to go to pieces. Dai demanded ginger beer but only barter transactions were permissible in Llanstephan on the Sabbath, and my uncle had nothing suitable to offer in exchange. He had brought a shovel with him to dig up c.o.c.kles, but as soon as he started to do so he was insulted and threatened by the c.o.c.kle men, who came running from their shack under the cliff to accuse him of taking the bread out of their mouths. My aunt got her feet wet when the tide came in. We were menaced by an aggressive cow that had strayed down to the beach, and when we presented a dog with the remnants of our stale sandwiches, it went off and returned with the gift of the decayed corpse of a large sea-bird, and could not be driven away. Dai complained that the wet sands were unsuitable for golf, and became quarrelsome and morose, and my aunt struck up a tragic att.i.tude, and said, "I have sacrificed my life for this." When the bus left at four, we boarded it with relief.
The return journey was conducted in silence apart from an occasional moan of frustration from Dai, and Lalla, who anxiously studied and responded to the slightest variation in her son"s moods, announced that he was unhappy because he had been deprived of his proper walk, so at Llangain, to my consternation, three miles from Carmarthen, she stopped the bus, and we were put down.
From Llangain it was two miles to John"s Town and we covered the distance slowly. My uncle got out the matchboxes, and Dai, determined to make up for time lost at Llanstephan, swiped them into hedges from which, often with delay and difficulty they had to be retrieved. At John"s Town the first of Carmarthen"s houses came into sight, and my nervousness increased as the supply of matchboxes ran out, despite repairs carried out by my uncle to boxes not irreparably shattered by the first stroke of Dai"s club. Dai"s recurring frustration showed in pleadings and gestures, and my uncle rushed into the newspaper shop at the top of Lammas Street, and persuaded them, on the promise to pay next day, to hand over a whole packet of a dozen boxes of matches. Dai s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his hands, ripped open the packet, tore out a box, threw it on the pavement outside the shop, and demolished it with an unerring drive, scattering the matches in all directions. He crowed and chuckled with delight at having found a new sport, held out his left hand to shake that of his invisible opponent, then addressed himself to the next box of matches. In this way we progressed slowly towards the town"s social centre, shifting on Sundays from the business and shopping area of the weekdays down to Lammas Street in the vicinity of the Boar"s Head, where people gathered for a chat and a stroll before evening chapel.
The situation here turned out to be even worse than I feared, for not only, and inevitably, were there familiar faces in the crowd, but to my horror Aunt Annie, expecting us on a later bus, was waiting at the bus stop. She wore a feather in her hat, carried a bright parasol, and smiled like a j.a.panese when we came into sight. I had already discovered that Dai Bennett was the only human being that meant anything in the world to her, and as soon as Dai saw her he rushed forward, waving his club and gabbling with excitement. They fell into each other"s arms. Then Dai had something to show her. A ring of curious bystanders had gathered as he put down a matchbox, took up his stance and swung the club. The moment had come for me to sneak away.
The Bennetts went, leaving Polly, it seemed, miraculously renewed, but there were soon troubles in other directions. For a show bird to be at its best when the time came, it had to be given a "walk", i.e. a separate run, encouraged only by a view of hens, and ideally be permitted to roost at night in the branches of a tree. All these conditions my grandfather provided for his king, although at the expense of security because, having reached the branches of the tree, it was easy enough for the bird to fly down into the garden instead of back into its run. This happened only too often. Aunt Annie, who wore high-heeled, unsuitable boots, rarely went into the garden, and was therefore fairly safe, but whenever Aunt Li and I happened to do so and saw the king skirmishing and parrying through the flower beds, we retreated into the house and stayed there until my grandfather came home in the evening and he and Polly would join forces to get the situation under control. Since the garden beyond the herbaceous borders was a maze of outhouses and chicken runs the time was bound to come when one or another of us was too late in becoming aware that the bird was at large. This eventually happened to Li, and it inflicted a bad wound on her hand before she could escape.
A few days later, happening to look out of his bedroom window shortly after getting up, Grandfather noticed one of the hill farmers" dogs busy with something that looked like a bundle of feathers on the other side of the high garden fence. Going down to investigate, he found the corpse of his king. The bird had been partly eaten, but there was something about the circ.u.mstances of this reverse that aroused his suspicions, which were strengthened when the vet he called in was able to tell him that the cause of death had been a crushed skull through a heavy blow on the head. From overheard conversations it was quite clear to me that my grandfather suspected Li of this crime. I do not believe that he ever forgave her.
Polly had a calm month, and Grandfather brightened up after his second-best bird, sent to the Agricultural Hall, took first prize in its cla.s.s. These were the quiet days of late summer, long enough for evening outings with Aunt Li, fishing in the ponds and chasing b.u.t.terflies on the top of Pen-lan.
One day I came home from school to hushed voices, excitement and speculations. A plain-clothes policeman had arrived at the house, and he and Grandfather retired to the drawing room. It was later explained to me that at this time the town was suffering from an outbreak of poison-pen letters. The motives and details of this visit were later disclosed in a long meeting between my grandfather, Annie and Li, when some pretext had been made for removing Polly from the scene. The policeman, said my grandfather, who had been most apologetic, polite and pleasant, had shown him a page of one of the letters that were causing the trouble, and asked him if he recognized the handwriting, to which my grandfather had replied, he did not, and the man had then asked his permission to speak to Polly. To this my grandfather had agreed, and he had gone to fetch her. Polly, he said, had been at her best, very calm and reasonable, and accepting with the best possible grace the a.s.surance that this was nothing more than a routine enquiry.
She told the policeman she had never seen the letter before, that she certainly had not written it. She made slighting reference to the cheap, lined notepaper. Grandfather then said that the policeman had asked Polly if she would have any objection to writing down several words. The obvious intention was to compare these with the same words in the letter. Grandfather, objecting, had told her not to do this, but she had done it all the same. He had asked the policeman if someone had made an accusation and, as the policeman replied in an evasive way, it was to be a.s.sumed that this was the case. The thing was, as all agreed, that so much time was spent in Carmarthen schools - which I knew to my cost - in the practising of a hand that came as close as possible to copperplate, that all local handwriting was extremely similar. For example, Grandfather said - pointedly, I thought - that he could hardly tell Polly"s and Li"s handwriting apart.
Next day, or perhaps the day after that, I was amazed to be treated by Aunt Polly with extraordinary kindness. It was a Sat.u.r.day, with no school. In the morning the jackdaw cake was divided as usual, but before this took place - and it was something that had never happened before - she took me into her room and give me a slice from her share. She then whispered to me to put on my best suit as we were going shopping together. This came as another surprise. The only time she risked going out was when she had had an early-morning fit, leaving her clear for the rest of the day, and I hoped and a.s.sumed that this had occurred. We went into several shops where she dealt, and she purchased a few things including a gramophone record I talked her into buying. She chatted in an amiable way to the a.s.sistants, cupping her hand to her lips to amplify the sound. An outing for Aunt Polly was a rare treat.
At the chemist"s she wanted perfume, and sniffed at several bottles open for testing before she decided on Jockey Club. I was surprised when she took me into our cousin Morgan"s, the butcher"s, because there had been a quarrel and the family had withdrawn their business months before. Morgan was there, a burly man, with a face as red as the steak on his chopping block. Aunt Polly bought some meat, shook hands with him, and the quarrel was made up on the spot.
She then told me that she had forgotten to give me a birthday present, so wanted to buy me one now. I was unable to think of anything I wanted, so she took me into the toyshop in Priory Street and bought me a football and a mouth organ. By this time it was about midday, and all I could think of was the possibility that she had not had the morning fit, and she might have one while we were out together.
We reached home without incident, and I breathed again. I was told to take off my best suit and change back into my normal weekday clothes, and Polly removed the hair pieces covering her damaged scalp and washed away the crisp, white mask of make-up, and the bright chequer-board pattern of her cheeks and forehead reappeared.
That afternoon was an exceptionally pleasant one. I kicked the football about the back garden until I was tired, and when I went into the house Polly laid aside the bedspread she was crocheting and put the record on the gramophone which she had been persuaded to buy. It was one I enormously enjoyed, a favourite of the day, said to have been made on the battlefield in the First World War and one of a series that were avidly collected. Aunt Polly"s record, "Our Brave Boys at Vimy Ridge", featured a lead-in of patriotic music; a hymn in this case to Lord Roberts, "Good Old Bobs of Kandahar", then the sounds of battle, the fixing of bayonets, the enthusiastic babel preceding the charge, a sustained rattle of gunfire punctuated with explosions - to which people listened with their heads stuck into the trumpet - and the faint cries either of triumph or anguish, then "Good Old Bobs" once again. It was a record I never tired of listening to. The muscles under the mouth the surgeon had given Aunt Polly moved in what I now understood to be a smile of contentment. Although the day was Sat.u.r.day she was wearing a Sunday dress, and was fragrant with Jockey Club.
The fit, when it took place in the afternoon as I suspected it would, was the shortest on record. Polly got up quietly, went off to the kitchen for her own personal battle, and was back in a matter of minutes. She bore no sign of damage, walked quite steadily, took up her work again, and, after a half-hour or so, was able to speak. She had bought cakes for tea. It may have been the most relaxed day I spent at Wellfield Road.
I was awakened that night by a series of tremendous crashes, the sound of splintering wood, of shouts and of running feet. I got up, fumbled my way down the dark back stairs into the kitchen where a light was on, then slipped through into the hallway to reach the bottom of the front staircase. The bathroom door at the top of the stairs had been smashed open with an axe, left standing against the wall, and pandemonium was going on in the bathroom. I went up the stairs, and Aunt Li in her nightgown, her hair in curlers standing up like a golliwog"s, rushed out of the bathroom to push me away, then dodged back inside again. Following her I saw Aunt Polly, also in her nightgown, who seemed to be standing, very straight and stiff against the wall, held by Grandfather who was struggling with something attached to her neck, while Annie in the background waved her arms up and down like a frantic bird about to take off. A moment pa.s.sed before I realized that Polly was attached by the neck to a lamp bracket that had bent double under her weight, so that now she stood on tiptoe. It was a frozen instant in a scene overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g with activity, with flying shapes and shadows, and faces frenzied in the candlelight; Annie flapping up and down the bathroom; Grandfather"s pyjama trousers falling over his ankles, his deep baying cries and ba.s.s sobs; Polly"s thin falsetto breaking through with a psalm as soon as the cord was loosened from her throat; the smell of Jockey Club and urine.