Once Read Free Page B

say in exclamation, ‘Well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!’ He was this day sprinkling thick black soot from the chimney round his gooseberry bushes, to deter slugs and snails. My father, playing gooseberry to his neighbour’s peace and quiet, was interested.
    â€˜Let me have some,’ he said, ‘I’ll sprinkle a little on myself.’
    At which, as if hand over mouth not to laugh aloud, I tripped rapidly down the steep concrete steps (how many, 39? – dozens and dozens, anyway it always seemed) wellingtons flapping, to tell my mother, about my father, the thought of him sprinkling soot over himself too much to bear. Humorous in my way I was, but also it seems nervous and prone to stresses and anxieties.
    Not I think that I was especially sickly, not in any romantic way, you understand, as might have been interesting. But writing about this faltering exposure to schooling reminds me quite strongly of unlocated spells spent ‘ill’ at home at ‘Thornfield’, long afternoons, for some reason in my parents’ bed, presumably for the view that my little back room didn’t have, staring at the bare wintry tree-tops in the Glen, listening to the homely cackling of the jackdaws, on long interminable afternoons, pricking up my ears at hearing Mr James with his pony and trap come down the road at a trot, carrying milk churns to the dairy, from Pentr’uchaf.
    I’d shoot out of bed when I heard the hooves and watch him go. He was a man you’d know now as one straight out of R.S. Thomas’s early poems, a Lloyd George thatch of grey hair under his tilted cap, old trench-coat tied at the waist with regulatory binder twine. He was Iago Prytherch. I’d seen him up at the farm when I went to play with the Roberts brothers, red-haired Welsh boys in Red Wood country, and to lean over the sty to see and get a closer whiff of the mochyns .
    Or it would be Hughie Bach, the casual farmhand, with the emphasis on casual, staggering up from the Ship. Drunk as a lord he’d struggle along, heading for the hills, for whichever farm outbuilding he spent his nights in. You’d hear him singing, or calling out, and he was a sight to watch, trying to snatch his cap up from the reeling road, singing in Welsh, earth of the earth. He made you nervous if you met him on his way but he was harmless they said, with quick but gentle hazel eyes. It always intrigued me what kind of being he was, another one who wore a belt of binder twine. A character they said, a rogue, handing his way up the road by means of the Glen railings, rolling and pitching, slumping, as if still aboard the Ship and the Ship at sea in wild weather.
    During the war Hughie once tried to sell my parents a stolen goose from under his coat at the door. ‘Iss a fine goose,’ he said, flashing it out from the skirt of his coat. But they were having none of it. They knew whose goose it was. The story of his crime had run ahead of him and lay in wait to send him ‘down the line’ for a spell in Liverpool’s Walton Jail. Another time he took my father for a ride, up in the back lanes after nightfall, near Llanelian, selling him a sack of black-market mud and stones, with just a foot of so of potatoes on top for good luck. Sometimes on a wet day you’d see him in a hood improvised from a sack, one corner poked into the other, with the rest of the sack hanging behind, keeping his shoulders dry. He always made you think of the earth, smell the earth when you saw him.
    I was once brought to a sudden halt running in the Glen when round the corner I came face to face with Hughie Bach’s arse, as he bent double to relieve himself, barely screened by a laurel, trousers round his knees. I doubt you ever saw anyone turn whiter in the face, whiter than Hughie’s grey-pink arse, for sure, or beat a hastier retreat than I did that afternoon.
    Or else it was the clopping laundry van, from Laundry