Authors: Catrin Collier
‘We don’t have farms like you do here. Not family farms. We have collectives. It’s something like a village,’ he tried to explain, regretting the impulse that had led him to talk about his homeland because it brought memories only too vividly to the forefront of his mind. ‘Everyone lives in one area and they all work the land, take what they need or rather what the government leaves after the quota has been met and most of what they’ve produced has been sent off to the cities.’
‘Then you can have more than one family living there?’
‘Hundreds on the larger ones.’
A farm to Bethan was one of the hill farms on Penycoedcae or over in Maesycoed. She couldn’t imagine a farm big enough to hold hundreds of families. ‘Did you live on a farm?’
‘No, but I grew up in a village that had many farmers.’
‘And it became a ... a collective?’
‘Not exactly.’ Charlie retreated into his shell. He wasn’t ready to talk about his past, but didn’t want to rebuff Bethan. He hadn’t talked to anyone like this since Evan had been sent to jail, and he hadn’t realised just how much he’d missed him. He returned to the easy chair and lit another cigarette. ‘Have you heard about my shop?’
‘I’ve heard about nothing else for weeks from Will.’
‘I hope to open the doors next week. That way we can start trading, and hopefully making some money to offset my outlay.’
‘William told me there’s a flat with a bathroom upstairs.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you moving in there?’ She dreaded his reply.
Money wasn’t a problem at the moment. Between the lodgers’ rent money, the little that Eddie brought in, and her pound a week they were managing. But she knew that without her money her father would be hard pushed to meet the mortgage, and the loss of Charlie’s would be almost as disastrous. He was that rare being in Pontypridd: a lodger with a steady job who was also easy going, and always ready to lend a hand. There were women who’d throw their husbands out of the house to make room for a steady, sober man like Charlie.
‘No.’ He looked at her in bewilderment, and she was relieved to see that the thought of leaving the Avenue hadn’t crossed his mind.
‘I’m glad to hear it. We’d hate to lose you.’
‘If you want me to go ...’
‘I’d hate for you to go. We need you, Charlie, and I don’t mean your money. With Dad away I don’t know what we’d do without you. At times like this, for instance.’
‘I’ve asked Alma Moore if she’ll work in the shop. In the back, superintending the cooking. I was hoping she and her mother would live in the flat.’
‘You’re going to rent the flat to Alma Moore?’
‘She’s always been a good worker for the Ronconis, I thought I could do worse.’
‘You could do a lot worse,’ Bethan said thoughtfully, recalling the rumours Diana had talked about, ‘but then, from what little William’s told me about the flat, so could she.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d call into the shop and give me your opinion on what we’ve done so far and what needs doing before I open the doors?’
‘I don’t know anything about shops.’
‘You do from a customer’s point of view. I don’t even know how many chairs I should have for shoppers to sit on.’
‘If there’s room, at least three.’
‘Why three?’
‘One for tired invalids, one for ladies who think they’re important and one for children to climb on.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought of that.’
‘Don’t underestimate the children. They’ll drag their parents into any shop where there’s a chance of a free taste of food.’
‘That’s something else I hadn’t thought of. It could prove expensive,’ he mused, visualising slices of his best ham cut up into thin slivers as “tasters” and disappearing down the throats of the town’s half-starved urchins.
‘What are you going to be selling?’
‘Cooked meats, pies ...’
‘Pastry stars.’
He looked at her uncomprehendingly.
‘Get whoever does the cooking for you to make shapes out of the leftover pastry. If you really want to attract a crowd, mix some stale leftover cheese with it. Lots of shops do them in London.’
‘Cheap giveaway.’
‘Provided you don’t try to feed the town.’
‘Thanks for the tip, but you’ll still call into the shop?’
‘As soon as I get a chance.’
‘I’d better get back to the front parlour before Phyllis wakes up and finds Rhiannon alone.’ He picked up his coat from the chair. Tucking it under one arm he pulled down his shirt-sleeves and buttoned them up.
‘And I’d better clear the dishes.’ She brushed past him as she went to the kitchen window and pulled the curtains open. A pale light shone low over the garden, peeling back the darkness from the ground. ‘Another hour and dawn will break.’
‘You’ve seen in the dawn before?’
‘Often when I was working in the hospital.’
‘Of course. I forgot you worked nights as a nurse.’
‘I’d almost forgotten it myself.’
‘I used to watch the dawn break over the sea when it was my turn to take watch. It’s different out there. At least when it’s not raining. Colder, clearer and brighter than it is on land, especially in the North Sea.’
‘Were you a sailor long?’
‘A while,’ he answered evasively.
‘In between living in Russia and here?’
‘Yes.’ He shrugged his coat over his massive shoulders and stepped into the hall. ‘I’ll close this door behind me. It’s getting colder and you’ll need to keep the heat in. Phyllis and the little one will be waking up soon.’
Bethan opened the drawer at the bottom of the stove. It was choked with white-hot, powdery ash. As she went out to the washhouse to look for the ash bin she wondered how well one human being ever really knew another.
Particularly where a man like Charlie was concerned.
They started arriving before dawn. Small children, shabbily and inadequately dressed in torn jerseys, faded shorts and cotton skirts, knocked Rhiannon’s front door and handed over plates of Welsh cakes and fruit cakes that were more flour and fat than fruit, with whispers of ‘Mam says she’s very sorry, and she’ll be over later.’
Bethan stacked the cakes on plates in the pantry and marvelled at the speed of the Graig grapevine. Either Trevor had let something slip at the house of the bronchitis patient, or a neighbour had seen the undertaker’s hearse and spread the word.
It soon seemed as though every family on the Graig knew that Rhiannon had passed on. At eight o’clock the women began to arrive, and the gifts of food from their meagre stores mounted. Those who hadn’t lit their stoves that day brought pots of home-made blackberry jam and cold bowls of "cawl" made with the cheapest, scraggiest of scrag-ends of lamb, ‘to be heated up later to save the poor girl cooking at a time like this’.
By the time Phyllis had roused, washed and dressed herself and her son, the callers had begun to arrive in earnest. Bethan and Charlie took it in turns to corpse-sit and make tea, trying to look as though they were listening attentively as the neighbours repeated the same trite phrases over and over again.
‘So sorry to hear the news.’
‘But then she was a good age, wasn’t she?’
‘How old was she, by the way?’
‘Would have been eighty next month!’
‘Well then, that’s all any of us can really expect, isn’t it?’
Even the women who had shunned Phyllis came, but they took care to make it abundantly clear that they called only out of respect for Rhiannon.
The cakes in the pantry were brought out, cut and distributed on Rhiannon’s best china plates.
Brian, totally bewildered by the influx of alien people into his home, sat on his own small chair in the corner next to the stove, solemnly eating cake for breakfast and pocketing the halfpennies handed to him by one or two of the women who had working husbands. He knew from the quiver in his mother’s voice and the tears that hovered perilously close to the surface of her red-rimmed eyes that he had to be extra good, so he bravely concealed his excitement at the very first money he’d ever owned.
‘Well, I am sorry to hear the news and no mistake. Mind you, not that it’s unexpected, but you must be devastated all the same.’ Mrs Richards walked into the kitchen through the washhouse door just as Myra Jones; Phyllis’s next-door neighbour was leaving, and just in time to take possession of the easy chair. Now she was enthroned as though she had taken root. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ she asked Phyllis, who sat white faced and drawn in the chair opposite.
‘Not really, Mrs Richards,’ Phyllis replied softly. ’Bethan and Charlie have done everything.’
‘Well they won’t be here to help this afternoon, but then neither will I,’ Mrs Richards announced. She glanced at the women crowded into the room in the hope that someone would ask why she wouldn’t be around. When no question came she volunteered the information in a piercing voice that made Bethan cringe. ‘It’s prison visiting. The first since they sentenced my Vivian and Evan Powell. Martyrs, that’s what they are. Martyrs to the Communist cause,’ she repeated, conveniently forgetting her husband’s Fascist leanings, which would gain her no sympathy in this company.
‘Bethan, you must be exhausted, and you must have things to do at home.’ Phyllis followed Bethan as she went to fill the kettle and get away from the chattering throng in the kitchen. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done. I don’t know how I would have managed without you.’
‘I will go now if you don’t mind,’ Bethan said wearily. ‘But I’ll be back tonight, and in the meantime I’ll send Diana over.’
‘There’s no need ...’
‘You’re going to need someone to organise that lot for you,’ Bethan jerked her head towards the kitchen door. ‘And I can’t think of anyone better than Diana. She’s her mother’s daughter in more ways than one. If anyone can get Mrs Richards off the topic of her Viv, and out of that chair, it’s Diana.’
Bethan was cheered by the sight of a tight smile crossing Phyllis’s face. It wasn’t much, but it was the first sign of animation since Rhiannon had died.
There was barely time for Bethan to wash and change herself and the baby before they had to leave for Cardiff. She stumbled down the Graig hill between Charlie and Eddie like a sleepwalker, wondering how she had ever managed to work a full night shift in the Graig Hospital when she had been doing her midwifery, and then go out all day with Andrew.
All she wanted now was to put her feet up. Even the prospect of a bus seat seemed like deep luxury, but because it was a Sunday with an uncertain local service they had to walk down to Broadway to be sure of getting a connection.
Edmund, normally so placid, became fretful as a cold wind whistled up the Cardiff Road and through the inadequate cover of the shelter. When the bus finally came, the only seats available were the hard wooden slatted ones at the back that were usually reserved for labourers dressed in their working clothes.
They jolted painfully over every pot-hole in the road between Pontypridd and Cardiff, and long before they reached Taffs Well Bethan would have believed anyone who told her that the bus company had switched to wooden tyres to save money.
The closer they drew to Cardiff the more peevish the baby became. Worried in case he was sickening for something, Bethan became irritable herself.
Eddie took Edmund from her to give her a break, and jiggled him up and down in his arms, but the child refused to be placated, and Bethan greeted the conductor’s bell with heartfelt relief when they finally reached the stop closest to the prison.
They walked up the road in silence, then Bethan stopped, stunned by the number of people who were standing outside waiting to go in. Mrs Richards and her son Glan must have caught an earlier bus, for they were well up the front of the queue. Behind them pale-faced mothers coped as best they could with children that ranged from clinging, whining babies to fully grown boys and girls who were passing the time by fighting and spitting at one another.
Old women stood patiently in line as they dabbed at their eyes and noses with damp, grubby handkerchiefs. Young men, hands thrust deep in trouser pockets, talked loudly amongst themselves and tried to look nonchalant, as though visiting prison was nothing special, simply an everyday event in their lives and nothing to be ashamed of.
‘Ten minutes to wait,’ Eddie murmured as they halted at the end of the queue.
‘Yoo-hoo! Bethan! Eddie! Charlie!’ Mrs Richards waved vigorously from the head of the line.
‘I’ll kill that woman one of these days,’ Eddie muttered darkly.
‘They’ll want to search us before they’ll let us in,’ Charlie warned.
‘You’ve visited prison before?’ Bethan asked.
‘With Diana and William. They’ll go through everything you’ve brought for Evan as well.’
‘It’s only tobacco and Welsh cakes.’
‘They’ll still want to examine them.’
A grating of bolts galvanised everyone. A small wooden door set in the left-hand side of one of the two massive wooden doors that closed off the prison yard opened, and an acid-faced, black-suited warder stepped over the wooden stoop on to the pavement.
‘Form an orderly queue there. Step lively,’ he shouted, and the ragged crowd of visitors lined up in tight formation.
‘The sooner we do as he asks, the sooner we’ll get in,’ Eddie suggested hopefully, pushing into line.
Charlie, who knew better, stood protectively at Bethan’s side. The warder watched as they waited for what seemed like hours, although the hands on Charlie’s pocket watch ticked off only five minutes.
Finally the warder capitulated and allowed the first half a dozen people through the door. The queue shuffled forward with interminable slowness.
Bethan fixed her attention on the door and waited. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see inside. To be shown straight into a room where her father would be sitting, waiting for them perhaps? A clean, bright airy room like the waiting room in the workhouse which was always being painted by the inmates in order to make a good impression on any influential visitors? Would she be allowed to hug her father? Hold his hand? Hand him the baby?
A second warder appeared in the gateway and ushered the small group that they were a part of into a bleak, empty, stone-lined ante-room to the left of the gate. A barred iron door crashed shut behind them, penning them in like sheep. Frustrated and disappointed she had to stand and wait again, trying to make sense of the noises that she could hear from the open yard she had caught a glimpse of on her way through the door.
A series of ‘Move along there’, ‘What’s this then?’ and ‘You can go’ couched in brusque, masculine tones echoed into the room. After another ten minutes of frustrating inactivity the door finally opened and they were herded along a path that cut a straight line between raised flowerbeds adorned with the shrivelled, spidery arms of hibernating plants.
‘Move along there.’
Charlie drew close to Bethan. Taking her arm he steered her across an open yard hemmed in by the towering grey blocks of the prison.
‘All bags, parcels and gifts for the prisoners to be left here.’
Bethan shivered despite the thick flannel shawl that was wrapped around the baby and herself.
The yard was more sheltered than the pavement, but it was still icy with the chill of an atmosphere that was rarely, if ever, touched by the warmth of the sun. Charlie guided her and Eddie towards one of four tables set out in the bleak courtyard, and they stood in line yet again, waiting while the warders tore open the bundles and parcels of those in front of them.
Bethan watched as the warders broke a fruit cake into crumbs, turned a bible upside down and shook it until the pages fluttered free of the spine, and spread the contents of a tobacco tin so thinly over a sheet of white paper that half the strands were lost in the breeze that fluttered, trapped between the walls of the buildings.
‘Your baby, Miss?’
Bethan stared uncomprehendingly at the hatchet-faced warder facing her.
‘It’s Mrs. Mrs John. Her husband’s a doctor so you’d better watch your mouth,’ Eddie snarled angrily.
‘Didn’t mean anything by the remark, son,’ the warder said easily.
‘And I’m not your son either.’
‘Eddie, it’s all right. They’re just doing their job,’ Charlie interrupted smoothly, realising that although Bethan and Eddie were both intimidated by the uniformed men and bleak surroundings, they were coping in very different ways. Bethan had sought refuge in silence and Eddie was, as usual, trying to conceal his feelings behind a front of open aggression.
‘Your baby, madam,’ the officer repeated with elaborate courtesy. ‘I have to check his shawl and his clothes. Sorry, it’s customary procedure.’
‘Can’t we go inside? He isn’t well and it’s freezing out here.’
‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’
Bethan reluctantly unwound the shawl and handed it to the man. He held it by the corner and shook it, while she opened her coat and pushed the baby inside, close to her shivering body.
‘I’m sorry, madam, but I have to check the baby’s clothes as well. You can keep hold of him.’
Bethan held out Edmund and the man ran his fingers over his tiny frame.
‘Now you, madam.’
‘Here, give the baby to me.’ Charlie retrieved the shawl from the warder and wound it inexpertly around the baby, who’d begun to whimper. The warder ran his hands down the sides of Bethan’s coat and asked her to empty her pockets.
She laid a comb, handkerchief and sixpence in change on the table.
‘You can go the other side of the table, madam, but you’ll have to wait while I examine your bag and parcels.’
Bethan took the baby from Charlie, and huddling in what little shelter the wall afforded, wrapped both herself and Edmund in the shawl. She soon saw that the warder had been quick with her. He certainly took his time over inspecting her handbag and Eddie and Charlie’s clothes, asking them to empty shirt, trouser and coat pockets, as well as checking and double-checking the turn-ups on their trousers.
The parcel Bethan had prepared for her father received his attention last of all. The Welsh cakes she had wrapped so carefully between layers of greaseproof paper in an old biscuit tin were emptied out and broken up, every single one of them, into three pieces.
‘For God’s sake what do you think we’re going to hide in a Welsh cake?’ Eddie complained bitterly.
‘You’d be surprised, lad. You’d be surprised,’ the warder echoed, totally unaffected by Eddie’s irritation.
He fingered the crumbs then scooped them back into the tin. He opened the tobacco, peeled back the outer covering and prodded the contents, before stripping away the gold leaf and shifting the brown strands from one side of the pack to the other.
‘Prisoner visitors through the double doors and along the corridor on the right,’ he barked when he was finally satisfied that the tobacco and cakes were what they appeared to be.
Charlie took Bethan’s arm as they walked through a doorway flanked by two more warders.
The corridor was painted dark green; the walls and tiled floor looked clean but the air stank of male sweat and stale urine. The passage opened out into a small hallway bisected by a row of desks. Two warders sat behind each one, bellowing the same questions as the visitors approached.
‘Name? Age? Address? Name of prisoner to be visited?’
‘Damn it all, anyone would think we were the ones who’d committed a crime,’ Eddie said as they joined yet another column of shuffling people.
‘No more than two visitors to a prisoner,’ a warder said sharply to Bethan, Eddie and Charlie when they finally reached the end of their line.
‘Does the baby count?’ Eddie countered truculently.
‘Infants under one year don’t count as visitors,’ the man replied, straight-faced.
‘Can we change over after ten minutes?’ Charlie asked, knowing full well from visits to Megan that changeovers were allowed.
‘You’ll have to keep an eye on the time yourself. Next.’