Testimonies: A Novel (3 page)

The rest of the valley was in proportion. It lay deep, wide and smooth between its long enclosing ridges and the stream wound through the brilliant green of the water meadows. There was the bottom of the valley, green, and with a narrow long strip of fields; then the lower gentle slopes, still green but with more brown mixed in the color; a long, horizontal wall and then the slopes rose faster, more and more barren, to boulders, shale and at last to the barbarity of naked rock. Everywhere there were walls, dry-stone walls criss-crossing, walls of enormous length, running up impossible slopes. The whitish spots that I saw on the far slope, peppered the length and breadth of it, right up to the top, were sheep; they could be heard, if one stopped to listen, and their voices came from every quarter, drifting on the wind.

There were the farms, with neat squares of wall by them and a few trees: the one I had been to last night was just under me—absurd to have mistaken the way. They had dove-gray roofs that blended with the outcropping rock; one at least I stared at for several minutes before I saw it at all.

Then there was the huge extent of air. I do not know how it is, but this feeling of the air as a thing with dimensions is peculiar to mountainous countries. Between me and the dark curved ridge that closed the top of the valley there was perhaps three miles of air, perfectly clear, but somehow evident. It was keen, fine air, a pleasure to breathe.

I stepped out briskly for the village, fairly glowing with satisfaction. As I went down the road the other mountain, the mountain in whose side Hafod was wedged, began to loom up behind me. Before, I had been too near to see it, too much under the first slopes. It was not until I was right at the village itself that the head of Penmawr rose up. It was a great high-shouldered mountain, with three ragged peaks; higher by a head and shoulders than the Saeth; imposing in its way, but lacking unity, and for dramatic beauty not to compare.

The long quarry road ran up to its lower side and vanished round a shoulder, to reappear much higher and farther away. My little white box showed just under the road; the sun caught the panes of the two front windows.

I did not see the village until I was almost on top of it. It was in a sheltered corry, hidden from our part of the valley by an overgrown series of hillocks that I took to be a glacial moraine. Below this place the identity of the valley changed; it was savage and rocky, but somehow less satisfactory. There was a crossroads; I turned to the right and there was the village a hundred yards from me, across the stream.

It was a shock. I had not expected anything like it. It was a hard, rectilinear pattern, almost a cross, set on the rising slope of the Saeth ridge. The upright of the cross was the shiny macadam road on which I was walking, the cross-piece a lane running about thirty yards each way. In the lower left-hand space in the cross there was an official-looking building in a bald yard, obviously the school. The chapel stood in the right-hand top space. At the intersection I saw the bright red of the post-office.

As I walked into the village, I saw that all the houses were exactly the same. They were built of slate, thick pieces either cut or left ragged, almost black. The windows were edged with yellow brick. The paint on the woodwork was everywhere a dark, purplish chocolate. There were no gardens at all: the houses rose straight from the earth.

Those were my first impressions: they were mistaken. After I had been to the post-office (they had no tobacco; and in a way I was glad, because I was already ashamed of the weakness of my resolution) I walked about a little more and saw that there were four houses out of the pattern; they had front-door steps and railings. I had not noticed them before because they were overwhelmed by the monstrous chapel, which, like them, was covered with yellow stucco. It was a shocking piece of work: I got used to it, in time, but at first it made me gasp. I can hardly describe it; there is not much point, anyhow. It made a few bows in the direction of English church architecture (English church architecture of the ’80’s) and a few more at each of the classical orders in turn.

The post-office was the only shop; and it did not appear to have much in it—it was not the general store that I had expected.

I wondered what the devil the village was doing there, what was its
raison d’être.
It looked like the outburst of a malignant building lunatic. I was still staring at the chapel when a gentle rain began to fall. At once the gray roofs turned black and the slate walls grew even darker.

I hurried back to avoid a ducking, and as I came to the crossroads I looked at the village again. It was a monstrous thing and it should never have been called a village; but it was not without beauty if you considered the hard lines (harder still now in the rain) and mechanical pattern of stark rectangles and cubes against the unbounded sweep of dissolving mountainside. Still, I was not sorry that it was invisible from Hafod, and that our upper valley was shut clean away from any influence of that kind whatever.

“M
y reason for coming here today, Mr. Lloyd,” he said, “is to ask you to tell me about Pentref. We thought about it for some time and decided that there was no one else so well qualified: ministers come and go, and even if they stayed all the time, I do not know that a minister would be able to see the whole picture so well as the schoolmaster.”

Mr. Lloyd did not answer at once. It was hard to know where to begin: he knew so much about the place—fifty years of his life—he knew so much that the knowledge turned in unconnected fragments in his head.

“If you were to begin by describing the place?”

“Yes. Yes, I will do my best to describe it.”

“Then you might go on to the people.”

Mr. Lloyd cleared his throat. “Well, sir, the village—as you know, perhaps—is almost the highest in Gwynedd. It stands in Cwm Bugail, the valley between the Saeth and Penmawr y Gogledd, about halfway up the valley. The village is not down in the hollow of the valley, because of the floods, but rather up on the slope of the Saeth ridge. The river, it is not more than a stream ordinarily, runs just below the village, by the school, and there is a very old bridge, across it. That is the only old thing in the village, which was built for the big quarry up on Penmawr. It was built by contract in the 1860’s, when the slate trade was doing well. The quarry is almost worked out now, but the village is still full—overcrowded it is, indeed: at least, that is my opinion. There are men who still work in the quarry, keeping the pumps in order, and the old quarrymen with silicosis who have pensions, and there are the grown-up children who go to work in Llanfair or Dinas—it is difficult to find houses near their work. There are twenty-one houses: there are some people who do not like the style, but I prefer things squared off and exact rather than straggling. And there is the school and the chapel. The school is large for a village school, big enough for me to have had a female teacher for the infants. It has a good asphalt yard and slate lavatories; you can see the building from far off because of the big green ventilators.

“We were very proud of the chapel. It was built when the men were earning good money—they worked by bargains then—and it was big enough to hold everybody when we had an eisteddfod. No expense had been spared inside, and a carver had come from Liverpool for the woodwork: it is in the Gothic taste inside; the outside is plainer—it is not stucco, but a patent composition.

“The village does lack some things. There are no shops except for the sub-post-office, and no smithy, and the bus does not come nearer than three miles. But there is the telephone, and the air is very healthy. The schoolmaster’s house has indoor sanitation and a bath in the scullery.

“Then there are the farms. The upper farms, the ones above the bridge, make a whole with the village; the ones below, except for Cletwr, belong more to Pontyfelin, the village down on the main road. They are much older than the village, of course. Some of them are very old-fashioned, and you find the cattle under the same roof as the people and only the big open fire to cook by and the people sleeping in the half-loft, with no doors, but those farms are in the lower part. In the upper part there are three farms; Hendre on the left, nearest the village, owned by Gwilym Thomas, a little farm with not much mountain; then farther up Hendre Uchaf, John Evans. On the other side is Gelli, which is reckoned the best farm. It has not as much mountain as Hendre Uchaf, but it has more arable at the bottom of the valley, and the mountain it has is sheltered, with good enough pasture for them to run some beasts as well as the sheep.

“There are also two cottages in the upper part of the valley, one on each side, about halfway up. The one on the left is Bwthyn-bach, Megan Bowen’s cottage. The other is Hafod; it used to be taken by people for the summer until Mr. Pugh came to live there.

“The other farms by the village and to each side in the valleys next to ours also belong to our community. There are eight—nine if you count Tyddyn Mawr.”

“We might leave them to one side for the moment. It is Gelli that interests me particularly.”

Lloyd gave him a hesitating look and paused before he went on.

“Well, Gelli was the best farm. It was farmed by Armin Vaughan. He came from Cwm y Glo when I was a very young man. I had known him before and we were friends, although he was older than me. I always liked him very much; even when he was young he was quiet, sober and respectable. He came of good parents; they were very poor, but they did their best for their children. He was a strong worker and a religious man: everyone liked him. But he was one of those men things go wrong for: however conscientious he was (and no man could have been more conscientious than Armin Vaughan) some accident would come to spoil his work.

“The very first year he came to Gelli some Liverpool people made a picnic fire up by the far barn and burnt all the hay; then it was found that his cousin Ifan had forgotten to post off the insurance. It was still in the pocket of his best coat. Then another time a dog bit a man in his farmyard and he had to pay all the time the man was in hospital, as well as damages. It was always like that for him, as well as the ordinary misfortunes, like black-leg and fluke in the sheep, foxes, blight on the potatoes, rain for the hay and the corn; he had all of them worse than his neighbors.

“He had taken a big farm with almost no money at all after he had paid for the sheep (the sheep were high the year he came, and they have to be paid for, the ewes on the mountain, as soon as you come in) and he needed two or three good years to put him on his feet. He did not have them, though he worked so hard. The sheep went down; it was terrible for all the farmers, even those with money behind them. But he worked and worked and kept going somehow. He was a good man. He was very much respected in the valley.

“His wife was a big help to him. She was very pretty when she was young; she came from the same part of the country as he did, but I had not known her before she came to our valley.

“They said she was not very great as a housekeeper: however that may be, she was a great help to him. I have seen her early and late, working before the light and after it.

“They did not have a good year until Emyr was born. He was their only child that lived. You would have thought no one had ever had a child before, they were so pleased with him. Things began to go a little better for them after that; not well, but a little better, so they could wind the year round.

“Armin Vaughan worked even harder, with a son to work for. He was a good boy, Emyr; I was fond of him from the start. He came to me at school, of course, and from the beginning he was a good pupil—he was good at Sunday school too, like his father. He was a great improver: I mean he took his lessons with intelligence—I could tell him the principle of things when other boys could only learn examples by rote. There were some boys I liked more although they were not so good, rougher boys like Moses Gwyn and poor John Davies Tŷ-bach, but I was proud of Emyr when the inspector came. Emyr liked me too, and I can give a proof of it: it is a very hard thing to break a boy of the vices that may come on him, and I do not know how it can be done at all unless there is affection on both sides and good spirit in the boy. By break I do not mean just driving the trouble out of sight. Often with my boys I did no more than that, I know, but with Emyr I was more successful. Twice I had to talk to him; once it was about cruelty to a captured bird (it surprised me in him, so tender usually) and once it was about some habits—it is difficult to explain, but they might have grown very unpleasant and dangerous if they had not been corrected before they grew strong and established. I mention this because it shows the confidence between us: he turned from the beginning of this bad way and I never saw any backsliding.

“He was serious as a young fellow; no larking about down to Llan or going with the factory girls at Dinas—indeed I thought that perhaps he was not the marrying kind. The same thought came to his father and mother, and it grieved them; for of course they wanted grandchildren.