The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Read online

  ‘East Wales Fusiliers, is it?’ Siencyn repeated. ‘Well, well. Third class?’

  ‘When is it?’ Marged asked.

  ‘Friday next, 21st inst.,’ Dafis said. ‘Take your identity card, Siencyn bach, don’t forget that, now. Or it’s C.B. you’ll be right from the word go.’

  ‘Jawch,’ said Siencyn, ‘there’s a lot to remember, Dafis. Where’s my identity card, Marged? In the poe in the spare room, is it?’

  ‘And your birth certificate is there,’ she said, knowing where to put her hands on things. ‘You’ll have to find somewhere else to keep your things from now on, Siencyn bach.’

  ‘Aye, that’s true,’ he said, rubbing his tangled hair. ‘Well, I better go round and tell everybody.’

  ‘Don’t trouble,’ Dafis said. ‘I’ll tell them on my round. Stay you, my boy. I’ll come down to-night and give you a bit of wisdom, see? Four years of it in the last war I had, and no more for me thank you.’ He looked at his right hand, from which three fingers were missing. ‘German sniper did that,’ he said proudly, and then screwed up his red bunioned face into a wink. ‘Held it up above the parapet, see, Siencyn, and got a nice little blighty. But there, you don’t know what a parapet is yet, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘I’ll learn,’ Siencyn said, with all the good will in the world.

  ‘You will,’ Dafis said, speaking with the sardonic finality of experience. ‘Solong both.’

  ‘Solong, Dafis, thank you,’ Siencyn said.

  Dafis pushed his bicycle off, the cycle clips pulling his small trousers up nearly to his knees. He wore a straw boater all the year round, Dafis did.

  The third winter of the war was just relaxing its grip on this closed corner of Cardiganshire; six weeks of frost had held up the winter ploughing and the spring sowing, and Siencyn had been having a soft time of it, lying in bed in the mornings, chopping a bit of firewood, mending a few broken scythes and shafts, patching up the cowsheds of his employer, cutting enough hay for the drayhorses, and a pint or two some nights. He had been medically examined and registered a whole year back, but his call-up was deferred for the summer harvest and the autumn trapping, – Siencyn was the offical trapper of the parish and sent four hundred and thirty-seven rabbits to Cardigan station, Great Western, in five weeks, – and then the winter ploughing. He had got tired of waiting, restless and unable to merge himself in his work and the weather and the requirements of the horses and of Marged. He was a good-natured man, but out of patience with things. He had quarrelled with Marged a lot this winter, beating her once, leaping out of bed on a Sunday morning when the cracked church bell was tolling, and beating her for calling him an idle heathen. And she used her tongue on him for that. Said that people were saying things about them. What things? She shrugged her shoulders. Once he’d cleared out of the way, they were saying, perhaps they’d discover before a year was out whose fault it was there were no babies coming in their house. Well, that wasn’t a nice thing to say, and it says a lot for Siencyn’s good nature that he only shrugged his shoulders and said pity they hadn’t got more important things to think about than that. She didn’t use the rough edge of her tongue on him again, but she was very secretive and moody all the winter. He didn’t worry about her; he’d go and she’d stay behind; she was his wife; there you are; nobody is indispensable; she wouldn’t want to leave the place she’d been born in, whether he went or not. It was different with him. He wanted to see the world. Lots of the boys from round about went into the merchant navy; either the sea or the land it was with all the boys. And he held it a grudge that his widowed mother had kept him home to work at odd jobs instead of letting him go to sea. His father must have been an old soft, too; he wasn’t wounded and he wasn’t ill in the last war. He just died. Ran home three times from the army, and then died in detention barracks. Heart-broken, his mother said. Well, what a complaint for a man!

  Nobody had a bad word for Siencyn, except that he was idle and fond of his drink and irregular as a christian and not reliable for doing a job or fetching you something from market or being prompt at the chapel concert rehearsals. So, when he went round to say solong, everybody was sorry to see him go and genuinely hoped the army would make a man of him before it got him killed. Old Mari Siop, who had a soft spot for anybody in trousers, said she thought strong men like him ought to stay at home in case the Irish attacked us. And he had a real good walk-round, ending up at the Ship hotel, saying good-bye and drinking basin after basin of tea in the cottages and then a pint all round on the house. This was on his last night, and you wouldn’t believe the offers he had to knit comforts for him, and old drovers and flannel vests fetched out of the cupboards where they had lain since their wearers had died. He took them all, and all that he didn’t drop on the way down from the pub he carried into the kitchen where Marged was sitting doing nothing by the wood fire. She was cross with him for taking them; they’d be saying how she couldn’t look after her husband’s pants even. She was always seeing the worst side of everything these days. She was almost fit to cry with desperation over a little thing like that.

  So they had a bit of bread and milk for supper, not saying anything at all. Then he fetched the money from under the bed upstairs and counted it out, five pounds thirteen and four, and divided it into two piles, three pounds thirteen for her and two pounds for himself. And then he got up and very clumsily and hesitantly smoothed her hair back. She was vexed, and said what a mess she was, all untidy and fat-getting, and she bent her head forward as if she was feeling bad; and she was all white and her eyes were yellow and suffused with watery blood. He was shifting from one foot to the other, uneasy about what to do, and she wouldn’t say a thing one way or the other. Dumb she was.

  And he was thinking how happy everything and everybody had been when he went round the farms this afternoon, and now Marged spoiling it all. But when she looked up at him, raised her head to him slowly as if there was a millstone round her neck, and then stood up with her arms raised a little, and said that Welsh word to him that she hadn’t said since they were courting, then he knew it was a million times better to feel black and torn in pieces like this than to be laughing and drinking tea and saying the Germans wouldn’t last long now he was in too. He picked her up, and she wasn’t heavy any more; and carried her up the creaking stairs as if she was a young virgin. Only she was better than a virgin, her fine big body which his big shivering hands slowly divested of the red jersey and thick skirt and woollen stocking and flannel vests that she wore on it winter and summer. The moon was out and the river ringing on the stones and the old jollyboy owls crying goodywhoo in the wood, and he knew he’d been waiting for this for a whole year, to say good-bye to Marged like this. And she lay warm and silken and trembling under his huge hands and she heard neither the river nor the owls but only him grunting and breathing in her mouth and in her ears and something gentle at last opening inside her, like a baby begging her to receive it in.

  Onions she boiled for his breakfast the next morning, and two hard-boiled eggs and a whole small loaf uncut for his pocket, and off he set, six miles to walk to Cardigan station. Dafis the postman had forgotten to bring him some stamped addressed envelopes, but he had found a letter in the grandfather clock with their address on it. He didn’t know how to write the address himself, but somebody would copy it off this old letter for him when he got there, no doubt. So everything was alright. Plenty of wood left for the fire and Marged walking to the crossroads with him, and the weather crisp and young, the cockerels crowing all the way in to Cardigan station, and Dai Pencwm passing him on the road giving him the benediction of the big pew. His heart was like a feather, walking like this through his own countryside, seeing the sea through gates in the sandy hedges, and singing Dr Parry’s Jerusalem to himself which was this year’s test piece at the Eisteddfod, and feeling a free man, as if he owned the place and no need to pick up a shovel nor a scythe nor the handles of the plough …

  There were other men like him on the train t
he last part of the journey, from Swansea. But they were different to him, smoking cigarettes and wearing posh navy suits and pointy shoes, with white silk scarves and grease in their hair. He sat a long way from them and he felt hot and uneasy. But when they got there it was all in together and fags out and form up in threes with a soldier showing you how with a silver-knobbed cane, and march through the streets into the barracks. Then he lost direction and control, there were so many things and people. He knew how to sign his name, S. Jones, where they told him, but they wouldn’t give him enough time to do it in, and he had to keep on signing in every room they went into, whereas he had never signed his name more than twice a week before, on the dole that was. But he was doing pretty well out of it; same as last night everybody was giving him things – mug, knife, fork, spoon, blankets, bag for straw, khaki suit, leggings, boots, cap, and lots of straps that he didn’t know what for. And then a rifle and a bayonet. You didn’t take long to become a soldier, for a fact. Then they had a good meal in the cookhouse, with girls in khaki doing for them, and then the most of them went out for a booze, and cursing everything they were when there were no corporals about. But Siencyn didn’t open his mouth, and he was frightened a bit because he’d lost count of what was happening, and he wanted to lie down and sleep, being suddenly very weak and shaky and yawning all the time. As for Marged and all them at home, they didn’t exist any more. It was all up with them, there was no doubt.

  ‘You’re looking buggered, Jack,’ a dark man said, sitting on the floor cleaning his rifle in the empty barrack room.

  Siencyn, like a frightened animal, watched him suspiciously.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It isn’t worth worrying about this lot here,’ the man said. ‘They don’t count in this war. They’re all peace-time soldiers. They don’t know what the war’s about, they only want to stay here and shout on the square and take the tarts out. You keep your head up. Don’t pay any attention to them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Siencyn not understanding much except that the man was friendly, ‘that is so far a fact.’

  The man began cleaning his buttons with a button stick and silvo. ‘I’ll learn you how to do things,’ he said. ‘They don’t mean anything, all the things they do here, but you might as well do them properly, just to show them there’s nothing in it, and then get on out somewhere where there is a war.’

  ‘You been a soldier before, is it?’ Siencyn asked, friendly with him now, like a dog that barks first, then growls, then wags its tail and sidles up.

  ‘Not in this army, mate. I fought two years in Spain, though. Seen a bit of it then, like.’

  ‘For a living, is it?’ Siencyn asked, shifting up, willing to listen.

  ‘No, not for a living,’ the man laughed. ‘A collier I am for a living, when the pits are open. Collier, stay-in striker, party member, anything’s better than keeping a greyhound, chum.’

  ‘Spanish they speak in Spain?’ Siencyn asked.

  ‘No, not much now. German and Italian they speak there now. But it doesn’t matter much there now.’

  ‘This war will do for me alright,’ Siencyn said. ‘Farm labourer I am, see, and trapper.’

  ‘That’s right. You keep to the plough, mate. It’s only a knife in your back or a few years in jail or no work and no friends you’ll get if you start doing what you believe in. I’ve never had time to marry a wife, and yet I’ve never done nothing I can show.’

  ‘I’m married,’ Siencyn said. ‘It isn’t very much of a thing; only down our way you got to get married if you want any peace, see.’ The man smiled, and Siencyn smiled back, and then sat thinking of the thing he’d just said.

  ‘No girl in the valleys would take me on,’ the man said. ‘They want a steady man, see. I’m an anarchist. I won’t go and live in two rooms and feed my kids on bread and dripping and make them sell the Football Echo and read the race results in the paper and shout hooray in the park on Labour Day.’

  Well, well, thought Siencyn, this is a different life to mine, and what it all is I don’t know. But I wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of this man, because he is like the prophet Ezekiel, and he can kill people by seizing their wickedness in his hands and squeezing it till they choke.

  And Siencyn became devoted to this man, and he wasn’t afraid of all the things that happened to him in the next few weeks.

  Well, Siencyn became 283749551 Private Jones, S., before you could look round, and the nickname he went by was Timoshenko, which was something like Shenkin, his own name. And the first morning he wore his battledress he had to take it all off and lift his shirt and cough and bare his arm and have a needle in it, all in a whirl, walking round the room with all the others because there was no time to sit down and no furniture, not like waiting for the doctor at home. And then they all walked past a man in a white apron standing on a stool and they had to open their mouths for him and when he looked in Siencyn’s mouth, he said ‘Christ! Take the lot out. Top and bottom plate for this man. Ever used a toothbrush?’ Siencyn said yes, because he’d used one in the infants’ school, but he wasn’t a kid any more so of course he hadn’t used one since. He was a married man now. Jawch!

  He was very bad after that, with a big swelling under his arm, and he crawled into his bunk like a sick animal and lay there till he was better, which was a day later. And then he had all his top teeth out, and his new boots were hurting something wicked, and he didn’t have a handkerchief to wipe his bleeding mouth which was dripping into the tin of potatoes he was scraping, and the sergeant called him a dirty something and the next morning he was marched into a room and the officer looked fierce at him and said ‘283749551 Jones, S. Is that your name?’ And he was told by the officer to get a shake on and wake his ideas up and not to come back to him again or look out. And Siencyn said he didn’t want to come back to him again, not likely, and then he saluted the way he’d seen them do it, and he’d have smiled just to show there was no ill feeling, only his mouth was full of blood. And when he got back to his bunk and they asked him how he got on, he grinned – because he’d spat the blood out on the way back – and said ‘The bastard!’ And that made everyone laugh and slap his back and say he was a bloody good soldier already, calling the O.C. a bastard like that. And he always called everybody a bastard after that if they said anything rough to him, which was nearly always, and he felt better straight away then.

  After he’d been there a fortnight and getting on famous with the boys and not too bad with the sergeants, and knowing how to slope and present, and halt and start up again, and fix bayonets and standing load, and unload, and two weeks wages, ten shillings a time, a telegram came for him, and that made him hot and excited and the centre of every eye, as you might say. But it was only Marged wanting to know if he was alright, because on account of forgetting to bring Dafis’s stamped addressed envelopes he hadn’t written home, not liking to ask any of the boys to copy the old address out for him; and no news is good news, isn’t it? But the O.C. sent for him again and asked him if he had quarrelled with his wife or what, and told him it was bad for civilian morale not to write regularly and tell them you was getting on fine. So he confided to Daniel Evans from Spain and Dan wrote a letter for him in two shakes and addressed it and they posted it together on the way to the Naffy, and Dan said why hadn’t he asked him before, it was nothing to him and he’d write Siencyn’s letters regular for him. If he wasn’t such a good man and a good scholar and knew everything about fighting and mining and unemployed and capitalists, Siencyn would have grabbed him by the waist and wrestled with him the same as they used to do in the country when they was boys in school and big friends.

  And at the end of three weeks the whole issue of them was sent off by train to the east coast of England to finish their training in a battalion that was short of men and wanted them handy in case of invasion. And in this new place it was the same as before only worse if anything. They had a new sergeant-major who shouted like a bull and you could
smell his breath when he shouted. He came up close and shouted in your face, so you could only think he was a bastard, he was too near for you to mutter it. But their sergeant didn’t like the sergeant-major and told the boys that he was separated from his wife for stripping her and thinking out dirty things to do to her, and he was only shouting like that because he wanted to keep in with the colonel. So Siencyn didn’t bother about the sergeant-major shouting, now he knew there was no religion in him. But some of the boys that you’d have thought wouldn’t care a bit – boys always boasting about what they’d done, big breaks in billiards, supper in married women’s houses and that – they became like shivering wet rats after a bit and the sergeant-major used to pick on them all the time and shout at them till they shivered all over, only with Siencyn and Spain he never bothered at all. And as for the sergeant, well, he couldn’t keep a straight face on parade with Siencyn. And when Siencyn caught a rabbit one day out on an exercise by putting his hand in a hole where he knew a rabbit was, and gave it to the sergeant to give to the grass widow he was always telling them about, the sergeant was always kind to him after that. Siencyn couldn’t remember all the names on the Bren gun and the mortar and the 36-grenade and the anti-tank rifle and war gases and all that. So the sergeant never asked him the names when they were being tested.

  The only fly in the ointment was the officer in charge of them. Not the young one, he was alright, nobody bothered about him; but the one with the three pips that walked around all day looking at everybody; and when he stopped in front of you on parade he grunted and muttered to himself and then told you what a bloody army you were to be sure. Siencyn didn’t like the smell of him, and he didn’t feel strong in front of him the same as with the other sergeants and officers.

  Everybody was frightened of him, yet they all said he didn’t know his job and ought to be sacked. And there were lots of stories about what he did in the nights with his spare time, but still Siencyn couldn’t stand up to him. Not even when he found out that the colonel could make the captain shiver like a rat the way the captain did to those under him. And one day, when their training was over and they were taking part in brigade schemes and defending aerodromes and building dannert fences and laughing at the Home Guard like hardened regulars, the captain sent for Siencyn and said ‘I hear you’re a country bumpkin, Jones.’ And Siencyn said ‘I live in Penyrheol, Cards, sir.’ And the Captain said, ‘I hear you were a poacher, Jones?’ And Siencyn said ‘Trapper, sir.’ And the Captain said, ‘I’m putting you to work in the Officers’ Mess, to catch rabbits and partridges for dinner, and you will be my batman; and if there’s any silvo on my uniform or you get caught with a dead partridge trespassing, I’ll break your bloody spine, do you understand?’ And Siencyn wasn’t brave enough to say no, so he said ‘Yes, sir.’