and looked up.
‘Evening!’ I said.
There was no answer.
He was a fully grown man, maybe fifty or so, doing a man’s chore. But there was something about him that suggested a boy. It was difficult to say what it was, his demeanour perhaps, or his wardrobe – something about the cut or style of his clothes told you, in a way you couldn’t define, that here was a man in his fifties who was still dressed every morning by his mother. A man who lives his life in the feverish embrace, in too close and suffocating a communion with a mother’s love. A man who says little except for occasional grunts, and whom people refer to as ‘one of God’s children’. Until the time, that is, when the sheriff arrives late at night at the back door with a posse of men with frightened faces. The family sit in scared silence round the supper table, listening as Mother talks long and low under the porch. Then she comes back, her face having aged ten years in the space of that conversation, and says, ‘Billy will be going away for a while.’ And the men come in and take him away, their eyes narrowed and glittering with hate; and Mummy has no one else to dress and must face the terrors of this world alone.
I knocked on the door and Tadpole opened with the air of someone who has been peering impatiently through the curtains for the past hour. Yet when you finally arrive she makes you wait before answering to make it appear that she has forgotten that you were coming. The smell of Tadpole’s house was a sour mixture of infrequently washed flesh, soot, onions and dripping smells from the pantry; and the stultifying thickness of air breathed in rooms where the windows had years ago been sealed shut by paint, and the only fresh air that arrives enters via the chimney.
I’m not sure exactly what I had expected. A gauche attempt at dolling up, perhaps; a moth-eaten dress stored in the back of a wardrobe in a room no longer used; a dress last seen in a sepia vignette of Gran and Granddad on a day trip to Llandudno. But I was wrong. She was wearing military uniform. She had black trousers, sharply creased, with red piping down the inseam; a black military tunic with gold braid on the sleeves and epaulettes and medals on the chest. The whole ensemble mirrored in the brightly polished convex toes of her shoes. She looked like a bandsman who plays the French horn in a gazebo on Sunday afternoons. Her hair, the colour of wet straw, was parted manstyle and plastered down with something that might have been Brylcreem but could just as easily have been beef dripping. In the porch light I saw with grisly fascination that little flakes of dandruff were scattered in the furrow of her parting, like cornflakes from Lilliput.
She noted my surprise and mistook it for delight. ‘Not bad, huh?’ she said doing a pirouette. ‘I felt really stupid trying on a frock so I thought I would wear my Soldiers for Jesus uniform. It’s the one we wear for ceremonial occasions.’
She led me into the small sitting room. Her mum was sitting in an armchair at the fireside, knitting. She gave me a look of appraisal but registered no verdict on her face, neither approval or disapproval.
‘Mum, this is Louie, remember? The boy from my class in school.’
Again there was no hint as to how she received the news. The man from outside came in and Tadpole’s mum said something to him in Welsh and he went to the kitchen and started to brew tea. In the light of the sitting room I saw his face had a strange brightness which suggested that, although he watched the same events through the windows of his eyes as the rest of us, the narrative he invented to explain them was utterly alien.
I stood by the fireplace and, because no one spoke, said: ‘Was that a grave I saw outside under the washing line?’
‘Yes,’ said Tadpole. ‘It was the lodger.’
‘What did he die of?’
‘Happiness.’
There was another silence and I examined a photo above the fireplace. It was a school photo from long ago. ‘Upper School 1927’, said the caption. I ran my gaze across the sea of lost faces, faded into fuzzy black-and-white and no doubt many of them faded into the grave by now. In the back row there was a face that stopped me. It seemed vaguely familiar and there was a vicious pin right through it, between the eyes. I stopped and peered closer.
‘It’s Mrs Llantrisant,’ said Tadpole brightly.
I touched the pin. ‘Is this witchcraft?’
‘Yeah. Mum’s trying to whack her.’
‘Mrs Llantrisant used to swab my step,’ I said stupidly.
‘We know. Now she’s run away to the circus with Herod Jenkins.’
‘Mrs Llantrisant is a nasty old busybody,’ said Tadpole’s mum.
Tadpole took me upstairs and showed me her room. It was a shrine to Clip. The walls were festooned with memorabilia: film posters, publicity shots, Clip scarves and Clip toys. In pride of place over a bed with a Clip coverlet was a framed paw print. ‘It’s real,’ said Tadpole. ‘The man at the museum did it for me with the stuffed Clip. What do you reckon?’
‘It’s fantastic,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I think so too. Mum says I love Clip almost as much as I love Jesus.’
‘High praise coming from a Soldier for Jesus.’
‘Ha ha, Louie you’re so funny.’
All tickets for the movie had long ago been sold, but Meirion in his role as
‘Never give a man what he wants until you’ve had all you want,’ she said wisely. ‘If I tell you now you might run off, mightn’t you?’
‘Of course I wouldn’t,’ I said and prayed no one I knew would pass by and see me with Tadpole. I cursed the slow progress of the queue.
At the entrance to the cinema Tadpole pointed to the posters and said, ‘Oh, look at that.’
It was a poster for the circus. The guy with the paste and broom still having had no luck with the horizontal crease in the strongman’s face.
‘Your old games teacher. I bet you never guessed he would end his days blowing up rubber gloves and wrestling tigers.’
‘No, strangely, the thought never crossed my mind.’
We sat in the darkened auditorium, near the back, and waited. The excitement built up like static in the air before a thunderstorm. Tadpole held my hand. I leaned over and said, ‘So what was the name of that soldier you told me about?’
‘Oh, Louie, not so fast! Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to rush a girl?’ She giggled in a way that gave her words an alarming double meaning. Eventually the lights dimmed, music started up, and thunderous applause broke out as the title
The movie began with an introductory spiel, superfluous to us but perhaps done with an eye to the jury at Cannes. Europe in the early years of the nineteenth century. Everywhere people are on the move, a great restlessness, a great yearning to be free from tyranny. Loud boos from the audience as we watch the appalling injustice of an absentee landlord turfing a peasant from his land, sending the family off to starve. Is it Wales or pre-revolutionary France or the vast steppes of Russia? It’s hard to tell because it is all three. The brave families set out in boats for the New World. A map appears with probing arrowheads pushing sailing ships west. Some head north: the huddled masses on Ellis Island, the lice inspections, and inoculations, grim-faced nurses examine scrofulous urchins from the European slums. Some go south to Uruguay and Argentina. From Wales they go Patagonia. Life is hard, but they struggle grimly and carve a toe-hold on the unforgiving land. They water it with their blood and their sweat and when the war of independence starts no one wants to leave; there are too many crosses on the hillside, and that counts for something. Cut to footage of the queues snaking down the street outside the recruitment office. The Legion embarking at Milford Haven, sweethearts in tears, tickertape, the feeling of a great adventure, they’ll be home by Whit. But things don’t turn out that way. Patagonia is a harsh country where people do not fight by the rules laid down by Clausewitz. Like all guerrilla fighters the enemy determines when and
