“Pretty good hook that, though,” said Morfydd, going home.
“Shut it,” I said.
“He’d have got worse, mind, if I’d been three feet nearer, the beast.”
Too ashamed to talk, me. Grandfer was standing at the gate, I noticed.
“It’ll be a day or two before he gets his chops into beef,” said Morfydd. “Justin Slaughterer, is it? Justin just slaughtered. Eh, pretty good that. Look out, here is trouble.”
Grandfer barring the way from the field, smiling, his hand up to stop us.
“Do not take it badly, Jethro,” said he. “Your mam will come round.”
“You on our side, Grandfer?” asked Morfydd.
“Who else, girl? Does he stand and watch her ravished?”
“The filthy swine,” I said, trembling. “It will teach him to keep his dirty hands off her. Filthy, filthy …!” The anger was coming to me now, strangely, and I saw Morfydd’s glance.
“Just what her husband would have done, Jethro,” said Grandfer, leering. “Rest you in peace, do not have a conscience.”
But I did not really hear his words until I got home. I knew what he meant, and hated him.
“Better go up,” said Morfydd. “You know what Mam is.”
“She wouldn’t dare!” I said.
“I have had it, remember – she can hand out beltings, little as she is. And she don’t know her strength with a three foot willow.”
“I am not being thrashed like a child!”
Morfydd jerked her thumb. “Up, boy, you’ve got to bloody have it. Thumpers and pugilists have got to be brought into line – reckon you’d better fold up the Cambrian. She raised lumps on me last time she belted, and you’ll be lucky with trews on and good sound packing, I was drawers off.”
Fussy walk coming down the path now, Mam meaning business, with Mari running beside her dragging at her and the boys tearing after them for a look at the slaughter.
“Up,” said Morfydd, “lest you have it down by here.”
“Jethro!” Mari at the bottom of the stairs now, weeping, clutching her dress. “O, Jethro, I am sorry.”
I winked, grinning at her. “What Mam gives me now I will give back to Justin, do not worry, girl.”
Mam now, just found the stick after rummaging, working herself into a fury, blocked at the bottom of the stairs with Morfydd and Mari pushing and shoving her and begging her to be reasonable. Don’t know what hit me then but I had to laugh. I threw back my head and rocked with laughter, ran to my room and went full length on the bed. Just hit out flat a fifteen stone slaughterer and running from a five foot mam with a stick. I laughed till I cried and the first stroke hit me. Round the room we went, Mam swinging, me ducking, but she cornered me at last.
She should have been in the Navy with her mainmast floggings.
CHAPTER 12
TROUBLE WAS coming.
The wooden horse was stalking the Carmarthenshire hills most nights now, catching the spots from Pembrokeshire. In every town Rebecca was springing up, and this, a movement that began with the small farmers, was now bringing in farm labourers and even quite rich farmers – both ends of the social scale. No gates were burned since Efail-wen, but hayricks were going up nightly, fewer threatening letters sent to the magistrates, more action instead. Floggings were frequent for those who dished out floggings, but Rebecca was best with the moral wrongs. Chiefly a Nonconformist movement, the laws of God were invoked as reason for the punishments. A man could not even beat his wife without a warning or worse; flog a child and be flogged; bastard babies were delivered at night to callous fathers who had cast off their mothers. A guardian of public morals was Rebecca, thank God, said Morfydd, who was a fine one to talk, said Mam, the way she had carried on in Monmouthshire and now trying the same antics here.
September died into the mists of late autumn. Prices were going up, the cost of living leaping weekly, but the price of corn was coming down – blame the damned speculators, said Flannigan, though he couldn’t spell the name – blame the rapacious men of industry who were discharging labour in order to keep their bulbous profits. Blame the swindlers who were jacking up food prices without official control at a time when people were starving and prepared to work for a loaf. One thing to grow your corn these days, quite another thing to sell it, and what slender profit you managed to get was swallowed by the iniquitous road tolls. So I threshed our corn that year, paid in kind to the miller for its grinding, and used the flour for our bread – living off the land in every sense, but I knew this would not last for long. I was paying the pound a week rent now, not Grandfer, and our savings were again nearly gone; Morfydd alone kept us from the workhouse, and I knew I would have to join her at Ponty soon again, although I had grown to love farming.
“Potatoes, potatoes,” said Morfydd, “that is the county’s trouble.
“The county would starve without them, though,” said Mam.
“Work it out,” replied Morfydd, hot as usual. “Potatoes and biddings are the root of starvation, and this is how it works. A couple in love want to marry,
