“Aye,” said Morfydd, and fixed him with her eyes. “The centuries of Time echo to the tread of the clog going up the stairs and the buckle coming down. Burning hayricks – chopping down tollgates? A barrel of gunpowder would bring this county alive.”
I looked at my mother. Her face was agonized. For this was the old Morfydd sparring for a fight, and we were here by the grace of Grandfer. But he smiled, to his credit, and stirred his tea.
“Speak, child, speak,” said he. “You know your Bible? Genesis twenty-four, verse sixty. Let us draw your teeth.” And Morfydd raised her dark eyes to his, saying, “‘And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, thou art our sister. Be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.’”
“Amen,” said Grandfer, eyes closed, and turned to my mother. “God help me, woman. Retired, I am, and I have opened the house to a nest of Welsh agitators.” He swung to Morfydd. “The first tollgate burned, young woman?”
“Efail-wen, just this year,” said she.
“When?”
“May the thirteenth – by Thomas Rees of Carnabwth. Burned twice since, thank God – June the sixth and July the seventeenth. Tollgates!” Morfydd sniffed. “Back home in my county we fought it out with redcoats.”
“Remarkable,” said Grandfer, quizzy.
“Aye, remarkable,” said Morfydd. “If your people had half the spunk of the Welsh I come from you’d have taken to arms and marched on Carmarthen. Look at the place! The people are either starving or pinched to the bone, your workhouses are filling up daily – they transport you here for poaching rabbits,” and here she looked at me, “and all you can do is burn a tollgate when you ought to be hauling up cannon. Good God!” Sweating now, the beads bright on her face, and she sighed and wiped it into her hair.
“You see what I have to put up with?” asked Mam, hands empty to Grandfer. “She lost her own man to the riots in Monmouthshire, and I lost mine to the iron. You see what I have for a daughter?”
“I see that you are harbouring a vixen,” said Grandfer. “But the goals are the same north or west.” Down came his fist and he thumped the table. “Keep a grip on that tongue, young woman – I have no use for it here.”
And Morfydd rose, shaking off crumbs. “And I have no use for yours. Thank God for starving, thank God for kicks. If the damned house burned down you’d be too frit to fetch water,” and she slammed back her chair, looking knives. As she reached the door her son came through it – Richard, her beloved, aged three, and she stooped and snatched him up and held him against her. “Come, boy,” said she. “There is no place for us here.”
That is what it was like in those early days at Cae White Farm; my mam the sandwich between Grandfer’s dislike and my sister’s fire, but it settled down after a bit, thank God. To hell with Morfydd, I used to think; to heaven with my mother, she being all gentleness in the face of rebellion. Eh, did I love my mam! If I had to die on the breast of a woman I would die on my mother’s – Morfydd’s next, though hers was mainly occupied. But where my mother went, I went; touching the things she touched, smoothing her place at table. Sometimes I wondered who was the more beautiful, Morfydd or Mam, who could give her twenty years, for Morfydd was lifting up the latch for thirty. Smooth in the face was my mother, carrying herself with dignity; pretty with her bonnet streamers tied under her chin, five feet of black mourning that turned every set in whiskers in the county. The basses went a semitone flat in the Horeb when she was present, but there beside me, singing like an angel, she didn’t spare the men a look. A smile for everyone, her contralto greeting, she was alive and dancing outside. Inside she was dead, in the same grave as my father. My father had joined the Man in the Big Pew over twelve months now but he still lived with us, I reckoned. For sometimes, when the house was sleeping, I would hear my mam talking to him in a voice of tears. And next morning at breakfast the redness was in her eyes and her mouth was trembling to her smile, as if it had just been kissed.
“Somebody slept in the henhouse last night,” said Grandfer now.
I got some more barley bread and packed it well in.
“Not rioters?” whispered Mam.
“Boys,” said he, eyeing me. “Same thing. And anyone this applies to can listen. If Tramping Boy Joey shows his backside round Cae White I will kick the thing over to St Clears, understand? Poachers and thieves, stinking of the gutter – I will not have him near!”
Chewing, me, eyes on the ceiling.
“Did you see anything of that Joey last night, Jethro?” asked Mam.
“How could he have seen him?” asked Morfydd from the door with Richard in her arms. “He was in well before dark and he slept with me. Come, Jethro, bach, it is cleaner outside.”
A bitch one moment, sister the next.
Two months of hell, it was, living with Grandfer.
Yet I remember with joy the early spring days in the new county, especially the Sundays in the pews of the Horeb. Mam one side of me, Morfydd on the other, she with an eye for every pair of trews in sight, until she caught my mother’s glance which set her back miles. Proud I felt, the only man in the family now; well soaped up and my hair combed to a quiff, singing quiet according to instructions, because my voice was breaking, but dying to let things rip. Little Meg Benyon was hitting it up on the harmonium, eyes on sticks, feet going, tongue peeping
