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  Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;

  Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;

  Change and decay in all around I see;

  O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

  The two tall windows of the Methodist Chapel looked blackly down into the lane. In its stable, others who had been at the public meeting were hackling their own traps, eyeing the weather, starting for home. Shadows skitted from their Tilley lamps. Faintly, out towards Rhosei Cottage, Etty could make out the tractor for Walter Cwmpiban—his family crammed in the box on the back, his headlamps blazing from the snow-heavy hedgerows. They followed his tyre tracks left at the crossroads, into the narrowing valley.

  Here was the Pant, where Philip had arrived already and raised a hand as he humped a bucket to the beast-house. Here, half a mile further on, was the track that led to Cwmpiban: the last of the houses before their own, the lights of the tractor showing on its gable wall. Idris reached the end of a hymn; he did not begin another. At Cwmberllan Ford he flicked the reins and the three of them leant to put their weight on the shafts, climbing laboriously through Turley Wood, up the pitch and into the yard, where the ducks were circling their space in the frozen pond. The wheels lurched on the hidden ruts. They had barely stopped before Oliver freed himself and sat, almost quivering, on the edge of the soft, plush seat.

  “All right, lad,” said Idris. “Down you get.”

  “How are you, Nip?” The dogs came swarming round the boy, tails up, ears down, yawling with excitement. “Hello, Towser! Blackie, did you miss me?”

  Albert was ready with his curry-comb in the stable. Taking the bridle, he spoke to Reuben like a long-lost friend and the cob himself grew so calm in his presence that he seemed not to notice his work on the straps. In the light that spilled from the stable door, Etty led her son and his phalanx of dogs across the sloping yard to the snow-drowned flem, which Oliver insisted on jumping, since there was, he said, a troll beneath the bridge. They kicked their boots against the step and tramped into the kitchen, where Molly looked up from her scratch-patterned spectacles—pulling her needle clear of the pullover her grandson had cagged on a bramble by the spring.

  She had thought it better for all of them if she remained behind.

  “He got his way, I suppose?” she asked.

  Etty nodded, avoiding her eye. She hung their hats and coats from the mantelpiece, swept up the snow and held her hands to the long flames surging up the flue.

  “It shan’t catch on,” Etty said. “That’s what they reckon.”

  “I cannot say I am surprised.”

  “The man from the Electric Board was there, though goodness knows how he aims to get home. There’s a queue across the entire country, that’s what he says. Every village gets its chance, and them as votes against, back they go right down to the bottom. It defeats me. Really. Ten more years we could be waiting now—”

  “Mam?”

  “Oliver, I’m talking.”

  “But I’m hungry!”

  “How much cake did you eat just now?”

  “You binna sinking, boy,” Idris told him, arriving from the hall in a gasp of freezing air.

  Oliver vanished behind the brown chenille tablecloth.

  “So much for that, then, is it, Mr. Hamer?” Molly asked.

  Idris grunted, arranged the long hairs back across his head and dusted the snow from the lapels of his suit. Checking his clock, which had almost reached nine, he crossed the flagstones to the windowsill—twisting the knob on the grand wooden wireless.

  “Consarn it!” he muttered. “I only changed them batteries Monday.”

  “Well,” said Molly. “There’s one problem we might have saved ourselves, anyway.”

  Through the keening wind in the open chimney, the sound of the Home Service rose momentarily. Beneath the table, Oliver made puffing noises for the wooden train he had been sent for Christmas by his grandfather. Etty looked from her husband’s back to her mother in her chair beneath the oil lamp, then turned quickly back to the fireplace, testing the weight of the water in the kettle, the chill draught tugging at her hair.

  “Now look you here, Mrs. Evans,” said Idris. “I has enough people saying how to run my farm. I takes it off the Ministry and I takes it off the taxman, but I’s blasted if I shall take it off you. If you has a hundred pound to go wasting on your precious electric, well, that is something different, that is a conversation. But while the money is mine then I shall be making the decisions in this house, and if you dunna like it you can just take your home in your pocket and get yourself back to your husband.”

  —

  IT WAS RARELY, in the darkness, a tender kind of business—even now that Etty had at last fallen pregnant. Idris had kissed her on occasion, for the scant congregation at their wedding at the chapel, in the weeks and months after she had first come to the Funnon, but more in the way that the boys had kissed her back in Erwood—suddenly, artlessly, as if searching for a way forwards. She could be sitting at her dressing table, dabbing at her eye-shadow or wiping off her lipstick, when she would find him beside her with his coarse, grey stubble, his breath coming sour and urgent.

  It had often been surprise as much as revulsion that had made her turn away.

  In the end, inevitably, he had settled on an approach that owed less to the embrace between Edmund Lowe and Rose Hobart in Wolf of New York, which she had coaxed him into watching at the pictures one market day in Builth Wells, than to the tiling over at the Hergest: the annual breeding of the valley’s mares. It was not unkind or, these days, particularly uncomfortable, but as he tugged up her nightdress with his leather-hard hands, as their bellies pressed together and his pelvis bit into the skin of her thighs, it might even have been useful to have had a third party present: a stallion man with cigarette and waistcoat, to guide his penis as he started aimlessly to push.

  —

  WITH THESE DAYS a hen’s stride longer, Oliver could see a trace of white between the open curtains as he peeped out of the blankets and tasted the clean, freezing air of the bedroom. The wind had, if anything, grown during the night. The sash windows were battling in their frame. There was a screaming and yelping all round the roof, as if the house were under attack from an army of witches. Lifting his eyes a little further, he made out his grandmother in her cardigan and ankle-length skirt, bent by the washstand at the foot of her four-post bed. She struck a match, which died at once with a glimpse of her eyes and shadows dividing her forehead.

  “Rise and shine, Olly,” she said, glancing in his direction.

  “Is it witches, is it, Nana?”

  “What?”

  “Witches? Are we going to have to fight them?”

  “Up you get now.”

  Since Molly was shielding another match, Oliver burrowed back beneath the blankets, revolved in the hollow of the old feather mattress, clambered over the cold hot-water bottle and extended an arm to the bedside chair. His shirt, his pullover and his corduroy trousers were all stiff with cold. He had to rub them together just to push his arms into the sleeves and his legs into the legs. He pulled on his stockings and his favourite red braces. He waited to be prompted, to have the bedclothes snatched away, but heard only footsteps leaving for the landing. Surprised, intrigued, he slithered out onto the rug, where his boots stood in line with his Noah’s Ark animals, his books and his jigsaw bricks.

  He almost laughed when he saw the hall. Beneath the two dim windows that framed the front door, there was a thickness of snow across the entire floor, which rose at the walls and drifted up the staircase almost as far as his feet. There was a run of prints where his parents and Albert had gone outside, so, holding the banister with his spare hand, he slipped down the stairs in a series of thumps.

  “Nana!” he called, peering round the kitchen door. “There’s snow, Nana! There’s snow in the hall!”

  “Come in or stay out, Olly, would you, please?”

  “What happened?”


  Besides her shuddering candle the kitchen was dark. The morning showed only at the topmost corner of the window. Oliver put his hot-water bottle on the draining board for his mother to empty for the washing. He stood on the flagstones bare of snow, wiggling the loose tooth in his lower jaw as he watched his grandmother clear the moaning flue, rise the ashes and light the chats—an operation he had never seen performed, as his mother always woke an hour before him.

  “Nana?” he repeated.

  “The wind broke the latch,” said Molly. “Be a good boy and rise us some eggs, would you?”

  The egg basket appeared to have suffered an explosion. He tilted it, then turned it upside-down.

  “Is they froze, Nana?” he asked.

  “Don’t forget your coat,” she said. “And give the door a good old pwning when you’re back. I shall have to bolt him behind you.”

  Arriving on the doorstep, Oliver had to hold onto the jamb just to stop himself from falling. The snow met his cheeks like tiny arrows. The wind hurt his ears, his eyes were watering so that it was all he could do to distinguish the great, grey bulk of the barn, and it was only by doubling over, almost by crawling, that he was able to work his way along the bank of the flem, to give a small, token jump when he seemed to reach the narrow point beneath the parlour window and to set out into the storm.

  Oliver knew all the nests of the bantams. He and his friend Griffin had almost as many dens in the hayloft as they did, and he had barely scrambled onto the first of its slopes before he found one of the vicious little birds to bully away from her nest. On the tall gable wall there were scratched words and numbers that had been hidden the previous year, he thought, until March or even April: the scribblings of labourers who had been here before he was born. One was a date: the word OCTOBER had been chiselled out plainly. Another seemed to be a doleful hymn they would sometimes sing in the chapel. Behind him, Blackie came clattering up the ladder with her keen dog stink and her gold-ringed eyes. She followed him to the top of the stack, where he buried his hands among the warm eggs in his pockets and stood on his toes to peer through the slit. In the yard, beyond the snow cascading from the roof, the pond and its girdle of elm trees had vanished almost completely. In their place were nothing but a few maddened saplings and a trench sunk deep into the white expanse.

  It was only by the regularity of her movement that he could make out his mother, who was spooning up the snow in quick, wild flurries, while the wind brought more from the sky and the ground so she might have kept digging forever.

  —

  “I WON’T SPEAK ill of Idris,” said Molly, as she and Oliver stood among the snow-skithed cattle, which were groaning, stamping, bwnting their mangers. “He’s not a bad man and he knows this farm like I never will, but I do wish to goodness as he would have the coal by here in the yard and not way down in the Bottom Field.”

  Turning away from Rachel, the house cow, she hooked her arms beneath the handle of a pail and hoisted it up onto the lip of the trough.

  “Is the beasts drinking milk today, Nana?” asked Oliver.

  “Got nothing else, Olly, have they?” Molly emptied the pail and crouched down to look at him, her blue eyes patterned with tiny red lines. “Now look,” she said. “You’s been a good old boy this morning, but you’re much too small to be out in this all day.”

  “I’m big as half of the Juniors, I am!”

  “And that’s as maybe. I want you please to go in the house, put a brun on the fire and warm yourself up. Fodder the geese, if you’re after a job. I’ve got to go see about the coal.”

  “But the coal is my job, that’s what the boss says!”

  “Olly…” Molly sighed and inspected her hands, which, even in their gloves, were doubled inwards like a pair of claws. She looked at him again. “You can come with me to the top of the Banky Piece, see what we’re up against, but after that you are going in the kitchen. And I don’t want no gapesing. You’re to hold my arm, you understand?”

  What with the snow in the house, the cattle out of water and the wind so strong that it could sclem the boss’s hat and a wad of hay and neither of them to be seen again, Oliver had not had a thought for the sheep. He had worried about the ducks, which might have been buried or else have missed to find another pond. He had worried about the robins, the tits and the wrens, as he had not yet sunk them holes to the ground. But it was only when he, Molly and the three dogs reached the gate beside the beast-house that he had any sense of the valley’s transformation—of the monstrous ridges that had risen over hedgerows, burst around trees and swallowed whole fields so that every familiar contour was gone. The church bell was ringing away to his left. Squinting ahead of him, Oliver saw the ghost of the oak that should have marked the gate into the Oak Piece. He edged around the end wall of the barn, clinging to his grandmother, looking west to breathe, and when they came to the corner and the full, unhindered gale that fled from Bryngwyn and the desolate slopes of Glascwm Hill, he felt her coat sleeve plucked out of his hand.

  “Nana!”

  Several times the bank revolved. It stopped only when Oliver landed in a drift, with the barn almost vanished and the bare-limbed oak tree flailing above him. He tried to stand and sank to his waist. He looked up the slope to see his grandmother crawling backwards towards him, but then Blackie arrived with Nip and Towser, more swimming than walking, and by some means he did not pause or think to explain he realized that there were sheep beneath him, waiting in the frozen darkness, and like the dogs he started madly to dig.

  —

  THE CASE CLOCKS in the kitchen had drifted some seconds apart since the previous evening, but for once the pendulums were swinging in time and a handful of their nine o’clock chimes rang out almost together. Standing by the fire, Idris breathed his last fit of coughing from his chest, his hands at his sides, shivering, bleeding. Beside him, the women having finished, the boy was sitting in the murky, soap-stinking water of the galvanized bath—a fold between his chest and his belly, his skin clear and bronze, as others became only in the summer. He was watching Idris fixedly, this son for his wife, his fat lips parted, the lashes tabbering on his big black eyes, and suddenly Idris felt a stab of revulsion, which escaped his throat as a growl.

  “Boss?” said Oliver again.

  “Do you think I binna thinking on it?”

  At last he felt some give in his shoulders and he was able to break the spine of his coat, which he peeled off like a chrysalis and leant against a leg of the mantelshelf.

  “Time to get out now, Olly,” said Etty quietly, and the boy rose with dimpled knees and penis jutting, his wet hair already recovering its waves.

  “It’s eight below,” Idris muttered. “You canna stand. You canna see. The dankering lantern blows out even in the barn!”

  “But, boss—”

  “They’s best off where they are, boy. They’ll be scratting on till Monday.”

  The sensation was returning to Idris’s fingers. They felt lacerated, flayed, and he groaned as he unwound the bandage from his head and tested his temple where the wind had planted a shard off the roof that afternoon. There was no fresh blood on his fingers—at least, no more than oozed from his knuckles—and so he filled the jug from the bath and squeezed past Albert at his table in the corner. He made it to the larder, where the geese were in their cubs and the pig was dangling salt-frosted from the gambrel, but while he managed to work up a lather with the brush, even with two hands he could not keep the razor from shaking.

  His chair was a mould of his back and his shoulders. He sat with his head slumped onto the top rail, his eyes on the three black stripes in the mantel where they would pin their homemade candles when he was a child, in the days when paraffin was scarce. “Three in one,” his father had called them: the tallow, the wick and the flame, which was the Holy Spirit and could be shared by all who held their candles in readiness. He remembered those nights before the Christmas market—himself and his brothers, Ivor and Oliver, cross-legged among
the goose feathers, their father still dark-haired and robust, with their mother beside him, singing as she plucked—and he pressed his hands to his face for several seconds before he spread out the paper on his lap.

  “CHILBLAINS! RADOX RELIEF AT LAST!”

  “It has been reported by Mr. J. Prichard, Dderw Estate, that the rainfall for 1946, by his gauge on the Dderw Estate, was 65.23 inches. This compares with 45.49 inches in 1945 and 49.78 inches in 1944.”

  “Rhyscog. Rev. A. W. Chant, Builth Wells, was the officiating minister at the Methodist Church on Sunday. Mrs. E. Hamer presided at the organ and Mr. I. Hamer was precentor.”

  —

  ASLEEP, IDRIS LOOKED not so much older than his forty-nine years as ancient beyond human reckoning. Sometimes, before she extinguished the candle at night or when she lay awake in the earliest daylight, Etty would watch him for minutes at a time—his head sunk sideways into the pillow, his mouth ajar, his short breaths gargling deep in his chest. He put her in mind of the Rocks at Aberedw, where they would go wimberry combing when she was a girl: pairs of legs and flapping skirts that would turn into people as they moved between the bushes. They would scramble together across those crumbling slopes, and in the shelter of some shelving rock she would always find a cove of flowers—pink erigeron or biting stonecrop—and pick a few to wreathe her hair, wondering that anything could live up here at all.

  With the screen back in the larder, she dragged the bath off the hearthrug and spread out the blankets on the table. She fastened the shield to the nearest of the flat irons, wiped it clean and tested its heat with her cheek; then, with slow, rolling movements of her wrist, she smoothed out the creases in her husband’s shirt. Only her son remained awake. He was standing on the stool to reach the face of her grandfather clock, which, like her husband’s, he wound every night. Both of the clocks were tall and dark, with narrow doors concealing their weights and pendulums. Both had a second keyhole just beneath the hour hand to give the impression they would run for a week. Etty checked the Sunday joint in the oven. She took two cleats from the fire with the tongs and dropped them into the box iron, but by the time that she was sitting in her chair with the paper she could hardly recall how her own best blouse, the boy’s shirt and a pair of stiff, starched collars had found their way onto the pile for the chapel.