Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (10 page)

So humanity tried something more sophisticated. They invented something called the greeting. Just a little form of words, a comment on the weather, made as an opening gambit, trivial in content but far-reaching in its implications. It allowed men and women to come together and live in things called towns. Because they discovered a strange thing about the greeting. Nutters were incapable of exchanging pleasantries of this sort. It’s the same today. There has never been a more effective way of singling out the benign from the malign.

But it doesn’t work so well at night. If you encounter a stranger at night in a place where there are no street lamps, it is always an unnerving experience. Tadpole lived in a copse beyond the top of Penglais Hill where there were no lights, where the sun
seldom reached, where families were often closely knit in ways proscribed by the Bible. A world with a high likelihood that anyone you encountered in the dark would be a nutter.

I had to leave the car at a five-bar gate held closed by a wire and counterweight strung over a pulley. The path was overgrown, a dark tunnel through wet black trees. I traced the route by gingerly testing the texture of dead leaves under my feet. Up ahead was a dark shape which might have been a clearing or quarry, or maybe the back door to Pluto’s realm. There was no light, except for a brief glimpse every now and then through gaps in foliage of the rectangular green direction sign at the side of the main road. It got smaller and smaller. The sounds of cars getting more and more muffled. I’ve always found those signposts strangely comforting, with the myth of order in the chaos that they suggest. You may be leaving town, they seem to say, but you will always be connected by the ribbon of tarmac, and you can’t go anywhere that those most prosaic of people, the council road menders, have not been before. But it was clear from the path beneath my feet that they hadn’t been here. An owl hooted. A lone star glimmered through a black cobweb of twigs and branches that groaned in the invisible breeze as if shaken by a giant’s hand. In my pocket my hand clutched the jar of Eye of Newt pesto that Tadpole had phoned and asked me to bring.

I came to a clearing in which stood a cottage. The windows were dark apart from one downstairs: black curtains edged with a glimmer of light. A man stood in the yard sharpening an axe at a grindstone, sending a flurry of blue sparks into the night. To the side of the house, there was a washing line hung with items that instinct warned one not to scrutinise; beyond that was a lonely grave. An invisible dog growled; the man stopped grinding 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
Cambrian News
film critic had managed to pull a few strings for me, a fact which seemed to impress Tadpole to an unusually high degree. The queue wound down Portland Street and onto Queen’s Road. Tadpole talked the whole time about Clip and her other obsession, Jesus. I tried to ask about the tortured soldier but she wouldn’t be rushed. In the manner of obtaining the solicitude of men, life had obviously taught Tadpole to bargain hard and to use what little resources she had frugally.

‘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
Bark of the Covenant
appeared, rippling over the red velvet curtains, which slowly began to wind back.

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 where to join battle; at other times he simply dissolves and evaporates into the countryside.

A nation looks for a hero, the stentorian voiceover informs us. And who answers the call? Clip does. Cut to close-up of Clip the Sheepdog on a Welsh hillside. His ears prick up at some unheard summons, his head swivels. Comprehension lights up his bright intelligent eyes. He understands. He turns and runs home across the hillside; he reaches his master and barks a few words, and carries on running. We see him trotting down the road past the postman, ‘Hello, Clip, old boy, where are you off to in such a hurry?’ Soon he arrives at the recruitment office. ‘Hello, Clip, old boy,’ the men in the queue say. They pat and stroke him. He runs on into the office and by the magic of cinema runs out pulling a trolley bearing his army kit. To the people back home, says the voiceover, he was just good old Clip. Cut to Patagonia, where Clip is running between the lines: carrying messages, impervious to the shells exploding all around. But to the peasants of Patagonia, the voice continues, he was something else: a vision, an inspiration, a hero, the dog that saved the hour, he was – the voice pauses for dramatic effect – he was
Pata Brillante
, or . . . and before he can say it everybody in the cinema shouts, ‘Bright Paw!’ Everyone in the audience except me raises
his or her hand, crooked at the wrist, in emulation of a dog offering his paw to shake. They sing the famous Bright Paw song to the tune that was later stolen by Champion the Wonderhorse. Tadpole nudges me and grabs my wrist and pulls it up into the correct shape. I, too, make the gesture of the Bright Paw salute. This is an unusual case.

‘
Pata Brillante! Pata Brillante! El Perro Maravilla!
’

I turn my head to look at Tadpole. She is singing her heart out. Her eyes are on fire, cheeks glistening with tears. The singing carries on for a while and then peters out. We watch enthralled as Bright Paw scampers across ridges, doggy-paddles through the foam of torrential rivers, runs headlong but miraculously unscathed into machine-gun fire. He dodges mines that explode a fraction of a second after he passes. He was a hell of a dog, that was for sure.

The movie tells the famous story of the Mission House siege. The men of the 32nd Airborne are bivouacked at the Mission House, marooned in bandit country. Clip heroically passes messages between the Mission House and HQ a hundred miles away, by using the legendary secret passage of the Incas that only he knows about. The situation is desperate, and General Llanbadarn, returning from Buenos Aires, decides to stake all on a bold, audacious, and some would say suicidal reconnaissance patrol. The men are afraid. Very afraid. On the eve of battle there are whisperings of mutiny among the ranks. And then lo! in the light of the silvery moon an angel appears among the men, plucking the terror from their hearts, filling them with courage. An angel on a white horse holding a flaming sword aloft. Next day at dawn the men ride out and fight like lions. Losses are heavy, the battle desperate, but the day is won and the honour of the Legion saved. Clip, though he manages to limp back to camp, dies from his wounds and pays the ultimate price. Tadpole was inconsolable.