Resistance (8 page)

One day William was bringing his flock off the mountain when he found Edith wandering through the bilberry bushes, barefoot, her hair wild and her hands black with the peaty soil. She’d been following Roderick’s voice, she told him. He was out on the mountain and she had to find him. She had to bring him home. Ever since then they’d made sure someone visited Edith every day. She was still fiercely independent and wouldn’t hear of moving down into the valley. With her boys gone Maggie would have had room for her.
And Mary too. But Edith wouldn’t leave The Gaer. They were retreating into the hillside together, she and the cottage, sinking back into the soil. She still managed to feed herself, tended her small flock, kept a sow she offered to William’s boar every autumn. But she’d become wild in other ways. One night a couple of days after William found her ranging the hillside, Sarah took her turn to stay over at The Gaer. In the middle of the night she’d been woken by Edith’s voice drifting up the stairs. When she’d gone down to investigate, feeling her way through the dark cottage with her hands along its walls, she’d found Edith in her nightdress in the living room, a single candle throwing a weak, flickering light over the lettered board on the table in front of her. When Sarah had spoken her name, “Edith?” she’d knocked the upturned glass to the floor and started like a frightened pony, white-eyed and ready for flight. To this day none of them could work out how she’d got that board. Maggie said it must have always been there, in the cottage, that there was a lot of that stuff around after the Great War. She told Sarah that after the Somme she remembered sermons being preached down at Longtown discouraging a rash of desperate forays into the occult. It was the devil’s work, the minister had told them, knuckles white over the edge of the pulpit, this twisting of grief. But still, Maggie said, she’d known of young women all over, up all night using boards, cards, even psychics, trying to speak to the ghosts of their dead husbands, sons, and fathers.

“What’s to say they won’t be back tonight? They’ve only been gone a few hours, haven’t they?”

And now here they were, holding their own kind of séance for their own lost men; trying to conjure a reason for their leaving from the spaces they’d so suddenly left in their lives.

“Well, Maggie?” Mary continued. “What makes you so sure? Did William say anything?”

“No,” Maggie replied, shaking her head and sighing again. “No, he didn’t say anything.”

There was something in Maggie’s tone, the slightest of inflexions over the way she’d said “say” that made the other women expectant. Mary stopped her questioning and all of them looked at Maggie, silently asking her to carry on. Maggie looked back at each of them in turn as if making a calculation, weighing their responses. Eventually, under the weight of their shared gaze, she stood and went over to the dresser once more. This time she pulled a pamphlet from the middle drawer.

“But I did find this. Just now when I came back to milk the cows.”

She dropped the pamphlet on the table in front of Mary. Sarah came over from the window and looked over Menna’s shoulder, her hands on the back of the chair. The pamphlet had a dull brown cover with the same typeface as the “Stand Fast” leaflet. The title, which they could just make out under smears of mud and a hole torn at its centre, curved around some illustrations of tools; a hoe, a plough, and a spade: “The Countryman’s Diary—1944.”

“It was in the milking shed,” Maggie said. “On the floor. I only saw it because one of the heifers was standing on it.”

Mary opened the cover and turned the first few pages. Maggie sat back down. She looked beaten, deflated. Whatever had been holding her firm from within had buckled and sagged.

“Stupid bugger must have dropped it. What chance has he got if he can’t even keep hold of that?” she said, looking out the window.

As Mary turned the pages Sarah caught glimpses of headings, diagrams, and snatches of text:

SILENT KILLING
 … insert the knife an inch below the ear and twist … 
DELAY MECHANISMS I. The Time Pencil
.… The Time Pencil looks rather like a propelling pencil. One end is copper, the other brass.… 
TARGETS I. Shell and Bomb Dumps
.… 
IV. Semi-Tracked Vehicles
.… Fix a charge of 2lb Gelignite at any of the following points.… 
I. The Pull Switch
.… The pull switch is designed so that when a wire fitted to the eye at the end is pulled, a cap is fired.… 
OB
Maintenance
 … ensure to keep all vents clear of debris.… 
Escape Routes
.… In the event of hostile intrusion …

All of them were silent as Mary carried on turning the pages. It was not a thick pamphlet and she soon came to the last one, closing it to reveal the innocuous cover once more: “The Countryman’s Diary—1944.”

Maggie spoke first. “That’s why I think they might not be back today. Or tomorrow.”

“How …?” was all Menna could manage.

Sarah sat down at the table again. “It isn’t possible. Tom never had the time.…”

“I know, bach,” Maggie said. “I know. But there it is.” She looked at the other three women. Each of them looked as if they’d been slapped. The blood was shallow beneath their cheeks and they looked numb, lost in their thoughts, retracing days, nights, any scrap of time their husbands hadn’t been home or on the farm.

“I thought he had a woman,” Mary said at last, looking straight ahead, her eyes unfocused. “Over in Llanthony or down in Longtown. That barmaid at The New Inn. I thought it might be her.”

Maggie gave Sarah a beseeching look. Come on, girl, help me now. Now you know. Help me with this. But Sarah’s eyes were also distant, staring out the window.

“I’ll get some cake,” Maggie said, standing from her chair and wiping her eyes. “Why don’t you put the kettle on, Sarah? Mash us some more tea, bach?”

It was well into the afternoon when the women left Maggie’s kitchen, each of them walking back to their farmhouses, loosened by the resonance of that pamphlet dropped onto the table like a pebble thrown into the still waters of their lives. Their husbands had not been who they thought they were. At least, not this last year. Or had it been for longer than that? They didn’t know. All they did know was that the men had left; that they had been left. That if “The
Countryman’s Diary” was anything to go by, the men had left the valley because of the invasion edging north from the southern coast. They had left to perform their duties, their secret duties. To sabotage, to kill (Sarah remembered the first time she’d seen Tom stick a pig, the resolute way he’d worked the knife into its throat … 
insert an inch below the ear
 …), and then to disappear. It was unthinkable. None of them were fighting men. William was in his late fifties and Hywel and Reg couldn’t have been far behind him. Malcolm walked with a limp, dragging his club foot like a ball and chain. Jack, Tom, and John were younger, it was true, but they’d been farmers all their lives. They’d hardly ever left the valley except for the market or the occasional farm sale. Sarah could count on one hand the nights Tom had spent away from the farm. They were not soldiers.

And yet this is what the handbook would have them believe. This is what Maggie would have them believe, and that’s why they’d agreed to tell no one about this. No one. If their husbands had kept this secret from them, their wives, then they must keep that secret too. Until the men returned they’d say nothing of their going. They’d stay in the valley and keep the farms running. There was no need to leave. Between them there was plenty of food. Maggie’s cows produced enough milk for butter and cheese for all of them. The potatoes were newly dug and the Ministry hadn’t yet collected their share. They had enough salted pork and bacon hanging in their larders to see them through the winter. Some lamb too. It would still be hard work though. Impossible, maybe, to keep all the farms going as they should, to manage the flocks. Maggie, ever the organiser, was already working out a routine, a weekly diary of mutual help. But that was nothing new. The valley had always run on a basis of cooperation. Everyone gathered one another’s hay, picked one another’s potatoes. William lent his tractor whenever it was needed. Tools, implements, horses, ploughs, all of them were shared. The only difference now was that it was just the women who were left to handle them. But still, everything would be shared. The work and the
results of the work, everything. At least, everything that could be. This, this returning to empty homes, was something each of the women had to experience alone. The sitting in quiet rooms that were somehow quieter than yesterday when they knew their husbands were out in the fields. Turning your head to catch the shadow of a movement and finding nothing, again. The intimate silences of their loss, each unique and individual, shaped by the man who had gone, these each woman suffered alone. But it was best to go to their homes, that is what they’d decided. In case the men came back. In case they left a message. It was best to be there, where the men could find them.

For Sarah that first day ended as it began. All the way back up the track to Upper Blaen, she heard the dogs and their chains. Scenting her approach they’d come out of their shelter and were straining on them again, pulling and barking, taut with unspent energy. As she came back into the yard they let the chains slacken and sat back on their haunches, nudging the air with their noses.

“Hello, girls,” Sarah said.

When she let them off they spun and turned about her, slick and supple as two freshly landed fish.

Unsure what else to do, Sarah bridled Bess the pony in the back paddock and rode out bareback to check on the flock. She also wanted to look on the hill again. She was sure there’d be some kind of a sign up there, that Tom couldn’t have left without making some kind of mark indicating where he’d gone. She took Fly and Seren with her, weaving ahead of the pony, trotting back now and then, their heads low. She wanted them for the company but she also thought there was the chance they’d pick up Tom’s scent and somehow lead her to him.

Halfway up the slope Sarah eased Bess to a halt and turned to look back down the long V of the valley. If she were to follow her mother’s description of the Black Mountains Hand, then where she
rode now was in the hollow between the thumb and forefinger. The Hatterall ridge, on her right, was the forefinger, a long slice of land pointing southeast towards Pandy with Offa’s Dyke running the length of its knuckles. The Black Hill, meanwhile, or Crib Y Gath, The Cat’s Back, as her mother would have called it, was the thumb; shorter, thicker, the last bulk of earth before Herefordshire’s patchwork of farmland. Between the thumb and the forefinger ran the river Olchon, after which the valley was named.

Just like a thumb, the Black Hill opened at a wider angle than the other hills, making the valley broader at its mouth. From where Sarah was sitting, this gave it the illusion of accessibility, a stadium view right down to the distant hill islands of Skirrid Fawr and Mynydd Merddin, rising from the lowland fields. Viewed from this lowland, however, Sarah knew the Olchon actually appeared more secluded, more secretive than the other valleys. There was something about the severity of its slopes, as if a cleaver had been driven into the soil and wrenched out with no movement from side to side. And the roads. The roads didn’t turn here naturally, warded off by the depth of the valley’s shadow. The one lane that did pass around its long bowl petered out into a track and doubled back on itself just below their farm as if retreating at the last moment from the hill in its path. No one ever came into the valley by accident. You only ever came here if you needed to, and apart from those who lived here few people ever did.

Sarah moved into the valley herself four years ago when Tom brought her to live with him at Upper Blaen, his late uncle’s farm.

“The last valley in Wales,” her mother had said the evening before their wedding. “You’ll be living in the last valley in Wales, bach.” She’d shaken her head, her eyes glazed with tears, enjoying the small drama of the moment.

“More like the first in England,” her father had retorted from behind his paper. “May as well live in Hereford itself as in the Olchon.”

Her parents had spoken as if she were to travel across the country, and yet the next evening Tom only had to drive the pony and
trap from Llanthony around the tip of the Hatterall ridge’s forefinger to bring his new bride home.

It was Sarah’s first move. She’d been born in the Llanthony valley and lived there all her life. She’d gone to school in the valley, had her first kiss there, known her first death there. It was even where she’d courted Tom, taking long walks with him along its upper slopes. Llanthony was where her life was shaped and where she’d come to terms with its boundaries and borders. Her mother had been born in the valley further west again between the middle finger of Tal Y Cefn and Gadir Fawr, while her grandmother was born outside the hand altogether at a farm beside Llangorse Lake, beyond Allt Mawr. Generation by generation the women of the family had moved eastward. Like pieces of driftwood floated loose from a shipwreck, they’d been drawn towards the shallower waters of the English plain. It was a journey Sarah could trace on the inside cover of her family Bible. Along with their birth, marriage, and death dates, all of her mother’s family were there, a copperplate roll call with spots of ink dotting the facing page where the book had been closed too soon after writing. It was these names that told the story of her family’s eastward movement. From the Welsh names of her ancestors, drawn from the myths of the Mabinogion: Branwen, Olwen, and Rhiannon, to her grandmother’s Megan, her mother’s Ruth, and finally her own Sarah. With each new wave hill that rolled them nearer England, with each man that took them east, their names were smoothed in the wash of the tide. The Mabinogion was replaced by the Bible and the ornate Welsh was rounded and buffed to the simpler shapes of English.

Every name in the Bible above Sarah’s and those of her two older brothers was matched with a complete set of dates. Some of them were pitifully similar, with only one or maybe two different numbers to set their years apart. Others, like those next to the sister she’d never known, were echoed by the same year altogether: