Testimonies: A Novel (10 page)

Q
. Was she a bad woman?

A
. Oh no.

Q
. I mean was she untruthful, dishonest, undutiful, dirty?

A
. I suppose she was honest: she was very clean. But she was not dutiful, if that is obeying a good husband in big things. And she was not kind. I think she had a real tenderness for him, but she was impatient with what she called his softness, and she did not think that he could manage as well as she could, ever. I hated her.

Q
. Did you not think it wrong to hate her?

A
. Yes.

Q
. When did Emyr come?

A
. We had always known him. His father used to come over for our shearing, although it was far away, and we used to go to theirs. Emyr often came when he was a little boy, and Meurig and he marked the sheep: when he was old enough to shear he always came.

Q
. Did you like him as a little boy?

A
. Not much. He was always telling Meurig things: he was older than Meurig.

Q
. What sort of things?

A
. Like a schoolmaster.

Q
. When did you start to like him?

A
. Not until a little while before my father’s death. It was at the Festival at Dinas, when I had a new dress. It was a very pretty blue spotted dress with a belt that Miss Dashwood gave me—they stayed every summer at the Rectory and they always used to come in and have tea when Mr. Dashwood fished in the lake—it was too small around the waist for her, but it fitted me exactly. I was very pleased with it. It was lovely quality material from London, the best I had ever seen. I did my hair up behind to go with it. At the Festival I saw Emyr staring and staring from the other side, where the young men sit. Any other time he would have come over, but he was too shy now; only when we were going out he came behind in the crowd and talked to Meurig. He was looking at me most of the time and in the end he said, “Well, Bronwen.” He did not say anything else until we were getting into the trap, and then I did not hear it, but I was pleased. It had been a very good Festival, better than I had ever heard the singing was; so I had had a fine evening, with my new dress, the singing and being admired, and I liked Emyr for admiring me.

After that he began coming over more often, by himself. At first he hardly spoke to me, but went fishing up in the lake with Meurig. Meurig thought that Emyr came to see him indeed, but I knew better than that. I must have been turned to him a little at that time, because when he came after the Festival I was covered with whitewash from doing the dairy and in my old mac and rubber boots, and I was angry to be seen like that. Before, I would not have minded.

He kept on coming. At the beginning he always had some reason—sheep, or they wanted to buy hay, or did we have a setting of turkey eggs for his mother. Sometimes they were such long-fetched reasons that Meurig stared at him, but my father understood him soon enough, and it came to be that he would come over the mountain once a week without any excuse, on Sunday evenings, usually. It is a very long way by road, and even over the mountains for a shepherd it is better than twenty miles, there and back, but he came, in rain or any weather, and sometimes I used to see him on a good night for the moon, looking up at the house from the river.

Q
. Were you in love with him?

A
. No. Certainly I was not in love with him: but sometimes when he was not there I thought perhaps I was—little I knew of it, a young girl. I knew that it all gave a kind of new excitement to the days when he came, and I was a long time in front of the looking-glass when I heard his voice below; and I felt a tenderness for him when he sat on the settle bent over with his hands flat between his knees, and nothing to say. He was always shy, and I liked that in a great strong tall man (he was twice Meurig’s size). I liked his strength too: he was modest about it, not standing in attitudes or bending the kitchen poker like Griffi T
ŷ
Hyll. But I knew nothing about him until we were married.

Q
. How long were you engaged?

A
. Only a little while. Mrs. Meurig wanted me to go, I wanted to be away, and Emyr was impatient: there seemed to be nothing to wait for. Meurig was very pleased: our father had told him that Emyr was a very good young man—he had asked for his character in Pentref long before. Emyr’s parents were pleased—I had been over there and they had been to ours, and Mrs. Vaughan had told me that they had been afraid Emyr would never marry—he would never look after any girl but me—and they were very glad he was going to many such a nice girl. She was such a dear, gentle old lady, and when she sat by me and told me what a good son Emyr was to them, and how they were both old now, I cried.

Q
. Was there any arrangement about how you should live?

A
. At Gelli?

Q
. Yes. Were you to come into the house as a daughter?

A
. No one said anything about that. I thought about it, but I did not like to say. I supposed it would work out. I know I had no idea of taking the house over from Mrs. Vaughan: I had seen something of that, and I did not want to be anything like Meurig’s wife. I thought we would all live together.

Q
. What was Meurig’s wife’s name?

A
. Gwladys. Gwladys Evans. Her father was Evans Drapers.

Q
. How did she behave at this time?

A
. She was pleased about it, and I think she tried to be kind; she would have given me a lot of clothes if I had liked them—shiny satin. She wanted to tell me things before I was married, but I would never let her begin—I said I knew all about it. If it had been anybody else I would have been very glad to have been told.

Q
. So you were married.

A
. Yes. In church: properly.

Q
. Did you go away?

A
. Yes, we went to Liverpool. We meant to stay a fortnight, but it was miserable, the noise of the trams and the traffic all the time, and crowds; and the English people at the hotel, Emyr said they were laughing at us. We came back after a week.

Q
. Straight to Gelli?

A
. Yes.

Q
. How did you like that?

A
. It was very strange: as strange as Liverpool, only they spoke Welsh. It began badly, because they had not been expecting us, and the house was still upside down. Mrs. Vaughan had been meaning to have it all clean and ready at the end of the fortnight. But they were as kind as could be, and Emyr was very good to me; so I began to settle down.

Q
. Will you describe the people of the house?

A
. There was the old man, Emyr’s father; he was a
good
man. He was true and kind. He was as good as my father, and I liked to be with him. But he had got under the burden of life too young, and he had worked and worked so hard all his life and he had had so much misfortune that it had made him stupid. No; it is wrong to say that of such a good, loving man; but in his old age he could not think of much but work and food (apart from Emyr)—that was all his life except Sundays, when it was chapel. He was a deacon. He was very strict: no one ever smoked or drank or danced at Gelli, and the year’s hay would rot if it rained on a Sunday; for no one would think of bringing it in. He did not like stories, or English books from the library. There was not even poetry, and I missed that. It was not that old Mr. Vaughan thought it was exactly wrong, but there was none there, nor music—they none of them had an ear for it nor cared much about it, though they would go to the festivals and eisteddfods. My father had been a lovely poet: he was always competing, and sometimes he won. I thought he was much better than the others I ever heard. Meurig too; but he liked the new way, while my father would never have anything to do with any poems but cynghanedd.

Noson lawen we used to have often in my home: songs and poems—not only hymns, but old songs about things and love. How I missed them; and the piano. I played it, not properly, but enough for the tunes.

Mr. Vaughan was strict, but he was strict without being nasty, if you can imagine that. He was straight through and through, and even Mr. Lewis, Cletwr, the other deacon, could never find anything worse to say of him than that he was selfish and wanted everything in the valley for Emyr. I hardly ever heard old Mr. Vaughan say anything unkind about anyone, except when Mr. Lewis, Cletwr, took Dolforgan (they had three farms already): then he said that they wanted the whole county, and that it was wrong of a rich farmer to take up little farms like that, which should be a living for a family.

Q
. What were his faults?

A
. While I knew him I never knew him do one thing that he thought wrong. You could say that he worked too hard, so that other people had to too, and that he was mean and selfish. But it was not true: he worked hard because he thought it was right that people should work hard: and as for being mean, he had had such a bad time in the hard years when sheep were worth nothing that he was frightened about money, and guarded it like a weapon—not for himself, but for his family. He
was
selfish for his family, but I am sure he never knew it, and I am sure he would never have done a wrong thing even to have advanced Emyr.

Q
. Did he like you?

A
. Yes. We always liked one another very much from the beginning. When the others had gone to bed we used to sit together sometimes, and I would read to him, or he would tell me about things that had happened long ago. He loved his food, and I used to cook him the things he liked best. I do not mean that he was greedy, though.

Q
. And old Mrs. Vaughan?

A
. That was different. I liked her: she was a dear, gentle old lady, and she did her very best to like me at first. But I suppose you can’t have two women in a house.

I tried, too, because I liked her and respected her, and I did not want to do anything wrong. I did not go to change anything in the house, and I wanted to take over the heavy work, to rest her. When she was a girl she had worked in the dairy and in the fields, and she had never got into the way of keeping house very well. Everything was shining clean, but it was higgledy-piggledy; and she could not cook. She said she was happier out of doors than in. My mother was a beautiful cook (she had been in very good service) and she always said that I had her hand for pastry: anyway, I enjoyed cooking, and the men liked eating what I cooked.

I brought some of my mother’s old things with me—Meurig’s wife had nothing to say with them, though she tried—and they looked lovely in Gelli. Before they came the house was rather bare, because the old people had never bought much. Once, when I was not feeling well, I asked Emyr’s mother not to paint the cupboard—there was some orange paint over from the cart. She loved painting things: she had mixed the dairy whitewash with sheep-mark for the kitchen, and you could not see anything in the corners of the room, it was so dark. The deep red always came through the next year’s coat. When she painted things with real paint they never dried, because she put it on so thick. But I should never have said anything about the oak corner cupboard. It hurt her, and afterwards, when she was not pleased with me, she used to talk about Bronwen’s things. “They are in Bronwen’s cupboard,” or “Look under Bronwen’s settle for them.”

The real trouble was that she thought Emyr was a god. I should not say that: she thought Emyr was the best man there ever was. She loved him so that anyone who did not think like her seemed to be against Emyr. When Emyr and I quarreled it shocked her, and she thought I must be very wicked.

Q
. What did you quarrel about?

A
. I could never explain it.

Q
. Go on to speak about Emyr.

A
. Emyr? Well, Emyr was a good man nearly always. I wondered sometimes that he was so good, the old people made such case of him. He spoke English well; he could read and write it properly, and he was quick at figures. Before, the old man had always had to take his tax papers and all the Ministry forms—there were so many of them—to the schoolmaster, who was very kind, but it meant giving away everything about the farm, which came hard. By the time Emyr was fifteen he could understand them and write the letters, and he could settle with the people at the Grading and write to England for hay and cake and read the instructions on the bottles of medicine for liver-fluke and all the things for the sheep. He was wonderful with sheep, Emyr. The old man was good with cows, but he never really loved the sheep, and he was not fortunate with them; and of course the farm lived on sheep. The milk was just a small thing for spending-money, like the poultry, specially as we often had to buy hay in the winter, because of the bad weather. It was the same with Mrs. Vaughan and the hens: she did her best, but she was never lucky with them. It was not for want of care or hard work, but something always happened. The rats had the eggs and the chicks, or it was the fox (the foxes were terrible in Cwm Bugail). Or there were too many on the ground and they poisoned it, or half of them were broody—there was always something. The marten-cat killed sixty-four in one night.

Q
. But Emyr?

A
. Yes; I was coming back to Emyr. They used to tell him how clever he was, and of course he saw what a difference it made when he came to be the one who worked the farm and made improvements. If he had not had a lot of real goodness they must have spoiled him: Mr. Lloyd the schoolmaster was very good for him and often stopped him when he talked too much like a grandfather, and Emyr took it well from him, though he was touchy as a rule.

Q
. Did you and Emyr quarrel much to begin with? It often happens at the beginning of a marriage.

A
. No, not at first. I tried so hard
not
to quarrel; I hated hard words and the feeling of crossness. At home we hardly ever quarreled, and I never heard my father and mother say anything unkind to one another. I can remember every one of the times when my father was angry with me, and how it hurt.