The Emerald Valley (33 page)

Was it when Mam took him to see that awful woman, who shouted and made her cry? Or was it when he was woken in the night by the shaking of the bed they were sharing and the sound of the hard, racking cough he had come to fear. He had turned over, humping the clothes over his head, but though that muffled the sound a little it could not prevent him from feeling the continued restless movement of the bed.

Next morning Mam had tried to get up, but she was too ill. Huw had stayed with her, partly because she kept hanging on to him and begging him not to leave her, partly because for the first time in his life he had met someone who frightened him – the dragon of a woman whose house they were staying in, Mrs Moon. She didn't look like a monster, Huw thought in puzzlement. She was small – almost as small as he was – with soft white hair and a flowered pinafore. But oh! the venomous expression that innocuous little face was capable of conjuring up! And how shrill was her voice with its unfamiliar, accent, harsh-sounding to Huw's ears after the lilt of the valleys. Huw had escaped from colliery managers, policemen and threatening neighbours, wriggling out of a dozen and more tweaking ear-holds. He had been up before the headmaster more often, he maintained, than any other boy in the school and always emerged laughing – even if it was a laugh that held back tears of pain. But none of them had frightened him as Mrs Moon did. Afterwards, in his mind she was also woven in as an integral part of the nightmare.

It was on the second night that it happened.

All day as Mam coughed – trying to keep it quiet so as not to call down the wrath of Mrs Moon for disturbing her – she had tossed and turned as though she could not bear the bedclothes over her and he had been aware of a sense of impending doom. It seemed to fill the room with the ominous heaviness that precedes a thunderstorm. That evening, unable to bear it any longer, he pushed up the sash window and escaped for a while to wander and explore in this strange and hostile town. When he returned he was more afraid of being caught by Mrs Moon than of what he would find in Mam's room, and when he went in head-first over the sill and caught sight of her, his heart seemed to stop beating.

She looked just as Dad had looked – waxy-white, skin shiny and drawn tight over the bones of her face. For a moment he thought she was already dead. Cautiously, heavy with dread, he crept towards her and bent over the still, white form. And when her hand moved suddenly, fastening around his arm, he screamed and screamed, shocked beyond caring about anything. Then, as the door opened, his scream became sobs of fear. He had done it now – Mrs Moon was coming. And Mam was not dead at all … she was alive. He could see the faint flutter of her eyelashes and hear the soft mew of her breathing.

‘What's going on here? What … ?' Mrs Moon broke off, as shocked as Huw had been as her searching gaze settled on the unnaturally pale woman in the bed. ‘Oh my Lord, whatever is the matter with your mother? We shall have to get the doctor to her. Why didn't you tell me, you stupid boy?'

She grabbed his arm to put him aside but Huw, veteran of dozens of encounters with angry adults, assumed she was about to mete out punishment so he twisted violently, and kicked out. Mrs Moon screamed in pain and anger as the toe of his heavy boot connected with her bony leg, but Huw did not wait for anything. Seizing his advantage he sped through the door and away, running, running, until his breath came in short, painful bursts and his legs shook beneath him.

He stopped, doubling up while he caught his breath, then straightened and looked around. He had run along a road that was parallel with the railway line and beyond it an embankment rose, coal-dust black and covered with trees. There was something familiar and welcoming about the embankment – the first place since he had come to Hillsbridge that did not make him feel totally alien – and it drew Huw. Nimbly he climbed through the strand-wire fence and scooted across the railway line. To his relief no one saw him – you got yelled at for wandering about on railway lines, too. Then he was at the foot of the embankment, scrambling up the first steep part and sending small avalanches of dust and dirt down behind him.

It was cool amongst the trees, cool and somehow safe. Huw climbed until he found a really thick trunk and wedged himself behind it. He knew he ought to go back and face Mrs Moon's wrath, but he didn't want to. And he didn't want to see Mam looking like that again, either. He wanted her to have some of her old colour back in her cheeks; to look the way she used to before Dad died.

How long Huw stayed on the embankment he never knew, though afterwards there were certain sounds that always conjured it up for him once more – the whistle of trains on the line below as they approached the station; their even puffing, so close at hand; the distant clanging of church bells, for it was practice night at the Tower. There were smells, too – the pine needles and the damp, dusty earth all around him, and in the air the teasing whiff of a couch fire. Each time a train went by clouds of smoke rose, fogging the spaces between the trees. But still Huw sat there, wedged against the solid trunk.

It was only when darkness began to fall that he realised he could not stay here all night. Reluctantly, aware he would be in for trouble when he returned to ‘the digs', he slid back down the embankment and picked his way across the railway lines. The light was failing fast and for a panicky moment he wondered if he would be able to find his way back. But landmarks presented themselves along the way and sooner than he expected he found himself nearing the house of torment. Lights were blazing out of every window.
I've done it now
, thought Huw.

There was nothing for it but to go in, but he hoped that he might be able to slip by the dragon unnoticed and into the room he was sharing with Mam. He tried the door and the handle turned; stealthily he pushed at it, then froze. Through the widening crack he could see the unmistakable dark blue of a policeman's uniform.

She went for the law! thought Huw in panic. She sent for the law because I kicked her!

His first instinct was to run again, but his path was blocked by someone coming in at the gate – a very large lady with a bag. He hesitated and was lost. Strong fingers gripped his shoulder and a booming voice with that strange, ugly accent announced:

‘So there you are! Where have you been, eh, lad?'

Realising there was no escape, Huw tried a different approach. ‘Mam? Where's my Mam?'

For a moment there was silence in the small, overcrowded hallway, and the quality of it panicked Huw. He looked around from one to the other – Mrs Moon, pinched-looking; the policeman, stern yet somehow sad; the newcomer – the large lady with the bag – her face set in a curious expression that somehow looked like pretend-solemnity. As he looked, fear seemed to explode in him like a roman candle on fireworks night, sending showers of small burning sparks through all his veins.

‘Mam! Mam!' he cried, struggling against the grip on his shoulder.

‘Now you wait a minute.' Huw did not perceive the note of kindness in the policeman's voice; he only felt the restraining hand and as before he kicked out wildly. The policeman momentarily slackened his grip just as Mrs Moon had done and Huw, the practised escaper, took advantage of it. Before any of them could stop him, he was across the hall and in the doorway of their room where he stopped again, his knees turning to jelly.

Mam was lying where he had left her, looking whiter and more waxy than ever, if such a thing were possible. Only now there was no flutter of her eyelashes, no gently rasping breath.

‘Mam – Mam!' He threw himself towards her, willing it not to be true. ‘Mam – wake up! Wake up!'

But already in his eight-year-old heart he knew. Mam was dead, just as Dad had been. No shouting, no crying, no shaking would wake her. And as he felt the policeman's hand on his shoulder once again, Huw began to cry for the first time since he could remember.

The days that followed would always be a merciful blur in his memory. There were questions – so many questions! – who was he, where did he come from, had he any relations? After the first instinctive reaction to lie, he told them the truth, but the answer to the last question was a definite negative. There was no one. As long as Huw could remember, it had been just Mam and Dad and himself.

After the questions there were discussions – always conducted just out of his hearing, though certain words and phrases were audible: ‘Orphan', ‘local guardians', ‘burial on the parish'. There were rooms, mostly lighter and brighter than the cottage he had called home, but with walls that seemed to press in on him until he wanted to scream to escape. Most of all there were people, hemming him in even more closely than the walls: Mrs Moon, a bristling hedgehog of indignation that Mam should be so inconsiderate as to die in her house; the large lady with her too-solemn-to-be-true expression; the policeman, kind enough, but Huw had an innate distrust of the law. Then there was the minister's wife, putting her arms around him and calling him ‘my poor lamb'. She meant well, but he hated her solicitous fussing even more than he hated Mrs Moon's hostility. And lastly there was ‘the woman'.

‘The woman'was named Mrs Roberts though some people, the minister's wife included, called her ‘Amy'. But Huw could not think of her as anything but ‘the woman'and he hated her with a venom that was stronger than his hatred for all the others put together.

‘The woman'had made Mam cry. She had turned them out of her house when Mam could hardly stand up because she was so tired and ill, and in his own mind Huw held her entirely responsible for his mother's death. But because of some arrangement he did not understand, he had been taken to her home – the very house out of which she had turned him and his mother so unceremoniously – and given a room of his own. ‘The small bedroom'the woman had called it, but Huw thought it was huge … huge – and horrible. It was so
tidy
, with a washstand with a special well for the jug and basin, a small wardrobe and something she called a ‘dressing-table'beside the bed. The rug on the linoleum-covered floor was wool, not the rag rugs he was used to, and there was a cottony bedspread as well as blankets on the bed.

And it was not only the room that was tidy –
he
was expected to be tidy to match it! The day after he arrived there, ‘the woman' had taken him to an outfitter's shop and bought him shorts and some shirts, short grey socks and sandals. Then she had taken away his own clothes, washed them and hung them out on the line and taken his boots to the menders. Huw could not remember the last time his boots had been mended; they were back now, standing in the corner of the kitchen, but not looking like
his
boots any more. There were new thick soles on them and brand-new laces.

The tidiness had not stopped with his clothes, either. ‘The woman' made him wash twice a day, once in the morning and again before he went to bed at night – and he was expected to wash his hands before meals too. She would have him looking like those two prissy little girls of hers if she had her way, he thought, with another gush of hatred reserved especially for Barbara and Maureen in their frilly frocks and white ankle socks, with ribbons in their freshly-washed hair. But she would not get her way, for he did not intend to stay long enough for that. He was going to run away – back to Wales.

What he would do when he got there, Huw was not at all clear. But for the moment that didn't matter. Just let him get away from here, back amongst his friends, amongst people who talked the way he talked, in streets he knew. He had already worked out how to get out of the house; there was a drainpipe conveniently close by his window and a big, soft paeony bush underneath. He could shin down without any trouble; then he would make for the railway. He and Mam had come on a train and he would go on a train. He had no money, but he had seen plenty of trains with trucks and wagons on the back and was sure he would be able to slip into one unnoticed. After that … well, he'd work it out as he went along. The important thing was to get away without the woman noticing.

Somewhere in the house, downstairs, a door slammed and then he heard footsteps on the stairs. There was a tap at his door and it opened.

‘All right, Huw?'

It was her – ‘the woman'! He couldn't look at her, he hated her too much. He aimed another kick at the skirting board.

‘It's bedtime,' she said.

Bedtime. At home he never went to bed until it was dark – not even then if he didn't feel like it. There was so much fun to be had when it was dark.

‘Would you like a biscuit and a glass of milk?'

He started to shake his head, then reconsidered. Her biscuits at least were nice – ginger nuts – and if he was going a long way on the train he might be hungry. He risked a cautious look and saw her offering him the tin and a glass of milk.

‘Look, I'll put it down here for you.' She came into the room and put down the small tray on the dressing-table. ‘Then you can have one if you feel like it. All right?'

With the biscuits safely deposited there was no need to look any more; he knew she would not take them away. He gazed unseeingly out of the window.

‘Don't forget to have a wash before you go to bed, will you?'

Still he said nothing and he heard her sigh.

‘Good night, Huw.'

He grunted. At least she didn't kiss him good night as the minister's wife had done when he had been staying there. That at least was something to be grateful for!

The door closed again and he heard her go into the girls'room, and then her own. He crossed to the tray, stuffed a ginger nut into his mouth and washed it down with milk. Then he filled his pockets with as many biscuits as he could cram in and lay down on the bed, covering himself with the cotton bedspread just in case she looked in again. He didn't think she would, but could not be sure.

After what seemed a lifetime the house became completely quiet. No more bumps and creaks from the room next door, no sounds of life at all. It was pitch dark outside now – not even the gas-lamp on the pavement outside was alight. Huw felt his eyes growing heavy and jerked himself upright. He mustn't go to sleep, for if he did he would have to spend another day in this awful place. Gingerly he slipped out of bed. He wished he knew where his own clothes were, but he had no idea where she had put them. But his boots – he couldn't go without them; if his friends saw him in these sissy sandals when he got home, he would be a laughing-stock.