A Toy Epic E-Book

Emyr Humphreys

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 361

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A Toy Epic is the story of three boys moving towards the threshold of adult life in the 1930s. From differing backgrounds their lives cross and touch until they become firm friends. Each of them, Michael, Albie and Iorwerth, take up the story in turn, creating their own particular world and contriubting to the composite picture of life in 'one of the four corners of Wales'. Significantly, A Toy Epic is Wales' most important war novel, the dominant central theme of the book. It is framed by the two World Wars, and their shadows, one gone and one looming, colour the novel dark. War is the ultimate representation in the book of a dilemma: that war, although a threat to the existence of civilisation, can also advance it. A Toy Epic is Wales' shining example of modernism. Humphreys, in this book at least, is a modernist in the exact sense of the word. He experiments with form (in the footsteps of Woolf - in particular The Waves which folds an avuncular arm around A Toy Epic from beginning to end), but also he is conducting these experiments at the fault lines of fear and exaltation that the early part of the twentieth century inspired in its artists. A Toy Epic is a marvellous example of modernist techniques employed to condense the reading experience whilst opening up the riches of the prose's potential. It is also a very moving story of three boys growing up, about childhood, and Welsh childhood specifically, between the wars; it is about church versus chapel, about class, about different types of masculine identity, about prospects, about sex, marriage and about death. As M. Wynn Thomas points out in his full and excellent introduction to this edition, the boys represent the polarities at work in Wales during the time; the anglicanisation of Wales from without and within, the erosion of tradition, the significant internal migrations to the coast. Seldom has the country been so tellingly portrayed.

Leseprobe

A Toy Epic

Emyr Humphreys

Edited & Introduced by M. Wynn Thomas

seren

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, CF31 3AE, Wales

01656 663018

www.serenbooks.com

© Emyr Humphreys

First published 1958

Reprinted 1989, 2003, 2008

Introduction, Afterword © M. Wynn Thomas, 1989

ISBN 1-85411-009-8

The right of Emyr Humphreys to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher works with the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council

Printed in Plantin by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Text

Afterword

Bibliography

Notes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

This edition of A Toy Epic would have been impossible without the great encouragement and the material support so generously provided by Emyr and Elinor Humphreys. I am very much grateful to them for all their help. Mr Graham Greene very readily allowed me to publish his letters and the Lord David Cecil letter is printed with the kind permission of his family. My uncle, Brinley Rees, has been my literary conscience in this as in so many other projects, and I would like to pay particular tribute to his scrupulous patience. Mae fy niolch, a fy nyled, i yn fawr iddynt i gyd.

Introduction

A Toy Epic made quite an impression when it first appeared in November, 1958. The comparatively sophisticated fictional technique the author had skillfully used was appreciated by The Times reviewer, who described it as “a kind of three-part plain-song of the sublimated ‘stream of consciousness’.”The delicately mixed tone of the book was well characterised in The Telegraph. There the reviewer noticed that “the sense of youth, standing fresh and innocent before the opening day already flecked with black cloud is beautifully conveyed. One feels the strange mixture of nostalgia and fear that remembered boyhood rouses – the compassion for what once was and never will be again”. A robustly appreciative piece in the Western Mail ended on a sensitive note: “his language is pure and strong, with images as sharp and bright as a child’s box of paints.” The Church Times therefore voiced the consensus of critical opinion when it described the book as “a minor masterpiece.”

A month after it appeared, A Toy Epic was included in The Times list of the dozen outstanding novels of 1958. It was in very good company. The sensation of the year was Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, but among the British novels mentioned were T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, and Iris Murdoch’s The Bell. Public acclamation of A Toy Epic was very shortly followed by welcome private confirmation of the novel’s quality. At the end of December, Emyr Humphreys received an unexpected and very kind letter from Lord David Cecil:

I hope you will forgive a stranger for writing to tell you how very much he has enjoyed and admired your book A Toy Epic. There are a great many interesting and efficient novels written nowadays but very few which are works of imaginative art. Yours surely is one of the few. Its whole atmosphere is suffused with that mysterious and poetic sense of life which is the mark of such an imaginative work, and yet this is done at no cost to realism. The personalities of all three boys have the vivid immediacy of real people – and also some of the unpredictability. One does not know how they are going to turn out, and certainly I was surprised when Albie failed to fulfil his promise and Michael developed extremist views. Yet both changes convinced me. I was surprised as one is by a real event.

The book is true and beautiful. Thank you very much for it.

The letter augured far more than the recipient could then have guessed. Along with Francis Wyndham, V.S. Pritchett and C. Day Lewis, Cecil was that year responsible for adjudicating the Hawthornden Prize.1 Instituted after the First World War, this distinguished prize was awarded annually “for an outstanding imaginative work” written by a British subject under forty years of age. Past winners had included Siegfried Sassoon, Graham Greene and David Jones. Early in 1959 Emyr Humphreys heard that the prize had been won by A Toy Epic, and in June he went to London to receive the award from his fellow-countryman, Aneurin Bevan.

*

Although it was first published in 1958, A Toy Epic had been begun eighteen years earlier, when Emyr Humphreys was a twenty-one year old conscientious objector working on a farm in Pembrokeshire. Having had several poems published in the Spectator, he mentioned to the paper’s literary editor, Graham Greene, that he had started work on a verse novel. On March 25, 1940 Greene wrote back expressing his readiness to “be of ... use to you when the book is completed, unless I’m in the army.” Encouraged by this response, Humphreys continued to work on the manuscript after moving to Plas Llanfaglan, a large farm near Caernarfon, where he worked from the early summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944. He soon abandoned the idea of a complete novel in verse, but the manuscripts that survive show that most of the opening three chapters of the novel as published in 1958 were completed between early 1940 and late 1942, having been written at night after work on the farm was finished for the day. Some material relating to the boys’ time in Llanrhos County School is also extant. But as this is fragmentary it is difficult to know exactly how much of it there originally was.

Graham Greene had meanwhile become an editorial director with Eyre & Spottiswoode, so it was to that firm the completed manuscript was eventually sent. By January, 1943, the publishers had decided to offer Emyr Humphreys a contract that secured first option for them on the novel. But they also pointed out that the text as received was too short for publication and therefore requested him to prepare additional material. An exercise-book from this period records the new plan to which Emyr Humphreys then decided to work: “ Part One: Fathers of Men. Part Two: Michael. Part Three: Alfie [who became Albie in the 1958 novel]. Part Four: Iorwerth. Part Five:?”

Part 1 was the first version of the opening chapters of A Toy Epic as published in 1958. It therefore dealt with the childhood and early schooldays of the three boys growing up together. Parts 2 to 4 were the sections dealing with their lives after they left school and went each his separate way. This was the material added on the advice of the editors at Eyre & Spottiswoode, in an attempt to pad the original work out to publishable length. The Michael section (Part 2) was eventually published in Keidrych Rhys’s magazine Wales in 1947, and is included as an appendix in the present edition.2 The other two sections have never been published, but are still available in manuscript.

The Alfie section (Part 3) fills two exercise books. It begins with him failing his exams and having to accept a home-town job in Mr Bell’s garage. Frustration follows until Alfie meets a girl called Eileen. The description of their sexual encounter is accompanied by quotations from Dante and therefore broadly parallels the relationship between Albie and Frida in the published novel. Iorwerth’s story (Part 4) also sprawls over two books, and it begins with the burial of his father. In accordance with his mother’s wishes he then goes to college to prepare himself for the ministry. There he surreptitiously reads the unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and cuts a strange, solitary figure. His oddness draws him to the attention of Beth Rowlands, a fellow-student, and the rest of the narrative follows his growing relationship with her, a relationship complicated by the guilt and confusion he feels as his sexual feelings develop.

Emyr Humphreys sent the new, extended manuscript of the first Toy Epic (as it was already called) to Eyre & Spottiswoode some time in early 1943. On July 4, 1943 he received a reply from Graham Greene, who began by apologising for his delay in commenting on the typescript, explaining that he had been busy “working for 62 hours a week” at the Foreign Office. He then proceeded to offer a mercilessly shrewd criticism of the material that had been submitted:

I read the original part of your novel with a great deal of pleasure, but I’m afraid I felt it was spoilt badly by the expansion. I rather doubt the policy they followed here of suggesting expansion: it might have been better to have kept the original book until you had a volume of several stories ready. Frankly I found the second half badly written, unoriginal, oddly novelettish and pedestrian. This is harsh, and it will be my own fault if you take your future work elsewhere as a consequence, but I have such a strong belief in your talent that I feel one can be frank with you. The completed book in my opinion is unpublishable. I’m not sure whether the expansion was ever possible: when I finished the first part I asked myself how it could be done. I was convinced that the same style of narration had to be kept, and it seemed to me the only thing for you to do was to skip say thirty years and give us the same soliloquies of the same characters middle-aged. That, I felt, would preserve the epic flavour.

But it’s no use suggesting ideas to you now. You may find another publisher ready to take the present book: if you don’t I hope you’ll send me your next. Have you ever gone on with the translations and the journal you were at work on two years ago?

Emyr Humphreys took Graham Greene’s hint and sent the returned typescript promptly to another publisher. He chose Faber and Faber, probably on Keidrych Rhys’s advice. On September 3, 1943, he received a letter from T.S. Eliot. Faber, he said, had sought two independent opinions on the typescript. The readers felt there was good material in it, and that it showed a great deal of promise. However, the structure was defective and the novel couldn’t be successful in its existing form. One reader had reported that he’d found the three voices difficult to distinguish at the beginning. Later the confusion cleared, but then there was a lack of connection between the three narratives as the characters went in different directions. The readers appreciated the detailed nature of the narrative, the accuracy of the record and the poignancy of the scenes. Eliot concluded by saying: “whether the next step for you is to find a new architectural design for this book or to start another one is a question which no one but yourself can decide.”

At about the same time, Emyr Humphreys met the great Welsh short-story writer and novelist Kate Roberts at a Plaid Cymru summer-school.3 Having read his typescript, she drew a simple diagram that made the weakness of the extended novel blindingly obvious to him:

It was then clear that (as Eliot also said) the original framework was not suitable for supporting and inter-relating the later parts of the narrative. Emyr Humphreys decided to put the typescript away, and to start on a new work. This was the novel which was published under the title The Little Kingdom in 1946.

*

The Little Kingdom was the first novel by Emyr Humphreys to be published. Others followed in regular succession, including Hear and Forgive, which won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1952, so that by 1955 he was a writer of established reputation. That year he moved out of school-teaching, which had been his main occupation since the war, into broadcasting when he was appointed Head of Radio Drama for the BBC in Cardiff. Since he was responsible for commissioning and producing radio plays, his conscience would not allow him to broadcast his own work. After he had been two years with the BBC, however, he was prevailed upon by Hywel Davies, then Head of Programmes, to write six half-hour scripts in Welsh – the language in which Emyr Humphrey had gradually become fluent after beginning to learn it when he was a student at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth before the war.

In search of material suitable for broadcasting he turned back to the original Toy Epic and began by translating the Fathers of Men section which dealt with the boyhood and adolescence of the three characters. A rough translation of part of it into Welsh already existed, prepared by a girlfriend of Emyr Humphreys’ during the war. This may have encouraged him to attempt a complete translation of his own, and as he proceeded he slightly modified the forties English text, expanding it and improving it. Then he added substantial new sections in Welsh that were in keeping with the character and tone of the successful forties material. The strong rhythms of the original English version were useful in that they set a pattern of writing he could follow and develop. But his greatest difficulty was ensuring that the assured sophistication of his mature writing style would not destroy the freshness of the young experience he had captured fifteen years earlier. His new title for the completed work was Y Tri Llais (The Three Voices) and it was broadcast as a Sunday serial by the BBC in Wales in early 1958.

The programmes were widely admired, not least by Radio Talks producer Aneirin Talfan Davies, who was himself a respected Welsh writer and man of letters. He was also an inspired promoter of literary talent, having been one of the people primarily responsible for commissioning Dylan Thomas to write his play for radio, Under Milk Wood. Aneirin Talfan urged Emyr Humphreys to turn the scripts into a novel, with the promise of publication by his family firm of Gwasg y Dryw, Llandybie. Y Tri Llais duly appeared in novel form in the summer of 1958.

Y Tri Llais was particularly fortunate in its reviewers, who included several of the most eminent Welsh-language writers of the period. Their knowledgeable discussion of the world portrayed in the book, along with their sophisticated appreciation of the literary techniques employed, are still among the best critical comments available on the text in either its Welsh or its English form. E.Tegla Davies, for instance, remarked on the way the novel brought all three of the boys, in turn, face to face with the inescapable terrors of living.4 In a remarkably perceptive extended review, John Gwilym Jones pinpointed several of the novel’s particular strengths.5 He was especially appreciative of the way the author had succeeded in “setting the story in a historical, social, moral, religious and political context without ever making these aspects of the work in any way obtrusive.” They “worked like yeast in the text”, quietly swelling the story out into a satisfying fullness of shape.

Emyr Humphreys spent the summer of 1958 in London, being trained in television production skills, and it was there, in Cornwall Gardens, that he worked on the English version of his Welsh novel. With him he had Fathers of Men, from the early forties, and the complete text of Y Tri Llais. He was therefore able to write very rapidly, and in this, its final form, A Toy Epic is virtually identical to Y Tri Llais. The only major difference between the Welsh and the English texts is the absence from the English of the brief dream sequence with which the Welsh novel opens and closes. Emyr Humphreys’s good friend, John Gwilym Jones, had judged this to be the least successful aspect of Y Tri Llais, and Humphreys respected his critical judgment. Moreover the dream was an allusion to the great eighteenth century Welsh prose classic by Ellis Wynne, Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Cwsc (The Visions of the Sleeping Poet) and Emyr Humphreys realised that the implicit reference would be utterly lost on English readers.

For the novel in its English form he chose the title he had first used fifteen years before. At the time the word “epic” reflected his view of himself as primarily a poet and referred to the origin of the work as a verse novel. In 1958 it still seemed the appropriate word to describe his poetic treatment of the wide vistas of experience that opened before the wondering eyes of three growing boys. “Toy” suggested both a sense of miniaturisation, or reduced scale compared with full adult consciousness, and also the element of play in both childhood and adolescence – with a further musical allusion (via the prominent compositional features of the novel) to Haydn’s Toy Symphony.

The Welshness of A Toy Epic was immediately apparent to reviewers, and proved altogether too much for Americans to take. Emyr Humphreys’s other novels had been successfully published in the United States, but this one was reluctantly refused by publishers there who admired its artistic qualities but were convinced the society portrayed would be too foreign for American taste. The Times reviewer, however, saw this cultural distinctiveness as one of the strengths of the novel: “Small nationalities to-day are self-conscious in expressing and asserting themselves, and nothing could be more Welsh than Mr Emyr Humphreys’s A Toy Epic, unless, indeed, it were actually written in that language.” Actually, of course, it had indeed been written in that language before being rewritten in (rather than translated into) English. Y Tri Llais and A Toy Epic therefore provide an unprecedented, and very welcome, example of the two “tongues” of modern Wales speaking, for once, with one and the same voice.

M. Wynn Thomas

A Toy Epic

1

I was brought up in a broad valley in one of the four corners of Wales. On fine days from my bedroom window I saw the sea curve under the mountains in the bottom right-hand corner of the window frame. My sister and I played in the garden. Hiding behind the soft forest of asparagus grass, climbing the apple trees. My name is Michael.

I was brought up in the kitchen parlour and bedroom of No 15 Cambrian Avenue. Cambrian Avenue is in Llanelw which is a busy seaside town. Under the kitchen table I first saw motes swimming in a beam of sunlight, and crumbs lying white and edible near me on the floor. At three and a half I played in the cul-de-sac, and numbers 13,14,15,16,17 and 18 stood on guard about me, watching me with square indifferent eyes. My name is Albie.

I was brought up in the heart of ninety acres, at the end of a broad valley, at the headquarters of Noah, in an anchored ark. My growth was calf-like from the semi-twilight of the darkened kitchen to the sharp light of the empty front garden. I followed my mother, going to riddle cinders, sheltering behind her skirt from the aggressive eloquence of the geese. I followed my father to view the new hunt bull, and my small fist groped along the resistant corduroy breeches he wore. The cart-horse, the duck pond, the cowshed and the hayshed, the stable and the granary constituted my city. My name is Iorwerth.

The Rectory was my home, said Michael. My mother believed the house was far too big. My father’s stipend was £300 a year and to this I may add a small private income of £60 a year, the rent of a smallholding far away in Cardiganshire, left to him in the will of his great-uncle Job. I went to the village school and mixed with the village children, being different only in as much as I retired from school or play down a drive sheltered by elms to a large house instead of going home to a terrace house in the village; or in as much as I could watch the parson in his white and distant surplice, with the inward knowledge that I could sit on his knee and even put my finger inside his hard gleaming collar.

My mother was firm and well-bred, the daughter of a vicar, accomplished in playing the piano and embroidery. Because there was little prospect of my going to a Public School my mother strove particularly hard to give me the advantages of a good upbringing, at all times desiring me to be conscious of my good origins.

One rainy afternoon Wil Ifor Jones came to play with me in the Rectory stables. Wil was the daring boy of our class. But his father was a farm labourer, famous for his hard work, for his drinking bouts and for sometimes beating his wife.

“Nid fel yna mae gwneud,”6 said Wil as I failed to spin my top, as my mother came to call us in for tea. “That’s not the way to do it, you silly fool.”

“Don’t you call Michael a fool, Wil Ifor Jones, and don’t you use the ‘ti’ with him either. You should know your place.”

I felt vaguely elated that I should be accounted better than Wil, who was a daring boy, and I looked at him curiously. I was more than ever anxious to secure his permanent friendship, but he never came to the Rectory to play again, and at school, for quite a long time, he treated me rather roughly.

In the garden, my mother always wore gloves, and my sister and I, uprooting weeds, moved obedient to her refined remarks. We pulled up weeds in the flower bed around the lawn while my mother clipped the laurel bushes, or, in her absence, we ran about among the laurels and the rhododendrons.

In the house, my mother commanded Mary, the maid, to scrub the large square slabs on the kitchen floor, to wash the dishes, iron our clothes, clean the grate, and sundry other domestic duties, which we watched, my sister and I, with pleasure.

“Mary!” my mother would call in various tones. “Mari-mary! Mary-mari! Mary-this-house-needs-two-or-three-maids-notone!”

“Mary!” my father would call in his deep, kind, parsonical voice. “Have you seen my pipe, my hat, my gloves, the red book, the blue book, this, that, or the other?”

Mary, fat and unattractive, would confide in us, and speak to us as equals, and Mary’s opinions were ours. She had too much work to do. We agreed. George Jones was a daft fellow. We agreed. Our father-in-the-study had a memory like a sieve. We agreed. Mary was our mentor, our adviser of the business of living. We were credulous clay in her red, scrubbed hands; her rights and her wrongs were ours. We were on her side.

In the evenings she read children’s stories to us in hauntingly monotonous English: What said Dobson are you game for a lark the beak is out we could hide the tuckbox in his study too ris-ky said Peers...

Mary enjoyed the stories as much as we did and she told us which were best and which ones were no good. Mary was English, she said. Her father was born in Chester, but her father could speak Welsh when he had a mind. Only old Methodies7 spoke Welsh all the time. We agreed, and answered our father in English which pleased my mother, I think, apart from our accent which we got from Mary. But my father never gave up what must have appeared then a losing battle. That is why my sister and I prefer to speak English. It was Mary’s idea. One of her principles.

I run around the cul-de-sac, said Albie, steering my way with a broken stick between my hands, my lips being my engine.

“My father drives a bus!” I shout to anyone who happens to pass.

My father comes through the back door for tea, throwing his stiff peaked cap on the sofa and hanging his leather money bag behind the door.

“Near thing today, by the S bend, between Pantbach and Pydew.”

“Oh, yes, Dic. What happened?” my mother’s voice is soft and patient.

“Just as I’d got round the first bend, there was a fool of a fellow coming racing towards me. I couldn’t see through the hedge, could I?”

“Well, no, Dic, of course you couldn’t.”

“Good job for him I was going slow or the b ...” My father looks at me and does not finish what he was going to say.

“He could have had it. Smashed up!”

“Oh, dear.” My mother shakes her head and I feel I want to shake mine. “Another cup of tea, Dic?”

“Diawch, Nel!8 I heard a good one down in the yard today. You know little Archie, fellow from Llansannan, conductor on one of our double deckers. You know, little fellow, very small. The one who always says ‘A-way John Jones’ every time he rings the bell?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t, Dic bach.” My mother cuts bread and butter effortlessly, watching also the kettle on the verge of boiling, my father’s plate, and me.

“Diawch, you do,9 Nellie! Terrible temper for such a small man. Like a lucifer.10 Anyway for you, he got into a quarrel with one of those Royal Yellow chaps. D’you know what he did?”

“I’ve no idea.” My mother holds her head on one side expectantly. My father pauses dramatically now that she has given him all her attention.

“Threw his ticket punch at him!”

My mother looks shocked and startled, but my father is still laughing so I know it is all right.

“He did. Threw his ticket punch at him!”

My father belches. Sitting down all day, gripping the large steering wheel that vibrates constantly between his hands, staring down the winding roads and breathing petrol fumes with every breath of air: he says himself it’s no wonder his digestion is bad. “I get shaken to death to earn my living,” he says quite often. As a joke. My father loves to make jokes.

“Wish they’d leave me on this circular run for ever more, Nellie,” my father says, drinking a cup of tea standing by the open back door. “Nice to pop home for tea. Much better than the country run.”

“Well ask them about it, Dic. See if you can get a transfer.”

“I will do that, Nel.”

“Nel! Nel!”

“Here’s your cup of tea, Dic. What’s the matter?”

“Thanks. Just a sip. Can’t wait. They are saying at the yard that Foster’s going to sellout to the Royal Yellow. You can’t tell. It’s hard to say.”

“Jim Morris was saying that the working on the buses is the best place these days. You don’t get the sack so easy. You can’t tell. It’s hard to say.”

“Nel! Nel!”

“Here’s your cup of tea, Dic.”

“Sorry, Nel. Can’t stay long. There’s talk of a strike at the Royal Yellows. Have you heard?”

“You don’t know what to believe, Dic bach. You can’t tell.”

“It’s hard to say. Must be off now. Don’t you dance too much attendance on those visitors, Nel. So long, little ‘un.”

“So long, Dad.”

The cap with the glistening peak once more on his head, and his money bag hung over his shoulder, his face turns towards us, smiling between two steps as he passes the kitchen window.

“So long, Dad. Take care, Dad. Ta-ta! ta-ta!”

The first time I am ever allowed to carry out a pint tin of hot tea to the field where my father and Llew are busy hedging, said Iorwerth, it is winter and I am well wrapped up.

“Hedges are cut with the aid of a two-foot rule, aren’t they, Llew?” My father is jolly as I run about him. Everything he says seems jollier with the wind blowing it. Indoors he is always more serious. “Look out, my boy. Don’t stand too close, my love!” He wields his bill-hook with ardent pleasure, the slim, white-haired man in corduroy trousers and a torn old coat. Half the hedge is bent and neat and half stands untidy and upward, remaining to be tackled.

If you happened to look into my father’s diary – Boots’ large farmer’s diary which he keeps in his desk, – for the year 1926, you would read an account of how, in February, it being cold outside, he allowed me into the barn to watch him chaffing hay for the cattle, breathing heavy and hungry in the warm adjacent byre.

“Ho!” I shouted and danced about.

Clec! Clec! Chuff! Chuff! Chuff! said the oil engine, and the chaff-cutter rattled like mad. My father stuffed hay along the trough into the false teeth of the machine. Those false, false teeth, for when his back was turned I put my hand in thinking I might experience the ecstasy of the shaking machine, and although I cannot remember, the false teeth took my finger, and, I suppose, chaffed it. My right hand now has three fingers and a stump in addition to my thumb. Everyone notices I write with my left hand.

I think it is an advantage to be brought up in the country, spring, summer, autumn and winter. “It is an advantage,” said Miss Roberts, our teacher, “to be brought up in the country, and especially on a farm, isn’t it Iorwerth?”

“Oh, yes, Miss Roberts,” I blush.

“There are little children,” continues Miss Roberts, “living in large cities who have never seen a blade of grass.”

“Oh, pity. Pity,” Our whole class sighs.

Spring, summer, autumn, winter, smartly, slowly, slowly, fast, I walk a mile and a half to school alongside hedges and across fields. Picking the flowers according to the season, a handful of primroses for school, a handful of bluebells home, harebells for Miss Roberts, violets for Mam; or strapped in high gaiters I march as well as I can manage through the more navigable snow.

“Robert Jones! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself living almost next door to the school, and ten minutes late! And here’s Iorwerth Hughes, who has to walk a mile and a half, never late, never late. Take that impudent grin off your face.”

Yes, Robert, please, Robert, take it off. Don’t annoy him. Don’t scold him. Let’s all be friends.

“Iorwerth Hughes has had all his sums correct this morning. He is a very good boy. Come and sit in the front, Iorwerth, here, sit next to Michael.”

I slink happily to the front with my pencil and book and I slide my behind along the seat, and Michael, looking at me curiously, slides up.

“Mam,” I said, out of breath in the evening when I got home for tea. “Mam, Miss Roberts said I was a good boy today. I got all my sums right. She moved me to the front to sit by Michael Edwards.”

“There’s a good boy. Tell me, Iorwerth, did Michael get his sums right, too?”

“No, Mam. Only me.”

The first day I went to school, said Albie, I was escorted by my mother.

There’s Nellie Jones taking her darling to school. She makes too much of him she does. Like a one chick hen. She’s sure to ruin him. Mark my words.

“Good morning, Mrs Jones. Nice day, isn’t it? Albie off to school? Hello, Albie! Hello, love!”

Doesn’t he look nice and clean.

“Ta-ta, Albie.”

Sulky little chap. Most unloving. Like a little old man. Not natural I call it.

Passing the little gates and little gardens, the housewives bare-armed in doorways, passing the shops and the fish and chip saloon not open yet, I see Mr Pike, the fruiterer, carrying cauliflowers out in round wicker baskets. He speaks to my mother.

“Morning, Mrs Jones. Beautiful morning. Off to school, is he? Big day, eh?”

I see the assistant brushing in the gloom of the shop towards the daylit door sawdust and bits of paper; I see the newsagent and the tobacconist pulling out the placards for the day, which I linger to look at as I believe he wants me to do. But my mother tugs at my arm.

“Come along, Albie, or we’ll be late.”

My mother hates being late. It is wrong to be late.

“If you don’t go to school you’ll never learn anything. Come on now, there’s a good boy.”

What are these tall railings that stand between us and a broad asphalt yard and a dirty red building? What is the wrought-iron gate half open to allow us through? What are these bright and shining faces, these groups, these running figures, this echoing choir of voices? We walk, my mother and I, among talking, shouting girls of all sizes, and very small boys.

My mother has gone. I am alone sitting in a desk among a lot of children of my age. There are blocks on the desk and beads for counting. There is a young lady standing in front of us, and a blackboard. The young lady has a lot of fair hair and a kind face. Like me, please, young lady. We get up, stand in rows between the desks and march out of the room along a corridor, through a glass-topped door, into a large room, a huge room, filled with children, hundreds and thousands of children, and we march to the very front. The young lady makes us stand in rows. I stand trembling with nerves, my nose almost on the gleaming gable of the upright piano. I see a blurred reflection of the endless rows of children that stretch behind me. Bang goes the piano, and I jump with fright.

“ There’s a home for little children

Above the bright blue sky...”

The September sunlight streams through the high churchlike window across rows of singing faces, rows of wide open mouths. Could there, anywhere, be room for them all? A mighty noise fills the earth, pours through my tender ears. It is not a bad noise; if only it was not so loud; which pause will be the last ... how long will it go on? Aaaaaamen. It is suddenly quiet.

The man with grey hair and a finger inside a book opens the book. The grown-ups bend their heads and close their eyes. The man with grey hair is speaking with eyes closed. I look along the row of teachers and I am able to see the top of their heads. I look around and the children have bent their heads and closed their eyes also. Now is my chance to understand. They are all silent, their eyes are closed. No one looks at me and I look at everyone. I have begun to explore a new dimension.

Since I was the Rector’s son, said Michael, and the village school was a church school my talent received early recognition. At Sunday school also I was expected to give bright answers. Here there were four teachers; Miss Meurig, babies; Mr Jones, boys; and Miss Watkins, girls; my father took the young men and a few grown-ups. Miss Meurig with a cardboard alphabet on her knee taught us the alphabet in Welsh and read Bible stories to us and showed us bright pictures: Ruth gleaning the field of Boaz, Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah.

I gained an early promotion to Mr Jones’s class and became its youngest member. Here we memorized the Creed in Welsh. I caused some commotion because I refused to acknowledge that I could read Welsh. Mary, the maid, I suppose, sowed the seed of sedition in my mind. Mr Jones was afraid of my father and hated a fuss. So eventually I had my own way. I would sit in a corner of the pew and eagerly await my turn to read when we read through Psalms together, one verse after another because we read them in English, and I could read English better than the others. If it was a long verse I was delighted and read as fast as I could to emphasize my superiority. For this the others disliked me and kept me out of their games and conversation. I looked back at them, over my shoulder, delighted with my superiority, as I ran alone through the graves to the Rectory gate and they made their way down the broad path to the litch-gate. The advantage of having a path of one’s own to come and go by! The advantage! The superiority!

My father had his churchwardens to tea on alternate Sundays, in the seclusion of his study. The one was a farmer with whom he discussed farming and local gossip, and the other the village schoolmaster in whom he endeavoured to awake an interest in archaeology. I was allowed to join them after tea if the conversation was at all fit for young ears. I sat near them, and listened intently until it was time for evensong. Sometimes I had a story book with me, and as I grew older I grew less interested in the conversation and more interested in the book.

But at this time I am a patient audience to Mr Lewis, the schoolmaster, who loved to talk about football more than anything in the world, and my father who wanted to talk archaeology, and to Mr Williams and my father who both talk of the wonders of farming and the genealogies and the strange histories of the families of our parish.

“The Daily Mail had a good shot at the Labour Party yesterday. Did you read it, Rector?”

“Llwynhendy is an interesting old farm, you know, Lewis, very interesting. The farm road is definitely the only remaining part of the Roman sarn in this parish. I’ve established that.”

“Rector bach, I never saw such a cow in all my life. She had a bag, well, I’ve never seen anything more perfect.”

“Hughes bach’s mother and Twm Tan Twr’s grandmother were two sisters, as you say, but I still don’t see how they can be related to Lias Tyn Gors, Rector, quite honestly.”

“I’ll show you the book, Williams. I’m quite certain. Michael, pass me that large blue book on the bottom shelf, over there.”

“I’ll have a look in the old Parish Register, Mr Williams. Get my keys, Michael. I’m sure John Morris is over sixty-five. Quite sure. But I’ll be able to tell you for certain.”

Mr Lewis speaks slowly. In his anxiety to please, he leaves a sentence unfinished, as though inviting his listener to draw the conclusion he found most agreeable. To myself I say, almost in pain, oh, please yourself, Mr Lewis! Just please yourself, and I devise a conclusion for him that I feel couldn’t fail to please anybody, which is what would please Mr Lewis most. But he never knows what I have done for him.

Mr Williams crosses his short fat legs so that I see his under-pants above his thick woollen stockings. Oh! I say to myself, almost in agony, adjust your trousers, please, Mr Williams. Mr Lewis taps his finger-tips together and stares through his glasses at something beyond me. Mr Williams smokes like a furnace, I can hardly see his face behind the cloud of smoke that hangs and eddies around him in the windless study. Then perhaps my father will discern the face of the water-clock on the mantelpiece and say:

“Duw, Duw! It’s five to six. Come along, Lewis Williams, we must go to Church. They can’t get along without us, you know Michael, go and wash yourself.”

“It’s Welsh tonight, Dad. Can I stay at home please?

“Go and wash, and don’t try and tell me you can’t understand Welsh! Go along. It’s this maid of ours, you know, Mr Lewis. She can’t speak Welsh, she says. If you heard her English! Sheep’s English! But then maids are so scarce, so what can we do?”

Mary gets all the blame, but in fact it is my mother who is sending my sister to a boarding school at Llandrindod, for the sake of her accent. Her cousin is the headmistress and therefore my sister gets special terms. There is no talk of a boarding school for me.

My sister, who has spent the time between tea and evensong with Mary or my mother, now comes to view and races after me across the lawn to climb over the wall into the churchyard. Or, at other times, my mother catches us in time and leads us through the white gate and along the official footpath.

In Church the lamps are lit ready for the darkness that falls during the second lesson. There is a smell of paraffin, and the heating apparatus is boiling over. From a tank in the top corner of the back of the Church comes the sound of mighty rushing boiling waters, and a small cloud of steam. John Elias is ringing the bell, one hand behind his back, his fingers playing about the slit in his jacket. His hair is scanty and parted in the middle, his thin weather-beaten face is creased into a broad toothless smile as he nods at us and raises his eyes at the tank, creasing his forehead neatly, and stretching his smile still further.

The rushing boiling waters roar as we kneel in prayer. My sister and I are afraid. She whispers: “Dolgarrog,” and I see the front page of the Christian Herald that Mary showed us last week – a woman clinging to the branch of a tree with a baby on her other arm, and the water from the broken dam filling up the picture. The sound of mighty rushing waters assails my ears. If the tank of boiling water burst, if the pipes exploded? The tank was at the back of the Church, we sat neatly and quietly in the second pew from the front. Could we get out in time? Through the stained glass window? Or could we climb up the pulpit and stand on the Bible above the rising boiling water?

“Rhif yr emyn dau gant tri deg a phedwar,11 two hundred and thirty-four.”Thank God for my father’s firm voice from the back of the Church. All will be well. Long ago my mother has stopped me from turning round, but the twitch in my neck still remains.

Miss Morris at the organ is behindhand again. Oh, the painful interval. A fat spinster with a straw hat and pince-nez fumbles with her hymn book and peddles away the while, getting wind into the organ’s tired lungs.

She’s off! We get up. My father in a white starched surplice walks solemnly down the aisle, passing us without as much as a glance. He sinks gracefully to his knees before us. We sing on.