Country Dance E-Book

Margiad Evans

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

At the heart of Country Dance is Ann Goodman, a young woman torn by the struggle for supremacy in her mixed blood, Welsh and English. This first-person account of passion, murder, and cultural conflict is set in the border country in the late 19th century, and the rural way of life is no idyll but rather a savage and exacting struggle for survival.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

About Margiad Evans

Foreword

Country Dance

Introduction

Ann's Book – First Part – 1850

Ann's Book – Second Part – 1850

Epilogue

About Catrin Collier

Library of Wales

Copyright

Country Dance

MargiadEvans

LIBRARY OFWALES

Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler) was born in Uxbridge in1909, and lived in the Border area in Ross-on-Wye. The border was central to her consciousness, and she adopted the Welsh nom de plume, Margiad Evans, out of a sense of identity with Wales. She attended Hereford School of Art, but although she continuedto paint and draw until late in her life, writing displaced art as her primary work. In addition toCountry Dance(1932), her novels includeThe Wooden Doctor(1933),Turf or Stone(1934) andCreed(1936). She also wrote numerous articles and short stories, some of which were collected inThe Old and The Young(1948), and two collections of poetry,Poems from Obscurity(1947) andA Candle Ahead(1956). HerAutobiographywas published in 1943 andA Ray of Darkness, an account of her experience of epilepsy, appeared in 1952. She died in 1958.

Foreword

A fellow writer once showed me a set of ten beautifully bound diaries she had discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. Written in elegant copper-plate script by a farmer’s wife during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, they were decorated with pictures of royalty, flowers and Gibson girls cut from magazines. The pages were perfumed with the scent of long dead, pressed summer flowers, which added to the seductive promise of a glimpse into a vanished world.

The diaries emphasized the narrow confines of rural life in Wales during the first half of the twentieth century. Possibly the most dynamic entry was written on Saturday July 1st, 1916:

Rose early, milked cows. Weather fine. Packed cart. Changed into second best dress. Took bacon, plucked chickens, butter and cheese to market. Bought new hat.

Nothing, not even the Great War, existed for that woman outside of her husband’s farm and its immediate vicinity. She noted the passing of the seasons, the vagaries of weather, prices at local markets and the purchase of every garment. National and international events passed her by. For her they held no relevance.

The life recorded in those diaries, like those of the characters in the novellaCountry Dance, belongs to a society that has ceased to exist in memory, but traces linger – on the written page, in contemporary documents, and in the imaginations of historians and writers, such as that of Margiad Evans, who obviously knew it well and used that knowledge to produceCountry Dance.

It was a world in which horizons were marked by the distance that could be travelled – and back – in a day, in which disaster was the hired boy pouring hot, not cold water into a churn and spoiling the butter, and in which chapel or church – depending on whether you were Welsh or English – was the highlight of the week. Excitement was a child falling into a river and almost drowning before being rescued, and marriage and courtship were the most important events in life outside of birth and death.

The novella opens with an introduction and brief biography of Ann Goodman, ‘a country-woman to the backbone’, born of an English father and Welsh mother. Brought up on a farm in the Welsh mountains, she returns to her birthplace in the Border country to live with her parents in 1850. We are given adescription of the derelict shepherd’s cottage where she was born:

the garden where she worked is overrun with weeds... sheep crop around the doorstep... the chimneys have fallen... the fireplaces choked with fallen plaster... and only the stone benches remain as they were when she was alive.

It requires very little imagination to picture Peggy Whistler taking on the mantle of her alter-ego, Margiad Evans, walking the beautiful Border country and stumbling across the ruin that had been reduced to serving as a store for apples. Perhaps the writer sat on one of the benches, and gazed at the vista that would have been familiar to Ann. Perhaps she pictured the shepherd’s daughter looking to the Welsh mountains and thinking of her lovers... the English shepherd and the Welsh farmer who was ‘her father’s master’.

‘Ann’s Book’ follows the brief introduction and is penned, diary style, in the present tense. She begins to write in 1850, when she leaves her cousin’s farm at Twelve Poplars in Wales, to care for her ailing Welsh mother in England. Her fiancé, the ‘English’ shepherd Gabriel, gives her the book as a parting gift ‘... to write in it all I do, for him to see, until we shall be married’.

In the book, Ann begins to chronicle the minutiae of farming life that changed little between the setting ofCountry Dancein 1850, and 1932, when Margiad Evans wrote the novella.

Ann meets a parson and her father’s master, who is ‘hard and sharp… two men I do hate’. She recalls her brother who ‘died grown up and married’, and attends a barn dance, where the master notices her. Her mother dies, her father rejects her, and when she travels to Wales for her mother’s funeral she returns to Twelve Poplars, close to her fiancé and far from the master, yet her affection for Gabriel has not survived their separation.

An outing to sheepdog trials proves to be one of the highlights of Ann’s book and life, but then the two protagonists are Ann’s father and fiancé, and her father is representing the hot-headed master who has noticed Ann and dared to speak to her, to Gabriel’s chagrin.

From the first page there is a sense of foreboding. Ann’s life is a tragedy waiting to happen – the only question is what form it will take. From the outset we know that Ann’s lover is a jealous and exacting man who demands she give him an account of everyone she meets and talks to during their separation, and there is little humour inCountry Danceto relieve the sense of impending doom – a few episodes chronicling the mishaps of an inept farm boy, Charlie, but even through those we have a sense of approaching disaster.

This simple story of lovers’ rivalry mirrors the conflict between Welsh and English in the land that borders the two countries. On the one hand we have the ancient language and farming ways of the Celts; on the other, the anglicised ways of the Saxon English. Yet the division is not so great when both factions live the rural life that was doomed to disappear with the advent of mechanisation.

InCountry DanceMargiad Evans gives us a glimpse of old rural Wales and life in the Border country even more potent than the faint scent of flowers pressed almost a century ago. While we read, we see again the isolated shepherd tending his flock on the hillside, feel the anxiety and terror of bankruptcy that accompanies an outbreak of sheep scab, and sleep under a hedge with a farm labourer turned drunk because he cannot face the finality of his wife’s death.

Margiad Evans wrote to considerable critical and popular success during her lifetime. The Riverrun Press edition ofCountry Danceon my desk is a 1978 reprint of the original 1932 edition published by Arthur Barker – a London publisher. On the back is a brief author biography that begins: ‘The years since the death of Margiad Evans in 1958 have not been kind to the reputation of a poet and novelist who was widely acclaimed in the 40s and 50s...’

I grew up in Wales in the 1950s and 60s, yet her work was never mentioned at my school or in the local library. Whenever I asked the eternal question ‘What should I read next?’ I was directed towards Russian, English, American, German and French novelists. I discovered a few – a precious few – Welsh authors for myself, which only added weight to my teacher’s pronouncement that ‘people like you (translate as South Wales Valley born) don’t write’.

Peggy Whistler/Margiad Evans was born in 1909 and died in 1958, but though she was widely read and admired, she fell out of favour and her books went out of print. I look forward to revisiting her world in the future, and also entering those of other fellow Welsh writers who are thankfully not forgotten, due to the Library of Wales series.

Catrin Collier

Country Dance

Dod dy law, on’d wyd yn coelio,

Dan fy mron a gwylia ’mrifo;

Ti gei glywed os gwrandewi

Swn y galon fach yn torri.

*

Place thy hand, unless thou believest me,

Under my breast and beware of hurting me;

Thou shalt hear if thou listen

The sound of the little heart breaking.

OLD SONG

Introduction

The struggle for supremacy in her mixed blood is the unconscious theme of Ann Goodman’s book.

She writes of Gabriel, her sweetheart, English, jealous and sullen; of Evan ap Evans, her father’s master, Welsh, violent and successful; of Olwen Davies, whose strange, whimsical beauty became the talk of the Border.

She was a country-woman to the backbone, hence the absence of rustic description: floods, winds, storms, and sunshine were as natural and unremarkable to her as to a bird. Of the human mind and temper she was an acute observer.

Born of an English father and a Welsh mother, brought up on a farm in the mountains, she returned for a brief period to her border birthplace: at her sweetheart’s request she wrote down her actions and sayings, as a concession to his jealous disposition. This only roused it to fury. Once formed, however, she continued the habit, and to that and my discovery of her book I owe my true knowledge of a tragedy which, tricked out and distorted by tradition, has been handed down among us: chance threw me the facts, and I grasped them with eagerness.

Circumstances have dimmed the memory of this woman and ironically accentuated that of the rivals, Gabriel Ford and Evan ap Evans, shepherd and farmer, Englishman and Welshman. The glare which at her death picked them out with horrible distinctness has left her curiously nebulous and unreal, a mere motive of tragedy. Even today, nearly seventy years later, anyone of our countryside will describe either of the men from hearsay. Only one very old man remembers her face because as a boy he loved it.

The shepherd’s cottage where Ann was born is falling to ruin on top of the hill. I wish that it were not so far gone, that the garden where she worked were not overrun with weeds. The garden walls have vanished, sheep crop around the doorstep, and only the two stone benches remain as they were when she was alive. The chimneys have fallen, the wind and rain make free with the windows, inside it is not safe to tread the narrow staircase, and the fireplaces are choked with fallen plaster.

The present owner uses the place for storing apples: he has had most of the rubbish cleaned away, and a pleasant smell lingers there even in summer.

From Ann’s benches, one either side of the gaping door, miles of country can be seen over the roofs of the farm: the winding road to Salus, broadened and macadamised, dipping and rising, the river and the bridge, Salus itself backed by two low hills, again the river meandering yet swift, in winter a red torrent spread sullenly abroad, then away, away to Wales, where turned the eyes of Myfanwy to the mountains whence she came.

It may seem remarkable that Ann in her writing makes use of only the present tense. It must be remembered that the entries were made over a space of months, and at the beginning were intended to take the place of speech between her and her sweetheart. Her part of the world, for one reason or another, has preserved little dialect and fewer turns of speech, but the custom of referring to past events as though they were at the moment occurring still survives, and doubtless would be even more prevalent in her day. To me this lends additional strength and vividness to her records, and at times even gives me the uncomfortable feeling of listening at a keyhole.

Curious people may express surprise that a shepherd’s daughter, born nearly a hundred years ago, should attain such proficiency in reading and writing. For my part I can only add that I am glad that it was so.

Margiad Evans