Addlands

Addlands

1941

By four o’clock, when Idris was devouring his tea, perched between the tall, spoked wheels of the whilcar, the fence no longer straggled around Llanbedr Hill but cut out almost to the heather. Its wires whistled in the searching wind. He appraised the bent grass, the sheep’s fescue and deep red fern of his new-­claimed ground. He checked for rocks with his quick, black eyes, then, tossing a scrap of cake to the dogs, lowered himself back onto his smarting feet, warming his hands inside his old tweed coat before he gripped the shafts of the Ransome and manhandled it over to the working horse, which was tethered to the first post he had sunk.

“Aw!” he called. “Aw whoop! Aw whoop!”

Buster was a contrary animal. To catch him in the mornings took guile and diligence—­hiding the harness, proffering bread or threatening him with Albert’s bicycle, which always filled him with a paralysing terror. But a horse was a horse: the highest of all animals, whatever the virtues of the sheepdog. Once Buster was hackled he would nettle to his work, and although Idris held the jo-­lines and the handles of the plough, he guided him with his words alone—­his voice shrill over the clatter of the tack. Short, round-­shouldered, he toiled behind him up the shallow slope, one foot in the reen, the other in the crumpled fern. He watched the mountains emerge from the red-­green hilltop, snow in the gullies of their long black body like a skeleton exposed. He paused at his former boundary with the common land to hurl a few stones out of the way, but in time he reached the addlands by the green lane to Painscastle and lumped the plough round to face the wind, the valley and the birds already diving and arguing on the scar he had left in the hillside.

“That’s him, Buster! That’s a boy!”

On occasion, ploughing, Idris had counted thirteen different species of bird in his field. Even now there were seacrows, and starlings, and lapwings, and rooks from the trees at the church. How anybody could think this work was lonely was more than he could understand. And then there was the pleasure of the ploughing itself—­of the line, of the furrow falling clean and firm so the seed would sit in the ridge. The War Ag paid every farmer in the country for ploughing up grazing, for putting down crops, but others left grass between their furrows; others still had refused to comply at all and found themselves thrown off their land. Compulsory war work: that was what it meant. Idris, he would do his bit of usurping the common, same as the next man, but he found his defiance in precision, in a tidy job, and if his neighbours took it for acquiescence, well, there it was.

The plough stopped dead in the black, peaty soil. It threw itself forwards so that the handles kicked out hard as a bullock, and Idris caught such a blow to the chest that it was only by grabbing the plain wire fence that he was able to keep his feet. He gasped and choked on the airless wind. His long, pale face turned dark, almost scarlet. In the naked pain it was as if he had been gassed, as if his lungs were blistering all over again.

The sun was falling now, between Mynydd Troed and the far-­away plume of the Beacons. Beneath the colouring clouds Idris stood propped against the nearest fence post, coughing, wheezing, wiping the tears from his face. There were ravens in the larches round the cottage at the Island, wethers out for Llyn y March Pool. The sunlight, in places, revealed old copps and reens: the work of the Denes, so his grandfather Idris had told him.

It took all of the strength in his uninjured arm for Idris to push himself upright, then to hoist the plough handles level with his shoulders to allow the horse to pull it clear. The point of the share was snapped off clean. With his hand he tore at the rhizomes of the fern and peeled back the grass from a flat-­faced stone a foot in the width and some six inches deep, which he tried at first to lift himself. He tunnelled beneath it, throwing up earth, but even with his boot he could not work it loose, so he trudged across the bank to the whilcar, fetched the chain and bound it round the stone—­looping the hook end back through the tee head on the plough.

“Easy, boy,” Idris murmured. “Easy now . . .”

He led the horse slowly down the slope, the Ransome dragging uselessly as the long chain jangled along with the brasses, rose with the share and came tight. The birds lapped back down their single furrow. Buster snorted, shaking his head as if bothered by flies. The muscles showed in his thick white coat. He dug up the soil with one feathered hoof, and with another, and then, with a sucking of mud and a tearing of roots, the skin of the hill at last gave way. The stone reared into the evening light: a slab of darkness, cut, not formed, taller than Idris by a head or more—­its long shadow lying coldly on the hilltop for a moment before it fell.

At the table in the kitchen the white jug fell from Etty’s fingers to shatter on the flagstones: an ink spot of water in the last red light from the east-­facing window. A moan broke unbidden from the back of her throat and grew into a lowing, like a beast. Her long eyes clenched, her wide lips trembling, she sank until her face was almost in the basin and her nostrils flooded with the reek of yeast. Pain encircled her back and her belly like a noose. An urge came upon her simply to run—­even in this sack of a dress, with nowhere to go and the night coming on—­but her body held her as completely as the house. The clocks passed the time across the larder door. Somebody was hurrying down the boards of the landing. She looked again into the fist-­shaped valleys and the lakes in the dough, which spilled and shimmered as she tried to stand.

“Mam,” Etty managed, then with growing panic, “Mam!”

By the time that Idris had packed up his tools and lowered the long stone onto the whilcar, the first of the nightly searchlights was scouring the sky above the mountains in the south. It trailed through the cobweb clouds, pointed out Venus, found the first new moon of the New Year high over the Twmpa: a dry moon, longer at the bottom than the top, on account of its holding in the water. Idris removed his old felt hat, joined his hands, bowed to the moon and made a wish. This done, he opened the gate he had hung that morning and—­with a second searchlight now sparring with the first, patrolling a land in which he could see not one fire, not one window or headlamp—­he allowed Buster to make his way home.

There’s a long, long trail a-­winding

Into the land of my dreams,

Where the nightingales are singing

And a white moon beams.

Bumping and slithering, the whilcar followed the track back down towards the farm, its iron snout digging up the wet ground, taking the weight from the half-­seen horse. Idris sat on the head of the stone, his boots among the unused posts and wire, his bad arm tucked across his aching ribs. He sang along to the wind in the trees: the larches at the Island, the hawthorns on the common and the beeches on the bank above Llangodee, where the dogs were yawling into the darkness. He could have told any place in this valley simply by its sounds, by the movement of the air.

There’s a long, long night of waiting

Until my dreams all come true;

Till the day when I’ll be going down

That long, long trail with you.

On the near side of the brook he slipped to the ground and, with the moon and the searchlights appearing once more from the hill behind him, led the horse through the ford and into the Bottom Field. In the thin, shifting light, he saw the first signs of a glat in the hedge, a fresh mole tump, a ewe he’d known as Bessie as a lamb, which was rubbing on a gatepost and would need to be checked for the scab. He passed the creatures gathered round the hay cratch and climbed towards the Banky Piece, where the barn for the Funnon rose above him, loud with cattle, the wind on the roof and in the surrounding trees.

The stable lamp flared then sank into a glow as the stocking fell back over the flame. Idris had to lift it just to make out the rabbits hanging in braces, their big shadows stirring on the deep barn walls, the bantams roosting on the fat white beams. In the yard the sheepdogs were wagging and whining for attention. The pig he had spared the previous month returned his look from the door of the sty, while the cattle in the beast-­house shouted their hunger and the door of the stable swung and creaked—­the cob gone out of his bay.

“Drat that boy . . .” Idris started.

He stood for a moment in the stars in the puddles, beneath the tall and blinded house, then, hawking, spitting, he went to fill a bucket in the stone-­lined flem, which ran along the top edge of the yard. He washed the feathering of Buster’s legs, unhackled the ropes and rose his supper of swedes and oat straw. He took the hay knife down from its peg, but at the first sound of a motorcycle he returned outside to peer down the track at three lines of light, which came blinking out of Turley Wood, throwing shapes like ghosts onto the trees and the hedgerows.