4

Elin, the older child, sat upright as a poker on the table, having been told firmly that she was not to move. At that moment she had no desire to move, since it was so hot, and the strap of her bonnet was itching under her chin. On the rocking chair sat her mother struggling to pull a dress over the head of the younger baby – Sioned, who was flatly refusing to put her arm into the sleeve, insisting on putting her fist to her mouth and dribbling all over the clean dress before her mother had a chance to get a bib. She was so lively that the mother could scarcely hold her on her lap long enough to change her nappy and button her apron.

Then the mother hurried out carrying the two infants to the old-fashioned pram that stood in the yard in front of the house, and put them both to sit side by side on the long seat. Then she strapped them in tightly to prevent the younger one from falling out, placing the oilcloth over their feet. Sometimes their mother thought that taking the children out for a walk like this wasn’t worth the bother of rushing to finish her work in the house during the morning. She made dough the night before sometimes and left it to rise overnight, lighting the fire at five in the morning so as to get the baking done. She would be exhausted before starting out. But it was a chance to keep the children quiet and a chance for a chat with someone on the road when she took them out like this.

With two cows and a calf, two pigs, and two babies – one two and a quarter and the other six months old – she had no time to visit anyone even if she’d wanted to. She couldn’t go to anyone’s house for ‘elevenses’ as other women did who had no smallholding to look after. As someone who didn’t know the history of the neighbourhood, that was just as well, since she wouldn’t be able to understand the references in the small talk that went on. She enjoyed taking the children out like this, enjoyed dressing them in their red twill dresses, their white petticoats with embroidered hems, and their starched bonnets. She felt that life was good. She had not yet experienced want. The money for the pigs paid the rates and the interest on the loan they had taken out to buy the small farm, and sometimes they were able to pay off some of the debt from the salary. One day they would pay it off, and the farm would belong to them.

It was of such things that Jane Gruffydd thought as she pushed the pram towards the mountain. Sometimes she felt a pang of regret that the two children in front of her weren’t boys – they would have brought more money to the household than girls. But really Elin and Sioned were pretty little things. To her, from behind, they looked comical, the peaks of their bonnets sticking up straight and Sioned’s yellow ringlets peeping through the holes in the needlework. Sioned leaned forward against the harness in her eagerness to grab at anything, while Elin sat up straight, giving Sioned an occasional slap.

They reached the cart-track that led to the mountain, the same mountain they had climbed over in going to Ifan’s Grandma’s house. The road was narrow and hard underfoot. Round about them was the heather and gorse, wet moss and peat bog. The gorse bushes were small and springy, their flowers of the palest yellow like primroses, contrasting with the colour of the stubby heather and the dark earth all around. Little streams ran from the mountain down onto the road, and the glistening water flowed on then, along the gravel at the side. Sometimes the stream would flow into a pool and would remain still there. The sheep tracks criss-crossed the mountain all over, and the sheep and long-tailed mountain ponies grazed everywhere. Everything connected to the mountain was small – the gorse, the moss, the sheep, the ponies. The silence was broken by the cry of the lapwing flying on her way and landing suddenly on the mountainside and then running to her nest in a little hollow – the indentation of a horseshoe, perhaps.

Jane liked to have a rest, taking the children out of the pram and putting them to sit on a shawl on the mountainside, while she herself sat down to dream. It was her own life that she dreamed about. She had no time except on a lazy May afternoon like this to wonder whether she was happy or not. She didn’t put the question to herself very often. She had been very happy during the season of courtship; but she had enough common sense to realize that life could not carry on at that climactic pitch. Ifan was everything she wanted him to be, but he looked much more weary now than when she had first seen him those times he’d visited Lleyn with Guto the drover. In her own mind she was quite sure that working in the quarry and keeping a smallholding was simply too much work for him. But what could be done about it? She knew enough about the quarries, from hearsay, to know that a quarryman’s pay was highly unreliable, and besides it was a good thing always to be able to rely on having plenty of milk and butter. One thing bothered her a great deal, and that was the state of the house. The kitchen where they lived was the only cosy room in it. The bedrooms, especially the one at the back, were damp and completely unhealthy for anyone to sleep in them. The dampness ran down the walls, ruining the wallpaper, and when there was frost and ice, drops of water would fall from the wooden ceiling onto the bed. She would have liked to have a new extension built onto the old house, so that she would have a front kitchen and at least two bedrooms. There were plenty of stones on the land of Ffridd Felen to build such an extension, and to get rid of those stones would be an improvement to the land itself. But Ifan would have to lay charges to extract the stone, and that would mean even more work for him. So, what was the point of dreaming?

She gazed at the distant village lying in the stillness of the afternoon. Up on the left was the quarry and its tip which thrust its snout down the mountainside like a snake. From afar, the stones in the rubble tip looked black, and they glittered in the sunshine. This was the quarry where Ifan’s father had been killed. Who, she wondered, had emptied the first waggon of waste at the base of that tip? He was certainly in his grave by now. And who would be the last to throw his load of rubble from the top? What was she, Jane Gruffydd, a young woman from Lleyn, good for in this place? But after all, it was no worse for her here than in Lleyn. She had to be somewhere. And what was the good of dreaming?

A lamb’s sad bleat came from afar, and the honking of geese from a nearby farm. There was something forlorn in the entire scene, the quarry, the village, and the mountain all tied up in each other. But then the next minute Jane was happy again, she and her children, happier perhaps than she would be for a long time to come.