9

My second visit since the building work started. The first very brief one, with Marcus watching like an eagle for flaws in contracts, was taken up with sorting out what was what and where and how, and being told firmly that I had better keep out until things had been made secure. This time I’d come on my own, and had a day in hand.

It was a shock to see how my plans for restoration involved so much ripping and stripping and laying bare. The cottage was now accessible, but the romance of the place had been blasted away. A hedge trimmer had neatened up the lane and a mountain of hardcore had made it passable, revealing the badger’s sett in the banks. I heard his men cheerfully muttering about anticipated culls, but my builder, Matthew Harries from the next village, Felindre, swore that he would keep the badgers safe. It was easy to trust a man with such a round, guilelessly innocent face, who tacked ‘honest to God’ onto every sentence, but I was having trouble believing he was really going to make something out of the chaos. Vans, rubble, concrete mixers, scaffolding, timber, tarpaulins, a JCB and utter mess.

Marcus had taken a good long look at my detailed plans and decided there was investment potential in the place, so he was willing to tolerate my private project, my play house, keeping me out of mischief. In return, I’d thrown myself into the hunt for our future home proper. We’d spent the previous weekend viewing Dockland apartments.

He wasn’t helping though with Caroline’s current line of nagging: wedding presents. Apparently we had to draw up a formal wish list. I found the idea repugnant; I was twenty-nine, Marcus was thirty-two, we both had careers and had two flats full of furniture and all the toasters anyone could possibly want. I thought lists were for teenagers who needed help with the bare necessities, but Caroline was proposing a catalogue of serious items, and Marcus was wickedly playing the game. A longcase clock (walnut). Any pre-Victorian silverware (no reproductions). First editions, any title as long as they were signed.

Okay, it had been funny, watching Caroline solemnly noting it all down. But I was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the way Marcus sometimes toyed with his mother, even if I wanted to throttle her myself. He was very good at playing obedient Mumsy’s boy in order to wind her round his finger, but there was a dark thread in his mockery. Something close to contempt. Half of me liked to believe she deserved it, but the other half knew she was just a hapless mother panicking at the thought of the umbilical cord being cut. She didn’t know yet about his plans for America. I’d hinted to him to warn her, but he’d just laughed, promising to tell her as soon as it was a fait accompli. I knew what her reaction would be when she finally heard, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

But I wasn’t looking forward to a weekend of Knightsbridge catalogues either, so I’d decided to immerse myself in the world of timber treatment, lagging and septic tanks instead.

The minutiae of restoration were actually fascinating me far more than I’d expected. Builder Matthew had an eye for curious details, probably because he was itching to rip them out and flog them to the next conversion down the road. But I was adamant that everything of interest was staying put, and that included the oak roof beams, which, Matthew told me, were surprisingly old. Maybe the place was a lot older than it looked on the outside.

‘How old?’

‘Hard to say. Could go way back, behind all that rendering.’

The rendering was coming off, and I thought about letting them dismantle the whole dressed facade, the Victorian sash windows, the slate slab flooring and see if they could unearth something really ancient. Something Tudor, or even mediaeval. Who could say how long ago someone had singled out this sheltered little nook for a home? Some ancient Owen in woad? According to the beautifully detailed Ordnance Survey map that I now kept in the car, there was an Iron Age fort nearby, as well as several standing stones, a burial chamber and hut circles, not to mention a Norman castle mound in the village.

I reminded myself firmly that my aim was to reclaim the family home of the 1940s, and even that simple reconstruction was going to be costly enough.

I was allowed in, to the ground floor at least, and I had my chance to poke around for clues. No words scrawled in blood on the parlour wall. No half-burned scraps in the grate. Nothing but an old kettle rusting away, a rotting plate rack by the stone sink in the clammy scullery and a green farthing, George V, 1934, that Matthew had prised from between floorboards. I held it, thinking, John Owen must have touched this.

There was the dresser. My first real link to John and Gwen, and it must be worth keeping. I had an idea how much genuine old dressers were worth.

‘Better if I just carted it away for you,’ Matthew assured me. ‘Honest to God, it’s not worth saving.’

I was obstinate. It had to be salvaged. Some discreet supports for the sagging shelves, the doors rehung, the rot and the mould and the worms treated, the disintegrating feet replaced.

With the help of Matthew and a chisel, I wrenched open the warped cupboard doors. Nothing but a bolt of chintz cloth, mildewed almost out of recognition. We prised the drawers open too. Empty except for some pins in one and a desiccated mouse in another.

I stepped back, disappointed, as four of Matthew’s burly men set to work to budge it from its position by the stairs. It fought back, apparently welded into place. As it finally shifted, releasing a couple of spiders the size of small terriers, something shook loose at the back, flopping down into the cupboard space.

An old notebook, pages creased and torn. It must have slipped over the back of a drawer and been forgotten by all but the mouse, which had devoured most of the cover and several pages.

I pounced before Matthew could sling it into the rubble going to the skip. At last, something. A detailed diary would be too much to hope for, but anything was better than nothing.

It was a school exercise book. The mouse had left enough to show that. I leafed through it hopefully. An Owen school book. There was a picture of a man and his camel. I knew it was a camel because the careful childish writing, spelling out the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours, said so.

A page of sums. A page of Welsh. It couldn’t be my mother’s work, for sure. Uncle Jack’s maybe. I took it to add to my box of evidence, while Matthew’s men clattered around me, and the gagging stench of rotten plaster filled the air.

I wanted this place back. I wanted the silence again, when I could feel the breath of the past brushing my skin, when the house was waiting, almost ready to speak to me. But while the builders were busy wrecking and rebuilding, I’d just have to be patient, pay their bills and keep out of their way.

Which meant I could spend the rest of my visit indulging my other obsession; the question of the murder, the demand for justice.

I’d found a base nearby; a country house hotel, Plas Malgwyn, along the valley; a low-slung grey stone place, with a touch of Edwardian elegance about the front. At the back, in a shameful 1960s extension, was a restaurant with pretensions to international cuisine, and there was a stable block converted to a mini health spa. Only five minutes drive to Cwmderwen and the map showed a footpath between the two. Less than a mile to walk.

In my room after dinner, I studied the school book at my leisure. Thick yellowing pages like blotting paper, scratched with a metal nib in a handwriting immature but far more elegant than the boxy script I’d learned at school. I couldn’t judge the Welsh, but the English was awkward, correct but artificial. Someone’s second language. There was the story of Llywellyn’s butchered dog, told with childish relish, then more pages of Welsh. It was weird to think that this family that I wanted to claim as an essential part of myself wouldn’t even have thought in the same language as me.

The book was only partly filled. After a section of long division and a list of the countries of the Empire, there were a couple of empty pages, then a final story. A very Welsh story with characters called Culhwch and Olwen, although it began in English. Culhwch was a hero and Olwen was the princess he was after but she had a big bad giant of a father, whose name I couldn’t even begin to attempt and he – whatever it was, Jack had given up on English and drifted into Welsh. The writing lost its copperplate crispness and became a blotchy cramped scribble.

Result: teacher was not pleased. The last used page made the penalty clear. One phrase, over and over again. Fi’n casau ef, casau ef, casau ef, casau ef. One hundred lines? I must write neatly? Just to prove the point, the writing became smaller and smaller and then ceased in one final blot. Oh dear.

It hit me. This was probably my uncle Jack’s last work book here in Cwmderwen. His father had been murdered, of course his school work suffered. Didn’t the teachers allow for that? My heart swelled with pity for the poor boy. This sad little book could be the one real memento I had of the black day with all its horror. It was all there, between the lines.

I carefully filed it in my box of Owen records, wishing there had been more like it in the dresser.

And I found more. Not at Cwmderwen, but there at Plas Malgwyn, of all places. As I left my room in the morning, I realised there were photographs everywhere, up the sweeping stairs and in the lounge and the reception hall.

I glanced at the printed labels and discovered that Plas Malgwyn had once been the centre of a large local estate, probably the very estate that had owned Cwmderwen. Grandfather Owen’s squire and landlord must have lived there. Well, well. I hoped he’d have felt some satisfaction to see his granddaughter there now, calling the shots as a pampered guest.

I thought about making some loud and unreasonable demands, as a matter of principle, but I made do with asking about the history of the place as I went into breakfast. They gave me a leaflet, which I read as I studied more of the photos. A manor once held by a Malgwyn ap Hywel ap Griffith, who was second cousin to a Someone ap Someone Else, and some time in the seventeenth century it was granted to…

Unpronounceable genealogies and Jacobean land deals meant nothing to me. There was a quote from a George Owen, but nothing I could directly link to my family. In the early nineteenth century the place had been acquired by the younger branch of some aristocratic Glamorgan family who sold it, towards the end of the Victorian era, to an Arthur Parker, newly returned from the Cape with a fortune in diamonds. Most of the photographs on the walls were of the Rhys-Parker clan or their tenants.

A boating party; blazers and white organdie drifting on the meandering river; an election rally, men with stiff collars and large moustaches, outside Penbryn town hall; huge hats and driving goggles in a vintage Rolls Royce; an Edwardian hunting party gathering on the drive, in frosty winter fog and a couple of unsmiling, rather jowly daughters of the house, done up in strapping finery for some soirée. No, I wasn’t going to find my Owens among the gentry.

Happy peasants in the hay fields, armed with scythes. There might have been an Owen among them, but the figures were too distant to identify. A household of dignified retainers, dapper gents in black, pert maids in white aprons, a waspish old lady armed with a saucepan and an elderly gardener. This was more promising. Some of the Cwmderwen children could have been sent to work as servants at the big house.

An estate celebration – harvest supper? 1920, it said. Perhaps my grandfather was one of the blurred faces.

A picture of the squire, Colonel Rhys-Parker, and his good lady in tweeds, with home guard volunteers, 1941. The colonel was a stout whiskery gent, more at ease with his position in the world than Captain Mainwaring. My grandfather could be one of the Corporal Joneses and Private Pikes. I didn’t recognise him, but then I only knew him dimly from a couple of flaking photographs.

My first real find was with the other memorabilia plastering the walls of Plas Malgwyn. Among the unbelievably extravagant butcher’s bills, the yellowing newspaper cuttings and patriotic jubilee banners, there was a poster advertising an evening of entertainment at Llanolwen Village Hall, to raise money for a mission to China. Colonel and Mrs Rhys-Parker to be present as patrons, Mr Thomas Jenkins on the pianoforte, Mrs Florence Phillips on the harp, Miss Gwladys Jenkins, soprano and Mr John Owen, baritone.

My heart missed a beat. My John Owen? 1932. It was possible. More than possible. It had to be him. I had never thought of my grandfather as a singer, and a public performer at that; he had been just a farmer. But no, he sang. Of course he sang. We were linked. Of course. Suddenly he seemed more real.

Then I found a newspaper cutting. Colonel Rhys-Parker, his stockman, and a local farmer, William George of Castell Mawr, standing proudly by a prize bull. It was the bull, phenomenally masculine, that most guests would probably chuckle over, but it was the mention of Castell Mawr that struck me. This William George would have been my grandparents’ nearest neighbour.

It was a fine warm day, so I took my coffee and croissant out onto the terrace at the side of the house. An early morning mist still clung to the valley, cloaking the trees and the green river. Some of the other guests were already down there, fishing. I could see up the winding vale, along lush meadows and copses. Then the valley side rose a little more steeply and there was a shadow in the enveloping woods, indicating a narrow side valley. Cwmderwen.

I could see it more clearly from Plas Malgwyn than from the road just above it, but only because I knew it was there. There was the meadow where it opened out, full of alders and reeds. That would once have been John Owen’s land. That long strip of rough pasture rising up beyond, under the shady eaves of the woods, must be the field beyond the rusty gate. My grandparents had probably stood there, looking this way, towards their landlord’s house. It seemed hopelessly unfair that little Cwmderwen should have had to pay rent to keep a mansion like this in its aristocratic glory. Just as well the house itself was hidden in the trees. Not quite spied upon by the squire.

He could have spied on Castell Mawr though. There it stood, this side of the dark gash of Cwmderwen. Our entrances up on the road shared the same lay-by, but our respective lanes wound off down the hillside in different directions, and Castell Mawr, on a broad sunny bluff, faced Plas Malgwyn with serene confidence; a primrose yellow house with a side order of Dutch barns and a vast expanse of corrugated roofing. All around it, spilling down the valley, was rich green pasture studded with Friesians, and a couple of newly harvested fields, pale and naked. Brooding over it were the grassy ramparts and concentric ditches of the Iron Age fort. Perhaps Castell Mawr had first been farmed by the fort’s inhabitants. It dominated the landscape. Plas Malgwyn, the interloper, however elegant, couldn’t compete.

I guessed that Castell Mawr had acquired my grandfather’s land when he died. My land. There it stood, unrepentant, challenging all comers.

Right. I’d take the challenge. I’d mentioned the murder at the hotel, hoping some local might remember something, but the manager just panicked and assured me that no murder had ever occurred in this area, ever. But then he wasn’t local and most of his staff seemed to be Polish or Asian. If I wanted local gossip, I’d have more luck at Castell Mawr. I decided to call at the farm and introduce myself. Just to see how they’d react.