On Commercial Hill

He met her, my English grandmother, on a chilly summer afternoon on the beach at Southerndown. She was sitting on a rock, on top of her coat, smoking a cigarette and he—I heard this from someone, from Daddy or Mair—was enchanted. He asked her if he could sit down next to her and, no doubt because he was such a big and handsome man, she said yes, and he lit a cigarette of his own and she told him her name, which was Agnes, and he told her his, which was Will.

That day the two of them walked along the road from Southerndown to Ogmore, and from Ogmore over the dunes at Merthyr Mawr to Ewenny, where they watched a pot being fired with a blue treacle glaze, and before she left him to go back to the hotel where she worked, she let him hold her hand.

He came back the next week, and the week after that, and every day that they didn’t see each other they wrote to each other, and at the end of four weeks he brought her home for the first time, up on the train to the valleys, and it was there that she discovered something about him that he hadn’t told her. Perhaps she overheard it somewhere, or maybe someone made a point of telling her, thinking it was something she ought to know. Anyway, when she asked him about it, he waved his hand and told her it was nothing. It was a daft embarrassing thing that had happened a long time ago, a story about him some people still liked to tell, but it wasn’t important and it didn’t mean anything any more—the whole thing was a remnant of his youth, something from so long ago he could hardly believe he’d had anything to do with it. Most people had forgotten it and so had he and if anyone ever mentioned it again she should take no notice because he never did any more, and when she said, ‘Really?’ he said, ‘Yes, really.’

Three months after that they were married.

He was thirty-five years old, quite a bit older than she was, and his full name was William Illtyd Parry.

William and Agnes Parry.

They moved into a house on Victoria Street, next to the Co-op, and had three children: the two boys, quickly, first my father Emyr, then my Uncle Tudor, then my Aunty Mair, three years later. I still have a photograph of Will with Mair—at Southerndown again. They are both eating ice-cream. She is wearing a pink ruched bathing suit with a frill around her bottom and he has rolled up his trousers to just below the knee and he is actually wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head. I never knew people really did that till I saw that picture of him. He is holding her hand. He looks happy. He does not look like someone who wants for anything. ‘It is enough for me,’ he seems to be saying with his sunburned face and his big smile, ‘to be standing here on the beach at Southerndown in the sunshine with my baby daughter eating ice cream.’

He worked at the marshalling yard, and at some point he bought the four-room house on Commercial Hill, the one I visited as a child when Agnes was still living there, and people have told me that when he talked about his life at that time he spoke of good suppers and sweet bathed babies and the peace and quiet of the evening. It gave him joy, he used to say, to walk down the high pavements of the sloping streets and feel the mountain in his back and the closeness of the houses in their long staggered rows, the lighted windows of the shops. He never understood why anyone wouldn’t want to live their whole life there. He could not think of a better place on earth.

And then the day came when he was promoted at the marshalling yard and he was sent off in the evening to the Red Cow for an hour because Agnes and the children were getting a party ready for him—sandwiches and paper decorations and a cake with candles on it because even though it wasn’t his birthday the children begged for candles and Agnes laughed and said, Oh all right then, we can have candles. It was supposed to be a surprise but he knew what they were up to. Mair had spent most of the day behind the settee with a bottle of glue and a pair of scissors and a packet of crêpe paper. All afternoon he’d heard the sound of her trying to be quiet. The boys had shut themselves in the back with Agnes and for hours there’d been a clatter of pans and spoons and jolly shrieks and shouts.

And now he was sitting by himself at one of the brown varnished tables in the lounge bar of the Red Cow when his friends came in, Tom Bara and Cy Fish and Jack Midnight and Will America, all of them looking shifty and serious, and when he said to Tom Bara, ‘What is it then, Tom?’ Tom looked sideways at the others and then at his feet and said, ‘She is back.’

I have often pictured him, nineteen years old, standing there that day in the chapel: dark wavy hair greased neatly in place, neck scrubbed and pink from the bath, starched white collar; waiting. Standing there like an idiot, red-faced and sweating for an hour and a half; everyone whispering and coughing and shuffling their feet and turning their heads to see if she’d arrived yet; some people looking at each other and nodding to indicate that they’d seen it coming, a girl like that. The minister eventually touching his arm and saying, Come on then Will boy, perhaps it’s time to call it a day.

‘Where is she?’ he said now to Tom Bara. Tom shook his head and looked at his feet and then over at the door that divided the lounge bar of the Red Cow from the passage outside.

‘Tell her to bugger off, Will,’ said Tom. ‘Tell her she has come too late.’

At the house Agnes said to Tudor, ‘Go fetch your father, we are ready.’

But Tudor was fussing with the cake, and so was Emyr, both of them trying to fit the last of the candles into its metal flower.

‘You then,’ she called out from the back to Mair, still busy in the front room with her decorations. So it was Mair who ran off up the hill to the Red Cow to call him home; Mair who ran up the hill to the opaque glass door between the outside passage and the lounge bar and found a stranger in a brown hat at the threshold; her father rising slowly from his chair, all his silent friends behind him.

Mair remembers standing there, bits of crêpe paper stuck to her cardigan and her small gluey hands. She remembers that he looked at her and closed his eyes; that a breeze blew in from the passageway, lifting a few strands of his hair, which then settled in a slightly different place, lightly across his forehead. And what she also remembers—Mair who is old now, Mair whose grasp of the here-and-now is getting frailer by the day but whose memory of the past is clear and sharp and fierce and abiding—what Mair remembers is him stepping forward in the stone-still room towards the door, opening wide his arms to her and saying, ‘My lovely girl.’