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your boys clever?’ I asked her. I couldn’t help being interested in her sons though they were so rough and ugly. She’d given the three of them old-fashioned Welsh names: Iestyn, Bleddyn and Rhydian. I couldn’t tell which was which because I was always too nervous to look at them properly.
    â€˜Their teacher says they’ve got good brains, but I can’t judge because they never say anything in the house except “What’s for dinner?” and “Any more?” And they’re not in the house much, to tell you the truth. No, always haring out and leaving doors open. It would have been so nice to have had a little girl.’ She sighed deeply and gave me a hug, but I knew it was only politeness; she was very proud of her boys who ate like horses, ganged up against their father and hadn’t had a day’s illness in their lives.
    When I got to the grammar school in town I discovered that my cousins, or cousins-once-removed, were the most popular boys there. It still surprises me because country boys, and especially farm boys, were usually either disparaged or ignored. Those three certainly couldn’t have been ignored; they were very tall and dark with beak noses and riotously untidy black hair. They wore only very few items of school uniform along with their farm-workers’ clothes and seemed to get away with it, though the Head was strict with other boys, insisting on the full regalia; ties, white shirts, navy-blue blazers, grey trousers, black socks. Perhaps he realised that there was nothing rebellious in the way they dressed, that they simply led their own lives, made their own rules. Anyway, he’d never have dared expel them or where would the cricket team be, the rugby team, the athletics?
    They weren’t keen participants in any case, always having to be persuaded to turn up to any match taking place in out-of-school hours, so I think he made it clear that no one was to cross them in any way. Rhydian, the eldest, had broken the school record for the 1500 metres, but when the games master put him up for the All-Wales championship, there was no sign of him on the Saturday morning when the coach was due to start. The Head had to drive out the nine miles to the farm to fetch him. ‘Aren’t you interested in the honour of the school?’ he asked him. ‘No sir,’ he said.
    When I started school at eleven, they were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I think I was more nervous of them than I was of any of my teachers, terrified that they might tease me as they had when I was five or six. My hope was that they’d no longer recognise me, but I noticed the youngest of them, Iestyn, glancing at me once or twice and while not exactly smiling, his scowl seeming less pronounced than usual.
    The three boys were academic, it seems, as well as athletic, but Bleddyn turned out to be a mathematical genius. It hadn’t been noticed until he was in the Sixth; he’d done very little work until then. But in the Lower Sixth, when Rhydian and other older boys began to solicit his help, it became apparent that he could see numbers whirring about and sorting themselves out in his head, that he was able to come up with the correct answer to any problem without showing any working and without being able to explain his method. He seemed surprised that the other boys, some of whom seemed sophisticated and urbane, able to argue fluently in the debating society, for instance, even talk to girls, found difficulty in something which seemed straightforward and obvious to him.
    Rhydian got a couple of A levels and much to Uncle Ted’s annoyance – and derision – decided on a local farming college, but the following year Bleddyn was put in for a scholarship to Oxford. ‘Did they say you were an exceptional candidate?’ the Head wanted to know when he got back from his interview. ‘No, sir. It was only my fingernails they seemed to notice. I don’t