The Welsh Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

a thickening in her throat, a brimming pressure behind her eyes. It's gratitude she feels, mixed with pride and hope, and she trusts that together this blend amounts to love.
    The broadcast ends and the noise builds again in the pub. It's not quite a cheer--the speech has been sternly cautious-- but there's a sense of excitement kept just in check and a kind of relief, as if a long-held breath can finally be released. All spring the whispered talk has been about an invasion, and now it's here, D-day, the beginning of the end. The suspected secret the whole country has silently shared for months can be talked about openly at last. Everyone is smiling at the soldiers and calling congratulations, even the locals clustered behind the public bar. Constable Parry, the blowhard, goes so far as to mention the huge floating harbours glimpsed off the coast
    to the south ("Now we know what they was for"), raising a glass, clinking it sloppily with one of the sappers, who winks back ("No pulling the wool over your eyes, ossifer"). And the constable, egged on, launches into the rumour about Hess being held in Wales. Esther steps up on the crate once more and turns the radio dial through the catarrhal interference until it picks up faint dance music, Joe Loss and His Orpheans,
    from the Savoy in London. She hears something like applause and, looking round, sees with delight that it's literally a
    clapping of backs.
    There's a rush for the bar again. People want to buy the men drinks. They're only sappers--road menders and ditch diggers, according to her father--but they're in uniform, and who knows when they could be going 'over there'. Suddenly, and without doing a thing, they're heroes, indistinguishable in their uniforms from all the other fighting men. And they believe it, too. Esther can see it in Colin's face, the glow of it. She stares at him and it's as if she's seeing him for the first time; he's so glossily handsome, like the lobby card of a film star.
    The crowd in the lounge is three deep and thirsty, and she pulls pints--"Yes, sir? What can I get you? Yes, sir? Who's next, please?"--until her arm aches, and froth fills the air like blossom. But when she turns to ring up the orders, she sees the public bar is emptying out. It's shearing season, after all. Invasion or no, farmers have to be up early.
    She glimpses her father, Arthur, shouldering his way to the door, shrugging his mac on over the frayed dark suit (Sunday best before she was born) and collarless shirt he wears when out with the flock. Cilgwyn, their smallholding, lies a couple of miles above the village; he'll be sound asleep by the time she gets in, milking the cow by the time she rises. He jams his cap on his head, fitting it to the dull red line across his brow, and gives her a nod as he goes, but no more.
    She's been working here for almost three months now, since she turned seventeen, but she's never once served him. He sticks to the public bar, the Welsh-speaking half of the pub, while she, with her proper schoolroom English, works in the lounge serving the soldiers, locals like the constable who mix with them, and the motley assortment of other new arrivals.
    Not that her father's English, his spoken English at least, is so bad for all his thick accent; it's just beneath his dignity to use
    it.

    She would stand Arthur a pint or two if he ever ventured into
    the lounge (Jack wouldn't mind), but that too would be beneath him. She's been in charge of the housekeeping money in the old biscuit tin ever since her mother died four years ago, but only since she started working has he shown her the books, the bank account, the mortgage deeds. Of course, she had
    her own ideas of how bad things were all along, but guessing and knowing are different and now she knows: knows why they've taken in their young English evacuee, Jim (for the extra ten-and-six billeting allowance); knows why they've been selling off ewe lambs as well as wethers the last two seasons. Between