The Welsh Girl Read Online Free PDF

the national subsidy and the demand for woollen uniforms, the war is quite simply holding them up. Her father is a proud man, the kind who stands straighter in hard times than good, and she's grateful that poverty in wartime is a virtue, something to be proud of. It reminds her of the epic stories he tells of the Great Strike at the quarry, though he was only a boy then. But she wonders sometimes, also, what it'll be like when the war is over, and it crosses her mind that the same thought has sent him out into the night early.
    Still, she's not sorry to see him go, not with Colin here too. She doesn't want to face any awkward questions, from Arthur or anyone else (she knows how local tongues wag), and she doesn't want to tell the truth, that she's stepping out with an Englishman-- a Londoner! , she reminds herself. Beneath the national betrayal is an obscurer one to do with her pride at taking her mother's place beside her father, a sense of being unfaithful somehow. She catches sight of Colin through the crowd, the tip of his tongue tucked in the corner of his mouth as he dips his shoulder to throw his darts--one, two, three-- then strides forward to pluck them from the board. He catches her looking, puckers up for a second, and she turns away quickly.
    Colin says he loves her English, and she's flattered, though when she asked him once what it was he loved about it, he said, "You know, it's so proper. We all reckoned you were stuck up at first. You talked like an actress, a toff almost." He laughed, but she must have frowned because he tried to take it back--"apart from the accent, I mean"--though that had only made it worse, of course. He likes it, he's insisted--"sounds
    like singing"--but she's been trying to use more contractions of late, to flatten her enunciation, even asking him to teach her some slang.
    "No need to call us 'sir', for one thing. Makes like we're in the officers' mess."
    "Well, what should I say?"
    "I don't know. Try, 'What's yours, luv? What's your pleasure? What's your poison?' And if someone's hurrying you, tell him, 'Hold your horses, keep your hair on!'"
    She's used the phrases when she remembers, though she can't quite bring herself to say 'luv' without blushing. "It don't mean anything," Colin reckons--when she looks for him now he's chalking up scores, grimacing over the sums--but it still feels funny to her.

    Pretty soon the pub is down to just soldiers and diehards, the Welsh voices behind her wafting over with the smell of pipe tobacco. They're quieter tonight, slower, sluggish as a summer stream. The talk for once isn't politics. This is a nationalist village, passionately so. It's what holds the place together, like a cracked and glued china teapot. The strike, all of forty-five years ago, almost broke the town, plunging it into poverty, and it's taken something shared to stick back together the families of men who returned to work and those who stayed out.
    The Quarryman's Arms is the old strikers' pub--the hooks for their tankards, her grandfather's and great-grandfather's
    included, still stud the ceiling over the bar--a bitter little irony, since most of its regulars, the sons of strikers, are sheep farmers now. Their fathers weren't taken back at the quarry after the strike, blacklisted from the industry, and for a generation the families of strikers and scabs didn't talk, didn't marry, didn't pray together. "Robbed our jobs," Arthur always says, though he never worked a day in the quarry himself.
    Even now the sons of scabs are scarce in the Arms, only venturing up the high street from their local, the Prince of Wales, for fiercely competitive darts and snooker matches, games the soldiers have cornered since they arrived.
    To Esther the old scores seem like so much tosh,
    especially after the cutbacks at the quarry, where barely one in ten local men work now. But the old people all agree that the village would have died if not for the resurgence of Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales,