Pridd

Earth.

Llŷr Titus

This book is dedicated to the memory of Yncl Ellis, Anti Gwen, Nain Cae Du and Evan. 

S….

                                                     S….

S….

We speak.

                 We speak.

                                                            St…

                                  St…

                                                           We stand.

                                                                             We stand.

We have stood here for centuries and millennia before that ever since we were torn form the black womb of the earth. We were cleaned, shaped, placed. Holes were cut to our cores, eyes to bear witness. The world turned and we turned with it. Burial chambers, gateposts, lintels, menhirs, standing witness. Answering and listening stones, collecting voices and keeping them. Growing sense like moss. Since those first children clad in skins arrived in their boats, we have kept record. And still, we remember under the numberless stars. We go on remembering. Though we slip ever nearer to the darkness of forgotten things We have yet to be swallowed up. Those names perished from the tongues of the world are our song: names that have started fading from stones set in graveyards; ones that went before cemeteries existed; and those still alive but already lost from memory. 

There are places where we still stand, where boundaries are closer together and hedges thrum with life. Quiet places where we can still hear. 

We answer. We listen. We speak. 

                                                                          Summer.

                                                                  Opening of original book.

Tick

                                                                                                                                                                    Tick

Tick

The Old Man wakes up. He has been conscious for two hours and forty-three minutes. He’s been lying between sleep and wakefulness where life’s hard edges flow softly for two hours, then he’s been staring at the roof or the wall for forty minutes, listening to the ticking – the harsh ticking of a wind-up clock – and looking at the darkness softening a little, losing its grip as if the dawn behind the mountain were milk sidling into a cup of tea.

Only when the clock rattles off its alarm does he get up. Only when that sharp, angular sound shreds his ears. Only then, after reaching and hitting the cold metal and sacrificing the warmth of his hand for silence, does he leave the bed.

It’s far too early to get up but the clock gives him an excuse and sleep remains elusive. He might as well get something done.

The room is cold. Cold enough to wake him up properly and make him want to withdraw deeper into himself. By now he and the heap of blankets on the bed are losing their warmth to the darkness.

The Old Man dresses in the dark. He doesn’t need light to remember; to remember where he placed the folded clothes the night before. Where they’ve been placed for eighty years and more by a mother, a wife, and then by hands not used to the work.

As he dresses slowly he sighs and mutters but only the walls hear, and they don’t want to listen. Stones that were ripped from their home to build a house for someone else have very little sympathy for anyone. Neither has damp plaster. Plaster doesn’t think, it only blackens as it absorbs more water from the air of the room, or the Old Man’s breath. Getting steadily darker, like blood gathering in a bruise.

He puts his shoes on, thinking that there would be Words about that if a certain Someone were alive. But of course if they were to rise up from the grave perhaps the shock and relief of that would mean that they wouldn’t worry much about shoes being worn in the house. But after mulling that over for a while he knows that wouldn’t be true. To be alive is to worry about such things.

Only as he feels his way to the stairs with his hand on the wall does the Old Man reach for the light. The passage appears before him exactly as it did yesterday. Yesterday it was the same as it had been for decades, the gloss painted walls shining yellowish as the bulb comes to its senses. Even if these bulbs, light saving bulbs, are poor things in the Old Man’s estimation, he is grateful that this one offers its light slowly, second by second, rather than throwing brightness everywhere and blinding him. Seeing the world appear so quickly would surely scare him. But like this he can absorb everything forming slowly, the window, the airing cupboard, and the banister.

He dares not go down the stairs without light. His feet remember each step, but they could always have a moment of confusion. In the dark people trip and it’s easy to take a false step even though they’ve always been the same steps on the same wood. There is no carpet. People trip on mats; their corners grab hold of people’s feet and drag them down. Why? The Old Man asks as he starts towards the kitchen. Because they want company, probably.

A friend, or certainly someone he would talk to on the phone now and again, fell flat out as he was carrying his supper because a mat had caught hold of him. It held him softly, tenderly almost — but that and the momentum of his body were enough to throw the plate, knife and fork, the egg, the toast and the person carrying them onto the tiled floor of the back kitchen. The plate, thought the Old Man, stepping down with one hand on the banister and the other on the wall, must have made a louder noise shattering on the tiles than the one who carried it. The toast and the egg must have got cold faster as well.

The man who fell lay there for two days before someone found him. The Old Man had phoned, and the phone must have been heard, its noise ricocheting through the house from the little table by the front door. Perhaps the one who was on the floor with the coldness of the tiles worming its way through his flesh had shouted help at the ringing even though he knew that a phone cannot help anyone, only those who use it can.

The Old Man thought that the man he phoned must be busy, or away—even though he hadn’t mentioned a trip—asleep, or didn’t want to answer the phone. Maybe he didn’t want to talk. Maybe he didn’t want to talk to the Old Man in particular. So, he didn’t phone again later that day or try to contact anyone else. He should have, but did not. He reminded himself of that often.

Two days of lying on the floor, listening to the television, knowing that the programme he had timed his meal so carefully for had long finished. Two days on the floor in an empty house with the voices of long dead people on the television trying to deceive him. Two days alone, the mat having long since tired of his company. The egg yolk dried on the tiles like lichen. Then the door being unlocked with a neighbour’s spare key. The phone being used.

                                                                                     *

                                                            Page 20 in original book.

Some say that sheep are stupid.

Yet they understand time, and paths and where to go in rough weather.

Early in the morning they’re all accounted for, lying down, blanketed by dew and chewing their cud but by lunchtime one could be on her back with two raw holes instead of eyes, listening to the laughter of crows.

But they’re fine now and that’s enough for the time being. The Old Man learned be content a long time ago.

As he heads back towards the house and his daily porridge he pauses and notices that he’s on the exact boundary between two fields. Or rather, where one used to be once. In front of him the house and outbuildings huddled together and behind him two fields and a thread of barbed wire and beyond that the rest of the world.

There used to be a hedge here, once. Raised by his grandfather or that man who owned the place before him. A man who’s still alive on yellowing pieces of paper in a drawer in one of the bedrooms, resting between bars of soap too posh to use and old hot water bottles.

By now all that remains of the hedge is a small hump, a low line of stones under a skin of grass. The Old Man might have thought that it was a shame to see that something like this had decayed to such a state. But because it’s early and the dew is shining it’s not a tumble-down hedge. It’s something to stand on to get his breath back. Nothing more.

It’s almost as if the world is new. This is something that strikes him occasionally, some trick of the light that turns the familiar into something different, if only for a short while. On its side in front of him is a stone nearly as tall as he is. It must have been a gatepost at some point but as far as he can remember it’s always been on the ground like this. But as he remembers that, something else comes to his mind: his grandmother — someone who has by now melted into one long memory of sunny days and secret sweets — mentioning that this stone had been an answering stone, once. He then remembers her sitting on it looking far out across the fields.

This stone was once moved for some purpose but that purpose disappeared then it was left on its side to nurture moss and lichen.

An answering stone, one he used to shout at as a child.

Hey.

                                                                                                                                                                        Hallo. Be quiet.

                                                                                                                                                                        Mam. Fuckin’el.

The stone has been quiet for years. Maybe it wasn’t this one to begin with.

He heads for the house.

After shutting the gate he turns again, for a quick look at the sheep, perhaps, and notices something moving then pausing in the mist beyond the stone.

A Fox.

Must be.

He thinks of the chickens but they’re within reach and seem oblivious.

The Fox and the Old Man look at each other, one on the ruins of a hedge and the other leaning on a gate.

 One thinking about fetching a shotgun.

The other feeling the warmth of the earth and knowing things that no Old Man could ever comprehend.

 The Fox is swallowed by the mist and because it had never been wholly visible to begin with the Old Man cannot say for certain that it was ever there.

He decides to keep a closer eye on the chickens.

There, still leaning on a gate covered in dew the Old Man has a sense of something beginning, of a thread starting to unravel. But it’s time for breakfast, and there’s plenty of work to be done.

                                                                                    *

                                                                   Page 28 in original book.

With time, take your time. Time isn’t time when time is over.

Something his grandfather used to say, perhaps something he cooked up himself along with other things like

Better untidy handwriting than a good memory

Things that he cobbled together like someone building a stone wall. Perhaps he picked them like blackberries from the hedges of books and other people’s mouths. The Old Man doesn’t know. But it’s time that he’s thinking about today.

He thinks of his work and those things that have come to lessen it. Tractors, hoovers, combines, micro-wave ovens, washing machines and bigger tractors, a machine to spread muck or pesticides, even bigger tractors, electric lights and a tin opener that opens the tins by itself.

He thinks about time, that thing that keeps having fun at his expense these days.

He considers that saving time doesn't necessarily mean that you have more of it to spend. There was less and less of it, or so it seemed.

He would spend hours spreading muck with a fork or building a cyrnan — a mound of potatoes covered in straw and soil to keep them over the winter — but there seemed to be more time then somehow. Or that’s how it feels now, though life must be whole lot easier than it was.

Now he thinks about those who lived before there was even mention of muck spreading forks or tins of spam. People who had once lived thousands of years before he screamed his way into the world. Those people that the University crowd seem so fond of.

One morning a group arrives in a mini-bus with mattocks and spades, cigarettes and sun cream and they start to dig. Every now and then the Old Man heads over and is told that very interesting things are being unearthed. Things that mostly look like bits of stone to him, but then he’s not an expert. These things are so interesting that visitors come to the dig site and forget to close gates or how to reverse their cars in the lane in their curiosity and haste.

But the Old Man doesn’t have a quarrel with the archaeologists and students even though they shout at times and the old place isn’t used to so many voices. Every now and then he makes his way to the top of the hillock to wave at them, to listen and poke his nose in. He asks if the people who lived here were farmers, like him. Quite probably replies the big boss in his cowboy hat. Look he says, showing him another stone — someone, years and years ago, used this to make flour.

The boss has questions for the Old Man about the quality of the land, the location of wells and other things that he knows a lot about. Slowly, both come to learn from each other. The Old Man shows him interesting stones that he’s collected over the years and finds out that a few of them are Something.

A scraper used on hides, a hammer, a stone for warming water.

He learns that the hands of someone, at some time, shaped them.

Most of them are English, but there’s the odd Welsh one — one a local girl who strikes up the odd conversation with the Old Man, fair play to her. She tells him that the Mountain was home to these people as well. Other students have come from all across the world because what’s always been here under the Old Man’s feet since he started roaming the fields is interesting enough to draw them here.

They leave each afternoon around the same time in the mini-bus which spews out smoke and dust and some god-awful tin-pan music as it speeds along the road.

One evening as it’s getting dark the Old Man goes into their hole to stand and finds himself in a circle of stones. He realizes that he’s standing on the floor of a house once lived in by people long since dead. A strange feeling. He remembers how the big boss in his fancy sunglasses told him it was quite likely that some of his hedges were first built in the Bronze Age and that some of the stones still standing on his land were placed there by the hands of these people. They’re still here. Patched, straightened, and maintained by generation upon generation.

After that the Old Man doesn’t feel strange or rude, even though he senses that the shadows growing in the holes and the stones all around are watching him. He thinks about saying thank you before leaving the ruins of the house and likes to think that its inhabitants might have thanked him as well.

One giving thanks for the foundations laid and the other thanks for holding out so long He doubts that they’re related. That wasn’t the point. They came here from somewhere, like the Old Man’s family. All that matters is what they did once they arrived. It’s supper time and the tin opener that opens tins by itself is waiting in the drawer next to the sink. He leaves through what was most probably the front door once upon a time.

                                                                                    Autumn.

                                                                      Page 54 in original book.

Sale day. Not a sale in a mart, the mart has got further and further as things wither away. A farm sale. One of those events that takes someone’s life in its hands like a child holding a chick before dashing it to the ground on the farmyard. In no time the crows come, except in this instance they knew the chick and feel awkward in a way that it’s in bits on the cobbles but they’re hungry as well. And it would be odd not to pop over, even if they weren’t planning on pecking some scrap or other from the dust.

A neighbour. Four fields’ width away; a man who was respectable enough, who kept his boundaries tidy and his seat in the Chapel. There was a time when they saw each other quite often. They would pop over to each other’s houses, especially when the children were young but as their worlds shrank, their farmhouses became islands. Every now and again a glass bottle with a cork in it would float between them, with an ‘alright?’ or a Christmas card.

There’s a pattern to the conversation in places such as these. The pattern for any conversation is pretty similar:

Alright? Weather. Shame, isn’t it? Weather. Bye.

Every three or four steps.

How are you? Weather? Terrible shame. Weather. Bye.

The Old Man follows his nose and the tide of people around the machines, odds-and-sods and rubbish. The stock — what little there was — has long gone. The neighbour was put in a home after one too many falls and after he couldn’t look after himself, whatever that means.

That’s life — being unable to look after yourself and finding someone else to help. But there are some things that are harder than others to do on your own; chatting, eating properly, ironing, laughing, recognizing the smell of piss. A Home then.

The Home had a name, one that suggested comfort and self-respect. Something-or-other Hall or such-and-such Grove. A name that didn’t hint at getting help to take a shit or crying to go home.

How are you? Weather. Yes, yes. Weather. Bye.

He was happy there, so they said. He didn’t try to escape even once.

The Old Man remembers a magpie he had in a cage to lure other magpies. She was happy as well — quite tame — until he left the door open once and turned his back. Away she went into the trees, cackling. Then, in the evening as it was getting dark, she was outside the cage again… He has lost his train of thought.

Weather. Memories. We’ll be next. Weather. Take care.

Yes. And you.

A slight hesitation perhaps, before melting back into the sea of work-clothes and wellingtons.

He wanders around the farmyard studying the machines. Their owner had never been very careful of them, or at least no more than he had to be. There are mounds of iron and old bits and pieces piled high, kept for scrap price with the odd piece chucked on them now and again. The promise was that there would be a great deal of money in it someday, but the iron had rusted and become brittle. Even then there was no room for it in the coffin.

In an outbuilding he comes across old shire horse tack — the brass long since tarnished and the leather cracked and fading. He can name each piece even now. As he touches them, he runs his hands over the shoulders of all those old partners he once had, who opened furrows and carried loads by the sweat and steam of their bodies. Shani — yes — that had been the name of his last mare. They’d been firm friends.

The Old Man fetches a cup of tea from the food truck. He pays for a polystyrene cup full of hot water. The tea tastes of plastic.

He might be expected curse and feel bitter towards the people wandering around in clean wellingtons and glossy magazine-cover coats, debating how to turn old milk churns and troughs into planters. But he doesn’t. He likes flowers and knows that things change. But it’s a shame that people can’t change with them sometimes.

No-one buys the scrap.

                                                                                    *

                                                                     Page 59 in the original book.

The Old Man dreams that things are back as they used to be. Longer summers, colder winters. People still alive.

Tonight he’s out in Cae Dan Lôn digging a hole in hot weather. One of the children and a teacher from his primary school are there with him. He doesn’t think about that. The digging is slow and sluggish, like movement can be in a dream.

Between the striking of the digging bar against stone and the scrape of the shovel in the soil, the baying of a fox can be heard. The type of scream that usually comes at night together with sharp-pointed stars and goose pimples.

The hole does not get deeper, nor does the pile of soil grow but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the digging. As he strikes the pale-yellow subsoil he hears a sound from the direction of the house, the sound of his name carried on the wind and the steam from the kitchen. Two high notes that he hasn’t heard for decades, only like this during the small hours.

It is lunchtime and as he steps into the barn that’s between the yard and the house, the soft coldness that is in stone buildings during the summer flows over him. He becomes aware of his shirt as the sweat on it starts to cool and dry.

She is in the kitchen, humming under her breath as usual with the steam spiralling around her — almost dancing as she moves from a bowl to the milk jug or one of the four saucepans. She wears her apron pulled tight around her, one loop of the bow tied above her behind slightly longer than the other. The Old Man stands by the door in his young body, leaning on the frame.

Cool wood and the smell of boiling potatoes.

He looks at her, sweat and beads of carrot steam lightly settled on her forehead like baby powder. As he does, he feels — not desire or lust, or love either in a way, but contentedness, some certainty. Not happiness, that’s a rare thing no matter what the television or wireless said. A thing that flashes into being and then disappears like a mackerel to unfamiliar depths, to a sea that’s purple-dark. A deeper, more solid thing. A feeling that will — when the Old Man wakes up — cause him pain and leave him feeling empty like an old eggshell on the floor of the coop, pecked empty by the chickens at first light.

But while it lasts the feeling fills him like the smell of boiling fills the kitchen.

His wife pours the boiling water into the sink and the steam rises in columns, scattering white from one wall to the other. She walks out of the columns of steam like some woman in a film.

Two minutes.

All that remains is to mash the carrots. Two minutes. But two minutes are worth the world, and more.

He goes to sit down and the children and Defi appear one by one. The bowl of potatoes covered with a clean teacloth is placed on the table. Like a pride of lions, there is an order to who gets the spoon first, for each potato has been counted and everyone knows how many is allotted to them.

He lifts the cloth, releasing the smell of food and a of a freshly washed cloth. The white potatoes are yellow in contrast to the whiteness of the bowl. He smiles.

Then, the smell of food changes into something sharp, hot and the Fox is on the table. A bastard Fox, on the tablecloth.

The Fox sits so close that you can see clearly the flecks of grass and soil on its paws. An Old Fox that knows people. An Old Fox that stares into the eyes of the Old Man for ages until his family around him fester to skeletons, the house turns to dust and the earth spins and spins into nothing, throwing him into the dark of the cosmos. There’s not a sun or a star in all of creation as bright as those eyes in front of him.

 He wakes. It is still dark. Far away in the night, through the glass, there’s a noise — a hint of a fox screaming, but it is so faint that it could be a spring creaking underneath the Old Man as he turns.

                                                                                    Winter

                                                                        Page 83 in original book.

The Old Man is a bit under the weather, but work is calling. After breaking the ice in the sheep’s water troughs with a hammer, he notices that one of them has managed to get her head stuck in the wires of a boundary fence That is the nature of sheep: to go looking for a greener blade of grass and then have to pay for their ambition. Not just sheep either.

The sheep tries to go forward rather than back as he walks towards her, making the wire bulge. Then she goes wild, jumping and writhing and before he can reach her and put a hand on her back to steady her the Old Man hears a fencepost give way.

Damn it.

Now the sheep is still, gathering her strength to begin struggling again. The Old Man takes this time to get his breath back, the vapour of his breath mixing with that of the sheep in the cold air. Both are tired out.

Before she can start struggling again, he moves one handful of wool at a time up her body and manages to loosen her head and set her free. She darts off, leaving the Old Man leaning on the fence with nothing more than her grease on his hands.

He’ll have to sink a new fencepost. Rather than removing the old one and digging all of it out with a crowbar, the Old Man decides to place the new one next to it. This would be a lazy man’s fix twenty years ago but by now it was a matter of necessity. It will take the rest of the morning as it is.

He goes to the tractor shed and finds a passable second-hand post, then heads to the old cowhouse to look for the bucket of staples that look like little horseshoes. Someone must have moved it again. He already has the hammer. Now for the sledgehammer and iron bar for digging.

He goes to work with the eyes of the sheep staring at him above their ever-moving mouths.

As he works his mind wanders.

It didn’t exist in the past. Or if it did it wasn’t the same. Some — his grandfather included — would get ill sometimes. Everyone knew what kind of ‘ill’ that was, even though the word was the same. There was something about the context, or the way the word fell out of people’s mouths like a half-chewed piece of ham that made the meaning clear.

There’s a tidy enough hole in the ground. Now for one or two blows with the sledgehammer to get the post in its place. Then the wire needed to be stapled to it. Then, finally, lunch perhaps.

Not ill like a cold, or gout or cancer but another kind of ill, one that was more difficult to place. But in the same way that his grandmother’s generation would use ‘red’ to describe the colour of a loaf, tea, blood and foxes, ‘ill’ changed its shape in the minds of people, if not their mouths.

Staple. But in his hurry, the Old Man hits a knot in the wood of the fencepost with the hammer and the staple pings out and falls, hiding now in the grass below.

The Old Man hears that nowadays words that used to do more than one job have divided and new words have come into being. Brown bread, black tea, depression. Depression is a brown word in his mind. One of those new, made-up words that appear on GPs’ posters and that arrive at the house on forms that come through the post. Someone in an office has given birth to the word between the afternoon cup of coffee — thanks Rachel, sweetener instead of sugar please — and the end of the working day.

The Old Man gets on his knees to look for the staple. No-one leaves a staple on the ground like this. No matter how difficult it is to find it you can bet that a sheep or a cow will and that it will make them lame or slip into a mouthful of grass, then stay inside them tearing and grasping like a word or an unpleasant memory.

It’s something new, then, even though it’s always existed.

As he runs his hands through the damp grass — as if he were blind or looking for loose change —occasionally feeling bits of hawthorn twigs, the Old Man remembers those who suffered before the word existed.

Richard, the quiet one who would turn the heating on in the Chapel. A bachelor. The two of them had been good friends. They had done a lot together once but had grown apart, as these things go. Not a sign of him for a day or two before someone remembered that he had a key for the Chapel. And there he was, hanging from a beam by a rope. Between two lamps with the heating not turned on. Totally still. Like a pendulum that had long settled. Hell of a job to cut the rope with a pocketknife.

He finds the staple. The Old Man gets to his feet slowly. There are two ragged circles on his knees where the land has been licking him. He straightens the staple with a soft tap of the hammer and carries on. He tightens the wire a little.

                                                                                    *

                                                                   Page 87 in the original book.

You have to eat, Dad.

He explains that he does eat, regularly, he had bread and butter for lunch.

But it’s winter, it’s cold. You have to eat something hot, even if it’s only a boiled egg.

So, today with it being winter and cold the Old Man boils an egg and eats it. With some bread and butter.

                                                                                    Spring.

                                                                 Page 117 in the original book.

‘There’s hardly anything so fine as letting cattle out to fresh pastures after they’ve been shut away all winter releasing cattle out on to fresh pasture after a long winter inside. As the Old Man loosens the rope that holds the gate he can feel it. Some strange, green energy pent up in their muscles, an energy that comes to all animals in spring and with it an urge to live, to run, to experience.

He drags the gate open, leaving the opening clear.

The dark-eyed rabble are reluctant to move. He could go in and encourage them but that would be dangerous — he could be trampled on or thrown to the floor. He has time enough today anyway. Some things should not be rushed.

A cow surges forward, having perhaps seen the open expanse beyond shit-stained walls or having smelt bruised new growth. The rest explode forward.

Away they go in a cloud of stamping. Plunging ahead with their tails held high, making a noise that isn’t quite mooing but something that the Old Man has always taken to mean happiness.

They run together, flexing and snorting the air, rubbing the dew and in these minutes the Old Man is nearly certain that they forget about the existence of hedges and barbed wire. Because they are free.

As he watches the tails waving and heads whipping the Old Man thinks about the word

                                                                                    RAPTURE

He borrows some of that exultation watching them.

In time they’ll fill out, shed the matted clots of dirt and their coats will begin to shine as all the blue-greenness of the spring penetrates its way deep into their bodies.

There is some exultation in that as well, for the Old Man at least.