Grampar hates Fedw Hir, you can tell, and he wants to get home, but I don’t know how we can manage it when he can’t walk without help. Auntie Teg was talking about people coming in to get him up and put him to bed. I don’t know what that would cost. I don’t know how it could be arranged. It’s such an awful place, though. They’re supposed to be giving him therapy, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. So many of the others are so clearly just waiting to die. They look so hopeless. And he looked like that at first. When we went in he was sunk down in the bed, I expect having a nap, but he looked small and pathetic and only half-alive, not like Grampar at all.
I was talking to him about when he taught us to play tennis, and we went up to the Brecon Beacons and played on the uneven ground up there and afterwards on flat ground it was easy. I remember the skylarks singing high above and the tufts of bracken and the funny tufted reeds we used to call bamboo shoots. (They’re not bamboo, really, not anything like, but we had a toy panda and we used to play that they were and he could eat them.) Grampar used to be proud of how fast we could run and how well we could catch a ball. He’d always wanted a boy, of course. It’s not that we wanted to be boys, it’s just that boys have so much more fun. We loved learning to play tennis.
And I thought all that was wasted, all that time practising up there, because Mor is dead and I can’t run and neither can Grampar, not any more. Except it wasn’t wasted, because we remember it. Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time. I’m never going to win Wimbledon or run in the Olympics (“They never had twins at Wimbledon…” he used to say) but I wouldn’t have anyway. I’m not even going to play tennis for fun with my friends, but that doesn’t mean playing it when I could was a waste. I wish I’d done more when I could. I wish I’d run everywhere every time I had the chance, run to the library, run through the cwm, run upstairs. Well, we mostly did run upstairs. I think of that as I haul myself up the stairs to Auntie Teg’s flat. People who can run upstairs should run upstairs. And they should run upstairs first, so I can limp along afterwards and not feel I’m holding them up.
We called in to see Auntie Olwen, and then Uncle Gus, and Auntie Flossie. Auntie Flossie gave me a book token, and Uncle Gus gave me a pound note. I haven’t forgiven Uncle Gus for saying what he said, but I took the money and said thank you. I’ve put it into the back pocket of my purse, where it can be a start on my emergency stash. There’s a very comfortable wing chair in Auntie Flossie’s. Otherwise, I found all the chairs very difficult. I don’t know why people make them so low. Library chairs are always a lovely height.
Sunday 30th December 1979
Leg a bit better, thank goodness. In fact it was well enough that as I was walking through the bus station an interfering busybody asked me why I needed a cane, at my age. “It was a car accident,” I said, which usually shuts people up, but not her.
“You shouldn’t use it, you should try to manage without it. It’s obvious you don’t really need it.”
I just walked on and ignored her, but I was shaking. It might seem as if I don’t need it, walking along on flat ground, but I need it if I have to stand still, and I really need it for stairs or broken ground, and I never know from one minute to another if I’m going to be the way I am today or the way I was yesterday, when I can hardly put my weight on my leg at all.
“See, you’re walking really fast now, you don’t need it at all,” she called after me.
I stopped and turned around. I could feel my cheeks burning. The bus station was full of people. “Nobody would pretend to be a cripple! Nobody would use a stick they didn’t need! You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that I would. If I could walk without it I’d break it in half across your back and run off singing. You have no right to talk to me like that, to talk to anyone like that. Who made you queen of the world when I wasn’t looking? Why do you imagine I would go out with a stick I don’t need—to try to steal your sympathy? I don’t want your sympathy, that’s the last thing I want. I just want to mind my own business, which is what you should be doing.”
It didn’t do any good at all, except for making me a public spectacle. She went very pink, but I don’t think what I was saying really went in. She’ll probably go home and say she saw a girl pretending to be a cripple. I hate people like that. Mind you, I hate the ones who come up and ooze synthetic sympathy just as much, who want to know exactly what’s wrong with me and pat me on the head. I am a person. I want to talk about things other than my leg. I’ll say this for Oswestry: English standoffishness means I don’t get as much of that there. The people who have asked me about it there, both whether I really need it and what’s wrong, have been acquaintances, teachers, girls in school, the aunts’ friends on Boxing Day, people like that.
It took me ages to calm down. I was still overheated and nervous when the bus went round the narrow corner to the bridge in Pontypridd. If it didn’t make it, I thought, if we all fell to our deaths, that awful woman would be the last person I talked to.
I had lunch with Moira, which was my ostensible reason for going up to Aberdare today. Moira says my voice has got posher, which is absolutely horrifying. She didn’t say “more English” because she’s my friend and a kind person, but she didn’t have to say it. School must be rubbing off on me. I so don’t want to sound like the other girls there! I don’t know what to do about it. The more I think about it the odder my voice sounds in my ears, but I hadn’t noticed before, I was just talking. There are elocution lessons. Are there anti-elocution lessons? Not that I want to talk like Eliza, but I really don’t want to open my mouth and get filed as upper-class twit.
Moira’s had a good enough term. It was surprisingly hard to find things to talk about. I can’t remember what we used to talk about; nothing, I suppose, gossip, school, the things we were doing together. Without that there isn’t much there. Leah’s broken up with Andrew and Nasreen is seeing him, and her parents are flipping out, apparently. Leah’s having a party on January 2nd, in the evening, so I’ll see them all there.
After lunch I went out of Moira’s house onto Croggin Bog and walked across. Heol y Gwern is the only proper road across it, of course, but I went off that right away. Croggin, well, properly it’s spelled Crogyn, is big: It’s an upland bog, it’s the whole shoulder of the hill. There are older paths running through it, not as old as the Alder Road, but they’ve been there a long time. It’s a bad time of year for it, and it’s been a wet winter, but it isn’t really dangerous if you know the way, or even if you don’t if you follow the alders. Mor and I got really lost in Croggin Bog once, when we were quite small, and got out purely by alder-recognition. Anyway, it isn’t quicksands, it’s just wet and muddy. People are more scared of it than they need to be. There was also the time I went into it in the dark not long after Mor died and deliberately tried to get lost, but the fairies helped me out. They say marsh lights, willow-wisps, lead you astray and into the worst bits of bog, but that time they took me pointedly to the road right by Moira’s house. I went in dripping and Moira’s mother made me take a shower and dress in Moira’s clothes to go home. I was afraid of getting into trouble, but Liz was fighting with Grampar and didn’t even notice.
There’s a good story about when they built those houses. They were building them along Heol y Gwern, and they started to build little short streets off it, into the bog, with new houses, because they wanted a proper estate for people to live. The problem was that the bog didn’t want the houses. The real story, which I had from Grampar who remembers when it happened, is that they’d built the foundations for a house and they left it on the Thursday before Good Friday, and when they went back on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, they had completely sunk. The way I heard the story though, is that they’d built the whole house and when they came back after the weekend only the chimneys were sticking up above the bog. Ha! They stopped building up there after that and built the new estate in Penywaun instead, and I’m glad. I like the way the bog is, with the little stunted trees and the long grasses and rushes and sudden unexpected flowers and moorhens on the standing water and lapwings slow-flapping to guide you away from their nests.