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A story of a group of friends as they edge towards adulthood in the sunshine and shadow of Llandudno during the years of the Second World War.
Parthian Books; January 2010
ISBN 9781848397217
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ISBN 9781848397217
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Throughout our youth in Llandudno, Gregory was ever the nasty prophet of our loves. Like a woman, he seemed to know in advance what shifts might be expected in the changing pattern of our relationships and never failed to heighten the embarrassment of any dying affair by recalling to all parties the accuracy of his earlier predictions. Yet he was himself so socially inept, so clumsy, gauche, obvious, that we regarded him as a sort of clown, placed among us as a warning of what might happen if we, too, took our¬selves a little too seriously. It was to Gregory that I owed one of the biggest setbacks in my growing interest in girls; and it was Gregory, I wryly recall, who first drew my attention to Kathy. My usual approach to school, in those early, unsociable days when I had no friends apart from Gregory, was across the fields between the gasworks and the Links Hotel. There was a point at which I could just manage to jump the ditch which divided the fields belonging to the farmer from the school playing fields, and it was just as I was making this jump that this girl, Kathy, sprang up suddenly from behind the hedge on the other side of the ditch and bounded away towards the school. Surprised by this sudden apparition, I missed my footing on landing and slid back into the ditch, soaking one leg and staining my grey flannel trousers with the green juice of crushed grass. Cursing inexpertly, I scrambled up and chased after the girl – safe against catching her, I thought, for she had already reached the long wall by the tennis courts before I was halfway across the field. This, I knew, was the girl referred to by Gregory, a few days earlier, when he had said ‘There’s a wench in 3B yearning after you, Bernard. Quite a looker, too!’ I had myself seen her more often than might have been expected, but, until she sprang up from behind the hedge that day, had not enough conceit of myself to believe that she could have selected me, out of the scores of available boys, as the object of her attentions. As she reached the tennis courts, that day, she disappeared behind the long wall which separated them from the playing-fields; and when I reached the corner of this wall myself I saw that she must have slowed down as soon as she was out of sight, perhaps even have dawdled, for I was now nearly on top of her. I did not know, myself, if I wanted to catch her or not, but there was now no avoiding it, and clearly no doubt in her mind. As she reached the school door she paused and stood as, since, I have often seen her stand: as if poised for flight: one foot on tiptoe, her body bent forward supported by a hand against the corner of the wall, her head turned over her shoulder to look at me. Very quietly, as if she hardly dare speak aloud, she said ‘I hope you didn’t get too wet – Bernard!’ Then she turned and flew towards the girls’ cloakroom. She knew my name! After that I began to see this girl about everywhere: in the school, on the beach, outside the Library, or simply cycling quietly along, alone, down the Conway Road on some unguessable errand. She always seemed, if she were not on her bicycle, to be running. Perhaps I would be walking up to Llanrhos to buy tomatoes from the market gardener there, when suddenly this girl would appear, running away across the fields behind Bryn Maelgwyn; running, it always seemed to me, with a sort of desperate intensity which had nevertheless about it a kind of purposelessness, as if she were running because she must run, but was not running to any place in particular. Or I would be scuffling my way moodily along the beach between the Ormes, kicking at the tide-wrack in the vague hope of uncovering a dead German, when I would suddenly hear a clattering of stones somewhere in front of me, and a few moments later this girl would come flying desperately along the Promenade above, her head down and her elbows swinging. She seemed to have plenty of friends, though. One of them, called Dora Maguire, was in my class at school, and though I had never spoken to her we had once exchanged exasperated smiles over some swanky scholastic exploit of Gregory’s. Often I saw Kathy, with Dora and two or three other friends, standing in a little knot on one of the wide pavements in the centre of the town on a Saturday morning. She always had her bicycle with her on these occasions, and would stand there, listening to the excited chatter of her friends, with her head lowered and on one side, looking up at them sideways with a smile which seemed to keep her always a little removed from them; with one foot on a pedal and her hands clasped side by side in the centre of the handlebars, looking as if she were ready, at an instant’s notice, to swing into the saddle and pedal furiously away.
