Dai Country by Alun Richards

Author:Alun Richards [Alun Richards]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906998738
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

FRILLY LIPS AND THE SON OF THE MANSE

They met in a light opera at the tail end of the war. He was eighteen and she was nineteen, tall, willowy and dark with a stunning physical elegance that was immediately displayed by the tight-fitting clothes she wore and a way of moving which was quite unlike the girls he knew who remained in school. She had poise, money to spend which was a puzzle, a predilection for black and something extra which was very special to the times. ‘It’, they called it then, the superficial appearance of a glamorous detachment, a quite beautiful girl who seemed altogether unobtainable to people like him. There were girls you made friends with, others you chatted to or had grown up with, but she was the one you turned around to look at, a raver whose high forehead, long black hair, large pouting lips and sinuous carriage added up to what the boys called an absolute knockout. There was also something sad about her, a note of regret, the suspicion that a part of her mind was absent and elsewhere in a strange way, but this was a feature of herself that she revealed much later. At first sight, she was immediately distinguishable by those looks, that carriage, the haughty, curving lips, her natural leonine grace, and all his life he would remember the impression he had of her walking towards him in the hallway of the Workmen’s Institute where the local amateur operatic society was meeting for rehearsals. A small beginning to a major transformation.

In the first place, being present at all was rather a joke to him. The shortage of men due to the war had caused the music master at the local county school to send a dozen senior boys down to rehearse as the group were short in the chorus. He was doing Higher School Certificate then, had been working too hard, and his mother thought it would be good for him.

‘You ought to mix more, Selwyn. You take far too little time off. Musically, of course, they’re not up to much, but it will be something different for you.’

Selwyn was a son of the manse, dutiful and obedient, and it was typical of him that he should arrive at the rehearsal room with twenty minutes to spare. He wore his school blazer and sat in the hallway just inside the main doorway. It was the first time he had ever been inside the building of which his mother had disapproved since it also contained a bar for the sale of intoxicating liquor which was open all the week, including Sundays. It was also used for political meetings and was associated with the miners, a group for which his mother also had no special liking, being country born and bred, some distance away from the Welsh mining valleys. Selwyn himself had gone to school with the boys who were now down the pit, but the break with boys of this kind had come at eleven, and there was all the difference in the world between Selwyn and these boys now.

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