Bron-8

Continued from Chapter 7: Bron 7 | ABCtales

Chapter 8

Pubs were grim places, in Bron’s very limited experience, but she liked the Plasterer’s Arms in Twickenham, just down the road from the rugby stadium. The TV had been turned on specially for the big game – normally, the regulars made enough racket on their own without it – but today was an exception.

There was scarcely a space to stand on the Plasterers’ wooden parquet floor, which reminded Bron of her primary school. She was wedged into the Main Bar by the bay window with Chris, Goeff and Mike either side of her; occasionally, Mike would tread on her foot or poke an elbow in her face. “Sorry, Bron!” he said, for the fifteenth time. “Can hardly breathe in here, let alone swing a cat.”

The shouts, yells and sudden outburst of laughter bounced off the floor and the faux-Elizabethan half-timbered ceiling. Bron’s glass of red stood on the windowsill, almost untouched.

“Oh, Bron must be used to that. Pubs in Wales must be even more packed out than here when Wales are playing England,” said Geoff. “That right, Bron?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, nodding uncertainly. Truth be told, rugby wasn’t a big thing in Anglesey. With few volunteers for the game at School, her brother Ger, along with a couple of dozen of his classmates had been cajoled and coerced into playing the game by the gym master; their skills would be little-missed by the school football team.

If Anglesey could be said to have a national sport, it was football – actual football, as opposed to the oval ball kind. The place looked to Liverpool for its cultural and sporting references, and that city was, as everyone knew, football-mad. Her Uncle William would make occasional trips to Merseyside to watch Everton when they were playing at home, an exercise that seemed to do little to relieve his habitual deep gloom.

It was a few minutes to three. On the TV, the teams took their places on the field. The English mouthed: ‘God Save the Queen,’ looking uncomfortable, embarrassed. A few supporters in the crowd tried to take up the chorus, raggedly. There had been talk of replacing the wretched dirge with something a bit more rousing, Jerusalem perhaps. At least that had swords and green and pleasant green fields to stir the blood of the suburban Englishman.

Then Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau thundered out from the pub TV, at least as much as the tinny speakers allowed.

“Live in holes in the ground, and only fight when cornered! Turn the sound off, man!” someone yelled. The TV sound abated in a hiss of static amid boos and catcalls.

Then, above the cacophony, a thin little voice. In school choir practice, Miss Madryn had often halted performances with a tap of her baton on and urged Bron to sing more quietly, or even on a few occasion to shut up altogether. Now, above the din of the pub, her voice was tremulous at first, but gained in steadiness, if not tunefulness:

“Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i-i-i miii!

Gwlad BEIRDD a chantorion, en-enu-wogion o FRI!
Ei GWROL ryfelwyr … rwy'n anghofio rhywbeth…

Tros ryddid gollasant eu GWAED.”

The pub went quiet, apart from the mummering of the silenced TV. Everyone swivelled round towards the bay window. Then, from across the rammed pub, another voice, a male one, strong and steady:

“Gwlad, Gwlad, pleidiol wyf i'm gwlad!”
“Tra môr yn fur i'r bur hoff bau” – Bron re-joined, this was her favourite line, ‘may the sea be a wall to my loved country’
O bydded i'r heniaith BARHAU!”

“BRAVO!” someone shouted. “Buy that lady a drink!” And: "Bloody brave singing anything in public with a voice like that!"

A big guy in a vaguely military-looking navy blue pullover with reinforced elbow and shoulder patches shouldered his way through the heaving throng, shouldering aside protesting Englishmen like a forward making a run for the line at Arms Park.

“You my fellow songstress?” A South Wales lilt, overlaid by a couple of decades-worth of south-west London.

Bron nodded.

“Patriotic Welshman I may be, and six-foot-two, but I would never in a million years have dared to do what you did just then. Drink?”

“No thanks, I don’t really.” Bron nodded to her untouched glass of red on the windowsill.

“So you didn’t even need a shot of Dutch courage? Duw, what a lady! WHAT a lady!”

Geraint (Ger) worked in aviation, he said, for a company that chartered out planes all over the world. And he had his own plane, a Cessna Skylane (whatever that was), based at Fairoaks (wherever that was).

“Fancy a quick spin over to France one of these weekends, Bron?”

Her answer was drowned out by a bellowing roar by the rugby-watching crowd but she shook her head vigorously. Apart from playing Lt Hinds, Bron’s experience of flying was limited to a going out with a lad who worked as groundcrew at the local RAF base in Anglesey. Bespectacled, an aircraft nut, more Top Geek than Top Gun, only just outgrowing teenage acne.

But she’d liked him and it was only when he was posted to somewhere in Scotland that the relationship had ended.

Some of the other RAF guys had been jealous, including the sergeant whose beery breath reminded Bron uncomfortably of Tad when he lurched through the farmhouse door after a visit to the Farmers. Perhaps the abrupt posting to Scotland had been deliberate. Leave the field open for the others, perhaps, but Bron hadn’t gone back to the base since Stephen had left.

Anyway, as far as Bron was concerned, flying in anything other than a big airliner – not that she’d ever done that, either - would mean loops and barrel roles in a screaming fighter jet over the English Channel. Besides, she didn’t have a passport.

To be continued in Chapter 9