Tommi was to see an angel again, years later, when he lay dying in a bomb crater towards evening during one of the last days of the war, not feeling any pain from the wound that had torn off his arm. A man ran past with a shard of metal, blast-whitened in his back, ripped and shaped like wings. ‘Angel,’ said Tommi, as his life levelled out.
He was a tiny and scared child and he still looked mesmerised and stood talking quickly, opening and closing his hands while he told the preacher, Tegla Davies, what he’d seen. The preacher listened quietly. His father wrote how it always seemed he was listening to a far off sound. There were eleven of them at the school that day and not one of them would ever forget the thing they were about to see.
Outside there was a vicious frost and the preacher took them out to see the angel.
The preacher was a man whose mellow voice and stern fervour gave him effortless control over the children and they were quiet as they walked. There was no malice meant for Tommi in taking them to see a thing which could not possibly be there — he didn’t for a moment want the boy to look a fool. Clearly, Gareth’s father reflects, the preacher would have been thinking of some lesson, some didactic: how God could manifest Himself in many ways; how angels could visit, pehaps, a pure enough mind, even in the beauty of water. He was successful at getting the children to believe in God, not by forcing them to believe, but by showing them things which would make it almost impossible not to. For the first time in their lives, they felt the quiet excitement of grown ups.
When the preacher reached the bridge he stopped and held on to the bluestone wall. He was trembling. The children filed around him. The tiny riot of the stream below them and the falling sound of melting where the sun fell thinly over the hoar frost, and the preacher shaking. These are the things his father remembers most. The waterfall was frozen. And there in the ice, where the fall began, was a girl, catching the light like spider thread, with her white shawl spread out around her in the frozen water.
It was years before they were told she had drowned herself because she’d found she was with child and in his father’s village they talk about it to this day. This story stood out for Gareth. He’d seen a lot of things die, and none of them beautifully.
__
He left the bike at the top of the lane and walked into the long field that crested the hill. They called this field Top Field. Over the road was the plot. He could hear Bill’s tractor ticking close by.
__ Bill
Bill had lived on the next farm and grew up with Gareth. He had a very pretty sister. Bill was simple.
When Bill’s father died they had to leave the farm because they found out they did not own it. It hadn’t belonged to them for years. Bill did not understand.
Bill’s father had invested heavily in pigs. He borrowed from the bank to build pigsties and a place where he could kill and salt the pigs, which is a hell of a business. Pig farming was a very different thing from cattle and sheep, which he sold, but it seemed the clever money back then.
They had long kept just one pig; would feed and fatten up the pig then slaughter it and slowly the children came to accept this process (only the head scared them, whenever they found it, and when they sneaked into the cool pantry and opened the brine barrel, the grey distended cuts of flesh floating in the water would always disturb them). Their father decided to develop a pedigree herd of Welsh pigs — a strong, long pig with long wide ears and a long jowl and he protected them mercilessly from the invading Landrace pigs, which came in from Sweden around the 1950s and which, to the general wisdom, were a good thing to start breeding into your stock. He farmed the pigs outdoors, and his fields were scattered with the corrugated iron farrowing arcs which Gareth’s father said reminded him of Nissan huts and airfields. (This picture amused Gareth — squadrons of flying pigs).
Even when the Welsh breed opened up its herd book for a time in the middle of the 50s and encouraged the introduction of pure Landrace blood, Bill’s father held out — despite the accumulating problems of maintaining sufficient male and female lines while avoiding inbreeding. It became more and more difficult for him. To keep the blood lines fresh, stock had to be imported from several sources, which was always a risk, and gradually, without a doubt, the number of pure pigs was decreasing. He borrowed more and more. Meanwhile, over-production of low-quality pigs — the very thing he fought against — almost collapsed the market and herds declined in line with their fall in profitability.
The herds which had cross-bred cleverly still stood; the improved carcass quality and production efficiency of the scientifically-bred Landrace enhanced the originally hardy constitution of the old Welsh breed and made them economically viable, reducing Bill’s father, who had never hybridised, to the standing of a hobbyist. Eventually, his fight for purity backfired. Increasingly, piglets were born with defects, all with cartoon names — ‘splay leg’, ‘kinky tail’, ‘blind anus’ — all harking back to some sexual deviance. In desperation, in ‘57 he introduced a line of Landrace boars, hired in from across the border. Ironically, they were of Danish origin, rather than the Swedish stock: the Danish strain had already caused great problems out in Canada. The pigs born developed raised lesions on their skin, had broken hooves, died easily of pneumonia, and it took some time for the local vet — a cow man, really — to diagnose the hereditary Dermatosis vegetans. Everyone was pretty sure the semi-lethal recessive gene responsible lingered in the Danish pigs.
He fought through it more or less but then a few years later pigs started to simply die. They diagnosed swine erysipelas — the thing they call ‘the diamonds’. The germs that cause this can live in piggeries and on ‘pig-sick’ land for years so it was assumed the pigs that came in brought this. In one form of this disease, the skin discolours into raised purplish areas, which at first looked like the dermatosis again, so they did not treat it properly. The purplish areas run along the back and over the flank and belly and look like diamonds, more or less, which is where the sickness gets its name. In the chronic form, the pig’s joints are affected, causing lameness, or the germ attacks the heart valves, making cauliflower like growths on them until they fail and the pig dies. The vet looked at the dead hearts and gave his misdiagnosis.
The pigs were becoming recognisably ‘depressed’, went weak, then collapsed and died within a day or else died suddenly. It was really Mulberry Heart disease, and the second, younger vet confirmed this when he found the bloated, mottled livers and hearts lacerated with haemorrhages.
The herd was culled and any of the good meat sold. Bill’s father gave all the money he could to the bank and a few years later shot himself.
Before that happened, another farm bought the place and broke it up. They used much of the land themselves, but let the family stay in the house for a rent, and farm cows on some of the land. The family never knew the place was not theirs anymore, their father kept that from them.
When the old man died and they couldn’t work the farm anymore, the big farm sold it. They had to move into a small house in the village but Bill could not adapt. Gareth would find him walking round the old place, mystified, at night; or in the day, amongst the unused outbuildings as they were then, and around the boarded-up house.
So Gareth’s father gave some land to Bill. He fenced off a few acres by the road and said to Bill it was his land now, and he could farm it. So he takes the orphaned lambs and grows things there and helps out on the farm when help is needed, like at shearing time — and he cuts grass for old ladies in the village and takes people spuds and cabbage; but underneath, as Gareth knows, he doesn’t understand still.