eto, Volume 2

By StoryForge Press

eto is a multi-genre anthology featuring new short fiction and poetry by Welsh authors and authors of Welsh heritage from around the world.

eto, Volume 2 includes English-language short fiction and poetry by Bel Roberts, Stuart Keir, Lloyd Jones, Sheila Lewis, Cynan Jones, Robert Nisbet, Richard Rhys Jones, John Good, Lesley Coburn, Ian Denning, Paul Worthington, Matthew D. Rhys, Gaynor Madoc Leonard, Philip Evans, Julie Samways and Meurig Jones.

eto is a Welsh word which means "again" and "still" and "yet."

To find out more about eto or to inquire about submissions, please visit http://etofiction.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: StoryForge Press
• Release date: Apr 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9780991653522

StoryForge Press

StoryForge Press is the publisher of eto, a poetry and short fiction anthology, featuring new work by emerging and established Welsh authors and authors of Welsh heritage. eto is a Welsh word which means "again" and "still" and "yet." To find out more about eto or to inquire about submissions, please visit storyforgepress.com

Book preview

This second volume has become, by happy circumstance and the welcome, insidious influence of our co-editor, Phil Rowlands, sort of the Rhondda edition.

For readers who don't know, the Rhondda is two connected valleys in the former South Wales coal-mining region, once home to most of Wales' famous coal mines and the birth of Cylch Cadwgan, a group of Welsh-language writers and intellectuals. Famous Rhondda residents have included authors Ron Berry, Gwyn Thomas and Rachel Trezise; boxer Jimmy Wilde; Dr. Strangelove author Peter George; the Plaid Cymru party's Leanne Wood, and inventor Donald Davies who co-created packet switching and made the internet possible. We are graced in our second edition with work from six Rhondda authors and poets, and the work of co-editor Phil Rowlands, also from the Rhondda.

We are honored and extremely grateful for the involvement of every one of our authors, and each wonderful story and poem in this volume, regardless of whether they are from the Rhondda.

We hope you like these stories and verses as much as we do.

MANAGING HYDROPHOBIA

Bel Roberts

Water has never been my element.

I was born in the Rhondda Valley and spent my childhood and adolescence land-locked by impenetrable mountains. The sea was only twenty miles away but it was totally inaccessible to a family with neither a private car, nor train fare to the coast. However, in other ways, water has always been too plentiful. The Rhondda has had, consistently, one of the highest recorded rates of annual rainfall in the British Isles, so when Voltaire wrote in the eighteenth century that the weather in Britain was always unusual for the time of the year, he must have just spent a dry summer in a South Wales valley.

Welsh weather forecasts are boringly predictable ̶ low cloud, damp conditions, precipitation over the hills, sea mist, rain imminent, showery, heavy rain, flood alert ̶ compared with the exciting highs and dramatic threats of positive climatic conditions in south east England ̶ wall-to-wall-sunshine, hose-pipe ban, heat wave expected, drought.

Moreover, the quality of Welsh rain is unique. When it is light, it falls like powder and settles on people’s heads like dandruff; when it is heavy, it hammers, so whatever the season, an umbrella here is more than a fashion accessory carried just in case. Wherever we are travelling inside Wales, we natives accept that rain is a strong possibility and we leave home most days expecting to be drenched. So when it comes to being party to a voluntary soaking for mere enjoyment, which is what swimming is meant to be all about, a lot of us valley people say, ‘No, thank you’. In any case, many of us become, prematurely, too arthritic to swim.

I realise that my hydrophobia has much to do with being born in an economically depressed area during the Second World War, when the family could not afford a bath towel, let alone a swimming costume. Bath-night was a once-a-week, hierarchical ritual cleansing ceremony and I, as second child, never stepped into clean or warm bath water. What little water there was, had been poured into a tin bath from an old boiler that had seethed for hours , steaming and spitting like a witch’s cauldron on the open coal fire. By the time it had been ladled into the bath, the water was tepid. In fact, I was a teenager before I saw a bath with hot and cold taps and a bath tub full of clean water, so I never felt deprived, or unfulfilled, because I couldn’t swim. I naturally assumed that those of my contemporaries who could, had somehow acted on instinct when their mothers’ waters had broken and, subsequently, had performed out of habit.

On annual Sunday school trips and social club forays to Barry Island or Porthcawl in the 40’s and 50’s, the only children reported lost were the swimmers, as if becoming adrift were part of some conscious plan to ditch one’s parents and be brought up elsewhere. The seemingly hourly panics about who had last seen little Huw or Sian as bobbing dots on the horizon, related only to swimmers who had put their faith in the gravitational pull of the moon and on the tide always coming back in after going out. Those grounded by lack of buoyancy, or by virulent impetigo that necessitated dry skin conditions, stayed literally stuck to the sand, building castles or being buried in them (the one sure way of keeping warm), before being press-ganged into grim search parties to the sea’s edge, or to the Lost Children’s Unit, a kind of Battersea Dogs’ Home for misplaced urchins, a paddock-like construction which had been built temptingly close to the resort’s only ice-cream parlour, a natural draw for deprived and curious kids.

For the few who swam, the oil-slicks left by passing tankers cruising the Bristol Channel posed more of a health hazard than the cross-currents and added a touch of nostalgia to the proceedings. Waifs emerged from the foam as black as pit-boys and could only be restored to recognizable, freezing-blue siblings by being rolled onto areas of dry, abrasive sand, or by being dabbed and chafed with the shared, threadbare towel.

‘The-sea-is-really-warm! Come-on-in!’ invitation, chattered unconvincingly between clenched jaws never deceived me, but there was no doubt that wading out to shoulder-depth levels and being flung back by pounding waves onto wet sand, without one’s feet ever touching the bottom, was a piece of macho one-upmanship on those who insisted upon remaining on terra firma. It was also a fitting rehearsal for many of the ritualistic, full-immersion, baptismal initiations practised regularly in some valley chapels.

Later, when Sunday school trips, and, indeed, Sunday schools, became memorabilia of a pre-television age and when County and Borough Councils sank community swimming-baths, where formerly only collieries had been excavated, the thought of paying to splash about in, let alone swallowing, other people’s bodily fluids still failed to pull me in.

In the mid-sixties, the availability of package holidays to warm, foreign destinations acted as a powerful incentive to many aspiring swimmers, myself included, but as hotel pools became more luxurious, their function changed from sporting to cavorting opportunities and swimwear became non-functional, essentially dry fashion statements.

Holidays became comatose, passive states of mindless relaxation and the fun people were those who sported the briefest bikinis and the deepest tans. Swimming was ‘naff’, because chlorinated water turned tinted hair green and contradicted the claims of manufacturers of waterproof mascara. Immersion in water also meant having to re-apply tacky sun-lotion, or risk ending up like the proverbial lobster. As lidos and pool sides developed into scenic backdrops for photogenic poseurs, suddenly, non-swimmers were seen to have numerous, aesthetic advantages.

But, just to prove that I haven’t got a closed mind, or a defeatist attitude, and in order to believe and participate in the obvious fun you were all having in the water, I even paid for private swimming lessons. They proved quite beyond my depth.

Apparently, a prerequisite to buoyancy is a 100% trust in the element and the teacher, though no one informs the terrified learner how they should obey the order, ‘You’ve got to relax!’ It is natural for my instincts and muscles to resist drowning, even if my body looks relaxed and my face bears a strychnine smile of confidence. When I go under, I do not bob back up. I sink like a weighted sack and , YES , I was drowning, not waving, whatever the poet, Stevie Smith, thought. I even smiled bravely during the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Over the years, I’ve survived the humiliation of 8 year-olds volunteering to hold my hand beyond the three-metre mark, and of my crotch providing the physical archway under and through which teenagers with personality dive and surface. And I’m not too interested in the brand of marine archaeology which involves exploring the shelving, slippery floors and ceramic walls of swimming pools, even of 5 star hotels, if

1. I’m not vertical;

2. the right way up; and

3. in complete control of my movements.

Nevertheless, I am aware that swimming is the most complete form of physical exercise ever devised. I know ̶̶ I’ve struggled to do it. It engages and exhausts every muscle of the body and it comes as naturally to me as steeple-chasing, or caber-tossing. And the argument that one needs to swim in case one gets into life-threatening difficulties in the water is equivalent, in my view, to saying that one needs to learn to swallow to save oneself from gorging to de ath. There just isn’t any danger, if you don’t indulge.

Besides, I’m too young to die, lulled into a sense of false security by aqua-enthusiasts, who seem to prefer standing dripping over my supine body, eulogising about all the benefits I’m missing, rather than staying in the water and enjoying it. Why can’t they all walk past me and take a running jump? As long as they remember that I can’t help them, if they get into difficulties.

If I had to divine a water-tight theory for my manic hydrophobia, I could do worse than consult the stars, for I was born under the cardinal fire sign of Aries to an equally water-resistant, non-buoyant, Aries-born mother. My father was another astrological fire sign ̶ Sagittarius. Now, what pedigree could be more incompatible than fire to the power of two and H2O? (I cannot put this into chemical formula! Perhaps you can.)

But it is possible considering the amount of foreign travelling I do, that I will eventually be consigned to a distant watery grave. Certainly, during a 45-day cruise between Tilbury (Essex) and Manaus (Brazil) in 2012, my aversion to water was tested to the limit and, at one point, had I been able to swim, I would have jumped over the side.

The Russian built ocean liner, Marco Polo, was eight decks high and carried eight hundred passengers but it was old – as were most of the eight hundred passengers ̶ and narrow gangways were not designed for crashing waves and clashing Zimmer frames. Our lifeboat drill was cancelled because of bad weather conditions, so there was a whiff of HMS Pinafore to proceedings as the captain negotiated our way through the Bay of Biscay. Those of us who did not succumb to sea-sickness kept our spirits up by romanticising about the golden age when Britain ruled the waves, manning its trade and battle ships by press-ganging into service drunks abducted from sea port inns and maintaining discipline and obedience by strapping recalcitrant cabin-boys to yard-arms for flogging with the cat-o’-nine-tails. In fact, all things considered, it’s difficult to fathom where the naval term ‘Jolly Roger’ originated.

We human flotsam weathered the storm in the Atlantic Ocean but the electronic system had been water-logged and the vessel limped rather than sailed into the mighty Amazon river at Parintins. There the ship’s engines were shut down for 24 hours and there was excited talk of our being air-lifted over the rain forest to Rio. Most travellers on board were grateful that we had simply stopped moving but the lack of electricity meant that toilets couldn’t flush, showers couldn’t function, lifts couldn’t work, chefs couldn’t cook but, more crucially, gin-and-tonics couldn’t get iced. After the Atlantic rise and swell, came the eerie Amazonian torpor, reminding us of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and his lament,

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

By the time the generators had been re-booted and the ship was once again lurching onward and westward , most of us seemed ready to sell off the rain forests to any static restaurant chain that offered us food, as distinct from fodder. Let the natives eat beef burgers! Viva McDonalds! came the common cry.

The Marco Polo reached Manaus, capital of the Amazonas state, a thousand miles from the sea. We witnessed ‘the meeting of the waters’ (two rivers, one grey-coloured and the other yellow, which maintain their separate identities even when they join), then we sailed back in glorious sunshine via Ile du Diable, or Devil’s Island, (I can’t understand why anyone would want to escape from there) calling at Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua, St Lucia and Barbados. We left the West Indies (full of dope-frenzied, quarrelsome natives) knowing that we faced five unbroken days at sea, before calling briefly into Horta in the Azores, Portugal and finally berthing at Tilbury (full of dope-frenzied, quarrelsome natives). On the four-hour car journey back to Wales, it rained solidly, by that I mean liquidly, and continued to rain for the rest of the subsequent summer and autumn. I had no grounds for complaint – in fact, I had no grounds ̶ all washed away by floods. Hurrah! No digging and weeding next year. Perhaps the tide was turning in my favour.

Anyway, now we’re midway through 2013 and it’s business as usual. Although it’s summer, it’s raining outside and my memories of warm evenings spent on deck watching flying fish and sipping Caipirinhas and Margaritas are as water under the bridge. I’m left wondering, if ever I were water-boarded in an attempt to incriminate anyone or anything to account for my hydrophobia, would I blame nurture, nature or astrology? Yes, I’ve concluded that it was my birth-place that was primarily at fault, because I favour the rather deterministic historical theory that the Welsh are the ancient Irish who couldn’t swim and I have no wish at this watershed in my life to change my national allegiances. It is my firm intention to remain living miles inland for the rest of my life on the larger, drier of the two main British islands.

And, you aqua-philes, consider this: if water is so beneficial and user-friendly, why are mermaids an extinct species, and why is Davy Jones’s locker stacked with sailors’ bones?

Believe me, if God had intended us to swim, he would have given us fins.

BEL ROBERTS

Bel Roberts was born in South Wales and is a graduate of Aberystwyth and London Universities. She published her first novel, A Discerning Woman’s Guide To Manhunting, just before her 69th birthday and her second, Surfing Through Minefields, in June 2012.

Bel Roberts is an accomplished and much anthologised short story writer, who has won several competition prizes and been published by Honno Press in its collections, Catwomen From Hell (2000) and Written In Blood (2009). One of her stories, A Touch of Gloss, (which appears in this collection) was broadcast twice on BBC Radio 4.

THE DIG AT THE STATION HOTEL

Stuart Keir

The Station Hotel was a Dinosaur, a Relic, a Thing of the Past, Uneconomic in its Present Condition, a Statement of the Valleys' Past and This After All, Was l965.

The words of the young Brewery Architect hung in the air like cobwebs, long after he had gone, and Griff Lewis kept walking into them, brushing them away, but they kept coming back to remind him of what was going to happen in the very near future.

Redevelopment. The word had hit him straight between the eyes, for the word also meant retirement for him. That was not what bothered him, if the truth were told the place was getting a bit too much for him now anyway. A quick glance in a bar mirror showed him an ageing, bespectacled man with a paunch and thinning grey hair, re-enforcing his view.

Redevelopment into what? The thought sent a shiver up his spine, surely not one of the new-fangled pubs with Flock wallpaper, low claustrophobic ceilings, and God forbid, frothy beer from electronic pumps. He sought solace by sitting in the bar after closing time one afternoon, and looked around.

The Station Hotel had been built in 1882, of dressed stone, and real timbers. It had been built in the Valleys' boom years, the years of the Black Yukon, when men from all over the world, came to the Valleys to work the coal. More men than there was housing for and with the coming of the Railways, The Station Hotel and all the other Station Hotels had been built.

Within its impressive two-story facade were twenty rooms and, for better than sixty years, most of the rooms had been occupied by as large a mix of humanity as could be imagined. New incoming mine workers, travelling salesman, actors, boxers, con men, all of the human flotsam and jetsam that supports and lives off a boomtown.

The two bars of the Station Hotel were either side of the double-fronted doors. The bars faced onto the street, announcing their separate identities by advertising the fact in frosted glass. Saloon Bar and Lounge Bar were written in large letters and, just in case of confusion, the two half-glass doors also had the words emblazoned on them. The words decorated with swirls, and fancy work, and defended by diagonal brass push bars, worn smooth and shiny by years of pushing and polish. Inside, the bars were similar in size and shape, both having fine high ceilings, with cornice work and decorated ceiling roses. From these ceilings ornamented gas lighting had once hung but had now been acceptably replaced by electric bulbs in large opaque glass bowls. However, the difference between the Saloon and Lounge bars, and the lifestyles associated with them, was in the fittings.

In the Saloon Bar was a high, shining, hardwood-topped and paneled bar running for most if its length. Pump handles, standing like enameled cricket stumps were strategically placed along it. A brass footrail also ran the length of the bar, specifically for the comfort of those, who preferred to drink at the bar.

The floor was of flagstone, the furnishings comprised of wooden chairs and tables, tables large enough for cards or dominoes, with four or more chairs, that scraped the flagstones noisily when moved. The emulsioned walls were decorated with plaques and cups of by-gone sports days and nights successes. Essentially and enforceably men only.

The Lounge Bar had a smaller, semi-circular bar in one corner, giving more room for tables and upholstered chairs. Ladies were allowed here, only accompanied by men in the early days, but times had changed. Changes had brought concessions to comfort, such as carpet, curtains, wallpaper and some pictures, altogether a more cosy atmosphere.

This was a proper pub. So thought Griff Lewis, after living and working here for most of his sixty-two years, initially with his parents and, after his father died, with his mother and subsequently his wife.

Wife. The word summed up an episode in his life, that still rankled and the venom in the memory surprised him by raising his temperature, he suddenly felt hot. He had tried very hard to forget her. He had married her relatively late in life, she had been much younger than himself and had turned out to be flighty, the old fashioned adjective his mother had used to describe her seemed too polite. Too polite to conjure up the faithless, scheming bitch he had known.

The anger rose in his throat again when he thought of the men, the money taken from the till, the humiliation he had suffered at her hands, until the confrontation when the worn thread had finally snapped. He had caught her with a Scottish soldier, out in the back yard, and had beaten the Scot to a pulp. Then turning on her, he slapped her face, knocking her to the ground. She had gone off with the soldier, and were never heard of again in the valley, or at least that was the basis of the gossip that was put about. She had gone from him and the door had closed on the only truly dark period of his life.

Griff looked at his hands, they were quite damp with sweat. He thought a walk around the Pub would calm down his inner thoughts. He went upstairs, to let the cool atmosphere and the spirits of the past inhabitants wash over him. He entered the rooms above one by one, walked to the window in each room and looked out at the same view, each time from a slightly different angle. He stood with his back to the small fireplaces, as if warming himself, an attitude he was sure every one of the previous inhabitants had adopted at some time during their tenancy.

In one or two of the rooms, things were slightly in disarray where the architect, and his minions had investigated; a raised floorboard here, some hacked-off plasterwork there.

In number Fourteen, a smaller room, overlooking the back yard and what once had been stables and storehouses, the small cast-iron fire surround had been levered off the wall on one side, for what purpose he could not imagine, but it gave the impression that it was about to fall. Griff was a tidy man, not fastidious but tidy, he liked things to look right, and so with the heel of his hand, he attempted to bump the fire place back into position. It took three tries before it yielded and straightened. He stood back to assess his handy work and, as he did, something dropped into the empty hearth.

He bent and picked it up, it was something wrapped in a piece of tarpaulin or similar material. Unwrapping it, he found it was an old school exercise book, yellowed pages stuck together, faded writing stronger in places, weaker in others.

He could not read the words, stopped to put on his glasses. They did not make any difference, he still could not read the writing. Suddenly he realised why: it was written in another language. Welsh, his instant thought, and he looked closer because, as with many Valley people, he could not speak Welsh but would be able to recognise certain words. Nothing. He looked from faded cover to faded cover, he could recognise nothing. His mind raced, excited questions leaped to the fore, what tongue was it, who had put it there, why hide it, what to do? He looked at his watch, damn, it was close to evening opening time. This would have to wait.

Griff leaned on the bar and looked toward the door. He could tell almost to a minute when his regular customers would arrive and what they would drink. Some nights he would challenge himself to be pulling the correct drink for the respective customer, as they walked in the bar. Tonight was different.

He was waiting for two particular customers, his life-long friends and bosom companions, Tom Parry and Hugh Brian Williams. H.B., as he was more popularly known, both for his initials and also after his favourite expression Hells Bells, for which he had uncanny knack, along with a hundred different emphasis, of bringing into every given topic of conversation or discussion. Precisely at 7.30 p.m., they entered the bar and took