MORNING SERIAL
HE GAVE his butties thin glass bottles with wide mouths to capture the moths and butterflies. They stoppered the bottles with cork bungs and he placed them in a sack from his basket, along with cuttings of golden saxifrage, red campion and wild columbine and the friable fretwork of tiny, ancient mountainside ferns.
When they had rested and eaten, they would divide into teams of two and separate to hunt out the nests of goldcrests and blackbirds, or of the common willow warblers and darting chiff chaffs, and, with a rarer excitement, of fierce kestrels from the higher niches of the cliff faces below the plateau. Later, in the House, he would carefully pierce and blow out the stolen eggs to add to his collection of the speckled and blue and mottled green and yellows, to whose cases he would affix inked notes of species, time and place. Sometimes on the lawn at Ysgurborwen House he would lay out his cases for the boys to see, the boys who had found them for him, the boys who never entered the House. They looked at his treasures and at the cards on which he wrote in a neat hand with black ink the Latin terms, book-learned, of the things and creatures from the hills which the boys knew and called by different names. They would laugh and sip the lemonade the maid brought out to drink on these hot days, and say “Da iawn, Dai bach. Da iawn, butty”.
Through all these long summers of their quickening lives, the boys foraged and scavenged, together, collecting for him. It was lived as if it were a childhood in common. In the higher stretches of the river they fished with bamboo poles and string and attached offal, with scant success, and they swam naked in the swirling eddies of the river and the deeper, pooled water at the bends where the banks were set above the flow. He was not, through all these days of growing together, apart from them, though all understood the difference, the distance. For them there was a rudimentary, fractured schooling but such as it was it was only, as they knew, the prelude for work to come.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW