MORNING SERIAL

DAD brought some of it home. I can remember it, the meat, all squashed and dead.

There was only the mortuary, where they put Mam in her best dress and in a coffin, and then it was the funeral. In the funeral I stood between everybody’s legs while they sang, and while they read things from the oldfashioned Welsh of The Bible. Then it was the heather ground of the hill’s graveyard. And in the coffin there was Mam, and even though she was as thin as a baby tree, she was heavy. You could see Dad and the men were struggling with the weight of her, and at the end they almost dropped her into the cold hill. Then everyone prayed to ‘god!’ and you were supposed to go home.

Nain said it was “the only way”.

“Wipe your hands and back to work or whisky,” she said to Dad, patting him on the back like a dog.

But he hung about with a lost look by the side of the grave, just all the dull gorse bushes and the dead bracken on the hill behind him. Efa tried to go to him, but Nain pulled her arm.

“He’s just maudling,” Nain said “Leave him to it. It does no good to share grief, love.”

Grief was when you had the heavy thing round your ribs and you couldn’t even cry.

He couldn’t take it. Not Dad. Efa says he couldn’t take it. Efa says Nain had this idea. About men. You had to be like a bull. Strong. You had to earn money and be a “real man” and Dad couldn’t do it, Efa says.

He went on years: years of working at the factory. And, at home, there was just Nain. Nain, in the kitchen, making smooth, empty jam.

Back then Nain was the only one who sang. Sang perfect, stiff folk songs, the ones you learnt at school for Eisteddfod competitons. Nain sang them too pretty and too neat, this tidy kind of happiness in the way she sang them.

“Molianwn oll yn llo – o – on!” she’d sing, or “Tw rym di ro!” or “Migldi Magldi hei now now! Ff aldiradi lid alym !”

Nain’s tidy folksongs were a lie, like those pretty tea-towels they sell in Pringles to the blue-rinsed tourists, the ones that say ‘Wales’ all vague at the top.