Testimonies. Patrick O’Brian

her need for conversation. I know it was not for money that she threaded the mountains at shearing time, because she always took a fleece as her day’s pay, as they used to do in former times; but instead of having it made into flannel as the old people did she stored the wool in her loft, where it mounted and mounted, the home of innumerable rats and mice. Mouldering wool was the chief of the smells in her cottage; the next in strength was her goat, her companion and pet.

      The first time I went to ask why she had not come she gave me a cup of tea with her goat’s milk in it; even in that dim light I could see the encrusted grime on the mug. There was something soft at the bottom, which my spoon encountered but did not entirely dislodge.

      It was conversation that proved the downfall of our relation; that and wounded pride. She was the most garrulous old woman I have ever heard. She knew very little English, but that did not prevent her from starting to talk as soon as she opened my door, a flood of words that did not stop until she closed the door behind her. As far as I could make out they were mostly anecdotes of her young days, or the history of families living in the valley, diseases, catastrophe, anger and death. It was impossible to follow her. Most of the farming people had some trouble with English pronouns (hi in Welsh is she in English, which starts them off on the wrong foot) but none was so wild as this old lady.

      I used to listen with strained attention to such phrases as ‘Then it went off with the hwnna [this took the place of any unknown English word] with Dai to the sheeps; and tomorning I say “Men: the damned things.”’ It was a pity that I could not understand her, for I am sure she would have been most interesting: I tried, but the difficulty of language was far from being the greatest barrier. Her mental processes were tortuous and involved; she was the victim of association. She would plunge into a vast series of parentheses and never come out. An account of Criccieth fair thirty years ago would become the history of Mr Williams, Moelgwyn, and then by some fresh association, dark to me, it would turn to a tale of obscure injustice.

      In the end I stopped trying, and she resented it. Once, during an inordinately tedious speech I got up at the end of a paragraph, hoping to be allowed to get on with the book that lay open on the table, but she said, ‘Sit down. I am not finishing …’ so firmly that I had no choice.

      She grew more and more irregular in her attendance as I listened to her less, although I tried to make up for it by paying her more than our bargain. I wrote to her once or twice, to ask her to order coal if she were going down to Dinas, or to come on Thursday instead of Friday. She never acted on these notes, and answered evasively if I asked her about them: it occurred to me that she might not understand written English, so one day I wrote to her in Welsh. She never came again after that. She was quite illiterate (I wish I had known: I would not have humiliated her for the world) and she could make nothing of any of the notes; but when she learned that the last was in Welsh she found it wounding and insulting. She forgave me in the end, and we were quite friendly, but she said she was too old to go out any more.

      I looked everywhere for another woman; I advertised and made inquiries as far as Llanfair and Dinas, but there was none to be found. There was no middling gentry in this part of the country, and no local tradition of going out to service.

      I was obliged to keep house for myself. I did not do so badly after a while, though the ordinary mechanical operations like washing up, or making a bed always took me very much longer than they would have taken a woman. In a way it was a good thing: it opened a new perspective to me. Formerly I had used what I now found to be an unreasonable number of plates, cups and saucers, knives and forks: when each of these things has to be washed up, dried and put away, things take on a different aspect. Now I grew careful of my saucer (a triumph if it remained unslopped), never put butter or marmalade on the edge of my plate, so that the plate might get by with no more than a few crumbs, which could be blown off, and I learned that one course to each meal was enough.

      My simple diet appeared to suit me. That, the change, the excitement, the unwonted exercise and the mountain air combined in the first few months to make me feel better than I had felt for years. I ate when I chose and as much or as little as I chose – a great change from the set, unvarying meals of my former life. I rather insist upon this point, because I am convinced that a man’s diet and his surroundings have a deep effect on him. Before this time I had tended to coddle myself: I was hagridden by an ignominious and painful digestive trouble, and in an exactly ordered life I had spent much too much time watching my symptoms and worrying about them. My new way of eating did not have the permanent good effect that I had hoped (I write like a hypochondriac) but the vast country opened and strengthened my being in ways that I had never imagined. Many things that had appeared all-important dwindled to trifles, and other values rose. It is difficult to explain because it is difficult to seize; but I know that I began to feel more of a man – more complete and masculine – and less like a neutral creature in an unsatisfactory body.

      The strength of the country; that was a new concept for me. I had known the Cotswolds fairly well, and the Sussex downs; they are very beautiful, but they had never given me this idea of strength – a direct and powerful influence. This was something quite different: from my very first days in the valley it struck me that men, here, were no longer in the majority; it was the untamed land. It is possible that I exaggerated this because of my urban background, but making all allowances, it still seemed to me that it was neither fanciful nor weak to feel that the ancient order was hardly disturbed here. (If this was the case, and I am sure it was, a man’s natural reaction would be to become more virile.)

      The ancient order was hardly disturbed, particularly at night. I remember standing just under the black precipice that rushes up to the top of the Saeth looking down at the three or four handkerchiefs of fields down in the bottom of the valley and comparing their extent with the prodigious sweep of untouched mountain; the night was touching on the barren land, making it vaster and more powerful, while the little fields dwindled and vanished.

      There was no longer that great buffer of civilization between a man and his remote origins: I felt it strongly; and in an attempt to convey something of what I mean I have written the two following pieces, although they break the run of my narrative.

      I was walking along the road in the morning of a beautiful gentle day when I met Emyr Vaughan going the round of his sheep. We were well acquainted and friendly by this time and he often used to take me part of the way with him to show me things and explain them. It was still the lambing season, and twice every day he went clean round the lower mountain. He was having trouble this year with weak ewes who could not feed their lambs, and with foxes. As we walked he showed me here and there a patch of skin with the close-curled wool of a new lamb on it, and once the hoof, or the foot, of a lamb with the shank still uneaten. He slackened his pace for me, but it was still an effort to keep up, and I did not always hear or understand what he said; however, I remember being struck again by the extraordinary way he recognized individual sheep. ‘That ewe there, she is the daughter of the one by the wall. She had twins, but she could not feed both of them, and I put one to that ewe we passed by the road, the one I said had the maggot very bad last year – her lamb had the brait.’ It was obvious that he was not talking for effect: he had hundreds of sheep there, and he knew each one, with its maternal ancestry. I do not think that any of them had names except those few who had been hand-reared at the farm, brought up with a bottle, and I meant to ask him how he identified each, whether he said inwardly, ‘There is that sheep with the drooping ears and brown legs, the daughter of the one who got caught in the trap the autumn before the bad winter.’

      We were coming down again to the road a little way above my cottage when we found the body of a lamb, dragged between two rocks. Its head was eaten off.

      ‘Diwch annwyl!’ he said. It was a fine well-grown lamb. He said that he thought he had seen the mother earlier in the day, much farther up. It was a fox of course, he said, and when he had thought for some time he said, ‘I will put some poison to it tonight.’ He spoke with an air of caution – a hushed cunning, as if it were something illegal. He said he was sure I would not tell anybody. It was when he spoke like this that he lost his amiability entirely; all the idiot sharpness of the peasant came into his face; it was as if his eyes diminished and went red round the edges.

      I left him shortly