Wendy Mulford
Going "home" : in Suffolk, the nightingale sings
in Wales, hooting with owls
Each year, in spring-time, I migrate
as surely as moth or passerine
and I pick up my Welshness like a plaid &
disappear into its mysterious darkness,
its unquestioned
family likeness, familiarity I never questioned
growing up among the sandstone-red soil & the
valley's cattle-heavy husbandry.
A long time there has been a connection between us
a historic connection you might say
I came first to the Gavenny in wartime
a refugee to my grandmother's scrawny farm
in the foothills of the Skirrid.
She only the second generation to try
a living here, soldiers not farmers in her [blood] -
her stock - Red Poll cattle , poultry : scruff
chickens, ducks , geese picked up at Abergavenny market,
and one pig. Matilda, I called her. She was my family.
Dogs cats & tired women make up the farm,
& one old man, Willie, too old to fight, &
then, later, Italian prisoners-of-war, some of whom
settle & marry local girls
found rival Ice Cream empires.
I remember the days the butter didn't set,
the generator failed the milk yield low
I remember kittens drowned soon as born
dogs kept miserable outside on a chain
& the old pony & the donkey suddenly not there
not a word spoken
& the tall gaunt farmhouse in which we rattled about
always cold and the water from the taps brown and the food
from the kitchen cold when it got to table
***
-
the war ended the grown-ups have new worries-
ration books no cash divorce - other men return to their families
not ours. Then my sister is sent to school in the
nearest village, Llantilio Pertholey
& mum & I walk the three miles to meet her at the end of the day
& she cried & said Michael was it? had thumped her
& nothing else changes.
For us little ones there is still lumpy porridge & lessons
& the bars on the high nursery window shut out
farmyard and mountain
& it is 1947, deep snow, everyone is cold.
***
we thought
fun & laughter come to other farms & cottages
why not ours? At Triley these four women
tight-lipped get on with their lives
at the foot of the Skirrid where
the blue veil of the Black Mountains baffles them
& there isn't any laughter or music in the tall
ugly overgrown house
The women are shut in with their lives, their
lawns and their laurels, their own kind
And I, I grow up a solitary child
& grow into poetry
*** *** ***
WM , Wenhaston, Suffolk first night of the nightingale singing. [On the eve of the Usk Valley Vaughan Association conference marking the birth of Henry Vaughan & after reading [in Poetry Wales] Gwyneth Lewis on Dafydd ap Gwilym: how she faced up to him, & then became sweet on him]
Copyright Wendy Mulford 2013