The Woman at the Window (22 page)

I didn't use the world ‘love'. For the first time I took him in my arms and we clutched at each other, desperate with inexperience. Clinging to each other still, we stumbled to a caravan. Damp as it was our excitement and ardour warmed it. I was as patient as Ifan was eager. As I feared he failed to penetrate me the first time. But he was so humble and enthusiastic I could only love him more.

***

And that is how I was conceived. That mundane and mysterious moment when the process of our existence begins. So commonplace, so bathetic, of no significance to anyone except one's solitary self. That's true of all life I suppose. It might not have happened, but it did and we spend the rest of our lives wondering what to do about it, until the corpse is made ready to be laid in the earth. Not however in Zofia's case. My mother spent her entire life struggling, protesting and arranging protests. In our family, history is made of milestones in her long march. My dear father abandoned his literary ambitions to nurture Maen Bedo and develop the caravan park with the success that made his wife's life of protest possible. The skill in the strict metres remains only a hobby. There were language protests too, but the beastly bomb was always at the centre of her preoccupations: the Cuban crises (I came home from school crying the world was coming to an end at three o'clock); the Berlin crises, an incident here an accident there, Greenham Common and the Trident protests. Right up to her death she kept banging on. 

‘That nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. What the hell are they doing about it?'

History made me, but I'm no legend. All I can do is accept the joke and carry on protesting. Whether or not it means anything, without having any effect. I shall never know, unless I find out after I stop breathing. But at least it's my life. It was given to me. I have no other.

Acknowledgements

The Grudge
,
Rendezvous
,
Luigi, Vennenberg's Ghost
and
Nomen
, have previously been published in
Planet

The author is deeply grateful to M. Wynn Thomas for assembling this collection and for his help and encouragement over many years.

About the Author

One of Wales' most celebrated authors, Emyr Humphreys was born in 1919 in Prestatyn, Flintshire.

As a conscientious objector, he served as a war relief worker in the Second World War. After working as a teacher, BBC drama producer and lecturer, he became a full time writer in 1972.

During a distinguished writing career he has won the Somerset Maugham Award for
Hear and Forgive
(1952), the Hawthornden Prize for
A Toy Epic
(1958) and several major Welsh Arts Council awards. In all he has published twenty- one novels as well as short stories, plays, poetry and essays, and is regarded as a major figure in post-war writing.

Emyr Humphreys novels published by Seren include
A Toy Epic, Outside the House of Baal, Unconditional Surrender, The Gift of a Daughter
(Welsh Book of the Year 1998),
Old People are a Problem, Ghosts and Strangers
and
The Shop
.

Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

© Emyr Humphreys 2009

ISBN: 978-1-78172-134-6

The right of Emyr Humphreys to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author's imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The publisher works with the financial assistance of The Welsh Books Council.