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head a bit, and then took me up a rough track, still uphill, on and on, and then when I thought I couldn’t walk a step further, he brought me through a yard of some kind, and knocked on a door. The woman who came said no, like all the others when she saw me, but he talked and talked, and then a man came to the door too, and joined in. Then suddenly the man who had brought me from the station left, and trudged away down the hillside, and they let me in through their door.
    It was a big farm kitchen I walked into. A great log fire was burning in the chimney corner, and there was bread and cheese, and a cold roast chicken on the table. I was so hungry the sight of food made me feel tight in the stomach. They looked at me, and the man said something in Welsh.
    â€˜How old is it you are?’ she asked me, in English.
    â€˜Fifteen,’ I said.
    â€˜You look more. I thought you were a grown man when you stood out in the dark there,’ she said. ‘Will you want your bed right away?’
    â€˜Can I have something to eat first?’ I asked.
    â€˜Right away, boy. Sit down then,’ she said. She put food in front of me, four sorts of bread, and great hunks of cheese, and butter with beads of saltwater shining in it, and the rest of the chicken. She sat down by the hearth, and folded her hands in her lap, and the two of them talked together in Welsh. I listened to all that musical mumbo-jumbo and ate and ate, and as soon as I stopped feeling hungry my head drooped forwards onto my hands, and I fell asleep at the table where I sat.

2
    I suppose I stuck it there for about five weeks. They weren’t unkind; but Mr Williams, the farmer, spoke no English, only Welsh, and his two shepherds, David and Evans, were the same, save for a word or two. Mrs Williams, and their son, Hugh, could speak some English, enough to tell me simple things, like where to put my clothes to dry when I came in soaking, and when to come to table, and not to go by myself on the mountain; now and then they even talked to each other in a funny sort of English, just to help me not to feel left out of it. It didn’t make me feel that! Anyway they couldn’t manage it for long.
    The farm was a mile above the village, on a narrow track all its own. The village wasn’t like an English village at all; it had no church, but two chapels, one made of red brick, the other of green-painted corrugated iron, a bit rusty at the corners. There weren’t any cottages, only rows of terraced houses like bits of a town thrown down in the valley, and ugly bits of a town at that: grey, and vicious red brick under slate tiles that seemed shiny with rain all the time. A railway ran up to the head of the valley, but it only served the slate quarry, where everyone worked who didn’t work on a farm. For the rest there was mountain, great humps of bare green; smeared with blotches of purple where heather grew, blotting out the sides of the sky in every direction. And the colours and shapes of the land were always blurry, washed out by a haze of incessant fine rain. I suppose it can’t have rained without stopping for five weeks, but that’s how I remember it. I spent a lot of time lying on my bed, reading the only thing I could find – old
Woman’s Weeklies
, with sloppy stories in them, which Mrs Williams kept stacked up under the stairs. They didn’t seem to take a newspaper, and if they talked about the war, well, of course, I couldn’t understand what they said.
    Once the billeting officer came to see if I was giving any trouble, and they said no, thank you, they could manage me nicely. I plucked up courage to ask him if there was a school I could go to.
    â€˜There is the school in the village, boy,’ he said. ‘But nobody still at it, the age you are.’
    â€˜I was at a Grammar school,’ I said. ‘I should be at a Grammar school.’
    â€˜There is a Grammar school over the mountain, in