much.
He jotted down some numbers on the back cover of the Undertaker’s Journal and totted them up.
‘Five, ten, fifteen, twenty,’ he counted to himself. ‘We’ll be all right now, Da, don’t worry, even if no one pops their clogs for two or three months – and someone surely will.’
‘Mustn’t be thinking too much about money, Wilfred. It’s not the be-all and end-all.’
‘But it is important. And we have this now – this is for us. And it means we can look after ourselves, and not worry.’
But Wilfred did worry. Wilfred who, as a child, was always starving hungry; everyone said he had worms and hollow legs because he ate so much. He remembered the way his father had eked out his paltry wage so Wilfred might have more food. When money was very short, his da made kettle broth with hot water poured over broken bread, and when there was no work as a gravedigger, he would spend his days walking the hills and valleys around Narberth foraging for food with an instinctive sharpness born of hunger and the imperative to feed his child. He would find mushrooms and wild garlic, occasionally potatoes, and in the late summer there were hazelnuts, walnuts, many blackberries and sometimes strawberries. Then in their small yard his da grew vegetables, willing himself to be green-fingered while tending the peas, turnups, cauliflowers and the parsnips, and feeling dismayed if there were caterpillars on the cabages.
Hunger made Wilfred eat every morsel in his bowl, even the tasteless kettle broth, scraping the enamel until there was nothing left. Then his da would turn from the table and stand at the sink tidying so Wilfred could lick his bowl clean while his da pretended not to see, because he knew that his son was hungry and needed all the food he could get. And they shared their meals with great generosity because they had both lost so deeply and dearly when Wilfred’s mam had died that neither of them could bear the thought of life without the other – and so their consideration for each other overrode their own hunger.
‘No, Da, I’m not hungry – you have the last slice of bread,’ Wilfred would insist when he got older. ‘I found an apple on the way home.’ From necessity, he had become an adept scrumper of the many pears and apples in Narberth’s orchards.
‘You eat it, boy,’ his da would urge. ‘I’ve had more than enough, an ample sufficiency.’ Both of them knew the other was fibbing.
But there were many nights when Wilfred, despite his da’s very best efforts, went to bed hungry, his stomach taut over his hipbones, and he would lie, listening to his da snoring and harrumphing in the next room, unable to think of anything but Mrs Annie Evans’s magnificent Conduit Stores with its breathtaking array of sweet jars crammed with pastel-coloured sugar almonds, sticky liquorice allsorts and toffee, precious as gold. Then there was the counter lined with fresh, hot, wondrous loaves. In those famished bedtimes of his childhood, Wilfred imagined eating huge mouthfuls of bread spread munificently with butter and piled high with jam before falling asleep while saying his prayers: ‘Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, eating jam.’
Wilfred settled into the driving seat of the hearse and adjusted the mirror. He found a barley sugar in his trouser pocket, brushed the lint off it then popped the sweet in his mouth. He still felt guilty about Grace, very worried that he had hurt and humiliated her in the High Street, but he must try and put thoughts of Grace out of his mind and focus on the matter at hand today: young chap from Templeton. Flu.
At Templeton Church the pallbearers were waiting, bowler hats held tightly, looking out desolately to the empty road and the green valley beyond, waiting for Wilfred to arrive.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Enoch Davies. And Mr James Davies and Mr David Davies,’ said Wilfred, nodding at the father and brothers of the deceased. ‘My sincerest condolences to you all.’ He had already offered his condolences to the next of kin but one could never say enough comforting words to the anguished souls of the bereaved. The men collected sombrely and silently around the sleek hearse to help slide the casket out.
‘At the count of three: one, two, three.’ Wilfred took his usual position of back right and checked the pallbearers were ready to process. Today the chief pallbearer was the deceased’s father. Sons, sons-in-law, sometimes brothers and the