Fall of Giants

“And Billy,” said Ethel; and then, whispering in Lloyd’s tiny ear, she added: “And your daddy.”

Geraint had a canvas sack slung across his shoulder. Ethel wondered fearfully how many more telegrams were in it. The boy crisscrossed the street, the angel of death in a post office cap.

By the time he passed the toilets and came to the upper half of the street, everyone was on the pavement. The women had stopped whatever work they were doing and stood waiting. Ethel’s parents had come out-Da had not yet gone to work. They stood with Gramper, silent and afraid.

Geraint approached Mrs. Llewellyn. Her son Arthur must be dead. He was known as Spotty, Ethel recalled. The poor boy did not need to worry about his complexion now.

Mrs. Llewellyn held up her hands as if to ward Geraint off. “No!” she cried. “No, please!”

He held out her telegram. “I can’t help it, Mrs. Llewellyn,” he said. He was only about seventeen. “It’s got your address on the front, see?”

Still she would not take the envelope. “No!” she said, turning her back and burying her face in her hands.

The boy’s lip trembled. “Please take it,” he said. “I got all these others to do. And there’s more in the office, hundreds! It’s ten o’clock now and I don’t know how I’m going to get them all done before tonight. Please.”

Her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Parry Price, said: “I’ll take it for her. I haven’t got any sons.”

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Price,” said Geraint, and he moved on.

He took another telegram from his sack, looked at the address, and walked past the Griffithses’ house. “Oh, thank God,” said Mrs. Griffiths. “My Tommy’s all right, thank God.” She began to cry with relief. Ethel switched Lloyd to her other hip and put an arm around her.

The boy approached Minnie Ponti. She did not scream, but tears ran down her face. “Which one?” she said in a cracked voice. “Joey or Johnny?”

“I dunno, Mrs. Ponti,” said Geraint. “You’ll have to read what it says by here.”

She ripped open the envelope. “I can’t see!” she cried. She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear her vision of tears, and looked again. “Giuseppe!” she said. “My Joey’s dead. Oh, my poor little boy!”

Mrs. Ponti lived almost at the end of the street. Ethel waited, heart pounding, to see whether Geraint would go to the Williams house. Was Billy alive or dead?

The boy turned away from the weeping Mrs. Ponti. He looked across the street and saw Da, Mam, and Gramper staring at him in dreadful anticipation. He looked in his sack, then glanced up.

“No more for Wellington Row,” he said.

Ethel almost collapsed. Billy was alive.

She looked at her parents. Mam was crying. Gramper was trying to light his pipe, but his hands were shaking.

Da was staring at her. She could not read the look on his face. He was in the grip of some emotion, but she could not tell what.

He took a step toward her.

It was not much, but it was enough. With Lloyd in her arms, she ran to Da.

He put his arms around both of them. “Billy’s alive,” he said. “And so are you.”

“Oh, Da,” she said. “I’m so sorry I let you down.”

“Never mind that,” he said. “Never mind, now.” He patted her back as he had when she was a little girl and she fell down and scraped her knees. “There, there,” he said. “Better now.”

{III}

An interdenominational service was a rare event among Aberowen’s Christians, Ethel knew. To the Welsh, doctrinal differences were never minor. One group refused to celebrate Christmas, on the grounds that there was no biblical evidence of the date of Christ’s birth. Another banned voting in elections, because the Apostle Paul wrote: “Our citizenship is in heaven.” None of them liked to worship side by side with people who disagreed with them.

However, after Telegram Wednesday such differences came, briefly, to seem trivial.

The rector of Aberowen, the Reverend Thomas Ellis-Thomas, suggested a joint service of remembrance. When all the telegrams had been delivered there were two hundred and eleven dead and, as the battle was still going on, one or two more sad notifications arrived each day. Every street in town had lost someone, and in the close-packed rows of miners’ hovels there was a bereavement every few yards.

The Methodists, the Baptists, and the Catholics agreed to the suggestion of the Anglican rector. The smaller groups might have preferred to remain aloof: the Full Gospel Baptists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Second Coming Evangelicals, and the Bethesda Chapel. Ethel saw her father wrestle with his conscience. But no one wanted to be left out of what promised to be the largest religious service in the town’s history, and in the end they all joined in. There was no synagogue in Aberowen, but young Jonathan Goldman was among the dead, and the town’s handful of practising Jews decided to attend, even though no concessions would be made to their religion.