Last Post: A Story for Christmas

Keith Davies

Oh it snowed all right that year: not the sugar-sieved-the-angels-are-shaking-out-their-pillows-stuff; the kind that melts cutely on eyelashes, floats down in a hush to soften the black crags above Diwedd-y-Byd – but brutal hanks flumping down; the kind that freezes on contact, sends panicking sheep crowding against boulders and dry stone walls; bellying into every hollow, scoop and scrape of shelter from the drifts.

Farmers along the valley scowled and spat as the snowfall quickened, spilling out of a slate sky; they flung fresh straw bedding into barns, byres and shippons; cut long branches or fetched poles, shepherds’ crooks, bamboos, even broom handles – to prod for the hypothermic, suffocating sheep and ponies who would be buried within hours, knowing precisely where they would cower and huddle.

The furthest thing from their minds was Christmas.

Gareth, up at Rowlyn Uchaf cottage, took one peep from the back kitchen door, reluctant to let the hearth-fire’s warmth be snatched out and whirled away, and thought twice about going out at all that morning.

It was his first Christmas here – six hundred feet up in a four-roomed cottage on the western flank of the valley – and he knew all about the ‘feeding’ snows which lay in gullies or congealed into peat-stained ice in the shadows, making the single track down to the village treacherous. But he needed vital stuff: firelighters for the range, torch batteries in case the single power line draped between larch poles, already heavily-fanged with icicles, snapped – postage stamps, envelopes, writing paper, butter, fresh milk, toothpaste, shaving foam, and the last ingredients for that evening’s supper with Ionna – pheasant with wild garlic, shallots and bacon cooked on the wood fire embers, including a tray of roasted vegetables with rosemary and honey.

Besides, it was the last day of posting before the holiday began. Any letters, gifts or cards left unsent until tomorrow would, at best, fail to arrive until the first weeks of the New Year.

Gareth was an anomaly: he had been a keen letter-writer since he could first shape words in ink – in his teens he mailed letters to friends, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, obscure cousins; he joined pen-pal clubs; mail-ordered pocket-money priced stuff from cereal packets and comic books – Sea Monkeys, squirting fake fountain pens, invisible ink, itching powder, stink bombs, packets of exotic stamps ‘on approval’ and sent off sticky sweet or ice lolly wrappers for model spaceships.

He illustrated his letters and cards with coloured inks and crayons, added snapshots, cartoons, puzzles or crosswords clipped from his Dad’s paper; curlews’ and jays’ feathers, pressed flowers, tiny seashells or particles of sea-washed glass.

It was a life-long habit – and this morning his rucksack was crammed with Christmas cards and letters, all snug in their envelopes; pre-stamped with sufficient postage to carry them variously to relatives and friends, from the Orkneys – an elder brother who taught at a primary school in Kirkwall – to Southern Italy: his cousin Angelica who had married a restaurateur in Otranto; across the Atlantic to Mad Aunty Wendy in Arizona – a four-times divorcee who drove a lemon-yellow Corvette and kept a loaded snub-nosed .38 in the glove box.

He also carried Ionna’s air mail letters and cards to her family in Ukraine: to her son Antin assigned to an Engineering Battalion deep in the Kherson Oblast marshes; grandmother Anna and her two younger sisters, now living with relatives, safely evacuated to Zosin in Poland. Ionna kept the old factor’s cottage directly across the valley on Pen-y-Grugog ridge at a kindly reduced rent – a gift from the landowner’s estate, the Vivian family.

Their friendship began when they accompanied each other on Spring walks up-and-over the cloughs and hags along the valley floor through the heather, seething with hawkbit, tormentil and white-tufts of cotton grass. They found lapwing’s and curlew’s nests; he pointed out buzzards and red kites; Ionna told him sadly of the alpine meadows, sunflower fields; birch and pine forests where the migrating storks built their comical, lopsided, scruffy nests. She would pause, a catch in her voice, and he’d offer her a consoling hand squeeze.

They ate Spam sandwiches and Ionna’s honey cake sitting on the bank of the little Afon Ariannog, laughing its way to the Mawddach estuary. At dusk they signalled Goodnight and Dobroyi Nochi across the valley through their windows with a torch or a Tilley lamp – three sweeps horizontally for All’s Well; the same number vertically for any emergency.

There was no Wi-Fi reception for six miles.

He recited the shopping list aloud as he dressed. Gareth now had the habit of talking aloud to himself quite unselfconsciously – thermal vest and pants; thick cotton, a lined micro-fleece shirt, his sweater – with its comforting whiffs of woodsmoke and paraffin – a scarf; then an old friend: an ankle-length, heather-flecked Donegal tweed herringbone coat; he pulled on thickly-dubbined boots, two pairs of gloves, and finally a US army-surplus fur-lined trapper’s hat.

The effect was a mash-up of 30’s aristo-gangster and a B-17 ball turret gunner, but with his collar turned up, and walking briskly, Gareth knew he’d be snug.

He brought up his supplies from the village in a big canvas rucksack – a fortunate find over twenty years ago: a thing of mysterious tapered straps, buckles and endless pouches.

Fire banked, he unfastened the latch and crunched out into astonishing silence.

Gareth knew, of course, that sorrow steps on your heels, hisses from corners, detonates sudden, rogue tear-grenades, and climbs into bed with you each night; that it can rapidly intensify to multiple feeds: self-obliterating shock; bewilderment and despair.

But there are alternatives.

When Jenny left him for the searing antithesis of everything she’d purported to love for six years – for someone flashy, shallow and smug – he’d shaken convulsively and sobbed like a two year-old as he read her last text.

There followed fourteen weeks of raw-eyed insomnia, harrowing self pity and snack-gluttony.

It took the sight of cyclamen and early primroses amongst the leaf litter and gale brash in March; the fractured sunlight through the trees to thaw him; reviving clarity and set hope fizzing.

A Revolutionary History Module lecturer at a provincial university – though his faculty were now clamouring for him to take redundancy after his two months’ sick leave – Gareth knew his Tom Paine.

These are the times that try men’s souls.

And yet:

We have it in our power to begin the world anew.

And that is how Gareth quit work; sold everything, bought Rowlyn Uchaf online; scarred his hands with lime plaster, hacked, lugged, ached, chiselled, sledge-hammered, sprained, bled, spluttered, and wheezed his way through a year’s refurb: clearing out sheep dung, fox dens, sodden lino, rooks’ nests, web-infested, rust-rotten pre-war tractor transmission parts – to bring back limestone walls, beams, roof trusses, slate flags and a kitchen range.

Local farmers kindly brought up cement, plasterboard, cabling, sealant, rubble bags in quad bike trailers – glaring horribly at any suggestion of payment.

By July, he had unboxed modest final purchases: crockery, cooking utensils and
bedding; he had power, warmth, light and peace.

He made good time – the snow was firm and crunchy – and he reached the old quarry track within twenty minutes, descending rapidly towards the crossroads below Mwrog Farm.

Then, perhaps exhilarated by the glittering snow, gleaming sky and his richly-oxygenated blood, he felt the urge to try another path.

The community-run stores and Post Office in the village would remain open until dusk; it was early morning, with at least six hours’ daylight left.

There would even be time for a pint of Reverend Jennings’ bitter by the fireside in The Conquering Hero pub.

He was intrigued, and intent on exploring another route to the main road. It was pillowed by snow, but still discernible as a dip twisting between tumbled dry-stone walls and curving downhill. His OS map had shown the contour gaps expanding rapidly within a mile and the single legend among the symbols for conifers, scrub, scree and outcrops: Lodge (Dis).

He knew this to be the old Vivian estate shooting lodge – where, until the mid-fifties, Christmas had been kept with fierce, joyous intensity: Gareth had seen the framed, foxed photos at the pub – dog-carts heaped with wicker provision hampers sent on from the station at Betws; guns and cartridge bandoliers, and sticks for the beaters. The ‘guns’ posed, dogs twirling about their legs, before a porch thickly greened with seasonal holly, ivy, laurel and rosemary.

The Vivians, he had been told, sitting by the pub fire, kept the windows ablaze with oil lamps all through Christmas Eve; there were no distinctions – shepherds, tenant farmers, stable lads, maids, gardeners, neighbours – all enjoyed a warming whiskey brandy, or sherry – or ginger beer, of course, for lads and the chapel pledgers – and latticed game pies, treacle-and-cloves-coated cold hams; pheasant, partridge, mallard and rabbit from the estate and – O gan Dduw – cakes deeply steeped in rum-plumped raisins.

Then, somehow, the whole crowd of them squeezed into the tiny, freezing church for the Plygain Fawr – three hours’ unaccompanied singing from 3-6am, a tradition honoured since the rush-lit Middle-Ages, to keep vigil as the light thickened on Christmas morning.

Gareth found the ruins – roofless, frost-blackened, surprisingly extant – beyond a shelter belt of larch and spruce.

The heaped snow delineated the footings, partition walls, fireplaces and outbuildings and he stood in the silence imagining the laughter; singing, the crackling fires; the clink of glasses, the sheer warmth and proximity of company – and he thought sadly, achingly, of Christmases he’d shared with Jenny, and how they had brought back the sheer wonder; the grace and ease of childhood.

So long ago now it seemed, he almost recalled them in black and white.

He sighed, cinched his rucksack straps, then turned towards the remnants of the track and the village.

As he turned, the conifer tips in what had once been a carefully-planted belt, became agitated; branches creaked and the wind hissed through them. The first fresh snow flurry whirled into him, and he noticed with a jolt of panic, the sky blackening evilly to the south-west.

Within minutes the worst blizzard recalled in fifty years engulfed the valley in all its eighty-miles-an-hour bitter fury. They would later claim birds froze in mid-flight; that the sea was crusted with ice for a mile offshore; that, in the aftermath, you could walk all the way from Abergwynant to Craig-las without realising you were above rooftops, barns, and entire, entombed flocks.

For Gareth, it seemed to manifest a personal malice. He became the centre of a howling white fury. He must decide instantly – press on to the village, a further three miles, or hasten as best as he could back to the cottage, roughly the same distance, though uphill. He did not know this new track; better to go back.

As if to endorse his snap decision, the blizzard relented; lifting for barely a minute.

In that moment he saw the Post Box embedded in the drystone wall: it was the recessed type with its hooded aperture, lock plate intact and gleaming; although the frozen snow had encrusted the front and obscured the collection plate, he could trace out ‘VR’.

Bright Pillar Box Red: instantly evoking robins, glitter, entwining holly leaves, and all the yearning, foolish hopes of Christmas.

In they went – shielded from the now-shrieking blizzard by his thick coat. Gareth spilled them in; every single letter and card, knowing that they might otherwise be sodden pulp by the time he lugged them back to the cottage. With luck, some tough-as-nails postie would collect the mails along the valley within the next two days from this and other rural boxes – pillar boxes, wall-recessed, and lopsided lamp-boxes often lost in summer to bindweed and honeysuckle.

His pack lightened, with the gale clawing at his back, he turned back.

Head down, he made plodding, faltering progress at first, until the numbing cold seeped into his ribcage, hands, and neck, and the massed snowfall merged – sky, hillside, path all blurred into a single slashing vortex and Gareth cursed, ranted, prayed, beseeched without even noticing it. It was as if every bitter, calcified pain- residue roared its way into the whirling white. He felt weirdly elated; drunk, indifferent – and sagged onto his knees, horribly compelled to sleep.

The driving snow somehow dimmed into grey; then took shape – it yelled his name and all he could command by way of a reply was a rasping:

I am so sorry. I was a bloody idiot. But I meant well.

Ionna lifted him, beat sense into him with gloved fists, yelled all the curses she knew at him, and half-shoved, half-dragged him back to Rowlyn Uchaf. Fortunately, she had watched and timed his departure that morning through Soviet-era binoculars – which fogged up immediately at the merest hint of warmth – and she knew a bitch-winter – a dykhannya vid’my – was coming. She had found his tracks until the blizzard closed, and then heard his faint, silly English yelling.

Gareth was finally dragged by the ankles onto the kitchen flags, stripped to his inglorious thermals, kneaded, pummelled, towelled until his core-heat returned, and he dripped and steamed before the fire, as Ionna wrapped him in everything she could find – blankets, a tarpaulin, tablecloths, rugs, even binbags.

He revived, smiled, croaked and apology, and slept fitfully for two days, watched over, given hot tea with rum as the storm blasted the valley.

Oh you want a fuller ending? Is this not sufficient?

Very well.

On Christmas Eve morning, the stillness came and the blizzard sulked away to the west. Ionna mustered all the foodstuffs – jars, tins, packets, sachets and produce Gareth had stowed away; though there was no promised pheasant, there were eggs, potatoes, onions, flour and sausages. There was chocolate and rum.

That Christmas Eve, with the range aglow, they dined on toad-in-the hole, followed by digestive biscuits and a very boozy chocolate pudding. The electricity held, and they listened to carols on the radio, utterly content in each other’s company.

All the mailed cards and letters arrived: Aunt Wendy set aside her fifth bourbon and paused White Christmas to open hers – and she would treasure the letter it contained: recollections of shared childhood summers; dancing The Twist, ice-skating at The Silver Blades, and seaside holidays.

Gareth’s cousins, nephews, nieces, distant friends opened theirs to find they were booby-trapped – miniature torrents of green, silver, red and gold glitter poured out, or else whirring paper butterflies: there were holly berries, stamped, coloured imprints of reindeer, frosted branches, Gareth’s tiny fine-liner sketches of his cottage; cats curled by the fire at The Conquering Hero; tipsy snowmen, and even the lamp-glow of hillside farms at dusk, devised from the reverse of an old punched, ink-stained train ticket flecked with luminous paint.

Ionna’s sisters opened theirs with cries of excitement to find their sister had written great swirls of news in Cyrillic; the flimsy Aerogramme paper was blushed with her fingertip-sized watercolours of curlews in flight, furze in full yellow, and the gangly Englishman sitting on a riverbank.

Antin caught up with his, begrimed, utterly exhausted on the leave-train back West; carefully opened it and read it aloud to his corporal. They encircled arms and drank horilka toasts to their friends, lost in the birch forests to murderous rocket and drone barrages.

As they scissored, slit or simply tore open each envelope, they all noticed a curious thing: the stamps – either of the English King or bland barcoded pre-paid stickers – were completely unfranked.

Far below Rowlyn Uchaf, as the stars wheeled into first light that Christmas morning, the thaw revealed grey stones of the old Vivian lodge turning roseate, and an empty socket in a slumped wall: the recessed post box had been chiselled and wrenched out fifty years ago in a frenzy of rural rationalisation.

But maybe, just maybe, should you chance to slog your way to the old lodge between Christmas Eve and dawn, you will hear – ever-so-faintly – warm laughter; rather tipsily-tuned fiddle music, and choruses of Nadolig Llawen!