CHAPTER 19
The rest of our time at Shrewsbury went along the same path, with some decent music, a lot of dancing and some steadily more intense practice sessions. Mark’s grandfather, Mr Kerr, had turned up on schedule, which meant a lot of hugs and kisses from most of what was now our group, plus some initial confusion on my part when he made some noises with his lips and tongue that I assumed were meant to convey some sort of message, at which point Steph simply slapped his arm.

“Jimmy, behave! Enfys, he does it deliberately”

When I managed to stop laughing, I nodded through the remaining giggles.

“I know! I remember him coming to the Cow once. The Folk Club. Year or so ago?”

The old man raised an eyebrow, speaking with an odd precision as if trying to make himself understandable for a foreigner, which I suppose I actually was.

“Aye, pet. Ah’ve been gannin’ there for a few yors noo. Some ginger lass’s borthday it wes, forst time. That reet, Steph?”

She pointed over to Jan and Bill.

“I think it was their doing, but aye. Yes. How many sets, Jimmy?”

“Whey, me and the lad hev a couple on, this eftor and same time the morra”

“It’s the first time here for Enfys and Alys, but they both play”

“Aye, I mind. Not brought your harp then, lass?”

It was all so obviously a game he was playing, a stage act of sorts, but I could feel no malice. This was a very sharp man, clearly with an excellent memory.

“No, Mr Kerr”

“Jimmy, pet. We’re aal musicians here, so none of that silliness”

“Thank you. Alys is a drummer, so Jan has sorted her out with one of hers. I’ve brought some whistles. Bit of a pain dragging a harp about”

“Aye, ah owe. Same as those cellos. Whey, Ah sees these lads, geet big hard cases on their backs, and Ah sez, ‘How, Ah fund a really easy way to carry MY cello roond’, and when they asks what it is Ah just tells them Ah play fiddle instead”

Sometimes, just occasionally, I met someone I couldn’t help liking from the first moment.

“What do they say back, Jimmy?”

“Various things, pet, some of which are a bit rude, but that’s their aan fault for picking something as big as a cello. Or a harp”

A real twinkle, and then he held out his mug for a refill. Seamless, they all were, as an extended family. I shook my head, catching a wink from Steph, and as I did Duty Wench once more, she whispered in my ear.

“What I thought when I first met this lot love—I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted in on it”

She raised her voice again.

“Bill, done the plotting for the rest of the weekend? Don’t say you haven’t, because you’re no good at lying”

“I never lie!”

“As I said, you’re no good at it”

“I’d get away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky kids… Ah. Got the list here”

He rattled off some names of groups, a couple of which I recognised, but most of which were new to me, one of which was a name that brought a very shocked sound from my girl.

“What’s HE doing here?”

Bill lowered his little sheet of paper.

“Who?”

“That horrible racist pig!”

Bill looked absolutely unruffled, then I realised that Steph was almost turning purple with laughter, Annie seeming almost as amused. The policewoman started prodding her husband, whose eyes suddenly widened, and then he too was choking back laughter before putting a hand to Alys’ arm.

“No, love! Tom Robinson, not Tommy!”

Alys shook her head.

“Bill said ‘Tommy’, Eric! I’m sure he did!”

Jan sighed.

“You are how old exactly, Woodruff mine?”

An eyebrow went up.

“I may perhaps have teased a little. Alys?”

“Yes?”

“Two different people, okay? This Tom Robinson had a big hit with a song called ‘Glad to be Gay’. I always wonder how many Nazis might have turned up for one of his gigs and been a little confused”

Once the laughter had settled, I found Kelly looking over at me, nodding.

“Yes. He IS always this bad. Why do you think Steph fits in so well?”

They dragged us straight out at that point, Alys still fuming over Bill’s teasing, and we got through another practice session. The weather was staying dry for the day, so I was in my Tracksters and a T-shirt, Alys a summer dress, and we worked our way through the practices session, a spicy noodle lunch and a couple of the afternoon acts, including Jimmy and Mark, before the ritual of a pot meal of curry and naan and an attempt to dominate the dance floor. I may have been getting used to the dancing, but I felt I would never tire of being so close to her in public. The playing by my two new friends was quite wonderful, the dancing was all I wanted, the curry wasn’t too spicy, and Tom Robinson turned out to be brilliant.

He wasn’t an instrumental virtuoso, I thought in my arrogance, and his voice wasn’t exceptional, but his words, and the passion he brought to them, seized my attention immediately. I left the marquee shaking; Jan saw my distress even before Alys, and laid an arm over my shoulders.

“Lots of history there, Enfys. Things that went on before you were born, official bigotry, laws to… This family knows what that sort of thing did to people, so if you need to take a break, if you just want to go back to the tent, I’m happy to come with you”

I looked across to my love, and she was in much the same state as I was, and I kicked myself at my failure to notice. I raised an eyebrow, and Alys shook her head firmly.

“No. Not doing that. Supposed to be a couple of the headliners on tonight, and it wouldn’t be fair. Jan?”

“Yup?”

“We can cope. Not exactly on our own, are we?”

“Glad you spotted that bit. Now, tonight is one of Steph’s favourites, and the lead singer’s Welsh. And no, he doesn’t, apart from some lines in one song. Sing in Welsh”

Alys clung to me again, which was safe in the darkness of the concert tent, and yes, the Oysterband were very good, but I didn’t see how much Steph was enjoying ‘one of her favourites’ as she was off down the front with every member of our group except Bill and Jan. The concert ended with the band coming off stage into the audience, singing a song called something like ‘Put Out The Lights’, with lines that included “The dark is warm, let me take you in my arms”, and of course there was nothing else I could do but reach out for Alys and do just that.

She was far more relaxed that night, and I was just drifting off to sleep when she whispered my name.

“Enfys?”

“Yes?”

“It sort of makes sense now. Stuff. Us”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it was deliberate, our parents and that. With Steph, all this lot. No shame, is there?”

“Why do you say ‘shame’, love?”

“Ah, it’s me, isn’t it? Not normal, not even straight. Not just queer, but QUEER, aren’t I?”

“You thought that?”

“Part of being the way I am, Enfys. Can’t really think any other way. That’s what all the scheming was about for us, I think. Show us… No. Let us live with people who are just as queer, and see that they aren’t queer at all. Been talking to all of them, I have. Darren and Shan mostly. They have… Not tonight. Not nice stories, either of them, but both of them talked about Annie, how she and Eric got together, and Shan told all sorts of silliness about her Mams, and that was the thing”

She wriggled away towards me, so that she was spooning me, her mouth just behind my ear, and continued her whisper.

“They’re all the same, love. All Mams, Jan, Annie, Shan’s Ginny and Kate, and they’re all different but still just the same. Still mothers. Nobody… Nobody worth caring about sees anything different in them. That’s what our parents wanted us to see, I think”

I took a slow breath.

“Is that the sort of thing you want, Alys? To be a mother?”

Her own sigh tickled the side of my neck.

“I don’t know, Enfys. Not really had time to think about that; too busy getting used to being me in public. Not used to being a lesbian yet, am I?”

Another long sigh.

“Settle down. Busy day tomorrow, and I want to do a lot more dancing. And there’s a traditional Welsh dance workshop at nine, so we need sleep”

That evening seemed to have broken a dam somewhere inside her, and her sleep was a lot more settled than it had been that first night. The next day was actually fun, especially as she was laughing most of the time, but she insisted I needed to be in a skirt for the dancing because the workshop title included the word ‘traditional’. I countered with a perfectly rational argument about that word being the very last one that could fairly be described to any of our group, but she insisted, so skirt it was. She seemed to have packed quite a number of them.

Our weekend finished early on the Tuesday morning, after a prolonged musical session in that long bar, where half the room seemed to know either Steph or Annie or both, and if one moment could sum it up, it would be a set of tunes I had picked up at the practices: Blarney Pilgrim, Lark in the Morning and Banish Misfortune, all jigs, all Irish, all played JUST slow enough to allow some slightly less confident people (like myself) to join in. Jimmy and Steph were on fiddles, Annie on her flute, Mark on some bagpipe things, Eric and Geoff on stringed things, Bill on a squeezebox and Jan, Alys and Darren on the drum things, while Shan and Kelly clog-danced in the middle of our group. Every type of instrument known to man seemed to be wrapped round us and joining in, from tubas (two, no less) through fiddles and mandolins to ukuleles and a single harp I later learned was carbon fibre rather than wood.

It felt like the whole world was involved in the music, and if anything else hadn’t made it clear, this was why our host family came to the event every year.

Sod normality, I decided, there and then. Alys and I were allowed a couple of glasses of wine, just enough to make us feel relaxed, and the morning sunlight was a surprise, which wasn’t the case for my real sense of regret at having to leave both festival and friends.

We spent quite a while making sure all phone

Numbers had been shared and confirmed, before helping to strike the tents, pack away our belongings, which now included several signed CDs, and then Kelly and Mark drove the two of us to the station for our train home.

I wasn’t surprised by the change in direction at Chester this time, and when we came to the miles of dreary caravan parks, we simply pretended they weren’t there by working through the Metro’s cryptic crossword until we reached Conwy.

Neither of us, aptly, had a clue about how cryptic crosswords worked, which was the main point of things. We got about a third completed, probably incorrectly, before giving up and watching the hills pass on the run-in to Bangor.

My Dad was waiting, looking slightly worried, but our smiles on seeing him weren’t feigned in any way.

We were home, in so many ways.