A Pack of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean Page A

breakfast, and was only stopped from saying it by an advertisement in the national newspaper which caught his eye . . . It was for the Army & Navy Stores. He slapped the paper violently with the back of his hand. ‘Now
they’d
have them. My life on it they would!’
    ‘But they’re in London,
cariad
,’ said his wife, soothingly. ‘Tell you what. I’ll knit you a nice all-over set.’
    ‘Rubbish, woman! I’ll go up there and buy them, that’s what I’ll do!’
    ‘Up to London?’ whispered his wife. (Tresillick slapped the paper again triumphantly.) ‘But you’ve never been out of Wales, Dafyd! Well you’ve never hardly been into Pontypridd but twice since the War!’
    He was offended. ‘Never been out of Wales? I’ll have you know I was in London the summer before I married you. Filthy smoky place and no air to breathe hardly. But if that’s where I have to go to get decent drawers, I’ve no fear of going there, and don’t you think it!’
    Gwen gnawed her lip. ‘Supposing the Army-and-Navy
don’t
have your drawers, Dafyd? Terrible advanced they are, up there in London Town.’
    ‘Nothing advanced about not selling a pair of good drawers!’ declared Tresillick, and his wife was silent, knowing it was pointless to argue. For some reason, agreat darkness welled up in her at the thought of Tresillick going up to London.
     
    Next morning it was still raining when Tresillick boarded the first train of the day bound for London, but not so hard that he wore his oilskin and sou’wester — only the oiled aran sweater. His bald head gleamed as the raindrops rolled in great curves across his scalp like tiny airliners flying over the North Pole.
    The train was almost empty, but as it crossed England it gathered a harvest of travellers heading for the capital. By eight-thirty it was stopping at commuter stations to pick up regular daily passengers.
    Foolishly, Tresillick went to the buffet for a sandwich, and when he got back his seat had been taken by a woman with a child on her lap. The train by now was heaving with wet, steaming people braying in strange, un-Welsh accents:
    ‘Filthy day, what?’
    ‘Oh absolutely. Filthy. What a bane.’
    ‘Different from last week, eh?’
    ‘Can’t complain, I s’pose. Had a good one, didn’t we?’
    ‘Absolutely!’
    ‘Can’t complain.’
    But complain they did, as though the rain were the cruellest blow since God sent the Flood down on Noah. Tresillick rested his forehead against the window and looked out at the Home Counties grizzling by. It wasn’t even raining hard! — a tame, refined drizzle, it was, that left pretty, diagonal, silver streaks on the dirt-caked windows. It was a mystery to him.
    They reached another station and he gazed out at the damp, jibbering commuters who pressed and jostled towards the doors. They wore creased, lightweight trousers and skimpy barathea jackets, and pointed the way they were going with unfastened, flapping, dripping umbrellas, just taken down.
    ‘Umbrellas, pah!’ thought Tresillick. ‘If God had intended us to keep off the rain, he’d have given us shells like turtles or lids like dustbins!’ The newcomers clambered in, and the crowd in the corridor heaved tighter together until people were packed closer than beans in a tin. On Tresillick’s left, a girl in a New-Look dress with a very wide skirt full of petticoats took up twice the space she warranted. And she wore heels so high that now and then she had to rest one foot and lifted it sharply and jagged Tresillick in the shin. On his right, a man in a bowler hat and suit attempted to flap the rain off his umbrella and only succeeded in sending a chute of water into Tresillick’s shoe. Then he pressed himself hard against the Welshman, snagging his suit buttons on Tresillick’s aran pullover, and said with a friendly grin, ‘Terrible weather, eh?’
    Tresillick thought of his allotment, lifeless as a desert, the birds pecking on his shrivelled marrows for a