No Comebacks

The silence lengthened and there was no reply. It came a full fifty seconds after the question.

'Wales,' he said, and filled his mouth with another wad of bread.

I should explain here that if I do not, in the telling of this tale, speed up the dialogue somewhat, the reader will die of weariness. But it was not like that at the time. The conversation that slowly developed between us took ages to accomplish because of the inordinately long gaps between my questions and his answers.

At first I thought he might be hard of hearing. But it was not that. He could hear well enough. Then I thought he might be a most cautious, cunning man, thinking out the implications of his answers as a chess player thinks out the consequences of his moves. It was not that. It was simply that he was a man of no guile at all, of such slow thought processes that by the time he had ingested a question, worked out what it meant, devised an answer to it and delivered the same, many seconds, even a full minute, had elapsed.

I should perhaps not have been sufficiently interested to put myself through the tiresomeness of the conversation that occupied the next two hours, but I was curious to know why a man from Wales was farming here in the depths of the French countryside. Very slowly, in dribs and drabs, the reason came out, and it was charming enough to delight Bernadette and myself.

His name was not Preece, but Price, pronounced in the French way as Preece. Evan Price. He was from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. Nearly forty years earlier he had been a private soldier in a Welsh regiment in the First World War.

As such he had taken part in the second great battle on the Marne that preceded the end of that war. He had been badly shot up and had lain for weeks in a British Army hospital while the Armistice was declared. When the British Army went home he, too ill to be moved, had been transferred to a French hospital.

Here he had been tended by a young nurse, who had fallen in love with him as he lay in his pain. They had married and come south to her parents' small farm in the Dordogne. He had never returned to Wales. After the death of her parents his wife, as their only child, had inherited the farm, and it was here that we now sat.

Madame Preece had sat through the oh-so-slow narration, catching here and there a word she recognized, and smiling brightly whenever she did so. I tried to imagine her as she would have been in 1918, slim then, like a darting active sparrow, dark-eyed, neat, chirpy at her work.

Bernadette too was touched by the image of the little French nurse caring for and falling in love with the huge, helpless, simple-minded overgrown baby in the lazaret in Flanders. She leaned across and touched Price on the arm.

'That's a lovely story, Mr Price,' she said.

He evinced no interest.

'We're from Ireland,' I said, as if to offer some information in return.

He remained silent while his wife helped him to his third portion of soup.

'Have you ever been to Ireland?' asked Bernadette.

More seconds ticked away. He grunted and nodded. Bernadette and I glanced at each other in delighted surprise.

'Did you have work there?'

'No.'

'How long were you there?' 'Two years.'

'And when was that?' asked Bernadette.

'1915... to 1917.'

'What were you doing there?' More time elapsed.

'In the Army.'

Of course, I should have known. He had not joined up in 1917. He had joined up earlier and been posted to Flanders in 1917. Before that he had been in the British Army garrison in Ireland.

A slight chill came over Bernadette's manner. She comes from a fiercely Republican family. Perhaps I should have let well alone; not probed any more. But my journalist's background forced me to go on asking questions.

'Where were you based?'

'In Dublin.'

'Ah. We come from Dublin. Did you like Dublin?'

'No.'

'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.'