CHAPTER SEVEN PONTYPOOL
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Pontypool
The army wouldn’t tell the men where they were going, but when they put them on a train to New York and then on a ship, Roscoe guessed Italy. He’d been reading the papers, and Italy was where the European action was.
They arrived at a place with rolling hills dusted with snow, which wasn’t Italy, and were marched over to a station with signs reading ‘Gourock’, wherever that was, then herded onto trains. Where they were headed to next was anybody’s guess.
Roscoe spent hours looking out of the window, watching breathtaking scenery slip by. He passed some curious faces, but none of them hostile, which made a nice change from the US, where they’d kept the curtains closed on the trains because sometimes locals shot at the windows of colored servicemen.
They arrived at a place called Pontypool, Wales, where Lieutenant Colonel Reed handed each man A Short Guide to Great Britain, which explained things like soccer being called football and a pub being a folksy, social gathering place that doubled as a bar.
It didn’t mention that the British hadn’t learned the knack of turning their backs on colored troops. Roscoe found that out for himself.
On his first night off, encouraged by the friendly locals, Roscoe and a couple of others tried out one of those pubs. They sat at the bar and waited to see what would happen.
The barkeep came up to them with an ‘Evening, Yanks,’ and asked their order. Roscoe looked left and right at the local men, wondering if someone would make a stink.
‘How about three beers?’ Roscoe said, speaking for all of them.
As the man drew the first beer, a local fellow walked in, but the barman didn’t stop what he was doing. He just nodded a greeting at the white man, who sat himself down at the bar and waited his turn.
‘Anything else?’ the barkeep asked, when he’d tapped all three beers and placed them in front of Roscoe and his friends. The local man still sat waiting.
‘No, sir,’ said Roscoe, grinning. ‘Thank you, kindly.’
The barman moved on to his next customer and the three friends slapped each other on the back and drank, nearly giddy. The beer was as warm and flat and weak as the guidebook said it would be, but it was the best beer Roscoe’d ever had.
They stayed in the pub, ordering and drinking, for hours.
Eventually Roscoe had to relieve himself, so he went to the back searching for the toilets.
He found separate toilets for men and women, but that was all.
As Roscoe stood there, one of the guys from the bar stepped out, and then held the door open for Roscoe to pass through.
Wales wasn’t just a different country for Roscoe. It was a whole new life. Every chance he got, he spent time in town with the locals. He loved the freedom of walking into any shop he liked and knowing he’d be served.
One Sunday afternoon, coming from his favorite pub, he heard a yelp and saw a young lady tumble forwards, thrown from the seat of her bike.
Roscoe rushed over, so comfortable now with his new home that he reached out and took her hand to help her up.
Only after he’d done it did his Florida reflexes kick in, sending his heartbeat racing and his head swiveling around, checking if anyone had seen him.
He almost yanked his hand away, but she wobbled, steadying herself with his grasp.
‘Oh, my goodness, how embarrassing.’ She let go and brushed the road dust off her skirts. Then she looked up at him. Her soft brown eyes rooted him to the spot.
‘Are you all right, miss?’
She nudged her bike with her foot. ‘Better than my bicycle.’ The front tire sagged on the rim, flat, and she’d badly twisted the handlebars.
‘Looks like you punctured it,’ he said, pointing to the sharp rock she’d run over that had sent her flying.
Roscoe picked up the bicycle and put the front wheel between his legs, tugging at the handlebars to straighten the alignment, but without a patch there was nothing he could do for the tire.
She told him her name was Megan, and she didn’t live that far away. She’d push the bicycle home.
‘I’ll walk you,’ Roscoe said, taking the bike for her and rolling it beside him. It made a sad dragging sound as they walked on the cobblestone road.
It turned out ‘not that far away’ was actually across town on the other side of the park, but since he had time before he had to be back, he didn’t mind. In fact, he was enjoying her company so much that when they got to her house he offered to stay and fix the tire for her if she had a patch.
‘I don’t know if you’ve heard, soldier, but there’s a war on. We don’t happen to have spare bicycle patches in the cupboard.’ She tucked her brown bobbed hair behind her ear and crinkled her freckled nose at him.
He liked her teasing him. It made him feel like they were already friends.
As they stood on the threshold of her house, with Roscoe wondering how he might tease her back to let her know he wanted to be friends too, Megan’s mother came bustling out.
She insisted Roscoe stay for tea, so he did, and found out that tea meant supper.
She said she’d made cow, which he thought meant beef, but turned out to be cawl, a potato and vegetable soup with bits of lamb.
He only ate a little, knowing Megan and her family had to ration food, while the US Army had plenty.
He kept one eye fixed on the clock, worried about making it back before curfew, and the other fixed on Megan, who had both eyes fixed on him.
At the end of the evening, he had to run back at full tilt to make it in time.
The next day he went back with a rubber patch he’d rustled up from the motor pool. He’d come, he said, to thank them for their hospitality by fixing the tire, and he accepted gratefully when they again invited him to stay.
The Davies family was a revelation for Roscoe, and Megan most of all.
Beautiful and sweet, but also clever and funny, meeting her opened up a longing in him he’d never known.
She filled his mind by day and his dreams by night, crowding out thoughts of Cora.
He hadn’t realized a person could feel like this for somebody.
He’d certainly never felt anything close to it for Cora.
Roscoe tried and failed to turn off his longing for this woman he had absolutely no future with, staying away for two solid weeks, but then he ran into Megan’s mother by the river, and she asked him to visit.
It would have been rude to refuse. After that, he stopped trying to keep his distance.
What was the point? He enjoyed their company, and it wasn’t as if anything would happen between him and Megan.
He became a frequent, welcome visitor to the slate gray house on St David’s Close, bringing whatever presents he thought might ease the burden of living on rations.
One week he’d turn up with a pound of ham, the next, half a pound of sugar, the next, tea or butter or chocolate. In wartime Wales, they were rich gifts.
Sometimes he’d take Megan out for the evening.
He didn’t think of these nights as dates.
They were just two people going to the pub or out for a walk.
One night as they strolled through the park, Megan tucked close to his side, she stopped to look at the moon shining fat and gibbous through the bare winter branches.
She made a comment about the pull of the moon, just inches from his face, her breath tickling his lips.
In that moment, he became two people. The Roscoe who’d been taught a lifetime of Jim Crow lessons that he felt in his bones, and the Roscoe who dipped his head the few inches that separated them, revelling in the feel of Megan’s lips and the press of her warm body against his.
It was only much later, lying alone in his bed, that he remembered his commitment to his last-minute, far-away bride.