Tirion

You didn’t understand how people could be bought and sold or how one person could actually own another one. Justin’s account was full of facts – like school, but he brought the story to life, just like he had when he’d read from Prince Caspian to you that morning. He described how the ships from Liverpool carried to West Africa fine materials manufactured by the cloth and wool merchants in Yorkshire and Lancashire, china from the Potteries and guns made in Birmingham.

‘The white people traded these goods for slaves. Black people, just like me, my great great great great grandparents and uncles and aunties and cousins. They were hoarded into the holds of Liverpool ships with hardly enough food and water, chained with leg irons, and taken to Jamaica.’

Shocked by what he was saying you’d asked, almost disbelieving him, ‘Why would they want to take your family there?’

‘To trade them for sugar from the big plantations,’ he’d said. ‘One of the biggest and richest was the Clarendon. Thomas Pennant was the owner, the same man who owned the Penrhyn Quarry. My family slaved for five generations to make him, and those that came after him, rich beyond imagination from the sugar and with part of his fortune he’d developed the slate quarries around Bethesda.’ Your interest in slates was sullied by what you’d heard and your liking for history was affronted by what your teacher had left untold, but carrying the plants in from the back of the Land Rover you couldn’t stop thinking how much more exciting your uncle Justin had become.

Rhodri

Penri had set the table for lunch and the knives and forks were mislaid; Tirion took it upon herself to re-set them and he started to cry again leaving you wondering how Eleri and Gwydion coped with such a snivelling child (and thinking, too, that a good slap across the back of his legs would indeed do him some good). Justin calmed him in minutes by making an aeroplane from the credit card bill that had arrived earlier and been propped against the pepper mill. Penri threw the paper dart around the kitchen a few times until it came to a soggy end, crash-landing in the washing-up bowl. Your glare suggested something like ‘that was really effing stupid’ to Justin, who gingerly unfolded the sodden bill and set it on the shelf above the ancient anthracite range to dry. Penri’s attention turned to the jar of Branston Pickle, his favourite, and they ate bread, cheese and pickles in a relative calm.

Tirion

Despite a sheet of nimbus unfolding and spreading itself out over the sea beyond Rhyl, you and Rhodri took a spade and a fork from one of the outhouses Justin had decided could serve as a temporary garden shed and Rhodri set about digging the furrows for the Maris Pipers. Struggling with the fork (that was at least as tall as you were), you followed on behind him slopping sometimes over generous amounts of horse muck into the furrows. It was a smelly job and you soon wished you’d gone with Penri and uncle Justin to plant the African Lilies and Speedwells which, you were sure because they had such lovely flowers, weren’t grown in stinking horse manure. Rhodri, sensing your disaffection with potato planting, asked you about the poems and songs you were learning for the Urdd eisteddfod and about multiplication tables. Though irked by his questions, you recited one of the poems but then refused to say your tables because you always got stuck after the sevens… And all the time you were thinking about Jamaica and slaves and how it was that your uncle Justin could still be friends with uncle Rhodri after what Thomas Pennant had done to black people from Africa. Then the rain came in heavily off the sea and you were saved from forking manure with your boring uncle Rhodri.