Mrs Amelia Roberts’ daydreams were disturbed when a fat, red-faced woman with a cod’s mouth and eyes more bloodshot than a bulldog’s squeezed onto the train in Caersws and sat opposite her across the narrow table. She smelled the rich mixture of the hill farm this country woman had left earlier somewhere deep in the folds of the hills, and Amelia Roberts remembered the goats she and Nellie Bet had herded when they were land girls. How they had both hated those goats for the way their smell clung. The cod-mouthed woman rummaged in a shopping bag and pulled out her knitting. Amelia Roberts watched the stout, fleshy fingers loop the five strands of coloured yarn dextrously around the needles in a complex sequence and she envied the woman’s skill; Fair Isle had always defeated her. At Newtown the knitting was bundled back into the shopping bag. As Amelia Roberts watched the goat woman’s abundant buttocks swagger along the platform into the obscurity of the station’s gloom, she dabbed some Je Reviens onto her lace handkerchief and patted it around her neck; the perfume masked the smell and awakened some sweeter memories.

The two boys who got on the train with their mother in Welshpool needed a good hiding for the way they answered back the plain, tired-looking woman. Mrs Amelia Roberts had never heard such cheek, not even from the rough fairground crowd who descended on a winter-weary Barmouth in the days before Easter, livening the place up until their departure just before the October gales. The more brazen of the two boys reminded her of Glyn at twelve or thirteen… Not that Glyn had ever been impudent; it was something in the boy’s face, a winsome questioning look every now and then. It was just the way Glyn had looked when he’d asked her about wet dreams. That was one of the few times she’d thought to herself, ‘He ought to be talking to his father,’ but then, what a good-for-nothing Idris Greenbank Cottage had turned out to be. She’d never understood how Nellie Bet had put up with his womanising all those years. Of course, she knew what wet dreams were. Hadn’t she slept in the same bed as her three older brothers until, one at a time, they’d left home as young men to take up their apprenticeships? But knowing didn’t give her the words to speak about such things, and even as the sexual revolution went on all around them and the hippies who lived down by the quay were the talk of the town for their orgies on Ynys y Brawd, she thought it more proper to buy the boy a book by mail order from one of the Sunday newspapers. And so she helped Glyn on his way to adulthood with the gift of Approaching Manhood and its chapters on self-respect, honouring girls, self-restraint, and the evils of self-abuse. Glyn never asked her about sex and things again; at the time she remembered thinking that the book must have satisfied his thirst for knowledge, but of course, the letter he sent her from Aberystwyth some years later, just after he’d gone there to study, had set her thinking about just how badly she must have let him down.