Ben knew nothing of the minor insurrection unfolding at Bro Meirion that Thursday morning; nor did he know that by the final bell of the afternoon, Manon and Tracy’s unlikely alliance had given birth to a petition in his support, which had been signed by over four hundred of the school’s six hundred pupils. Ben had thought he would spend the morning on the phone getting some advice from the teaching unions, but the morning sunshine was warm, so he sat in his garden and watched the insects dip into the blood red of the tulips cascading over the steep terraces. He rubbed balm into his palms and knuckles but the pain gnawed deeply. Through the open windows, resounding across the valley to the majestic Cader where Ben sometimes imagined God to be seated, Wagner’s music soared and Rienzi’s plea, Almighty Father, look down upon me… echoed Ben’s own prayer. A prayer from another hillside in another time.

The Wedding Invitation

The Wedding Invitation

Just after the Penyffordd by-pass, Seth always begins to feel that Wales really is his home. He’ll never belong in Liverpool even though the city has, for more than a decade, breathed into him the courage to become himself. As the dual carriageways of the Wirral and Deeside yield to the country roads that snake through the Clwydian range, the hills, with their lush, deep purples and greens of late spring, embrace Seth in a welcome home. Freddy Mercury’s lament, The Great Pretender, bawling from the speakers on auto-repeat since driving into the Mersey Tunnel, jars with the mood of belonging that grips him. Ejecting Freddy, he pushes Leah Owen into the gaping mouth of the cassette player, the tape that had made him so homesick during that year in Israel with Jude.

Bala, for as long as he can remember, is the place where the journey from Liverpool to home has always been broken: for a pee, for chips, to buy a loaf of bread from the bakery that Seth’s father is almost willing to admit bakes finer bread than he himself bakes in the Williams Family Bakery. In honour of this tradition Seth stops for ten minutes. He walks up the High Street as far as the Welsh Craft Shop to look at the Welsh wool sweaters rich in blues, reds and greens… and to finger the smoothness of a love spoon, before returning to the car and continuing the journey.