Rhodri

When you came back into the bedroom you found the stricken schooner re-imagined; Justin the Dwarf was propped up against the pillows, a child nuzzling under each arm, and they were rowing in a boat, eastward around the tip of a magical island. Tirion brought her index finger up to her mouth sharply with a ‘Shhh!’ and explained to you in Welsh, her excitement overflowing, that they’d reached a good bit. Justin, with a wink and a smile, carried on reading in a suitably dwarfish voice: ‘Beards and bedsteads! So there really is a castle, after all?’ You pulled on your jeans and wondered how different the scene might be if the children weren’t just borrowed; if they were yours and Justin’s how quickly would they tire of being read to and become the diawliaid bach, the little devils their mother claimed them to be?

Before you’d finished laying the table for breakfast, you heard Penri’s crying, quickly followed by an avalanche on the back stairs. When he burst into the kitchen you took in the disaster that had befallen the little chap: so bound had he been by the magic of Narnia, he’d peed himself. Taking him up into your arms, you told him that it didn’t matter and that life was hard when you were five and a half. Consoling Penri wasn’t made any easier once Tirion arrived in the kitchen. Grumpy and disconsolate because Justin the Dwarf had stopped reading and begun to strip the bed of the wet sheet and mattress cover, she teased and baited her little brother and said that she’d be sure to tell Mam about him wetting uncle Rhodri and uncle Justin’s bed.

Tirion

Carelessly pushing a spoon around your cereal bowl trying to fish out the last pearls of soggy puffed wheat you explained why Quaker’s were nicer than Tesco’s own brand.

‘Sugar Puffs are just too sweet and not at all healthy,’ you’d just announced with authority, prompting Justin to ask if you’d done a degree in breakfast cereals. Laughing at his suggestion, you added, rather too seriously for a nine-year-old, that you’d like to study history at university because you liked learning about the Celts and slates and you liked reading Y Mabinogion. And when you grew up you were going to teach at a university just like your mother. But you didn’t know what physics was yet, except that it was science and that your mother was the only one of her kind.

‘What do you know about slates, then?’ Rhodri asked, laughing. You talked about your class project on the Penrhyn Quarry at Bethesda where some people your mother called ein cyndeidiau had slaved.

‘The biggest slates are over 700 millimetres long – they’re called ‘queens’,’ you explained, stretching out your arms. You described with precision how the great slabs of slate were docked, split and dressed.

‘I can’t remember exactly how they came out of the mountain – they were exploded.’

Justin asked if you’d learnt about John Pennant and his son Richard, the men who’d first opened up the quarry in the 1780s? Shaking your head you looked blank while Penri shrieked with delight as one of the nameless barn cats caught one of the starlings that had settled on the lawn to feed.