You Didn’t Love Me
by Roberta Murphy
Because Uncle was dying, I wasn’t allowed to go to the Castle Cinema to see Bill Haley in Rock Around the Clock. It was showing for two weeks. By the end of the first week, nearly everyone at Avon Fach Grammar had seen it—probably every teenager in South Wales had—and you could hear, “One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock” all over the school. Only I, and my best friends, Anwen and Elenid, hadn’t seen it. They were waiting for me. I was waiting for my great uncle to die so I'd get permission from Gran and Bopa, his sisters. It was disrespectful to go to the cinema when he might leave us any minute. I had to come straight home from school to be at his bedside.
I lived with Gran and Grandpa because my parents worked long hours. My great uncle and great aunt, who I called Uncle and Bopa—the great part was too much of a mouthful—lived next door. Uncle really had been great to me all through my childhood, until I turned 13 a year ago. Since then he’d been not-so-great Uncle. He was a widower and Bopa was a spinster and she’d kept house for him as long as I could remember. His wife had died before I was born and when I asked Gran about her, she said, “We don’t talk about Seiran. She’s been gone a long time and she broke Uncle’s heart.” I thought she meant for dying until I knew the true reason.
On Monday of the second week, Anwen said, “Elenid and I will have to go Friday, Lynfa. It’s the last day.” Elenid said, “I hope he’ll be gone by then,” and Anwen said, “Since he’s going anyway.” Walking home from school that afternoon, I was saying my wish like a prayer, “Uncle’s going anyway, so please let it be before Friday.”
When I got home, Gran and Bopa were crying in Gran’s kitchen, and Gran said, “Uncle’s gone, love.” My wish was granted, and it gave me a weird, guilty feeling, as if I’d killed Uncle not the silicosis, especially when Bopa said, “We were taking such good care of him. How could he go so sudden?”
My wish was granted, and it gave me a weird, guilty feeling, as if I’d killed Uncle not the silicosis…
“We’ll put the funeral date in the paper,” Gran said. “All his butties will want to come. They remember what he did.”
She meant the colliery cave-in the year before Uncle retired. He was a foreman, and he’d brought his whole team out to safety, risking his own life. A reporter from the Avon Fach Express had interviewed Uncle and put his photo on the front page. Since he became bed-ridden, his former butties had been visiting regularly, so many of them, they had to queue up in the street and take turns getting in.
“Everybody loved Davy-John,” Gran said.
That wasn’t true though. Not everybody loved Uncle. His daughter Menna didn’t love him. She hadn’t come to see Uncle dying. She’d never come to see him that I could remember in all my 14 years. Grandpa wasn’t too fond of him either. He told me privately that Uncle hadn’t let Bopa marry so she could look after him. I hadn’t loved Uncle for the past year, and he hadn’t loved me that either. I was changing at the County Grammar, he said, getting too big for my shoes, but it was he who changed. “It’s the silicosis, love, makes him short-tempered,” Gran said, but that wasn’t the whole reason.
On the day Uncle died, Gran said to Bopa, “We should let Menna know, I suppose.”
“Who’ll we send?” Bopa said. “She won’t want to see us.”
“Don’t look at me,” Grandpa said.
“Lynfa can go tomorrow,” Gran said. “Menna can’t hold anything against her. She wasn’t born.”
“Wasn’t born when?” I said.
“She lives in Pen-Y-Darren like your friend Elenid,” Gran said. “Ask Elenid to show you the street.”
Elenid was shocked I had a cousin living near her I’d never met. “And you come to my house all the time,” she said. I felt ashamed, and that was another reason not to love Uncle.
* * *
A woman with short, curly hair and glasses opened the door in Glendower Street. She was big for a woman, like Uncle had been big for a man. There were two girls, younger than me, standing behind her in the passage.
I said, “I’m Lynfa Howells and I’ve come with a message about Davy-John Griffiths.” I didn’t want to say “my uncle,” or “your father” in the circumstances.
“I know who you are,” she said. “You’ve been pointed out to me in High Street. His favorite. What’s the message?”
The two girls were staring at me.
“He died yesterday. His sisters think you might want to come to the funeral.” I couldn’t say “my Gran and Bopa” either. The way Menna was looking at me, I didn’t want to be related to anyone in Einion Row.
“Do they indeed? And why do they think I’d want to see him dead? He never wanted to see me when he was living. None of them did. Tell them I didn’t love him so I’m not grieving.” She shut the door in my face.
Bopa said, “There’s heartless for you,” and Gran said, “Saying straight out, ‘I didn’t love him,’” but Grandpa said, “No reason to love him. At least she’s honest.”
I didn’t agree with Grandpa about that. I didn’t say so, but I thought Menna was grieving. Her face as she shut the door had switched from angry to more like she was shutting out something she couldn’t bear to look at, as if it was Death not me standing on her doorstep. She’d said Uncle never wanted to see her. Maybe she’d always hoped he might change. Now he was dead it couldn’t happen, and that was reason to grieve.
I still wasn’t grieving for Uncle. I tried to force myself by remembering times when I was younger and I’d loved him.
I still wasn’t grieving for Uncle. I tried to force myself by remembering times when I was younger and I’d loved him. We used to go for long walks with Mandy, the dog he had then. We took cans to pick blackberries, or went into the Park Woods to gather bluebells. Before we started for home, he’d go into the little shop outside the park gates to buy sweets for us. One Sunday I was waiting outside, holding Mandy’s leash, when two boys in my class at Abermorlais Junior came along.
“Is that your dog?” Royston Pugh said. “It looks ancient.”
“She not it,” I said. “She used to be a prize dog when she was younger.”
“She looks exactly like you,” David Dawes said. “She could be your sister.”
Then he and Royston went off because Uncle was coming out of the shop with our sweets. He gave me a packet of licorice allsorts and we started walking home.
I said, “Does Mandy look like me?”
Uncle was popping chocolate nuts into his mouth and a guffaw nearly choked him. “Don’t be daft,” he said. “How can a dog look like a human? Who were those boys?”
“They go to my school. One of them said Mandy looks like me.”
“Cheeky bugger,” Uncle said. Then, “Come to think of it though, her fur is the same lovely reddish-brown color as your hair, and you both have shiny dark eyes.”
In the evenings, we’d play dominoes or Ludo at his kitchen table while Bopa dozed in her rocking chair by the fire, very homely like the model Welsh kitchen in Avon Fach Museum, except we weren’t wearing national costume like the waxwork figures. We weren’t fixed forever like them, either.
Remembering when I was a child couldn’t bring love back. More recent memories were too strong, of Uncle being nasty and critical in his last year, making me fed up with hearing about my faults, which included not wanting to go for walks or play games with him. “Too hoity toity for my company now. You’d rather gallivant with grammar school snobs,” and it was true, I preferred to be with my friends. Going for walks with Uncle felt little-girlish after I passed 13.
One afternoon when I was in my bedroom, reading my favorite novel, Jane Eyre, he came into Gran’s house and shouted up to me, “Don’t be lazy. Come out and get some exercise.”
“I have homework,” I’d shouted back.
“Not so much you can’t dally in High Street with your pals after school”—which a nosy neighbor must have reported—“wearing your blouses too tight to get attention from boys.” When he said that I could have died of shame. My mother had told me that when she came to fetch me one Saturday morning for my weekend with her and Dad, Uncle had taken her aside for “a private word." He said, “Stop Lynfa padding her chest. Some of my butties noticed in High Street. It’s disgusting at her age.” Mam said she’d laughed in Uncle’s face. “That’s not padding,” she’d said. “It’s Lynfa herself.” She thought it was funny, but I was mortified that Uncle’s butties looked at me like that. I thought it was another reason he was nasty, and that wasn’t fair.
* * *
The funeral was on Thursday. I stayed home from school and Mam and Dad took the day off from work at the aeronautics factory.
My Uncle Trefor, Mam’s brother, came into Gran’s parlor. “Here at last,” he greeted Mam. “Didn’t turn up when he was dying, did you? I’ve been coming daily.”
“It’s far from our house,” Mam said, “and I’m tired after work.”
“Well, I work,” Uncle Trefor said, “and me and Gwynora are raising our two, a duty you don’t have to make you tired, do you?”
“For God’s sake, Trefor,” Grandpa said, “leave Megan alone.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Dad,” Uncle Trefor said. He was a born-again Christian, saved in the Crusades six years ago. Now it was his mission to save the rest of us.
“I’ll say anything I bloody well please in my own house,” Grandpa said.
“I hope it pleases you to damn yourself to Hell then.”
We were in Gran and Grandpa’s parlor where the women were laying food on the dining table for when the men came back from the cemetery.
“Let’s go next door,” Dad said to me. He didn’t like family rows.
We went into Bopa’s parlor where Uncle was laid out in his coffin. The miners were there in their best black suits, waiting for the minister to come, and Gran and Bopa were putting the finishing touches to Uncle before the coffin was closed.
I didn’t go to look at Uncle in his coffin. I was afraid he would open his eyes, and his mouth too, and he’d say, “You didn’t love me, Lynfa.”
I didn’t go to look at Uncle in his coffin. I was afraid he would open his eyes, and his mouth too, and he’d say, “You didn’t love me, Lynfa.”
Then Reverend Parry arrived and Uncle Trefor said to Gran and Bopa, “We're ready to move. Leave it to us men now…and God if He’s willing.”
I stood on Gran's doorstep with her and Mam and Bopa to watch the procession of miners going down the street. Eight of them were carrying the coffin. Leading them, with his Bible under his arm, was Reverend Parry, who Uncle wouldn’t have wanted to lead him, but Uncle Trefor had persuaded Gran and Bopa. “His last chance of getting into Heaven,” he told them. “He refused to let me save him,” and now he was walking beside Reverend Parry. I could see the coffin heaved up above the heads of the men carrying it, and I watched it all the way down the street, and that was the last I knew of Uncle in human form.
Next day, Anwen, Elenid and I went to see Rock Around the Clock after school. The Castle Cinema wasn’t crowded. Most people had seen it by then, so there was no jiving in the aisles, and no policemen trying to keep order that we’d heard about. We sat in one of the many empty rows and screamed, “Rock with me, baby!” and did hand jives. When Bill and the Comets sang Rock A Boogie, we were screaming and shouting, “You gotta jive! To be alive!” and laughing hysterical.
A girl usher came down the rows with her flashlight. She shone it in our faces and said, “Behave, you County girls,” which she knew because we were still in our uniforms, “or I’ll report you to your Head Mistress”
After the film, we stayed outside the Castle a long time, talking about it, and when I got to Einion Row it was nearly dark and the street was empty. It was a long street, 26 houses, and I lived in Number 17. No lights were on in the parlor windows I passed because people lived in their back kitchens and only used the best front room if they had visitors, and the lampposts were far apart and flickering, so that shadows moved, and I thought of the funeral cortege coming down yesterday, but now I fancied I was seeing a procession from the Underworld I’d read about in Greek Mythology, the dead in their long, hooded cloaks, and leading them the three horrid Harpies who carried off in their talons anyone who’d killed a family member, and I heard a hollow, lugubrious voice saying, “You didn’t love me, Lynfa. You wished me gone.”
When I went into the house, Uncle Trefor, and Gran and Bopa and Grandpa, and our neighbor, Mrs. George, Gran’s best friend, were all in the kitchen. I could hear Gran from the passage saying, “What I wish is to see Davy-John again. If he’d only come back one night when I’m by myself. I wouldn’t be afraid. Hello, Lynfa love, why are you so late?”
“Loitering in High Street on a Friday night,” Uncle Trefor said, “with the pubs and the Palace dance hall open to temptation.”
I said, “I’m too young to drink, and if I wanted to sneak into the Palace, I’d be daft to wear my school uniform.”
“Don’t give me lip, Lynfa. I’m not talking about going in. I’m talking about mingling outside with the bad elements those places attract. Rock ’n roll will lead you into evil ways.”
“God Almighty, every damn thing is evil to you, Trefor,” Grandpa said. “Is breathing all right?”
“Not when you breathe to blaspheme,” Uncle Trefor said, and to Gran he said, “Why’d you let her go?”
“Lynfa has a mind of her own.”
“Because you’ve allowed her to. You’ll come to rue that.”
I heard a hollow, lugubrious voice saying, “You didn’t love me, Lynfa. You wished me gone.”
“We could go to a spiritualist meeting,” Mrs. George said to Gran. “The medium could call up Davy-John. If you’d rather do it private, I’ve got an ouija board somewhere. My girls were partial to it when they were still courting."
“Devilry, Mrs. George!” Uncle Trefor was shaking his head and his finger. “Nobody comes back from where the dead go, be it Heaven or Hell.”
“I read a novel about a dead woman who didn’t go to Heaven or Hell,” I said. “Her ghost haunted the man she loved, and when he died he joined her.”
“Well, I’m not ready to join Uncle,” Gran said.
“Why can’t you keep your mouth shut for two minutes, Lynfa?” Uncle Trefor said. “Rubbish in novels isn’t proof of anything in this world,” and that showed how ignorant he was. Probably he’d never even read a novel. “Heaven or Hell, that’s it. “We’d better be prepared.”
“My husband didn’t believe in Hell,” Mrs. George said. “God forgives everyone, Jac believed, and we all meet again in Heaven. ‘I’ll meet you at the River, love,’ were his last words to me.”
“Don’t count on Jac turning up for that meeting,” Uncle Trefor said. “He’s found out his mistake now,” and Mrs. George’s face crumpled.
I didn’t want to hear any more from Uncle Trefor so I said good night and went up to my room. But when I’d got into bed, I couldn’t sleep. I was remembering Wuthering Heights and the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw at the window, begging to be let in. What if Uncle came to my window? It was upstairs, but that wouldn’t matter if you were dead. The window was half open. He could easily lift it all the way and climb in. I got up and dashed over and dragged it down so hard it slammed against the ledge.
* * *
“It’s like I’m trespassing,” Bopa said a few days later in Uncle’s bedroom. “My brother was so particular about his privacy.”
We were going through his chest-of-drawers that I’d never seen the inside of before. Bopa had asked me to help her because Gran said she couldn’t bear to and Bopa couldn’t bear to do it on her own. There was nothing interesting in the first two drawers, just Uncle’s best shirts folded, and ties, and ironed pocket-hankies. In the third drawer there were more folded clothes, but on top of them lay a photo album that Bopa took out, saying, “I haven’t seen this in donkey’s years. I don’t want to look at it now.”
“Can I have a look?”
She gave it to me and I sat in Uncle’s basket chair while she carried on sorting. There were photos of past relatives I’d never known, and also of Gran and Bopa and Uncle when they were young. No surprise that Gran and Uncle were good looking. The surprise was Bopa in a long, floaty dress, her hair loose and reaching to her waist. She was like one of Arthur Rackham’s slender, sylphish creatures, and the photographer had posed her in front of a woodland scene, so he must have had the same notion. I’d thought she hadn’t married because no one asked her. Now I saw she could have married easy, and it must be true Uncle hadn’t let her so she could look after him.
The woman in the photo had masses of that black, curly hair, and dark eyes that sort of pierced you, and she had her hands on her hips and her head tipped back, as if to say, “Go on, dare me!”
“Look at what else he’s kept all these years.” She put an unsealed envelope on the bedside table and showed me what was in it, a black-and-white photo of a woman, a long lock of curled black hair, and a tiny silver brooch in the shape of a rose. The woman in the photo had masses of that black, curly hair, and dark eyes that sort of pierced you, and she had her hands on her hips and her head tipped back, as if to say, “Go on, dare me!” She reminded me of the Spanish dancer I’d seen doing the flamenco on TV at Mam and Dad’s and I could imagine her clicking castanets and stamping her feet.
“It’s Seiran,” Bopa said. “Uncle’s wife.”
You could have knocked me down with a feather. Bopa was saying a name I'd only heard mentioned once before, when Gran said we didn’t speak of her, and showing me someone I’d never expected to see, she so much didn’t exist in Einion Row.
“She died not long after giving birth to Menna. We never spoke of her again. Uncle couldn’t bear us to.”
“You can speak of her now,” I said. “Tell me the story,” and she sat on Uncle’s bed and told me:
“When Uncle was a young man, he was so handsome all the girls fancied him, but he cared for none of them. He was too fond of carousing with his butties. Then he met Seiran at a Miners’ Hall dance. They fell for each other straight off, but they were never suited. Uncle wouldn’t stop his wild ways, and Seiran had a temper and she’d rage at him.”
Nevertheless, Uncle married her and brought her to live with Bopa and his parents who were still alive, Gran and Grandpa living next door, and Uncle Trefor and Mam small children. That didn’t last long. The newlyweds were fighting all the time, and Seiran left Uncle in less than a year and returned to her family in Pen-Y-Darren.
“Two months later, Menna was born. Uncle wrote to ask Seiran would she reconcile if he put a deposit on a house separate from his family. Seiran answered she would, but then she was struck with the fever some women can get from childbirth. Her father brought the message. Uncle rushed to her, and Seiran wouldn’t let him leave her bedside, day or night. She died in his arms.”
He stayed until after the funeral that none of our family went to, and when he was leaving, Seiran’s Mam said, “We’d like to keep the baby for a bit, Davy-John, if you’ll agree. Just to help us cope with losing Seiran,” and Uncle said, “You can keep her for good. I don’t want her,” and he packed the few clothes Bopa had brought him and came back to Einion Row. “He grieved for Seiran the rest of his life and never had looks on another woman let alone marry one,” Bopa said.
A romantic story—except for Menna’s part. I couldn't imagine growing up with my mother dead and my father not wanting to know me. Uncle had never sent his daughter a Christmas present or a birthday card, never taken her for walks or played dominoes with her. He’d never wanted to set eyes on her.
Bopa said, “I don’t have the heart to sort any more today.”
She was crying, so I said, “I’ll do it,” and she went downstairs.
When I opened the envelope to put back the photo and the brooch and the lock of hair, I saw a folded paper, so thin it had stuck to the side of the envelope so Bopa had missed it.
When I opened the envelope to put back the photo and the brooch and the lock of hair, I saw a folded paper, so thin it had stuck to the side of the envelope so Bopa had missed it. I took it out and unfolded it, and I saw it was the beginning of a letter: “Dear Menna, I write to you because I want,” and that was it, a greeting, an unfinished sentence, and no date. Want what? To see her? To give her the photo, the brooch, and the lock of hair? The brooch did look too small for a woman, so maybe he’d been writing when Menna was still a child and he’d bought it for her. He’d changed his mind, but he’d kept the letter and the brooch in the same envelope as his precious mementoes of Seiran.
I put everything back and fitted the envelope into my skirt band under my sweater so Bopa wouldn’t see I had it. Next day, I took it to school to show Anwen and Elenid, and I told them the story Bopa told me. “He loved Seiran,” I said, “and now I think maybe he loved Menna, too. I think he bought the brooch for her.”
“Why didn’t he send it to her then?” Elenid said.
“That’s what I wonder.”
“Harder to love a living daughter than a dead wife,” Anwen said. “The dead can’t pester you to do things for them.”
That wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to tell my friends Uncle was haunting my mind and I feared that some night his ghost would appear, unquiet like Catherine Linton’s, because I’d shut him out of my heart. There was no way I could make up for that. What else I could do for him I hadn’t a notion.
* * *
In History class, I wrote a note to Anwen and Elenid that said, “Where can I buy an ouija board?” I wanted the board to spell out what I must do for Uncle to leave me alone. I daren’t ask Mrs. George to lend me her board. She might tell Gran who might let it slip to Uncle Trefor.
Mrs. Rees saw me passing the note and ordered me to bring it to her. She read it, as teachers always did, though it’s not their business. Then she tore it up and threw the pieces into the rubbish bin. “Where is your brain, Lynfa?” she said. “Maybe an ouija board can find it. I’m sure I can’t.”
She moved me from Anwen and Elenid and sent me to sit next to Gronw Hopkins who was nervous and shy and always sat in the back so he wouldn’t be called on and have to speak. When our form master asked his name on our first day in Form Four, he'd said very fast, “Gro ’Opkins, Sir,” so that’s what we called him. I hadn’t sat down two minutes when Gropkins passed me a note: “Dear Lynfa, May I have the pleasure of your company to the pictures on Saturday? There’s a film at the Castle Cinema about wild animals in Africa. I hope that appeals to you. Yours respectfully, G. Hopkins.”
When I got over being nonplussed with shock—Gropkins had a crush on me!—I wrote a huge NO, and thrust the note back at him. But I thrust too hard and knocked his ink bottle over. Ink shot across his desk and the note and streamed to the floor, and both Gropkins and I exclaimed loudly, not meaning to, and everyone turned around.
“I knocked it over, Mrs. Rees,” Gropkins said.
Mrs. Rees shook her head. “Very chivalrous of you, Gronw, but I happened to see Lynfa do it. Go to the kitchen and bring cleaning materials,” she told me. “You will not leave until that desk and the floor are spotless.”
When I came back, everyone had gone because the bell had rung for last period, and by the time I’d done the work, I was terrifically late for French and I’d get a row from the teacher in front of everyone. I decided not to bother going. Instead I walked to the Assembly Hall that separated the boys’ side from ours. It would be empty at this time and I could wait there until the last bell rang.
It was a dark, rainy afternoon and the Hall was gloomy and silent, and I remembered the Red Room where Jane Eyre had been locked in by her cruel aunt and how she was terrified she’d see the ghost of her dead uncle, and I thought my dead uncle might appear to accuse me again: “You didn’t love me, Lynfa.” But that was stupid. Why would Uncle come to my school when I lived next door to Bopa and he could just slide through the wall? I didn’t want him to come to me ever, anywhere. But how could I prevent him? It was too late to love him more than I had, and I couldn’t think of any other reparation.
So maybe Uncle’s unquiet spirit wasn’t haunting me because I hadn’t loved him but because he wanted me to do something for him that no one else could.
I sent my imagination on another path. If Heaven was the way Jac George believed, Uncle was up there, forgiven for deserting his only daughter, and reunited with Seiran at the River. There’d be no fighting in Heaven. Everyone would be loving and good, so Uncle and Seiran would be happy and peaceful together at last. Except, it occurred to me, Uncle couldn’t be at peace even there for the way he’d treated Menna on Earth. Seiran would ask about her, and Uncle would have to confess because there’d be no lying in Heaven either, and also, surely, heavenly Uncle, as well as changing his being, had a changed heart, and he regretted he hadn’t loved Menna when he had the chance.
So maybe Uncle’s unquiet spirit wasn’t haunting me because I hadn’t loved him but because he wanted me to do something for him that no one else could. Shadows were gathering in the Hall. I went to stand outside in the girls’ corridor. At least there was light there, and a light came on in my head, too. Uncle’s restless mind was caused by Menna not me. He’d never made reparation to her in his lifetime, and now he couldn’t unless he had a human deputy. I came to a decision. I’d put the envelope with the photo and lock of hair, the tiny brooch, and the begun letter, inside a bigger envelope and write on it in capital letters, THE THINGS IN HERE BELONG TO YOU, and then I’d go to her house. I’d hold it up in front of me as soon as she opened the door so she’d have to read it.
Maybe she’d invite me in and I’d meet her family, the two staring girls, her husband, and whoever else lived there. Seiran’s parents might still be alive, though very old, and maybe they’d offer me a cup of tea and tell me stories about my Aunt Seiran that I’d never heard in Einion Row, and maybe they’d say, “Come again, love,” because they were grateful to me for the mementoes I’d brought.
More likely, Menna would snatch the envelope and slam the door in my face. Even so, I’d have done the right thing, and possibly heavenly Uncle or ghostly Uncle, whichever he was, would know I was doing it to show Menna he’d cared for her—at least a little bit. He would call it quits and say, “You did love me, Lynfa, after all.”
I decided to make reparation to Gropkins also. Not that he was likely to die, but that capital NO I wrote was unkind and I regretted it. Luckily, the ink had ruined it before he saw it. I would write a note that said, “Dear Gronw, Thanks for your invitation. I’m sorry I can’t accept. I’m not allowed to go out with boys.” I didn’t know if that was true because I’d never had reason to ask, but I wanted to be nice. “Yours respectfully” had done me no harm. He’d tried to take the blame for the ink I spilled. Mrs. Rees had called him chivalrous. I supposed he was. He’d never stared at my breasts.
Roberta Murphy has published two novels in the U.K., her country of origin, and many short stories in literary magazines in the United States, her country of citizenship. She has been the recipient of an NEA grant for creative writing. She has taught fiction writing to adults at the Writer's Center and is currently a volunteer reading and writing tutor to young students for whom English is a second language.
