Free Resistance by Owen Sheers

awkward attempt at courting, Reg stooping through the low doorway of The Gaer, a bunch of wildflowers in one hand, a leg of lamb in the other, the residue of carbolic soap cracking in the creases around his neck. But neither was made for romance. Both had only ever known their dead spouses, and their capacity for companionship had been formed and died with them. Reg might have lived at The Court, but he was of the same stock as the other men in the valley: spare of speech, tender as a wet nurse with a newborn lamb, clumsy as a schoolboy with a woman. And Edith wasn’t interestedanyway. She was too busy for love or anything like it. As well as keeping The Gaer going, she had her son, Roderick, to raise. Edith had high hopes for Roderick. Tending sheep about a wind-whipped cottage on the prow of a ridge wasn’t for him. No, she wanted university for her boy, an education. Every Monday morning she’d see him off on the ten-mile walk down to Pandy, where he’d catch the train to the grammar school in Hereford. He’d won a scholarship as a weekly boarder, one of only two in the district. During the week he lodged in the town with a spinster and her brother, whose house Edith had checked over thoroughly first, running her damp finger over every lintel and door jamb. Her son would be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer even. His health must be protected. Roderick became the focus of Edith’s life, as if her husband’s death, having amputated one channel of her love, left the one still flowing to her son doubled in force to the point of breaking its banks. Which is exactly what happened when Roderick went to war and was killed in a training accident before he’d ever fired a shot in anger.
    The blackout regulations had stopped them all whitewashing the outside walls of their homes, but in the years following Roderick’s death Edith stopped cleaning hers too. The Gaer’s brightness dulled with mildew and mould. The little garden of rhododendrons and azaleas, fenced in from the sparse hillside, grew wild. The slates slipped and skewed in the gales, leaving the roof a crossword puzzle of dark square gaps. Edith’s defences, once as strong and deeply rooted as those of the fort above her, collapsed under the weight of Roderick’s death, just as those of the fort had disintegrated under the weight of time.
    One day William was bringing his flock off the mountain when he found Edith wandering through the bilberry bushes, barefoot, her hair wild and her hands black with the peaty soil. She’d been following Roderick’s voice, she told him. He was out on the mountain and she had to find him. She had to bring him home. Ever since then they’d made sure someone visited Edith every day. She was still fiercely independent and wouldn’t hear of moving down into the valley. With her boys gone Maggie would have had room for her.And Mary too. But Edith wouldn’t leave The Gaer. They were retreating into the hillside together, she and the cottage, sinking back into the soil. She still managed to feed herself, tended her small flock, kept a sow she offered to William’s boar every autumn. But she’d become wild in other ways. One night a couple of days after William found her ranging the hillside, Sarah took her turn to stay over at The Gaer. In the middle of the night she’d been woken by Edith’s voice drifting up the stairs. When she’d gone down to investigate, feeling her way through the dark cottage with her hands along its walls, she’d found Edith in her nightdress in the living room, a single candle throwing a weak, flickering light over the lettered board on the table in front of her. When Sarah had spoken her name, “Edith?” she’d knocked the upturned glass to the floor and started like a frightened pony, white-eyed and ready for flight. To this day none of them could work out how she’d got that board. Maggie said it must have always been there, in the cottage, that there was a lot of that stuff around after the