Free Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees

of Christ is thick and sweet. I sit in a state of blushing confusion. For the first time in my life, I have taken communion on the holy island where St David may very well have been a monk. How Welsh is that?
    In the hallway a grandfather clock tocked and tolled towards lunch. Over the pots and pans my mother would throw in her lot. Perhaps Aunt Joan assisted with the final push to share in the glory. My uncle would offer his services, but they were always declined. He was famously incompetent in the kitchen. None of the other men would lift a finger. Towards one o’clock my grandfather would put down his pipe and rise from his armchair in the corner nearest the fire, and summon us. We gathered, three boys with bright eyes, to follow him down the corridor, carpeted in dark red, slung with long Persian rugs, towards a door at the end. Into a small sanctum we all clustered, supplicants of this forbidding figure who, we knew, was about to dispense largesse.
    â€˜Now, boys, who would like a drink?’ A hint of Welsh warmth in the voice.
    â€˜Me!’ The reply in triplicate would produce a stern, expectant look. ‘Me, please, Grandpa.’ This contritely from my older brother, who was old enough to read the signs. After a nudge, it was echoed in duplicate.
    â€˜What would you like?’ A more or less rhetorical question. We all craved the same thing: ginger beer, but ginger beer that you could get nowhere else, to our certain knowledge, in the entireworld. To us it was Welsh ginger beer, Carmarthen ginger beer, Mount Hill ginger beer. From a tall bottle our grandfather slowly poured a fizzing liquid into three tumblers. You wanted to get drinking straight away.
    â€˜Now, what do you say?’ Glasses pulled away from mouths.
    â€˜Thank you, Grandpa.’ You sipped and felt an instant rasp at the back of the throat. This stuff was toxic. In no time you’d have drained it. Through the bubbled base of the glass you could then watch people, refracted and multiplied, taking their places around the octagonal table. The back of your mouth was searing from the ginger as now trolleys rattled across the hall and into the dining room, one pushed by my grandmother, the other by Aunt Joan flagrantly doing her bit.
    My grandfather now stepped up to slice the sizzling bird on a table by the door and briskly sharpened the carving knife as if preparing for something less innocent than lunch. Our grandmother bustled. Uncles and great-aunts nattered. Children chattered. Plates groaned. Even, as the years go by, mine. Until the age of seventeen I mainly consisted of ribs, but this was one meal it was worth not turning up your nose at. You couldn’t argue with those crunchy potatoes. The fleshy white meat was perfectly acceptable. Even the odd vegetable from the steam-powered trolley might find a way past your line of defence. It was the gravy that sugared the pill, a rich brown gloop that seemed to have been piped up from some Welsh Middle Earth. It had the smooth consistency of thinnish cement.
    It took Dorothy an age to settle. She would spring up to fetch things or to minister to others. No such mania for Bert. Methodically he sliced, silently he chewed, carefully he swallowed. My grandfather never did anything at pace. The food, he was said to believe, was too good to spoil with talk. Which left the field opento the others. Aunt Joan, a miniaturist, regaled the room with tales of the bishops and ministers, chief rabbis and archimandrites and other assorted panjandrums she’d lately (or not so lately) painted. The first and in fact only time I ever heard my grandmother express intolerance was when Aunt Joan’s narrative torrent was in full flow one time.
    â€˜You aren’t listening, Granny.’
    â€˜Oh, don’t worry, Jasper bach,’ she said, leaning in conspiratorially. ‘I’ve heard the stories before ever so often.’ She called us all
bach
– ‘little one’.