All Through the Night

Neil Thomas

Description

Digital marketing and social media has had a significant impact on the way companies engage with potential customers when selling their products and services. Companies are now able to connect with their target audience in a way that makes people feel engaged in order to help them make purchasing decisions.

Sujets

• Westerns
• Western (genre)
• Western

Informations

• Publié par: Thorogood Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781854188977
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

A l l Thr ou g h the N i g h t

A WELSH WESTERN




Neil Thomas




Published by Thorogood
10-12 Rivington Street
London EC2A 3DU
Telephone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.thorogoodpublishing.co.uk


© Neil Thomas 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Neil Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN paperback: 978 185418 8960
ISBN eBook: 978 185418 8977


To my Welsh ancestors: the stories they told and the songs they sang

Also to Cheryl, Ella and Amy for indulging me when I bathe my Welsh roots in the warm waters of nostalgia

And in memory of my father



Author’s note

For far too long, the Americans have had the monopoly on the Wild West of cowboys, trailhands, rawhide and cattle drives.
However, as this tale shows, this Wild West did not ‘come out of nowhere’, as it were.
The familiar story of cattle drives – in the sense beloved of Westerns – really originates in the UK, with the drovers who brought cattle, sheep, goats, turkeys, geese and pigs to the towns from far-flung rural areas of Scotland, the West Country and Wales.
Maybe crossing the Menai Strait doesn’t have quite the same cachet as crossing the Rio Grande, but everything we’ve come to expect of a good Western happened in Britain, only many years before.
From the Wild West of Wales, it is also tempting to think that we exported the very notion of cowboys – Americans are much more literal – but we called them drovers.
The fictional events in this novel take place in the late eighteenth century, perhaps the heyday for cattle drives from Wales to London as well as for the popularity of Welsh music and poetry in the capital. For example, a book entitled Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards was published in London in 1794 as a three-volume work by Edward Jones (1752 – 1824), a Welsh harpist, bard, performer, composer, arranger and collector of music.
The language throughout is English, ignoring the fact that a lot of it would have been in Welsh, especially, of course, the old songs.



The English lyrics for the Welsh songs used in this book are based on those appearing alongside the older, Welsh lyrics in The Songs of Wales (Royal Edition) , published in the nineteenth century and edited by Brinley Richards.
The monologue in Chapter 10 was written down by my father having been passed down through previous generations by oral tradition.


PART ONE

1
Riding his Welsh cob out of the water and across the sand, Rhys has his back to a narrow strip of shallow sea. He looks up in wonder at the panorama ahead of him. As if accompanied by sweeping music, he sees Snowdon in the distance surrounded by its mountain ranges, slowly being shrouded in melancholic clouds of rain and mist as the weather closes in.
He wheels round quickly so that he now faces the fast- flowing waters of the Menai Strait and looks over to the far bank, to Anglesey.
There, about a quarter of a mile away, he sees his father – a white-haired old man of dignified bearing – standing next to the young black-haired and fiery-eyed woman Rhys is betrothed to. Alongside them is a small bunch of black-clothed men that looks like a small herd rather than a choral group at this distance.
He hears, floating across the water, the voices of the dozen-or-so-strong male voice choir that seem to take up the tune he has been hearing in his head as they sing All Through the Night.

Love, fear not if sad thy dreaming
All through the night,
Though o’ercast, bright stars are gleaming
All through the night.
Joy will come to thee at morning,
Life with sunny hope adorning,
Though sad dreams may give dark warning
All through the night.
Angels watching ever round thee
All through the night,
In thy slumbers close surround thee
All through the night.
They should of all fear disarm thee,
No forebodings should alarm thee,
They will let no peril harm thee,
All through the night.

Rhys then sees a dark mass visible in the water and he slowly picks out the herd of Welsh Black cattle, led by the oldest of the cows, swimming towards him for the near shore. He sees one animal, much smaller, losing its way at the back and returning to the far, home shore and wonders what that might symbolise for the start of their long drove to London.
He looks closely at the herd and the cattle are variously thrashing about, with men in rowing boats shouting in Welsh and English trying to direct operations without too much success. There are dogs – corgis and border collies, some in the boats barking and some in the water swimming furiously.
It is a scene of total chaos and, almost in spite of the efforts of the men and the dogs in the boats and in the water, their shouts of encouragement and anger and their attempts at throwing ropes round the horns of some of the cattle to try and tow them across, somehow progress across the wild stretch of water does seem to be being made.
The only calm spot is the boat at the rear, methodically being rowed across, which contains some of their provisions for the journey as well as ferrying over, in relative comfort, the travellers who would be tagging along with them on the journey for company and safety.
Rhys, knowing that because of the shifting tides there is only a half-hour slot, at most, for the crossing to be completed successfully, glances anxiously across again to the distant shore and sees the ‘lost’ runt standing near the choir, his girl and his father – all forming a fitting farewell tableau.



2
Three weeks earlier

In their cosy farmhouse kitchen , Rhys, as black-haired as his father is white-haired, but otherwise with the same square jaw and Roman nose, sits on the other side of the hearth from his father, Caradog. The lamb and leek soup in a pot on the range is bubbling merrily away as Caradog puffs on his clay pipe, their two black and white border collies asleep at his feet in front of the fire.
Caradog takes his pipe out of his mouth.
‘It’ll be Honesty Jones’s last drive to London. I still think of him as a young man, mind, for I’ve got ten years at least on him, but he feels he’s now getting, like me, too old for the arduous work alone and he misses the days when he and I would set out together, with Smithfield as the journey’s end.’
‘He was, it’s true, very frightened the last drove he did, what with him carrying so much money, when they were lucky to miss that highwayman who robbed and killed another drover, and only the day before Honesty passed the self-same way.’
‘This is why you’ve now to take up the droving duties, or we risk losing our livelihood.’
‘I can see that, but I’m happy on the farm raising the animals. Anyway, I’ve Eunice to think about and our future.’
‘Eunice knows and understands.’
‘You’ve spoken to her about this, behind my back?’
‘I know what she means to you and I wanted to square it with her first. Only with her support will this work.’
‘She wants me here. I want to be here. I’ve the Bard’s crown at the eisteddfod to work towards. Why can’t we do what other farmers do and let other men do our droving? And, as he’s keen to do it, we could let Guto take over.’
‘You lose control doing that. The money is cut too many ways. Better to drive our own animals and do that, for a price, of course, for our loyal friends as well. Our family has made its name and its money doing it this way. Will you try it this time with Drover Jones? You might enjoy learning the ropes from him and seeing London.’
‘I’ve done the journey before you know, once, when I was a boy, and I didn’t enjoy it one bit.’
‘You’re older now and wiser, I hope. And you’d be partnering a master and learning from him. If we take him up on his offer, he’ll carry on for a while until he thinks you’re ready to take over. He’s a true and faithful friend to us. Not for nothing is Drover Jones’s nickname Honesty. By the way, he also says he doesn’t think he can really trust Guto to do it, so he wants us to take over from him and to handle his lucrative trade of carrying money and legal documents for the farmers around here and doing all kinds of business transactions on their behalf.’
‘I’d be hopeless at that. The only notes I care about are musical, not promissory ones.’
‘There’ll be time enough for poetry and music when you’ve made a success of this. Look, I don’t want to play this card, but I’ve thought about this long and hard and frankly, I’ll not be here much longer.’
‘That’s blackmail – totally unfair. You’re right on one thing: you shouldn’t be playing that card, not with me.’
‘I want to know that you can do it and carry on here. You speak English fluently, which is a huge advantage when it comes to haggling and in winning the trust of the people you’ll hope to deal with. In a few years, when you’re thirty and married, you can get your droving licence and you’ll be set up for the future. Droving has taught me so much about people and life – seeing the town