No.22 - Effigy, an Introduction to Death

[I posted a series of childhood and youth reminiscences on Facebook a while back, and although they mostly relate to the 1960's-1980's, I thought I'd re-visit some of them here. This one covers a rather sinister episode.]

In Wales the sheep are always there, always munching, and always watching. You could be forgiven for believing that they are all the same - but they are not. There are different breeds of course, but it’s more than that. In North Wales they are timid and will scatter before humans, dogs or or even a light breeze. On childhood visits to South Wales, it came as a  surprise to find that sheep in the Rhondda Valleys were not such timid creatures. They were urban sheep, and they arrogantly prowled the steeply-sloping streets, using the gradient to deliberately overturn galvanised zinc dustbins, so that they could forage for scraps of food they might find more enticing than grass. 

Little old me c.1962.

Dad’s little green Ford Anglia struggled up the mountain roads as it was, so it was annoying for him to round a bend, only to be confronted by a sheep lounging in the middle of the road as though she owned it. A beep of the horn would elicit nothing more than a languid glance of some insolence, a second might earn an expression best translated as “bleep you mate!” Dad would get out and physically shoo the offender away. With a reluctant “baaah!” she would scramble to her feet and move aside, deliberately taking her time, weighed down with all the swaggering resentment of a sulky teenager. Dad would then have to get the Anglia to start again on a hill, which he would do with his usual measure of good grace, which was none at all. 

I was frightened of sheep when I was small, ovinaphobia I think they call it. A plaster effigy of a ewe graced the frontage of Pwlldefaid, a clothes shop on Pwllheli High Street, and Mum had to take us on a roundabout route to avoid passing it. If she tried sneaking me by, there would be a scene. Her reassurances that it was harmless were half-hearted, because she knew full well why I was afraid, and why my fear, although irrational, couldn’t be dismissed altogether. It wasn’t quite as pathetic of me as it sounds.

The sheep I couldn't pass on Pwllheli High Street.

On our October breaks in the Rhondda, when the family was mustering to do something that was for adults only, another ‘auntie’ would be conjured up from nowhere to look after me. I was never unduly concerned about it. As long as I was made a fuss of, then it didn’t much matter who was doing the fussing. I was often left in the care of the widow who lived next door to Auntie Eva, who I came to know as Auntie Ginny. At first she wasn’t a widow at all, because she had a sandy-haired husband called Dan. I was a bit wary of him, but he died early in our acquaintance. I remember Auntie Ginny as a toothless, gurning face under a headscarf. I didn’t care about that, because she was always lovely to me, and that was what counted. Auntie Eva explained that, unfortunately, due to a horrible mix up, Dan had been buried with Auntie Ginny’s teeth in his mouth. 

Once she minded me on a horrible wet afternoon in Ferndale, where the twin peaks of the sodden coal tips merged with a leaden sky. My felt pens, my Lego and my old Quality Street tin full of acorns picked from the floor of Darran Park, no longer diverted me. I sat in the living room, dismally listening to the rain hammering onto the scullery’s glass roof. I fancied that a particularly slow and insistent drip, might have been the footsteps of Auntie Ginny’s dead husband, coming back in search of his proper teeth. There was an old office clock on the wall, and its loud, lazy tick seemed to slow down time itself, keeping Auntie Eva and Mum away from me. To a small boy, a slow afternoon can seem an eternity. I didn’t mither, but the memory of the misery I felt has endured all these years.

When the rain stopped, perhaps weary of my miserable face, Auntie Ginny suggested I might like to go into the garden and play for a while. It was a poky, sloping affair between the rear of the house and a rough lane, beyond which the barren mountain and the slag heaps lay, but it was better than nothing. As I emerged from the scullery door, from nowhere, a sheep startled me by leaping the fence between Auntie Eva’s and Auntie Ginny’s gardens. No North Wales sheep would have had the audacity to encroach in someone’s garden like that! Startled, and a little outraged, I immediately ran indoors to snitch on it.

“Auntie Ginny! Auntie Ginny! There’s a sheep in the garden! It’s jumping over the fence!”

“Is there? Well, I never!” she exclaimed in a pitch that had it been any higher, would only have been audible to dogs. “Go back out and shoo it away then, there’s a good boy!” 

I liked to think I was ‘a good boy,’ so obediently, I ran back out to do her bidding, half expecting the sheep to be long gone by then. But it was still there. And it was still jumping over the fence. I said “Shoo! Shoo!” But, as though suspended in time, it was still jumping over the fence. I went back inside.

“Auntie Ginny, the sheep is still jumping over the fence.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well it can’t be! Oh I’ll come and look now,” she exclaimed, no longer expecting to get any sense out of the foolish boy. 

We returned to the garden, where the sheep was indeed still jumping over the fence. You see, it hadn’t made it. It had impaled itself on one of the fence posts in mid leap, and although its eyes were wide and staring, it was quite dead. By now there was a great deal of blood. Auntie Ginny hurried me away from the gore and the farmer was phoned. 

What is it with me and braces?

I remember being told that the ewe had left two orphaned lambs, but I think that the family was more concerned about the trauma her demise had inflicted upon me.

I knew that Auntie Ginny’s husband Dan had died, and that it was a sad thing. To lose a husband is a very sad thing, and to have him take your teeth with him must have added insult to injury. But I hadn’t seen Dan die, or dead. This poor animal had given me my first real encounter with death and it had been a dramatic and memorable one. It made enough of an impression to make it hard for me to walk past the effigy at the end of the High Street.