The train dragged its feet into Swansea station seemingly as reluctant as we were to arrive since the heavens had chosen just that moment to unleash vertical rain which, by the time we were under the corrugated roof of the platform, had turned to a deafening drum roll of hail.
The August Bank Holiday Weekend.
In my suitcase I had a swimsuit. Somehow or another I didn't think I would be using it. Similarly the open toed sandals seemed to be an even bigger mistake as my feet slipped out of the sodden soles and I walked away from them, barefoot on the platform in the deluge. The connecting train that was apparently leaving for two unconnected destinations at exactly the same time from the same platform Carmarthen and Caerfyrddin, was twenty minutes delayed. I called Eva. She was breezily cheerful at the news, as you would be if you were tucked up warm in TK Max buying Betty Jackson dresses. I tried not to snap. There would have been little point. She wouldn't have heard me over the hail and the succeeding thunder.
Lightening flashed across the black and blue bruise of the sky as I shivered so much that the wheels on my suitcase rattled on the concrete. And the cafe was closed.
'How much further?' I asked when I eventually arrived in Carmarthen/Caerfyrddin (when we were Anglicising all these ruddy Welsh place names you would have thought we would have come up with something that at least remotely similar and not merely a word that begins with the same letter of the alphabet) and she and her friend Sheila had stopped laughing at me in my little ghost dress, bare legs and gold sandals. ('I see you're a Welsh virgin, then Mar-i-o-n-n-e,' Sheila had chortled adding more syllables into my name than I thought linguistically possible. I kept my last visit when I arrived wearing satin slippers and silk trousers, to myself.)
'Oh about an hour.'
'An ho....?'
'To Sheila's farm, and then another forty minutes to my cottage...'
It was dark when we finally drew up on the gravel and let ourselves into a tiny stone house which was maybe 10 degrees colder than the car (which had a heater, you see...) and Eva showed me to my bedroom into which she had thoughtfully put a radiator in case I got chilly. I wished I had brought flannel pyjamas instead of the purple silk nightdress and matching dressing gown. I wished this even more two days later when it was raining so hard that we didn't bother to get dressed until two thirty in the afternoon (to go to a tea dance in a nearby village) and simply went back to bed and watched the weather from the relative warmth of the duvet for the morning.
'Shall I open the bottle of wine you brought?' She asked as I put on several sweaters and glued myself to the wood burning stove which she was stoking like the mouth of hell.
The fact that she even had to ask made me quake with fear.
'I don't usually drink when I'm here,' she added.
If I had boots, my heart would now be in them.
This is why St Bernard's have brandy round their necks...
