Half and Half by Adele Evershed

I tooty down into the attic to sort through boxes of Dad’s old Groggs. My hand scrams across the past—time spent in the damp of a dying language. The tamping rain sopping into all that dirty history held now in my Bamps’ Davy lamp and Da’s heavy metal snap tin. Dust floats in the crawl space, coating my tongue with ash, and I feel claustrophobic. I’ve never been good in small spaces.

I put my head between my knees and hear Bamps in the kitchen moidering about his tea, “It’s like widow’s piss,” but as he says it in Welsh, Nan doesn’t shush him. Dad is calling my brother, “Twp,” for being caught on the mitch, not the mitching, mind you, just the catching. My brother’s poody as larva bread, sliding his daps over the lino so they squeal like a pit pony. Mam and Gran are chopsing as they drop pikelets on the bakestone—big as puddles and porous as a miner’s cough.

The kitchen smells of frying batter and coal smoke, smuts clinging to the air. The radio hums in English, spoken with a heavy Welsh lilt, so ‘here’ becomes ‘yur’. Mam starts singing “Come by yur my Lord, cum by yur.” It’s an old joke from when she thought the hymn was written by a Welshman. I hum along.

I stand, and everything disappears. I’m left staring into the sad eyes of the Pontypool front row, Groggs fashioned out of clay. Da collected the whole 1970s rugby team from his glory days. They are mine now and I’m not sure what to do with them so I dust them when I remember and then pack them away to deal with at a later date.

I know my valley was never green, more a bara brith burnt at the edges brown. In New England, there are towns called Cardiff and Swansea, Welsh in name only, a bit like me. You see, I’ve shrugged off dinner for lunch, orange pop for Perrier, half-n-half for jasmine rice with curry—and I make sure I pronounce the H when I say here.

But when I come down from the attic, I still feel the wet earth in my bones, the lush hills cwtching themselves around my shoulders, the faraway drip of rain in the rafters. Bamps’ grumbles, Mam flips a pikelet with one hand, wiping flour through her hair so she looks older than she is. All these burnt edges of memory, where the world is damp daylight, Welsh squealing on the lino—chaotic, loud, messy, alive, and small.

And it’s all just lovely—and I wish it had all been enough.

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Modern Haiku, Flashflood, Free Flash Fiction, Trash Cat Lit and Literary Mama. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection, In the Belly of the Wail, is forthcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas-in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a third called, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, (Unsolicited Press).

Find her on X @AdLibby1, Instagram @ad_libby, and BlueSky @adlibby.bsky.social.

Image – WorldOfGroggs via wikimedia commons

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