1.  Keeping Up With Half The Valleys Phone Book

"To take with me:

Tea bags. Pyjamas.

Luchwen for making Welsh cakes, also for brandishing at people who snigger if They beat Us at the Millennium Stadium next March.

Dictionary (until my French gets fluent)."

I looked up, but I might have been speaking that fluent French for all the interest they showed. The three of them were sitting there like exhibits in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Apathy. (Not that our living room could have passed itself off as a chamber, with that cheesy wallpaper.)

"Suitcase," I suggested.

The South Wales Echo rippled with indignation. "There's no need for silliness," it said. "And there's no need for you to go abroad at all. Young girls, roaming about the countries..." Dad lowered his newspaper briefly. The distaste in his tone made it plain he considered foreign travel by females under retirement age to be the cause of most of society's ills.

Griff, my brother, rolled his eyes. "How do you expect Holly to get her degree if she doesn't go to France?" He glared at the Echo. "Where’s she going to learn French here, in Pontycynon? At the Co-op, reading the labels on the bags of croissants?"

"The Cwarp hasn't got any cross ants in," said Mam, helpfully. "I had a look, this morning."

Griff looked almost as cross as the ants. Before he could bite back, Mam turned to me: "You've started packing a bit smart. The college haven't said where you’re going yet."

"The college doesn't know," I said, patiently. "They’ve sent my application to the people who organise these exchanges. Everyone in my class applied. It's the exchange people who decide which part of France you're sent to, and which school you'll be teaching in."

We’d been over this a dozen times since I’d broken the news that I would have to spend a year in France, working as an English language assistant, as the third year of my degree course. Mam and Dad had been proud when I went to university - Dad dreamed that one day, I would make deputy supervisor in Pontycynon steelworks' typing pool. But when they'd found out the course included a year abroad, Higher Education had suddenly become the route of all evil.

If Dad had realised that the French lessons I'd started when I was eleven were going to lead to such depravity, he'd have had the school bus clamped. He didn't like the thought of me crossing the Bristol Channel, let alone the English one.

"Not much shape on that college." This was Dad's regular critique of the university's administrative system. "They ought to have wrote to you with the name of the school. Then we could have found you some people to stay with, nearby."

"Why would they need you to arrange things?" asked Griff. He paused, then delivered what Mam would have called the Cwarp de grâce. "You've never even been to France."

"Neither have Holly," pointed out Mam. The familiar crease appeared in her forehead.

"A whole year out there. And Christmas.”

"Spend Christmas in France, Holly," Griff advised me. "More fun than sitting round the gas fire, listening to Dad's chesty cough. Although you'd miss the street's annual blackout when he plugs the tree lights in."

The Echo rustled menacingly again.

I got up. "Cuppa? Give me a hand, Griff?" To my relief, Griff not only rose and followed me, he didn't even slam the kitchen door behind us.

"They haven't got a clue," grumbled Griff, grabbing an innocent teacloth and twisting it. "You've got a chance to go somewhere, do something. I'd go for it."

I hid a smile, but I was touched. Griff had gone straight from school into his clerical post at the Job Centre, no further than a bus ride from home. It must have been galling for him to watch his little sister packing for adventure on the Continent. In a surge of affection, I filled his Newport County mug first.

Back in the would-be chamber, I handed Dad his mug of tea.

“What’s that by there?” I reached behind Dad’s cushion and rescued a stray library book. “Heck, that’s due back today. I’d better get up the Tower.”

"But they’ll be closed," said Mam. "That Mrs Whipple's always out on the stroke of four, and straight into the bakery to grab all the ice slices. And then your father creates when we have Welsh cakes for tea instead."

Dad looked pained. "I told, I don't see a lot in them Welsh cakes," he defended himself.

"Yes," shot back Mam. "After we'd been married thirty years." She turned to me. "It's ridiculous. Stuffing yourself with cakes, then saying you've got to watch your figure."

I looked up, surprised. I'd never heard Dad voice any concern about his weight, whatever Mam served up. Mind, that was because he usually had his mouth full at the time.

Mam warmed to her theme. "Prancing about dressed like a teenager. Painting over your grey hair." She paused for breath. "Coming out, like that, when you're over fifty."

Griff and I exchanged horrified glances. Coming out? Were there other, darker secrets Dad had closeted from us for the whole of his married life?

"Mam?" I hesitated. "How do you mean - Dad - coming out?"

"Not him." Mam was scornful. "That Mrs Whipple. She’s in her fifties and she still dresses like Cher. Can't come out on her doorstep without showing her knickers."

I put down my mug and reached for my jacket. "Doesn't matter if the library's shut. Lin will let me in."

Mam was intrigued. "What will she be doing there, if they'm closed?"

I leaned over her and hissed: "Opening a bottle of gin. They keep one behind the Maeve Binchy paperbacks."

"Oh, go on with you." Mam pushed me away, clearly tickled at the thought of a secret cache of liquor behind the Binchies. "Drinking in the library, indeed.”

"Oh, the gin's not for drinking," said Griff. "It's for cleaning Mrs Whipple's tongue stud."

Our front gate creaked shut behind me. A pity Mam and Dad couldn’t cope with my going to France. Normally we all got on like a torched holiday cottage. I turned and headed uphill. Our town, Pontycynon, clung to the side of a mountain, which explained why none of us kids had grown up to represent Wales at marbles. And, like in all small Valleys towns, you couldn't walk ten steps without meeting someone who knew all your busin-

"Hello, Holly!" screeched Mrs Flook, from her front doorstep. "Off to France, then? When you going?" She leaned on her broom expectantly.

I returned the greeting politely, maintaining a careful distance from the broom. Mrs Flook was rarely seen in public without it. Griff used to say that if the roof fell off her house she'd have swept the rubble into next door's yard before the firemen got there.

"Sylvia!” Mrs Flook had sighted another neighbour. “Holly's going to France."

I turned to see Mrs Stockley, our English neighbour, approaching us. Mrs Flook rushed on: "Going all that way. There's brave. And all that studying for college."

Suddenly I was starring in a remake of The Corn is Green. I wondered if I should offer to give up my scholarship and marry the village trollop, just to keep in character.

You could tell Mrs Stockley was a relative newcomer to Pontycynon. She missed her cue to ignore my travel plans and ask if I was courting. Instead she smiled and said: "Come and say au revoir to us before you go."

I liked Mrs Stockley. She and her husband had emigrated from Surrey ("up England way" © Mam 1998) to settle here, a few years ago. They'd needed time to adapt, though. At first, they'd thought Dad was Welsh-speaking, until he'd put his teeth in.

"Our Georgia's doing well in school, and all," said Mrs Flook. "She passed her certificate for dancing, last week."

I managed to nod before excusing myself. By and large, Pontycynon wasn't used to Higher Education.

In High Street, the only sign of life was the light flickering in Derek Pugh the Bookie's window. Derek must have been calculating that week's dividends from his equine investment plan, a scheme tailored to supplementing the individual's weekly State benefit. Our town wasn't nicknamed Ponty Sign-On for nothing.

The Tower loomed at the top of High Street. Once a tavern, it was now the town library, although most of its former regulars now frequented the other hostelry, The Nelson Arm. My friend Lin, the assistant librarian, opened the door in response to my knock.

"I hope she's paying you overtime," I lectured. Lin was too easy-going. Following her upstairs, I could just about make out Mrs Whipple's stiletto imprints on her back.

“Well, there’s a lot to do, with this French evening coming up,” said Lin, indicating a pile of posters on the table. “Are you sure... You won’t...?”

I was, and I wouldn’t.

“Lin, I’m not wasting an evening listening to that Twinning Committee going on about how they spent a week in Mauvoisins without speaking a word of French.”

Pontycynon had been twinned with Mauvoisins, a town in west France of similar size and ineptitude at rugby, for exactly ten years. Ponty’s Twinning Committee organised trips there every year. I’d heard them regaling the stay-at-homes with tales of how they'd made the Frenchies cook them bacon and eggs, not any of that Garlic muck. Whatever else was uncertain about my year in France, I knew I wasn't going near that town. I was going to discover France for myself, not follow the path trodden by half of Pontycynon.

"Oh, there's a pity." Lin had a twinkle in her eye. "Guess who was in here this morning, telling me he's writing up the evening for his newspaper?"

My face grew hot. "Kim was in here?" I'd had a crush on Kim Meredith since the sixth form. I’d never actually spoken to him, but I pored over the articles he wrote for the local newspaper, Y Llais. This weekly was known to its faithful readership as The Lies, an epithet that, in our house, had softened over the years to the more affectionate The Fibs.

"The French evening’s on Thursday at eight," Lin reminded me. “It won’t be all photos and slides, Hol. A couple from a local vineyard are bringing their wine. We’ll sample it with French bread and some nice cheese.”

“You know I don’t like cheese,” I grumbled.

“Suppose I’ll have to have a drink with Kim, then,” teased Lin. “Tête-à-tête, like.”

“You’ll put Owen in a jealous rage,” I said. “He’ll turn green and burst through his anorak.”

Owen was Mrs Whipple's son, a fashion design student at art college. He’d been sighing after Lin for years, although she hadn't the heart to tell him that his designs on her were never going to get beyond pencil and paper stage. Still, at least Lin had an admirer, and she’d acquired him without even leaving Pontycynon.

I remembered how, two years ago, after our A-levels, Lin had set down her glass of champagne to tell me she'd turned down a place at university in favour of a job at the library. I'd sprayed a mouthful of Tesco's finest over Mam's Harlech Castle placemats. But at least she was earning her living now, and not faced with repaying a massive student loan. In my circumstances, I couldn't afford to return my library books post-deadline.

"What book did Kim borrow this morning?” I asked, wistfully. “Was it called How To Meet A Fat, Plain Languages Student?"

"I can’t remember," said Lin, turning back to her posters. "And you're not plain, Hol."

I winced at her honesty, resolving to jog all the way home. How many calories could I burn off before eight o'clock next Thursday…?

Eighteen, nineteen, gasp, twenty. I panted to a halt. After years of walking up hills, I still moved with the effortless grace of a bread pudding. As I opened our back gate, a voice made me jump.

"Holly!" I spun round to see Mam, standing near our bin. With her was a grey-haired lady of commanding height who looked vaguely familiar.

"Well, open the gate for me,” said Mam. “Don't you remember Mrs Hathaway? Taught you in the Juniors?"

The memories came flooding back. That prison-door smile. The screams of fury if you forgot your daps for P.T. Your skipping rope trembling in your hand in case she selected you for that day's public humiliation in the crowded schoolyard.

"Hello, Mrs Hathaway," I said faintly, opening the gate for Mam. “It’s nice to see you.”

Mrs Hathaway stared at me.

"Holly." It was a statement, not a greeting. "Your mother says you're going to France.”

I nodded. Mrs Hathaway smiled. “Angeline was in France at Easter. She travels quite often with her job - France, Germany. She speaks French fluently."

I remembered Angeline, Mrs Hathaway's niece, from junior school. She’d never shared her Smarties, declaring, with her mouth full, that she didn't have enough to go round. I had a feeling that, grown up, Angeline was running the loans department of a savings bank.

"Holly's university is arranging her year abroad." I recognised Mam's bay-window voice.

"Angeline thinks of France as a second home," stated Mrs Hathaway. "She's been going there every summer since she was twelve, with school exchanges."  

"Holly will be teaching in a French school," said Mam smoothly. "We think it's a wonderful opportunity."

I nearly gasped. Not even pausing to blush, Mam took aim again. "Didn't Angeline apply for teacher-training, when she left school?"

Mrs Hathaway's smile stayed in place. "She feels more fulfilled as a personal assistant. She’s been to several company dinners, using her French and her German."

Mam and I exchanged glances. Mrs Hathaway wished me a safe journey, added that Angeline's company always paid for her Eurostar tickets, then took her leave. Dismissed, Mam and I headed indoors.

"Hear her brag," snorted Mam, banging the kitchen door behind us. "That Angeline never even got in to university."

"What is she doing now?" I hadn't seen Angeline since I was eight. One day, she'd run up to Lin and me in the playground to tell us her parents were transferring her to a better school, and the next she'd gone.

"Secretary with some clothes firm in Cardiff,” grumbled Mam. “Typing letters."

"In French and German," I sniggered. Knowing Angeline, she had only learned the imperatives. Bossy? She dictated the book.

Mam’s nose drew level with the curtain rail. "Angeline," she brayed. "I met that awful Gethin child who used to beat you in the spelling tests. I’m glad you don’t have to mix with such common people, now you're Wales' top businesswoman."

I yawned. "Enough, Aunt Maggie. I'm off to tonight's company dinner." I grabbed the tablecloth and swathed it around my shoulders, a checked evening wrap.

Hearing the kitchen door opening behind me, I swung round to make a particularly snide face at Dad or Griff. The tablecloth, caught up in its role, swept around with me and nearly wiped the nose of our neighbour, Mrs Price Opposite.

"Oh, excuse us, Mrs Price." Mam recovered herself. "Just some silly joke of Holly's."

"Bullfighting, is it, Holly?" said Mrs Price Opposite. I shook my head, darting an indignant look at Mam. Trust her to put the fault on me.

"I thought it was France you were going to, not Spain," continued our visitor, unperturbed. "I just popped round to ask, could someone help me put my bin out. Our Mansel would have helped me, only he’s gone to keep it real in Barry Island.” Mrs Price Opposite’s son, Mansel, was a part-time DJ and full-time rock obsessive.

“Leave it to me,” said Mam. “Griff!” she bellowed. “Go and help Mrs Price! Oh, and Holly, the phone went, while you were out.”

Griff joined us in the kitchen, his sleeves rolled up for bin management, his face tense.

"A lady from your college phoned," he told me. "Olwen."

"Olwen's the secretary of our French department," I reminded Mam.

"Olwen said the professor wants you to come in for a chat on Monday." Griff spoke tersely. “About your year abroad. They thought they had a school for you, but apparently it’s fallen through. You haven't got a place."

- end of Chapter 1 -