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Herman. He’s not exactly tame, is he? You know, the crow chick Lizzie German’s husband gave me just before the War. I named it after him. Don’t you remember? He had a broken wing and I mended it. They took him away because he was German and Lizzie never saw him again. He died in one of those internment camps on the Isle of Man. Poor Herman.’ She sees the confusion on Gwydion’s face. ‘Not the bird, the man. He was the kindest of men. But Herman the crow still comes to visit us.’
    â€˜So, can he talk? Herman?’ Gwydion says.
    â€˜Of course he can.’ She gives a laugh that sounds tinkling and false to her ears. ‘But I’m the only one who can understand him.’
    Gwydion grins down at her. He has grown so tall, but the boy is still there in the man’s face. She puts her hand on his cheek.
    â€˜Non,’ he says, the grin gone now, his face serious. ‘I have something to tell you. And a favour to ask.’
    A buzz of alarm runs through her at the gravity in his voice, her heart beats faster. Is it this that caused her to feel full of foreboding when she woke this morning?
    â€˜That camp you just mentioned – where Lizzie German’s Herman was sent? – it wasn’t the only sort of camp people were sent to during the War, you know. Did you hear of the camp at Frongoch? Near Bala?’
    She didn’t know there had been such a place so close. She shakes her head.
    â€˜They had German prisoners of war there to begin with, but they cleared them out and the English Government brought all the Irish freedom fighters they feared over after the Easter Rising and locked them up there – nearly two thousand of them. Plonk in the middle of Wales so no one thought ill of the English for it. And we let them do it, Non.’ His fist hits the open palm of his other hand.
    Non has never seen him so agitated, so serious; her Gwydion made light of everything. His eyes seem to flash at her and she steps back.
    â€˜Aoife’s cousin was there, that’s how I came to know about it, I went there with her to see the place. He was locked away for standing up for his countrymen’s rights, as if he was a common criminal. It makes me hot with shame to think about it.’
    Non is ashamed that she knows nothing about this atrocity.She puts out a restraining hand, but he ignores it, walking back and forth on the hard sand at the edge of the sea – the sea on which the sun will later lay down a red-gold path to Ireland – as if he were in a room, pacing.
    â€˜Aoife’s father finishes at Aber this summer,’ he says. ‘And I’m going back to Ireland with them, Non. Aoife and I will be married and I’ll help in Ireland’s fight for real independence. We could take lessons from the Irish, Non. We Welsh, we’re too subservient, we put up with everything that’s thrown at us.’
    He reminds her of his grandfather. Her memory of her father is a child’s, and she sees him now, pacing up and down in their large, cold kitchen where the fire in the range always seemed to have just gone out because he had forgotten to feed it, always heated about some political or moral question or other, and all the more heated, she realises now, for being powerless to do anything about it.
    â€˜And the favour?’ is all she can think of to say. Gwydion has made up his mind and nothing can sway him from his course.
    At that, the man disappears and the boy returns, the boy who would always call for Non if he had fallen or if one of his sisters had stolen his toy away from him. And the boy says, ‘Will you talk to Mam for me, Non? You know what she’s like. Will you stand up for me?’
    Time passes, the world revolves, the tide ebbs and flows. She puts her hand on his cheek once more. ‘No, Gwydion,’ she says. ‘If you’re man enough to fight battles for others, you’re man enough to fight your