Pillow Skies

This is an extract from the beginning of one of my plays called 'Pillow Skies'. It's the story of a girl who is raped whilst living on a farm in World War 2. In this passage we are introduced to the antagonists, the farmer (Llinos) and his wife (Mair). The play is performed in a very Brechtian style and the Narrator, who is omniscient and detached, speaks directly to the characters and interact with him, even though he doesn't exist.

Narrator: It was no secret that Llinos Owens beat his wife. And it was no surprise to hear that in her own secret rebellion Mair, his long suffering and outwardly patient spouse, had been cumulatively sabotaging the farm in silent hatred. She tore a whole in the chicken-wire for foxes to scramble through and every time Llinos stuffed an old shirt and trousers with hay in a vain attempt to assemble a scarecrow, within two nights the shirt would lie limp across his bird-savaged potatoes and the hay would blow across the field, skipping in the wind.

Mair would sometimes leave gates unlatched and Llinos, alert and furious, would trample around the farm night after night, not understanding why gates were always open and cattle roamed free, trampling crops and churning the ground to pot-holed mud and pea-soup puddles.

Mair: I hated him.

Narrator: And far beyond the jades of hell you hate him still.

Mair: I hate him only for his own hatred.

Narrator: And he hated you because of the way you looked him in the eye and told him that he meant nothing.

Mair: And that’s when he first hit me.

Narrator: And you hit him back.

Mair: And I miscarried his child.

Narrator: Llinos Owens was overlooked as a child. He was unimportant, showed no signs of brilliance or insanity. He played with other boys, but in secret had a china doll that he kept under a floorboard that, until the age of six, was occasionally glimpsed by his parents, but as soon as he developed a sense of guilt, Victoria was cradled by the cobwebs and the dust and never saw the light of day. He wasn’t ashamed of her, but his yearning to cherish and possess pretty things made him into a selective and snobbish magpie.

Llinos: I liked jam-jars and pencils and matchboxes and floral print tablecloth and little booties for baby girls.

Narrator: But Llinos had no desire to better his own appearance, his yearning was to covet and own. And his inanimate collection would be lined up docile, placid and unresisting and the more difficult the object to attain, the more he loved it. The more he wanted it.

Mair: I gave him no illusions that I wanted to be his wife.

Narrator: She was a pretty little thing when she was younger.

Mair: I was delicate and my cheeks flushed and my eyelashes were dainty and soft.

Llinos: She looked like a gossamer pillow made of bone china. She was a Russian doll with tiny versions of herself piled one inside the other and I wanted to expose the central tiny delicate version of the blushing white exterior. I wanted to hold it in my hand and I wanted it to be mine.

Narrator: But Mair hated Llinos.

Mair: I hate you Llinos.

Narrator: And in time Llinos hated Mair.

Llinos: I hate you Mair.

Narrator: And he no longer cared when he bruised her perfect skin and he watched as she ground down her perfect hands against the scrubbing brush and the now perfect floor. And Mair took to making jam and filling jar after jar with preserves and chutneys, which she delivered with letters filled with dreams and fantasy to loose friends and tenuous acquaintances and anyone who would reply.

Mair: I dream of sleep and death and plateaux strewn with wild horses and coelacanth peeping between broken shale and cracked earth. I dream of nothing and my husband blowing in the wind and flying across the Presellis on the back of an empty cloud. I dream there is a child and she screams from my belly and it opens up like a door.

Narrator: And never before had the farm felt such discord or suffered such pain. Pengelly Farm, nestled on the hill that would one day be blanketed with an oil refinery, was just a few miles west of Pembroke, and in the shadow of the thirties the land grew dark, and the soil turned grey and pests spread like Biblical plagues. And when the war came Mair prayed to God:

Mair: Let them call on Llinos and take him far, far away. And let them shoot him so his body is riddled with bullets and they eat him from the inside like maggots. Let him fight. Let him die. Oh Lord, let him die!

Narrator: But the call never came.