Welsh Journals

Winner Takes Both By CON MORGAN WILLIE HANDEL WALTERS was nearly forty when he lost his mam. She was taken with a stroke in the middle of papering the best bedroom and went within a week. After all the years of her care and cherishing it came hard on him to fend for himself. He tried to manage, frying a few sausage when he came home from the shop in the evening and polishing the brass candlesticks every Friday night, but soon Willie Handel and the house began to show signs of neglect. A musty smell rose from the damp flagstones beneath the gay patterned linoleum, rusty patches ate like a disease into the steel fender and a blue obscuring bloom lay upon the brightness of the mirror and dulled the mahogany of his piano in the front room. Willie Handel's suit began to flap about his meagre body, his small head and outstretched neck wagged more tortoise- like than ever within the wide circle of his stiff white collar. Only his large opinion of himself suffered no change. When, at last, things were in such a plight that he could cope with them no longer, in spite of maternal warnings still ringing in his ears, he began looking round for a wife who would save him the expense of a housekeeper; and Fanny Jane, Cemetery House took to popping into Morris the Ironmonger's for three pennyworth of screws or a ball of string and suchlike, whenever she passed by and saw that Mr. Morris was out and Willie Handel would be the one to serve her. Fanny Jane was a tall, dark, full figured woman with a slightly tarnished reputation which she had decided to brighten by marrying Willie Handel Walters, Calvaria Chapel organist, now that his mother had loosed her hold on him. Old Mrs. Walters would have leapt from her grave could she have known of her son's attentions to such a one, but Hughes the Cemetery, Fanny Jane's father, was a man with a pride in his work and old Mrs. Walters lay deep in the hole he had dug, secure beneath the growing turf and an artificial wreath, unable to interfere in the matrimonial plans of his daughter. After the fiasco of the honeymoon at Aberystwyth, where Willie Handel succumbed to mumps, they returned to Pensteps and settled down into a habit of daily bickering. Fanny Jane moped about the untidy kitchen she was no longer interested when he talked of the