Chapel Eisteddfod, by Glenys Prothero

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Bethel Chapel was full to the gallery, and the windows had steamed over with the breath of three hundred people in their Sunday wool. Megan Cadwaladr stood at the side of the platform in the white blouse her mother had ironed twice and waited for her name. She was fourteen. In the front pew, very upright, sat her grandmother, who had won the solo for girls under sixteen in this same chapel in the year the old King was crowned, and who had never let anybody forget it.

Megan knew the song as she knew her own front door. She had sung it to the hens, to the washing on the line, to the long wet mile home from school. She told herself so as Mrs Watkin settled at the harmonium. As she knew her own front door.

The first verse went beautifully. Her voice rose up into the varnished roof, clear and sure, and for a moment she forgot the adjudicator in his little box with his sharpened pencil. Then the harmonium paused for the second verse, and Megan opened her mouth, and there was nothing there.

Nothing at all. Where the words should have been was a clean white space, like a field after snow.

The silence spread outwards from the platform, pew by pew. Somebody’s child whimpered and was hushed. Megan felt the blood leave her hands and rush up into her face, and her knees, which had carried her to school and back for nine years without complaint, seemed to have been borrowed from a stranger. Her only thought, wild and absolute, was that she would never be able to walk down Chapel Street again.

She did not look at the front pew. She could not.

Mrs Watkin, without lifting her eyes from the music, simply played the introduction again, softly, as if that had always been the plan. And on the third note the first line came back to Megan, and the second line followed it, the way sheep follow one another through a gate. She sang the rest slowly and carefully, testing each word before she put her weight on it.

Afterwards, in the vestry, her grandmother came and straightened Megan’s collar without a word. Then she leaned close.

‘Nineteen hundred and two,’ she said. ‘Second verse. Stood there like a post for a full minute. Your great-grandfather never spoke of it again.’

Megan stared at her. It was the first she had ever heard of it.

How does the writer show Megan’s thoughts and feelings about her performance at the eisteddfod?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Megan
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.