Not all headlands aspire to the condition of islands. But the Great Orme, as the Norse name is, or Gogarth as Welsh prefers – St Tudno’s headland – at the end of the Creuddyn Peninsula, was surely once an island. And it might become one again, with a little help from climate change in due time. If that happens it will fulfil an apocalyptic fantasy of my youth, in the name of small islands and their beauty. What still attaches and detains the Orme lies below sea-level but not yet below the sea.
In my day the Creuddyn isthmus – the name connotes bloodiness, after massacre – was for much of its length a delta of green farmland, with the town huddled and piled up a little at the end of it, taking a foothold where it might on the lower landward terraces of the Orme’s head. There, in winter, on the plain, flashes of flooding would surface to blink at the sky. These sudden surfacings, uplifting to heart and eye, most of all on a whistling-cold morning, were haunted by gulls and waders, oyster-catcher, curlew, sandpiper. They were a breath of fresh air and I loved the way they brought a frisson of shoreline landward of the town.
What caught me then and catches me now is the way such manifestations, such upwellings, expose the tenuous nature of our settlement. How easily it might go down, and be as nothing. Such flashes come to life most at dawn and nightfall, spring and winter, with change of light. So in youth and age tempus fugit inspires impatience and scorn at human vanity.
If only we could grasp our insignificance and live appropriately. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in Nature that is ours. So runs the text. It’s only a matter of time before souls become extinct, as I put it in a strange poem written in 1968 on Inis Mór: the soul is only human after all.
Edge-of-town supermarkets and new housing occupy those open spaces now. The flash-floods are drowned out by Asdaville and shopping ‘parc’, tarmac and concrete. The ground remains below sea-level, protected so far by sea-wall-cum-promenade. But there is hope yet, post- apocalypse, to name Ynys Gogarth or Tudno... or Inis Orme, Orme Island, the Isle of Orme, as anyone left alive might choose. Ferryman wanted.
My Scottish grandparents are buried on the Great Orme. They lie in a graveyard – O grave yard – whose cross-eyed northerly aspect squints up the Irish Sea, beyond the Isle of Man, to Galloway, home from home, for my grandpa at least (my granny was born in Govan). An ideal lodging, in the circumstances. Who wouldn’t prefer self-draining limestone to dank and wormy clay? I did not go to either funeral. I was deemed too young, even at twelve, my age when grandpa died. It was his death, my granny predeceased him, that brought us seven miles west along the coast to live at Tan-yr-Allt.
The house stood at the eastern boundary of Llandudno, high above the town, ‘under the wooded hill’, as so expressively the Welsh name has it. Where do you live? Under the wooded hill.... What a way to think and speak. Hard to think too at this point in my legendary ideal story that only ten years later I’d be living on Inis Mór (too mundanely, the big island), another limestone landscape to praise, living out my dream for real, or unreal, playboy of the western world. So this time under the wooded hill nursed the dream and helped it grow. What was the dream? That our lives are travesties, whatever our dreams. Or are dreams are travesties, whatever our lives? I know what I believe.
From our vantage beneath the cliffs, we oversaw the known world, 180° of it anyway, wild Wales and beyond, from the Carneddau and supporting cast – Black Lake country – in Eastern Snowdonia to the Isle of Man itself (a speck on a very clear summer’s evening), taking in Penmaenmawr, Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and Ynys Seiriol (Puffin Island aka Priestholm), across the Conwy estuary, and the Great Orme, in a single westerly panorama of chastening beauty.
Though before you get carried away, I should say too that the panorama included, slap in the middle of the picture-postcard, the town’s rusty gasometer and the rubbish tip. Over the tip yellow bulldozers sailed all day like trawlers on high seas. Beyond them according to the tide, year in year out, real old-style wooden-hulled trawlers came and went in the estuary, haloed by gulls as they ran home, their Ailsa Craig engines beating like my heart to see them from my high vantage point. Fare forward! What kind of youth was I, to be so hooked? What was written into me to set my course like that?
Gulls wheeled about the bulldozers to strengthen the sea-going simile, and flew in their wake, raucous airborne litter, day-in-day-out, a billowing conflagration, burning intensely at sunset, in summer from the wooded hill. In the middle ground, the gasometer went up and down like an iron lung, according to the tides of consumption and supply, high and low water, breathing in sea-air corrupted by the tang of refuse, endless garbage from the town’s hotels. But it was all beautiful to me, the salt air and the windy town, the mountains, the islands, the estuary and the running sea: my province to find beauty in ugliness. Why wouldn’t it be?
For Nature is everything and nothing without the human entanglement. Or who’d sing and celebrate it and all its wonder and waste? Who’d pay it homage? Apart from the shorebirds with their starry chatter, the song-thrush in the dark wood, the blackbird – those immortals of our parish? Though you’ll hear them sing out of season more often now, thrown out of kilter as they are by their body clocks. Wind them on, wind them back. What’s happened to the Spring?
* * *
Here and now, under the wooded hill, we were confirmed in our unbelonging: cultural and social borderers, within and without the town, newcomers, ‘Mcs’ not ‘aps’. We’d stepped from Denbighshire into Caernarfonshire. This was a marked difference most simply expressed in terms of Sunday opening. Our Sundays must now be dry. We were in hellfire Wales proper, if with limestone not brimstone. Though that hardly concerned me then, as to drinking. By the time it did, the populace had voted, or was on the brink of voting, to join the twentieth century, good or ill.
Had we not moved, and at the very threshold of my teens, it always strikes me hard how my life would have been utterly different. My social roots would have been stronger. I would have been a different person, with quite other stories to tell of that time, and I’m sure even as to subsequent adventures. So vital and determining was it, and for me at least, so perfect in its timing: as I left boyhood behind and embarked on youth, wildly unworldly by today’s standards, but an honest-to-god sinner in those times. So chance makes us and becomes choice, or seems to. Who was it said those who voyage across the seas change their skies but not their souls? (The poet Horace.) But my soul underwent a sea-change none the less and how could it not with the skies the way they were now in our westerly and northerly seascape?
Not that uprooting from the Red Wood didn’t have its hurts. Nor was it complete, for my father still worked there, and we always kept our family friendships there, and knew great ties in heartening reciprocity of affection.
Like the Red Wood too, the wooded hill was a place of jackdaws. They nested on the cliff, they nested in our chimney, and cackled continuity, immortal markers always in my mental map. So it is even as I hear them in the evening now in suburban middle England, flying in loose flocks home to roost, wherever home might be for them here, not down our chimney, anyway. Homage to them, local shades, and their sudden blissful crescendi and shimmer above the wooded bryn.
Not that coming to a new school didn’t have its traumas. Flashbacks from my original educational shellshock disturbed me at John Bright Grammar School. There I found my education much less advanced than that of my fellows. I was behind in everything, except cross-country running. Even in English, otherwise my only academic salvation, I lagged. For here it was more about drawing columns and parsing sentences than anything else. You hardly saw a poem or read a book or had a chance to write an essay in those middle years, and there lay my emerging interest, blessing or curse, my only possible salvation.
For a while, I couldn’t work out what on earth they were doing. It was disturbingly like not being able to read. I regressed into that earlier hypnotised-rabbit state caught in the headlights of what I couldn’t construe. Such misery. The shade of it can hover about me even now, if I have to do anything remotely testing with numbers. I can feel my ears burn this minute at the mere thought of it.
I knew then what a sentence was, and an adjective: a thing to purge, according to my father, and an adverb, and so on. Writing is just what’s in your mind, he’d say. You don’t need to know any of that. Though damn me for a fool when an end-of-term report suggested I took him at his word. But even when you roughly got the hang of it, filling columns, treating sentences as if they were formulae in chemistry, was the soul of boredom. What was the point of it? What was the point of any of it – the so-called education? I preferred chemistry. I did very well in chemistry. How on earth I do not know. In reality though I preferred the word, spoken and heard. As I do now. But now I add the printed word, as the alpha and omega of all.
On Mondays, in the trout fishing season, I’d sometimes be so tired anyway and distracted by the reverie of yesterday and the promise of next Sunday, there was very little I could work out at all. I spent a lot of lesson-time in speculation, in considering the ways of the brown trout and the secrets held along the shores of the Black Lake. Nor was my homework likely to have been done.
If I wasn’t daydreaming about trout, it would be about a hare I’d seen that sudden frosty morning, in the low field, quite unusual to see there. Or it was a pheasant that had rocketed into our wood from next door. Would it be there – somewhere to intuit and stalk in the fading light – when I got home? Or in winter when snow fell in the hills I’d rehearse how I’d steal up on the woodcock I knew to be haunting the bottom of the dark wood, as soon as school was over and I could hurry home.
The school I now found myself in had no time for that kind of thing. I don’t suppose any school ever had, not even a hedge school, the only kind of school I’ve ever liked the sound of. More hedge than school, I’d hope. It was a highly ambitious school and gave no resting place to the idle dreamer, nor so much as a hint of laurel for the proud scholar to rest on. Not that it ever told us much about John Bright himself. You’d never have guessed he was a radical deeply reviled by the establishment of his day. That might have been something encouraging to know.
But it liked the high-minded association with Mancunian Liberalism and being on the right side of the Corn Laws. That is: the wrong side to the powers that were, with some gesture of sympathy implied, at least, for those who perished in the Great Hunger. Virtue with the benefit of hindsight is all too easy. But I suppose it’s better than its opposite. None the less, every year the school sent people to Oxbridge, in the best Welsh tradition, builder’s son, butcher’s son... nurse’s daughter.
In my year and the years immediately above and below, they schooled future professors of botany and history, medical consultants, lawyers, doctors, in considerable number, relative to the local population. They even schooled me, far better than I knew or wanted to believe, holding me back a year that I might develop and come to my senses. Which is a nonsense to say in my case. For I needed to come away from my senses, from my intense sensual pleasure in the world about me, if I needed anything, that is. An institution is only the sum of its individual representatives at a given time. Not even its sum. Only one of all the schoolmasters I suffered under had a life-altering effect on me, and that was the late J.K. Warburton (a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge) who introduced me to the nineteenth-century French writers, the poets especially, Baudelaire above all. He used to say he slept with a portrait of Baudelaire pinned to his bed-head. He was a bachelor, a Methodist lay-preacher, a gay man at a time when it was illegal to be so and lead a fulfilled life.
By way of salvation, right on my first day, I found myself in a class with an older youth, Michael-John Thomas – they were all older youths and older girls; girls always being older in mind than youths, and my birthday falling in August: they’d never look twice at me, no matter how many times I looked at them.
Himself a transplant, from the South Wales valleys, Mikey-John was a great sea-fisher. By chance we’d already met fishing on Colwyn pier the summer before. He was just short of a year my senior. We’d hit it off at once, both of us fanatics for fish, swapping local knowledge, telling tall tales about how good the fishing was in our respective territories.
His fishing already extended to Anglesey, and Llandwyn Island. I was still in the nursery compared with him, with his tales of tope- and conger-fishing... and skate as big as grand-pianos, in the deeps at the far reaches of Llandudno Bay. The happy accident didn’t help my studies, but it improved my fishing no end to have a local guide to the estuary and the Orme, a youth who went on to work in the fisheries at Conwy. His approach to fish and fishing even then was much more an exercise in field science than an intuitive shot in the dark of Davy’s locker, dreaming under the heavens, such as I preferred.
Apart from Trefor Samuels, Mikey was the first South Walean I ever got to know, he and his mother who worked for her mother in the general store on the council estate. I recognize now, there was a different kind of sociability to them and solidarity, and so with Mikey’s South Walean stepfather, who worked in the Junction at Hotpoint. Trefor had it too, lighting his fag in the mountain rain, a warmth first and last. They showed they liked you. They put the human first, in all its fallibility. ‘Macky’ the Thomases called me, and ‘Macky-boy’, until it became universal in the known world. To begin with my family looked askance at Mikey’s turquoise luminous socks and black winkle-pickers, at the expense of the soul within. But they took him to their bosom in the end.
* * *
Unlike the one in the hymn, ours was not a green hill exactly. It was literally a wooded hill, or more properly a cliff and a bluff, limestone scarp with outcrop cliffs, terraces, rough grasses, gorse, larch, and thorny scrub. Nor was it far away. I could see it from the schoolyard, and in some cases the classroom. The wood itself, though, was largely evergreen, but the green was broken, relieved by a limestone backdrop, a stone full of brightness and glare, on sunny days above all, and moonlit nights, and never dour but only a little drab in rain.
Great Norwegian pines, forty foot high and more, swept in a tide, a turbulent strait, round the base of the hill. They filled out, up beyond our cottage, into a deep, steep wood, an evergreen sea, a sea-chasm, where the cliffs fell back raggedly, to form the wood’s high margin. It was a high and for much of it a very steep wood, petering to a little strand of sporadic hazel, ash and yew, along the southerly boundary, and at its topmost southeast corner, where the tawny owl liked to roost in the ivy.
Not that the wood was coterminous with the property to the east. A little more ground, rough and stony and steep, clambered beyond it to the back wall, the land’s most open border, in regular need of repair against our neighbour’s wandering sheep. Farther back still from the wood’s northern edge, putting an L-shape in our boundary, rose an isolated outcrop of wind-bent larches and pines, Tam O’Shanter Scots pines among them, bonnets set askew by the prevailing westerlies. This wild planting was more-or-less hemmed in by gorse and bramble entanglement and penned back to right-angled walls, the outermost cape or point to our territory.
It was a good place to go if you wanted no one to find you. As I often wanted no one to find me, I was often there. It was a hard place too from which to dislodge wily sheep. The jay tended to skulk here, and the magpie made a nest. Quite often on a warm day a cock pheasant would pick his way in and sun himself beyond the far gorse, a challenge to stalk him there. The place was like a little island, remote, and rarely visited, unless by the sheepdog from the pig farm that neighboured us near there.
Next, beyond, in this back-country lay the disused gulf of Nant-y-Gammar limestone quarry, and farther round, a continuation of our limestone seascape, the Little Orme. Also across that direction but hidden from view, the high village of Pen-y-Bryn where nearly every householder was a pigeon fancier. These men were like poets in their passion for the homing bird. Place-names like Gabowen, Craven Arms and Frome and, beyond the channel: Rennes, La Rochelle, Nantes, Poitiers, Bordeaux... from whence their birds raced home were poetry on their lips and in their hearts.
Pines stood right over our cottage, within a few feet of it at the nearest, and over the yard. Some of them grew straight out of the rock, even out of the face of the cliff itself, having seeded in crannies and grown out and up, crook-handled to the sky.
The cliff immediately behind the house – about sixty feet or so off through the trees at its nearest – was like a land-bound headland, as was another crag in our neighbour’s property. More markedly, so was the high-domed bryn known as Fferm. In time, as we observed, the crags of this bryn were colonised by fulmars. Fferm loomed beyond our southern march wall, in Gloddaeth Estate, the demesne of Lord Mostyn. For we had march walls here, on three sides, containing five tilted acres.
Our northern or seaward boundary was discontinuously marked. It ran fenced through a walled orchard, and there was a gate across a path, a strand of barbed wire across a footpath at the very height of the cliff. But no walls make best neighbours, and our neighbours were good neighbours, a family of smiling Christadelphians called Collins. Irish perhaps they were by descent? Kindly folk, they turned the other cheek and a blind eye to a trespassing youth who stalked and hunted pheasants and wood-pigeons and skulked and mooched, and come spring plundered their cliff for herring-gull eggs, as pleased him, in the upper part of what was called ‘Collins’s Wood’, some nine mostly deciduous steep but at the top more open and rolling acres.
The combined properties had once been a single pocket estate, the ‘big house’ most recently a hotel, our stone-built slate-roofed cottage belonging then to the gardener. In our fiefdom therefore we had an old stone deep-cellared shed called the potting shed, opposite the house, bounding a crazy-paved blue slate courtyard, above which loomed a flotilla of pines. What a thing it was to have a fiefdom, how absorbing and securing. It became part of my consciousness, an outward manifestation of my imaginative life. It haunted me as I went to sleep and in my absences, as at school. I haunted it.
Just beyond the rose-bed there was greenhousing of commercial proportions, including a series of three long, linked, lean-to greenhouses against a plastered wall, and a vinery. Joined together in a ‘T-shape’, the long greenhouse and the vinery enclosed the top end of an orchard. All a little dilapidated now, they were patched and repaired as best makeshift could do. But the great arterial pipes and the underground boiler-room meant to heat them lay defunct and beyond repair. Yet another big greenhouse stood between the potting shed and the vinery. Here my grandpa had indulged his passion for cacti, and brought on other pot-plants, and it remained for us the cactus house. Who otherwise could never have dreamt of such a thing in our wildest dreams in Red Wood country.
If the greenhouses were serviceable enough, so was the orchard of espaliered apple trees. The staves of wires on which the trees had once been trained were rusted now and broken from their stansions. But gnarled and wired through, reaching out finger-tips to each other, the trees could yet with due pruning fill with blossom in spring and bear more apples than we knew what to do with come autumn. And there were pears a-plenty on trees trained against a sunny stretch of high wall, down beyond the long greenhouse, where my father kept his bees.
These fruit trees and greenhouses stood to the north, seaward of the cottage. They were walled off above the lane by a high wall, in summer topped by that succulent import, red-flowering and white-flowering valerian. The stuff grew anywhere it might seed and root and it flourished in the limestone. So did the great fuchsia, outside our gate, under the gable end of the potting shed. A ground-hugging plant with evergreen leaves and red berries I cannot remember to name claimed much of the lower terrace of the cliff in the same burgeoning fashion.
To the south, inland, below the wood proper, was an area variously used for keeping fowls and growing vegetables. It was skirted by a long hazel hedge running atop a wall, beside a footpath, all that became of the lane at this point, leading, via a stone stile, into the Gloddaeth Estate. Pheasants from the Estate liked to pick along the bottom of this hedge. I was always on the lookout for them and sometimes shot one from the bathroom window, or otherwise slipped from the house to stalk one.
Here, across the way, beyond the little farm, rose the wooded Bryn Maelgwyn, an ancient bardic allt, east of Deganwy, itself a legendary location. Both are to be discovered in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the Mabinogion. But the Maelgwyn and related stories are omitted by modern scholars as belonging elsewhere, not in the branches of those legends. Yet I wish they would provide them anew. For they are a wonder and of the genius of that part of the world, worthy an appendix at least. I could see these places every day when the leaves were off the high hazel hedge, as I stood to clean my teeth. Idle window-haunting filled much of my time. It was a male pursuit in our house, sometimes shared and accompanied by spoken observation. Then at any moment it might become intensely purposeful, as I’d be despatched with the gun, at my father’s direction, in the hope of putting one delicacy or another on the menu.
The terrain of Gloddaeth – of the entire known world, in outline anyway – has been described by that intrepid Welsh traveller, and explorer in the Western Isles, Thomas Pennant:
From hence is a short walk to GLODDAETH... placed on the slope of a very extensive hill, or lime-stone rock.... The upper walks [reaching the heights of Fferm, beyond our wooded hill], having fortunately a steep and stubborn rock for their basis, checked the modish propensity to rectitude; so there was a necessity to deviate from it; but in no greater degree than the flexure of a zigzag would admit. Notwithstanding some blemishes, corrigible at an easy rate, these walks may be considered among those of the first rate of this island, for such beauties of view as nature can bestow; and, from those spots favoured by the sight of Conwy, I may add the majestic ones of ancient art. Every flight of path presents new and grand objects; first the great windings of the river towards Llanrwst, the lofty towers of Conwy, and the venerable walls of the town; and beyond is a long extent of alps, with Moel Siabod, the Drûm, and Carnedd Llewelyn and Dafydd [Black Lake country], towering with distinguished height. From a little higher ascent is opened to us the discharge of the Conwy into the sea, sublimely bounded by lesser Penmaen, and the immense Orm’s Head, or Llandudno; between which appear, a fine bay, the vast promontory of Penmaen Mawr, the isle of Priestholm, and the long extent of Anglesey. After gaining the summit, beneath is seen a considerable flat, with the estuary of the river Conwy falling into the Irish sea on one side, and the beautiful half-moon bay of Llandudno on the other: one of whose horns is the great head of the same name; the other the lofty head of Rhiwleden, or the little Orm’s Head. A little farther progress brings us in sight of a great bay, sweeping semicircularly the shores; and beyond are the distant hills of Flintshire, and the entrances into the estuaries of the Mersey and Dee, frequently animated with shipping.
Like Robinson Crusoe on his island, we could have subsisted under the wooded hill, had we really been pressed to. And for several years we produced and kept more than we could consume, honey from the honey-bee too. Asdaville and its like hadn’t been invented. We lived a little closer to nature, but fortunately not out of necessity. My father still had his day job and wrote and wrote away, books and journalism, as if there might be no tomorrow, as I often wished at the end of Sunday, or when the holidays were on their last legs.
Tan-yr-Allt was a land of milk and honey, except we kept no cow. It was Eden. Though we toiled and moiled hard there, for our potato crops, early and late, our peas and beans, cabbages and sprouts, spinach and leeks, tomatoes, courgettes and pumpkins, squashes and grapes, our fresh eggs, and against the predations of mouse and rabbit, foraging wood-pigeon, egg-stealing jay, magpie and crow.... Wasn’t Adam a gardener and didn’t he delve? It was paradise gained and full of firewood. It was deliverance from the shipwrecked world. It was heaven on earth, especially to a youth of my inclination, head turned by the Black Lake.
I was now the luckiest person I knew, self-sufficient there in mind too, up the rocky unmade lane, off the last easterly back-road of the town, beyond the pale. My luck would run out at school as you know and I would run adrift there. Yet, to no one’s greater astonishment than my own, I passed my exams and got into the sixth form. There ahead of me, a year my senior, and destined for medical school, the history master’s daughter could no longer quite look down on me. I’d fallen off the cliff for her the year before. But even as I left the precipice, I knew my passion and devotion were absurd.
At that stage I was as nothing, utterly unaccomplished, disreputable even, one of the ‘lads’, if a little on the edge of them, by dint of living where I did and being a bit of an odd one. I was young for my years too. So I hope I am still and still postponing to be wise. A scholarly girl, part of the school establishment, a master’s daughter, a girl who listened to classical music and played Chopin and Rachmaninov on the piano, who knew her vocation, and so beautiful besides, was hardly going to deign to consider me when she could have her pick of the scholarly boys.
No matter everyday I aligned myself in assembly so that I could fix her with my eye, and steal glances between the heads of other boys, as we sang our hymns: ‘There is a green hill far away’... etc, and listened to the announcements.... I was a hobbledehoy who reared racing pigeons, kept a ferret called ‘Gorgeous’ (who turned out to be afraid of rabbits), reared a pet owl (if one cosmopolitanly named ‘Hibou’*), procured by a half-gipsy acquaintance who left school early to become a deckhand on the Conwy trawlers. But watch this space.
The bright ‘snowcemmed’ cottage, cream not white, stood perched high above the lane, rising directly up a fair height from it, its westerly frontage like the side of a fortress. The house itself caught the light. Once you closed the gate behind you, a solid wooden gate too high to see over, affording no view through it, and climbed the slate steps, you left the world and its worries, shut away at your back. There was no need ever to return to either, except the law of the land obliged you to go to school.
Except the estuary beckoned and Gogarth’s shore, the Orme’s west side, with promise of fish: flounder and plaice, bass and mackerel. The pierhead, too, sang its siren song, a nightfishing song above all, lunging and booming as it waltzed to the tide’s motion, like a night out at the Winter Gardens, dancing the conga, and ten sheets to the wind at the Northwestern. It stalked on its centipede legs in the Orme’s shadow, wading up to its chest in winter shoals of codling and whiting. Except that from 1 March to 30 September the Black Lake pined for Sunday.
Down below us ran another pinewood in the grounds of a huge crescent-shaped building of grey stone, and glaring orangey-red paintwork, a convalescent home called Lady Forester’s, for industrial workers from England (how different their pale dressing-gowned and pyjama’d lives, as you might glimpse them, taking the air on the fire-escape, stealing a smoke). So we had the sea-sound of pine-trees all around, and the sea itself to see at a glance, and to sense in the air, and on wild nights to hear its long drawl, swept up with the roar and crash of pine-masts. On such nights, our bedrooms being in the roof, I’d be rocked to sleep, and startled awake by sudden powerful blasts, and wonder if it mightn’t prove my last night on earth. It was very like being at sea, timbers taking the strain, bulwarks and roof-tree, against the house-high waves and crashing breakers of packed air.
We took a westerly and southwesterly full on, and a northwesterly too, even a northerly quite directly. But cold easterlies couldn’t get at us at all, though they do their worst, and so we were snug and warm when they blew, tucked up there cozily, safe and sound. One furious night when the wind was in the northwest, some thirty or forty giant pines were levelled down in Lady Forester’s. The calamity sounded like the end of the world, just below my bedroom window. A high dormer window, like a lookout in the roof, it always took the brunt of things. Our trees howled and crashed, in great waves running like the sea, but they stood firm, rooted in rock as they were. The greenhouses took a battering, though, with the loss of many panes, and much work to do to repair them as in a poem by Theodore Roethke, brought to harbour at dawn.
Then with the dawn came the aftermath of purest essence, a distillate, in the high tops, the trees thinned of dead branches, the yard and paths and slopes littered with needles and cones, a harvest of kindling thrown ashore. The jackdaws would be cackling as if for the first time in creation, and gulls mewling, and somewhere a pheasant might crow in the wake of the storm, as on summer days you’d hear one, in David v. Goliath style, answering the quarry-blast at Penmaenmawr.
But the air would still be boisterous and billowing, and the sea-horses stampeding, rearing, the morning after the night before, all the way to and fro between Anglesey and our shore, out round the Isle of Man and back, and down the Irish strand by Wicklow where the fishing fleet rode out the night, Frenchmen among them... L’Etoile, Le Guillemot and their sisters later known to Seamus Heaney, tuning in to the shipping forecast, just across the sea in Ireland from where we were in Wales: the known world, district and circle.
The wooded hill was not new to me. I had known it from the early fifties, when my grandpa bought the place, on retirement. A blacksmith-next-tenant farmer’s son who’d left school in Galloway at fourteen for an apprenticeship on Clydeside, he had since risen in the aircraft industry, to become a production manager for Fairey Aviation and then AVRoe. Now he turned his hand to running his smallholding and like a good Scottish engineer built things to last forever, a henhouse as stout as Noah’s ark, a place for them to roam in as secure as a prison yard and as ugly as a concentration camp; and if a thing was broken he repaired it, in the same spirit, calling on my father for labour at the weekends.
There was a peasant’s mentality to what he did and a barbarism to his building. Nor would he give us anything but like someone in a story by Maupassant sold us our eggs and wrote the sale up with a pencil in his little notebook. As to landscaping, my father inherited something of his father’s blindness. But under our occupancy the brutalism was softened and some more thought given to the look of things.
In grandpa’s time, we would go there regularly on a Saturday, or a Sunday in the trout-fishing close season, and have a direct injection of Scotland, under the wooded hill. There wide-eyed I began my explorations and developed my skulking, mooching, stalking, day-dreaming, solitude skills, as brought to perfection at the Black Lake. Where nothing happens, everything begins to happen, nothing being a contradiction in terms.
In those days much more of formality survived to be seen in the grounds. Gardens and pathways echoed something of what Pennant called ‘the modish propensity to rectitude’, but not without the redeeming ‘flexure of a zigzag’. There were garden beds, and just below the big wood, on a terrace, steps led to a sundial. Pampas plumes rose from clumps on either side, like silver-white torches, at the entrance to the dark wood, where I was so happy to be lost. As night fell, how ghostly visible those torches would be: you could use them to steer yourself down the path after a night-time adventure.
Back along the way by the long greenhouse, a blind turret stood above the path. In through the bottom of the wood ran the remains of a chain-link fence, and its gate at the top end, at the wood’s southerly entrance, beyond the sun dial, could still be closed, though with difficulty. It was the kind of fence you’d find round a tennis court in the grounds of a country estate. What this one had been intended to keep in, or out, wasn’t clear. Now it ran rusted and wrecked under the pines, through clumps of elder.
But the height of all formality and gothic grandeur was the tower at the top of the cliff. You reached it by a zigzag path whose flexure Pennant would have surely approved. It climbed up through undergrowth, round to the south of the main cliff, where the rock dropped back, beside the northerly edge of the big wood. At last it reached a terrace and ran along a couple of hundred yards or so, a little crooked and uneven way, between bramble and scrub, thorn and larch and gorse. By the time it reached almost to the open clifftop, the gorse towered six and seven feet high in places. In wild weather it lunged on the wind and stabbed you in the face and about your head, if you didn’t shield yourself with a raised elbow and duck down.
Then you emerged and the known world lay spread out before you, just as if you were looking down from the window of an Aer Arann plane or a post-war Dakota, bound for Galway or Dublin. The tower commanded the breath-taking view described by Pennant, the full panorama. It was an eyrie, a lookout, a bird’s eye view. And it was capacious. You could easily accommodate half a dozen or more people in it, for a picnic. In those early days the remnant of a flagpole survived there.
From the tower you could look down not just on the town – the Naples of the North, with its beautiful crescent bay – and the wider land- and seascape across to Anglesey but also down at wheeling jackdaws and gulls too. And as they swept up you found yourself among them. It was the most exhilarating place on earth. There were the mountains. There hidden away among them was the Black Lake. When my grandpa lay dying in the town’s hospital, all exhilaration spent, just beyond the gasworks, we once or twice went up to wave a huge Scottish flag as big as a tablecloth, not the more beautiful Blue Saltire, which was too threadbare to survive the exercise, but the one with the rampant lion, to make him smile, if we could. Though we could not tell if we succeeded.
The tower stood right at the northern boundary of the property. Just a couple of steps beyond its entrance and you entered Collins’s wood, my favourite territory. I preferred it partly because it was a mixed wood, largely deciduous, low and wind-combed in its upper reaches. Hunting was better there. And partly I loved it because, strictly speaking, I wasn’t supposed to be there, with or without a gun. It was a trespass, and trespass in pursuit of game, I could exaggerate with impunity, yet register the thrill of needing not suddenly to bump into Brian Collins, or his father, so as not to embarrass either party.
Fire a shot in there and watch, and listen, and steal to another part of the wood, lie low and watch, and listen. Hadn’t I read The Poacher’s Handbook by Ian Niall? Didn’t its author bring me up by hand? Let a little while go by unless another opportunity to fill the pot springs up or passes. Then retreat right along the back of the wood, and loiter there as evening falls and the wood-pigeons come to roost, or refuse to. Just so...
I waited in those days until the evening thinned
All light away to distant strings and
Starry clusters, and a green pier-light
Blowing, like a bird’s bright eye,
Away below, starboard on that seaboard.
It’s not that I let anything distract me
At that wood’s edge where I stood sentry.
Though I heard the odd one flutter home
Far behind me, and remembered the scent
Of cropped clover and barley.
And caught a kestrel briefly, anchored at
The corner of my eye, but kept my watch unblinking,
Through thick and thin, though rain spat sharply
And night loomed in. Still they wouldn’t come.
As if something warned them I was there.
I’ve waited for poems in the same way since,
At the edge of things, in the heart’s dark border.
And just as shrewdly they’ve stayed away.
Though I’ve caught sight too late
Of their shadows passing, on the way home.
Or I’d spend the entire day there with the .22 airgun called Meteor with its telescopic sight, and make a little fire and cook a blackbird, or a wood-pigeon breast in a piece of foil. Follow your circuit like a fox. Be invisible. Dream of never needing to go home again. Relish nightfall and the winter air descending cold on that beautiful country, sharpening the outline of everything in sight, until night rises up, for it is a mistake to speak of nightfall. Night’s of the earth and rises up to fill out shadows as the sun goes down.
By the time we moved in, the formal qualities of the old hotel grounds had fallen a good deal farther from view since the day my grandpa bought his portion of them. Wilderness had taken over more of the place. We kept the paths open, but in a rough and ready way. It was a kind of benign neglect, as far as I was concerned, making it a better place of escape, a better place for bird-life, a better country to stalk. But it wasn’t all benign and it wasn’t all neglect.
Soon some trespassing youths burnt the remaining stump of the flagpole, and just about as soon, my father converted the tower into a more-or-less impenetrable fortress, its walls coiled with tangles of barbed wire, its entrance barred with a gimcrack portcullis. Theoretically you could raise and lower this great metal contraption through tracks of angle-iron, especially if your name was Hercules, and didn’t mind grazing all the skin off your knuckles in the attempt.
It was easier to climb the wall and find a way through the barbed wire. At which I soon became so expert I could do it in the dark. And regularly I had to, but usually only when the very worst storms blew off the coast. For my father, frustrated by our limited television reception installed a TV-aerial up there, elaborately guyed and wedged to hold its alignment to the signal from Manchester or wherever it was it came from in England.
Up until then, down below, under the cliff we were better served by RTE than any other station, something that gave us ‘The Riordans’ soap opera, the tolling ‘Angelus’ at six, ‘Gay Byrne’... from across the Irish Sea, though we also got the basic BBC. The trouble was no guys or wedges could do anything when a storm hit the cliff head on. Then the aerial would invariably wrench itself out of alignment with all signals. That such winds could be accompanied by lashing rain had nothing to do with the sleety picture-quality or anything that my father heeded. His imperative – as if our lives depended on it – was to restore reception. It was a calamity. So off I’d be despatched, with a heavy mole wrench, a hammer, and a lamp, up to the dark tower, as if I was Childe Harold turned aerial man.
Given the serious nature of the emergency, I paid no heed whatsoever to the long route, but went straight up the cliff, no matter the cold blast and the wild roar of the pines. I’d done it often enough in daylight I could have done it blindfold. First I had to clamber round by the jackdaw’s nesting hole, a deep round hole, about the diameter of an apple, created by some flaw in the rock, then struggle on along the first terrace, round up the next step of cliff, often through rainy squalls, and then the second step, more deafening bluster, at last to the tower.
Here the struggle to get in was the more difficult not simply because the coils of barbed wire shook in the wind and were all the harder to negotiate, but because I’d know my father’s impatience was itself reaching storm force. I scarcely took time to look out into the storm, to see the town-lights all blurred and blowing, the sea surging, white and broken through the dark, and, perhaps, if the wind was in the west, the bleary lights of a vessel riding out the storm in the lee of the Orme.
Once in the tower the task was to turn the mast into what I guessed was the right position, and to secure it as best I could. The cottage being invisible, away down under the cliff, I had then to climb out, and climb down the first step of rock, to the edge of the next terrace to flash the lamp, requesting a signal. A fully drawn curtain signalled success, a curtain swept impatiently to and fro meant back to the drawing board.
Could the TV be so important? I assure you it could, and every minute lost was viewing never to be recovered, I suppose. So to the dark tower back I came, climbing its wall again, fighting through the barbed wire, getting hooked up on it and scratched by it, struggling with the cold metal mast, hammering and wrenching, not to say swearing, against the deafening wind. Then back down to the ledge again and so on.... What was the code? Was that an opened curtain, way down there? It was no good my father coming out and shouting, as sometimes he chose to. The wind just snatched his voice away, like a hand over his mouth. (How I wished that hand was mine.) You couldn’t begin to guess what he was trying to say.
Meanwhile the wind roared, the rain pelted, and abandoned homework festered. The tower wall grazed me, the barbed wire tore me, and the cold metal of the mast and guys numbed my hands, all so that my father might lie on the sofa and watch whatever it was he generally slept through or otherwise condemned as rubbish.
So we settled from the Red Wood under the Wooded Hill, and made our new lives there, complete with grandpa’s TV.
* * *
For me, in those first three to four years, before and as I fell hook-line-and-sinker for the Welsh girl, the wooded hill held me in its thrall. It did so even more than the Black Lake, being on my doorstep, a place more than big enough to disappear in, beyond sight and earshot. It was the dream, the realm of escape, of resolution and independence. No doubt it entailed labour and being at my father’s beck-and-call. But that was no price to pay, and I loved it the more the stronger I grew. So the more independent I could be, at working the slope with the two-stroke rotovator, planting the spuds, and so on, thinking on stories of life at North Clutag, authentic peasant life close to the earth. I can think of no happier times, however shadowed by school, however desolate the last day of holiday. There’s no mystery in it. What boy primed as I had been wouldn’t have felt he had died and gone to heaven under the wooded hill?
There is familiarity and there is intimacy. Intimacy is never familiar but always new. But familiarity can afford it shelter and foster it, as it might foster love. At first to steal from the house with my gun was unfamiliar, an unaccustomed freedom. Before long, gradually, as if stalking step by step, entering that world became like putting on my old army surplus jacket, jeans and boots. I wore the place about me. I smelt of the earth there. It sheltered and fostered me, warped round me as the Black Lake did on Sunday. Black Lake water ran through me, animated me, but this was all present to my eye, each day, school or not.
This was my element. My clothes breathed it. They were worn by it as I wore them, torn, scuffed, grown into the place and earthy. My gun was a tool, an accessory, an extension of me, a talisman. This was especially so when quite soon I graduated to use the Damascus double-barrelled gun my father had used in his youth at North Clutag, a gun discharged by my great grandfather and my grandpa in their day, a twelve-bore gun that spoke to me of many an exploit and occasion. I could lurk cradling it and enjoying it with affection as part of my inwardness.
Talk about worn. Talk about Damascene moments. Its beautiful Damascus steel barrels were paper-thin and would not have survived proofing. They weren’t made with modern powder in mind. But my father, I know not how, had hoarded a big cache of black powder wartime cartridges, in old metal ammunition cases, and I used these until I fired the last of them. They weren’t too dodgy but sometimes you got a dud that failed to go off. They left more soot up the chimney than their modern counterparts too. Then my father latched on to a lighter modern cartridge that did as well, if no better, except there were no damp squibs. All this reduced the range at which I might knock a wood-pigeon or a pheasant out of the air. In consequence I became a quick snap shot, which suited our tight terrain, if not an exceptionally good shot for the long, deliberate interception. (I had my moments, none the less.)
But the point of it all was I shot for the pot and had the best of whatever I shot, first served, whatever it was, but especially if it was at all exotic, like a woodcock, when I’d have the whole thing to myself, of course. Woodcock are hard to come by. They know the flexure of a zigzag to be sure, when they startle up from the wood floor. But in the evening when they fly in circuits round their territory, in a habit known as roding, they do so steadily, and can be hit more easily. They were scarce, though, scarce as serious snowfall.
Even the pheasants were scarce, unless in the autumn, and after Gloddaeth’s first shoots of the season, when survivors sought refuge under the wooded hill and in the grounds below us. The pheasant had to be earned. I became expert in the terrain. Sometimes my father and I would be window-haunting, he talking to me as we stared out, and we’d see a cock bird shoot up and fly away up through the wood, or onto the cliff.
I’d take the angle of it and my father would despatch me, as if I was a dog. And like a sheepdog I might go a big deep circuit, up through the bottom of Collins’s wood, and round, fast at first and then come on stalking moccasin-light to where experience told me the bird was likeliest to be by the time I got there. I was all eyes and ears and moved as if preceding myself by the range of a gunshot or two, in the zone with my prey. It was as if I dispensed with physical presence. I have to say little escaped. By the time I was sixteen, my speed and stealth, my animal knowledge of the territory saw to that.
It would be a while before the hammered single-barrelled gun came my way, a long gun with a very tight choke. With the heavier cartridge known as a Maximum it had far greater range than most guns. My father had no equal at the very outer limits of its range, as suggested in this poem called ‘Cormorant’:
I remember the day the old man shot one
high over the house and how it folded,
like a winded umbrella, and came down
in a thorn bush, stone dead, neck collapsed,
wings hooked up to dry for the last time.
But why still, that nervous, apprehensive wonder,
the word skart on my tongue for pleasure?
Why couldn’t I settle to sleep that night
for thinking about it? I wasn’t upset.
I didn’t weep. It got what was coming to it.
It was the devil, the thief on the cross, of fish
that we might catch. Way out of range it swerved,
but the old man was a dead-eyed dick.
I’d seen him perform such miracles before.
And even if I smiled, when he laid it out
for my education in the life and death
of birds, and distinguished it from the SHAG
I kept my school-yard smirk to myself, so he had
no cause to curse me for a tom fool.
Perhaps it was just those three dabs,
the size of half-a-crown, that came
flipping from its gullet alive, alive O
O, O as moist as eyes? … Maybe.
‘Skart’ is a Scots word for a cormorant, Gaelic ‘Sgarbh’ (derived I believe from Old Norse-Icelandic). Satan metamorphosed into the form of a cormorant in Eden. That’s all you need to know.
The Damascus gun could not have hit the cormorant, whoever fired it. But it was legendary, and legend has always stirred me and stolen into my heart. No matter it is a dangerous thing, as Plato would surely have agreed, seeing the poetry of it, its power, in fact, to bring us down to earth. But Plato or no Plato, the gun itself bordered on the dangerous. If you cocked both its hammers at once (only one was original to the gun), firing one could trigger the other, if not reliably, unreliably, which of course in such a case is worse. Still I loved the Damascus gun above all others, even if the trigger guard all-too reliably chopped back against my second finger every time I fired and made it swell and bruised the bone, after two or three shots.
So with my gun as part of me, as quick to come to my shoulder and fire as you might blink an eye, I’d step in under the wooded hill and up into the dark wood and beyond until it was all second nature and only first nature left, the zone of intimacy, where I was, out there, beyond where I stood, with what I pursued. What I pursued might be either prey or simply the observable world in close-up and slow-motion, flora as much as fauna. For stalking imposed slow-motion on everything, and enlarged everything to the gaze. It was a country with extraordinary plants and flowers to find, according to their season. Shelter from the east, the drainage typical of limestone, a coastal warmth and a north-south westerly aspect, bred a rare fecundity.
Botanists have listed numerous varieties to be found on our hill and in its vicinity. I will not list them all (Pennant catalogues very many of them), but of the names I knew to identify, I remember most the dark orchids, the speedwell and the gentian. In the blackthorn and ivy-floored entanglement to the south of the tower great beds of violets flourished, and in a meadow beyond, at the northernmost end of Collins’s wood, carpets of cowslips flowered such as I’ve never seen anywhere else in my life. It was a floral paradise. And a myriad bird species flitted and nested there, from the goldcrest to the tawny owl and the herring gull. And the raven lunged overhead, crossing from the Little Orme, and the cormorant winged it fast as it could back to the Little Orme, after fishing expeditions up the estuary or in the mountain lakes, or simply at sea, one eye on my father, the other far away.
The first full season we had there was autumn. For me it is always the first season, the elegiac best and worst. Worst because it heralded back-to-school. I cannot tell you the gloom that prospect gave rise to, a gloom heightened by the fact that I could see the school from the cliff, appropriately located just this side of the gasworks and the rubbish tip. Best because the birds fattened and the warmed sea in the mouth of the estuary ran with fish as at no other time of year.
It was a while yet before I awakened to the literary, in any conscious way. But by sixteen I began to find myself detained by poems, distracted by them, abstracted by them. The works of the poets began to seduce me and the lives of writers generally: authors of nature and wilderness writing above all, whether in verse or prose. I started now to save to buy books and not so much simply to feed the racing pigeons I’d begun to keep a little earlier. To which end, and to my father’s disapproval, I made myself a bicycle from an old frame and bits from the tip, painted it bright yellow, and took on a paper-round. Nor was it just any round but the round of rounds: the one, there was no other, with the singular virtue of including in its compass the Welsh girl’s home.
So I could go to her door every day, and deliver the Guardian (which had been as recently as 1959 the Manchester Guardian), and a little monthly magazine her father liked called Sea Breezes, a ‘Worldwide Magazine of Ships and the Sea’. He’d served in the navy, escorting convoys, during the war. Digressions about the hardships and horrors of war endured upon the cruel sea were ever the best part of his lessons in history. In time the family would often get their papers late on Saturday morning, in the hope the Welsh girl might be up-and-about to be seen. Slip them the wrong paper and she might come out to catch you. But she never did, only her kid brother or her father himself. Sometimes if I was lucky I’d catch a glimpse of her, or hear her playing the piano. It was enough.
Then at some doomed point in my sixteenth year I started to attempt to write verse. Soon I’d be stealing home hurriedly, not always to change into my old clothes and escape with the Damascus barrelled gun, but to use my father’s typewriter, laboriously to type up what I’d written, just to see it at that remove from my hand, ever an important material stage. This had to be done secretly.
Above all my father must not know. The pressure of his gaze on my words would be too much to bear. I can understand my fears. The poems were too bad. To describe them as juvenilia would be to abuse the term. Until recently I thought they’d all been destroyed, except one or two that by editorial misjudgement found publication. I binned or burned everything I could lay hands on in my late twenties, except my account of the Aran Islands.
That proved to be at the commencement of a two-decade depression, not induced by the hopeless poems but more generally at not living the dream, not writing it, with the pram in the hall and all that. But such things are all to the good in time. You must just know your mind and keep your course at heart, no matter. Either it is in you and will out or it isn’t. It was a good decision and not baleful, to burn those paper bales. But some poor things from that time slipped the net. Copies survived, as have recently been brought to light by an old schoolfriend, now a retired professor, who won’t relinquish what he has, except in photocopy. So I can’t put them out of their misery.
Attracted at first by Keats, I began with the view that a real poem should be a poem of some length. I had little or no idea what they were about but I liked to flirt with ‘Hyperion’ and ‘Endymion’ as much as read the more accessible poems, ‘To Autumn’ and the odes. But I wasn’t a well-wrought urn man. It was the idea of length I liked, and the promise of being able to talk.
I was ambitious. I kept two artless long poems on the boil at once, in this time of my first fumbling after the muse’s favour. One was about a road across the moss to Alticry shore in Galloway (my lost sphagnum opus), the other about the Conwy estuary. Not a line of them do I have to look at now, at least not in their earliest form. They weren’t remotely like Keats, either, as cannot be surprising.
A revised fragment of the estuary poem was published. It was a passage revamped when I was nineteen and approaching twenty. Conscripted into the service of a shorter poem, it appeared after some delay in the American magazine Shenandoah. A man called Richard Greer facilitated publication, a Fulbright scholar, and another man whose surname was Dabney. To the very best of my recollection the following from that illustrious periodical (even Homer nods) bears some resemblance to the same lines in the original, begun, I believe, when I was sixteen, and continued over a year.
He walks out to the sea with a barbed spear
Follows down the channel that is empty
Looks over the horizon to the sun
Waiting for the tide to turn back inland
With its haul of silver and green-backed fish
Already nosing at his heart’s gravel.
The sea breaks out from the slack of low tide;
Far against the sky, between the headland
And the island, the big september flood
Limps in its beginning, chokes the river
Back with salt, thrusts heads of water forward
As fast as the careful man retreats,
Slips forward, runs back from beneath itself;
The foam, mud-brown, dries down into the sand
About to vanish, is pushed on and grows
Swings deceptively in, now ankle deep
Sucks the white foot down, down the pooling land
Behind him, to more than man-deep holes.
He once saw, out beneath the point of rocks
As the tide sprang, the heavy-headed bass
Press in upon the shoaling land
Fixed to the current of the sea’s hunger;
And now these fish push against him, spines bared,
Driving in the flash of the sea’s teeth...
Who was that youth, writing those lines, secretly, as if hiding them under his hand? I take some pride in him, to think of my younger self, so intense, so fixed to his current, so fixated, if only descriptive. Such hope heaped in him, I wish I was in his boots today. No matter the deaths he had to face and disappointments, until he made his way to me. (I still have the head of his barbed spear, more properly a tine, used for stabbing flounder, at risk of stabbing your white foot. Also used for spearing salmon.)
I was too intense, a friend of my father once told me. No friend of mine, I thought. But the headland and the island, the point of rocks, those shoaling bass, how they chastened my eye. How the sea’s hunger consumed my heart. How it all led me astray beyond reason or comprehension. How strange it is to have been someone else, and to feel even the slightest pulse of his purpose so many years later, like something from another life, an earthquake’s tidal aftershock.
What really increased the intensity was the copy of J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands I found among my father’s books. The effect of this work on my mind defies rational explanation. It so touched me it couldn’t have been more affecting if it had been written by the Welsh girl herself. But she was a scientist and literature didn’t cause her to lift up her heart to the stars – though music did – or lead her from her path.
It would have led me from my path, if I’d been on one. Instead it became the path, the way, the road to nowhere, whether sea-road, shore road, high road or low road – I’ll be on Inis Mór before you, became my philosophy. It wasn’t any of Synge’s twilight fairy-host stuff that took me, or the story-telling of Old Pat, reputedly founded in models from antiquity, but passages like this one:
When we set off it was a brilliant morning of April, and the green, glittering waves seemed to toss the canoe among themselves; yet as we drew nearer this island a sudden thunderstorm broke out behind the rocks we were approaching, and lent a momentary tumult to this still vein of the Atlantic.
or this:
The rain continues; but this evening a number of young men were in the kitchen mending nets, and the bottle of poteen was drawn from its hiding-place.
One cannot think of these people drinking wine on the summit of this crumbling precipice; but their grey poteen, which brings a shock of joy to the blood, seems predestined to keep sanity in men who live forgotten in these worlds of mist.
I sat in the kitchen part of the evening to feel the gaiety that was rising, and when I came into my own room after dark, one of the sons came every time the bottle made its round, to pour me out my share.
I liked the sound of Michael, Synge’s guide on Inishmaan, but I wasn’t hooked as Synge was by a primitivist ideal. I was more taken by those ‘half-civilized fishermen’, as he chose to call them, individuals he encountered on a visit to Inis Mór, the big island. These men were inclined to despise the simplicity of life on Synge’s preferred middle island, Inis Meáin. They wanted to know, what still interests me: how Synge passed his time ‘with no decent fishing to be looking at.’
But it was the overall Synge-song of the prose I really liked. Its rhythms soon stole my attention from itself. Strong tributary streams I found elsewhere, in late Dylan Thomas, and early, among those boys of summer in their ruin and in his estuarine ‘Author’s Prologue’; in the T.S. Eliot of ‘Prufrock’, especially the closing paragraph, and ‘Dry Salvages’; in Lawrence’s ‘Ship of Death’; in what eventually I could understand of Baudelaire, and a very little Tristan Corbière, which I think I got at through a reference in Eliot. But you must understand these things were all seen as through a glass darkly. I was seduced symbolically. I didn’t have precocious powers of understanding. I didn’t need to stop to ask if I understood. The thing was different. Something in it ran away with me. I ran away with it, like a thief. I was more interested in my sensual life, which now, most passionately, included the sensual life of words.
A very little went a long way with me. So it does still. So it does here, in the same sense that often can mean rarely, and once is more than enough, as you know. A glance from the Welsh girl, for example, a dismissive glance no less than a longed-for come-hither. When I read my favourite writers I could hardly hold my eye to the page without shooting off in my own direction. I wasn’t a good reader. I’m still not a good one. Nor am I a scholar any more than I am a gentleman, please my maker.
Then last of all in the genre, beyond the end of school, Richard Murphy’s Sailing to an Island which I bought in Dublin at Green’s Bookshop near Trinity College, on just turning nineteen, after a pilgrimage on my summer dreyman’s Border Breweries wages, to Inis Mór, prospecting. I have the copy still, as I have most of them, above all among them: John Bright’s ‘Charles Jones Memorial Prize for Literature’ – winner’s choice: The Plays and Poems of J.M. Synge; but The White Goddess, and Six Existentialist Thinkers... are more recent replacements, the originals going the way of all books, as life takes one here and there. But what days they were, for that wide-eyed boy of summer in his ruin.
A longer catalogue of reading there was, but these works and authors were the most telling ones, and also fragments of MacDiarmid put my way by a Welsh nationalist autodidact, Meirion Roberts, a man who did more than anyone to broaden my reading, except perhaps the late Charles Jones, but that’s a story for later, just round the corner. Meirion put Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That in my hand, and I loved it for the good riddance of it, the rejection of the world as ordained by one’s supposed betters and the powers that be.
Your country needs you! But what ish my nation? Wales, I was born there.
Meirion would travel with my father when he came to visit me on Inis Mór to disturb my universe, to comic effect. Here’s a poem that tells you more about him, and explains something of his interest in Graves’s book, more concisely, ‘In Memory of Private Roberts: British Soldier’:
Crossing the square in early spring,
Wreaths withered on the memorial,
Poppies bled by frost and snow,
I met Private Roberts reading
The roll call of the town’s fallen.
‘Armistice day? My pet aversion,’
Turning to me, his lip moist,
His thorny eye narrowed like a sniper’s:
‘Ior Evans? He’d never spent
A night away from home before,
Buried in Mad-a-gas-car.
Corner of a foreign field?
I doubt he’d ever heard of it.
Dei Sam? on Manchester
United’s books in thirty-nine:
Buried in France. I bet
He’s never remembered
At the going down of the sun
Or in the morning... Duw!
You know, I often contemplate
Siegfried Sassoon, chucking his medal away.
Never applied for mine.
All the way to Tobruk without
So much as a lance-jack’s stripe,
I’m proud to say.
And Francis Ledwidge, born
The same day as Hedd Wyn,
And killed, you know, the same day
And in the same place too.
His comment: “To be called
A British soldier
While my country has
No place among nations...”
He’d marched to Vesuvius
With Marcus Aurelius
In one breast-pocket and
The Mabinogi in the other,
An old campaigner
Over bog and heather
To find and fish the Serw stream:
Elusive, stubborn thread of water,
Of stygian glooms and mountain glances,
Its limpid, garrulous medium,
‘Full,’ as he said, ‘of small trout
The length of a youth’s hand.’
Meirion also lent me in their slender and deeply moving first editions The Stones of the Field, first published by the Druid Press in Carmarthen in the year of my birth, and An Acre of Land, printed in Newtown, Montgomery, in 1952, by R.S. Thomas. There was hardly anything Meirion hadn’t read, from a slender essay by Virginia Woolf about going to purchase a pencil, to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, to Logan Pearsall Smith’s Trivia, from the work of Mary Webb (O Precious Bane!) to that of Alun Lewis and In Parenthesis by David Jones. He was an inspiration, his gates wide open to the written word and his insight into the colonial situation light-years ahead of the view elsewhere. For sheer intelligence, humour, passion and rootedness he had no equal. He was a postcolonialist avant-la-lettre and so was I under his influence, whether I knew it or not; and I certainly knew it if not in name when I entered the unknown world. It was a revelation, and one that has never waned.
It was the sea and the literature of the sea I loved most. I remember particularly being stirred by Joshua Slocum’s marvellous sea-going story: Sailing Alone Around the World. But it’s not so much that I was so taken by the writings I refer to, which in the wider world is something unremarkable, but that as to Aran I held to my resolve. More than once or twice I’d tell my parents, at sixteen and seventeen and more, that one day I was going to live on Inis Mór. How was this? It seemed so unlikely a thing they merely smiled, in the spirit of ‘one day you’ll grow up’ my son. How pleased I am now to know how wrong they were, especially about the growing up. The way to grow is circular, longest way round, shortest home. Up is a big mistake. Down into mind and round is best.
Who says poetry makes nothing happen, Synge being all poetry, verse or prose? There is no circumstance in which nothing happens. But the assertion burdens poetry with irrelevant expectation. There’s the strongest case for saying it makes everything happen, that it’s prior to all other verbal forms of expression, vision, and thought. The poets precede the theologians and philosophers and stand elsewhere from them, looking awry. Here’s my poem of it. I call it ‘Synge-Song’:
I was one after your own heart
or so I thought, neither landed
nor gentry, but blew ashore
aboard your limpid pages,
to Inis Mór and there I stranded.
My mind blown away
and all at sea for nevermore.
The curragh also wears a thin partition.
I’ve felt the sea-pulse beneath it
through my hand, life itself,
inside out, outermost to be
inmost in the world.
Get out more, you who say
poetry makes nothing happen.
Be-in-the world and see:
the poem is earthbound
and elsewhere to the day
as any playboy knows
down the passage of recorded time
through calm and storm
the first to make landfall.
There is or there was once a strong case for saying all mental landscapes in the western world would be profoundly different if Wordsworth hadn’t written his Lyrical Ballads and its preface, or ‘The Prelude’, which also overtook my life at this time, no less than is clearly true in the case of Homer’s Odyssey, no matter nothing happens without hearer or reader. One or two of either at critical historical moments are enough to bend the world’s bias and change the horizons of humankind.
Just a small work of words can set the world atilt. Forget your global network. When the power goes down in the post-apocalypse, and the visionaries rise from the rubble what use your password and your headlong hurry, you intel-pentium? Where is your digitized archive now? You need no password to encounter a poem, spoken or read, oral or written, to nourish your soul before whoever your maker is. Remember that as you scavenge among the ruins of Rome? But those scavengers won’t be of your kind. They’ll be the descendants of those who scavenge now. Of whom there is no shortage and never has been down the course of time.
To be sure, a little can go such a long way it can reach to the crack of doom, like the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Wanderer’.
* * *
Or the ‘Sea-farer’.... An element to account for here, beyond the shore, is the sea itself. The sea plays with horizon more thoroughly than anything on earth, than night and day together. I first took to its magical perspectives in yet another ritual connected with my passing the eleven plus. Not only did that singular occasion entail the Black Lake, as you know. It also saw an unprecedented act of extravagance and expenditure by my grandpa. He was otherwise, you know already, rightly deemed the very epitome of a penny-pinching Scotsman. But my little success so pleased him he stunned the known world and took me out for the day, aboard the St Tudno, from Llandudno pier, a steamer as they say, though there was no steam involved, to Menai Bridge on Anglesey.
Forget that we played bowls there or before coming home stopped at the fun-fair and rode the dodgems by the gates to Llandudno pier – all staggering indulgences, never witnessed before or again in grandpa’s company.
The important thing for me is that I made my foundational sea-voyage then, my maiden voyage. I had been out off Ynys Enlli in a little mackerel-fishing boat. I’d whizzed a circuit of the inlet at Traeth Coch, powered by a Seagull, as you know. I had a taste for it. But this was a voyage, such as on a more dramatic scale the Naomh Eanna made to Kilronan pier and the islands, as later I would love. And it whetted my appetite and fuelled my longing. I’ve never forgotten it, even if we never lost sight of land. (That would come, on trips to the Isle of Man, as also sailed from Llandudno for a time.)
Often is one thing, once another. I saw the Orme swing round and shrink in our wake. I saw the Creuddyn sink in sea-haze, islanding the Orme, as fascinated and delighted me. I saw the seabirds – the razorbills, and puffins too, the different gulls, the cormorants – whizz in and out from the headland cliffs. I heard and saw the sea run and break, and felt the sure foot of the vessel slide and gather. I breathed the hot air of the engine room, mingled with the salty ozone of the sea. I saw Penmaenmawr, and Puffin Island close up, crowded with seabirds, and the lighthouse, and heard the clang of the bell at Penmon. I saw the pretty doll’s house frontage of Beaumaris. I saw Snowdonia on the other shore roll and shift, rearranging its ranges, as we went by. I experienced the strange dream-element that is the world at sea, on a halcyon day. I saw the straits narrow and its currents race on Menai’s shore. It whetted my appetite and more. I went under like a cormorant that’d not surface again until it reached Galway Bay, however many years away, in November 1968. My life over again. So breath-taking was it and heart-stopping, it drowned me for good and ill.
The St Tudno was my maiden voyage, innocent and virgin. The few trips that would follow later, putting out from Conwy on the fishmonger Mr Arundale’s trawler were last nails in Queequeg’s coffin for me. Call me Ishmael. They still haunt me, above all biding the tide after nightfall, to enter the river and come home to harbour. The What-Ho! was a decked lugger of a once-popular local design. I doubt she was much more than a forty-footer. She had a mast and a short brown sail. Above all she was powered by an Ailsa Craig, over-powered it might be said, but all to the good, by a big engine.
The name ‘Ailsa Craig’ meant a lot to me, the mysterious, burdened way names can mean to us. I had seen the Ailsa Craig, also known as ‘Paddy’s Milestone’, with the naked eye of childhood, the granite dome off the Ayrshire coast, from which the engine took its name. This pleased me and merged the two in my mind. It made me remember the harbour at Girvan, with its trawler fleet of those days.
Curling stones are traditionally made of Ailsa Craig granite. I have two for heirlooms on my doorstep at home. My Wigtownshire farming relations and their like used to put such stones on the gateposts to their retirement bungalows. So the name ‘Ailsa Craig’ weighs for me resonantly, the full weight of its granite. What’s in a name? Worlds of meaning, ‘Ailsa Craig’:
I voyaged with you once
beating like my heart
right through me,
whatever the opposite is
to weak knees, weakness,
a balancing act, and now
I anchor in memory
on those wild seas.
I cannot ground but fathom
where I am, sitting on
a doorstep, here at home,
running a hand over
a granite curling stone,
an heirloom and horizon
sixty million years ago,
I remember seeing you.
Mr Arundale had been a commander in the Navy during the war. He loved the sea and knew it like the back of his hand, saw into it with his grey eyes, and read the weather as if he knew it by heart. He had just that much of Ahab about him to keep you guessing. I suppose he was a hobby fisherman, but it was a hobby that served his shop with the freshest fish on the coast.
So it came that I shipped aboard the What-Ho! under Mr Arundale, first with my father and then, far better, on my own. I remember being early and killing time on the quay, haunting there, relishing the expectancy in the morning air, as the tide rose in the river and the river rose in the tide, and the vessels beat a foot to the gathering rhythm and kicked their keels to be off. I felt myself into it, into the role of the sea-going fisherman, deckhand trawler-man. Compared with the all-weather real thing aboard the boats that would go away for several days, it was like poaching in Collins’s Wood: all the kicks without the risks. But drowning is drowning. Just as you might say never trust a horse, never trust the sea.
Nor was there anything half-hearted about it when Mr Arundale arrived amid the bustle of fishermen and mid-morning idlers and holidaying lookers-on. He took command. You had to look lively and haul in the pram and lower the supplies and lower yourself. The pram only took two, oarsman and crew of one at a time. It sat deep in the tide at that, quick to turn on an oar, like a gull on its webbed foot turning smartly to feed on something passing swiftly by in the stream, the flood from the mountains. There across the way where the river ran hidden the What-Ho! rode at her mooring, all ship-shape. She looked somehow businesslike, as if a vessel might put on its experience and purpose and wear them with vigour, restless as a thoroughbred for the tide-race, throwing her head up against her mooring.
So then you got aboard her and looked back across the waters at the floating harbour and riding castle town. Who’d ever want to live ashore again? Who’d want to come back to the humdrum world of the dull lubber, the hidebound burgher? Except that coming and going, putting out and making landfall, are heart and soul of it. In which spirit I commend to you the fare forward of it, and fare well but not farewell, as the Ailsa Craig starts up with a great throb, like a heart throb, and the waters rouse with a deep churning as she gets the bit between her teeth. Is this the death-wish under us as the stern bites in and takes a step down, to bring the prow up, or so it feels, like an orgasm, an acceleration, a surge? I always think so. And so too at this moment, as away we went, it felt not so much as if we were bound to our fishing ahead, as rushing from our haven astern.
Down the channel we ran between the now submerged shellfish banks, out by Morfa, and round beyond Penmaen-bach to shoot our net down the Fairway, down to the Lavan Sands, beyond Penmaenmawr. There are few things more intoxicating, in all the fishings I’ve undertaken, than being slewed there between trawl and tide butting down that sea-road, like driving with the brakes on, as the otter boards resist the flow and keep the wings of the net wide. From where you are, the sea runs round the world, and you feel part of its immensity, suspended in time, until it’s time to haul and gravity returns for a while, against the backdrop of the floating world.
We’d have a couple of shots down that way, the bulging sock of the net when we swung it up, spilling plaice, flounder and thornback skate, barnacled crabs and cobbles, shocks of glistening weed, a bather’s plimsoll but happily no bather, and so on. Then we’d run out round Puffin Island, trolling for mackerel, with hand-lines, four and six at a time, and if we hit them, pause to wallow and hit them hard, feathering vertically, so the boxes rattled and splattered with them as they filled, before we shot again by Table Road, out off Traeth Coch.
It seemed we had all the time in the world there, shoaled together. But the tide waits for no man, and with one last haul on board, we’d beat for home, the Ailsa Craig drumming hard, vibrating under us, the What-Ho! with the bit between her teeth, galloping, and night rising up and the stars shoaling so near you’d think you might shoot your net at them, in the topsy-turvy seaborne world. Now we’ve been too quick for it and must hove-to, to nose forward little by little. Mussels crunch under us. At the water’s edge, all round, oyster-catchers and sandpipers make their music, pipe their chorus to the stars, as the dark engulfing tide chivvies them. Up they wheel into the chill night air, piping and whistling, to re-alight and fish for their supper and sing for it, again. Over and over they retreat with the water, heard but not seen, unless as a faint glimmer or aura, until the tide is in, and silence seems to fill the world, for a moment if no more.
So it was. There in the midst of it, the Ailsa Craig chugged and spluttered and sang to us, and the What-Ho! told us the story of her life, in every creak and dark recess of her, wooed to it by the river at her shoulders, the sea at her stern. We had our catch all gutted and sung for, except not all the thornback skate were skinned. So we worked on at them, feeling the cold now, hands cut and raw, the very dream itself, except for the one behind it.
I’d up and walk from my wage-slavery tomorrow to do that again. Though there’s no again only another time. Once it would be, in itself, however freighted with past remembrance. But no one invites me. Mr Arundale is long-gone under the sea. I know no one with a boat. I’m a mere harbourer of thoughts and memories. All I do I do in mind, then set out in pen and ink, a fisher of tropes and expression. Make fast. This is the last fishing ground, as yet not known to any other. Shoot your sentence here, I urge myself at break of day this morning. Run out your spillet and trammel, your seines of sense, trawl-tales as tall as the sea at the mind’s stormy rim. Be buoyant in spite of all. Why? To show courage in ignoring death. Pour encourager les autres. Fare forward. Plough on. Having put your hand to the wheel, don’t look back. Even at the cry ‘Man overboard!’ hold to your course, go overboard with a passion. Haul in your catch. Live with your luck. Make your luck. Be a Makar. Don’t look back.
But it’s all looking back and longing too.
Just so I’d look back after the Welsh girl when we passed. Look back I did and long, even for simple acknowledgement. But she showed no interest, no matter I studied hard to cross her path, to gaze on her, her pale cheek, her raven hair, her attitude so composed and quietly purposeful. I didn’t exist for her, which only heightened her allure. The fateful afternoon was now not far away when I’d wait at the far school gate by the canteen to ask her, stepping forward from the wall, to speak to her for the first time. No one ever waited there for any other purpose. Though it wasn’t the first time I’d waited. Just the first time my courage held and she wasn’t with her friends, two other medics in the making. How absurd my aspiration! But such is or was the onus on the male to propose and the female to dispose. She took no time disposing of me.
‘I’m going out with Max,’ she said without pause or blush and stepped back on her way. It was a blow, as you can guess. Yet, incorrigible, I found comfort in the moment as well as disappointment. She could have shown outright scorn but she didn’t. She’d spoken to me at least, and I to her. There was no put-down but the knock-back made me deliver papers much earlier for a few weeks, so as not to run the risk of meeting her. But nothing changed. I did not move on. And now, little by little my passion grew beyond obsession into the wilder realms of idealisation. It was as if I lived a script by Petrarch or by Dante, though I’m sure I’d never heard of either. My day would come.
Or night, anyway, the night of the school dance. They’d given lessons in the Gay Gordons and the like, the waltz, over several evenings before the night itself. I was no dancer. Nor was she among the girls with whom we tried to learn our steps. But I went to all the lessons. No rock-and-roll here.
I remember my mother scoring the soles of my new black shoes with a kitchen fork to give them grip. I remember plunging off down the black lane, skidding about, turning my ankle, in those inappropriate, pinching shoes, and walking the three miles to school, in a suit and tie. The hall lights shone out and for perhaps the only time in my life I went to school with a light and eager step. Did I know something? I did not. I didn’t even know if she’d be there. I merely hoped against hope. But there she was, in a white dress with blue polka dots, and her hair newly cut the way she wore it, short, so the hairline ran just below the jawline, and parted in the middle so she seemed to look at you with her big hazel eyes from between two black curtains, each ending in a little sweep, upwards. I can see her now, and those bottle-green suede high heels she turned on as she danced.
It should be said that by this time, while I kept as ever my two worlds, moving between the scholars and the wilder boys, with the strongest friendships in both camps, I’d drawn attention to myself. I was the literary one. Now and then I’d taken one or other of the more priggish masters by surprise with my eccentric reading. As with the one I thought a stuffy one who eventually deserted for an English public school in the South Downs where clearly he’d be more at home. What he said – it was about Maupassant – I don’t remember. Something perhaps about realism and peasant life. He was the junior French master. He alluded to W.H. Hudson. He was sure we’d never heard of W.H. Hudson, a wonderful writer. But indeed I had read A Shepherd’s Life, the very book he had in mind, as I could tell. I knew a good deal about W.H. Hudson. My father revered and loved him. I can still see the surprise on the master’s face. Reasonably enough, he’d always thought we were every last one of us as ignorant as the day we were born.
W.H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies had been for a spell my staple reading, though Synge was my master, the orchestrator of the dream. So pleased to realise all this was the poet manqué Leonard Brookes, my English teacher, long since not of this world, that he gave me his own copy of Edward Thomas’s life of Jefferies, the first thing by Thomas I ever read. I was blessed in all this and advantaged in coming from the home I did. I had a head’s start, for once. It no longer mattered that I was an innumerate daydreamer. Though I was no scholar, as you know. Though I wasn’t really a reader but one for the kickstart tasting, as still I am. I was none the less no longer entirely beyond the pale.
So at one point or another in the latter part of the evening, I caught the Welsh girl’s eye between dances, and in that look saw what I’d lived and died a thousand deaths for: a come hither, a louch look as they say in Scots. I danced with her. Nor would I be backward in coming forward. I monopolised her, we monopolised each other and danced the three last dances together, and the last smooch more intimately than any of the others dared. Nods and smiles and jokes there were among the supervising teachers. It was as if we’d gone just a step to the very edge of going too far. But would she let me walk her home? She would if she could but she couldn’t. Her father etc etc.... So I walked home alone, or flew. For I was in outer space, and my thoughts went flying everywhere.
But where did this leave me when I came back to earth?
I don’t know where it left me. But it found me the next night after a day’s euphoria braving the doorbell to my fate. My body took me to her door, as if in slow-motion, as if dragging the Earth behind it.
‘I knew it was you,’ she said with quiet passion, ‘I knew’, in a hurried whisper. How with the foresight of hindsight we know these things when we’re in love.
‘Will you come out with me?’
What did I think, after that dancing...? She was just delivering the bad news to Max or Brad or whoever (the class of their names spoke volumes), back from the university for Christmas, and ever hopeful. Yes... yes... yes... she would. She would. I wanted to kiss her at once but could give no indication, I was so overcome. I still can’t believe my lucky stars. I certainly couldn’t believe them then. Disbelief threw me back into orbit, to go and look a little closer at those stars, to believe my eyes, into the wildest orbit I can remember, bar one (euphoria at the Black Lake, in the estuary, or on Inis Mór being of a different, steadier order).
It was a cold December night. The stars were up above the wooded hill. And the hill held dark chasms where the trees stood, dark as any allegorical dark wood ever portrayed in life’s way. The sea ran on the coast, just audibly. And the town went about its business, oblivious that a miracle had taken place while I walked and then ran through the streets up to Tan-y-Bryn Road and, instead of plunging up our rocky road, ran on round to Nant-y-Gammar hill. Yuri Gagarin never made a bigger or faster orbit of the known world than my lap of honour that night.
Nant-y-Gammar is a narrow hill road of steep gradient. But I ran, the loneliness of the long-distance runner my forte at that time. No gravity could hold me back. On I ran, talking to myself, urging myself on, calling her name, my name, in wild exclamation. Yes! Yes! I shouted to the night. Talk about possession. Whoever said it is only nine-tenths of the law never set eyes on the Welsh girl. I got onto the heath, way back beyond our property. The surge of energy released in me by her yes, yes... was surely as manic then as it is comic to consider now. I ran on, climbed the high estate wall and jumped down into the conifer planting. The trees there being not yet established, the planting was entangled and overgrown underfoot. But I leapt and bolted through it on to the ancient deciduous woods of Gloddaeth.
Pheasants spurted up about me from the planting like fireworks as I went. I took no care whether Mr Groom the gamekeeper might be about or not. Pegasus couldn’t have caught me as I raced on down the hill now, through the great shadowy wood, deciduous and bare, except for loomings of yew and cedar that suddenly obscured the stars. Believe them? They filled my head. Then I broke on down through a little run of hazel and saplings until I met the low wall, at the back of the big house.
A peacock trailing stars behind it flew in wild terror from its roost on the high wall, at my sudden descent, and laboured with a peacock cry, to settle in a tree above me. Such a din! I ran a little faster now, for the path was a dark and shadowy trap, until I got beyond it, beyond the lodge house in the corner of the field, where a dog had begun to bark. I ran out to the foot of the bryn, and on, accelerating as if for the finishing line at Marathon, till I reached home, my heart still hardly quiet, in the wake of her acceptance.
So it was my life entered a fourth dimension.
Now instead of stealing glances into the front-room as I delivered the Guardian, I could sit in it, while my beloved played the piano, or did her homework, so that we could go out. I could talk with her there, in the chaos of that room which accommodated in pillars the dispersed library of the late Charles Jones, B. Litt. (whose memorial prize I’d won). Here I found undreamt of treasures. It became my own private library. All the poets in library editions were there and many another thing that shaped my reading as not even the combination of my father and Meirion Roberts could have done. There were books and there was a gramophone too. Now we’d sit entwined on the sofa together listening to works by Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Grieg, Sibelius, Dvorák, Smettana, Tchaikovsky.
For me it was the first time I heard such works. I applied myself to them. I applied myself to her. I realise now that the preference in that household for such a high proportion of nationalist music was an expression of Welsh passion by other means. Not that the great Welsh choral performances were silent there. Not that the family was as Welsh as it might have been. There was Liverpool-Welsh in them, and a strain from Manchester. The Welsh girl’s mother was a fay one though, and her mother seemed to me as Welsh as they come, a one-eyed, glass-eyed granny, sea-widow, living on Menai Strait at Waterloo. There sometimes the Welsh girl went into purdah to study and I’d be allowed down for an afternoon, perhaps to see her.
High culture and Welsh culture notwithstanding, ‘Top of the Pops’, in the era of ‘The Supremes’ and ‘Ike and Tina Turner’ (river deep, mountain high), didn’t go neglected by the Welsh girl either, all that stuff about love-me-do and not being able to get enough satisfaction. Here was sexuality manifest, just as our own was compelling us towards each other in our all-embracing dream of each other.
By comparison up under the wooded hill we were hardly a musical household. We had only recently acquired a record-player. My sister, away to train as a speech-therapist, encountered jazz in England, at concerts promoted by Norman Granz. It was the era of Acker Bilk too, whose ‘Stranger on the Shore’ I taught myself to play on an old clarinet, with n’er a lesson. But I soon departed from that and moved on from my sister’s taste too, for the like of John Lewis and the MJQ. Less prim African-American music became my obsession, a music of the body and the soul, speaking to the wrongs not just of history but of America there and then, with proud and brilliant virtuosity.
Jazz was hard to come by in North Wales. Everything was hard to come by. I once set out to hitch-hike from Llandudno to Bangor to go to a specialist French-language bookshop there, in pursuit of work by nineteenth-century poets. It was a little shop near the university. No one would stop for me, so I ended up walking all the foot-weary way there, eighteen miles, only to find the shop had just closed. But I did come by jazz records: Thelonius Monk my first, most intense, personal discovery; Lester Young, Lucky Thompson, Johnny Griffin, Dexter Gordon, Roland Kirk, John Coltrane – all the horn men....
But here by the guiding light of the Welsh girl my horizons shifted and looked up even more, and my life changed. She even arranged for us to go to hear the Welsh National Opera perform ‘Madam Butterfly’ at the Odeon. I didn’t take to it. Little could I have guessed then that decades later I’d go with a friend to a brilliant performance of that most tragic and painful work, in Los Angeles. High up in the gods there, and blasted almost senseless by jetlag as I was, it still swept me up, and roused me too, vividly to recall my first night at the opera, in the kissing seats at the back of the Odeon, with my first love.
But all that excitement of discovery was as nothing against the intoxication of her presence walking with me, down Clarence Road to go to the pictures, for the first time, hand in hand, like Adam and Eve entering the unknown world together, as if forever. I can still hear those bottle-green suede shoes with the high heels clack and click as she stepped along chattering and laughing. I can still see the skirt of her light fawn tweedy coat swing from her waist as she strode and its suede collar and pocket flaps. I can still see her paleness highlighted by her raven-black hair. I can still feel her hand in mine, fingers interlocked, as in a dream. So it was.
I would know such intoxication again. But twice is impossible. And once is always enough.
A man’s life no more than to say not just one, as Hamlet said, but once.... Then nevermore.