II

THE FIRST WINTERS

Was that really my very first memory: when I was six? Or was it, more likely, when I was sitting on my wooden lorry, called Borry, pushing it up the incline of flagstones in a huge kitchen at the age of three? After the Second World War, there were no metal toys to buy, no Dinky or Tonka Toys, just what local artisans could make from bits of wood and nails and wire. That was how Borry was created.

The floor of that kitchen seemed to stretch and slope as far as the eye could see. There was a great, hot coal stove to cook on that kept the whole room cosy. I wonder how we had any coal, in that post-war time of rationing and penury – when women in the cities were queuing up for their coal rations with prams in which to take it home. Yet we seemed to have coal and no doubt that was why I was playing there when it happened. The winter of ‘46/’47 was particularly cold in Cumberland, just south of the Scottish/English border. We stayed there, at Lyulph’s Tower (which belonged to Hubert Howard, one of Mother’s first cousins), for a winter because our house in North Wales was still impractical for winter living. For a start, our new home had no legal access (save by sea) and it was hard work bringing coal two miles across the estuary by boat at high tide. Besides, petrol was still rationed and Father could not get petrol coupons for his outboard motor, so he had to use some of the precious supply intended for the Jeep.

So it was that we spent those two winters in different houses in Cumberland (also known as the Lake District). They belonged to one or another of Mother’s numerous cousins: Howards, the Catholic side of the family. Some of their ancestors had lost their heads rather than renounce their faith during the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Doyen of that family was John, first Duke of Norfolk (1430-85)… the present Duke is so far removed from my family as to be beyond my sight. Lyulph’s Tower had been built as a hunting lodge almost a hundred years before, in Victorian times, in a bizarre style of ‘Gothic Castle’, a nineteenth-century version of some 1940s Beverly Hills folly. It had a vast kitchen and dining hall in which to prepare and enjoy the spoils of the hunt. Its Gothic style left complicated joints in the roof where great weights of snow accumulated. Leaks occurred where the lead flashing had failed. The leaks wet the heavy plaster ceilings below, until…

Bang! – there was a terrific crash as a huge piece of thick ceiling plaster plummeted to the floor, throwing up a fountain of dust about it. I remember watching, fascinated by the cloud of dust that rose, spread like a mushroom, and then slowly fell back to the floor. The chunks of plaster had whiskers of horsehair (added to the plaster to give it greater structural strength) protruding from its sides, where it had broken off and landed – just where I had been on my lorry only a few moments before. That startled me and no doubt, startled Mother even more.

That time in the Lake District, I first heard the word ‘terrific’ and sensed the exhilaration of a forceful, enthusiastic speaker. I was sitting between two adults in the huge, leather front seat of a Ford Motorcar (no such thing as seat belts then), climbing the driveway of Lyulph’s Tower, that Gothic Hunting Lodge. The car smelled of musty wood, leather and hot oil, that nostalgic odour of old motors which still grabs at my senses as evocatively as certain perfumes. The driver was a commanding old lady and she exploded the word ‘terrific’ with such vehemence that it has stayed in heavy italics with me to this day. It remains associated with the simple replica of an aeroplane that decorated the hoods of those big old Ford Pilots. It gave me visions of planes taking flight – the soaring force, the escape, the flight… all contained in that single word ‘terrific!’ At that age I did not wonder where the precious petrol to run this big car came from, but it certainly was strictly rationed at the time.

I wonder now if that determined lady was our Great Aunt ‘Tiger’, who terrified the whole county with her driving – a style not so dissimilar to that of Mother. They both drove by touch rather than by sight, punctuating monologues by forcefully changing gears – usually at the wrong moment for the car. Tiger had knocked down a ‘pillar box’ or mailbox at the end of her driveway. Pillar boxes were of heavy cast iron, set deep into the ground and painted bright red (how could you possibly miss them?) They were decorated with the Royal Coat-of-Arms and ‘G.R.VI’ for ‘George Rex Sixth’. The Royal Mail and its collection boxes were the property of the Crown and their abuse a serious offence. Nevertheless, when Great Aunt Tiger was summoned to the magistrate’s court, she stormed in with all guns blazing, upbraiding the sixty-year-old magistrate with: “Now listen to me, young man, that pillar box was placed in a most dangerous position. Someone was bound to run into it sooner or later. It must be moved to a safer place!” It was moved and Great Aunt Tiger continued to terrify the neighbourhood by driving around for many years to come.

While the War was in its final, desperate death-throes – successful at last thanks to Roosevelt’s skilful manipulation of American opinion, I had already managed to half cripple my left hand by holding onto the heating bar of an electric heater. It was off at the time, but incorrectly wired, so that even when turned off, electricity still flowed when given the ‘ground’ of a crawling infant. I was too young to have any memories of this, but I was later told that my youngest sister, three years my senior, was so terrified by my blackened hand that she screamed until Mother came and picked her up – ignoring, for the time being, the source of her horror: the hand! Well, that falling ceiling missed me too. How many lives does one have? At least in North Wales there would be no danger of electrocution – we had a twelve-volt windmill charging four tractor batteries. They were usually so worn out that the light came up and died down again on the whim of the wind as it freshened and failed – much as a sailing boat drifts to a standstill in a calm, then lists to the wind and leaps forward again. No, there was no danger of electrocution here!

Ten years later, my middle finger was still so bent from the burn that it threatened to grow into my palm. I was sent to a hospital for plastic surgery. The hospital had been built during the Second World War to patch up disfigured fighter pilots. It still looked like an army barracks but now it treated hare-lips and obtrusive ears in children, besides casualties of fires and accidents amongst adults. In three weeks the surgeons did miracles and the finger is as good as new.

Nor could I escape electrocution forever: in the sixties I was installing a kinetic art show in a gallery on the Boulevard St Germain, in Paris. Noon came just as I was in the middle of some complex wiring, but when the six artists setting up their own works called me to lunch, I dropped everything in midstream and we all went round the corner to a neighbourhood bistro for a well-lubricated lunch and much enthusiastic discussion. We were just behind Les Deux Magots, hangout and workplace of Hemingway, Sartre and Camus – but it was too busy and expensive for us proletarian workers. Upon our return an hour later, what I had been doing had escaped me and I had forgotten what I should do next. I decided simply to pick up where I had left off and hope it would all come back to me. The metal-handled wire cutters were still there on the floor where I had left them, right next to the wire which I was about to cut. The bang threw me right across the room. I could see the wire was still plugged in – the outlet smoking ominously. My wire cutters were perfectly melted to use as wire strippers with two small rounds melted in the cutting edges. Could that have been why I moved to America, where the voltage is 110 instead of 220?

The next year, in this peripatetic, half-homeless life, we spent the winter in a real medieval castle called Naworth, also part of the Howard fiefdom in Cumberland. It had been converted into four living units, each with a corner tower and one long, narrow, habitable wall of rooms. Father wrote in the great gallery, a room perhaps a hundred feet long, lined with portraits of ancestors – ideal for pacing to and fro as he cogitated.

Alas I was too young to participate in a battle, organized by my older siblings. The children of the castle defended it against an onslaught of neighbouring friends and cousins. They used paper bags full of flour and the fire hoses and stirrup pumps intended for serious defence of the castle in a conflagration. Everyone finished up looking like papiermâché puppets. The courtyard was partially flooded from the fire hoses and in the night it froze. Next day I went sliding on the ice and Mother broke her coccyx, falling on some outdoor stone steps. She had to sit painfully on a doughnut-shaped cushion for many weeks thereafter.

I do not know if we were really hungry in those days (as one of my sisters tells me), but I do remember where Mother had hidden the precious, rationed ingredients to make a Christmas pudding. There were raisins, sultanas and lots of sugar. I had never before seen such sweet bounty and soon made myself thoroughly sick out loud (as Mother too graphically termed the act of vomiting!) I am sure I was severely punished and no one, myself included, was happy with the greatly diminished size of the pudding. However green I looked after being sick out loud, it did not stop me from going to Mother one day and saying: “Owain’s pale and weakly, Doctor says he needs more choccy.” Disgusting child that I was…

On Christmas Day, I was in bed with my youngest sister. We were exploring our stockings – what could be more wonderful for two very young children to find in their Christmas stockings than a whole fresh honeycomb from a neighbour’s hives? We scooped out the honey with our fingers until they went right through the wax on the other side and honey flowed stickily everywhere. I particularly remember how delightful it felt between my toes… until some grown-up came with harsh words and clean sheets.

That winter, I often played with a boy of my age and eventually caught whooping cough from him. His father owned a four-seated air taxi. At the time, the favoured cure for whooping cough was to fly in an unpressurised plane to 5 or 7,000 metres… so, from whom better to catch the wretched bug than the son of the owner of an air taxi? I loved the flight, soaring over the rolling lush green hills and dark, almost black tarns or inland meres of the Lake District and buzzing Naworth Castle until people came outside and waved… but I came back still whooping, while my friend shook it off.

There was a biochemist friend of my Parents, who had inherited some vast expanse of highland with its peat bogs. There was an old tradition of cutting blocks of peat and drying them for sale as a heating fuel. I remember the miles of narrow-gauge railway tracks across the moors with small wagons pushed by men to bring in the harvested peat blocks. This friend decided to set up a factory to make other products from the peat. After each product was produced, there was always a by-product left over which he made into something else until finally there was a colourless, odourless, slightly viscous material with high heat-retaining properties – he sold it to an ice cream factory as an additive filler. That was the part I remember so vividly, though it would be some years before I actually tasted this mythological treat known as ice cream.

Soon after the whooping cough interlude, Mother and I flew down to North Wales with our friend the air taxi man. I remember clearly how we circled low over Snowdonia. The day was sunny and clear; each rock and each path stood out vividly below. The grass was emerald green, the lakes the deepest blue and the craggy rocks in greys and blacks. There were many tiny walkers and climbers below, wearing bright clothing, hiking up the easier paths. The exhilaration of flying over this scene was god-like. I caught another bug up there in that tiny plane: from then on, I wanted to know those rocks and crags and precipices intimately. I wanted to break them as one breaks a wild stallion. I wanted to learn to conquer them by scaling their rugged heights and scrambling over them.

Almost twenty years later (as a young man) one Easter day in Paris, I flew once more over those brilliantly clear mountains, crags and lakes – this time without a plane, just on the power of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony which entered my eyes as a full-spectrum rainbow and left through my outstretched arms, from under my fingernails. The rainbow flowed through me and supported my flight as I turned left and right, sweeping up like a raven on the updraft, then gliding down into the valleys. Later that day we ran through the courtyards of the Louvre and saw the significance of architecture as it defines the open space within it, just as much as it exists in the form of walls, floors and windows. For the first time, I saw and appreciated empty space as architecture. Now I came to understand that you can construct empty space as an edifice by defining that space with walls.

Suddenly, the bouncing of the aircraft on the multiple up and downdrafts over the mountains took its toll. The pilot quickly handed me a paper airsickness bag. Once used, he slid open the cockpit canopy and tossed it out… I had a dreadful image of the bag landing squarely on the unsuspecting head of a passing, sweating hiker… but was assured that it would disintegrate on the way down. Anyway, when those hills did indeed become my playground and I hiked for days and nights on end, I never feared being crowned with a vomit-laden paper bag. For one thing, it’s very tricky flying in these mountains, with such violent thermals and I have no recollection of ever seeing light aircraft flying low over those mountains. Many a mountain rescue helicopter has crashed. Endangering oneself is one thing, but doing so endangers many others.

We flew on south towards our house on its estuary and located a field a mile or two away, where the locals said a small plane had landed during the War. It turned out to be surrounded on all four sides by power lines, besides having high banks underneath with hedges growing on them. The surprised pilot said it was quite impossible to land there. Even if he could fly under the wires and over the banks and hedges, he could never take off again. We flew on and tried the beach of the estuary in front of our house. We must have radio-telephoned Father, because he was already on the beach with our American Army Jeep, waiting for us.

The pilot thought he could land where there were ‘car tracks’ on the sand, but one very tentative touch-and-go threatened to flip the plane over in a somersault and he was not prepared to try again… Father in his Jeep had been driving on soft sand which was totally unsuitable for landing. By this time, most of the anti-aircraft poles (of which, more later) had been removed, but the sand remained stubbornly deep and soft.

We flew west, towards the open sea and there, by the salt marshes where I would later spend happy hours trying to shoot wild duck, we found an unobstructed field. Hoping that there were no rabbit holes to catch our wheels, we landed with some wrenching bangs, bumps and bounces. That was where Father finally chased us down. Later, we learned that the famous field where we had first tried to land had killed the pilot and crew of the only aircraft to land there – a fatal crash-landing due to engine trouble! A small detail that was missing in local lore which might well have made all the difference in the recommendation…