III

HOME

On the edge of a great tidal estuary, twice daily transformed from sea to sand to sea again, sits a simple square white house. It was to become our long-term home over the next thirty years. The tides from the estuary come in from the Irish Sea, which is warmed by the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean. It sweeps all the way up the east coast of the United States, then across the North Atlantic, before embracing the coasts of Brittany, the Scilly Isles and up between Wales and Ireland. Yet it remains a current warm enough to temper these latitudes. At sea level, a freeze is exceptional; a few hundred feet up and away from the sea, it’s a very different story. The opposite shore is a rocky promontory (dividing twin estuaries) that had belonged to a wealthy amateur botanist in the nineteenth century. He had brought back specimens of rhododendron from Nepal, bamboo from China and redwood from California and had planted a lush forest garden on the promontory, to this day called the Gwyllt (or ‘Wilderness’). His large house, with its tall, barley-sugar chimneys, nestles down on the edge of the tidal estuary, constantly changing from sand to sea or sand and sea. The property was bought by the celebrated architect and environmentalist, Clough Williams-Ellis in the mid-1920s and converted into an eccentric hotel, his ‘Experiment in Sympathetic Development’: Portmeirion. From our house, a mile away, it looked like a brightly coloured Italianate village in the distance. He denied being influenced by Portofino (which he must have known, even then, but the parallel becomes more evident further on in this story). As a very young child I had precociously declared that Portmeirion had been built during the ‘Early Ice Cream Age’… what did I know of ice cream at the time? The hotel remained a magical mélange of architectural styles, a mirage in my mind. As for the frozen dessert, I had to wait for refrigeration and the end of sugar rationing… for Britain maintained food rationing until 1954 largely because of the cost of maintaining its armaments (three full Naval fleets and one-hundred-andtwenty RAF squadrons worldwide).

The estuary is a mile across and some days, when the sun shines, the shadows of clouds chase each other across the brilliantly-lit expanses of sand and water, bringing a rapidly-changing light, like a fast-forward film of clouds. Ever changing from grey to bright light – moody as Mother. It was true that Father could also explode like a thunder-clap when disturbed by children’s games. He had a huge voice and large presence. His anger was an avalanche or violent squall, driving us noise-makers into submissive silence and seclusion. Some child once remarked that: “Daddy’s thundering again.”

The situation of the house was remote and wild beyond what one might imagine of Britain – and indeed remains largely unspoilt to this day. True, we could see the hotel a mile away across the estuary and a few other houses appeared as tiny dots still further off. On the far side of the twin estuary stood the small, silted-up harbour town of Porthmadog, but that is two miles away. On a very still night, one might hear the train a mile and a half away, but otherwise there were no sounds of civilization, no cars, or trucks, or buses. Our neighbours on either side were several hundred yards away. To the east was old Mr Edwards (the farmer) who had no motor, save his son’s old lorry for the hay harvest. To the west stood the house of old Mrs Thomas who must have had some money because she drove a little old Ford from the 1930s, but with petrol rationing, she used it only once every two weeks. Since none of us had electricity, motor mowers, chain saws or today’s other noisy contraptions, the only noise was the sound of the seagulls, the wind and perhaps the waves at high tide. In the isolated silence, we could hear the blood pressure pounding in our ears – a rhythmic reminder that we were alive, but certainly no proof that anyone else in the whole wide world was also alive…

Then the clouds would pour rain here and there on the scene, while all the rest remained in bright sunlight. Much of the time, the mountains to the north were shrouded from view by thick cloud and sometimes, even the mile-away coast opposite disappeared completely and rain would pour down for many days on end. We spent day after day reading, until our Parents went out. Then, in holiday times, when some of my siblings were around, we could burst out with our raucous indoor games.

Behind this little oasis of lush gardens and colour on the opposite shore, rise the sharp peaks of the Snowdonia range, craggy summits soaring from treeless slopes, snow-clad during the winter months, an ever-changing view of spectacular depth. Squalls of grey rain clouds would veil the brilliance of blue sky. The mountains themselves turned from pale blue in the misty light to deep blue in clearer light or were veiled completely, those sharp crags far away, inaccessible as a Romantic painting of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, frameless as the open sky. They were intangible in their distance. The very concept of access, the idea of walking their slopes, climbing the crags seemed quite inconceivable – yet in fact is so very real. At times, there was a brooding calm but again later, it could be fierce and tempestuous, ferocious, magical. It was a constantly shifting scene. This is no theatre backdrop, but natural scenery. This is the view from our family home. Sixty years later, it is a view that still takes my breath away when I get out to open the farm gate at the top of the hill behind the house and look down over the vast panorama when I visit it again, (after an overnight flight from New York to Manchester). This is the view that I have left behind. It belongs to another life, a could-have-been life that I do not, for a moment, regret not having pursued.

This white house was built in 1911 to serve as a base for a headmaster (John Chambers) and his family, while his pupils camped in a field next door. An additional wing was added after the First World War. It was never intended as a year-round residence, so our eight-bedroom home was very simple, even utilitarian – but the situation spectacular. Behind it rose a small hill, the ‘Ynys’ or Island – for it was a tidal island until the end of the nineteenth century and going back seven hundred years (when Harlech Castle was built) it was a full-time island with access only by boat or perhaps at low tide over the sands.

In those early days, Arthur Koestler (the intensely engagé Hungarian writer) and his wife Cynthia had come to dinner with us in Wales, despite the difficult access to our house. Afterwards, Father escorted them the half mile, in the pitch-black night, along the sea grass that was carved by deep gullies where the tide ran out and edged the estuary, to where the old driveway was washed out and came to an end, where their car was parked. The tide had risen, leading Koestler to remark that he was almost drowned on the way back. “Nonsense,” said Father afterwards, “he never stopped talking for a second, I would have known at once if he was drowning, there would have been a moment’s peace!”

The estuary used to be forked, the northern part having been dammed in 1811 to create arable land on that reclaimed branch. The southern fork, where our house stands, is still tidal: twice a day, the seven by one mile estuary is transformed from sand with a few streams in it, to being completely full of water. At spring tides there can be a vertical rise and fall of up to 11.5 metres. Tides governed whole sectors of our lives and respect for the lethal currents was in our veins. To this day, tourists drown where we children played. For one thing, the warning signs are usually illegible and, even when they are decipherable, often only in Welsh. At home, the tide table always hung on a string in the ‘telephone room’, to be consulted before planning a dinner, accepting an invitation or making any other daily plans, whether building sand castles, setting and cleaning the nets, baiting the night-lines, collecting the fish, going sailing, riding or shooting.

Our family was broadly divided into two camps: sailors and horse people. Father headed the first, though he also rode well enough to have gone pig-sticking for wild boar in Morocco, where a fall during the chase could be fatal. The second camp was under Mother’s tutelage, though she too could row a dinghy with the best in an emergency. My brother (the eldest of the family) and my eldest sister were sailors, while the next two sisters, horsewomen. As we were of an uneven number, I fell between the two camps, though it was impractical to be a member of both sides. The amount of upkeep demanded by old clinker-built wooden boats on one side, and ponies and horses on the other, made adherence to both at once just too much work. There are not enough hours of light in the day. We could all do both, but we had our preferences and priorities.

I wanted to be a sailor (and have been all my life) but my horse-riding sisters could not resist the urge to use me as a jockey in one-mile pony races. I was young enough to be in a special class and light enough to race the smallest pony. Apparently, I had cold feet at the last moment before my first race at the age of seven, and had to be given Dutch courage in the form of hard cider, which was more alcoholic than beer. After a large glass of that, I forgot my fear, raced as if the devil was on my back, missed the last post in a haze of alcohol and started to retire – only to be told that everyone else had already missed several posts. I turned back into the race and just won it anyway. My sisters had another red rosette to hang in the tack room!

There were occasional squabbles between the two factions. Had the boat people stolen the grain scoop to use as a bailer? Had the horse people stolen a line to tether a horse? I never bonded with horses and later experiences have done nothing to elevate things equine in my estimation. I rented a knock-kneed skeleton of a horse in the Taurus mountains of southern Turkey, only to have it fall off the path we were on and roll down the mountain with me and my camera underneath. The camera fared even worse than I. In fact, nowadays, I think: “the only animals more stupid than horses are the ones that sit on top of them.”

Both hobbies involved escape in several forms. Horses and boats themselves escape and have to be brought home. Such moments required an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ response, so the horse people joined in rescuing boats and vice versa. Besides, sailors and horsemen alike revel in the joys of solitude and evasion, whether sailing away for a few miles on a high tide, or riding along the vast open sands, or up into the wild mountains. Cousins and friends came to stay and frequently needed rescuing, either from a cantering pony as they called out: “Where are the brakes?” or a boat they had taken downstream on an ebbing tide. Father showed them no compassion or sympathy. He would just say, peremptorily: “You’ll have go back and get it on the next tide,” even though that might well have been at midnight or later. One of us would have to go with them to help them retrieve the boat or the pony, west, down the estuary to the sand bar before the open sea or east, up the estuary to a tidal island called Ynys Gifftan.

On that island, there was a tiny farmhouse where a tenant farmer and his wife tried to make a living by grazing sheep and cattle on the salt flats, where the domesticated animals lived a ‘turf war’ on the salt grass with the Canada geese. Cows would often drink the rainwater out of our boats at low tide, the only trouble being that they would try to climb into them, and sharp hooves on the floor of a wooden dinghy on dry land can cause a great deal of damage – so we would chase them off. The farmer had a small horse and cart for going to and fro at low tide. One day, he and his wife could no longer bear the isolation (like us, they were without electricity but did not even have a telephone) so they decided to move to Chicago. They held a sale and sold everything they owned. A short time later, they returned, saying that: “they would rather cross the estuary at night on a rising spring tide, than traverse the smallest street in Chicago.” News went around that they were back and, knowing that they were flat broke, everyone brought back what they had bought at the sale. No one asked for their money back, everyone knew they had none left. Everyone, that is, except Father, who had bought a china bowl, which had only lasted a week in its new home before being broken, to our shame. In the end, they only moved off the island to the cemetery and the adventure of Chicago lived on (as a somewhat embarrassing attempt at escape) in their own minds.