XXIII

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

Now that we had the wherewithal to travel, five whole pounds of it, we packed our rucksacks and set out to walk back to the house where Father was holed-up to write. It was about fifteen miles over the mountains, around the head of ‘our’ estuary and across the head of its twin – the one that had been reclaimed as farmland in the early nineteenth century.

As we set out, we must have looked like Hobbits, with our small, boyish statures and large rucksacks, but at that moment, we felt more like Tolkien’s Aragorn, the Strider. We were well rested, the day was bright and a great trek lay ahead of us so there was purpose in our strides. True, after a few miles in the heat of the day, we really would be again reduced to Hobbits: tired, short-legged folk, out of their depth on a long journey, but nevertheless stubbornly trudging on.

We were two little boys in shorts. As we plodded ahead, sights evoked stories from the past but once we were in unfamiliar country (on our third day), my memory kept itself busy with all the miscellaneous thoughts that tumble higgledy piggledy out of the dusty, disorganised attic of my mind.

I had only one pair of long trousers that I had inherited. They were chequered and my family had dubbed them my ‘Newmarket Bags’ – Newmarket being one of the most famous horse racecourses in England, with many shady ‘bookies’ or illegal betting agents who wore flashy clothes, hence Newmarket Bags. So of course we wore shorts. We had no sophisticated all-weather gear, ‘Gortex’ didn’t exist and whatever was available for the Everest expedition (no doubt ‘oilskins’) was not available because of clothes rationing – not to mention price. I had a cheap plastic mackintosh which I had shortened so it would not get in the way of my legs and stuck the hem to the collar with paper glue to make a hood – of course it fell off the first time I used it. There was no plastic glue around. As for our footwear, Alan had a pair of real leather boots because his father said that his feet had stopped growing, so it was worth buying good ones. I wore high-top plimsolls with very thin soles. I wonder if they were invented by Samuel Plimsoll, who perfected the Plimsoll Line – that you may see on the side of every commercial vessel. It shows the safe water line of a laden ship in waters of varying salinities.

One of Father’s secretaries was called Miss Plimsoll, and she assured us that it was indeed her great grandfather who had invented ‘the line’. I wish I had asked her about the shoes as well, I do seem to remember that she was fleet of foot. By then they were manufactured by Dunlop and were also called ‘daps’ (Dunlop Athletic Shoes) – but to me they were ‘plims’. I must have walked and climbed through quite a few pairs.

It was many years before Father hired a year-round secretary to take care of the business side of being an author, so he took to hiring a secretary for a short period each year. There was a woman who came from London and stayed at our house. The first morning, he showed her to her small office where a year’s unopened mail awaited her attention. He asked her to open every envelope and sort it all out, making a list of questions for him to answer. When she did not come down for lunch, he went in search of her and found her crumpled over the desk in tears. There was not a single letter in sight – she had burned the lot in the boiler in the kitchen! The very sight of a year’s mail had been too much for her… he used to say that it took him ten years to sort out the problems created by all that unanswered mail.

Then there was Mr Bigger. He had been Father’s secretary at the Admiralty during the War. He lodged with two spinster sisters in the village, rare birds in that they were Catholics. There were very few Catholics in Wales, where non-conformist chapels and the Anglican Church covered the spiritual needs of most people.

Mr Bigger was a flabby, mild-mannered little man and he would have to walk over the hill to our house to work every day – perhaps three-quarters of a mile. The first morning he did not arrive. Mother suggested that the walk was too far. Father pointed out that during the War he had walked to work and back, several miles, all the time that there were no buses at all, for want of petrol and drivers. Eventually Mr Bigger telephoned from the village to say that the geese at old Mr Edward’s little farm would not let him by… we all thought that hilarious. Even I (the smallest) knew that if you charged a hissing, threatening goose, it would turn and run. But Mr Bigger was a city man and very much a secretary at that. From then on, he had to take the long way round, by road and then up our rocky driveway. There were no geese loose at the larger farm on the hilltop.

As an extreme counterpoint to Mr Bigger, there was Candida, the daughter of John Betjeman (the poet and crusader for the preservation of Victorian architectural buildings). She was a quite different kind of secretary: a blond Bardot bombshell before Bardot made the scene. She was in such awe of Father (what had Betjeman told her?) that she wore silk miniskirt suits of the most brilliant colours that she had bought specially to come and work for Father. She fitted into our crazy lifestyle by being barefoot all the time, but she still wore the tight little silk suits to go sailing. If she was impressed by Father, I was doubly impressed by her…

Alan and I walked half over, half around, the small hill behind the house, following a tiny path created more by sheep than by man – the very path attempted by Mr Bigger a few years before. The hill was overgrown with gorse bushes, their dark green thorns a strict warning to keep our distance, their deep yellow flowers a brilliant contrast to the green. In between the gorse there were bare rocks and patches of short grass, grazed by hardy little Welsh sheep that had left wisps of their wool on the gorse thorns. In other places the hill was covered in bracken, a wild fern that overgrows the grass. In those days, farmers burned it or cut it for use as bedding for their cattle, but nowadays its smoke is considered carcinogenic and such practices are illegal. When young, bracken closely resembles fiddleheads, but as far as I know, it was never eaten. In the autumn, it goes an orange brown, so whole hillsides look as if they are aflame.

We went through an old iron kissing-gate (devised by farmers to withstand sheep) and looked down into a little barrel-shaped glen that led down to the tidal beach. The small valley was shaded with a few old oak trees that leaned in towards each other from the sides, almost meeting at the top. In the eighteenth century, ships were built here, as the natural shape of the narrow valley allowed men to work up the side of the ship without much (if any) scaffolding. When I was younger, perhaps still at the harness age, Mother took us on picnics there in the shade of the oaks. She loved to sketch the gnarled old trees in pastels, no doubt the offspring of the original oaks used to build the boats in days gone by. The place had a whiff of magic to my young mind, a place associated with elves, fairies and goblins.

Now we bounced down into the valley and up the other side, then skirted a couple of hay fields, keeping strictly to the sides so as not to trample the crop. There were foxgloves growing along the edges of the fields, their tall stalks hung with purple trumpets the size of fingers – hence the name ‘digitalis’. As children we had been warned about how poisonous they are, but that never seemed to stop us from wearing them on all ten fingers – and probably sucking those fingers afterwards. The morning was already warm and a skylark hovered high against the blue sky, as if held up by its own frenetic song, rather than constantly beating wings – invisible from such a distance.

We passed the little grey church – Eglwys Llanfihangel-y-Traethau – with its walled cemetery grown with tall yew trees. There I had dozed through many an interminable sermon. Near the west door stood a strange vertical gravestone, about five feet high and roughly square (8 inches or so to each side). It was engraved with letters – just recently deciphered by an archaeologist friend – in abbreviated Latin and mostly Roman characters. It was a tombstone from the twelfth century and read: “Here is the grave of Wledr, Mother of Hoedliw who first built this Church in the time of Owain Gwynedd.” King Owain ruled Gwynedd from 1137 to 1170, so the walls of the Church are some 150 years older than those of nearby Harlech Castle’s Norman masonry.

The church itself had been rebuilt and repaired so many times over the centuries, it now looked like a non-descript little chapel, built in the nineteenth century, its very ancient origins covered over with pebble-dash and plaster.

We went down the lane between high stone walls, from the church and past the large, square rectory (forever dour beneath its great dark pine trees) it was said that a man, jilted at the altar, had hung himself from the great old, gnarled oak tree. That was where my brother had fallen over a sleeping cow as he ran down the lane in the dark of night on his way to catch an early train, giving him quite a fright since he was just thinking of the jilted suicide at the time. From there we carried on down the hill to the hamlet know as Ynys (pronounced ‘un-iss’), which means ‘island’ in Welsh.

From the small sprinkling of cottages, the road runs across flat land that had been sea when Harlech Castle was built over seven hundred years ago. When my namesake Owain Glyn Dwr (the renowned Welsh Nationalist-separatist hero and ‘guerrilla’ – Father even claimed he was an ancestor) captured (in 1404) and held the castle for four years, it was still on a tidal sea and remained so until 150 years ago. Now it is rather marshy farmland. After half a mile we crossed the railway line at Ty Gwyn Halt, the one with a platform long enough for one door of the local train, where benighted passengers had thought it was the End of the World when they alighted in the dark only to find themselves surrounded by seawater from the great tidal wave. After that flat land, we walked up into the ancient highlands of the geological Harlech Dome. We trudged up a pretty lane which followed a small cascading river in its narrow valley, heavily wooded with 300-year-old oak trees with their very dark green canopy of leaves and lush green, moss-covered rocks below, where jagged edges of splintered rock were wrapped and cushioned by a velvet carpet of moss. The trees were clad with lichen, but only on their north sides. In this dark shade, the air smelled cool and fresh. The great roots of trees writhed, clutching piles of river rocks to their wooden embrace. The small river tumbled white and foaming down to its more peaceful way on the flat land, on down to the ocean. Bright rays of sunshine sparkled here and there, where beams of light found a path through the heavy foliage.

We walked past the tiny one-room cottage that Father had rented as his first house in Wales – when he was sixteen. It had been built as the first school in Meirionnydd. Now it was overgrown with trees. Just as it had been when he first rented it, there was still a small spring that came up in front of the hearth and ran across the floor and out of the door. He had kept his food in red and white spotted handkerchiefs, their corners tied together and hung from nails in the low rafters – out of reach of the rats. His annual rent had been two pounds, four days work on the farm and two pounds of honey – the cash had come out of his school pocket money. In those days, he thought little of walking from his school in Surrey to North Wales.

From there we followed a track down the bottom of a hanging valley, known locally as a cwm. This valley was wooded with oak, with some green fields surrounded by great dry-stone walls. Now another stream ran alongside us. The track led us past a small lake full of water lilies, a lush contrast to the barren landscape above, into which we were about to climb. We climbed up to an ancient, lonely church on a hill, where a service was held only once or twice a year. The view from the graveyard is spectacular and panoramic, so we stopped a few moments to take it in.

Our progress was much as it had been the year before, when my sister and I were riding the ponies – except that we did not have to stop to be shod at the blacksmith’s, nor did we stop to graze, just to catch our breath and drink deeply from the rivulets that, despite the drought, still tinkled out of the bogs. But there was this vast difference: I had chosen this expedition, I had financed it, if I suffered it was my choice. Again, we had a hot, sunny day, too hot for comfort. I remember the toil of climbing steep slopes with my knapsack, the drudgery of putting one foot in front of the other, an automatic movement that somehow invoked the image that I was an overloaded truck with a 16-speed gearbox with which I was for ever ‘changing’ gears up and down. On this ancient road, we were above the tree line. The way was surely chosen to be in open country where brigands and highwaymen could not easily hide. Nowadays, law and the welfare state had put such dangers behind – but the view from up here was spectacular.

We looked down over the flat land that had been sea, the land across which we had just walked. We looked over to the hill behind my home, the Ynys, and we could see how it had been an island, all it took was to replace the wet green fields in our mind’s eye with tidal sea water – for the fields were as flat as any water ever was. We could not see the house; the hill hid it from this angle. South and west of Ynys was the great sweep of depositional sand that holds Cardigan Bay in its arc

– the beaches ironing out the irregular, jagged interjections of rock from the ancient mountain formations. As for the Bay itself, it was the beginning of the open ocean, the beginning of the outside world, beyond Britain and all that Britain meant. Over the horizon was Ireland, some say that you can even see it on a clear day, though I never saw more than haze upon the curved horizon.

By the same token, a seventeenth-century traveller who climbed Snowdon, claimed that you could see the whole of the British Isles and the coast of France – in which case, either the mountain was higher or the world flatter in his day – clearly he did not think there was much risk of anyone else being so foolish as to climb that peak again to verify his information… then again, perhaps he was merely practicing ‘poetic licence’.

We picked up the same Roman Road I had taken the year before with my sister on horseback. Here we were above the tree line, the moors dried out and burned by the long drought. While the bogs in lower ground were still waterlogged and bright green, up here the still air smelled of dried herbs and parched heather. The usual wayside foxgloves and nettles could not survive up here. The vegetation was stunted, with wind-whipped heather, short reeds in wet boggy hollows, even a little bracken here and there. Our packs were minimal, but all the same they felt like lead: I carried my sleeping bag and most of the food, while Alan carried his own sleeping bag, a tiny camping gas stove and a small pup tent, of which he was very proud. We carried little water, knowing that there would always be a mountain stream wherever we went. It was years later that we all learned of fatal diseases from sheep manure or carcasses that make those crystal-clear mountain streams potentially lethal. Meanwhile, we enjoyed them in happy ignorance.

We passed Llyn Tecwyn Uchaf, a reservoir for some newer houses below. There were some ruined houses higher up, roofless, door-less, windowless shells built like the stone walls, of big stones and boulders – mostly without any mortar in-between. The highlands of Wales are dotted with these skeletons, once lived in as upland farms (no longer profitable or desirable) or groups of them where miners and quarrymen used to live during the week, then hurry down to their families and homes on the lowland for a square meal and chapel on Sundays… and who knows, perhaps a spot of beer (well, it was beer or chapel, not both – not worth the scolding from the Minister in front of everyone) and even some slap and tickle beforehand on the Saturday night?

From the reservoir, we plunged downhill into a recently planted government re-forestation project of fast-growing conifers for paper pulp and other junk uses. The bureaucrats had no use for slow growing oak, ash or beech trees. These single-species plantings were much maligned locally as prone to disease, not ecological, unnatural and ugly. Right now, the trees were not much taller than ourselves, yet already so deep green that they were dark and foreboding. We still walked on grass but soon, without sunlight, the growing trees would blanket the ground in needles and there would be no grass, no flowers, no heather. Evergreens seemed indeed like a deathly blight on the landscape.

At the head of the valley of the Dwyryd (which lower down became ‘our’ estuary), we came down through real deciduous woods again and briefly trudged the road to use the bridge at Maentwrog to cross the river, just as I had done on horseback. There is a single track toll bridge much lower down the river and had we been hitch hiking, that would have been the shortest, quickest way to go. Now however, we were determined to avoid walking on roads as much as possible. Besides, this longer way round was much more beautiful. So from this old stone bridge, we walked back up through more great oak woods, but this time with a heavy undergrowth of wild rhododendrons, and again out onto the open highlands to pick up the ancient track again. This time, we were further from the highest point, for here the Harlech Dome is replaced by the younger, more recently bent and folded mountains of Snowdonia. We skirted the flanks of Moelwyn Bâch – where, higher up, Alan had almost been killed, that time when he slipped on a cliff we were traversing. Amabel’s magic herbs had by now totally healed his injured thumb. Now the view to the left was southwest down the larger valley of the Glaslyn, which had been dammed with the Cobb and reclaimed as farmland. The foothills still seemed to end in the flat sea, but in fact it was a green sea of grass crisscrossed by banks with hedges on top and ditches to drain the low-lying fields. Down there, it was an oasis beyond stone wall country which was everywhere else on higher ground. Down there, drainage was the issue. Up on the hills, stones were the issue. The stone walls were built to clear the surface of the fields so that grass would have a little more space to grow, besides defining property lines.

Oh yes! This view was my view. This was the landscape that I had chosen to wander and admire. The visibility was no clearer today than it had been when I passed this way on horseback the year before… but now it sang! From now on, I hoped that I would choose my views, whether they be of a slag heap outside Essen (Ruhr) one foggy, freezing December night or the brilliant bird’s-egg blue of enamel on the Shah (or Imam) Mosque in Esfahan, the windows of the Sistine Chapel as the sun sets behind them and a chamber orchestra plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the dirt-floored, filthy house of a crack-head in the Mexican desert. To each view I say: “Seize this view, for this I may never see again.” It took cancer, forty years later, to see just how truly fundamental is that thought. “We are on Earth but for a brief span of time, if we lose our lust for life, we lose our lives.”

We passed the sharp little point of Craig Ysgafn and then over the rounded flanks of Moelwyn Mawr, a particularly round, grassy mountain with few sharp rocks visible. Below its surface it is honey-combed with old slate mines that were used to store artworks in, from the major museums of London during the War. It is still a mystery to me how they kept them dry, for whenever I had gone inside those mines, water poured, rather than dripped, from the roof and ran down the floors where there had once been narrow gauge tracks for slate wagons. We came down into the cwm between Moelwyn Mawr and the next mountain Cnicht, totally different from the Moelwyns. It looked like the Matterhorn, or a dinosaur lying on its belly with its scaly back the long sharp ridge of rocks.

I used to enjoy walking up the ‘dinosaur’s back’ to the summit and then, rather than retrace my steps, would continue a short way down the other side, before turning right and scrambling down a ‘chimney’ or narrow cleft in the vertical rocks. At the bottom of this cleft was a perfect scree slope, stone debris broken off from the cliff above, lying at 43º – the angle of repose. You could run and jump down this slope, the stones sliding under your feet as you landed, absorbing the shock and hastening your descent. Scree-riding is a summer form of skiing, but it is best done on rarely travelled slopes because each passer-by reduces the angle of the slope a little until the stones will no longer slide under your feet. It is not for the faint-hearted and you have to keep concentrating on your next landing place, for if you hit a solid, stationary rock you are likely to break a leg.

It is always easier going up mountains formed by glaciers, than down them. This is because the rounded, armchair-shaped valley known as a cwm or cirque frequently drops away into nothing at its bottom end (where the giant’s legs would be if one were sitting in the cwm). They are cut off by a transverse glacier lower down. There are often lazy, meandering ‘mature’ streams in these high up, hanging valleys, which suddenly turn into wild, tumbling torrents when they reach the end of the valley. Climbing up to such a hanging valley is clear walking, you can see how steep it will get ahead and skirt the vertical parts. Going down, on the other hand (especially in cloud or in the dark), the way may seem almost flat, but when you reach the end of the valley, there is no way to tell where it leads to a vertical drop and where a descent may be negotiated without breaking one’s neck.

As I had leapt and slid down this rock-strewn slope, I thought of a story Father had told of when he was a boy, climbing Cader Idris near Dolgellau and meeting a shepherd looking for a lamb on a scree slope. The old man said to him: “Come along with me, young gentleman, I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.” Father followed him to a spot where a mountaineer had missed his footing while scree-riding, tripped on a large rock sticking up through the loose stones and fell forward with full force and cracked his skull on another rock. The shepherd asked. “See where his brains come out all over those stones?” Father pocketed a small one with plenty of blood on it, though he was less sure of the brains, and kept it in his ‘museum’ – a child’s collection which disappeared over the years. So I never did see the bloody, brain-splattered stone, though the story remained engraved on my mind, as if the dangers of scree-riding were not already sufficiently obvious to keep all of my attention.

Looking up at these relatively parched mountains, there were still a few boggy patches where water pools in rock depressions and the grass and stubborn little reeds there keep their emerald colour despite the drought. There were no other hikers to be seen. Everyone climbs Snowdon, but many ignore its remarkable minor cousins. There were white spots here and there; if they moved they were sheep, if they were stationary they were mushrooms (scale at this distance is difficult to gauge), but with the present drought, there were no mushrooms. Sometimes, if we were really lucky – and on this trip we were not – the white spots could be a herd of wild goats. These goats are superb. Their hair (neither fur nor fleece) is long and hangs down half way to the ground, especially when groomed. Not that they are ever groomed in nature. The bucks sport great horns as long as 45 cms, which sweep back in a proud arc. I was told that a few individuals are sometimes caught by professional rugby players to serve as mascots for the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. A herd is corralled into a narrow valley trap, and there a few are tackled like the opponent team in a rugby match. Alas, they do not last long in the stressful life of London, with their horns polished and their hair shampooed and groomed into silver tresses. Life on the parade ground is not worth living when compared to life on the cliffs of Snowdonia.

From where we were, the nearest visible house was half a dozen miles away, down on the coast. Closer by, the next village was hidden below in a valley. Our feeling of isolation was exhilarating: we were alone and capable. We could keep on walking until we could walk no more and camped. The independence we felt was thrilling. We were proud of our strong little legs.

Where our track reached its lowest point in the valley was the tiny hamlet of Croesor with a shop-cum-post office, chapel and primary school, all built of slate. For fencing, slate was taken from rejected slabs up to 2m long and 60 to 90cm wide, which were slightly buried at one end (the earth was so shallow over the rocks below, it was impossible to bury them deeper) and then held together with the next piece by means of heavy twisted wire. In those days, where the slabs of slate had fallen down or where a gate was needed, farmers used Victorian iron bedstead ends to fill the gaps. This curious stop-gap solution had led an uncle who farmed a rich successful farm in the west of England to ask Father: “… if the farmers slept on gates, since their bedsteads were already used as gates?” Later, with the mode for gentrification, antique shop owners came all the way from London. They bought the bed ends for a song and had them restored, to sell to a new generation of Yuppies moving into renovated slum houses in London. Sometimes they even stole them when the farmer was not around, leaving a gaping hole in the fence.

At Croesor, we turned left and walked down the lane wide enough for one vehicle at a time, the last half mile to Parc, the sixteenth-century house where Father was writing. It was late afternoon, though the summer sun would not set for a few hours yet. Alan and I were hot, thirsty and hungry, but we knew very well that there was no such thing as a refrigerator to raid in this house. As in our family house, there was no electricity (not to mention that this house still had no drains or running water either). Food was still scarce and scarcer still when Father was the caterer.

He was sitting in the big dark kitchen, hunched, bear-like (menacingly or protectively?) over his little Olivetti 22 typewriter, hardly any larger or heavier than a modern laptop – an invention he would have loved to work on, had he lived another thirty years. His big hands were pounding away fast with four fingers, interspersed with long periods of silent reflection. The fire was smouldering in the huge fireplace (where one brother had “cleaved his sibling in twain with an axe”). He was a little confused to be interrupted by us, thinking he had just got rid of us ten days before, but he seemed not so displeased either. And so ended our first long day’s trek.

Once we had slaked our thirst, we set about collecting wood and reviving the fire, knowing that this was the first step towards dinner. By then, he had put away his typewriter and marshalled his typescript into a neat pile. He poured himself a glass of wine and started making a very hot curry with cooked cold lamb and vegetables. I told him of our plan to walk to Bardsey Island. Far from saying we were too young to be travelling so far alone, the idea seemed to light his fire.