XXIX

HOME AT LAST

Seven miles from home, we were dropped in Maentwrog and I finally went to a public telephone and called home, reversing the charges. Father answered and accepted the call. He expressed no surprise that we were still alive, nor even that we were finally coming home. He just said: “Good. Stay right there. We’re going out to dinner with Hamish and his wife. We’ll pick you up on the way through.”

Sure enough, half an hour later, the rattling old grey jeep pulled up with my Parents. We climbed into the back with our packs and set off up into the mountains, high up behind Llan Ffestiniog. In its heyday around 1900, it was a flourishing slate-mining town, but by the end of the War the slate business was no longer viable and many houses looked abandoned, with broken window panes and front doors hanging askew – but the truth was that unemployment was as high as 46 per cent and those who had not left, had given up hope. Already, by 1955, there were a few small signs of revival, but it was still a blighted slate town. It would take years before some slate mines would be reopened as tourist attractions. The main road through Ffestiniog was asphalt with just enough width to pass an oncoming bus or truck.

Then we took a single-track asphalt road much higher into the mountains. After a while, there was a rocky track up to the right and at the top of that track stood Hamish’s hafod, or highland farm.

The house had once been a retreat for monks and also a place for them to tend their sheep on the summer pastures. It was a low stone farmhouse with a tiny chapel attached. All around were rocks with patches of grass in between. Stone walls had been built to clear rocks from the grass, but it was still a very poor little hill farm. The house and chapel certainly predated the Reformation, so they were over 400 years old.

Hamish and his wife, Daphne, were English (well, he was Scottish, but just as much an outsider) and had two small children. She was fragile and lithe, a dancer, if I remember correctly. He was a short little squat bull of a rugby-playing man who never did anything at a walk – he sprinted from his workbench to the car he was working on, from table to sink with the dirty dishes. He had red hair and a most combative nature, especially after ‘having drink taken’. A mechanical genius, he had driven a 1913 Lagonda motor car from London to Cape Town and now restored other vintage cars. He had converted the tiny chapel into his garage. He put a wide door in the west wall and had enough space for two cars side by side. He used the altar as his workbench, his tools hung neatly on the east wall in place of a crucifix. At that time, he was working on a 1928 supercharged Alfa Romeo (a bright red two-seater) and a 1924 four-seater OM touring car, both Italian marques. In the old cow barns he had a few early Bugattis (some with the pointed ‘boat tail’ of the 1920s) that he not only raced, but to the scandal of vintage car collectors, even drove (rather than bringing them on a trailer) all the way to and from the race track: over 200 miles each way to Silverstone, in a one or two-seater priceless antique car with only rear-wheel brakes.

He once took me for a drive in a two-seater 1920 Bugatti Brescia. The seats were of cane work, the passenger sitting a little further back than the driver, so his legs lay beside the driver’s seat. My job was to pump up the pressure on the cylindrical petrol tank behind me (this one was earlier and did not sport the boat tail) to maintain fuel supply to the carburettor. The mudguards were of shining copper, the paintwork in bright Bugatti blue and the 1.4 litre four-cylinder, sixteen-valve engine growled and howled. We roared off further up into the mountains on the one-track asphalt road, taking the sharp turns at the speed only a practised racing car driver can pull off successfully. I kept thinking of that photograph Hamish had, framed from a press shot of him racing at Silverstone, taking a corner on two wheels, the other two flying so high you could see the crowd beyond under the tyres. Then suddenly we stopped. Something was severely amiss. Our roaring élan was aborted. We were not on an even keel. One back wheel had fallen off, the centre lock hub had stripped its thread. We trotted back home…

Needless to say, as a young boy I worshipped him. His drunken eccentricities were not my problem – his cars and his enthusiasm were my joy. As for my Parents, they were intrigued by this attractive, eccentric young couple (whose palpable mutual attraction was fiercely magnetic) and their arrival to the neighbourhood… though their sympathies later went to his (by then) abused wife.

I assume we were both carried out to the Jeep after dinner. I have no memory of our departure. Later, Mother remarked only that she had never seen two such filthy dirty little boys as we, when they picked us up. Not in Tangier, nor Naples, nor in the slums of Liverpool. I shall never know if, in fact, she was anxious when I was away with Alan for so long without communication, or if she was satisfied that we were sensible enough and could cope alone. Life in general and communications in particular were so very different then.

Was this, then, the great ‘eureka’ moment? Did this truly mean that henceforth I could just get up and walk to Kabul or Tokyo? Not exactly, but now my foot was in the door and I had been introduced to the concept that the world could be my stomping ground… you, the reader, may see this as the End. For me, it was only the Beginning.