Pen Yr Allt
Two red kites, rust and charcoal colours, circle in slow laps above the valley, the Severn sparkling beneath. I sit on the damp grass that forms a barrier between our rented cottage and the tree line of the Pen Yr Allt woods, Helena dozing beside me. A generation ago the kites were nearly extinct. I watch their slow spiral and remember the times when my dad drove us deep into Wales to look for the dwindling raptors. We drove further west from where I now sit, my wife fanned out on the grass next to me, soaking up the sun. I swig from a bottle of pear cider and light a cigarette while Helena sleeps, watching the circling birds, enjoying the optimism they give me. Not all stories are set in stone. Trajectories can be changed. The river flows and I wonder if redemption is possible.
The world sits somewhere there over the Severn, past an ugly line of felled pines up on the hill, uprooted and harvested by the Forestry Commission who periodically plant, grow, uproot and harvest in an endless cycle. These pine forests are near-birdless, hostile to life, they shift and can’t be trusted. Cycle-paths and walkways change with the seasons.
Helena wakes and stretches. We spend another two hours idle, eating an improvised picnic, looking out over the valley, saying little and enjoying the quiet. Finally, we opt to explore the surroundings. I sluggishly pull on suitable footwear. Helena, better rested than me, bounds up the steep incline into the woods. This heat is so unexpected. I follow, up an unofficial but well-worn path into the trees.
The woods lack human noise, only the two of us to snap dry twigs and crunch through fallen leaves. Not quiet, but a different kind of noise. The undergrowth teems with midges, gnats, beetles, butterflies, bees. Birds chirrup, mating songs fill the air, woodpigeons coo. A flapping pink jay bursts out from his hiding place. Wood cracks beneath Helena’s feet like the crack of gunshot. She bought new hiking boots, especially for this trip, last week in Brent Cross Shopping Centre. I remember the argument at the returns counter of one of those interchangeable clothing stores. A woman, trembling with rage and losing the argument she’d started, spat in her opponent’s face. We stood and watched, did nothing. Don’t get involved. Such things seem absurd today.
A huge Great Dane bounds out of the trees onto the path in front of us, one of the many spectral hounds that haunt all corners of the island, a ghost of Gelert. I flinch, stand back while Helena becomes visibly excited. The dog runs into her embrace like it’s greeting a long-lost lover, she pats and rubs the giant animal, cooing a soothing ‘hello girl’ and ‘look at you, you’re lovely’. This dog is real, here and now, no beast from Celtic mythology. Cautiously I join my wife and stroke the thick bristling fur.
The owner appears, affable and friendly, four other plus-size hounds fanning out in front of him, his loyal vanguard. He’s young, mid-twenties at most and the only soul we’ve seen in hours. I wonder what his life out here in quiet central Wales must be like. So different from a life defined by salt water and concrete. We make the required small talk, though I find myself enjoying it, Helena talking of how she desperately wants a dog but it’s a lot of commitment, especially in London and it’s not fair to keep them cooped up. The young man nods with genuine interest. I find myself agreeing with my wife. I fantasise about walking a husky on daily trips through Gladstone Park, letting curious children stop and pat him or her, scooping up mess and dumping it in a red bin. The troupe of hounds and their leader move on and we wave our goodbyes and nice-to-meet-yous.
My mind unfolds like a map when I have access to a horizon, can walk the woods and can see, not theorise, a river. I scratch one of three lumpy mosquito bites on my right hand.
We step into a clearing and see a red kite circling overhead, perhaps one of the pair I watched earlier. Muddy ruts from recent bicycle trips cut through the earth, the crusted ridges drying out and hardening in the sun to a light grey-brown. It’s sweltering today, caught us off guard. We didn’t pack the right gear, our minds on auto-pilot saying: rain, cold, take jumpers and waterproofs. Beads form on my forehead. Helena strides ahead.
Rituals
We woke early, too early for the tube. Anyway, we didn’t want to share our journey with the previous night’s party-casualties, their dilated eyes, tobacco stink and embarrassment too much a reflection of our younger selves.
We cabbed it to Euston. I regretted the couple of beers the night before, argued our set-piece we’re tired and irritable argument that was forgotten by the time we hit the queue at Caffè Nero. A ceremonial observance, we knew the script off by heart, familiar and reassuring.
Helena sort-of-slept on the train, jerking awake at Rugby, bleary-eyed at Coventry. I watched the West Midlands through smeared glass, too tired to read but unable to sleep. I devoured an overpriced egg baguette during the twenty-minute change at Birmingham New Street.
‘Waste of four pound fifty. You should have had breakfast,’ Helena murmured and stroked her belly. She was right, of course. From Birmingham to Caersws she slept again as kids ran up and down the carriage, their accents a muddle of Liverpool, the Welsh borders, Black Country. I tried to read a book about the Kent coast I bought years ago but never got around to reading. I couldn’t concentrate. The train crossed the border into Wales, another country, sun streaming through the windows.
Coast, City, Country
In these woods I can see the future. Helena rubs her belly-bump. She seems excited. She was always precise with her words, careful not to waste them in idle chatter, and I like her that way. I always did. She’ll speak her mind when she knows it, not before. Nothing changed as everything changed. She says she doesn’t enjoy visiting her friends in East London anymore, the routine once-a-week ceremony she has with her best friend Sofia withering. We left the city and many of our friends for almost three years, went to live on the Kent coast in cheap expansive housing in a dilapidated resort town, a life of salt and watery amnesia, exactly what we needed at the time. We learned, there, how to slow down and adapt to the rhythms of a sea so different from the city. Long ago, as a couple we agreed we were people of the city, the coast or the country – never the suburbs. Friends would periodically come down to stay, marvel at the cheaper beer, the sand grains stuck between their toes, and sometimes they bought driftwood sculptures by local artists to put on display in flats back in the capital. We travelled occasionally to the city for birthdays, a New Year’s celebration, the christening of my sister’s firstborn.
We moved back three months ago, and then, to the dismay of all our friends, to Kilburn not Hackney. Here we were, today, escaping out to Wales for a week, already an itch to escape the city on a regular basis in a way we never had before. I like returning to London, that’s the only way I can put it. Naive to think our old routines could just be picked up, as if we weren’t older. As if her belly didn’t swell.
Helena has drifted from her friends. I know this hurts my wife in a way she cannot, or will not, articulate. I have no idea whether she’s told Sofia the news. I feel it’s not my place to ask. Things, times, people change, I say to her, knowing I’m spouting platitudes and ashamed of my clichés. But what else to say? We only become more like ourselves as we get older.
‘Dan!’ cries Helena, wandering off ahead while I stare skyward at the wheeling kite. ‘Dan, come see this!’
‘You don’t see them in Kilburn,’ I say gesturing at the kite, beaming, and striding toward her. I sound like my dad.
‘You get them in Chesham, Si, it’s not that special.’ She’s right; end of the Metropolitan Line out in Buckinghamshire the kites are ten-a-penny, successfully reintroduced; once nearly extinct and shunted to the peripheries of Wales, now as common as the kestrel and buzzard. If it makes seeing them less of an event, so be it.
Llyn Clywedog
Up by Llyn Clywedog reservoir the kites are plentiful, wheeling over the still black water. Yesterday we ate sandwiches and drank milky coffee at The Red Kite Cafe, looking out over that flooded valley where old farmhouses sleep under black water. From the cottage, we walked into the nearest town, Llanidloes, through its tiny market square past a few pubs with locals and tourists already outside drinking and smoking, enjoying early summer. In the local hiking shop we picked up a badly designed leaflet marking out the route of the Sarne Sabrina route, a route that would take us up to the sleeping black reservoir. We found the starting point behind a half-empty car park, where a statue of the Celtic river goddess Sabrina, spirit of the Severn stood a few metres from an overflowing bin. A spider’s web connected Sabrina’s ear to shoulder. I looked at our crude map. Helena swigged her water. We set off.
We walked through farms, saw handwritten signs warning that dogs off leads would be shot, next to photographs of disembowelled sheep. Helena lay down in one field among daisies and buttercups, the land falling away behind her into rolling hills with no other human in sight.
Bent Branches
The man who rented us our cottage, Darran, is a cheerful ex-Londoner with a dangling CND earring that Helena scoffed at the second he disappeared. He told us a few tales of the area, how a car carrying three generations went off the road into that black water a few years back. A little girl was murdered in a town ten miles away, her death plastered across last year’s red-tops. The days when this area was part of the nineties free festival scene, pubs with signs outside saying NO PUNKS NO HIPPIES, thieves rustling sheep in the night and shipping them over to Ireland, trouble with the gypsies.
I replay his stories as I follow my wife across the dry clearing. Now, for the first time, I’m seeing the world in terms of its negative potentialities. Soon, we’ll have something to truly lose. On a day of such beauty and sun, I struggle to not think of death around me, the mortality of trees, spectral hounds, the endless regeneration and rebirth that keeps the world going.
I catch up with my wife. After three years, it still strikes me as odd to put it that way. She wanders a few metres off the path into disordered undergrowth, a sound like scrunching old newspapers as she wades through the leaf litter.
‘Look.’ Her left hand, wedding ring glinting green light, clutches a bent branch. My eyes refocus: it’s like one of those dreadful magic-eye pictures from the nineties, and what she sees I suddenly see. Branches arched, entwined, held firmly in place with string and plastic ties. Bearing no load, only ceremonial. Here, today, in this wood, it feels right. I’m not a religious man but somehow this feels right. It’s in context.
‘It’s a chapel, Dan. A tree-church, or whatever they call it.’
‘They?’
‘The hippies. The pagans, wiccans, whatever. That’s what it’s got to be, right? Maybe Darran comes up here with his wife and kids!’ She rubs her belly and makes a sardonic peace sign with her left hand, her wedding ring obscured by green shadows.
‘I hope so. Else we’ve stumbled on some Welsh Blair Witch action.’
She throws a clod of earth at me. ‘Shut up.’
Peace
We met eight years ago. So long and the blink of an eye. Now that it, the baby, is growing, I fret about how we’ll edit the story of how we met, whether the facts should be blurred, the narrative tweaked. Do I even remember it all correctly? What kind of other parents will we meet and will I like them?
I liked her immediately: she hated the word creative being used as a noun, smoked American Spirit with liquorice Rizla and leaked blue smoke out the corner of her mouth. She said things I thought wonderful, like you can’t buy authenticity. She had family in Hobart and Sydney, whom she used to visit as a child. She wanted to go again and, four years later, we did. She bought a crappy fluffy souvenir of a thylacine in a gift shop, garish yellow with cartoon stripes. Hard to remember that the creature was once real, was talked about in the present tense. I think she still has it, buried with our life’s ephemera in a cupboard somewhere. Something for the kid to play with. She was into green politics, then, and still is, really.
In the edited story do I tell the child how many beers I’d sunk, what her mother and father snorted off the smeared glass table of a mutual friend, what my mental state was, how we ended up in bed not even knowing each other’s surnames? I was 26 and she was 24. There were ups and downs, and eight years rolled by. People think a child might bring a bit of focus, stability, peace. I want peace, I say to myself and to my wife, but the word is so hard to pin down. Peace as contentment, stagnation, boredom? To be at peace, I tell myself, is to be dead. To sleep under black water in a flooded valley.
Stories
Helena sits on a mossy log underneath the bent branches and pulls a quizzical face for the camera as I record our memories; I have this terrible nostalgia for the present. I project a future-image of myself remembering this day, pulling up the files on a tablet, a laughing toddler bouncing on my knee. In the woods, I can see the future. Helena’s bump is just visible. The dappled green light makes her face unknowable. I pass her the camera.
Here in Wales it’s easy to slink off into sylvan fantasies, fair folk of the Celtic hillsides, those bounding phantom hounds, portals into other dimensions and narratives structured so differently from the ones I was schooled with. I grew up on a diet of Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, before I graduated as an eager child on to mythologies outside of Northern Europe, the sometimes inexplicable tales of the Celts where I learned of titanic aquatic beasts like the Afanc, the charming trickster coyotes of the Native Americans, malevolent kappa in Japanese rivers and condor rides over the Andes to find a lost star-bride. I have to remember these stories, all these stories that meant so much to me, and pass them on.
I’ve read Porius and Sheepshagger and The Great God Pan. I find comfort in ideas of old ways persisting, eruptions of pagan rites through dirty cracked concrete. I say I’m a rationalist, an atheist, but these things have an undeniable pull. This church of bent branches is not helping and I pull Helena away, who is still snapping away at the thing with her camera from every conceivable angle.
We explore Pen Yr Allt for the rest of the evening until dusk draws in. We exit the wood onto an empty road, no pavement, that leads us down back to the cottage. Only two cars pass us on the walk back, and one tractor.
The evening passes with a single whisky. I nip out and have a solitary rollie, I’m trying to quit. She’s had to quit and so must I. I want to. I stoke the fire, we watch crap on the television, and I feel at peace.
Hafren
On our last day in Wales we visit the pine forest. Darran has kindly offered to drive us around a few of the sites that are beyond walking distance, knowing we don’t have a car. I enjoy his company and I think Helena does too despite her mockery. She sees something that she may have been herself, or may become, and she reacts against that.
I sit in the front seat of the car with Darran and we chat about bands we’ve both seen or liked, stuff from the old squat and free festival scene, he’s into stuff like Blyth Power and The Mob, Culture Shock and Radical Dance Faction.
‘I wish I’d been around for those festivals. I was too young.’
‘It got a bit much after a while,’ he says. ‘Once we had this hippy chick staying on our sofa for five weeks, never paid any rent or cleaned up, and when she wasn’t away with the fairies she was on speed.’
A thought strikes me. ‘Do you know the guy who walks those massive dogs up in the woods above the cottage?’
‘No, never seen him,’ replies Darran.
In the back sits Helena with Darran’s eight-year-old son, Iestyn, talking incessantly at my wife about everything from the ice-giant in his Beast Quest books to the murdered girl in the next town along and he asks Helena if she can sing the Welsh national anthem, at which point all three of us adults burst out laughing as Helena, flummoxed, apologises that she can’t. Iestyn simply shakes his head, genuinely disappointed.
We drive once more past the Llyn Clywedog reservoir, the water black obsidian. I squint and see a few backpackers resting outside The Red Kite Cafe, rucksacks at their feet. They stretch sore limbs, looking up at the soaring kites. The water holds its secrets. No water spirits live there.
We pull into a deserted car park, the entrance to a vast and silent pine and spruce forest. Hafren. I step out the car and dutifully read the information sign. The forest was planted in 1937. My grandmother is older than this forest, predating Hafren by twenty-one years. Somewhere near here is the source of Afon Severn where Sabrina must now sleep, under the peat bog where the river rises. Shrouded in this forest are Bronze Age copper mines, and somewhere we can walk to the place where ‘The Severn Breaks Its Neck’. I want to do all of this, see and understand all of this, and we have no time. Iestyn runs into the trees, his dad cheerfully reminding him not to go out of sight. Helena walks chatting with Darran. I lag behind clutching the camera, looking for a perfect shot. It looks like a forest. How can an image capture the emptiness? Hafren has no birdsong, no undergrowth to speak of bar moss and sphagnum, the soil acidic and hostile to unprofitable plant life. In this terrifying imitation of woodland, no branches are bent, no ceremonies undertaken, no stories told. No memories can be formed. I can’t see the future.
I step off the raised wooden path to look closer at one of the trees. I blink. The forest shifts and warps. I look around, trying to find Darran, Iestyn, Helena. Nothing.
Only silence.