It is 1993 and I am in the mountains. It’s a part of my job I like. I take boys from difficult homes and broken backgrounds up into the heights of Snowdonia. We travel from the towns and few cities of the south east where the landscape is often flat and woody, or marshy and muddy with imprecise demarcations between land and water. I take the boys in the van farther than many of them have ever been, following the motorways and stopping at the service stations to stock up on sausage rolls and fizzy cans of drink. The cashiers and attendants have accents different to the ones they know and they laugh and mock for the simple fact these people are ever so slightly different. But in some, I see an excitement in the eyes: a challenge but also a possibility.
Over the border, they laugh at the bilingual signs, saying that’s not a language, it can’t be. They look at the spreading greenery and the off-white dots of sheep covering the fields with scat. I point out floating ravens and buzzards. My colleagues and I keep a sort of order, encourage them and even help with the erection of tents. I laugh off the complaints at the shock of the rain and the mud, the grass that stains denim as they kneel and slide poles through canvas. The idea, I suppose, is to show them something different and to show them what they can do. To make men out of them, some say, but I do not.
We begin the ascent of Cadair Idris early. It’s summer but it is cold. Droplets of dew cling in my beard. Bags are packed with fleeces and water. We’ve kitted the boys out with good walking shoes and a professional guide is with us and I hope all of this will do some good. Hope that wherever life takes them they’ll remember this trip in some small way. We climb and I point out cwms, striated rock and moraines. I think I see a lonely red kite.
Today is misty, the sun trying to make inroads through the damp air. The guide leads the procession and I take the rear, ensuring no stragglers fall by the wayside. I am sweating and I swig from my water bottle.
I look behind me into the swirling mists, trying to see how high we’ve climbed, to try and see the land fall away below. A gigantic black figure follows me, his shape blurry and indistinct, rainbow light coiling off him into the mist. I raise my hand in alarm, and so does the black figure: he mirrors my movements in the mist, this spectre of myself, my mountain shadow high up here.
Boys, I shout, come see this.