TOO many things are happening at the moment. Hoping to hear news of Olly, I’ve started listening to the radio again and looking at the telly, and that’s always a bad sign. It’s February and it’s cold. I feel as if I’m sitting in a dark kitchen with the fridge door ajar – there’s a nicotine glow, the hum of snow to come. Outside, the earth is flat and colourless – clingfilmed ready for reheating; the barcode trees are stark and black, waiting for spring’s leafy new price tags. I wait for each dawn as a sick man waits for medical results.
I’m standing by the sea-facing window, next to my telescope, looking down at the harbour. If I concentrate all the lenses of my mind I can focus on a tiny upstairs window in Bangor in the nineteenth century. A man called John Jones is training a large telescope on the snowy cap of Mars. He calls his telescope Jumbo. He made it himself. By day he counts slates in the local docks; he has already been a farmer’s boy and a servant. But after reading The Solar System by Dr Dick he has become enamoured of stars.
There’s a blue boat in the harbour and its chains are rattling, its capstan spinning. Soon it will glide seawards and I need to be on it – I want to be a dot on someone’s horizon. And strangely, portentously, there’s a ghost moth in the hallway, clinging to the glass pane above my front door. It hasn’t moved for days. I stand there, sometimes, willing it to life. There’s sadness in moths. In times of drought, without dew, they may travel in clouds for many miles, looking for water. When they find it they drown in large numbers as they try to settle on its surface.
I have some final business to attend to. I am in need of friends. I have called upon them all to help me – and here’s one of them now, scurrying up the path.
He was with us a short while ago: magnifying glass in hand, one eye larger than the other in the best cartoon fashion. The man who used his brilliant deductive skills to free two innocent men from prison – in real life. He introduced skis to Switzerland. He voyaged to the Arctic as surgeon on a whaling ship. He enthralled the public with his creation, Sherlock Holmes. Yes, Arthur Conan Doyle is with us again, though in a different guise – as a spiritualist. For him it was a great crusade, and if you don’t believe me, read his two-volume The History of Spiritualism. To tell you the truth, Sherlock Holmes meant very little to him. Ready cash. He thought his historical novel The White Company was his best work. Like most of us, Conan Doyle had a skeleton in the cupboard – his father drank enough of the hard stuff to sink Baker Street under a sea of bottles. One of seven children, given to fits of violence, Doyle senior spent much of his life in mental asylums or nursing homes for alcoholics.
Already fascinated by psychic research – séances, telepathy and thought transference, Conan Doyle was devastated by the death from pneumonia of his son Kingsley, and the tragedy refracted his mind; at a sitting held by a Welsh medium his son ‘spoke’ to him. Conan Doyle was hooked.
Sherlock’s sleuthing tips were of no help in the search for Olly. And there’s even worse news. The police have given up. Even Dafydd Apolloni in Rome has thrown in the towel, and we all know what he and his hot-blooded compatriots will do to find a pretty girl. So I’m going on a different tack. I’m going to get in touch with her through spiritualism.
‘Oh well,’ I hear you say as you lay down my book. ‘Pity – he’d kept it together pretty well until now, for a lunatic that is. But communing with the lost and the dead? Forget it.’
The truth is, I have a confession to make. During the last few months a creeping sensation has spread over me. Not a realisation, exactly – more a suspicion. A hunch? A little orange Post-it note from Sherlock, or my Sixth Sense, saying: Everything is happening now. The past and the future, too. All that has happened and all that will happen is happening now. Without beginning, middle or end, the performance is continuous and ever-happening. Whatever has been in the past and whatever will be in the future is happening now, all at the same time.
I know, sounds barmy to me too. I don’t believe in all that tosh either. But hang on for a sec. Don’t go yet. I wouldn’t bother you with this if I didn’t have something to go on. A solitary clue.
Lately I’ve been having a recurring déjà-vu, but it’s a déjà-vu with a difference. It’s not a sharp, tangy repeat from the past. It’s from the future. It happened yesterday, when I was travelling up-country, from the sea towards the foothills of Snowdonia. Meandering up the valley, following the curves of the river – I was somewhere near the old Roman ford.
There I was, travelling along in my pick-up, when I had a typical déjà-vu experience but it was from the future: I was transported by my senses to exactly the same place after my death. It was the same old world, pretty much, and it felt familiar in a déjà-vu sort of way. But time had moved on a bit, and I wasn’t there. I was acutely – and not unpleasantly – aware that I’d left the stage; I was simply not there any longer. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in an afterlife. No – my senses (or my mind) were merely playing tricks with me. Happens to loads of people, apparently. Nothing new under the moon. But how about the millions who do believe in all that, all those who have believed in spiritualism? A surprising number of Welsh people, actually. Superstitious lot. I should know. Few people have spent more time than me avoiding ladders and tossing salt around by the sackful. Research has shown that the average Welshman spends a total of thirteen weeks of his life touching wood and saying Touch Wood.
I’m joking! Never take me seriously.
Let’s examine the Welsh and their penchant for the supernatural.
Take Jack Webber, born in one of the South Wales valleys in 1907: he spoke through trumpets and his presence affected electrical equipment.
Or how about Treherbert-born Alexander Frederick Harris. At one Christmas séance featuring a luminous ball he caused the decorations and balloons to be pulled down by spirit children who played on tambourines, mouth organs and drums. During the war he ‘reunited’ a woman with her dead son. At a séance the young man appeared dramatically, held out his arms to the woman, and said: Mum, it's Derry. With a cry of anguish she jumped from her seat and wept tears of joy in the arms of her ‘dead’ son.
I, too, decided to try a spot of spiritualism in my search for Olly. I got in touch, via the internet, with a spiritualist medium who makes your angels accessible to you.
‘I am bestowed with the gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairaroma and clairsentience and I have been psychic all of my life,’ she says on her website. ‘As a child I experienced the joy of playing with Spirit children and enjoyed their unconditional love. These same Spirit children are still with me, they are my guides who have grown up along side of me; and with their love and light they help me to link with the Spirit world.’
She continues: ‘By connecting with the Angels I will help you to be more able to understand the synchronicities – the planned coincidences which happen to all of us at some time in our lives.’
I emailed her, and while I waited for guidance I did a bit of detective work, since I am a Welsh Sherlock manqué (manky Welshman, more like it).
I sensed that the medium would never reply. She didn’t…
I had a bit of luck though. I met that man again, the Cardiff psychoanalyst and writer, or maybe it was Merlin, messing around again. He was sitting in a little café on the hill, and when I saw him I went straight up to him. No messing around this time.
‘You must be Mr Adam Phillips,’ I said as I sat down opposite him (if it was him). He looked a bit startled but he held his own counsel and nodded amenably as he ate his breakfast and listened to me.
‘I loved Houdini’s Box,’ I said enthusiastically.
Houdini’s Box, one of his books, examines four different escape artists. One of them is a little girl who has been abused. She plays her own version of hide-and-seek. You may not have realised it, but hide and seek is a subtle game. If you put yourself out of reach, or refuse to hide, you’re not playing the game.
I grabbed some paper napkins and scribbled down a few of the sentences which passed between us, over the tomato ketchup bottle, that morning:
❅ We can’t describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from and what we want to escape to.
❅ People often feel most alive when they’re escaping, most paralysed before and after.
❅ What we want is born of what we want to get away from.
❅ Sandor Ferenczi: do people colonise the world with fear to distract themselves?
❅ Hungarian proverb: It is better to fear than to be frightened.
❅ When it doesn’t starkly and literally save our lives (when we shoot our approaching lion) fear sustains our ignorance… what is being escaped from is often shrouded in mystery.
❅ The opposite of fear is choice. Indeed, the whole notion of choice may have been invented as a counter, an alternative, to fear.
❅ We transgress to find out if we can escape, create havoc to see what will survive.
❅ All symptoms are a kind of geography; they take a person in certain directions, to certain places and not to others. They are a schedule of avoidances, a set of warning signals.
❅ It is fortunate that pain has made us so inventive.
Adam Phillips (if it was he, I’ll never know now) finished his breakfast and thanked me for my company. It had been an exhilarating conversation. I had learnt much, and I thanked him effusively. ‘Absolute pleasure,’ he said as he enveloped himself in a large and warm-looking coat. Perhaps it was my imagination, but his step seemed to quicken into a near-run as he disappeared into the crowd. He liked to keep fit, obviously. But my thoughts were already elsewhere, since a faint but perceptible rainbow was forming over the town, as if to salute this transference of ideas from one mind to another.
The Yanomami people who have survived marauding gold diggers, loggers and Christians in the rainforests of South America like to hunt, fish, and cultivate gardens – when left alone. To communicate with the spirit world, their shamans snort a hallucinogenic snuff made from the bark of the virola tree. Their spirits appear to them as miniature humans, magnificently decorated with ceremonial ornaments. They are the spirits of the forest – mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects. There are spirits which represent trees, leaves, vines, water, also stones and waterfalls; spirits representing the sun and the moon, storms, thunder and lightning, and mythological beings. There are also humble household spirits such as the dog spirit, the fire spirit and the clay pot spirit. Finally, there are spirits representing the white man and his domesticated animals. These white spirits are conjured as an antidote – to ward off epidemics.
Shamans control the fury of the storms, the tic-toc of day and night, the seasons, and the abundance and fertility of game. They prevent the arch of the sky from falling down (the present earth is an ancient fallen sky); they also control the forest’s aggressive spirits and cure Yanomamis made sick by sorcery.
Shamans ‘die’ when they take their snuff and they enter a visionary trance. White men who have joined them in this rite have seen brilliant sights: rainbows trapped inside the shamans’ feathered headdresses, flowers weeping in their hair, trees trying to soar into the sky, leaves falling to the ground with great howling noises. They report that the stars throb; the sky opens and a great wind destroys everything in its path; the ground opens and snakes slip away into the earth. Then they are engulfed by terror and death hovers all around. They lie under a canopy of immense sorrows.
I am not the brightest of men, but I’m making a connection here. Forests, men behaving as if they were possessed, generally off their heads, but treated by everyone else as if they were wise beyond measure, awesome, visionary…
Yes, we’re back with our old friend Merlin again. The madman in the woods. Perhaps he wasn’t that mad after all. Just off his head. Shitfaced. And where did all the Druids and the vates hang out? In the groves. Sounds like a good excuse to me. Merlin the local dealer.
The time has come for me to describe my own descent into the underworld. You know already that my experiment with wells failed: that I was unable to journey into the past as I had hoped. The first ten years of my life were still a mystery to me.
So I turned to the ground itself, because over the years a few tiny shards had risen, slowly, as if they’d been transported – like miniature surfboards – to the surface of my memory on incredibly slow-moving waves created by the activities of a trillion mind-worms. Those shards reminded me of the poems which once formed part of an epic Welsh saga known as Canu Heledd. The poems are all that remain of a great myth; the basic story, told in prose (long ago) has been lost.
Looking back now, I can see that my descent below ground had started (unconsciously) a few weeks previously. Olly had been with me then too.
We’d been sitting in Merlin’s café bar in Ystradgynlais, I remember it as if it were yesterday. You know the place – red and green façade, big leather Chesterfield in the window to let you sit and watch the world go by. Me and Olly, just the two of us, loafing about and enjoying it. Good energy in Ystradgynlais, too. Steady community or, as they say down the valleys, tidy.
‘Let’s go down a pit,’ I said to Olly, but no, she wanted to go to the Dan-yr-Ogof caves up the road. I stood my ground and prevailed (for a change).
The Lewis Merthyr Colliery in the Rhondda seemed the obvious place to go. I asked a friendly man standing in the doorway of a shop on the crossroads: Brian Davies menswear, footwear & protective clothing etc: ‘How do we get to the Rhondda?’
There was a sharp intake of breath and he shook his head, as if to say that a blood-soaked man had crawled into town less than an hour ago… last stagecoach through the pass ambushed by Arapahos, all dead and scalped, mainly women and children. I felt excited by this, as if we were at the far end of the Silk Road, in Mongolia perhaps, not just round the corner from Lower Cwmtwrch.
We got there eventually, via Neath and Blaengwynfi. First a Sherpa bus full to the brim with people who bubbled with language: Welsh, and English, and even sign language too. Raindrops chandeliered the dirty windows in liquid constellations (I saw Hydra, Draco); my star-streaks glimmered against a dark backdrop of forests and ravines climbing up on either side – for most of the journey we were in a deep cleft matlocked in the moorland. Giant wheels appeared, as if newly invented, rearing above their dereliction; skeletal pithead wheels, abandoned like so many upturned supermarket trolleys, rusting above the coal shafts: spinsterish, spindled, bespoke. There be dragons.
A lonesome whistler on the back seat harrowed my brain. The wipers, I thought, were trying to reach out beyond their ambit, trying to suck in the unobtainable raindrops just beyond their sweep; and I saw parallels with my own search for meaning, beyond the constraints of my own blades, sweeping the glassy plains of my past.
The villages we passed had an Austrian feel to them, perched on ledges, but there were windows patched up with cardboard and flowerless gardens. King Coal took the money with him. Onwards we lurched in our bus, crammed into our seats as if we were spiders pushed into a matchbox by a bored child, and spinning from our backs – from all of us – came the silken thread of our lives, swirling though the rear window, entwining to form a history, a gossamer cord dragging the parachute of what has happened between us today, and may never happen again.
We hitched a lift over the mountain and descended into Treorchy. If Honolulu is the rainbow capital of the world, overarched by a vibrant bow almost every day of the year, then Treorchy was the capital of the clouds that day. Capital of the clouds… the appellation would look nice on a nameplate somewhere in Wales:
CERRIGYDRUDION
Capital of the Clouds
You could have a competition based on rainfall, cloudfall, and the number of angels seen walking the streets.
Through the rain-mottled window of the rain-mottled car I looked down on the Rhondda, half in awe. The place is legendary. This is where the Great Jehovah lives, the Great Redeemer – this is the barren land. This is where they bake the Bread of Heaven. Terraces of miners’ houses stretched away in long miles, some of them dead straight and some of them following the bendy contours of the valley.
A brief history of Hwntws: South Wales is riven by deep valleys, each with its own coal-mining history. South Walians are knows as Hwntws (North Walians are Gogs).
Hwntws are divided into Straight Hwntws (born in straight terraces) and Bendy Hwntws (born in bendy terraces). Telling one from the other is quite easy. Straight Hwntws prefer rugby, which has lots of straight lines in it: they sit in straight rows in the stands watching straight lineouts and straight three-quarters. The rugby ball, which is fighting the circle and gradually straightening out, is kicked between two very straight posts. Also, Straight Hwntws will frequently converge in long straight lines, standing in comfortable silence (often in pubs, as it happens). There is no point in walking to either end of this line, looking for the object of the queue, since there isn’t one – they’re merely drawing strength and comfort from each other in emulation of their houses. If you want to identify the Bendy Hwntws, simply throw a party and wait until everyone’s drunk, then start a conga. The Bendy Hwntws will adapt happily to the conga’s snake-like path, but the Straight Hwntws will eventually revert to the norm, stiffen into a straight line, and punch a hole in the side of your house before disappearing into the distance; thus the phrase to bring the house down.
The Rhondda is a place where pretty words bow their heads and stay silent, out of respect and politeness. All these valleys have been drilled out by a bad dentist and the gaping holes overlaid with poorly-fitted dentures – rows of houses, pitted with caries, which sit uneasily on the blackened gums of yesteryear. Never has so little beauty been compressed into so large a space, as Gwyn Thomas put it.
We arrived in a squall; the tired rivers and industrial-sized puddles were pocked by the rain in acne-rings, and a weaselly mandrel-wind slipped in and out of every hole in our clothing. Needless to say, the people were magnificent. Somewhere above us in the mist (we were lost in the spout of a kettle all day) was the ancient well and shrine at Penrhys, almost as important for pilgrims as Holywell.
When we arrived at the Rhondda Heritage Park in Trehafod we passed under a six-foot high model of a miner’s lamp (a memorial to the many thousands of Welsh miners killed over the years) and walked into the restored colliery buildings. Over half the visitors come from outside Wales. I wondered what they make of the Black Gold experience, with its reconstruction of a village street in mining days, art gallery, restaurant and gift shop. The surrounding village dropped 14 feet when the mine was working and it’s a wonder it’s still standing.
After sniffing around for a while we were taken on a guided tour by an ex-miner who’d spent a long time below, in the heart of darkness, at the cutting edge.
His voice slipped like a chisel occasionally and sent sparks into the gloom; he’d either smelt firedamp or had spent too many hours trapped in the sclerotic arteries of the past because there was a distinct whiff of mania in the air around him. He had a black, trammelled sense of humour and he scared the children once or twice. The canaries seemed fond of him though. Yellow and black go together quite nicely, I noticed. Compatible colours. We sat down in a metal cavern and struggled to understand an audio-visual show. Exciting and emotional, said the publicity. These people ought to get out more. Girders loomed in the vaulted darkness, and their dimlit cavities reminded me of those lovely little hollows behind girls’ knees. I half expected it to start snowing coal dust from the shadows overhead; soft black coal-flakes which glinted in the murk and turned us all, slowly, into minstrels with itchy collars and very white teeth, gleaming in luminescent rows. Dirty blackleg miners.
Coal seams, as you well know, are buried ancient forests. Which brings me back (neatly) to the Yanomami wise men, who snort hallucinogen snuff in faraway rainforests. Next time you look into a coal fire, when the tic-toc of time has brought you to the end of your working day, I invite you to look into the eye of the firestorm. You will see brilliant sights: rainbows trapped inside the shamans’ feathered headdresses, flowers weeping in their hair.
Lewis Carroll always maintained that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a story told during a series of picnics, was just a book of nonsense. But he was certainly influenced by The Seven Sisters of Sleep, published in 1860 by the naturalist and mycologist Mordecai Cooke; very popular in its day, it was an entertaining survey of the best known psychotropic drugs of the Victorian age: betel, cannabis, opium, coca, datura, and fly agaric mushrooms.
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
Alice goes on ‘a trip’. She experiences a slowing down sensation. She sees hallucinogenic animals. A baby turns into a pig in the story, reminding some of the curse of opium, which affected about five out of six Victorian families and killed many children – the infants shrunk up into little old men under the influence of the drug.
Drink Me! says the bottle and Alice shrinks until she’s 10 inches high. What a curious feeling! says Alice. I must be shutting up like a telescope…
Inside a glass box there’s a very small cake. Eat Me! So Alice grows enormous.
Don’t tell me that this nonsense has nothing to do with drugs. Or eating disorders.
It all ends in tears:
Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again…
‘I wish I hadn’t cried so much!’ said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. ‘I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!’
And there’s implicit danger, a lurking threat in the background:
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
With gentle smiling jaws!
Crying is good for you. Butterflies gather salty tears from the eyes of otters and turtles along the Peruvian Amazon. But no one knows the exact nature of tears. Are tears – high in protein – the residue of an ancient emergency feeding system for babies? Another crackpot theory…
Going underground: Plutarch (45-125AD) reported that vestal virgins who broke their vows were sealed alive in underground chambers and left to die. Medieval monks and nuns who broke their vows were often walled into niches with just a small amount of food and water for company. When graveyards became full in the mid-18th century, following a particularly busy era for the grim reaper, many graves were ‘recycled’ to accommodate new residents. When the old coffins were dug up something horrifying came to light: scratches, kick-marks, and even teeth-marks seemed to indicate that about one in every 25 of the ‘dead’ had been buried alive. So being buried alive became a huge fear factor for the Victorians, many of whom arranged for one of their fingers to be connected – via a small borehole and a piece of string – to a bell on the surface so that they could ring for attention. Doom service. Graveyards had someone on standby around the clock – the graveyard shift. In his book Buried Alive, in 1895, Franz Harman recorded over 700 incidents of people who were literally saved by the bell.
I’ve a little joke up my sleeve, for my fellow Taffies. There’s a word for the fear of being buried alive… taphophobia! No kidding.
So we went on a ride in a cage, that day, to the bottom of the mine. Could have been seventeen hundred feet down, could have been seventeen. Didn’t matter. It felt mighty authentic. There were great big iron hoops to keep the roof up, and nogs and sprags festooned all over the place like beads in a Rastafarian hairdo. We were inside a whale’s ribcage, a great big mechanical whale creaking and clanking through a coal tar sea. Swallowed by the darkness, we were all little Jonahs inside the whale’s belly.
So we were there at last, in the small intestines of the Rhondda Valley, and it was treacle black in there. Sloe black. A landscape of smells. I’ve always liked the smell of coal and pencils. Carbon. Compacted a bit more it turns into jet, then diamonds. It’s the same with people. The richer they are the harder they get.
But it’s no good. Down here in the dark, the past won’t come back to me. Pity. It smells just right. Musty and old. I’d hoped that the darkness, the drop in temperature, would help. But there are others humans snuffling around me, and I can’t concentrate. I would have to be alone.
We prepare to leave. Darkness has failed me; my obdurate memory has sealed itself in and refused to cooperate. I’m not even allowed to have Korsakov’s Syndrome, a drunkard’s complaint in which lost memories are replaced with fantastical inventions. Or euphoric recall, the romantic false memory system used by cocaine addicts to exaggerate the pleasures and diminish the pain of their trips.
Back on the surface I mentioned food.
‘Fancy a nibble?’ I asked as we sauntered around the knick knack area. ‘Because I’ve made some rather special sandwiches for us today.’
I looked smug, and she made I’m like soo impressed eyes.
We walked out underneath the oversized miner’s lamp and found a rough-hewn bench near a children’s maze. As I unpacked my mini-feast I regaled her with some facts about Britain’s commercial sandwich industry, which now employs more people than the farming industry – over 300,000 according to some estimates.
Top varieties:
1 cheese
2 unflavoured chicken
3 ham
4 tuna
5 bacon
6 flavoured chicken
7 cheese salad.
Each year more than 5.5 billion lunchboxes are packed for children in the UK.
‘Wow,’ said Olly through a mouthful of food. ‘That’s a hell of a lot.’
That morning, as the dawn chorus twanged my ears, I had stood in the garden for a while, drawing in some fresh air. I’ve told you much about telescopes; but I also like looking at the small things around us, the little things in life. I watched leaves take shape in the gathering light. On one leaf I noticed a squadron of flies in military formations, parked neatly in rows on the blade, between the veins, all of them painted gunmetal grey. They stood completely still. I admired their microcosmic tidiness. I like standing in the garden while most people are asleep, looking at very small things. Detail therapy. Tiny animals and thumbnail Monets in the lichen patches. Droplets lodged in the petals, tumescent water-boulders.
Anyway, as I studied the flies I thought of the day ahead and made plans. Having formed a mental itinerary I dwelt briefly on food. In particular, I considered what sort of sandwiches I’d provide for our trip, since it really was my turn. I’d insisted.
I settled on something special: a mango and mint salsa sandwich with diced mango, red onion and vine tomatoes plus fresh lime juice, rice vinegar, sunblushed tomato chutney and fresh mint leaves, sliced. All this went on a tomato and chilli bread smeared liberally with crème fraiche and low fat cheese. The best yet. Out of this world. To accompany it I chose individual bottles of Brecon Carreg water, high in calcium and magnesium, and an ideal compliment to the mango. You may be surprised to know that some of the world’s top restaurants now employ a water sommelier. Absolutely no bloody kidding.
Olly was knocked out by the picnic. We rounded it off with two tubs of sherry trifle. Brilliant. We chatted comfortably about various things, including my picnic in the snow film project at college. I’d already chosen Captain Oates, Karol Karol the Polish hairdresser, and Dr Zhivago to join me on the tartan rug – but which film character should I choose next? Actually, I’d already decided. I wanted a wise fool, an eccentric, a madman who’d keep us all entertained with his tall stories – who better than Baron Munchausen, the daddy of all bullshitters? I couldn’t remember if Terry Gilliam’s 1988 version, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, contained the famous snow story but I found a version of it in Rudolph Erich Raspe’s original book and it goes like this:
I set off from Rome on a journey to Russia, in the midst of winter…
The country was covered with snow, and I was unacquainted with the road. Tired, I alighted, and fastened my horse to something like a pointed stump of a tree, which appeared above the snow; for the sake of safety I placed my pistols under my arm, and laid down on the snow, where I slept so soundly that I did not open my eyes till full daylight. It is not easy to conceive my astonishment to find myself in the midst of a village, lying in a churchyard; nor was my horse to be seen, but I heard him soon after neigh somewhere above me. On looking upwards I beheld him hanging by his bridle to the weather-cock of the steeple. Matters were now very plain to me: the village had been covered with snow overnight; a sudden change of weather had taken place; I had sunk down to the churchyard whilst asleep, gently, and in the same proportion as the snow had melted away; and what in the dark I had taken to be a stump of a little tree appearing above the snow, to which I had tied my horse, proved to have been the cross or weather-cock of the steeple!
Without long consideration I took one of my pistols, shot the bridle in two, brought the horse down, and proceeded on my journey.
The Baron was just perfect, and Olly agreed with my choice as we sat together in the Rhondda that afternoon. My project was coming together. Soon I would have a fine group of people stumbling out of their films and joining me for a picnic. All I had to do now was to write a dialogue for all of us as we sat and munched our way through the chocolate cake.
Before the aptly-named Walter Coffin sank the first pits in the 1850s a squirrel could cross the whole of this area by leaping from one branch to another. But huge deposits of high quality coal made the Rhondda one of the biggest coal-producing areas in the world by the end of the nineteenth century, with 53 collieries in a strip of land only sixteen miles long. The population soared from about 3,000 in 1860 to over 160,000 in 1910. At one stage a miner was being killed every six hours.
On an April morning in 1877 a huge inundation of water, which had built up in an abandoned seam nearby, burst into the mine at Tynewydd. Two of the fourteen men underground were drowned immediately, as were a number of horses. The flood waters chased five of the miners onto higher ground, where they were trapped – and with the waters rising it was only a short matter of time, seemingly, before they were drowned too. But a bubble of air held the floodwater at bay.
The men started digging themselves out and by the following morning they had burrowed eight yards through coal and rock. Their picks were heard by rescuers, who started digging towards them. With only a thin wall of coal left between them one of the trapped miners – a young man named William Morgan – broke through, but the sudden outflow of compressed air flung his body into the narrow opening, killing him instantly. His four workmates, including his father, who witnessed his terrible death, were rescued.
Spotting air bubbles coming through the water from the workstation of a miner called Edward Williams and his fetch-and-carry boy, Robert Rogers, rescuers sank a shaft towards their faint voices and taps, which suddenly fell silent. When they finally broke through it was too late – both had drowned in the rising water.
Rescuers concentrated their efforts on another part of the mine, thought to be the likeliest place to find survivors. Four deep-sea divers searched the flooded galleries, venturing over 600 feet into the black waters, but strong currents forced them to abandon their mission. Massive pumps were put to work and after two days the water had lowered enough to allow a tunnel to be cut downwards. Four teams of four men worked around the clock in three-hour shifts, and eventually faint tapping sounds indicated that men were still alive below. The news spread like wildfire throughout the country and newspaper reporters flocked to the Rhondda. Before long the rescuers were close to the imprisoned men, who were huddled together on a ledge in a tiny cavity. Hunger had forced them to eat the wax from their candles, and they were completely exhausted. They sang hymns to raise their spirits, although one of them, a young boy, became distraught and frequently cried out for his mother. The rescue, which was complex and incredibly dangerous, ended when the leader of the four men on shift, Isaac Pride, aged 24, broke through to the trapped men, alone and in complete darkness. Isaac was thrown down by escaping air but recovered quickly and enlarged the hole. Trapped for over nine days by now, the men were too weak to stand and Isaac used his body as a human bridge so that they could be pulled to safety. Many of the rescuers were given medals and jubilant newspapers ran headlines like Life from the dead.
We left the Rhondda to its own devices in the rain. The greys were frolicking like lambs by now. We were on a bus again and we were all thrown into the air when we hit a bump in the road, or an iceberg, or maybe it was a coalberg. Farewell to thee fair Rhondda. As we zoomed up the dual carriageway to Merthyr I thought I saw an endless conga, black-clad but happy, snaking its way along the banks of the Taf. The experience had been too much for me, obviously.
Inscribed on the tomb of that famous iron man of Merthyr, Robert Crawshay, is the epitaph: God Forgive Me.
It was the task of the twentieth century to forgive Robert Crawshay.
But many people in Merthyr are still trying to forgive God.
I am a footballer. I have told you this, many times. I was in the business of making connections. Pass-pass-pass-pass-goal. A movement on the soccer field is a sentence with clauses and punctuation marks. There are some who argue that words are the curse of mankind, that they constrain the mind rather than free it. Like many, I am fascinated by the word on the page, by the fact that the sea of white around each letter is sometimes more meaningful – more emancipating? – than the words themselves. Books as liquid charts, slopping from one hand to the next. Sentences as sea-bound glaciers with their stony meanings trapped inside them, debris. Memories as terminal moraines. Each page a white mist, a spell upon the land, crowded with words which have forgotten their childhoods. Oblivion: etymology unknown.
And so I navigate this last dangerous sound using the words of others; listening to the sonic of their experiences and trying to find my own position on the map.
In 1992 the German academic and writer WG Sebald, who spent many years working in England, set off to explore Suffolk. His tour was a carefree one, initially. But as he walked through the countryside he experienced a series of intense encounters and witnessed traces of destruction reaching far back into the past. His health collapsed during that year and he was admitted to hospital.
He recorded his travels in Rings of Saturn, a phantasmagoria of fragments and memories in which the past and the present intermingle; the living seem like supernatural apparitions, while the dead are vividly present. Exemplary sufferers such as Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement people the author’s solitude, along with various eccentrics such as Major George Wyndham Le Strange, who lived in a Suffolk manor house, and who became incredibly eccentric as he grew old. Since he had worn out his wardrobe and saw no point in buying new clothes,
Le Strange would wear garments dating from bygone days which he fetched out of chests in the attic as he needed them. There were people who claimed to have seen him on occasion dressed in a canary-yellow frock coat or a kind of mourning robe of faded violet taffeta with numerous buttons and eyes. Le Strange, who had always kept a tame cockerel in his room, was reputed to have been surrounded, in later years, by all manner of feathered creatures: by guinea fowl, pheasants, pigeons and quail, and various kinds of garden and song birds, strutting about him on the floor or flying around in the air. Some said that one summer Le Strange dug a cave in his garden and sat in it day and night like St Jerome in the desert. Most curious of all was a legend that… the Major’s pale skin was olive-green when he passed away, his goose-grey eye was pitch-dark, and his snow-white hair had turned to raven-black.
This cave I will mark on my map; I may need to find it later. A rainbow above the town is strengthening. Wouldn’t it be strange if the colours were reversed, with the red on the inside… would our aesthetics be altered completely? By the way, if you look closely you’ll notice that the inside of the rainbow is always lighter than the outside.
The Lakota Indians of North America have a story about colours. Two men out hunting meet a beautiful young woman dressed in white buckskin, carrying a bundle on her back. Overcome by bad thoughts, one of them approaches her – but a white mist surrounds him and he disappears. Nothing remains but a skeleton when the mist rises. The second man is told by the woman to return home and prepare a lodge for her, and when she walks into his village he has completed his task. I have come from heaven, she tells the people of the village, and I am here to tell you how to live, and to teach you about your future on earth. She gives them maize, introduces them to the pipe, and teaches them the seven sacred ceremonies. She gives them colours for the four winds or directions. When she has finished teaching them she turns into a buffalo calf which changes colour – from white to black, to red, and finally to yellow, representing the colours of the four directions. Then she disappears.
Which brings me to a fitting coda – another passage from ap Llwyd’s masterpiece, Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise. I must ask you to return with me to that little Italian café somewhere on a hill in Wales, in a busy town, looking down on a harbour. Ap Llwyd gives no clues, and we cannot even guess where it might be. You may remember that, when we left him, ap Llwyd had found seven interconnected wells which had a common source, deep inside the mountain below him.
Torch in hand, he had stood at the mouth of the cave, wondering whether or not he should go down in search of the source of the water. To do so alone would be very dangerous. But he believed that deep within the earth he would resolve something important about himself: he would put himself to the ultimate test, and he would emerge either whole or damaged beyond measure. I quote ap Llwyd:
As I stood at the entrance to that cave, my mind flitted back to the café, and to my great friend Stefano. He had been in high spirits when I left; if I remember correctly he was going through an intensely religious phase at that time and invariably wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan:
A CHRIST IS FOR LIFE
NOT JUST FOR DOGMAS
of which he was immensely proud. ‘I pray for you every hour,’ Stefano had shouted through a cloud of steam as he dispensed one of his wonderful cappuccinos. I paused in the doorway to look back at him. What a crazy man he was, with his heavy Hoxton Handle moustache and his hairy, ape-like arms. His teeth gleamed through the festoonery on his face, and his Groucho eyebrows arched up and down in caterpillar waves as he greeted his customers.
‘I will see you in a week or so,’ I said across the room.
‘Maybe, maybe not so quick,’ he shouted back, and he suddenly looked serious. ‘Something big is happening, yes? You go careful. You mind out. I have a feeling about this one. Think before you jump. Remember the Well of Souls. I don’t want to pay for your requiem.’
I laughed. ‘Don’t worry Stefano! I know what I’m doing.’
He cocked his head in that appealing way of his and his lustrous eyes questioned me in the shadows of his caterpillars. I became aware of a body close to me, trying to enter the café, so I stepped aside and extended an arm towards Stefano, who froze and stopped what he was doing; indeed, a lull fell over all his patrons. I turned, and realised why they were all mesmerised, for the girl who walked in was so beautiful I was stunned into silence too. I glimpsed her face as she gave an almost imperceptible nod of thanks. I waved goodbye but no one noticed. And there was no one to notice me now, either, as I walked the first hundred yards into the cave. I noticed some marks made by a mammoth sharpening its tusks, so I knew immediately that this portal was very old. Dimly, in the far distance, I thought I could hear a whisper of water. Bats chittering above me in the darkness made the last noise I heard as I started the long, slow descent into the interior. You may wonder what went through my mind at that point. It was this, for I am in no position to withhold information from you now: a vague plan, a strange formulation had been occupying my mind ever since I had discovered the link between the wells, and a common source of water for them. I knew that in finding that source, and in staying by it for seven nights in total darkness without food or human company, I could put myself to the ultimate test. It would be like dropping a huge weight on myself and seeing if I would survive. I increasingly saw myself as two people: one was a building and the other a scaffold, and either the scaffold had to be dismantled or the building had to be thrown to the ground and then rebuilt. But I had no idea where to start. So my sojourn underground was the equivalent of testing both structures by dropping the whole weight of my life onto them. I hoped that one of them would survive, making it possible for me to start a new life with a True Self. The real me.
There was another possible outcome, of course, and it sent a frisson of fear through me as I plunged deeper and deeper below ground. The chill of that possibility seeped into my body as I heard the murmur strengthen, as my ears began to respond to the torrent of liquid life below me. And that possibility, of course, was that the house and the scaffold would both be destroyed, and that there would be nothing left. Nothing at all – and that I would be no more…
As we all know, ap Llwyd did survive. One can only wonder what happened to him during those seven nights. How, for instance, did he keep track of time? Did his mind play tricks with him? Was he frightened? Did he reach a state of enlightenment? Was it his True Self which survived or his False Self – and how could anyone tell them apart? I am told that he felt unable to tell the whole story in Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise, but that he intended to reveal all in a sequel. Unfortunately, that sequel has not yet been written. Many years have drifted by. I am told he is too happy now to commit his memories to public record. I’m not sure what he means by that. Can anyone be too happy to remember, or to want to remember?
But we have to leave him now. He has already taken up valuable time. We have our own little quest to complete, as we wait for the fair Olly to surface again.
I went in search of an explanation of True Self and False Self. The trail led me to a man called Donald Winnicott, regarded by some as the British Freud.
‘We have yet to tackle the question of what life itself is about,’ he wrote late in his career, in 1967.
He proposed a theory of True Self.
The experience of aliveneness can’t be taken for granted, he said. People need to feel real. People who experience a severe failure in their early environment often feel as if they never started to exist. And although they have complied with their surroundings their lives feel futile.
‘Feeling real is more than existing, it is finding a way to exist as oneself… and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation,’ said Donald.
The child who cannot develop a True Self retreats into a false existence, a False Self. The False Self hides and protects the True Self as a nurse looks after a child. It replaces the True Self and acts out the role of the real person.
The True Self lives a secret subterranean life, waiting for the day when it can thrive again. Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.
I have a childish analogy for you. Imagine a new house – it hasn’t been built properly. There’s something wrong with the foundations: plenty of sand but no cement. So scaffolding has been erected around the house, and hoardings put up to disguise the problem. To complete the cover-up, a perfect copy of the ailing house has been painted onto the hoardings, so that no one can see the difference at a distance.
Are you still with me? Because I’m off now. Do you remember our quest? I have summoned four eccentric Welshmen to meet me – and PC 66 – on the summit of Pumlumon Arwystli, smack bang in the centre of Wales. And why?
To complete some unfinished business. To kill off, once and for all, the monstrous man known to us all by now as Mr Cassini. There will be seven of us in all, waiting for him, if you include Gelert the dog. Our mountain has three sumptuous cairns on its summit. In short, my friends, I have summoned every source of magic at my disposal to rid us of this tinpot tyrant, so that Olly can sleep safely in her bed again.