Flic and I moved to West Wales nearly twenty-five years ago and living so close to the sea was a novelty and a cause of excitement for a long time. We looked out at the water and at the curve of Cardigan Bay from many different beaches and clifftops up and down the coast. One time we were camping near Braich y Pwll at the end of the Lleyn Peninsula and we watched a sailing boat making its way through Bardsey Sound, the channel between Bardsey Island and the mainland. I wanted to be on that boat. A couple of weeks later I was given the chance to do just that – to join a crew sailing up the bay, through the sound and along the north coast of the Lleyn. We sailed for a few days and slept on the boat in harbours along the coast. I didn’t like it. I spent many hours looking back towards the shore, barely visible through the summer haze. One day I borrowed binoculars to try to catch sight of a particular house that held very significant memories for me. I couldn’t see it. But I came back with a title for a book, The Land as Viewed from the Sea. I spoke to Flic about it. What’s the story? she asked. I had no idea. It was five years later that I started on the first chapter.
The book turned out to be the first of three novels dealing with, as much as anything else, the subject of landscape and memory; about perceptions of place and about memories attached to places. I wrote, in those days, by hand, more specifically with a fountain pen on A3 layout pads. Big sheets of paper, illegible writing at the speed of thought – those were the days before I had Parkinson’s disease. I knew my imagination had taken flight when my characters said things that I didn’t anticipate. But all the same I was rather taken aback when, towards the end of my third novel, one of my central protagonists, a certain Isabel Davies, came out with the words places don’t matter at all. People matter, it’s only people that matter.
To be fair I don’t blame her. She had spent a lot of time in the company of people talking about psychogeography, or psychoshit, as she came to call it. But I’m afraid I can’t leave off the subject. Sorry Isabel, if you’re out there (but of course you’re not). Here we go again.
It was William Faulkner who said The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Memories live on in us and make us who we are. But I think different people have different ways of dealing with time. When I told my sister Margaret that we were going travelling she said you will have such lovely memories. Wow, what a great combination of living in the future and the past at the same time. You will have memories. Everybody has their own way of dealing with past, present and future but Margaret’s is pretty special. I wanted to say that’s not why we’re going, we’re going for the present moment, just for the being there. And it was true. But of course Margaret was right, we do have wonderful memories and that’s why I’m writing this.
When we recover memories we give shape to them, just as the creative act of writing gives shape to our thoughts. At times like this I think of the year 1984. Nineteen-Eighty Four is the title of a novel by George Orwell that nobody reads anymore; a story of a future society under totalitarian government. When I read the book in 1975 the year 1984 was an impossibly distant future time, the stuff of science fiction. Now it’s history.
In the real world 1984 was the year that Margaret Thatcher took on the miners and won. It was also the year that Jim O’Shaughnessy and I went to the Pickwick Fete. We turned up on bicycles and walked around with expressions of amusement and mild disbelief on our faces. Here was a posh garden fete in the grounds of a seriously grand house and here was our friend Flic, who, we now knew, was brought up in this house. Ex-STRORD-inary. I don’t suppose I could have imagined then that 1984 was to be such an important year for me; the year that Flic and I started a life together.
I met Jim recently at Pickwick and reminded him of our first time there. He told me about his memory parcels. Jim has his own take on landscape and memory. He stores up memories of particularly special places and times so that he can return to them in moments of difficulty. Psychic reservoirs of good feeling that he calls memory parcels. I think they have got him through some rough times.
There is a wonderful book called Landscape and Memory by the historian Simon Schama. It is a history of Western society’s relationship with place and an assertion that our response to landscape and the natural world is culturally determined. That is to say that when I or you are moved by a particular place or landscape it is because we were brought up that way. I was strongly resistant to this idea when I read it.
Then I was in the Ystwyth Valley, here in Wales, doing a botanical survey of an old meadow surrounded by conifer plantations. Conifers, as we all know, are bad news; they are alien species of little value to native wildlife. The plantations are monocultures, completely lacking in biodiversity and a blight on the landscape. A man who was, I guess, on holiday came along and talked about how lovely it was there. It reminded him of pictures he had seen of wild places in Canada. I looked up at the scene; the little River Ystwyth flowing down past the meadow, the tree-clad slopes on either side, and suddenly it was beautiful. In a moment my idea of that place had been changed. And I understood a little about how our perceptions of places are constructed, not as instinctive as I had imagined.
Flic and I spent a few hours walking along the cliffs between Borth and Aberystwyth recently. The sky was fairly clear and the sea was a deep dark blue, not mud coloured near the coast and grey further out as it can be so often in Cardigan Bay. I hoped to see seals or maybe otters in the water and perhaps six members of the crow family flying by (yes: rooks, crows, magpies, jackdaws, ravens and choughs are common enough along this coastline and the last three are a pleasure to watch being aerial acrobats). But it was not what we saw but our ways of seeing that left an impression on me.
It started when we decided to have a spell of deliberate silence rather than intermittent chatter and see how it felt. We often walk a little way in silence but this slightly more prolonged spell of not talking and not even thinking of talking had an interesting effect. It was as if a switch had been thrown somewhere in my brain and the flow of information redirected. Quite suddenly I could see much more. On the water there were cloud shadows and cloud reflections, patterns made by the wind, changes of colour, and the lines of waves refracting as they met the shore. The sky was pale against the horizon. There were grasses and flowers along the clifftop that I hadn’t noticed before. Then I had another change of perception.
There was one spot where a valley came down to the shore and the hillsides folded against each other in a handsome pattern. I reached into my pocket and got out my camera, framed a well composed view and pressed the button. A message came up on the screen; no memory card. I put the thing back in my pocket, irritated that my son had borrowed the card and not put it back. Now I became aware of how in recent years I have got into the habit of looking for photographs, framing views in my head. It has become my way of looking at landscape. And now, in the absence of memory-card, I began to see differently.
I wondered if Flic, as an artist, found herself looking at the landscape for paintings. As if on cue she looked up at a patch of woodland on the edge of a hill and said if I was painting that wood I think I’d... and so forth, something about painting a dark colour underneath a light one and scratching through to it. It was turning out that both of us had constructed ways of seeing.
We carried on with our walk, talking now and pointing things out to each other as we went along, something we’ve always done. Did I say always? No, there have been times when this is impossible. When we were in India there was just too much to see. Whatever fascinating things I noticed as we walked down the street there were an equivalent number catching Flic’s eye at the same time and it was impossible to share them all. India is sensory overload. And we have been to plenty of other places where the beauty and interest in our surroundings is too much to take in and too much to point out. That’s what I like about travelling in foreign places. You live intensely in the present, in a landscape untouched by memory and where everything is brand new.