‌Six

‘Lorf? – Why, I Thought I Should ’a Died’

‘You were a nice woman to write with.’

Letter from Martin Ross
to Edith Somerville

Edith Somerville & Violet ‘Martin’ Ross, Welshpool to Chester, June 1893

After leaving the Abbey of Strata Florida, Gerald and Baldwin turned their horses north towards the rest of Wales, most of it at that time still under the control of Welsh princes, following the coast and keeping the mountains of Snowdonia to their right. There is a lake, Gerald tells us, hidden among these crags, where only one-eyed fish live; and another on which a floating island drifts and blows; but Gerald himself skirted around the edge of the mountains and was not able to witness any of these wonders, although he did share the story of the giant eagle that lands on the highest peak every Thursday, far above the world of man, and waits with bloodthirsty intent for the epoch-shaping battle that Merlin had prophesied would take place on that particular day of the week, even if, maddeningly, he neglected to give us the month or the year. You could have set your week’s calendar by it.

I don’t know if the prophecy had been fulfilled by 1893, but over 700 years after Gerald had ridden this way the Irish writers Edith Œ. Somerville and Violet Martin (aka Martin Ross) were struggling up the slopes of Snowdon, silently cursing their guide and keeping an eye out for eagles. They were gathering material for a series of travel articles and a short book, which would be published two years later as Beggars on Horseback: A Riding Tour in North Wales.

They had started their journey a few days earlier in the town of Welshpool, staying at the Royal Oak Inn, ‘with its thick walls and polished floors, and its associations of the old coaching days’, while they negotiated with shopkeepers for suitable horses. The Royal Oak still stands stolidly at the foot of the high street, but I’m sorry to say that the gas lamp on a stone pedestal that once stood just outside in the road has been removed to make room for buses and cars. There’s a fading photo of the thing in the corridor of the Royal Oak and, true to Somerville and Ross’s description, it looks like it was the one and only focus of Welshpool life, attracting the town’s loafers who ‘turned to look after us like sunflowers to the sun’. Perhaps visitors were a rarity in those days. Or maybe it was the unfamiliar sight of two young women travelling together, encumbered by safety skirts, riding habits and wide-brimmed hats, their hired horses reeling under over-stuffed holdalls, shying and zig-zagging down the high street, before galloping off to ‘the unknown and the unpronounceable’.

Despite the skittishness of their new horses, Somerville and Ross were both entirely at home in the saddle. They rode side-saddle (that is, with both legs arranged down the same side of the horse), a feat of great strength and control that also required the rider to sit for hours with her shoulders up and straight and the bottom half of her body twisted awkwardly to one side. Not surprisingly, in later years Somerville was plagued by sciatica in her right leg, although the pain was never enough to keep her off a horse for long. Ross didn’t survive to suffer the effects of side-saddle riding, although the tumour that killed her, everyone believed, was caused by a terrible fall she had taken seventeen years before her death. Ross was short-sighted, which made every outing a peril (on the day she fell she seems to have ridden into a fence without seeing it), but – like Somerville – she was fearless.

Anyway, I’m going to call them Edith and Martin, the latter because when Violet Martin first met Edith Somerville in Drishane, Castletownshend, Edith’s family home in south-west Ireland, there were at least two other Violets lurking among the numerous cousins and aunts, so she was dubbed ‘Martin’ to avoid confusion. And then, when they published their first book together, ‘Martin’ evolved into ‘Martin Ross’, in honour of her family home in Galway. The fact that she published her books under a masculine name (and Edith used the androgynous E. Œ. Somerville) must have helped when their bestselling Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. appeared. Many people read these tales of hunting and happy anarchy, narrated by a genial, put-upon, cigar-loving, irredeemably innocent English major working as a resident magistrate in rural Ireland, and assumed that the authors were men. Edith and Martin never hid their identities – they were well known in their lifetimes – but the publishers were probably pleased. In those days it was believed that men were less likely to read books written by women. In certain categories, I mean. Hunting, for example. And humour. It wouldn’t happen now.

Edith was thirty-five years old in June 1893 and Martin was thirty-one. They were cousins, like almost every other member of the Anglo-Irish gentility, but they hadn’t met until the year 1886, when Edith was twenty-six and Martin twenty-three. Edith wasn’t even that interested in Martin at their first meeting. She was older, popular, busy, with a wild beauty, and she may have felt her life was already replete with five younger brothers and a sister, an eccentric mother, cousins and friends. Anyway, she was about to head off to Paris to study art. It took some effort from the more introverted Martin to get her attention, but Martin knew what she wanted. Edith ignored the first letter, sent to her in Paris in March 1886, as you can tell from the somewhat querulous tone in the second, posted on 19 May:

My dear Edith, You know and you should blush to know that there is no reason in the world why I should write to you – but there are people to whom it interests one to write irrespective of their bad qualities and behaviour … you are a ‘popular girl’ – a sort that I have always abhorred – so bear in mind that theoretically you are in the highest degree offensive to me.

Edith came back from Paris later that year, she and Martin met again, and before long they were visiting each other as often as they could, even though Martin had her own eccentric mother to attend and her own family’s crumbling big house to patch and worry over. But they exchanged dozens of long letters, written deep into the night, and one time they met, in 1887, it was Edith who suggested that they should try writing a book together. They mockingly called it ‘The Shocker’, presumably in an attempt to deflect the hilarity of Edith’s hyperactive family, who couldn’t see why anyone would want to write a book, rather than play croquet, or row in the bay, or come hunting, or photograph each other in outlandish fancy dress. Much is made of the poverty of the Anglo-Irish gentry at this time, as Ireland changed around them, living in their big old decaying houses, unable to collect any rent once the tenants stopped paying, and it’s true that several families lost their homes, or left them to rot – but, still, it doesn’t sound so bad. If you want to know what it was like, you only have to read Somerville and Ross.

Edith and Martin were writing to make money (and who but a fool would do anything else?), because money, for them and every other unmarried Victorian woman, meant a modicum of independence. And when ‘The Shocker’ – real title An Irish Cousin – came out in 1889 they were rewarded with an instant commercial and a critical hit (‘It is very much like a dream – that I should sit down and write about a flourishing critique of the Shocker in the Athenaeum – but there it is, in black and white,’ purred Martin in a letter to Edith in September). Edith’s mother was still wringing her hands (it was all so agonizingly outré), but the rest of her family was pleased, even if they persisted in treating the whole thing as a joke. None of them seem to have recognized the deep seriousness of Edith and Martin’s ambition. Or understood how high they could fly. Perhaps we’ve all been misled by their modesty and talent for self-ridicule. Or even their sense of proportion.

There are other reasons. For one thing, they lived the life of a class that was under siege for its unwarranted privilege, even if, by 1890, much of that privilege and wealth was draining away, and they would insist on writing about dogs and horses and hunting and the curious marriage rituals of their tribe, albeit with the most acute and all-knowing eye. And they quoted, or transcribed, the speech of their servants and the local country folk, along with the rising middle classes and their own kin, which many (especially in the early days of the Irish Republic) found insufferably patronizing, however accurately it was done, or suspected that they were being laughed at, even though they never were – it was always with. And later, when Martin died, there was the awkward fact that Edith carried on writing for both of them, communicating with Martin through a spirit medium and refusing to remove Martin’s name from the title page of any of their books … not even the ones that were written long after Martin’s death.

Martin’s mother was impressed by An Irish Cousin. So was her son, Robert, who had shirked his responsibilities as the lord of Ross House to become a successful composer of light verse in London, playing up his Irishness for the stage. He was the author of the very popular Ballyhooly.

All together now:

Whililoo, hi ho, let us all enlist you know,

For their ructions and their elements they charm me;

We don’t care what we ate, if we drink our whisky nate,

In the Ballyhooly Blue Ribbon Army.

In 1893 this nonsense was rocking them in the aisles in London, while Edith and Martin were working when they could on their one truly great novel, The Real Charlotte (the three, even greater, Irish R.M. books are collections of interconnected short stories). They had also discovered a demand for travel journalism, and had been making trips to Denmark and Connemara (on a cart). Their Welsh jaunt fitted into this series: there was money to be made and they could escape the financial anxieties of home for a while.

Edith and Martin left Welshpool abruptly (‘there are no suburbs’), breezing along ‘the white road stretching westward into the unknown’. The sun blazed from a cloudless sky, the hedgerows were soft and drowsy with dog roses and elder bushes of every shade of pink and cream, the honeysuckle flowered in thickets and intoxicating perfumes filled the air:

The thought of them takes the pen from the paper in indolent remembrance of that first ride between the Montgomery hedgerows, while yet the horse-flies had not discovered us, and while the hold-alls lay trim and deceptive in the straps that bound them to the saddles.

And that, if you don’t know them, is a typical Somerville and Ross moment. Beauty and laughter, and any pride of achievement, are punctured with a gleeful smile. The straps on their holdalls burst, strewing ridiculous and superfluous objects across the road, the horseflies descended in droves to devour them and their horses, ‘and the reign of suffering that ceased not till our journey’s end was fairly inaugurated’.

I think Martin wrote most of Beggars on Horseback, while Edith sketched and painted and added her comments later. But it is hard to know, and as Edith said, the one doing the writing was usually the one who just happened to be holding the pen. Their separate thoughts, styles and impulses blended together, she wrote, like blue and yellow paints creating a perfect green. If they were apart, they would exchange episodes and ideas by post; if together, they would talk and write wherever they could. The incorrigibly modest Edith always claimed Martin was the greater writer, but there is only a slight falling off in the works she produced after Martin’s death (and Edith would simply have seen this as further proof that Martin was still involved).

Edith was perhaps less filtered – she churned with creative energy – Martin more controlled; but both of them shared an extravagant delight in the absurdity of their fellow humans, and they raised each other to heights it is hard to imagine they would have reached on their own. Writing gave them another reason to be together, chuckling over the latest gothic sayings of the Somerville cook, wrestling with the intricacies of plot and character … but, to say it again, their laughter and self-deprecation masked serious intent. If Edith’s later books lacked some of the soaring joy of their earlier, collaborative work (but none of the dark humour), well who’s to wonder at that? ‘My share of the world’, she wrote to her brother Jack in an anguish of grief after Martin’s death, ‘has gone with Martin, and nothing can ever make that better. No one but ourselves can ever know what we were to each other.’

Martin put it very simply in a letter to Edith in 1889: ‘Writing together is – to me at least – one of the greatest pleasures I have. To write with you doubles the triumph and enjoyment having first halved the trouble and anxiety.’

On their first night out of Welshpool, Edith and Martin stayed at the old Cann Office Inn, where they lingered late in the gardens among ‘the peace of a hundred sleeping roses’ and Martin ‘caught one of my very finest colds in my head’. Riding on the next day under a hot and cloudless sky they decided that the landscape was very like Connemara: no trees, many sheep, and the hills ‘big and mild, with the magnanimous curves of the brows of an elephant’. You can see it all today (with a garnish of tarmac and telegraph poles); we are closer to Martin and Edith than they ever were to Gerald and his medieval wanderings, despite the horses. Most striking of all is the ease with which they ride through Wales, where women travellers rarely ventured alone, encountering (like Gerald) ‘a politeness incredible, almost unnerving’. They have no fear of outlaws or wolves. The inns are trim and well-tended. And perhaps (it’s just a thought) they expected less than we do today: they drifted through Mallwyd, where they would have stayed at the inn except a ‘weird, pig-styish smell pervaded the village’, and immediately found and checked into a popular tourist haunt, the Griffith Arms Hotel; whereas I am pulled into a lay-by, 125 hectic years later, drumming my fingers and gnashing my teeth, while my smartphone gropes to locate an elusive network signal, so I can check if the Griffith Arms still exists and then scroll through its star ratings and user comments on TripAdvisor.

In the event, Edith and Martin galloped away from the Griffith Arms, vowing never to return (there was a sharp disagreement over the bill), and they struggled on in sweltering heat towards ‘Dolgelly’, these days firmly re-established as the town of Dolgellau. Edith had fashioned herself a hat out of bracken and a painting rag, to keep the horseflies at bay, and Martin was delighting in calling it a puggaree. The English language was always too small for them. The first book they ever worked on together, not for publication, was a dictionary of ‘Buddh’, a glossary of the invented language used by Edith’s family when there was no adequate word in English available. Words like ‘Gub (n.) – A vague pursuing horror, the embodiment of the terror of darkness.’ Or ‘White-eye (n.) – A significant and chilling glance calculated to awake the fatuous to a sense of their folly.’

The language of their books, including the ones produced by Edith alone, heaves and seethes with its own energy. They had both learned and spoke Gaelic, which may have been a factor. Irish writers (perhaps all non-English writers – and Edith for one never described herself as English) often loosen the bounds of the imposed language. You can hear it in Wales, too, a dissatisfaction with what’s on offer, along with a lip-smacking relish of what’s possible. The rolling momentum of the sentences. ‘… sloeblack, slow, black …’ I grew up in a family that used a large number of made-up words. Perhaps that’s normal, but I wonder if it was the influence of my Scots-Irish grandmother from Donegal, seeping down through my mother and aunts. Even when they weren’t making up words, Edith and Martin would put commonplace ones in surprising places. They are such evocative nature writers – present, watchful, joyous – but wary of overflowing into vapid effusiveness. Edith was no fan of sub-Romantic gushings and had no time at all for the then (and now) fashionable nature-mystic Richard Jefferies: all that ‘rot about Nature’ she snaps in a letter to Martin in 1891.

Edith and Martin (and I) stop in Dolgellau to refuel and pick up supplies. I wander into an outdoor sports shop (I am bound for Snowdon), and get talking to a lean and bearded ‘mountainy man’, as he would have found himself called in The Irish R.M., about following Edith and Martin’s route to the summit. He consults his weather chart and stares at my leaky trainers, threadbare anorak and wasted, clerkish limbs with unfeigned concern. ‘I’d head up tomorrow. The cloud is low, but a fresh south-westerly breeze should carry you to the top. If you’re setting off from Rhyd-ddu.’ I thank him and buy my mountain essentials: two beautiful maps and a sugary slab of brown (not white) Kendal Mint Cake. ‘The healthy option,’ I josh, limbering up for the most important part of any hill-walking expedition: excruciatingly bad banter. The mountainy man gives a short, dutiful, dying bark, like a seal choking on a badly thrown fish, and tells me it gets dark at 8.30p.m.

In Edith and Martin’s day every house in the town of Dolgellau was surrounded on all four sides by a street. The buildings were big and grey and the shopkeepers stood in the middle of their homes, ready to reach out to any passing customer from whichever direction they chose to approach. There must have been a deal of in-filling since those days, because now Dolgellau is arranged into neat streets, with many fewer shops. The major tone is still grey – sky and houses – but that doesn’t do justice to the place’s trim, uplifting appeal. There’s a beautiful cricket pitch on the edge of town, with standing stones on one boundary and a racing river on the other (it was a sluggish, drought-hit trickle in 1893). There is no sign of the Angel Inn where Martin and Edith ‘staggered into shelter’, drawn by the fact that the landlord’s wife looked like one of Edith’s aunts, and while Edith painted an ancient Welsh woman in a Welsh hat, Martin ‘no less enjoyably to myself, sat on a wheelbarrow in the stable and laid down the law’ to the landlord, ostler and saddler about ill-fitting saddles and ‘warbles’. I, meanwhile, am munching my way through ‘the best bacon sandwich in North Wales’, or so it says, and pondering Edith and Martin’s advice that there are three things to avoid in Wales, although you never can: butter, coffee and bacon. All of them are ‘odious’.

The Grapes Hotel in Maentwrog still stands, where Edith and Martin stayed on the night before they climbed Snowdon, and the village is as it was, ‘hemmed in between a wooded hill and a river, lying silent in the velvet gloom’. They were met at the entrance by a fellow guest from Manchester, his face scarlet with sunburn, who had just been up Snowdon and ‘had felt “that sick and giddy” at one place that on the downward path two guides had enveloped his head in a sack and carried him’. His ‘rather shy’ friend was playing ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ on the piano in the next room and ever since that night, wrote Martin, the tune has ‘held a horror for us that is not entirely its own’.

Oo’re ye goin’ to meet, Bill?

’Ave ye bought the street, Bill?

Lorf? – why, I thought I should ’a died

These days it is Sky Sports on every wall and a cheery hubbub at the bar. I haven’t been here long before I realize that every person in the packed front room – grandfathers, mothers, toddlers – is speaking Welsh. Everyone, that is, apart from me (‘a pint of Purple Moose please’) and Gary Neville on the commentary (‘they need to get tight on their man, Jamie, tight’). And of course, again, I remind myself that this should not be strange to us tourists. When Edith and Martin were here they often had trouble making themselves understood, whereas now the Welsh-speaking population is comfortably bilingual. But many English people continue to find this aggravating. When I was working at Time Out in the 1990s (yes, even there, at the great liberal London magazine), I remember one of our editors returning from a Welsh holiday and complaining that people refused to understand him in the shops and he was ‘sure that they had been speaking English before I came in’. The pressure to conform – the insistence on conformity – is relentless; so I’m very happy to sit here, drinking my beer, listening to people talk regular pub bollocks through the night. Or at least I guess that’s what they’re doing, because obviously I don’t have a clue what everyone is shouting about; and I suppose whatever ‘Pam na wnei di ffwcio i ffwrdd, y cont Sais ddiawl?’ happens to mean, it’s all part of the merry chit-chat of a big night out.

Anyway, the staff and patrons of the Grapes Hotel could not be friendlier. And the morning’s butter and coffee could not be any finer. Edith and Martin left early on the longest day of the year, riding through pine forests and oak woods and absolute loneliness, wrapped in their new Dolgellau puggarees and remarking on the rarity of the June tourist. The weather was on the turn and the air was growing chilly. They rode through the famously beautiful Aberglaslyn Pass almost without comment (‘Mother of God! It’s like a circus’ is all they’ll give us). On the road between the grave of Gelert, which was once a place of pilgrimage for newlyweds, and the nearby village of Beddgelert, they are delighted to observe that ‘the distance that separated each bride from her groom was noticeable, and seemed to indicate a desire to economise conversation’. Edith even supplies a drawing of four mournful figures, two brides and two grooms, shambling in single file along the road, heads down, each of them alone with their thoughts.

By this stage of their lives, neither Edith (thirty-four) nor Martin (thirty-one) seemed keen on marriage. Later in the trip, in the Saracen’s Head at Cerrig-y-Drudion, they came under the scrutiny of a middle-aged tradesman and his wife sitting in the pub’s parlour, ‘too entirely respectable to be aware that they were bored almost to madness’. Edith was pursued for much of her life by her cousin, Herbert Greene, a genial, pompous and reactionary Oxford academic, who would propose marriage to her every few months. It is possible she even accepted him once, in 1898, but was saved by the death of her father; and the engagement seems to have been allowed to drift away in the turmoil of her becoming mistress of the family home. According to her biographer, Gifford Lewis, she had also wanted to marry a young man called Hewitt Poole when she was nineteen, and was devastated when her father decided he wasn’t rich enough. I don’t know about Martin and marriage – but what mattered most to her and Edith was their independence.

Were Edith and Martin lovers? Many people seem to think so. A quick Google search finds them cropping up on numerous ‘Famous Lesbians’ websites; and their first major biographer, Maurice Collis, was convinced Edith was attracted only to women. But his book (published 1968) needs to be read through the filter of his times, not to mention the prism of his own prurience:

Any sexual union with a man had something revolting about it for Edith. Deep in her was a profound distaste for the opposite sex. Ethel [Edith’s first great friend] did not suffer from this disability [sic] … Edith’s deepest feelings, however, were entirely concentrated on her own sex. The emotion, however, was sublimated. It did not include what she would have termed its grosser manifestations [sic and, in fact, good grief!].

God knows where he got this stuff, but there he leaves us, more or less, with some misquoted notes from her diaries, until later in the book he re-emerges with Edith’s ‘disgust’ at her sister Hildegarde’s wedding, which ‘could only be fully explained by a psychiatrist, though perhaps enough has been said earlier in the book to hint at what his [sic] explanation would be’.

They loved one another, that much is certain. They spent all the time together they could. They often shared each other’s beds. But after Martin’s death Edith was horrified when someone suggested people might think they had been lovers and she immediately set about scribbling over what she felt were incriminating phrases and passages in Martin’s letters. Gifford Lewis has managed to decipher a few of these censored words and apparently there is no hint of any physical love; instead they are weirdly innocent. In 1919, three years after Martin’s death, Edith became close friends with the composer Ethel Smyth and she appears to have reacted with stunned surprise when Ethel suggested a physical relationship. Ethel (who angrily described Edith as ‘virginal’ and herself as having ‘more experience of life stored in my little finger than you have in your whole body’) was even more bemused when she managed to persuade Edith to come to Sicily on holiday with her, hoping for some love among the lemon groves, only to find that Edith had asked along her sister Hildegarde and her husband. In the event none of them went.

Well, what do we know? Really? It seems unlikely they were lovers. Not because of the times they lived in – or not especially – but because neither of them seems to have had the inclination. Perhaps they sought diversion in writing and hunting. I guess in the end we have to say that we just don’t know. And more than that, I now find myself wondering – and obviously I don’t want to come across like a gaslighting Victorian patriarch, or indeed the worst biographer in history, a kind of anti-biographer, the black hole of biographers – but I do have to ask: what the hell business is it of ours anyway? Here’s Gifford Lewis: ‘That Edith was a lesbian has gained general acceptance through an unlovely combination of affected liberalism, ignorant salaciousness and the sad assumption that huge vitality and strength in a woman implies masculinity.’

So – to Snowdon we must go. ‘The ascent’, wrote Somerville and Ross, ‘began as seductively, as gently, as the first step towards a great crime.’ The daughter of the landlady at the inn in Beddgelert, with ‘compassion in her eye’, had suggested they start from the tiny hamlet of Rhyd-ddu instead of from Beddgelert itself, cutting a long preliminary walk out of the journey. They had hired a guide for the trip, a stocky, almost silent man called Griffith Roberts, who had already been up and down Snowdon once that day. We don’t have guides any more in this country, or at least not ones who are hanging about at the foot of Snowdon or on the coastal path of Cornwall, waiting for business, like the men who sprang out of the mist to take Wilkie in hand. It wouldn’t make any financial sense. But after a few minutes of following Griffith Roberts’s unforgivingly broad back, Edith and Martin started to wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off with a slightly less vigorous guide: an asthmatic, perhaps, or someone with a club foot.

These days the route to the top from Rhyd-ddu is clearly marked: you just have to park next to the one-track railway station (where the steam train puffs and wheezes) and head up the hill. It couldn’t be easier. I am alone, but carrying my lovely new map and what’s left of the brown Kendal Mint Cake. Unlike Edith and Martin, I am not encumbered by a full-length skirt, bodice, cinch-waisted jacket, hat and thin-soled leather shoes. There is no one else on the path (how strange that is for a weekend), but then, as the mountainy man had warned, the grey cloud is settling on the heights and there’s a chill edge to the stiffening wind. I feel very close to Edith and Martin. Indeed, I seem to be tracking them precisely: an early over-confidence in the easy, grassy gradient is turning quickly into a breathless, heart-pounding, ignominious craving that Griffith Roberts might call a halt. We have been walking for about half an hour, so we are probably not nearly there yet.

When they finally pause, Edith tries to find out if there are still any eagles on Snowdon, as Gerald once wrote, but Griffith Roberts’s English is not up to the question. She leaps to her feet and flaps across the mountainside, squawking and shouting about ‘big birds who steal lambs’ and at last Griffith Roberts assures her that there are indeed plenty of ‘fahxes, oh yess, many fahxes’ on Snowdon. Edith sat down, exhausted, and Martin ‘laughed a great deal’, something she did often: she was famous for her wild laughter, impossible to suppress, which could come at the worst moments, and always at any sign of over-inflated dignity. The eagles were in fact long gone by 1893, although there is now a slender chance they might be making the most tenuous of returns, if only the conservationists and farmers can agree what to do about all these sheep and their helpless, succulent lambs.

The way grows steeper and rockier. Griffith Roberts is taking ‘a short cut’, and I am certain that I am on his trail, following the occasional signs and my perky little map. We are tracking the path of a stream, shallow in the summer months, slipping over boulders and a deluge of splintered rocks. I find I am standing at the foot of a sharp passage, peering over the beginnings of a cliff, watching distant pillars of mist glide from left to right, while silver filaments of cloud flow above them. It is more or less the last time I see anything, because now the Snowdon mist is upon us. I press on, finding hope in the cairns that lurk in the gloom. They must have been a rarity in 1893. A soft rain has joined itself to the thickening mist, although I could waste a lot of time wondering where one ends and the other begins. Let’s just say it’s grey and wet, up here on the cold mountain. Despite the fact that the land down below is writhing under the worst drought for many years, there is water all around: in the reeds and squelching underfoot, spraying from the falls, pouring from my hood and blearing my glasses – how on earth could Martin have seen any of this? A blanket of chill damp fog is laid across my shoulders. It is quiet. Heavy breaths and scrabbling footfall. Stones slipping back. No other sound. Water. Sheep. Crows.

A brief tear in the mist allowed Edith and Martin to see that ‘the cliff on which we were kneeling ran with a tremendous horse-shoe curve right up to the highest peak of Snowdon’. And that’s about where I am, I reckon, when Edith ‘made the contemptible suggestion that we should return to Rhyddu and get particulars of the sunrise and the view from the landlady’s daughter’. Edith and Martin, you see, were staying (or meant to be staying) overnight at the hotel at the top of Snowdon, and I am starting to think, as I read these words, alone in this fog, that Edith may have a point (and there isn’t even a hotel on Snowdon these days), but Martin ‘repelled the suggestion with appropriate spirit’.

I have paused (again), this time on the pretence of looking at the twelve tender saplings planted in plastic sheaths just to the side of the path. Once, long before Somerville and Ross came this way – and probably not even in Gerald’s day – the slopes of the hills and mountains of Wales were covered in trees. The early settlers and English conquerors made a good job of cutting them down (why give your enemy somewhere to hide?) and the relentless sheep ensured they never returned. Perhaps a pair of eagles, or a pack of wolves, would solve this problem. It is surprising how high the treeline might climb if these saplings manage to take hold, but we are conditioned not to think of our peaks as naturally wooded. We think first of moorland and peat and grouse, and the occasional square of forestry, but this barren landscape is not natural: it requires constant work to keep the uplands free from trees. It is also madness, of course (we need trees for flood mitigation, soil retention, species diversity, oxygen …), but with the climate in meltdown, and the sheep corralled, there might soon come a day when we see juniper, alder and birch near the very top of Snowdon.

There is an ancient wind blowing me up the mountain, ruffling the mist among the rocks. It is cold. I hadn’t thought I would be so alone here, just me and the long-dead Edith, Martin and Griffith Roberts. And I had not thought to give Snowdon the absolute respect it is due. But even Edith and Martin, before they started, were saddened by the way their planned route ‘degraded the ascent of the highest mountain in England and Wales into a mere episode of the late afternoon’. And I was following them – at least that’s my excuse – two Victorian ladies in all their finery, giggling their way to the top, although it’s only when they are finally there, shivering in a little wooden hut (because that’s all the ‘hotel’ turns out to be) that Edith admits that on the last narrow stretch, with cliffs on either side wreathed in tormented vapours, she had ‘an almost uncontrollable desire to traverse it after the manner of a serpent’.

How does anyone manage to lose his new, beautiful map on the slopes of Snowdon? It can be done, apparently. Round about the point where the mist is thickest and the path least certain. Perhaps I should not have come here alone, but I wanted to enjoy Edith and Martin’s company. Their friendship was the bond that defined their lives. In one of the later Irish R.M. stories, ‘Harrington’s’, they introduce us to ‘the chicken farmers’, two women who have retreated to a small farm on a remote stretch of the Irish coast, one of them a doctor, the other ‘very pretty’, and recovering from a broken engagement to a gunner (‘drink, I fancy, or mad’, says Philippa, the R.M.’s wife). I’ve always thought the portrait of the women chicken farmers must have been Edith and Martin’s wistful fantasy of escape, written not long before Martin’s death. It showed what might have been possible, if only family and duty had not pressed so hard. A little pink box of a house, on the shore of a small, round lake, far from the suffocating intrusions of others. Tending chickens. But it’s really not something they would have thought about for long. Or even much enjoyed.

In the story, Major Yeates, his wife Philippa and their cousin Andrew end up following the chicken farmers to an auction in the ruins of an old mine on the edge of nowhere. They have Anthony, their eldest son, with them, as a treat for not crying when his cake was spoiled on his ninth birthday. Mr Harrington, the last owner of the mine, had committed suicide (although the jury was too sympathetic to call it that), and everything he owned was going under the hammer. Unlike every other R.M. story, there is a twitchy unease running through it like adrenaline in a rat. There is a ghost, and second sight, and a groping, nauseating dash through the pitch-black mine, looking for Anthony, who is lying limp and stricken by a falling rock, and the major (who narrates all the stories) ‘felt that sickening drop of the heart that comes when the thing that seems too bad to think of becomes in an instant the thing that is’. I know that feeling too well. I guess we all do.

But anyway I have a horror of black mines, ever since my older brother, also only nine years old, plunged head first down the shaft of a German bunker in Brittany, in the dead darkness of an underground passageway, at the very moment when my mother was saying, ‘Hang on, wait, just stop, I’m going to strike a match.’ And he was fine, after the weeks in hospital when he drank puréed vegetable soup through a straw, and my parents never slept, and I managed to get myself stung by a wasp so the French nurses would pay me some attention. (I was seven, and sick with worry, and insanely jealous of that damned straw, which was long and could be twisted into all the shapes of a roller coaster. No one in England had ever seen such a thing.) I can replay every second of that time in the bunker, and still hear every word.

Mostly, though, the Irish R.M. stories have no dark shades. They are filled with the bright sunshine of carefree days. Reading them, you would never know (or you would have to read very closely to realize) that Ireland in the early twentieth century was a place of bitter division, on the brink of war. This was deliberate (Edith and Martin knew what sold), but also unavoidable: they really did find life very funny, especially when they were together. They stripped out all politics and put in all the people they met and knew. Disguised, of course: Edith always claimed that there were only two characters in the stories drawn from real life, her sister’s dog and a local drunk called Slipper. But this was not true. I even wonder if the ineffectual but lovable Major Yeates of the Irish R.M. stories is in any way a nod to the poet W. B. Yeats, whose work they knew well and whom Martin met for the first time in 1901, as she described to Edith in a letter:

Yeats looks just what I expected. A cross between a Dominie Sampson [an impoverished scholar in a Walter Scott novel] and a starved R.C. curate – in seedy black clothes – with a large black bow at the root of his long naked throat. He is egregiously the poet – mutters ends of verse to himself with a wild eye, bows over your hand in dark silence – but poet he is – in spite of various things – and I got on well with him, so far.

That ‘so far’ is revealing. Yeats was also born Protestant and ‘Anglo-Irish’, with its assertive and tormented and distancing hyphen, but by 1901 he was an Irish nationalist, with no time for any Home Rule compromises. How to be Irish – who can be Irish? (or British or English) – preoccupied Martin and Edith just as much as it did Yeats or any of them. Edith, as I say, would never have considered herself English – her family had lived in Ireland for hundreds of years – and she could flare into a rage at the thought of what England had done to her country. Martin too considered herself Irish, but she was also more conscious of her family’s leading place in the Protestant Ascendancy, and as opinions polarized, she found it harder to know where she fitted. On the side of Home Rule, no doubt, in 1901 – devolution that would have kept links (and much control) at Westminster – but Martin died in December 1915 and never lived to see the Easter Rising, the murderous reprisals of the Black and Tans, the burning of the big houses, the birth of the Irish Republic, Civil War and the flight of most of the Anglo-Irish (but not Edith) who represented, whether they liked it or not, centuries of oppression, servitude and famine. There didn’t seem to be much room for ambiguous hyphens in the new, independent, Catholic Ireland.

Later on in the day she first met Yeats, Martin was asked to add her initials to a tree that was being decorated by a gathering of ‘the literary crowd’. ‘WBY did the carving, I smoked, and high literary conversation raged and the cigarette went out and I couldn’t make the matches light, and he held the little dingy lappets of his coat out and I lighted the match in his bosom.’

‘Lappets’. The thing about Somerville and Ross is that they could never stay serious for long.

I was almost brought to my knees with relief when I met ‘Nick from the Wirral’ on the slopes of Snowdon, at the moment when the fog was at its deepest. I was skirting edgily along the cusp of the horseshoe leading to the top when Nick came bounding along another path, bearing a high-vis orange jacket and an open tap of merry banter. He was also on his own and had decided on a whim to take a longer route home, over the top of Snowdon, which is perhaps even crazier than it sounds. We made it to the summit together, in thick cloud and a few freckles of snow, and he insisted I arrange myself on top of the triangulation point for a photo, so I could show the world that I was briefly the highest person standing in England and Wales. There was a queue of people waiting to do the same thing, all of whom had arrived by the train that has been slogging up Snowdon since 1896, three years after Edith and Martin made the journey by foot.

The wooden hut where Edith and Martin stayed is long gone, replaced by a vast alpine visitor centre and café, which sounds like a hideous thing to impose on a mountaintop (and it is), but under the circumstances (aftershocks of vertigo amid pangs of mourning for the missing map) also hugely welcome. Edith and Martin shivered through the short night, made even more miserable by thin doses of sleep, hiding under their blankets when they thought someone was going to come and make them admire the sunrise. They awoke in the grey dawn with the certain knowledge that mountains are best viewed en profile, from the base – and ‘a beautiful view is not a mere matter of miles seen from a great height’. Which certainly makes a pleasant change from the needy posturings of male writers, spaying their way up the mountains of the world, conquering things. The best writers about nature, I decide, as I sip hot tea and peer through the panoramic windows at an impenetrable wall of cloud, are not ‘nature writers’ at all. Somerville and Ross are the proof.

The descent of Snowdon is a lot easier than the climb. I even find myself giving directions to a bunch of middle-aged men (‘just follow the stream bed, you can’t go wrong’), reassuring a nervous couple who are worried about the cliffs (‘it’s a lot easier if you sing!’) and, close to the foot of the mountain, joshing with a group of British Asian lads (‘Nearly there! One last heave!’).

Edith and Martin are grumbling about the litter, ‘the soda-water bottle, the sandwich-paper, and the orange-peel’, but there is no sign of my map. The smells are more familiar lower down the mountain – there’s a dusty whiff of heather in the air – and I am walking slower, wondering why I feel an ache of loss for people I have never met. Edith and Martin (and Griffith Roberts) kept me company every inch of the way, scrambling over the jagged scree and the icy bogs. Their laughter on the slopes was vivid and real. But of course, I do realize, they’re not actually here.

All of a sudden the sun is shining, not just here on the lower stretches but also, glancing up, on the peaks of Snowdonia. And there are groups of people heading up in the late afternoon, talking and laughing. Couples. Schoolfriends. Walking parties. Bands of brothers. I was a fool to have wanted to be alone on the mountainside. Thank you, thank you, ‘Nick from the Wirral’. None of us should be on our own. Love and friendship are all that matter. I don’t know why I feel so shaken (is there such a thing as reverse altitude sickness?), but perhaps it is not healthy to brood too long on the dead, although Edith, and most of her family, would have disagreed. In the 1920s, when armed men were at large in the country, Edith was convinced that the spirits of her dead family, Martin among them, but with Uncle Kendal the most active, had woven a web of protection around her and her home. They laid snares for intruders and whispered messages of horror and dread.

It was Edith’s mother Adelaide, and her brothers Kendal and Jocelyn, who had introduced the family to spiritualism. They were enthusiasts from the 1850s. Kendal once levitated his brother, who whipped out a pencil and signed his name on the ceiling, and they all consulted the dead, watched tables float in the air and channelled reams of automatic writing from their ancestors. At first Edith and Martin viewed these antics with detached amusement, but the possibilities of spiritualism seem in the end to have taken a grip on them all, especially once the more aloof Martin had left the scene, or at least had departed this earthly dimension. Edith became a convert, just as the movement grew in popularity with the grieving families and survivors of the First World War.

On 21 December 1915 Edith watched Violet Martin die in the Glen Vera hospital in Cork, having sketched her asleep only three days earlier. She wrote to her brother that her life was in ruins. Six months later, still ravaged by grief (‘the deadly details that go to the making of each futureless, featureless day’), she went to dine with a local medium called Jem Barlow and after dinner found herself watching in astonishment as Jem wrote out, in automatic writing, this message from Martin: ‘You and I have not finished our work. Dear, we shall. Be comforted. V.M.’ From that day onwards Edith was in almost daily contact with Martin (apart from when she went on speaking or horse-dealing tours to the US – apparently Martin had to stay closer to home), and after a while she found that a spirit medium was no longer necessary: she could communicate directly with Martin herself.

There are sixteen books written by ‘Somerville and Ross’ before Martin’s death in 1915; and a further sixteen produced by them afterwards. Of course, Edith was a brilliant writer, much greater than she allowed herself to believe: she always used to defer to what she felt were Martin’s superior talents. There were no more R.M. stories, or another The Real Charlotte, but the books by post-mortem ‘Somerville and Ross’ are still powerful, funny, ebullient, sharp – and almost as tightly written. It doesn’t really matter if you believe in any of this, or in Edith’s version of how it happened, although I do not see why we should be so quick to recoil from the possibility. Of course it can be explained away. And maybe all that really matters is that it was enough for Edith to know – and to be quite open about knowing – that six months after Martin died she was able to talk to her again and resume their writing partnership. And not only that. It was their companionship and friendship, their daily communion, their love – their laughter – that had survived the absurd severance of death.