One Moonlit Night

by Caradog Prichard

  Jees, the old Lake looks good too. It’s strange that they call it Black Lake cos I can see the sky in it. Blue Lake would be a better name for it, cos it looks as though it’s full of blue eyes. Blue eyes laughing at me. Blue eyes laughing at me. Blue eyes laughing.

  They might all be down there, for all I know. Huw and Moi and Em and Gran and Ceri and everybody. Ah, a wonderful thing it would be if I saw Mam coming up out of the Lake now and shouting: Come here, you little monkey. Been up to mischief with that old Huw again.

  I’ll shout, just to see if there’s an echo. Mam-a-a-m. Mam-a-a-m. Mam-a-a-m. Ah yes, indeed.

  * * *

  Is this the Voice, I wonder? Yes, this is it:

  I am the Queen of the Black Lake, rejected by the Beautiful One.

  My kingdom is the grievous waters that lie beyond the ultimate sorrow; whose bitterness did sweeten the waters of Marah.

  I am learned in the chemistry of tears; I assembled them in the cauldron of the centuries, then dissected and reduced them to their elements.

  Eternal and fleeting, sad and joyful, momentous and without significance was the task; as like the seed in the womb, I hurried from cell to cell, from person to person, in my quest.

  To fight and to lose and to win and to be vanquished was my lot; to battle and to conquer and to squirm beneath the boot of the oppressor.

  As we remember the garden, his crying out loud.

  I knew the thrill of the morning and did revel therein until surfeiting; thereafter surfeiting beyond surfeit.

  I raised my voice unto the firmament, even to the very joists of Heaven’s floor; and like comets did my cries return unto my lips.

  The showers of my repentance washed me purer than the laughter of a newborn babe; and rinsed me cleaner than the lowing of a lamb.

  But then did I return unto the quest and take hold the baby’s head, planting my red kiss upon his cheeks and turning his spittle into an issue of blood.

  Pass me that pot under the bed. Wherefore may ravening beasts tear down the tender first fruits?

  I sent forth my hounds; and watched as they returned with the tyrant in their jaws.

  My chariots rushed forth upon the wheels of the hurricane; and dragged my oppressors to their appointed stations.

  I had them brought before me; and fairly did I divide my judgements among them.

  And, with hands so dextrous did I skilfully complete the noose; and with luxurious tenderness did I prove the blade upon flesh.

  Serves him right. But he was my brother, you know.

  My innocence sought out the mysteries of the woodland; and deciphered with prophecy and music the melody of the birds.

  I dreamed the dreams of the pignuts; and watched them flourish in the wilderness.

  I walked humbly upon the smooth pathway of the sanctified places; and saw the fruit of their vines anointing the elect.

  I hungered for the bread of life and was satisfied; I thirsted for the living wine and was turned out into the sun, my thirst unquenched.

  I swallowed the sun; and took the moon for a pillow to my resting place.

  I plundered the stars’ number; and with promiscuous eyes did lure the clouds into the depths of my kingdom.

  I commanded her to come from the firmament and bow before me; she with eyes of bluest blue who did according to my word.

  Therefore with Angels and Archangels and with the entire Company of Heaven.

  AFTERWORD

  by

  Niall Griffiths

  Now their home is the mountains, and their wits have gone.

  Euripides, The Bacchae

  It’s the Otherness that first hits you, the ineffable strangeness, the sense that you have entered a world profoundly and extensively different from the familiar one you inhabit. Start reading, and within a few pages a child’s voice, of quasi-autistic cadence and tone, will confront you with alcoholic rage, shellshock, indecent exposure, underage sexual activity, petty theft, a kind of prostitution, crippling penury, drug use, violent and premature death, war, cancer, suicide, epilepsy, paedophilia, insanity and domestic violence. There is, or will be, a mad mother. There is the absence of a father, an awful void. There is a sustained exploration of the remote and blasted limits of human experience equalled in only a few instances in the literature of this Anglo-Celtic archipelago and there is, at the root, one of the oddest, most elusive, most haunting novels ever to have come out of these islands.

  The author himself remains a peculiar, intriguing figure. Born in 1904, at the height of the Welsh Revival, the time of the Voice and religious hysteria and the ‘wheel of fire’, in the bizarre mountain town of Bethesda, he went on to become the youngest ever winner of the National Eisteddfod Crown, aged twenty-two. He would eventually win the Crown three times and the Chair itself later in life. Hardly a subversive type, he labelled himself a Tory and became sub-editor of the Daily Telegraph, after he decamped from Caernarfon to London. All the more startling, then, that his only novel, and best-known work, is one of iconoclastic, myth-shattering importance, centrally concerned, ostensibly, with debunking tradition and nostalgia. Antithetical to the twee but popular reminiscences of childhood that domi¬nated the bestseller lists of the middle years of the last century (and, in a way, do again), Un Nos Ola Leuad describes no rural idyll in the hill villages; rather, its focus is the much-less-documented low-life of the slate towns that, supposedly, were breeding grounds for the noble savages who were to fight so heroically in the First World War. In Prichard’s world, people are systematically and inexorably trampled and dismantled by the terrible pressures of life; they break apart and go insane or commit suicide. Religion here is not merely something which supplies them with the songs they sing in close harmony as they return from the mines to Mam and a bowl of cawl, it is something they become obsessed with and hystericalised by. It is no solace, here; it is a problem. A blight, even, in its institutionalised form, in the dark and corrupting way it works on the internal emotional lives of these terribly vulnerable and raging people.

  Central to the themes and to the narrative (and, indeed, to Prichard’s life) is the Mam of the unnamed narrator. The conventional Welsh Mam is the hearth-keeper, the bread-baker, the protective, nurturing presence; but here she is the insane wanderer of storm-battered mountains, the weeper railing at others only she can see. Prichard’s own mother spent her final thirty years in a Denbigh asylum, driven mad, her son wrote in a poem, by the strain of losing her husband in a quarrying accident and as a consequence having to rely on the mercy of the parish. This in turn prompted a deep depression in Prichard which was to plague him all his life and propel his writing. His long poem ‘Earthly Turmoil’ (‘Terfysgoedd Daear’ in the original Welsh) describes an obsession with suicide and a concomitant abiding disgust with the world:

  Life, this is not the way I will cross your threshold

  to attain a lofty repose from the weary struggle;

  fearful of the exposed vein under the knife’s sharp blade

  is the miracle which turns blood to wine so futile,

  when the self-same act is performed in the fields of France

  with the constant terror of disgorging arteries?

  (trans. Martin Davies)

  And he entitled his memoirs Humangofiant Methiant, or, in English, The Autobiography of a Failure. Happy reading, eh?

  Well, yes, in a sense. Greatly formative and influential books tend to work on you in the same way as cataclysmic events; you tend to remember where you were when you first read them, as you might recall the World Trade Center crumbling. But I don’t remember the first time I read Un Nos … , despite the way it continues to make me reel or the way it capers to be noticed behind my own written work. The reason for this might, I feel, be because the book has in some ways been a force and a presence in my life from the moment I was born; the myths and legends which shape and inform it have been as much a part of my make-up as the colour of my eyes. Take the Queen of Snowdon, for instance, the Bride of
the Beautiful One; physically she is just the resemblance to a recumbent giantess that the mountain assumes when viewed from a certain angle and distance, but spiritually her Voice is, amongst many other things, the inescapability of God due to the beauty (sometimes brutal) of His works, not exclusively in terms of landscape but also in reference to the vital yearnings of our condition, one of which is, of course, sexuality. Prichard has her say this:

  My thighs embrace the swirling mists and my breasts caress the low-lying clouds; they in their precocity explore the secret places of my nakedness, luxuriate amid the wonders of the deep, then rise again in guilty satisfaction to the Heavens. Thou hast enslaved me. Thou hast enslaved me, my Beloved; and I submit myself unto Thy will; with my every living breath do I desire Thee.

  The Song of Songs is in there; I see a lot of Dylan Thomas in there, too. And I see some happiness in there also, or at least a kind of pleasure, an internal smile provoked by a shock of recognition, that soft stunning that only truly great writing can achieve. Prichard’s masterpiece is full of such moments, and not only in the liturgical abstract; the scene of the football match between the Holyhead Wanderers and the Bethesda Celts contains some fine comic writing, and much of the novel’s impact depends upon the exploitation of that potentially comic dichotomy between disturbing events and the naive child’s voice that relates them. Plus I personally find many of the setpieces and characters hugely funny, in a League of Gentlemen kind of way, but maybe that’s just me. Prichard’s namesake and predecessor, Caradoc Evans, shares this quality, as, in fact, does much modern writing from Wales, in either language; how can it not when it is so fascinated by the quirks and meaning of what it is to be human? Thomas’s Under Milk Wood bears more than a superficial resemblance to Un Nos …, in its parade of oddballs (some might unfairly say ‘caricatures’); it is worth noting that Prichard first conceived of his novel as a radio play for voices, and marginalia on one of Thomas’s worksheets for his famous play reads: ‘What have I missed out? Incest/Greed/Hate/Envy/Spite/Malice. STRESS THE FEAR OF SOME OF THE TOWN AFTER DARK.’ The exuberant and the horrific—the currency of this principality.

  There is, in fact, a quintessential Welshness to this novel. Menna Baines, in her introduction to the Penguin edition, wrote that ‘the social context … remains specifically and vigorously Welsh’, but I would go further; I would state that no other country but Wales could spawn the mind that could create such a work. True, Prichard wrote it during his exile in London, and that, too, colours the novel’s mood, but this tiny, wet and mountainous peninsula lashed by sea and storm with its people’s thanatomania, their incessantly questing psyche, their fetishisation of the dead and their love of misery matched only by their enthusiasm for celebration … all of this boils on every page of Un Nos Ola Leuad. His writing method is to quarry; to dig down, deeper and deeper, into the slime and blackness and filth and eventually through it to reveal the valuables, the precious ore of lived experience, in which can be found moments of inexplicable beauty, such as the prayer for food which results in a basket of goodies being left on Betsan Parry’s doorstep with a note addressed to her and reading: ‘As an offering of thanks. From a Well-Wisher,’ which benefactor remains forever unknown. There are a number of these touching moments of tenderness scattered throughout the novel; the party for Elwyn Top Row, for example, for his being awarded the DCM, or the narrator wanting to sleep so he can dream about Ceri and weeping because she’s too old, at eighteen, to fall in love with him, or the walk with Ceri to Beaumaris, although this last is immediately followed by the discovery of Will Ellis Porter’s body, whose suicide in turn ignites Mam’s madness and then the wider disintegration which does, fundamentally, characterise the novel. But those softer moments remain with the reader, alongside the scenes of squalor and anguish; the thread of observed and felt empathy and compassion which runs through the book is often unjustly overlooked, I feel.

  So what do we take from this novel? What does it give us, this peculiar and captivating little book? Well, its slipperiness is one of its best qualities. We take from it an aversion and resistance to being accosted by a demand for ready meaning. What haunts me about it is its treatment of childhood as, on the one hand, a period of adjustment to adult horror and insanity, or, on the other, as a period of intense and unsullied emotion, the unabashed expression of which is essential to our growth as human beings: ‘I’d love to be able to cry like that again, just once more,’ the narrator says after recalling how his mother was gulped by the asylum. The loss of this childhood intensity is tremendously painful, of course, but the memory of it stays in us, like the words themselves, in all their askew beauty; the style and the mood remain, close and reachable. Does anyone need anything else? If you do, then go back and read it again.

  GLOSSARY

  Adwy Gap

  Allt Hill

  Allt Goch Red Hill

  Bone Rhiwia Quarrybank slopes

  Braich Headland

  Bron or Fron Hill

  Bryn Hill

  Βwlch Gap, pass

  Cae Field

  Cafn Trough

  Ceunant Ravine, gorge

  Clawdd Ditch

  Cwt Crydd Cobbler’s shed

  Foel Bare hill

  Ffridd Pasture

  Ffwd Stream

  Garnedd Cairn

  Garth Enclosure, garden, hill or ridge

  Gorlan Sheepfold

  Lôn Lane, road

  Lôn Goed Wood Lane

  Lôn Newydd New Lane

  Llan Church

  Nant Valley

  Nant Ycha Upper valley

  Pant Valley

  Pen Top, end or head

  Pen Pennog Herring head

  Penwaig Herrings

  Pen y Foel The top of Bald Hill

  Rallt Ddu The Black Hill

  Rallt Wen The White Hill

  Rhiw Hill, ascent or slope

  Tal End

  Tal Cafn Trough End

  Tan Under

  Tan Bryn Beneath a hill

  Tan Fron Beneath a hill

  Terfyn Boundary

  Waun Moor

  Wen White

  About the Author

  One Moonlit Night

  Caradog Prichard (1904–1980) was born in the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda, in north-west Wales. Pursuing journalism as a career, he trained at Caernarfon before moving to Cardiff and eventually London. After the Second World War he became a sub-editor on the foreign desk at the Daily Telegraph. During this time he wrote four prize-winning odes and this exceptional novel. He remained in London until his death.

  Copyright

  First published in the Welsh language as Un Nos Ola Leuad

  English translation published in Great Britain in 1995 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2009

  by Canongate Books Ltd

  Copyright © Mari Prichard, 1961

  English translation copyright © Philip Mitchell, 1995

  Foreword copyright © Jan Morris, 2009

  Afterword copyright © Niall Griffiths, 2009

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain

  their permission for copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints and editions of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 423 4

  Typeset by HewerText UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  www.meetatthegate.com

 

 

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