by Lloyd Jones
Many days I wandered on the shore with the waders as they, like me, prepared to depart. On days like these Wales feels like a Promethean rock in the ocean, visited briefly by flights of souls as they travel to and fro between birth and death.
My impending walk brought to mind the opening passage of William Langland’s great fourteenth century book, Piers Plowman:
In a summer season, when soft was the sun,
I enshrouded me well in a shepherd’s garb,
And robed as a hermit, unholy of works,
Went wide through the world, all wonders to hear.
And on a May morning, on Malvern Hills,
Strange fancies befell me, and fairy-like dreams.
I was weary of wandering, and went to repose
On a green bank, by a burn-side;
As I lay there and leaned and looked at the waters
I slumbered and slept, they sounded so merry.
Came morning before me a marvellous vision;
I was lost in a wild waste; but where I discerned not.
I beheld in the east on high, near the sun,
A tower on a hill-top, with turrets well-wrought;
A deep dale beneath, and dungeons therein,
With deep ditches and dark, and dreadful to see.
A fair field, full of folk, I found there between,
Of all manner of men, the mean and the rich,
All working or wandering, as the world requires.
As I made arrangements for my journey I read many essays by the masters of walking, and their words fell around me like warm chippings scattered by passing cars laden with laughing people on a dusty summer road. I started with the daddy of them all, Henry David Thoreau, and his famous opening line:
I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness...
I took to this eccentric American, writing almost 200 years ago. His much-quoted sentence on walking is the best mission statement I have ever read:
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.
Attaboy, Mr Thoreau Sir! I liked his attitude, right down to his last words. When a friend asked him on his deathbed if he could see into the next world yet, Thoreau snapped back: ‘One world at a time...’
Here he is again:
I have met but one or two people in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking...
The word sauntering, he thought, was derived from idle people, fakers who roved about the country in the middle ages, asking charity, under a pretence of going a la sainte terre – to the holy land; or the word could derive from sans terre, without land or home. He was full of splendid theories. I love this sentence:
I once had a sparrow alight on my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.
But let’s return to the Vogel Papers. They are permanently lodged at the town museum, though last year they joined a touring exhibition entitled, predictably, Figures in a Landscape.
The exhibition was divided into two main themes:
1: Foreign travellers who have passed through our land, and their impressions.
2: Native itinerants, in pictures and folk stories.
Typically bourgeois reference points, you might say, but my interest was aroused because this exhibition, which started its peripatetic mission in our town, touched upon a very real interest of mine. Since I am now a travelling man myself, with that restless snail-like urge to clamp a few essentials to my back and head off somewhere, I spent many hours grazing at the museum, which housed the presentation.
I would say that my interest in the travelling folk was kindled by a roving gene among my chromosomes – and it came, by all accounts, from one of my grandfathers, who arrived here as a tramp, gentleman of the road, call them what you will. I was told this by one of my aunts, who was far from proud of our family skeleton. He was among the many itinerants who had arrived in a slow trickle in this rural backwater immediately after the Great War.
The word tramp comes from the Middle Low German for ‘to stamp’, and my ancestor – who had been well and truly stamped on by a roaring, monstrous world – had walked away from it all in search of sanctuary. Apparently he had wheeled everything he owned in front of him in a rusty old perambulator. There were many like him. My father told me that if they were treated humanely at a particular place they scratched a secret mark on the wall in the roadside by the house; I searched for this sign everywhere but couldn’t find it. ‘Ah, that shows you how discreet they are,’ he said.
I think he may have been romancing – a strong trait in our family.
Later I read about the way gypsies mark a patrin – a trail – with small piles of leaves or bunches of hay; some tie a ribbon or a rag to a tree, and sometimes a bent twig is enough to signpost their spoor.
In urban areas the tramps were sometimes given a small amount of food and drink.
In the rural areas they were expected to sing for their supper, by doing a few chores. Many had a regular itinerary, going from farm to farm to help with certain crops. They usually slept in the stable loft, directly above the horses, who gave them warmth and company; I will not examine here the long friendship between the rootless man and his horse – you can ask Genghis Khan about that in the afterlife.
I remember two tramps who trod the lanes of my youth.
One was called Birdie. He was a squat, gingery man with a mouthful of bad teeth. He sold transistor radios from two enormous cardboard boxes lashed with twine. Occasionally, as the school bus dipped and clonked its way through the rolling Welsh countryside, we would pass him as he walked from farm to farm touting his wares. As is common with tramps, it was rumoured that he was fabulously rich and did not need to work at all. The other common fable construed around tramps is that they were once very clever but their minds had collapsed after being spurned by a lover. Old Birdie dipped in and out of my life, like the school charabanc, until he was found, stiff as a board, in a hayrick one winter. He had just a few pounds in his pockets and holes in his shoes.
There were other tramps, mainly ex-prisoners who were social outcasts, and who went from village to village begging or stealing, usually from the priests. Of course there were no social services then. Many of these men were moving around in search of work. And there were peddlers and tinkers, who sharpened knives on a whetstone driven by the chain on their upturned bikes, and there were garlic-wafting onion-sellers, who had come on ships from Brittany with their black cycles, and Indians in turbans selling carpets roped to the roofs of their vans.
My father also described a previous generation of itinerants: wandering clerics and preachers, who led tumultuous religious revivals; clock-repairers, men selling popular ballads, men driving steam-driven threshing machines, and men walking stallions around the countryside, servicing mares.
The most unusual man he remembered was a moss-pointer, who walked around Wales stuffing dried moss into farmhouse wall-cracks in readiness for winter.
Tramps were far from my mind when I met Dr John Williams in a Cardiff hotel one day in March, 2000. It was a strange meeting; I can’t remember why we struck on that particular place for our first encounter. He was over from Tasmania for a symposium on Welsh maritime history – he was an authority on the work of the Welsh shipping scholar Aled Eames. I had asked a local journalist, who had also written on the country’s maritime history, for as many contacts as possible.
‘Williams is one of the best authorities on Welsh coastal wrecks you’ll ever meet,’ he told me; it was purely by chance that Dr Williams was due in Wales only a few weeks after I mailed him the Vogel Papers with a heartfelt plea for help: What might Mr Vogel have been looking for, if the story had any basis in truth?<
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Dr Williams was a small, Humpty Dumpty sort of man with a pronounced double chin, a bald dome-shaped head and a rather strange voice which quivered between a high octave and a low warble when he was excited. He had a damp palm and rheumy eyes. He also suffered dreadfully with dandruff. I was struck by this strange parallel with Mr Vogel’s story. Mr Vogel had dandruff; Tasmania was also mentioned as the country where the original landlord of the Blue Angel had begat a child.
Dr Williams echoed my sentiments: ‘Funny, isn’t it, that link with Tasmania,’ he said reflectively. ‘To be honest with you, that’s why I read the Vogel Papers when you sent them – my eye happened to catch the word Tasmania, otherwise I would have thrown them away in all probability.’ He sounded vaguely apologetic. I soothed him: ‘This whole thing is already one big bag of coincidences,’ I said. ‘It’ll be a miracle if we get anywhere.’
Through the window I saw spring flood the sky’s arena with a delicate duckshell blue. Outside in Cathedral Road a welter of traffic was thudding towards the city centre. Above the rooftops I glimpsed the top of the Millennium Stadium. We were in an alcove window and I felt pleased with my choice. Dr Williams was excited: he was back in the old homeland, he could spend a month re-exploring ancestral fields. He was enthusiastic about post-Assembly Cardiff – it had a new vitality, he felt. This was the first time I had visited the capital; apparently it’s changing rapidly now the old docks have been swept away – it has a slightly tentative air about it, as though the city was a rather wary woman who had bought some snazzy clothes for her first party after a divorce and wondered what everyone else would think.
Dr Williams wanted to help me. We sat facing each other comfortably; I had convinced him quickly that I was not a crank, and I knew just enough about the Royal Charter, the Resurgam, the Ocean Monarch and other well-known Welsh shipping disasters to kindle his interest. I turned the conversation towards Tasmania. Having known a couple of journalists over the years, I know the importance of preparation before an interview – there is nothing safer than a little knowledge of a person’s circumstances to buy a little time with him. It’s a discreet form of flattery.
I talked of Van Diemen and his conquest, and the apparent genocide of the indigenous Tasmanian nation, which perished finally with the death of Trugannini in 1876; the Aboriginal women kidnapped or bought by white sealers and taken to live in desperate circumstances in the Bass Strait, women who sometimes killed their own offspring as a refutation of what was happening to them; the black Tasmanians who were forced to live under different laws and in special areas until as late as the 1940s; the programme of assimilation which saw native children being taken away from their families.
‘Seems the Welsh didn’t suffer as badly as we thought,’ I said.
Williams’s response was swift and unexpected. His face tightened and his eyes hardened. ‘Bloody disaster, all of it,’ he said tersely. ‘And now the infighting... it’s like a civil war. Now it’s blackfella against blackfella. It was bad enough to strip them of their land and their dignity. But to come back a century later offering them some sort of pitiful self-government was downright criminal. They just couldn’t adopt white government. Their way of running things, their law is totally different... end result could be a bloodbath.’
I regretted I’d brought it up. It was clearly a cause close to his heart.
‘Something similar over here,’ I said as a way of giving the conversation a coda. ‘The Welsh were battered by any number of invaders but they spent half their time fighting among themselves to see who would fight the invaders. Absolutely bloody mad.’
‘I call it the paranoid factor,’ said Williams. ‘If you start feeling paranoid, which is a pretty normal sort of feeling sometime or other in your life, you start looking more closely at other people to see if they are looking at you. The result is that they do start looking at you because you’re looking at them, so you slink off into a corner to make sure no-one looks at you. It’s the same with minority cultures – they get so self-conscious and paranoid they end up half-mad with pain and either kill themselves or drink themselves into oblivion. Bet you anything you like a medical survey of fringe cultures would show an alcohol or drugs problem directly in proportion to the smallness of the culture. Innuits, Aborigines, Celts...’
We sat quietly and I thought of the Arab women I’d heard that morning on a bus to Cardiff Bay, jabbering away in their own language, a minority within a minority within a minority – they were clearly talking about their husbands, and one was volubly unhappy with her domestic situation (I don’t know how I understood her, but her consternation was plain to all who heard her). I had listened, and had felt, for the first time, part of Wales...
Dr Williams shuffled about in his pockets and brought out a package.
‘I’ve read the Vogel Papers. Very strange. Mostly fantasy, of course. I’ve never come across such an odd mix – I suppose the writer, whoever he or she was, might have been attempting a first novel; you’d never believe how many people out there harbour some such dream.’
‘He or she?’ I queried. ‘It’s always been assumed the writer was a male, after all it’s written from the standpoint of a barman.’
‘I thought we were all approaching this with an open mind,’ he said blandly.
He was the scholar. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ I conceded. ‘Take nothing for granted.’
Williams opened a brown envelope and pulled out some documents.
‘These might be of help. I’ve pondered on the Vogel Papers quite a long time, since I have a minority interest in cripples. My mother was a great fan of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t know that one.’
Williams grinned. ‘Larger than life character. Had polio as a kid. Then she was hit by a tram when she was a teenager and spent her life in a steel corset. Rumbustious life, had an affair with Trotsky, husband a serial womaniser – sort of put her pain down on canvas. My mother met her once and bought one of her paintings, in the early days, when they were affordable. It hung in our parlour all my childhood.’
‘So much pain out there,’ I mumbled.
‘So much pain, and so much energy and creativity too. There seems to be a link,’ he added.
We’d both had enough of brainplay so we headed for the restaurant. As we walked through I touched the document which Williams had given me, now warm in my pocket. Would it shine any light on Mr Vogel’s quest, I wondered. The Ride of the Vogelkyrie had something to do with Anglesey, I thought. And so did Dr Williams. Over the menu he said: ‘The island mentioned in the papers must be Anglesey. It can be no other. The papers were found in a Welsh pub, only Anglesey has a road bridge, and that gives us just one choice.’
He ordered Conwy mussels and Welsh lamb.
I just wanted a sandwich, but I didn’t want to make him look gluttonous. I made a feeble excuse... ‘cholesterol problems,’ I said guardedly, ‘got to be careful’. Truth is, I have always been very uncomfortable about eating in public, especially with strangers. The very notion has made me feel sick in the past. I’ve wondered if I have some sort of eating disorder, but I’ve veiled the problem over the years and I’ve got away with it.
Williams was understanding. ‘No worries,’ he comforted me – ‘you have what you like.’
I relaxed, and ordered the beef pie with new potatoes.
I finished a full five minutes before him.
Later, in my hotel room, I reflected on my conversation with Williams. He, also, had enthused about my trek. I had said to him as I stirred my coffee:
‘Actually, I’ve been wondering about something recently.’
‘Yes?’ he answered encouragingly, but I thought I saw a small cloud cross his eyes – I think he had already seen me for what I am, a parish-pump dilettante, a jobbing scholar with a penchant for dabbling and teasing intelligent people as a flea teases a tiger.
‘Yes,’ I consolidated, ‘I suppose I’ve been speculating a
s to why, exactly, I find Wales so lovely. I’ve asked a few people, and I would like your views, as a man from foreign climes. I wonder, do we love nature, the natural world, mountains and meadows and seas and lakes and suchlike because we have to? After all, if we didn’t, life would be intolerable – what I’m trying to say is, are we genetically programmed to like the natural world, since we would walk about in constant pain if we didn’t?’
‘Get your drift,’ answered Williams. ‘Me, I’ve always put it down to the romantics – you know, Wordsworth, Shelley and all that lot waxing lyrical about it all. Seems tame now but it was a big thing at the time, people hadn’t noticed how lovely the world was because they were so used to it and so busy scrabbling to get food and keep death at bay, they never thought about it. They hadn’t seen towns and cities either, most of them, so they didn’t have any comparison – they didn’t see what a mess man can make of things.’
He looked at me, wondering if I’d finished.
‘Also,’ I hazarded, ‘there’s a possibility we’ve grown to like what’s around us gradually, as part of our evolution.’
Williams sat back in his seat and harrumphed.
‘Where do you get these ideas,’ he asked (almost reproachfully?).
‘Oh books, TV, you know, that sort of thing,’ I told him. ‘Gave up work a while ago, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands...’
He had gone back to his own world, and the curtain had come down on this line of thought. But my own mind had wandered off on another trail. I thought of the Japanese people who go on an annual thousand-mile pilgrimage around the island of Shikoku, birthplace of one of the big names in Buddhism. During this trip they visit 88 temples; I thought of the little churches of Wales, dotted around the land, in villages and in fields, on shores and on hillsides. I would visit them too, not for their Christian message, but for their repose and their timeless, tranquil Welshness.