Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  Later, as I tried to sleep, city noises swished and beeped below me well into the night, and I’m not used to it. I had taken a book with me, as usual, and with my customary serendipity I came across an apt piece by Alexander Herzen, a Russian philosopher who lived in London for a while, where his home became a meeting-place for émigrés of all nationalities. He wrote, in mid-Victorian times:

  Ten years ago, as I was going through the Haymarket late one cold, raw winter evening, I came upon a Negro, a lad of seventeen; he was barefooted and without a shirt, and on the whole rather undressed for the tropics than dressed for London. Shivering all over, with his teeth chattering, he asked me for alms. Two days later I met him again, and then again and again. Eventually I got into conversation with him. He spoke a broken Anglo-Spanish, but it was not hard to understand the sense of his words.

  ‘You are young and strong,’ I said to him, why don’t you look for work?’

  ‘No one will give it to me.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I know no-one who would give me a character.’

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘From a ship.’

  ‘What ship?’

  ‘A Spanish one; the captain beat me a lot, so I left.’

  ‘What were you doing on board the ship?’

  ‘Everything: brushed the clothes, washed up, did the cabins.’

  ‘What do you mean to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you will die of cold and hunger, you know, or anyhow you will certainly get a fever.’

  ‘What am I to do?’ said the Negro in despair, looking at me and shivering all over with cold.

  Well, I thought, here goes. It is not the first stupid thing I have done in my life.

  ‘Come with me. I’ll give you clothes and a corner to sleep in; you shall sweep my rooms, light the fires and stay as long as you like, if you behave quietly and properly...’

  The Negro jumped for joy.

  Within a week he was fatter, and gaily did the work of four. In this way he spent six months with us; then one evening he appeared before my door, stood a little while in silence and then said to me: ‘I have come to say goodbye.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It’s enough for now: I am going.’

  ‘Has anyone been nasty to you?’

  ‘No indeed, I am pleased with everyone.’

  ‘Then where are you going?’

  ‘To a ship.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I am dreadfully sick for it, I can’t stand it, I shall do a mischief if I stay. I need the sea. I will go away and come back again, but for now it is enough.’

  I made an effort to stop him; he stayed for three days, and then announced for the second time it was beyond his powers, that he must go away, that ‘for now is enough’.

  That was in the spring. In the autumn he turned up once more, tropically divested, and again I clothed him; but he soon began playing various nasty tricks, and even threatened to kill me, so I was obliged to turn him away.

  These last facts are irrelevant, but the point is that I completely share the Negro’s outlook. After living a long time in one place and in the same rut, I feel that for a certain time it is enough, that I must refresh myself with other horizons and other faces... and at the same time must retire into myself, strange as that sounds. The superficial distractions of the journey do not interfere.

  There are people who prefer to go inwardly, some with the help of a powerful imagination and an ability to abstract themselves from their surroundings (for this a special endowment is needed, bordering on genius and insanity), some with the help of opium or alcohol. Russians, for instance, will have a drinking bout for a week or two, and then go back to their homes and duties. I prefer shifting my whole body to shifting my brain, and going round the world to letting my head go round.

  I lay in bed, listening. Little did I know that some months later I was to approach Cardiff on the shore, along the lip of the Severn. It was a day to remember, warm and happy: a day when the world left me completely alone. The muddy banks of the great estuary, all along the flatlands, lay like the huge grey gums of a dead dinosaur, mouth agape. In a moment of madness I took my boots off and attempted to cross part of Cardiff Flats in the mud, which pulled at my feet like a drunken parent sucking a baby’s toes, warm and slobbery. I slithered to the oozing ravine of the River Rhymney and nearly drowned in mud, emerging like a grey, naked Druid about to shriek at the Roman soldiers as they prepared to cross over to Anglesey nearly 2000 years earlier. Fortunately, the only people who saw me were workmen sealing off the gigantic municipal tip nearby; after cleaning up I encountered one of them as he drove a huge yellow tipper past me. I got the village idiot treatment – he was a specialist in withering, pitying looks.

  But that was all in the future...

  THE SHIPWRECKED BOYS

  I STILL get a bit excited when I open my drawerful of research papers and find the document given to me by Dr Williams in that Cardiff hotel. To put it simply, I had struck gold straight away. I hadn’t endured months or years of blind alleys and red herrings like a character in a novel: I had got what I wanted immediately.

  His document was a straightforward photocopy of a 1981 transaction by the Anglesey Antiquarian Society entitled The Bone-Setters of Anglesey.

  By the time I reached the foot of the first page I realised why the venerable doctor had underscored a line heavily and written NB in the margin. This is a précis of the story, put together from all the sources I could find:

  One day at the beginning of the 1700s a man called Dannie Lukie, a smuggler living in the north west of Anglesey between Cemaes and Holyhead, spotted a raft floating out to sea. It was a ‘dark and stormy night’ and by the time he got to it the raft was ‘already sinking’.

  On the raft there were two small boys. They spoke neither Welsh nor English. Most accounts say the boys were twins, of a Mediterranean appearance. One version says they were both naked.

  It has been postulated that they were Spanish, or Manx – or Scottish, since this was a time of great Jacobite unrest. The Spanish theory has the most followers.

  One researcher contacted the Spanish Embassy in London and discovered that there was a history of bone-setting in Spain’s Celtic regions – Galicia, Asturias and the Celtic-Iberian part of Castile. But we will never know the boys’ nationality nor the circumstances which led to their arrival off Anglesey’s shores, terrified and traumatised on a few planks lashed with hemp rope. It seems likely that their desperate parents had tried to save them as their ship foundered.

  The boys were rescued and brought ashore. One version says they were split between two families to ease the burden of sustaining them. Another story says that one boy died soon after his rescue. But one boy lived. His name was Evan, and he took on the surname of his surrogate family, which was Thomas.

  Soon, Evan showed an ‘amazing gift’. Starting with birds and animals, he demonstrated a marvellous ability to heal broken bones. This was well before orthopaedics became a medical science, and at a time when broken bones usually led to death or a permanent malformation. As he grew older he also grew in ability and reputation. In Cambria Depicta, Edward Pugh wrote:

  In this part of the island [Holyhead] I heard much of the worth and extraordinary abilities of Evan Thomas, the self-taught bonesetter... he seems to have acquired a most consummate knowledge of Osteology; for cases, desperate in the extreme, have been treated by him with expedition and success. His reputation has not only spread through his native country, but has made its way into England, where some unfortunate sufferers have happily experienced his superlative skill.

  This very day... I have been informed that a messenger arrived at his house from Shropshire, with a tender for £300.00 for his immediate attendance, which he has accepted. I find he has no other tongue than the legitimate language of his country.

  So this ‘Spanish’ boy had become a monoglot Welshman. His med
ical ability transcended all boundaries; no-one in pain quibbles about language, and more than one racist yob has bit his tongue when delivered to an Indian doctor in a hospital casualty department.

  Evan’s story infused my mind the following day when I travelled back northwards.

  Unexpectedly, I met Dr Williams on the platform at Cardiff Railway Station. He intended to spend a few days with distant relatives, discovered during a genealogical search of the Mormon database. I thought: how strange that this Tasmanian, chromosomally and emotionally linked to Wales, had been directed to his roots via Salt Lake City, another focal point for the Welsh diaspora. We faced each other over a train table, trying hard not to play footsie in the cramped floorspace and exchanging the occasional bon mot.

  When the train stopped at Newport I had no inkling that a year later I would have strong memories of this station. On my walk around Wales I would sleep here for two nights.

  On the first night I asked a railwayman if it was OK for me to bed down there. He was gentle, humane. I thought he was nearing retirement age and he had the soft, fatalistic charm of a man who had travelled for too long on the outside of life’s carriage rather than within. He directed me to the small waiting room in the central area, saying it was warm but was closed after the last public train (freight trains thundered through all night, and the arrival of the mail train in the small hours was quite an event). He pointed to the main entrance hall and said: ‘That’s probably the warmest place in the night, though the others don’t use it much.’ He was Indian, or part-Indian, and I was struck by a strong irony: here was an Asian seemingly in charge of a station with white men sleeping on his platform; during the days of the Raj it would have been quite the opposite way in his homeland.

  There was a genuinely downtrodden Big Issue seller squatting in the connecting corridor and I pressed a pound into his hand as I passed, waving away the copy he offered me. I’ve always felt a bit uneasy about the Big Issue.

  Later, unable to sleep, and lacking anything to read, I went back to him. He looked wretched when I offered him the extra cash for his Big Issue. He stuttered an apology. It was the only copy he had, and it was months out of date. He reached into his pocket and fished out a book, saying he’d read it and didn’t want it any more. Soon afterwards he was gone. People in houses hang onto their books and their possessions – people on the road pass them on to others, so they can travel light.

  You may have noticed that railway stations have become increasingly populated by the homeless and the mentally ill and the addicted in recent years.

  Of these social ‘outcasts’ the first I met was R––––, a local boy in his late twenties, I guessed. He had a bottle of White Lightning with the label removed. He was very wary. Later in the night he arrived in the entrance hall and sat on the bench next to mine. He just stared ahead. My antennae detected that he was half a bottle up on the last time we met, but no trouble. Also in the room were two other men. One was well kitted out and said he was merely a bird of passage, not a down-and-out. He said he lived in Ireland and he did peculiar things like showing us a police ID badge. I stood off, since he seemed the most unpredictable. The other was a nice bloke who had left his wife and grown-up family that night. He was drunk but seemed sure of what he was doing in a grimly quiet way. He was dark, slender, and South Walian in a prototypical way; he had darkly political eyes and the beguiling physical pliancy of the fly-half. But now he had angina, not much money, and he didn’t know where to go. It seemed he was going to catch the first train out, no matter where it went.

  I learnt there was a coffee machine in the little taxi office alongside the station and I asked R–––– if he wanted a cuppa. He did, and when I returned with his red-hot plastic cup he flashed open his filthy jacket, revealing an inside pocket crammed with Pepperoni, which he’d obviously filched. I declined but thanked him as if he were offering me riches beyond compare, then settled down to an hour of near silence with him. He wasn’t the talking type. This was as close to company as he wanted. Maybe I saw childhood abuse in his eyes, but this was guesswork. In my experience 99 per cent of people like him – addicts and self-harmers – have been traumatised in childhood.

  I slept fitfully and left towards Chepstow, nicely timing my arrival on the outskirts of town, in the shadow of an enormous chemicals factory, as the dawn took light.

  As I walked along the Caldicot Levels that day I thought of another son of Newport, the greatest supertramp of them all, the man who coined the phrase

  What is this life if, full of care,

  We have no time to stand and stare.

  W.H. Davies – author, poet, and roamer extraordinaire. A man who lost a leg jumping trains during an early career as a hobo in the newly-shaping America, and who excited George Bernard Shaw and the literary establishment with an account of his begging exploits along the length and breadth of America. Here’s a sample from The Autobiography of a Supertramp, taken from the time he was bumming on the eastern seaboard in the late 1890s:

  I shall never forget the happy summer months I spent with Brum at the seaside. Some of the rich merchants there could not spare more than a month or six weeks from business, but, thanks be to Providence, the whole summer was at our disposal. If we grew tired of one town or, as more often the case, the town grew tired of us, we would saunter leisurely to the next one and again pitch our camp; and so on, from place to place, during the summer months. We moved freely among the visitors, who apparently held us in great respect, for they did not address us familiarly, but contented themselves with staring at a distance. We lay across their runs on the sands and their paths in the woods; we monopolised their nooks in the rocks and took possession of caves, and not a murmur heard, except from the sea, which of a certainty could not be laid to our account. No doubt detectives were in these places, but they were on the look-out for pickpockets, burglars and swindlers; and, seeing that neither the visitors nor the boarding house keepers made any complaint, these detectives did not think it worth while to arrest tramps; for there was no promotion to be had for doing so. “Ah,” I said to Brum, as we sat in a shady place, eating a large custard pudding from a boarding house, using for the purpose two self-made spoons of wood, “Ah, we would not be so pleasantly occupied as tramps in England. We would there receive tickets for soup; soup that could be taken without spoons; no pleasant picking of the teeth after eating; no sign of a pea, onion or carrot; no sign of anything except flies.”

  Two-thirds of a large custard pudding between two of us, and if there was one fault to be found with it, it was its being made with too many eggs. Even Brum was surprised at his success on this occasion. “Although,” as he said, “she being a fat lady, I expected something unusual.” Brum had a great admiration for fat women; not so much, I believe, as his particular type of beauty, but for the good natured qualities he claimed corpulence denoted. “How can you expect those skinny creatures to sympathise with another when they half starve their own bodies?” he asked. He often descanted on the excellencies of the fat, to the detriment of the thin, and I never yet heard another beggar disagree with him.

  Please excuse me, fellow traveller, for my constant diversions. You will find that our path is long and circuitous, for that is the very purpose of my journey, not to get there quickly, but to encounter as many adventures, diversions, and amusements as possible on the way.

  Already I have discovered that the author of the Vogel Papers, in trying to evoke a bustling, multifarious society, didn’t have to exaggerate at all, merely fiddle about with time. And during my walk around Wales I found that time came and went with every roll of the landscape and every shift of the wind. Sometime later, on Offa’s Dyke, I almost felt the physical presence of Offa’s Mercians as they toiled to build the four yards or so of embankment allotted to each man before he could return to his own manor in the not-yet-English part of the British midlands. How they must have hated the Welsh, looking from their secret places in their savage land.

 
; Opposite me on the train, Williams appeared to stare into his newspaper but I could tell he wasn’t reading much. I suspected he was listening to that lilt in the Abergavenny voice, as did Alexander Cordell so many years ago. It was this place which first inspired him; he had stood in the streets of Abergavenny, in the valley below Blorenge and Sugar Loaf, listening to the thrust and vitality of the people, and he had marvelled. As we pulled out of Abergavenny I looked at the peculiar shape of Ysgyryd Fawr, the hill on my right, again not realising that this upturned keel would have great poignancy for me later in my walk as I wandered through Monmouthshire, along the Offa’s Dyke Trail.

  Ysgyryd Fawr had stuck up from the ground like a giant shark’s fin behind me as I tacked through the fields of Llanvetherine and Llantilio Crossenney.

  I’d had a ‘humorous’ episode at the White Castle. I arrived there early in the morning, before it opened, so I found a weakness in the fence around it and vaulted over into the grounds. I spent a stolen half hour on my own with a few birds and a squirrel in this Norman bastion and then headed back over the fence to the main entrance, where I had slung my rucksack behind a portable toilet.

  But the woman who sold tickets had arrived, and I had to explain myself.

  ‘You been in my castle, ’aven’t you,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘No – I’ve just been for a walk round it,’ I countered.

  ‘You been in my castle, ’aven’t you,’ she said again. She felt very possessive about her castle, I could tell. Norman blood? Turned out she’d lived a lot of her life in South Africa. Bloody colonialists, I muttered under my breath.

  ‘You going to pay then?’ she asked.

  I tried another tack.

  ‘Actually, I’m a member of the Collwyn ap Tango Re-enactment Society,’ I lied. ‘We’ve been asked to do a re-enactment here. Collwyn ap Tango was a prince of Eifionnydd [this happens to be true]. I’ve been planning our demonstration.’