by Lloyd Jones
On my walk up the bluff I have found a muddy postcard with an unfinished message. It has a picture of the very spot where I’m standing, so I have a little déjà vu in my hand. It has an address; I put it in my rucksack, dry it our later, and send it on to ‘Dear Grandad’ who lives on a farm near Uttoxeter; I get a charming thank-you letter. I really like that. I meet all sorts of people on these walks, from all over the world. Because we are in transit we can be bolder, more open with each other; little secrets and traits are shared in the knowledge that our divulgences will fade with every step we take away from one another. Perhaps it’s better to know people briefly. We can take in a lot very quickly, and imagine the rest. These meetings are quick cocaine hits; sometimes it’s better not to know all those deadweight details which sag the soul.
Talking of which, I have a little confession to make. You may find this amusing, given my strident remarks about not wanting romance in my life, but (don’t tell anyone else, for God’s sake) I seem to have, well, met someone that struck me as being (I mustn’t use that word nice) – attractive. No, that’s not right... striking?
She has a winsome smile, yes, a special way of looking at you...
We were in a graveyard. Pretty original place to fall in love, don’t you think?
This little love story starts on the Dyke near Kington, when I met a Scottish academic and his American wife (I met more Americans on the Dyke than Welsh people). These two were animated, flowing, pulsing with life on a warm morning sent by indulgent, drunken gods; they described their day, and urged me to visit a nearby church, where I could make myself a drink, since there were tea-making facilities there. As they parted the woman said:
‘There’s an American couple somewhere behind us – from San Francisco – we met them in our B&B last night; if you meet them tell them about the church.’
‘Of course,’ I said, waving goodbye.
I reached the church, St Mary’s, in a dip, nestling in a tiny hamlet called Newchurch. The graveyard contains the resting place of Emmeline, who died at the age of 14 – she was the daughter of the vicar there in the 1870s. There is nothing remarkable about that, since Welsh churchyards tell a terrible story of child mortality, but Emmeline was immortalised by Kilvert in his famous diaries, with the words:
The mountain was full of the memories of sweet Emmeline Vaughan.
Francis Kilvert was a curate at Clyro in Radnorshire and later vicar of Bredwardine, both near this little grave. Most of his diaries were burnt by a relative who was scandalised by his rather fulsome reflections on the female form. What remains gives us a lively picture of rural life in Victorian Wales; he has a lovely way of depicting the world, and daily events, the tragedies and joys around him.
As I knelt, looking at the inscription on the gravestone, I heard low voices and I swivelled round. I saw a couple talking by the porch, and as the man spoke I heard him call his partner Emmeline. Surely not. I must have misheard, I decided.
He went into the church, and she walked towards me down the path. She was beautiful.
I hesitated and faltered, but managed to say to her: ‘Emmeline – did your husband call you Emmeline?’
‘Yes,’ she replied softly.
‘That’s a most unusual name, isn’t it – and what a strange coincidence,’ I bumbled, looking down, because I had just been kneeling at the grave of another Emmeline. I looked from her face to the grave, and back again. I was amazed, and smitten.
My mind raced, now, not to her bedchamber but to the Great Wall of China, and the story of two very unusual artists. The man, from East Germany, was called just Ulay, and the woman, from Yugoslavia, was called Marina Abramovic. They had done a lot of work together: in one of their projects they went to live in the Australian outback in an attempt to fraternise with the aborigines, who ignored them (but relationships improved after the couple practised ‘immobility, silence and watchfulness’ for hours in the scorching desert). Their speciality was physical contact, especially bumping into each other.
During the height of their collaboration they decided to walk towards each other from either end of the 4,000-kilometer Great Wall of China, so that they could literally and metaphorically bump into each other half way along, but by the time they got clearance from the Chinese authorities their relationship had ended. They decided, however, to go ahead with their project. In 1988 they started walking towards each other, from either end of the wall, nearly 2,500 miles apart. When they met again, towards the mid-part of the wall, they embraced and went their separate ways. Now that’s what I call a classy farewell.
The Emmeline standing before me turned out to be the American woman I was supposed to look out for. Her husband was making tea in the church. He was much smaller than her and looked and acted like Paul Simon. I took a picture of them on a balcony at the end of the nave, and told them about my walk round Wales. The husband drifted off to look at Emmeline’s grave, leaving the two of us to talk in the cool of the pews.
‘Did you know there was an Emmeline buried here?’ I asked her.
‘No idea at all,’ she answered. ‘It’s a very odd feeling.’
‘Very remarkable coincidence,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but life seems to be one big twist of fate,’ adding: ‘I wonder who puts the flowers on Emmeline’s grave?’ There were three posies dotted around the cross.
‘Don’t know,’ I said, ‘but one thing occurred to me – the flowers aren’t put there in memory of Emmeline, are they?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘The flowers are put there to perpetuate a myth, aren’t they,’ I said. ‘No-one actually cares about Emmeline any longer – but they care about the story. Isn’t that how myths are made?’
She was intrigued by this, and we had a close conversation. I talked about Wales, and I talked about Mr Vogel. I hadn’t noticed, but by the time I finished his story she was almost crying. Yes, I could see that her eyes were misty. She had been moved by the Vogel story. I was amazed – and very apologetic.
‘No, no,’ she said to me, laughing off her tears, ‘it’s a really lovely story. Do you think you will find him?’
‘I really think he must be dead by now. But I would like to know what happened to him.’
‘Me also,’ she said. ‘Will you keep me informed? I really would like to know. Perhaps I can help in some way?’
I thanked her.
‘I like your hair by the way,’ she said in passing, ‘my brother has red hair. I’ve always liked people with red hair. Do you know why redheads are given such a hard time, especially at school?’
‘No idea.’
‘It’s because of Judas Iscariot. He was supposed to have red hair. So people with a ginger mop have been shunned ever since. Ridiculous isn’t it? People are so awful – anything out of the norm and they gang up. Something to do with the herd, normality and all that.’
We sat in silence, listening to the sound of a tractor climbing down a hill towards the church, bringing with it a waft of new-mown hay. She held my hand as we walked out into the blinding sunshine.
‘You look after yourself,’ she said. ‘Don’t go too close to those sea cliffs in Pembrokeshire – I’ve read about them, they sound really dangerous.’
She squeezed my hand and then let go as we approached her husband, who was kneeling by the cross. He looked at us strangely.
‘I really would like your address,’ she said to me.
‘Why?’ asked the Simon thing.
‘So we can send him a picture of us on the balcony,’ she replied blithely. We swapped addresses and e-mails. I was loathe to leave her, and circled the two of them, pretending to look at the graves all around. She kept an eye on me, discreetly. I knew she liked me.
My body was doing funny things to me – injecting me with strange drugs and messing about with my insides. This must be what being drunk feels like. The gypsies go to certain places for erotic love, to other places for procreation. With Emmeline I wa
nted both sorts of love, immediately, in a buttercupped corner of that graveyard.
I will take you on this walk from Hay Bluff, along the Black Darren, with the Black Mountains on my right and the Black Hill on my left; sounds very black indeed, but the day has blossomed into a riotously colourful cavalcade. I peek into the deep cleft of the Vale of Ewyas on my right hand, with its many buildings devoted to God, including the gaunt remains of Llanthony Priory. This valley has pulled at many men’s souls, like a spiritual magnet. Walter Landor Savage, named in the Vogel Papers, lived here for a while, as did Eric Gill the sculptor and typographer; if you’re into incest and depravity you should read about the antics of his strange little coven at Capel-y-Ffin.
On my left is a vast panorama, almost too much for the eye to cope with. The Olchon Valley, immediately below me on my left, and the Golden Valley beyond would take months to appreciate fully; it’s all beyond comprehension, so I set off at a jaunty pace, feeling pretty damn good thank you very much, and I hope you’re happy too. We’re walking on a broad saddle of peaty moor with a pavement of stones put down to protect the Darren from erosion.
I’m wearing my black Hi-Tec Ascent boots which cost me £50; they’re the first pair of boots I’ve ever felt affection for, which is probably a bit sad. I’m also wearing weathered black cords, my favourite purple pullover, and a frayed old jacket with some sort of check pattern which has long since faded into obscurity. My red frizzly mop is unhindered, since I don’t wear a silly hat or have any of the other marks of a pilgrim, viz scallop shell, palm leaf, speedwell, cross, staff, badge or relic pinned to my tunic. I have my light rucksack with lightweight sleeping bag, nylon mac, medicine, two small bottles of Coke, sandwiches, chocolate, two candles, lighter, OS Landranger map 161, and a copy of Watson’s The Life of Sir Robert Jones, which is the only non-essential item I carry today. I walk in a dream state all morning, passing no-one, since Dyke travellers all start at roughly the same time every morning and pass you in a half-hour wave, with no-one before or after them. Pilgrimage routes must be similar. For lunch I deviate off the saddle of the Darren and cut right to a col above Llanthony Priory, where I sit in the heather and eat my sandwiches contentedly like a summer cow chewing the cud in a plenitude of heat and food. I read a chapter of Watson’s book, entitled ‘The Crippled Child’.
There was little doubt, he said, that the primitive and nomadic tribes of prehistory had killed off their lame and maimed. He continued:
During the Dark and Middle Ages... to be crooked in body meant to be crooked in mind. Alternate fear and ridicule represented the medieval attitude. On the one hand, Luther advised the killing of deformed infants, and on the other it became the custom to employ dwarfs and hunchbacks as ‘jesters’ in kings’ courts and barons’ castles.
The psychological effect of ridicule, oppression, or contempt maturing over two thousand years needs no further elaboration. Right up to the nineteenth century to be crippled meant isolation and malignity. Of this dark background literature has left us a remarkable store of evidence. The centuries which separated Richard III from the Hunchback of Notre Dame or Scott’s Black Dwarf from Dickens’ Quilp show little evidence of a change in popular opinion. Even in modern fiction to be crippled is still a convenient simile for crime.
With the coming of the ‘age of sensibility’ in the 18th century humanitarianism was heard in the voices of men like Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine, Locke and Goldsmith – but although public attitudes softened, the lot of the cripple became infinitely worse.
The industrialism of the nineteenth century, firmly planted in factory and mine, commenced to produce cripples in such numbers that instead of being incongruous they were in certain districts almost universal. Those were the days... when tiny children worked fifteen hours a day before returning to hovels where nothing penetrated except gin and squalor. The mothers of these hapless little ones hauled trucks in the mines at a time when the problems of Negro slavery caused every household to glow with British rectitude. Industrialism became the most prominent contributor to the production of cripples. It was the greatest advertisement of the artificial causes of deformity – until the Great War – to be thrust upon public attention. Cripples, instead of being so rare as to cause boisterous laughter, were, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, being faster and faster manufactured by industrial conditions, slums, direct infection, and accidents.
This was the background, presumably, to Mr Vogel’s childhood. I have a vision of the young Vogel as a rather lanky youngster on two crutches fashioned by his drunken father from the branches of an ash tree. I imagine the scene: waiting for a wild and windy night to cover his sounds, the father takes a last mighty draw on the gin jar, then stumbles out into the darkness with his axe. He creeps through the outskirts of Manchester with a black scarf wrapped around his face, then dives into a wood, finds a young tree, and hews two branches with Y-shaped clefts which can be moulded to fit the youngster’s armpits. The branches are stripped and carried away in the dead of night, back to the hovel where the family sleeps. The ‘slattern’ mother awaits in the kitchen for her husband’s return. By morning there are two crudely-formed crutches awaiting the boy. He grovels with gratitude. He has also been given a violin. It is old, made of dark rosewood, and it has an unusual scroll, carved like a lion’s head. He peers into the soundboard and wonders at the mysteries inside which create this sonorous, expressive, disturbing sound. He knows of the blind musicians. There is a blind Irishman who plays Kerry fiddle tunes and O’Carolan’s planxties in a pub on the corner. The crippled and the blind, unable to do very much else, learn instruments and play music for a few pence. Now he learns to fiddle whilst leaning on a crutch. He plays with plenty of vibrato, to make people feel sentimental.
The crippled child was regarded as a hopeless case with a right to indolence and ignorance. To be a cripple meant in town house and country cottage generation after generation of weaklings growing up with no use either of brains or limbs.
Parents preferring to believe in the hopelessness of treatment were not discouraged by the medical services and general practitioners.
One doctor wrote at the time that children were often operated on needlessly, saying:
On examining the removed joint – and then contemplating the beauty of the child thus mutilated, one wondered and wondered.
Rickets and tuberculosis maimed countless little lives. Agnes Hunt describes the plight of the child cripple in this moving excerpt:
In 1900, England had no realisation of the magnitude of her crippled population, nor yet of its crying need. Some of the towns had cripples’ guilds... these societies gave treats to the crippled children, and paid for convalescent treatment. Much money was also expended on splints. Unfortunately, as there was no-one to supervise the application of these appliances, they were seldom worn, though much admired and greatly prized by the parents. I have seen children with tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, with osteomyelitis, and many other crippling diseases, go into hospital, and return to their wretched homes no better, or, perhaps, with arm or leg amputated. No proper treatment, no aftercare, and no hope for the future, except the gloomy portals of the workhouse – a burden to their loved ones, wretched and utterly helpless, alternatively spoilt and smacked by their people, and systematically cold-shouldered by a world which had no room, and little sympathy, for the physically disabled.
I looked down at the plain below me, and imagined it thronged with all those who had walked across it; the prehistoric tribes, the hunters, gatherers, marauding hordes, invaders, plunderers, mendicant monks, Lombards, friars, farmers, drovers, pilgrims, all pursuing their individual paths, all swirling in a medley of life, movement and hope.
In the white cottages at my feet, and beyond, in the smoke-gutted cities, there had lain children, some of them loved and pitied, most of them as unwanted as lepers, existing as a grim counterpoint to human hope and aspiration. I shuddered at my own good fortune to be treading this land. I am am
ong the first men free to do so on a daily basis. Not a single generation since primitive man has been as free as mine to walk here, mainly because the first and only priority in life, for the mass of humanity, has been to stay alive. Walking for fun is a modern phenomenon.
The afternoon is dwindling as I come off Hatterrall Hill into Pandy, and the mountains above Abergavenny – Sugar Loaf and Blorenge – fade into a soft grey evening haze. Pandy looks boring so I walk the extra few miles to Llangattock Lingoed, where I find a bed in the old vicarage. It’s old, big-roomed and comfortable in a classy way. I feel mellow after a bite and head for the village pub, where I am welcomed by the locals. I had expected Monmouthshire people to be English-flavoured; I am surprised to find that they look and sound like one of us, and the ground feels as Welsh as any soil I have trod.
Back at the old vicarage I phone my friend Paddy, who keeps an eye on my mail whilst I’m away. He also looks at my e-mails. He’s not Irish; he’s a Somerset man, and retains the soft old drawl; any explanation of his nickname has long since been forgotten. He saved my life once. He’s one of those unshaven builders with dirty vests and sunburnt necks and fags hanging out of their mouths. Tonight he’s drunk. By the way, please excuse his language, it really is appalling and frankly it mortifies me to write it down (the Welsh are new to swearing), but I have to tell you the story as it happened.
‘Hia Paddy. You OK?’
‘As fine as can be, yaroo, can you hear the whoosh in me storm drains, the hour’s systolic me old peculiar. I can hear it, the blood’s black and cold tonight and there’s a dead fly in me corned beef sandwich.’
This is typical Paddy jibberish.
‘Finnegan’s awake in the larder, four eyes, and your girlfriend wants a word with you. Looks stunning. She’s wagging her tail, wants to know how Mr Ulysses is getting on.’
It’s a Paddy joke. His dog gives me a welcome whenever I return to the north. Paddy says I’m like Ulysses returning to Ithaca after the Trojan War.