Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  A short time after the death of Henry I, King of the English, it happened that Richard de Clare, a nobleman of high birth... passed this way on a journey from England to Wales. He was accompanied by a large force of men-at-arms led by Brian de Wallingford, then overlord of this area, who was acting as his guide through the pass. When they reached the entrance to the wood, Richard de Clare sent back Brian and his men, and rode unarmed into the forest, although this was much against Brian’s wishes and, indeed, against his express advice. Richard was foolish enough to imagine that the trackway was safe. Ahead of him went a singer to announce his coming and a fiddler who accompanied the singer on his instrument. From then onwards things happened very quickly. The Welsh had prepared an ambush for Richard. All of a sudden Iorwerth, the brother of Morgan of Caerleon, and others of their family, rushed out from where they were hidden in the thickets, cut down Richard de Clare and most of his men, and made off with their baggage which they had seized in this savage way. Just how ill-advised and foolhardy it is to be so presumptuous is made only too obvious by disasters of this sort. We learn to be careful about the future and to exercise caution even when all seems to be going well. To rush on regardless is simply false bravado. It is at once rash and inconsiderate to take no heed at all of the advice given by those who are trying to help us.

  The buzzard on the cliffs harried me for well over a mile. I have a favourite walking pullover which was purple once. Now it is old and washed out, with a hole where I snagged it on the barbed wire at Pickhill Hall. I knotted it about my head like a babushka and tried to keep an eye on my attacker, but he raided from behind every time and frightened me damn near to death with his great swoops and menacing wing sounds. My heart was ticking madly by the time he eased off and let me go.

  I saw other lone flyers: a yellow-hammer on Anglesey, flashing absurdly through the trees; a greater spotted woodpecker on the banks of the Dee; and I heard green woodpeckers on the Dyke – how glad I was to greet the yaffle, which has seemingly vanished from my home territory.

  And the footsteps I have followed!

  Famous and feeble, ancient and modern. I have a picture of footprints made by three walkers in the Usk estuary over 6,500 years ago, still perfectly preserved in the ossified mud. I will ask you to do a little experiment now. Get up and take a step. Did you step out with your left or your right? Bet you’ve never thought about it, though you’ve taken countless steps. Me, I’m a left footer usually. There’s a left-leaning in walking. Walkers naturally drift to the left when they’re covering long distances. Many of the great left-leaning thinkers, radicals and libertarians of history, have been big walkers. The left hand path is said to be solitary, individualistic, personal. It can also lead to danger, and some people associate it with Satanism. Mr Vogel was said to be a little leftie. Bless him. I will teach him all about politics when I find him; I will invite him to my parliament of crows on St Anns Head to show him the tankers entering and leaving Milford Haven. I will invite him to stop one, or to influence its passage in any way. Observe, I shall say, how ships come in and ships go out, day by day, plying rich black money from one deep pocket to another. Observe, I shall say, that neither the ships nor the money nor this deep sound, the second best natural harbour in the world, belong to the nation of Wales. That will be enough political knowledge for poor fuddled Mr Vogel.

  Stop press... News just in from Dr Williams in Tasmania. He’s very, very excited: an expedition led by one of his academic friends may have found the long-lost Thylacine, the Tasmanian Devil, which was hunted to extinction by farmers – the last known specimen, Benjamin, died in Beaumaris Zoo near Hobart in 1936, though there have been many unverified sightings since – is this going to be the greatest comeback since the resurrection of the Great Auk in the Vogel Papers? A search party has stumbled across a lair with two live cubs deep in the Tasmanian forest. ‘Hold on to this news,’ he says in an e-mail. ‘The world’s not ready – media would be down here like a pack in their infernal helicopters. Will confirm the news when it’s appropriate.’ I’m delighted for him – it’s not every day an extinct species is rediscovered!

  I must summon one last emissary to conduct my affairs in another land, for as you know, I cannot leave Wales (I will try to tell you why later, if I have time).

  We must seek out those children mentioned in the Vogel Papers, and in the Bo Peep letters – in tracing them we will most certainly find that cunning old fox Mr Vogel, who has taken us on a loping trail across the wilds in an attempt to lose us, only to lead us straight back to the henhouse.

  Somehow I must get my talons on the hospital records, and I have an excellent candidate to do my nosing around. His name is Waldo, and he’s a little worm.

  There’s a word for the microscopic deposits left by burrowing insects after they’ve carved their neat little tunnels through your best furniture – frass.

  And this little corner of Wales is covered in Waldo’s frass.

  Waldo is a small pot-bellied Welshman, a builder with a battered van, and he has an enormous dog which is exactly the same size as him. I don’t know what breed it is – something to do with Ireland and bogs and hunting. Both of them have equal amounts of fur and mud stuck to them, with the exception that Waldo’s pelt ends in a furry line around his neck, like that part of a lawn which is next in line to be cut. Waldo is lively, animated and talkative, and he can listen to three conversations going on at the same time in different parts of the room. Despite his Neanderthal appearance he is a walking encyclopaedia and a huge repository of local gossip. Talking of Neanderthals, Waldo is convinced that he’s a throwback, and indeed, there is evidence that Homo sapiens and Neanderthal Man did have a little fling. Neanderthals were given a bad press, says Waldo. A longer gestation period and a slightly smaller pelvic girdle was all that held them back. Waldo is aware of my interest in the pale land of watersheds and crossovers.

  ‘Them Neanderthals were just like us Welsh, just a bit different, but it was enough to get them rubbed out. Life is just a matter of rubbing out everything that’s smaller and different,’ he said once.

  As I said, Waldo is a builder, but he’s interested in everything, and he has more information crammed into that seedy little brain of his than the British Library and the World Wide Web put together. Mostly he puts it to bad use, because Waldo is a naughty man. His mind is muckier than his beat-up Wellingtons and his moral fibre is tattier than his overalls. Waldo has never been ‘official’ – he doesn’t have a National Insurance number and he’s not on the electoral roll.

  That’s the way he likes it. He used to work in the quarry on a cash-in-hand basis until the manager wanted him on the books. Waldo is strictly off the record. He and Paddy the Pisshead – already mentioned – are major chums, and they’ve worked together since time began. One of those odd friendships, but it’s lasted.

  As I pondered how to broach the subject one evening he happened by, in that serendipitous way of his, whistling the Welsh song Myfanwy by way of recognition as he walked under my window The usual obsequies over, and my face slavered on by his hound, we got down to business.

  ‘Waldo, my old friend...’

  ‘Uh-ho. So we’re looking for a favour are we.’

  Waldo had espied my intentions immediately and sat there grinning inanely with a face like a big cheesy moon. His weathered mien glowed like peat burning on a fire and his eyes puddled into two black holes ready to suck in any matter which I or the universe could blow in his direction.

  ‘I wondered if you might possibly...’

  ‘Spit it out, don’t bugger about.’

  A thrush lingered and sang, briefly, of great sadness, in the branches of the sycamore outside.

  ‘I want you to take part in a little deception for me.’

  ‘Good.’ He rubbed his hands and adjusted himself so that he lay back in his seat with his legs straight out in front of him, with his chin on his chest and his hands clasped on his huge beery stomach, as if in prayer. He close
d his eyes.

  ‘I need to gain access to all the records of the hospital at Gobowen in Shropshire and I need you to find out some information for me.’

  ‘Righty-ho. Is that all?’ He seemed vaguely disappointed.

  ‘It’s important to me. I want you to do some ferreting about for me. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Righty-ho.’

  Waldo fussed his dog and waited for more, but I let the silence linger and we listened to the thrush’s wavering little solo outside, like a choirboy attempting the Piet Iesu for the first time.

  ‘I’ve prepared the ground for you,’ I continued placidly. ‘I have gained an alias for you to smooth your way. Your name will be John Parker.’

  Waldo looked unimpressed.

  ‘It’s been used before, in the Vogel Papers.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but it’s quite authentic.’

  I gestured to a black and white postcard on the mantelpiece, next to my teddy bears. It was creased and had a large cross in biro over one of the buildings in a large complex.

  ‘That’s Gobowen Hospital about fifty years ago. You’ll see a large chimney just off centre – that’s the laundry. If you follow the road alongside it you’ll come to the playing fields. Along the border of the field you’ll see a set of wards, one of them with a cross on it. That’s Ward 2 – the old children’s ward. It’s the staff social club now. You’ll pretend that you were a patient there in the late ’50s. That will be your angle. A few years ago a Japanese specialist who was conducting a major survey into Perthes’ Disease invited surviving ex-patients to Gobowen where they were X-rayed to evaluate their medical progress and to gauge the success of their treatment. The Japanese consultant, a deceptively young, handsome man of somewhat larger proportions than the average Oriental, had poor English but you gleaned the information that you had suffered from a mild form of the disease and that your hip bone had held up well to forty years of wear and tear.’

  ‘Righty-ho. I’ve got that. Can you tell me something about myself?’

  ‘Indeed so. Perthes’ Disease attacked the ball and socket joint in your left hip, so your first symptom was a slight limp when you were five years old. This worsened until your parents decided to take action. However, they were not convinced that your limp was genuine; for some reason they thought you might be shamming to gain sympathy, so they devised a little test for you.’

  ‘Good God man, that’s a strange story. Why would they think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anyway, this is the test they devised. One day, when you returned from school, they suggested that you join them in a ball game. You all stood in a triangle in the yard outside your home, tossing the ball to each another. Then, deliberately, your father threw the ball beyond you. They figured that if you still limped while running after the ball your affliction was genuine. You did limp. They took you to a doctor. Very soon afterwards you were taken from your home and sent to the hospital at Gobowen. They had to import a nurse from Wales because you couldn’t speak any English: you became very attached to her. She had long brown hair, dark eyes, and you loved her. You don’t remember her name. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it. But have you made this up? Will it convince them?’

  ‘Trust me. It’s all true. You’re merely taking the place of someone who really did experience all this. OK?’

  ‘OK – though I’ve about as much chance of carrying it off as those two up there.’

  He nodded towards the two teddies on the fireplace. Both had been found on my great trek – one on the beach at Newborough in Anglesey, one-eyed, one-eared, sunbleached and coming apart at the seams; the other – filthy and covered in oil – I’d found in the roadside grass at Pentrefelin near Criccieth. I had mended them, put them in the washing machine, and watched their little faces coming in and out of the suds like slightly alarmed children on an out-of-control funfair ride. They had become talismans and took pride of place among the ephemera which I had brought back: a giant yellow tooth which I told everyone was a woolly mammoth’s; a Dutch ship-to-shore fax message matted with fine emerald-green seaweed, now framed in my lounge; lustrous metal fragments from Burry Port, inexplicably light and silvery-blue, as if they had dropped from a spaceship; beautiful birds’ feathers, mainly pheasants’; a plank from a shipwreck, with two white crosses painted on a faded blue background.

  ‘Dya know something,’ said Waldo reflectively in the gathering gloom. The thrush had ended its solo and now a blackbird was jabbing the air with its alarm call.

  ‘Your walk around Wales is all about comparisons. I think artists call it chiaroscuro – the interplay between light and shade, which creates a sense of drama. Is that what you’re trying to do – create a bit of drama in your dull little life by playing with darkness and light, like a child with a torch?’

  ‘You may have something. I’ve never thought about it much.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Plato’s myth of the cave?’

  ‘No. Should I have?’

  ‘Not really. It’s a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, and it’s about a cave in which a group of humans are kept chained by the neck and the legs. They have been there since childhood, so they have never seen the outside world. All they have seen is shadows – the shadows of men and objects, on the wall of their cave.

  ‘One of them is liberated and shown the real world. He is blinded by the glare, and is distressed. Eventually the shadows he saw previously turn into reality and he is enlightened. Feeling pity for his cavebound comrades in the grotto, he returns to tell them the truth. But when he gets there he can no longer see the shadows as well as his comrades do, because his eyes have become accustomed to the light. And because he is perceived as being blind he is ridiculed – they say he went and came back without his eyes.’

  Waldo ruminated for a few seconds, then continued.

  ‘Do you remember that bit in the Vogel Papers when the author says he no longer feels he belongs to the land and the people of his childhood, because he has left them and has become estranged, whilst he will never be accepted in his new home either?’

  He went through the Vogel story, which had used the word déclassé. It’s a state of limbo, and although those in limbo are spared the eternal suffering of Hell they are also debarred from Heaven.

  ‘Is your perverse interest in cripples also related to this state of peripheral existence?’ he asked.

  I was struck by his words and fell silent. I sat there and let my mind grapple with Waldo’s outburst. He was a very perceptive man, but I wasn’t used to this directness.

  ‘Yes,’ I fumbled, ‘I think you may be on the right track. It’s true, I am somewhat engrossed in the condition of those who aren’t mainstream, who aren’t typical members of society, if there are such things.’

  ‘Could this do with you being Welsh?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘We’re not that small a minority – there are nearly three million of us,’ he replied.

  ‘I realise that. I’m more concerned about the half a million or so who speak Welsh, not that the rest are any less Welsh of course. It’s just that there’s a poignancy about the language and its fate.’

  ‘Any idea how many languages there are in the world?’

  ‘Wow – now you’re asking. Five hundred? A thousand?

  ‘You’re way off. About six and a half thousand.’

  ‘My God – as many as that.’

  He told me the statistics. Half the languages on Earth – over three thousand – have less than ten thousand speakers each. They really are small. They make the Welsh language seem prosperous. And 28 per cent of all languages are spoken by fewer than a thousand. Yes – more than a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than a thousand speakers apiece.

  ‘Puts things in perspective for you,’ said Waldo. ‘So we’re not such a washed up bunch after all.’

  ‘Yes, but you know what I’m driving at. No matter how optimistic we try to feel, we all sense that tide o
f uniformity washing over us. How many major languages are there?’

  ‘It’s true – a few major languages are making huge gains, especially English. Ten major languages account for half the world’s population. And the big boys are gaining all the time.’

  I knew the major causes – urbanisation, westernisation, global communications and marketing, population movement and discrimination. Most languages are facing extinction and linguists say that over half the world’s languages are moribund and will not be passed on. We and our children are living at a point in the history of the world when the majority of languages will vanish within two generations. Imagine all that history and experience down the drain, all those nuances lost, all that diversity and difference, everything which has made the world interesting, attractive. We’re looking at a one-stop shop peopled by identikit humans grazing on a McDonalds/Coca Cola axis in identical high streets and supermalls, with not a whit of difference between Bangor and Bangalore, Cardiff and Korea. Doesn’t that really mess your head up? Doesn’t that make you want to weep for all those languages which will be eradicated by men in suits who are as indifferent to our collective fate as the raiding, looting, raping, murdering armies of the past?

  It was almost dark in the room. We looked into the fire, and I remembered my childhood, when looking for shapes in the embers was a major pastime. This was before television, before domestic electricity. How naive we were.

  Tornelaian Finnish, Asturian, Aragonese, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Occitan, Romany, Sami, Mirandese, Frisian, Low Saxon, Ladin, Sardinian, Luxembourgish, Aromanian, Vlach, Pomaki... these were just a few of the languages which would disappear. And that was just in Europe.

  ‘Enough, enough!’ I said with a slight laugh. ‘Indeed. We all know what the situation is.’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ said Waldo, ‘there are dozens of dialects and ways of life which have disappeared from Wales without our knowing, and we’re none the wiser. Perhaps, after we’ve reached a mono-state with one world language, one culture and one colour, we will explode into a zillion fragments again, a human equivalent of the Big Bang – perhaps that’s the essential pulse of the universe. One thing’s sure. We won’t be here to see it.’