by Lloyd Jones
Waldo started the engine. ‘As good as done, chappie.’
‘In the bag, no problem,’ said Paddy, adding quietly: ‘Can you spare a few pennies till Friday? Spar’s open soon, and I need some medicine. I wouldn’t ask, only...’
‘Yes Paddy.’ I scrabbled around in my top pocket, realised I’d lost my lighter, jumped out and felt about on the porch floor. I found the lighter – and my money too. They’d dropped out in the night, with the dancing bear. I handed a tenner to Paddy and said: ‘Seems it’s my lucky day, and yours too. Don’t ask for any donations at your funeral. We’ve all paid in advance.’
Off they trundled, and I started off towards the glorious bay at Porth Dinllaen with its red pub, inaccessible to traffic. The pub had been built by a Dutch sailor, I seemed to remember. When I started my journey around Wales I had thought of my country as small and introverted, brooding, nostalgic, darkly recessive.
I had thought of Wales as an embryo which had become joined accidentally to England and the rest of the world like a Siamese twin; and as with all Siamese twins, the union was paradoxical – both natural and unnatural at the same time.
Like my forbears, it was easy for me to see Wales as a mother, and myself as a cell lodged in another period passing through her reproductive system, her womb. But it wasn’t like that really. Wales was an area of land which people like me became fond of through usage and association. It wasn’t ours, it most definitely didn’t belong to anyone at all.
Here was I, a Welshman by birth, passing a pub built from ballast brought by ships returning from Holland, on a particularly lovely strand which had narrowly avoided being despoiled by an English MP, who had wanted to create a great port on it; as I descended to the pub I walked through a golf course which regularly saw people of many nationalities playing a game invented by a Scotsman. No, I felt Welsh not because I had any more right to walk in this place than any of the other earth-mites around me, but because I had a huge jumble of facts and fictions about my birthplace amalgamated in my poor overheated cranium, a massive fable of stories and memories and pictures, a mosaic of small miracles and great cruelties, or great miracles and small cruelties – this is what human love is made of, give or take a few hormones. I felt a kinship with all the souls who had fought for and loved this little tile in the floor of the universe’s vast, echoing cathedral.
When I fell overboard and my little country sailed on like a beautifully crafted pinnace, its lights and music fading, I would disappear quickly like all of them, and another would take my place at the side-rail; there would be no wide sweeps and calls on the still sea to find me; but ah, what a fine voyage it would have been along the towering cliffs, terrible and beautiful like life itself.
I darted into a shop in Nefyn and got myself some victuals, then thudded along the road to Pistyll. I would break bread outside the astonishing little church there, sitting against the graveyard wall, close to Rupert Davies the actor, who once played a famous TV detective, Maigret. It’s a tiny church which still marks the Lammas feast, now a rarely-observed Christian festival celebrating St Peter’s deliverance from prison on August 1. But it has more of the appearance of a pagan festival when you open the door of this tiny little church above the sea. At Christmas, Easter and Lammas the whole building is decorated with boughs and twigs, and mosses and ferns, all suffusing the church with an intoxicating mixture of aromas, and there are flowers (for this old feast was once a harvest festival) and fragrant plants; in this fairy world of delicate green lights and subtle shades I have stood in wonderment, truly transported to another time, when lepers gathered in huts on the seaward side, and pilgrims fished in the nearby pond, now discoloured and fishless.
I sit awhile by Rupert Davies, eating. I open Esmie’s file and withdraw its contents. A robin flits onto Rupert’s headstone and regards me, his head tilted sideways.
There is a photograph. She has rounder features than the face under the Bo Peep bonnet; perhaps she is younger here, but it’s the same girl. Her haircut is farmhouse kitchen, pudding-basin plain, with one strand held sideways with a small ribbon. She has dark, glittering eyes and a cheeky little nose. Her smile is crooked and charming. There are no round specs, as yet. Her small shoulders are wrapped in a heavy cable-stitched cardigan from which the collar of her gingham blouse juts out, askew. There is no name on the back. There is a slight rust mark on the photo where the paper clip has held it onto her file. Esmie looks sweet, in an old-fashioned way. Children had a different look in their eyes then.
The first letter is from her doctor to the registrar of a hospital in Wales. I read it:
I would be grateful if you could arrange an examination for this little girl, who has had repeated tonsillitis and a more recent attack of quinsy which greatly distressed her – severe breathing difficulties.
The next letter I open is the registrar’s reply:
I have examined this girl. She shows signs of poor diet and I advise a course of vitamins and trace elements before tonsillectomy – I will arrange surgery as soon as possible.
Then there is a note, some months later, from a house doctor:
Please keep a close watch on this girl today. She complains of headaches and a sore throat. Nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. Alternatively restless and drowsy. Complains also of back pains and stiff neck, muscle tenderness.
Next, there is a consultant’s report:
I am very concerned about this little girl – she is the third to develop these symptoms on the children’s ward since we closed to admissions.
She has developed abnormal sensations and is sensitive to touch, experiences difficulty in urination, constipated with bloating of abdomen, swallowing and breathing difficulties, high fever. Positive Babinski’s reflex. Sputum and faeces tests. Close observation essential.
There is a gap of a day, then:
Poliomyelitis confirmed: paralytic, partial bulbar and respiratory. Inflammation of anterior horn seems likely, since lower limb muscles are flaccid and unresponsive.
Other cases on the ward are improving, but I fear we have permanent damage in this case. We are trying to discover the cause of the outbreak. Tests on all relevant staff.
There is a dossier of medical data, test results and indecipherable jottings, then a discharge note from the registrar:
I regret that this child, although recovered from immediate symptoms, will be permanently crippled. Please break the news to her parents.
Reading between the lines, I realise that the cause of the outbreak had been a new nurse on the ward, who’d been in contact with the disease elsewhere. She’d worked for just one shift, and had only momentary contact with Esmie, when she moved her from one cot to another. The discharge note continued:
I need not draw your attention to the sadness of this case. The girl seems generally well, and the reality of the situation has not sunk in yet. I have arranged for her to be admitted to Gobowen, where she will get specialist treatment.
I sat in the spring sunshine and watched a three-masted ketch with rusty red sails cleave the waves, struggling through the water with frequent tacks. I felt slightly nauseous, either from the greasy sausage roll I’d just eaten, or Esmie’s tragedy. Such a lot of misfortune for such a little girl, and here was I sitting in a place dedicated to a god who allowed such things to happen. Esmie, a perfectly normal little girl who had a minor problem with her tonsils, had been given a crippling disease in hospital, and to increase the irony, her infector was a nurse, and to make the whole thing black, black, black, contact between nurse and patient had been just one movement of the hands as the nurse lifted her from one cot to another. Just one tiny second on the endless plain of time had kicked Esmie’s little legs from under her.
I fastened my rucksack, said goodbye to Rupert Davies and the Robin, and set off on the road, saying farewell also to the tricorn peaks of The Rivals with their famous Iron Age settlement, Tre’r Ceiri – the township of the giants – and onwards into the day, which was settling slowly lik
e sediment along the roads (the tide was in and I couldn’t scramble along the boulder-strewn shore). Under the shadow of Gyrn Goch I went, remembering one particularly evocative spring day, unseasonably hot, when I had climbed it with a friend, young and carefree in the sheep-walks, meandering among the sedges and the sphagnum bogs, accompanied only by wheatears, pipits, larks, stonechats and ravens. We had become thirsty, like Coleridge’s ancient mariners, and we had longed for water. I had heard the faint whisper of running water under my feet, and plunging my hand through the turf, had found an underground rill of peaty but cool potability. It was on a headland not far from here along the coast that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had also travelled one hot day; his coach had broken down, and he and his companions had walked up to the higher ground, as I had done with my friend. With throats unslaked and black lips baked Coleridge’s group had searched for and found a spring, and had drank gratefully of the sweet water; the episode was transposed, later, into a passage in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth et al had rhapsodised about Wales’s sublime features, forgetting to mention in passing that they were here only as an alternative to the Grand Tour, which had been called off because the damned French were making a nuisance of themselves. And over there – that wall snaking up the mountain was quite possibly built by Irishmen who worked for their food and beer money, and slept (with their wives, who collected the stones) under stone slabs, or perhaps it was built by prisoners of war or soldiers who had returned to a destitute and jobless Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, and had been put to the task to prevent insurrection. Here, in this single vista, I have Coleridge and his fops gadding about with soldiers, blunted and dispirited, and here to join them comes Eben Fardd, who has just written one of the best odes ever to win at the National Eisteddfod, The Destruction of Jerusalem, and is on his way to his little classroom in the great church of St Beuno’s at Clynnog Fawr below us to teach his clutch of monoglot Welsh children; here comes a farmer, carrying his wife on his back to church, as was common, to keep her Sunday best clean – his dogs slink behind him (in St Beuno’s there is a pair of dog tongs to jettison unruly animals during services); here comes a seventeen-year-old youth, Edgar Christian, from Clynnog, who went in search of adventure in the wastes of Canada in 1927 and died in a log cabin with two other pioneers – his diary is a classic; and thither, in the time it takes a cloud to pass silently over us, we espy the silent war party of Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf, Llywelyn the last true prince of Wales, filing over the ridge towards Bwlch Dau Fynydd, to do battle with Llywelyn’s brothers Owain and Dafydd at Bryn Derwin, one of the defining battles of Wales; yonder, on the horizon, I can see the first yacht ever seen in Britain, the Mary – in a few minutes she will be shipwrecked on the Skerries, a jagged line of rocks off Holyhead: survivors will salvage planks from the wreck and make a fire; they will catch a sheep and roast some mutton, they will divide a small cask of whisky between them all. The 15 surviving passengers and 24 seamen will be rescued on Sunday and taken to Beaumaris...
The Mary was the first royal yacht and Charles the Second originated yacht racing in her. The jacht, a Dutch naval vessel used for fast patrols, had carried nobility around Holland’s canals in peacetime. Charles fell in love with the Mary while exiled in Holland, and brought her back with him; she became the ancestor of today’s yachts and dinghies. Her remains lie shivered on a Welsh coastline.
I think it’s possible, don’t you, that the author of the Vogel Papers had a purpose in introducing the image of the shipwreck into our innocent minds. This was a story about a cripple, after all, and he could find no better metaphor, in the parsing of a cripple’s life, than the imagery of the wreck – the vessel destroyed in a few minutes by ill fortune or carelessness.
This may be a pot noodle theory, but perhaps it’s worth considering.
I think the answer to Vogel’s quest lies in that photograph on my mantelpiece. There is something about it: I know, somehow, that the little group of crippled children pictured at Gobowen holds the key.
As for me, I will sit in St Beuno’s church, now that I have reached it. I am very fond of this church, with its quirky side chapel along a corridor. An elderly man is pottering about. We talk. He has a flat cap and the unlit remains of a roll-up behind his ear. He is a belt and braces man in a clean white shirt and gargantuan corduroy trousers hanging around his legs like corrugated iron sheets. He is avuncular, a man of the people, and he has ‘adopted’ the church – he spends much of his spare time here, mending broken bits, painting doors, sweeping, washing out vases. We sit on opposite sides of the nave, he a child of his times, with his household god, and I of mine, with my selfish genes.
‘Do you know something, I think I’ll try it,’ he said to me cryptically.
He held up a small object and I went over to look at it.
The man held a small rusty key.
‘Found it in the vestry,’ he said.
Then he lumbered past the rood, and I followed him like a dog.
He stood behind the altar, studying the wall, and it took me a while to see what he was looking at, a small square in the stonework, something that looked like a safe or a cupboard.
‘No-one knows what’s in there,’ he said. ‘It’s a puzzle to all of us.’ He held up the key, dropped his fag end, picked it up again, popped it back behind his ear, and wriggled the key in the lock.
The safe opened easily and quickly, and we both looked into the cavity behind the little iron door. Standing there was a most beautiful silver chalice, and the man took it from there and polished it with his sleeve. We both admired it; it had a quirky lack of regularity which made it look very old, and we quickly saw that it was, for we could make out a year which started with 16--, and a Latin inscription. Later I saw a magazine article about the chalice, which was indeed very old and precious, and had been presumed lost or stolen centuries previously. And I was there at its discovery. How fine that made me feel! Finer than anyone standing around when the Gunderstrup cauldron was lugged from its Danish bog.
Sitting there in the church at Clynnog with a host of motes, ancient and modern, swirling and dancing in a beam of warm spring sunshine which filtered through the windows, I too felt like one of the motes, warm and impossibly amalgamated, caught in tiny unseen currents, but here to share the moment in the vast molecular swirl of time, and I wished for this miscellaneous existence for ever; suddenly I cared not a whit for the race to the finishing line, nor of Martin’s victory. Let him have the laurels. I would join the cripples’ retinue and travel with them; we would make a merry band with our sticks and our crutches. We would be the last to reach heaven; it would be full and we would look through the lepers’ window, from outside, at the great and the good within. Jack would blow up his muscles and pretend to lift the pearly gates above his head; Edwin would get a bag of sweets from St Peter for telling silly jokes, and we would share them; Luther would dash around the perimeter looking for a place where we could all sneak in; clever Nosy Parker would thumb his pocket Bible and find an appropriate quotation which might sway St Peter’s judgement; Vogel would blow his horn like Little Boy Blue and summon the lamb of god for Esmie to play with. Yes, we would be the last to arrive outside the gates of heaven, and we might be locked out with all the sinners and all the animals, but that would be fine because we had all of us had some experience of being punished at random, and since the gods or mankind liked to punish someone as an example to the others, it might as well be us. It was slightly better than being one of the chosen few inside, looking out at the damned peeking and staring in through the windows.
I said farewell to the old man and his holy grail, which was shining now thanks to a good clean. He came to the door with me and stood there, watching me leave his temple.
I decided to leave the road. I’d had enough of the ways of man; I veered onto the beach and made my way towards the fort at Dinas Dinlle, half-eaten by the sea like that fort on the other side of Wales at Portskewett. I had alway
s wanted to go to Dinas Dinlle. There I could sit and look at Caer Arianrhod, the rock in the sea where the mythical Lleu had been mysteriously returned to his mother. She had cursed him, saying he would never have a name, nor a wife, nor his own weapons. The magician Gwydion had fashioned him a name and weapons, and a wife made from flowers, called Blodeuwedd. But she was unfaithful, and was transformed into an owl. Paddy had told me this story – his head was so mushy with romantic notions that he had once written an entire novel for a lover, and had burned it in front of her as soon as she had finished reading it, so that no-one but she would ever see it. She had thought him quite mad and had escaped with great alacrity.
I reached the great tumulus at Dinas Dinlle, a third of which is missing on the sea side as though the giant playing with his sea-mirror by Bardsey had got up suddenly and given it a great swipe with his boot, like an angry farmer sent mad by an infestation of moles. Here I welcomed the evening. I would not make Caernarfon that day, so I decided on a bed in Foryd Bay, for it looked likely to have a bird hide, which makes a good perch for travellers in the night. By now weary, but sublimely content as I neared the end of my journey, I entered the bay in a glow of reds and lambent yellows as the sun dipped into the ocean. As a child I had wondered if it fizzed and made the sea boil when it touched the water. The tide was out and the mudflats rippled away from me like the hide of a hippo emerging from the ooze. A curlew cried mournfully and I could see shellduck wandering like amnesiacs along the flats.
The bird hide was locked, so I gathered armfuls of dry grass and reeds, and made a bed for myself on a bank in a straggly copse overlooking the bay. I snuggled a shape for myself and lay there, looking at the shadows deepen in the water gulleys which spread like capillaries in the mud.