by Byron Rogers
Today, as he begins to pack up after the night, it contains a ground sheet (a piece of wartime barrage balloon found years before on some forgotten rubbish tip), two radios (both of them gifts), a first aid box, an old cap with ear muffs, two very clean towels and a shaving kit (says heavily-bearded George of the latter, ‘It’s in case I go anywhere special’), mending threads and needles, a pair of sunglasses, the Bible, a camera (a gift for which he cannot afford films), a toilet roll, a knife, fork and spoon, some lard (which he prefers, as more nourishing, to butter), tea, sugar, an elderly pork pie, some cereals, a bottle of VP wine (his one alcoholic drink), a bottle of paraffin for his spirit lamp, a wrapped up frying pan, some lighter fuel for his stick lighter (another gift) and a pair of shoes too large for him to wear but too new to throw away. ‘I’ve got everything,’ reflects George, ‘except the kitchen sink.’
The pram also contains his occasional books, old notebooks he has found or been given. On one, in a large, round, child-like hand he has written ‘George Gibbs Esq., Scotstoun, Glasgow, Scotland’: it was the last time he had an address, a quarter of a century ago. He records in these books, in a weird macaronic mixture of Welsh and English, the deaths of his heroes: ‘Judy Garland found dead in her flat, Chelsea, Mehefin 22, 1969. Dydd Sul.’ In another I came upon the fruit of 25 years’ tramping, a neat list of Welsh convents, presbyteries and colleges with crosses, and circles to mark the degree of their hospitality. There is also a list of the best places to sleep (it includes a police cell).
Strangest of all there is a roster of police names: force after force, town after village, the constables, sergeants, inspectors. George notes their progress with the attention of a herald to a ruling caste, and supplements these with cuttings from local papers so the plump, untroubled faces beam out at one. Some have signed their own names. The police force has no more uncritical lay admirer than George Gibbs.
His passions, in fact, are two: the police and Wales. There are Welsh-English word lists, sad little dates from Welsh history, even this touching entry: ‘Give me the Welsh-speaking people any day. They are more kindly and friendly. I will stay in Cymru, and be buried here.’ The Welsh, he says, are sympathetic to tramps. ‘But don’t put that down,’ he says in sudden unfeigned alarm. ‘You’ll have the English coming over.’ He has taken all Wales to be his bedroom.
From Machynlleth George was turning south. In the three months since he had left Stormydown he had moved north in a slow arc towards Anglesey and was now going south along the coast. He travels his 8 miles on a good day, but intersperses these with rest days at intervals. ‘It’s not an easy life. I wouldn’t advise anyone to take to the road. It was really tough when I used to roam in the winter, maybe two to three inches of snow. I have difficulty getting my old pram through snow.’
He is fortunate in having good health. Apart from his pneumonia in the early 1950s he has been ill only once, when he went down with flu at Christmas time, 1969, having been soaked in a downpour on the way to Stormydown. The flu resulted in a spot on his lungs and he had to spend a month in hospital. He says of himself: ‘I’ve never been ill actually on the roads. Getting the air, day by day, and walking. . . quite healthy, me.’ Yet he has little energy and tires easily. His teeth are bad. In his pram he has a jar of home-made jam which he has not opened in two years. ‘Can’t. It would play holy mackerel with my teeth, that.’
There is an even tenor to his life, which all untoward events disturb, to send great ripples across it. Thus I came across the news of my coming on different pages of his books. Yet he accepted me the way he accepts everything, and was soon introducing me to policemen. ‘This is Mr Rogers. He is writing the history of my life.’ They looked incredulously at his Boswell as we shuffled by.
George plans his trips in a very loose way. He has a vague overall target, like Anglesey, but changes his route as it pleases him. ‘A man like myself going on steadily, not bothering anyone, bound for anywhere. Anywhere does me. A man who goes everywhere, bound for anywhere.’ This is the week up to his stay in Machynlleth.
Tuesday night: A chicken shed, between Barmouth and Dolgellau. George has slept here before. The farmer, who has been here 20 years, says that, of all the tramps who once called, George is now the last. ‘We would think now that there was something missing from the year if he didn’t call.’ George sleeps just outside the chicken wire. Piled neatly are some old paperbacks he left the year before, and which the farmer has let lie. Before he sleeps, George, who is unable to light a fire here, asks the farmer for some hot water for his tea. The chickens grieve and scuttle. ‘Nice listening to the chickens,’ says George, ‘nicer than traffic.’
Wednesday: Towards Dolgellau. First stop Barmouth rubbish tip, where George spends an intent half hour, disturbing the seagulls and finding only some week-old newspapers. He collects the week-old papers. As night comes on he settles down for the night in an open barn some 2 miles from Dolgellau: he has walked some 7 miles. He lights a fire, drinks yet more tea.
Thursday: Towards Dolgellau. First stop Dr Williams’ School, a girls’ boarding school on the outskirts of Dolgellau. He always stops here. This time he knocks on the kitchen door and is given some roast beef sandwiches and tea. It is his first meal of the day. George reaches Dolgellau about midday and claims his Social Security benefit. This is the first breath of economics in his world. A tramp can claim a day’s requirement, the amount of which is left to the local office, but which in George’s case varies from 40p to 60p. At Dolgellau it is 60p. It is, in some ways, a cruel sum: just the minimum to keep a man alive. Yet to George it is a bonanza. Though he is entitled to the rate daily, the nature of his wanderings means that he rarely claims it more than twice a week. He encounters little difficulty at the Social Security offices as he is by now well-known to the officers. They fill in his name and age and seek to establish when he last claimed. Cases have occurred where the quick and the very quick among tramps have succeeded in getting to more than one office in a day, leaving a trail of benefit claims. With his 60p he buys milk, ten cigarettes, a packet of tea, and two pork pies. He begins the slow winding climb out of Dolgellau. The night is coming on as he wheels his pram over the pass towards Abergynolwyn, a slow little figure lost in an eternity of cloud and rock. He plays his radio. That night be sleeps in a barn under Cader Idris. It is his most romantic place, a foot deep in dried bracken. He lights his paraffin lamp, makes tea with hot water from a nearby guest house, and eats his two pork pies. And so to bed.
Friday: To Abergynolwyn. He rises at 10.00 a.m., his usual time, drinks some more tea, again with hot water from the guesthouse, and starts. It is a glorious day. He wheels his pram along the perimeter of Tal-y-llyn lake to the village, where he buys a tin of rice and calls on the policeman. He and PC Edwards talk about the old, dead tramps. ‘They’re a dying race,’ says the policeman. His wife gives George some sandwiches and a pair of good old shoes. The shoes disappear into the pram. Everyone seems to be glad to see George. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ says one old man. ‘Now I know summer is really here. You’re the first swallow.’ George goes off the roads early, about 4.00 in the afternoon, as he is tired. Because of traffic, he is careful not to walk at night. He sleeps in an isolated little shed some miles from the village. As the dark comes in across the mountains, he lights a small fire, heats his rice and eats his sandwiches. He plays his radio into the small hours.
Saturday: To Towyn and beyond. On the way he passes one of his old sleeping places, or rather what remains of it. The place, an old cottage, has been demolished by the local council to make a lay-by. George mourns briefly for it: ‘There was an old mattress there. I used to sweep the floor with my little brush.’ At Ysguboriau Farm nearby, Mrs Gwenda Jones greets George: ‘This was one of the old tramps’ calls. We gave them bread and butter and tea. But they’ve all gone. This one must be the last of them.’ We plod thoughtfully on, through Towyn, to a railway crossing house. But the night has come and is full of cars. George decides to stop at
a rubbish tip a mile from the house. Using the pram he drapes his ground-sheet into a lean-to tent, lights a fire and fries some old bacon, ‘what you would call a rough lay-down’. The night is warm.
Sunday: A rest day. George ambles the last mile to the crossing house. It is being modernised but the doors are still open. George does not like the modernisation. ‘Oh dear, all this was wooden once, wooden floors, wooden walls here. They’ve ruined it. I was quite warm. They’ve ruined it completely.’ He eats little today, some old bread and lard he has, and brews up. He plays his radio endlessly, pop, political reports and drama wafting into the bowed little head.
Monday: Towards Machynlleth. He walks 6 miles, calling at two houses for some hot water where he is given some bread and a couple of raw onions. He stops the night at a cluster of modernised little cottages standing in a courtyard, all for some reason deserted. He makes a fire in the fireplace, fries his bread, and eats it with raw onions. So far in the week he has only once asked permission of a farmer to stay the night: nobody minds, says George, as long as he leaves the place tidy. Each morning he cleans up his rubbish.
Tuesday: The last four miles to Machynlleth. He arrives early in the afternoon, having called in the morning on the Rector of Pennal, who gives him bread and butter, a cake and some tea, and tells me that he too doesn’t know what’s become of the tramps. At Machynlleth George goes to the Social Security office, and is given 40p.
‘I don’t feel envious at seeing a family through a window in winter. I hope they’re not the same as I am. I wouldn’t like anyone else to be out in the weather like me. I see how happy they are at their fire. It makes me happy. I had an experience once, about ten years ago, in an old mansion near Oswestry. It hadn’t been lived in for ten to twelve years. I got up to the attic. I’d just set out my candles, an old newspaper to read, when I suddenly saw the paper rise to the height of one foot, or thereabouts. When I saw that I went all cold and shivery, the coldest I ever was. There was no draught. I packed up as quick as possible and got out. There was something in that room, I went down the stairs into the pitch-black. But I think I would stay there now. I’ve slept in graveyards, in the coke holes of cemeteries, nobody bothers you there. Kids don’t come into graveyards, and the dead don’t do any harm. It’s the living you’ve got to watch.
‘The old-timers are all dead now, either found dead on the roadside or in derelict buildings. I’m not worried about whether I’ll be found dead. Everyone has to die, wherever he is, at sea, in a car, in a field, on a quayside. My ambition is to die in Wales, and be buried here.’
Like a swallow, he begins to move South. The holiday cars flooding into Machynlleth shy away from the intent little figure on the road, like horses shying from some creature which has somehow sidestepped the processes of evolution. He disappears into Wales.
Note: Mr Gibbs has now come in from the roads. Latterly he had taken to spending his winters in a hut at Lampeter Station, so the district council, seeking to raze the station, was obliged to offer him a home under the 1977 Homelessness Act. He was by then of pensionable age, and the council’s action had made homeless a man for whom homelessness was a way of life. It has to be the most wonderful of all bureaucratic ironies. Mr Gibbs has exchanged his pram for a bungalow in Lampeter, and the last time we met he gave me a visiting card.
The Lost Lands
Y EARLY AFTERNOON it was clear we were in a frontier zone. The country lanes had gone. These roads were wide, the tarmac well maintained, and there was military traffic now, jeeps and trucks, the drivers of which did not slow down as they passed. And then there was some kind of crossing point, unmanned but with a red flag flying over it. I braked to read a large notice in the two languages. ‘Do Not Touch Any Military Debris. It May Explode And Kill You’, which seemed reasonable enough. I pointed to the red flag.
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said the Farmer. ‘They put those up to deter tourists. You’ll be all right on this road.’
And so it was, at just after 2.00 p.m., with a cold wind blowing the rain so the horizons kept coming and going, that we passed into the Lost Lands.
Just after the village of Trecastle, the A40, moving west from Brecon to Llandovery, enters a valley where the old coaching road has been straightened. On the skyline to the south is an even older road under grass and mud, along which Roman legionaries and medieval English kings passed. On the other side of the valley a lane runs up past Llywel church, and on to a part of Wales where in the 40 years I have used the A40 I have never dared go. Beyond that skyline lie the Lost Lands.
Epynt. . . You will not find it on any road sign, for this is an area which has disappeared from everything except the memories of the old and the schedules of the British Army, whose maps of a rectangle 12 miles by 15, not that much smaller than the Isle of Wight, are detailed. It was here that 60 years ago the Army compelled 219 men, women and children to leave 54 farms and smallholdings to make way for an artillery range. The Army is still there.
A truck went by, faces under red berets looking incuriously down at the car parked beside the road. ‘Paras,’ said the Farmer.
As they had driven along, the Farmer had been intoning a litany of names, the farms he remembered from when, as a young man, he had himself been forced to leave. Hirllwyn. . . the Long Tree. Gwybedog. . . the Place of the Gnats. Cefnioli. . . the Farmer stumbled over the translation of that one, for these were names old in his father’s time and in his father’s before him. One of those evicted claimed his family had been farming the Epynt when, had they existed, newspaper headlines would have been about the Wars of the Roses.
The Farmer was remembering people now. ‘The old gentleman at Cwmioli, John Owen, the Army still let him graze his sheep on Epynt but each time he went back, a hedge would be down, a wall gone. He died of a broken heart. He said, “It was an end for me when Cwmioli went.’” Thomas Morgan, Glandwr. ‘He was so convinced he would return one day that he used to sneak back at night to light a fire in the old farmhouse. The Army must have seen the smoke, for in the end they blew the house up. Mind you, I don’t know why he bothered, he and his brother had been too frightened to sleep there for years because it was haunted.’
‘What happened to the ghost?’
‘Oh, the Army blew that up as well.’
Sometimes the farms were a heap of stones among the trees, sometimes not even a bump in the ground showed that generations had lived there. Occasionally, and this was bizarre, the Army had rebuilt the farmhouse to provide bivouacs for their men, so these stood blank and empty, but far more immaculate than they had been in life.
The Army had also built shell houses to train their troopers to react to the snipers of Northern Ireland, and a folly of eighteenth-century proportions, an entire high-roofed East German village in which to rehearse street warfare against the Warsaw Pact. They went into such detail on this (adding a cemetery and, to the indignation of the devout, a church), they had only just completed it, at God (and the MOD) knows what cost, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact disappeared like snow in water. An East German village stands forlorn on a Welsh mountain, part of it used as a rubbish tip.
Under some pines, ringed by a huge sky, is the old Drovers Arms, at a crossroads where the paths of prehistory meet. ‘This inn was once a welcome resting place on the old drovers’ routes. . . . Renovated 1994.’ I could see the green tracks winding away up the mountain, but a pole had been lowered and there was another sign, not reasonable this time, but peremptory. ‘Danger. Keep Out.’ And more red flags.
‘There’s a view for you,’ said the Farmer. From where we stood we could see hills, and hills behind the hills, and mountains beyond these. Then. . . Ker-POW. A huge dull noise, as though a man 7 miles high, suffering from a smoker’s cough, had cleared his throat above the clouds.
‘Is that thunder?’ asked the Farmer. Ker-POW. ‘No,’ he answered himself. ‘Time to be off, I think.’
There had been some talk of visiting the East German vil
lage and the Farmer had thought this might be possible, for the cold war, he said with irrefutable logic, was over. The two of us stared at its red roofs below us, but at that moment a star-shell burst lazily over it. ‘Though not today,’ said the Farmer.
We passed a little graveyard and the perfectly repointed bits of wall, which were all that remained of a chapel. Here, private subscription has raised a plaque on which there is a translation from the Welsh.
I remember the prayer meetings
And the children’s Sunday School,
And how many had walked
Over the hills and dales.
I will remember them as long as I live.
Amie Williams, 1996
We had reached a high point, where we stopped and walked, bent against the wind. ‘My old home is down there,’ said the Farmer suddenly. ‘Just beyond East Germany.’
He is in his 80s now, a merry, mischievous man, who in his long life has been farmer, milkman, caretaker, horse dealer and proprietor of a chip shop and, having flown over all these, still competes in sheepdog trials though he owns no sheep. ‘I find myself thinking more and more about this place now, and of what might have been.’
And I thought of the passage quoted by the historian, Herbert Hughes, in his An Uprooted Community, in which Iorwerth Peate, founder of the Welsh Folk Museum, records his meeting with an old lady. She was 82, and, as the two watched her furniture being loaded on to a lorry, she asked Peate where he was from, a question the Welsh always ask. He said he was from Cardiff. ‘My dear boy,’ she said, ‘go back there as soon as you can, it is the end of the world here.’