by Paul Theroux
“Oh, heavens!” Reeny said. “What shall I do, Paul? You tell me.”
I said to the old woman, “Have a cup of tea.”
“The police have been after me,” Reeny said. “They’re always looking in.” Reeny walked to the cupboard. “I could lose my license.” She took out a bottle of beer and poured it. “These coppers have no bloody mercy.” The glass was full. “Forty-five pence,” she said.
The woman drank that and then bought two more bottles. She paid and left, without another word. She had taken no pleasure in the drink and there was no satisfaction in having wheedled the beer out of Reeny on a dry day in Cardigan—in fact, she had not wheedled, but had merely stood there gaping in a paralyzed way.
I said, “It’s a hell of a breakfast—a beer.”
“She’s an alcoholic,” Reeny said. “She’s thirty-seven. Doesn’t look it, does she? Take me, I’m thirty-three and no one believes it. My boyfriend says I’ve got the figure of a girl of twenty. You’re not going, are you?”
Jan Morris
EIGHT MORE MILES ON THIS SUNNY DAY AND WE DREW INTO Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, “Criccieth: For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living travel writer.” The “James (now Jan)” needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book Conundrum, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.
I seldom looked people up in foreign countries—I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate—but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, “It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as ‘vernacular,’ meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it.”
She was wearing a straw calypso hat tipped back on her bushy hair, and a knit jersey, and white slacks. It was a very hot day and she was dressed for it. There is a certain educated English voice that is both correct and malicious. Jan Morris has such a voice. It was not deep but it was languid, and the maleness that still trembled in it made it sultry and attractive. There was nothing ponderous about her. She shrugged easily and was a good listener, and she laughed as a cat might—full-throated and with a little hiss of pleasure, stiffening her body. She was kind, reckless, and intelligent.
Her house was very neat and full of books and pictures. “I have filled it with Cymreictod—Welshness.” Yes, solid country artifacts and beamed ceilings and a NO SMOKING sign in Welsh—she did not allow smoking in her house. Her library was forty-two feet long and the corresponding room upstairs was her study, with a desk and a stereo.
Music mattered to her in an unusual way. She once wrote, “Animists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing, but I go one further; I am an inanimist, holding that even lifeless objects can contain immortal yearnings.… I maintain, for instance, that music can permanently influence a building, so I often leave the record player on when I am out of the house, allowing its themes and melodies to soak themselves into the fabric.”
Perhaps she was serious. Inanimate objects can seem to possess something resembling vitality, or a mood that answers your own. But melodies soaking into wood and stone? “My kitchen adores Mozart,” the wise guy might say, or, “The parlor’s into Gladys Knight and the Pips.” But I did not say anything; I just listened approvingly.
“I suppose it’s very selfish, only one bedroom,” she said.
But it was the sort of house everyone wanted, on its own, at the edge of a meadow, solid as could be, well-lighted, pretty, painted, cozy, with an enormous library and study and a four-poster: perfect for a solitary person and one cat. Hers was called Solomon.
Then she said, “Want to see my grave?”
I said of course and we went down to a cool shaded wood by a riverside. Jan Morris was a nimble walker: she had climbed to twenty thousand feet with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953. Welsh woods were full of small twisted oaks and tangled boughs and moist soil and dark ferny corners. We entered a boggier area of straight green trees and speckled shade.
“I always think this is very Japanese,” she said.
It did look that way, the idealized bushy landscape of the woodblock print, the little riverside grotto.
She pointed across the river and said, “That’s my grave—right there, that little island.”
It was like a beaver’s dam of tree trunks padded all around with moss, and more ferns, and the river slurping and gurgling among boulders.
“There’s where I’m going to be buried—or rather scattered. It’s nice, don’t you think? Elizabeth’s ashes are going to be scattered there, too.” Jan Morris was married to Elizabeth before the sex change.
It seemed odd that someone so young should be thinking of death. She was fifty-six, and the hormones she took made her look a great deal younger—early forties, perhaps. But it was a very Welsh thought, this plan for ashes and a grave site. It was a nation habituated to ghostliness and sighing and mourning. I was traveling on the Celtic fringe, where they still believed in giants.
What did I think of her grave? she asked.
I said the island looked as though it would wash away in a torrent and that her ashes would end up in Cardigan Bay. She laughed and said it did not matter.
At our first meeting about a year before, in London, she had said suddenly, “I am thinking of taking up a life of crime,” and she had mentioned wanting to steal something from Woolworth’s. It had not seemed so criminal to me, but over lunch I asked her whether she had done anything about it.
“If I had taken up a life of crime I would be hardly likely to tell you, Paul!”
“I was just curious,” I said.
She said, “These knives and forks. I stole them from Pan American Airways. I told the stewardess I was stealing them. She said she didn’t care.”
They were the sort of knives and forks you get on an airplane with your little plastic tray of soggy meat and gravy.
Talk of crime led us to talk of arson by Welsh nationalists. I asked why only cottages were burned, when there were many tin caravans—as the English called mobile homes—on the coast that would make a useful blaze. She said her son was very pro-Welsh and patriotic and would probably consider that.
I said that the Welsh seemed like one family.
“Oh, yes, that’s what my son says. He thinks as long as he is in Wales he’s safe. He’ll always be taken care of. He can go to any house and he will be taken in and fed and given a place to sleep.”
“Like the travelers in Arabia who walk up to a Bedouin’s tent and say, ‘I am a guest of God,’ in order to get hospitality. Ana dheef Allah.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s probably true—it is like a family here in Wales.”
And like all families, I said, sentimental and suspicious and quarrelsome and secretive. But Welsh nationalism was at times like a certain kind of feminism, very monotonous and one-sided.
She said, “I suppose it does look that way, if you’re a man.”
I could have said: Didn’t it look that way to you when you were a man?
She said, “As for the caravans and tents, yes, they look awful. But the Welsh don’t notice them particularly. They are not noted for their visual sense. And those people, the tourists, are seeing Wales. I’m glad they’re here, in a way, so they can see this beautiful country and understand the Welsh.”
Given the horror of the caravans, it was a very generous thought, and it certainly was not my sentiment. I always
thought of Edmund Gosse saying, “No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood.” The shore was fragile and breakable and easily poisoned.
Jan Morris was still speaking of the Welsh. “Some people say that Welsh nationalism is a narrow movement, cutting Wales off from the world. But it is possible to see it as liberating Wales and giving it an importance—of bringing it into the world.”
We finished lunch and went outside. She said, “If only you could see the mountains. I know it’s boring when people say that—but they really are spectacular. What do you want to do?”
I said that I had had a glimpse of Portmeirion from the train and wanted a closer look, if there was time.
We drove there in her car and parked under the pines. She had known the architect Clough Williams-Ellis very well. “He was a wonderful man,” she said. “On his deathbed he was still chirping away merrily. But he was very worried about what people would say about him. Funny man! He wrote his own obituary! He had it there with him as he lay dying. When I visited him, he asked me to read it. Of course, there was nothing unflattering in it. I asked him why he had gone to all the trouble of writing his own obituary.
“He said, ‘Because I don’t know what The Times will write in the obituary they do of me.”
We walked through the gateway and down the stairs to the little Italian fantasy town on this Welsh hillside.
“He was obsessed that they would get something wrong or be critical. He had tried every way he could of getting hold of his Times obituary—but failed, of course. They’re always secret.”
She laughed. It was that hearty malicious laugh.
“The funny thing was, I was the one who had written his obituary for The Times. They’re all written carefully beforehand, you know.”
I said, “And you didn’t tell him?”
“No.” Her face was blank. Was she smiling behind it? “Do you think I should have?”
I said, “But he was on his deathbed.”
She laughed again. She said, “It doesn’t matter.”
There was a carved bust of Williams-Ellis in a niche, and resting crookedly on its dome was a hand-scrawled sign saying, THE BAR UPSTAIRS IS OPEN.
Jan said, “He would have liked that.”
We walked through the place, under arches, through gateways, past Siamese statuary and Greek columns and gardens and pillars and colonnades; we walked around the piazza.
“The trouble with him was that he didn’t know when to stop.”
It was a sunny day. We lingered at the blue Parthenon, the Chantry, the Hercules statue, the town hall. You think, What is it doing here? More cottages.
“Once, when we lost a child, we stayed up there in that white cottage.” She meant herself and Elizabeth, when they were husband and wife.
There was more. Another triumphal arch, the Prior’s Lodge, pink and green walls.
Jan said, “It’s supposed to make you laugh.”
But instead, it was making me very serious, for this folly had taken over forty years to put together, and yet it still had the look of a faded movie set.
“He even designed the cracks and planned where the mossy parts should be. He was very meticulous and very flamboyant, too, always in one of these big, wide-brimmed antediluvian hats and yellow socks.”
I was relieved to get out of Portmeirion; I had been feeling guilty, with the uncomfortable suspicion that I had been sight-seeing—something I had vowed I would not do.
Jan said, “Want to see my gravestone?”
It was the same sudden, proud, provocative, mirthful way that she had said, Want to see my grave?
I said of course.
The stone was propped against the wall of her library. I had missed it before. The lettering was very well done, as graceful as the engraving on a bank note. It was inscribed Jan & Elizabeth Morris. In Welsh and English, above and below the names, it said,
Here Are Two Friends
At the End of One Life
I said it was as touching as Emily Dickinson’s gravestone in Amherst, Massachusetts, which said nothing more than Called Back.
When I left, and we stood at the railway station at Porthmadog, Jan said, “If only these people knew who was getting on the train!”
I said, “Why should they care?”
She grinned. She said, “That knapsack—is that all you have?”
I said yes. We talked about traveling light. I said the great thing was to have no more than you could carry comfortably and never to carry formal clothes—suits, ties, shiny shoes, extra sweaters: what sort of travel was that?
Jan Morris said, “I just carry a few frocks. I squash them into a ball—they don’t weigh anything. It’s much easier for a woman to travel light than a man.”
There was no question that she knew what she was talking about, for she had been both a man and a woman. She smiled at me, and I felt a queer thrill when I kissed her good-bye.
Railway Buff
“I LOVE STEAM, DON’T YOU?” STAN WIGBETH SAID TO ME ON the Ffestiniog Railway, and then he leaned out of the window. He was not interested in my answer, which was, “Up to a point.” Mr. Wigbeth smiled and ground his teeth in pleasure when the whistle blew. He said there was nothing to him more beautiful than a steam “loco.” He told me they were efficient and brilliantly made; but engine drivers had described to me how uncomfortable they could be, and how horrible on winter nights, because it was impossible to drive most steam engines without sticking your face out the side window every few minutes.
I wanted Mr. Wigbeth to admit that they were outdated and ox-like, dramatic-looking but hell to drive; they were the choo-choo fantasies of lonely children; they were fun but filthy. Our train was pulled through the Welsh mountains by a Fairlie, known to the buffs as a “double engine”—two boilers—“the most uncomfortable engine I’ve ever driven,” a railwayman once told me. It was very hot for the driver because of the position of the boilers. The footplate of the Fairlie was like an Oriental oven for poaching ducks in their own sweat. Mr. Wigbeth did not agree with any of this. Like many other railway buffs, he detested our century.
This had originally been a tram line, he told me; all the way from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog—horse trams, hauling slate from the mountain quarries. Then it was named the Narrow Gauge Railway and opened to passengers in 1869. It was closed in 1946 and eventually reopened in stages. The line was now—this month—completely open.
“We’re lucky to be here,” Mr. Wigbeth said, and checked his watch—a pocket watch, of course: the railway buff’s timepiece. He was delighted by what he saw. “Right on time!”
It was a beautiful trip to Blaenau, on the hairpin curves of the steep Snowdonia hills and through the thick evening green of the Dwyryd Valley. To the southeast, amid the lovely mountains, was the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station, three or four gigantic gray slabs. An English architect, noted for his restrained taste, had been hired in 1959 to make it prettier, or at least bearable, but he had failed. Perhaps he should have planted vines. Yet this monstrosity emphasized the glory of these valleys. I found the ride restful, even with the talkative Mr. Wigbeth beside me. Then he was silenced by a mile-long tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel was Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the head of the valley.
“Where are you off to, then?” Mr. Wigbeth asked.
“I’m catching the next train to Llandudno Junction.”
“It’s a diesel,” he said, and made a sour face.
“So what?”
“I don’t call that a train,” he said. “I call that a tin box!”
He was disgusted and angry. He put on his engine driver’s cap and his jacket with the railway lapel pins, and after a last look at his conductor-type pocket watch, he got into his little Ford Cortina and drove twenty-seven stop-and-go miles back to Bangor.
Llandudno
I WAS NOT FRIGHTENED AT THE HOTEL IN LLANDUDNO UNTIL I was taken upstairs by the pockmarked clerk, and then I sat in the dusty room a
lone and listened. The only sound was my breathing, from having climbed the four flights of stairs. The room was small; there were no lights in the passageway; the wallpaper had rust stains that could have been spatters of blood. The ceiling was high, the room narrow: it was like sitting at the bottom of a well. I went downstairs.
The clerk was watching television in the lounge—he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching “Hill Street Blues,” a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before—that I was the only guest in this big, dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, “I’m not happy here—I’m checking out,” but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.
I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, “This is my bird-watching gear. I’ll be right back—” The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in a nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.
I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.
Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses—naked people saying gloatingly, “We shouldn’t be doing this!” In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.