by Lloyd Jones
Sorry about last night, thanks for putting me up. Owe you a bottle of booze. Can’t tell you much at the moment but I broke into that house we went to and took it all a stage further. Very exciting. Old geezer asleep upstairs. As I thought – Guardian reader, film fan etc. Searched the place and eventually found what I wanted, some maps. Bullseye! Superb quality, among them an early Bartholomew chart of a region in Scotland. Beautiful. Took it with me and ‘imagined’ the place as well as I could in a night, then caught a train up north. Picked up a girl on the way, going to the same parts. Just been ill, on her way back home. Want you to meet her. She can do the same thing as me but with paintings, found she could do it when she was a kid, something to do with angels. Hah! The Scottish map took us to a wild part of the world. The place I ‘imagined’ turned out to be a croft with a rusty roof and little more than a woman inside it and an urn full of ashes – I’d predicted the woman but not the ashes. This time I didn’t break in, telling the truth seemed easier so she invited us in and we stayed a couple of nights. Bit of a weirdo. Clairvoyant, read my hand. Not very good news at first but she says things will turn out OK in the end. We got some good lifts all the way back to Wales... then something strange happened – we got a ride which took us past that house on the bend, the one with the red barn. The woman in Scotland had mentioned it. That house keeps on cropping up. Spooky or what! It’s up for sale now. Anyway, must dash – will let you know what’s happening ASAP.
Again, I heard nothing for several weeks. Then he arrived at my door again in a terrible state, shaking all over and covered in scratches. For a day he said virtually nothing, sitting in an old deckchair at the bottom of my garden, wrapped up warm in a rug. I managed to get some soup down him but he seemed stunned, and he was a lot thinner than before. I got just a few facts from him; he’d lost the girl during an escapade which had nearly cost him his life. Wishing to go one step further again, to push the boundaries of his world, he’d visited the council archives and studied – for days, it transpired – an antique map of the nearest city, and then he’d imagined it as it was in the early 1900s. Unable to speak by now, he wrote a note to me laboriously on a notepad I gave him, and I was shocked to see that his handwriting was in copperplate:
On May the first, shortly after four in the afternoon, I successfully ‘imagined’ the northern suburbs, including a section of the promenade, sometime in the past. It was the first time I’d tried this technique and I didn’t get it quite right – there was a time warp and I became confused over which age I was in. I entered the area during Victorian or Edwardian times; the very first man I saw was wearing a homburg hat and an astrakhan coat. The street names seemed to be in French, which I cannot account for; perhaps the map I studied had been lying next to a map of France. I followed the man – who looked remarkably like my father – and watched him enter a house. Finding my way to the back of this house, via a back alley which I had stored in my memory, I climbed over the garden wall and hid in the shrubbery, from where I witnessed a statue being unveiled in front of a large group of people. While I was watching them my experiment began to fail, due to a lack of concentration I think. The scene in front of me faded and I found myself in the present. At this point I noticed a wonderful aroma wafting from the same house – delicious chocolatey smells, which were so intoxicating I made my way to the back door and knocked, overcome with a desire to taste the cake being made inside that house. I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that I failed to foresee what the reaction might be to a stranger appearing out of thin air, so when I came face to face with a rather frail old woman she screamed and started to lunge at me with a chocolate-covered knife. I ran away as fast as my legs would carry me, through the next garden along, which is why I’m covered in scratches.
With this he burst into tears and struggled past me, pushing me out of the way. That glimpse of his tearstained face was the last I saw of him for six months or more.
In early December I responded to a stern rat-a-tat on my door and opened it to a distressing scene. Two policemen, looking as if they meant business, stood on either side of him; he was handcuffed to one of them. I invited them in but they declined, wanting only confirmation of my friend’s identity. After I told them his name and last known address they took him away to the police station, and I was allowed to see him only briefly after all the interviews were over.
It seems that he’d led a wandering existence based on crude maps he’d picked up at tourist information offices. He’d been to the Loire Valley, picking fruit, and many other places in Europe. In a bizarre twist, he’d felt so homesick while in Spain he’d stolen a map of Britain from a library in Madrid so that he could gain enough impetus to return home. He ‘imagined’ a place in Snowdonia so well that he soon found himself living in a hut somewhere in the mountains, where he’d been found by a man inspecting a new wind farm up on the moors. He’d nearly starved to death, and was hallucinating by now, imagining that he was living with angels.
After his visit to the police station my friend disappeared from sight for a long time, almost a year. The seasons came and went, and I’d almost forgotten about him when I received a letter from a hospital to the south of the country. This is what it said:
Dear C,
I beg of you one last favour. My journeys have got me into trouble again, and I’m in a hospital somewhere but I cannot find my way back home. After promising the magistrate never to look at a map again I did keep my vow, but one day I started looking at some of my old school text books and came across a map I’d drawn in pencil when I was in primary school, showing all the rivers of Wales. Unfortunately I found it impossible to resist temptation so off I went again. I was doing fine until I was taken in for questioning after being caught on private land. Eventually they brought me here in a van with no windows so I’ve lost the thread of my journey and no amount of imagining will get me home again. So I’m trapped without a map to get myself out again. PLEASE help me. They won’t even let me out in the garden. Can you find me? I want to come home now.
Your old friend, A.
It took no great feat of intelligence to trace him, and I found him in a psychiatric unit in Carmarthenshire – the silly sod had been following the River Teifi from the mountains to the sea. He was overwhelmed with emotion when he saw me and cried with gratitude, holding on to my arm as if he feared I would go without him. Passing myself off as his brother again, I eventually secured his release and took him home with me. He seemed to get better and by the end of the year I’d found him somewhere to live in a block of council flats at the other end of town. I went to see him now and again, and was saddened by the slow change in him. By then he was hitting the bottle quite heavily and I’m not sure if he was fully sane. He was telling me a great deal about his fellow residents, not that he’d met them. Having vowed never to touch any form of map ever again he’d turned to the postal service, in the way an alcoholic moves from whisky to meths. It transpired he was ‘imagining’ his neighbours from their mail, their newspapers, and any other documents he came across, such as delivery notes. He was particularly interested in a sleepwalking builder on the top floor.
When I arrived at his flat one day the place had been boarded up. But it didn’t take too much ‘imagining’ to know where he was. I found him at the local hospital, in a sorry state again, having succumbed to the booze and general despair. Again I had to lie, telling them I was his brother so they would let me in to visit him. He was in a six-bed unit with a motley crew around him, people he seemed to know quite well already – there’s a camaraderie among the sick if they’re well enough to care. They all looked at me as if it was my fault, so he introduced them with a certain dignity, something he’d always done well; it was the child in him. They were a bunch of freaks, worse than him.
Next to him was a woman being visited by a strange-looking man in a pork pie hat and white trainers clutching a posy of sweet peas. Over the aisle there was a bloke who looked surprisingly like a Mexican, having a blood
transfusion, then an old man who was really ill, surrounded by monitors.
Look, I said to him, after a bit of a chat, this lot are in a worse state than you. But there’s hope yet. I’ve got an idea.
It meant taking him home to my place, cleaning him up, and getting him off the booze. He was pretty desperate by now and he wanted to live, so he agreed.
I gave him a clean batch of clothes and he moved into my spare room. I also gave him a map, a camera, an artist’s set and plenty of paper. And then I drove him around Wales for a month until he’d got the hang of what I wanted.
What I’d bought him was the Ordnance Survey’s historical map of Ancient Britain, showing all the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman and Medieval sites in the whole island. All he had to do when we got to those places was to imagine them in the past.
He took to it like a duck to water and produced an outstanding body of work which has been used by almost every publisher in the land. He’s a contented man these days, gone a bit thick round the middle and prone to afternoon naps.
But he’s back among the sane again, and he’s in the land of the living. Sitting with my back to a standing stone on Anglesey one day I told him the worst secret I’d ever kept to myself – that I’d slept with his ex-wife one night in the distant past.
I know, he said calmly as he sketched a vibrant mass of people eating frog and fish stew at a spot not so far from us. I’ve known for a long, long time.
It transpired that his wife and I had gone for a walk soon after our misdemeanour, using one of his maps, and he’d been able to imagine what had happened from the way we’d folded it.
He even made a sketch of the scene, with the two of us talking about what we’d done and deciding that we’d never ever tell him.
His gift is stronger than ever now, but he’s learnt how to use it in a way which gives pleasure to himself and other people too. Life has a funny way of surprising us. After he was released from hospital he continued to call on the ward for a while to visit the people he’d met. He came home glum one afternoon because the old man had died and most of the others had gone home. I was worried in case he started to drink again. But in the following weeks he returned a happier man every time. The sole remaining person – the woman in the next bed to him – was making a steady recovery and was expected to live, against all odds. My friend seemed very happy about this, and he’s been cheerful ever since. I think maybe there’s a love interest by now. Initially he’d been touched by her devastating story – she’d had to close her post office business, and her husband had run off with someone else at the same time as she’d become ill. She’d almost given up. But she was on the mend, and in their mutual catastrophe they’d found friendship... maybe more. She was going to buy a house in the country, and he was thinking of moving in with her.
Life goes on, he said to me yesterday, with a pastel crayon in one hand and a beautiful drawing in the other. He folded the map away carefully and sat in the sun for a while, looking at me. And then he smiled that old smile of his again, and went indoors to make us both a cup of tea.
Essays
north ~ south ~ east ~ west
north
I WENT north into Liverpool Bay on board a great little ship which pulls in the water as a ratting terrier strains at the leash. I spent a day on the sea, and it was good.
A few years ago I walked completely around Wales, a journey of a thousand miles, and then I walked across the land seven times. The next journey to take my fancy was a trip around my homeland on the water, by sea and canal. I’m not sure why; in an age of great uncertainty maybe it’s a way of seeing with my own eyes what’s going on. I’m a journalist, and the original reporters, or intelligencers, were little more than spies.
With me as I started this jaunt was the actor Steve Huison – the tall ginger one in The Full Monty. As we surged through the Menai Straits, graveyard of so many ships, I saw him swallow a tablet. Yes, the man who can face any audience without qualms gets sick in a boat. Conversely, I can bob up and down on the water without a care in the world – but put me in front of an audience and I’ll sicken and quake. Thank god we’re all different.
We were on a day trip from Caernarfon to Liverpool on the Balmoral, a pleasure boat which plies her trade around the coast of Britain. Built just after the second world war, she was pensioned off as a floating restaurant in Dundee for a while – and having tasted captivity she’s enjoying her freedom again, waltzing through the water in a when I am an old woman I shall wear purple sort of mood. Amazingly, this svelte little ship can take up to 750 passengers, but the cargo that day was smallish, a motley crew of people, mainly middle aged and Welsh; we might have been a handful of west-coast families heading for Liverpool and the New World two centuries ago, escaping poverty and the perennial religious divides which plague mankind. I spent a day on the water with those disparate people, most of them whiling away the hours of retirement, some of them reinforcing a long friendship with the sea. There is a nakedness about people’s faces when they’re on ships: performance is abandoned and everyone reverts to type for a while. Eyes glaze over, faces slacken; we all become versions of the ancient mariner, scanning the sky for an albatross. The vessel’s heartbeat throbs through our feet and travels up our legs towards our own little engine rooms. Slightly tipsy and flushed after her leaving party, our ship blew bubbles coarsely in her bath and emitted a big wet fart when she departed. To emphasise our exodus from little old Wales, the crewmen crackled in Russian, Polish and Lithuanian as the Balmoral detached herself from a spiderish web of ropes glued to the harbour wall.
After picking up passengers at Menai Bridge and escaping through the jaws of the Straits we saw our pilot, Richard Jones, hop onto a charter boat which zoomed alongside; Richard is the seventh generation of his family to do this romantic but dangerous job. After threading our way through a flotilla of canoes, a burst necklace of colour on the polished surface of the sea, we dashed between Puffin and Penmon, towards the open sea. Almost immediately a smoky pall descended on us, isolating us from the landmass, which soon seemed no more than a bulky presence – a sleeping Hitchcock behind a stage curtain. Divorced from the land, I leant on a rail and dwelt on the future. I’d been restless of late, unable to find a comfortable bed, rotating on the spot as a dog tends to do, twirling around in its basket before settling down for the night. As the ship disappeared into a sea-gloom I mulled on the meaning of the word north – a word which actually came from the east, spilling from the mouths of prehistoric Indo-Europeans whose root word ner probably meant to the left of the rising sun.
North is one of the four cardinal points but let’s not forget here as a place; neither should we forget the navel or omphalos, also an important spot on the map. Both Wales and Britain have a traditional north-south divide. England’s halfway mark, famously, is Watford. There’s a tradition that Wales’ belly button is Pumlumon, which I see as a rather boggy centre circle on a football pitch, with the goals at Cardiff and Bangor. Aberystwyth is the spot where the ref blows his whistle to start the game. Historically, in Western culture, north is regarded as the fundamental direction and it defines all other directions.
But I tend to think of north as a place, not a direction. If you look at a political map of Britain it’s clear that the north and west are more ‘liberal’ and left-leaning than the rest of the island. There are almost no Conservative MPs in Scotland, Wales or South-West England, and socialism as a concept is stronger in those regions. No doubt the main factor is the historic poverty of the outlying areas; but I have a notion that the matriarchal Celts nurtured a healthy concept of fairness when it came to land ownership, since they practised gavelkind – the division of land between a dead man’s sons, including those who were illegitimate. It was the nauseating Normans who brought the curse of primogeniture to Britain – the inheritance of all property by the eldest son. This led to great power and wealth being concentrated in a few hands, and set the scene for modern imperial
istic Britain with its male-dominated, pyramidical power structures, ranging from companies with their managing directors to most families and societies. But I’m not talking about historical accuracy here; I’m describing my perceptions of the north. I was born in the north and I live in the north; I am in thrall to the pale, unripened beauties of the North as Addison put it. Besides, could David Lloyd George have been forged in Kent? I think not. Nonconformism also played a part in generating a breed of regional rabble-rousers, republicans, radicals and anarchists. Jac Glan-y-Gors is my personal favourite, a satirical poet and pamphleteer who spent much of his life running the Canterbury Arms at Southwark. Jac was a bar-room fundamentalist who led a spiritual and political pilgrimage to his own pre-communist version of the promised land. He was a six-pint socialist, as the South Walians say.
A ship’s rail is a great place to enjoy a five-star reverie and I remember leaning and mulling, looking at the faint trace of the shoreline around my home in Llanfairfechan. I’d recently enjoyed a cuppa with the violin maker and restorer Dewi Roberts, who lives with his musical family on the foreshore at Aber. At some stage he handed me a violin and invited me to play it. It was such a sweet instrument I almost managed to sound competent. I asked where he’d acquired it.
It belonged to a Mr Melville Cooper, who died recently, said Dewi.
And my mind flew back, over forty years, to an upstairs room at Llanrwst Grammar School, where a peripatetic music teacher known to me as Mr Cooper, patient and kind, had instructed me in the basics of violin-playing – and instilled in me a lifelong love for a few bits of wood which, glued together, can make such a beautiful sound. I learnt the violin merely to dodge treble physics. As I played Mr Cooper’s violin in Dewi’s house I became aware that I’d been a young boy when I’d last held this instrument in my hands – deeply unhappy, and willing to spend many hours in my own company, with a fiddle, merely to escape from the world. A lot had happened in forty years, and Mr Cooper’s violin was a link between two very different people, both of them me: a troubled teenager, on the verge of running away from his father, and a middle-aged man sawing away at wood and words, finding happiness in small things after a circuitous life-journey.