Dream On

by Dai Smith

  I have mulled it over, and over, of course, again and again the past few years since your mother died. And I decided to let it all go, for me at least. But I determined that one day you should, if the occasion arises, know the connections for yourself. That they are significant I do not doubt. What it means as we go on I don’t know. Will you? I suppose that he was ours as much as we are his, but I certainly do not think by any meaningful ties of blood or personal relationship. Only the unbreakable, inexorable, irredeemable bonds of a society which has been as little as it has been so much and as hopeful as it has been wretched.

  Love (of course)

  From Dad

  * * * * *

  I lay back on the bed amongst the rubble of my old man’s literary excavations. I had been spun back to a beginning I had not suspected. In the early years of a new century I was being told the false dawns had all come and gone, and the one that might have been was, in changed ways and circumstances now of course, the only one from the early years of the last century which had offered a glimpse of the actually possible. A final wake-up call. I was not remote from that. I was a living part of it. It was, then, pure sentiment to dream of any way other than through the order and gradation and acceptance of discipline that leadership and vision offered. Ceri had discovered the hard truth of this for himself, just as the old man had once invested it in the Party, and his own lost and found father had secured it in the management of the affairs of men and women whose lot was to labour, but not, he would say, in vain. All this I weighed up and now understood in a detail and with a specificity I had not possessed before. Ceri would have his answer. I’d phone him in the morning. He could do what he liked after that.

  FRIDAY

  Haf picked me up, as arranged, at nine in the morning outside the hotel. She was leaning against her car. She was parked in a taxi rank but effortlessly protected from their professional wrath. The rain had stopped. She raised her right hand in a wave and dropped the cigarette in her left. There were no half measures about the smile. I liked that smile. I could grow to like someone who could smile like that at nine in the morning. She looked as if she’d just stepped out of the shower, shaken her hair, tied together a tight cardigan, dark green, over a tight T-shirt, a white one, pulled on jeans, blue, and boots, black, and was ready to go. She’d more than do. She was an energy burst to cancel my sombre mood and grey suit, which was ageing me despite an open-necked magenta sports shirt. I gave her a paternal hug and a kiss on her cheek. I had told her what I had done and what I intended to do if other things did not happen that morning. She smiled.

  She drove carefully and skilfully out of the traffic dodgem-ride that was the city centre. We were going east through avenues full of lofty semi-detached villas that gave way to retail warehouses and elongated superstores, until we finally made it to the motorway. She pushed the Clio as much as was possible and the needle flickered gallantly around seventy in the slow lane. We exited to the north, through the overspill estates that marked the city’s boundaries, and up into a switchback succession of interlocking valleys, seeking out the new bypass roads that kept the narrow terraced streets well away from us.

  The roads cut across the slopes instead of following contours. They seemed the latest way to ignore all these settled places. In Haf’s car, window-gazing was easy. She couldn’t go quickly enough to cause any blurred vision. So I caught the salute of a thousand satellite dishes above or below, whichever way the road swooped or rose, and felt the sinister ranks of stuka pines – the biggest forestry plantation in an industrial area of Europe, Haf had told me – bristle above the topmost terraces like a buzz of crew-cut hair. I wondered if anyone could now recall these valleys as once properly industrial. They certainly weren’t really post-industrial. More like shagged-out-and-thrown-back formerly industrial. Her own politics were young politics, green shoots and all that, but not cosily environmental, more angrily mental. She said she worked with groups who were out to occupy the husks of institutes with a virtual and alternative culture based around community time-sharing. I must have looked blank. It was people, she said, who mattered for her, who “made” a place. I let that one pass. It was why she’d told me she’d been so bothered by the book of my Crazy Horse exhibition. I had, she’d felt, blotted out the people, the good with the bad. I told her I didn’t do those categories, even then. But Haf was too intense to let that pass. Blotting out human faces was denying them their humanity. I had disassembled them into machine-like pieces. I was not seeing anything beyond fragments. I had to put them together again. I said I’d hoped I was acknowledging a spirit that could not be seen or captured, only remembered. She said that now she didn’t understand. That there was no sense in having memories that did not serve life.

  We left it there for a while, though we weren’t seeing much life ourselves as we climbed higher and further until we came on the eastern rim of the former coalfield to one of the old iron and coal townships almost at a valley’s end, and even then we didn’t stop but left behind its great clefts of re-planted landscape and the concrete silos and sheds of the dead steelworks, on whose re-claimed acreage the windows in clusters of executive houses now winked hopefully in the fitful sunlight. We followed the signs that proclaimed, in stylish blue-and-gold Euroscript, Canolfan Cymoedd Dyfodol : Future Valleys Centre. The road took us through a gothic arch, a stone gateway, down a drive through a thickly wooded deciduous copse with ornamental ponds and lichened statuary hidden behind glossy evergreen shrubbery bushes. The square coalowner’s house that had long ago become council offices waited at the end of a rutted and potholed drive, but to its right a newer strip of road led us on to a glass and chrome cube, the Canolfan. The car park was to the side and the back and already full of cars more recent and gleaming than Haf’s French banger. She lined it up between a black Saab convertible and a steel-grey Golf.

  The short walk back to the Canolfan gave us the 360° perspective on the higher hills of an escarpment above us and the wooded slopes, screening any unsightly human habitation, below us. At the entrance to the Canolfan I waved an embossed press card and steered Haf, with a knowing smile at the doorkeepers, into the downstairs atrium. A couple of hundred people were either queuing up for coffee at long linen-covered tables or clutching their cups and moving thoughtfully in the very centre of the space around a glass-covered dome in which a model of the proposed development sat. Haf and I skipped the coffee and went straight for a gawk. The modelled development ascended in pentagon-like building pods from the lower wooded slopes above the valley townships until they scattered, seed-like, around the Canolfan on this flatter ground and then climbed again, built into the walls of the escarpment, nestling in abandoned quarries, colonising mountain pools and rivulets as in the trajectory of a waterfall going in reverse. The model’s landscape had been sculpted with an eye for the detail of the terrain, down to tinted pathways and the painted-in re-planting, a colour scheme of sage green and eggshell blue hinting at an outdoor/indoor Georgian idyll. But the pods, the capsules, were the thing. They were individual pentagons of glass-fronted rooms, set above a car port with carousel elevators, each one three tiers high and capped by roofs of weathered pine that were pitched at 20° angles so they almost appeared flat. The pods were interlinked by tubular glass and steel passageways leading from their second tiers. What made their uniformity somehow organic was the support structure each one had. Their skeletal frames of matt-burnished steel were legs which stood at different angles and heights depending on the lie of the land. They looked as if they were adjusting their weight and stance to embrace the earth on which they squatted. Here and there the architect had dotted a few expensive-looking cars, a number of tanned and suited men and women who even in their mannequin form seemed cheerfully at ease, powerful. And, positioned at car doors, in front of elevators, in the shrubbery there were other figures, more bowed and in attendance, a platoon or two of servants.

  All around us was a murmur of approval. You could tell which particular man-a
nd-womankind these spectators envisaged as themselves. Haf was giving wall maps and diagrams a scholarly look that told me she knew the topography by heart. I guessed that Maldwyn had sectioned this moonscape of iron and coal patches into a forensically planned mapping of further ownership and later availability that would have given the Domesday Book compilers a run for their money. Or his money. It wasn’t a scam, of course. It was a strategy. A magnet. Be attractive if you want to attract. Silly me, as Ceri had told me. Haf had displaced any emotional revenge she might have wanted to feel into what she saw as a more acceptable vengeance against these predatory exploiters, these fat cats, establishment bigwigs, land speculators, people movers, and here in this sanitised sanctum a whole ragbag of green and environmental and humane instincts flooded her cheeks, and made her blush with righteousness. Me, I couldn’t see anything wrong with personal revenge, the quicker the better. Outside, Sir Ceri’s black, chauffeur-driven Audi had pulled up. I saw Gwilym simultaneously emerge from a shoal of notables like an oil slick in search of a better beach. That would be Ceri, then. I’d forgotten how gestures had changed. The European creep, even here. In the old days, between old friends, a nod of the head and a grip of a handshake. But, here, now, Gwil actually embraced Ceri, who, in turn, did not stiffen. They were almost kissing. Ceri turned, smile at the ready, and then the wince did come, in the shape of a frown directed my way. I had been standing to make sure that I was in his eyeline. I positively beamed. My mouth cracked open so wide that it could have accommodated the San Andreas fault line. He looked hard at Haf. He would have read the letter. This was my counterstrategy. And I could tell it had disturbed him. Then things got even better.

  Maldwyn’s nose was squashed into a wrap-around bandage. His eyes were two small blood oranges, peeled, and the cuts and abrasions to his cheeks were a homage to the memory of Tommy Farr’s seventh round against Joe Louis in 1937, as told to me by the old man. I don’t recall Tommy having a broken arm after his slugfest with Joe, but my Tommy had given Mal one, for sure, if that sling was anything more than a fashion accoutrement. The conspirators huddled together. Ceri had changed colour when he saw Mal up close and personal, from ruddy to off-white. Gwilym had coloured in the contrary fashion, the real sign of amateur embarrassment in public that Ceri had long sloughed off. And Mal just stood there, his facial tints way off the chromatic scale of any palette used since Matisse completed a painting of his wife in green and crimson. I wondered about his teeth since his full, oh-so-kissable lips were split and scabbed. He opened them, with some difficulty, to spit something out. I muttered an “Oh” out loud with a soft purr of appreciation since there were at least two teeth missing, and his smart-arse tongue was swollen into inarticulacy.

  Sir Ceri could see that standing about was no good, that action was needed. He moved forward and onwards, the smile back in place, whilst Maldwyn hung back, consigned to his wake, with just Gwilym bobbing along beside him into the hall. Haf and I were swept along as the crowd moved in. We were close enough now to see Bran on Ceri’s other side, where his bulk had protected her from view. Mal, flanked by Wheelie who had pushed open the double-doors for him, limped down the aisle to sit in the front row. There were about two hundred chairs in the inner auditorium, rows of gilt-framed red plushed seats for the expectant backsides of councillors, estate agents, businessmen, journalists, accountants, politicians, academics and developers. A panoply of the professionally purposeful. We sat near the back and watched as the stage party assembled. The backdrop was a screen displaying the words:

  Canolfan Cymoedd Dyfodol

  Future Valleys Centre

  And to the bottom right:

  Tir y Werin : Bywyd y Werin

  A People’s Land : A People’s Life

  To the side and behind the stage party were ten-foot-high pop-ups with pictures of past, present and glorious future. There was a podium with a microphone to the left, and shiny metal boxes with pinprick blue lights. The local Mayor thanked everyone, introduced Dr Gwilym Jones, and quickly sat down. Gwilym puffed himself up like a pouter pigeon, made a few stirring remarks about historical oxygen levels, social adrenalin, and the valleys heritage – all just broken and breached ramparts apparently – before switching to a PowerPoint presentation that hailed the foresight of civic leaders, business entrepreneurs and academic creativity, all of which was set to propel us from this very base camp to the Himalayan heights we would need to ascend, socially and culturally, from the foothills of entrepreneurial endeavour where we were now stranded by our past. It was, all in all, to be a quick two-step into the future. Gwilym gushed a little more about the combination of architectural genius and locality which we had beheld in the model in the atrium, a sure-fire Gold Medal winner when built, in his opinion, and how it was making use of the sole real attribute that was left to “our people” – I liked that “our” – namely, the landscape, blighted or pristine, contaminated once, now cleared for use, an “Alpine Echo” which we, in our inane yodelling up and down the streets of a defunct past had failed to register as our true legacy. But here it was at last, caroming off the higher slopes of the foresight of our truly visionary leaders, to invigorate those below who could now look up, and hear the call. Gwilym’s speechifying flourished, on and on, for ten minutes, with more and more exotic blooms pulled from behind his back, out of his sleeves and out of his mouth, as the screen behind him dispensed with its headlines, slogans and logos, to flash images, from black and white and grey miserabilism to the cool, sharp pictography of the architectural present, and on to the fully imagined and animated hub that was our “only hope”, our very own patch of kryptonite, the super-messiah of a Future we must embrace, otherwise we perish. He ended with an introductory paean of over-the-top praise to Ceri which relished the great, self-made, articulator of the best we had been and the better we could be, in the person of the man who had, at this late stage in his distinguished career, agreed to head up the consortium that would deliver the Canolfan from concept to full reality in the next five years. Sir. To a ripple. Ceri. To a wave. Evans. To a crash. Applause. And Ceri diffidently rising, but at last on his feet. Alert, as ever, to the mood. Aware, instinctively that Gwilym had lost the audience, minutes ago, with his burbled boosterism and digital flash cards. Ceri walked slowly from his reserved seat in the front row to the podium. He paused. He began,

  “Thank you. All. And thank you, Dr Gwilym Jones. Friends, I’m afraid I can’t, this morning, match the informative flow of all that eloquence. And, as for pretty pictures, well, as you know, I don’t do those. Technically incompetent, me. I fear I am, in my own person, my very own PowerPoint presentation!”

  Laughter. A self-deprecating smile. And he leaned forward into the audience. Somehow, no longer speaking at them or to them but being, at one, in speech, with them. A conversation in all senses except for the fact that it was only him doing the speaking. I felt that I had come only to learn that, sink or swim, Ceri would not drown. I just still wasn’t absolutely sure which shore he would strike out to reach.

  “Where flattery is so shameless, Mr Chairman, blushing thanks are always inadequate – I must remember to come back sooner and stay longer. Does wonders for my self-esteem: political Viagra never felt better. And all this vigour on my home patch. For here, of course, I really am at home. Amongst friends, some very old friends. With comrades, unfashionable word for what we thought ourselves to be once. In the justest of causes.

  Home ground. As I said. Names and places I carry with me wherever I now go. And sometimes, nowadays, there are only names to remember for some places long gone. Names, my friends, which are, still, for some of us like a roll call of battle honours. Battles fought. Some won, and most lost. Always with honour.

  I drove here, up the valley, to this green and hopeful place this morning on our new bypass roads. Naturally I therefore passed around or looked down on townships and villages and streets upon whose very formation more clichés have been bestowed than we might hear in a bishop’s Easter se
rmon. The sentiment is put there, precisely, like the roads themselves to avoid the close-up look. In every sense, we have been by-passed.

  Even perhaps betrayed. Yes, I think so. A betrayal. But, as ever, of what, by whom? Betrayed by successive governments – whatever their political hue – fobbed off with the empty promises of empty warehouses, empty factory spaces, empty industrial estates. Betrayed by local government, too, in my very own vineyard of endeavour, where too often a want of imagination has been in cahoots, too many times, with a lack of faith. And betrayed from within. Betrayed by the feral, the anti-social, the resentful, the feckless who betray themselves by betraying the generation to come, and the memory of those who have been! And, for the rest, we close our doors. We blank our minds. We are atoms without fission. The chain of reaction amongst us is a mere flicker of yesteryear. And betrayed too by me. By people like me. Maybe, most of all because we have ceased to be the advocates. We speak, too often now, like the dummy on the ventriloquist’s knee.

  Why? Because we still cling to a learnt mantra. One which declares that however much is changed, all around us, materially for the better if spiritually for the worse, that, still, our values, our core sense of communities and cohesion remains one to cherish. Bollocks! It’s all bollocks, and you know it, because the whole edifice was built on a concatenation of forces that cannot be repeated, or even sustained. It is arrant nonsense to suggest we can regenerate all that has withered on the vine with buckets of social manure, vials of economic potassium and dollops of cultural bio-energy.