by Laurie Lee
The Welsh are not like any other people in Britain, and they know how separate they are. They are the Celts, the tough little wine-dark race who were the original possessors of the island, who never mixed with the invaders coming later from the east, but were slowly driven into the western mountains.
For well over a thousand years they inhabited this remote other-world, protected by poverty and their mysteries of language, showing a talent for survival in the face of Anglo-Saxon encroachment, and remaining insular, tribal and necessarily devious – border-raiders at times, passive resisters at others – but content on the whole to be left alone.
And they might have remained so, being chiefly interested in sheep, but for the discovery of the rich coal seams in the south, which took most of the farmers and shepherds off their mountainsides and put them to work underground.
Here was raised a breed of men accustomed to toiling in darkness, who grew old robbed of half their daylight, condemned to an ugly, dangerous and second-class life, bringing up their families in the waste of the pits – semi-slaves, in fact, seeking consolation, like Negroes, in music, poetry and religion, in occasional outbreaks of protest of a rhetorical nature, but mostly in the hope of something better in the life to come.
Puritan, unpredictable, in some ways still pagan, they have had to exchange their pastures for the mining slum, where the little slate-grey chapels replace their sylvan temples, their passionate hymn-singing the light they lost. But their particular strength in privation has always been the old tribal tradition, reflected in a close-knit feeling for family. Misfortune to one carries a shock-wave to all more instinctively than anywhere else in Britain. Death and disaster have always been familiar to the Welsh, and in the past have only bound them closer. The special tragedy of Aberfan is that it possessed unprecedented cruelties that threatened for the first time to erode a community.
Aberfan, it is said, suffered from two disasters – first the landslide, then an avalanche of money. The number and innocence of the victims, and the bestial nature of their death, sent a trauma around the world, a sense of unease so great that people were compelled to do something about it. So they sent money, it seemed the least they could do. Money – and toys (incredibly enough) – poured into Aberfan even before the bodies were cleared, piling a second shadow above the stricken village almost as treacherous as the first.
It proved in many ways a cruel misjudgment based on a spontaneous wave of sympathy. Of all places in need of money and toys at that time, Aberfan was perhaps uniquely the last on earth. Cash could bring little comfort to sorrow of this kind, certainly no peace of mind; and the mountain of toys – no matter how kindly meant – was, to say the least, a macabre irrelevance.
The Disaster Fund grew quickly to a million and a quarter pounds and became the source of unhappiness and division. For almost a year it remained, practically untouched, a vast and dismaying fortune, sprawling over the village like some great golden monster which no one could tame or put to use.
The problem became a lingering sickness, disturbing a part of everyone’s mind, subject of endless argument, rivalry and impotence. How was the money to be spent, and who exactly was it for – for the bereaved, or for the good of all? Many of the bereaved themselves were in no doubt about this. Why should those who escaped the tragedy benefit? The monstrous injustice of their loss could hardly allow them to feel generous, and they held unhappy meetings of protest.
The inertia of unspent wealth not only set troubled neighbour against neighbour, but also put a brake on Aberfan’s power of recovery. Now, after months of unease, some solution has been arrived at, with some lifting of the intolerable burden. Each bereaved family, it has been agreed, shall get an immediate sum of £5000, with a fund of £100,000 set aside for the injured children. ‘Now that the money issue has been settled,’ said one of the parents, ‘it may bring us a bit of peace.’
It may; but a deeper, more intangible sickness remains – the question of the cause of the disaster itself. Of all catastrophes to a community used to death in the mines this one was in every sense most vicious. Colliers’ wives have always been accustomed to sending their men off to the pit, wondering if they’d ever see them again. Men’s lives were traditionally part of the price of coal. But not those of the children, up on the surface.
Left to themselves over the months, time had drugged many of the villagers and they have been able to bury the worst of their questions. Then with the publication, last August, of the Government’s report on the tragedy, every wound was re-opened, and the darkest doubts confirmed.
For the disaster, as all feared, need never have happened. It was the result of sloth, apathy and blindness. ‘A terrifying tale,’ said the report, ‘of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings … of men led astray by foolishness or by ignorance or by a combination of both.’ Indeed, a tale of tips badly sited, recklessly maintained, and their perils blandly ignored.
Earthquake, flood, slaughter by the elements – any of these might have been accepted. But the tip that killed was not an act of God, it was put there by ordinary men, and everyone in the valleys feels somehow involved, and nobody can wholly accuse, or forgive.
Meanwhile, the lost mothers of Aberfan continue to live out their half-lives, wandering aimless round their empty houses, haunting their doorsteps, sitting dull-eyed in cafés, waiting for the afternoon climb to the graves. It is as though part of the chambers of their minds had collapsed inside them. One wonders if they will ever be entirely whole again.
I spoke to Mrs T. the local midwife, and she shook her head.
‘Some have had new babies – but it doesn’t replace. They always seem to be looking for the other one. “You’re still young,” I tell ’em, but they don’t want to think about it. A lot of ’em are worse than they were, not better. And there’s much bitterness, you know – they’ll turn away from the other children, like they just can’t bear to see them … Some of these mothers seem hollow, not with it somehow; talk to ’em, and they look right through you. The “bereaved” – I’m beginning to hate the word. It’s going to take a long time …’
Part Three
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Hills of Tuscany
In Florence the spring was over and the heat had come. The carved palaces quivered like radiators in the sun. Hot blasts of air, as from kitchen stoves, moved through the streets laden with odours of meat and frying oil. In the cheaper cafés brick-faced British tourists sat sweating and counting their crumpled money. But from the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio one could look out across the roasting roofs of the city and see the rising hills around – vistas of vine and olive, cool blue and frosted silver; a series of diminishing horizons, jagged and sparkling, floating south like icebergs in the fresh clear air.
I’d had my fill of Florence, lovely but indigestible city. My eyes were choked with pictures and frescoes, all stamped one on top of the other, blurred, their colours running. I began to long for those cool uplands, that country air, for the dateless wild olive and the uncatalogued cuckoo. I decided to walk to Siena, some fifty miles to the south, along the old road through the Chianti hills.
So I packed a rucksack, rolled up a sleeping-bag, bought a map, and left the city in a pair of stout shoes. It was noon, but it might have been midnight. The sun was blinding and the streets deserted. I took the Via Chiantigiana and walked in a daze for two hours. At two o’clock I flopped in the town square of Grassina and ate my lunch – bread, wine, fruit, and a memorable ice-cream.
In the café shade sat a row of old men with short silver hair, squeaking at one another like crickets. Nearby stood a row of mules, covered with wet sheets, and dozing. In a dry and rubbishy gutter the town idiot sat fishing with rod and line. Curly-haired children, with the gilded faces of angels, taunted him happily and baited his hook with orange peel. For some time I watched a procession of girls, in flaming red dresses, filling their kettles at the pub
lic tap. Then heavy with wine I staggered out of the town and slept for two hours on a bank of sage.
Through the late afternoon I walked six miles, climbing slowly into the hills. The road was white and deep with dust. The dust lifted like smoke on the evening wind and coated my hair and hands with tiny fragments of marble – marble of the Tuscan cities and their white cathedrals. The hedges were rimmed with dust and starred with jasmine and dog-roses, huge blossoms, heavy, dilating, fat as clotted cream, and bigger than any others I have ever seen. And at six o’clock rose the dog-rose moon and hung pure white in the daylight sky.
My bag grew heavy, and heavier as I climbed. But at last I reached the crest of the Campo dell’Ugolino and took a farewell look at the Florentine hills – classical backcloths slashed with cypresses, powdered with grape-bloom by the evening sun, and glittering with alabaster villas.
At last I felt I was on my way, I had reached the first of those magical horizons, and my feet were sound. Larks started up, and cuckoos called, and bright green lizards shot from stone to stone. Under the long evening shadows I entered Strada-in-Chianti, and marked it on my map.
Strada, strung out along its street, was cool and busy, engrossed in flashing needles. Groups of young girls sat on the pavements embroidering and making lace. Old men with sharp knives split withies as though they were flaying devils. Old women, toothlessly chewing, were plaiting straw hats with black and frenzied fingers. Only the young men were idle, squatting on their haunches outside the wine shop talking of football.
I had a meal here – spaghetti cooked with oil and butter, black wine of the village, and two fried eggs. The plump girl who served me leaned through the window and sang with voluptuous melancholy into the street. The street was full of swallows, diving low. The room was full of flies.
When I had finished, the girl helped me on with my rucksack, feeling the weight of it and puffing huge sighs of consolation through her wine-coloured lips. ‘Why do you walk?’ she asked. ‘Are you German?’ ‘No,’ said I. ‘Then why?’ she repeated, mystified. I hadn’t the word, nor the heart, to answer her.
Now through the red of sunset I went out of the village to find a place to sleep. A wood or a ruin would do, and I walked three miles looking for it. An uneasy time, full of illusions of homelessness, as the daylight dies, and the rose-warm clouds go dull, like wet ashes, and I enter the dark country and am suddenly startled by the sight of my moon-thrown shadow walking beside me.
I found a wood at last and unpacked among the bushes. The ground was hard and covered with little stones and flowers. The air was thick with the scent of thyme and honeysuckle. I rolled myself up in my bag and tried to sleep.
I shall not forget that night – it was worse than lying in the heart of a modern city. The moon came up over the trees and shone into my face like a street-lamp. Then, as though at the turn of a switch, the whole countryside suddenly began to whirr and roar, to squeak and whistle. The expected silence of the night became a cacophony of bellowing frogs, blundering beetles, crickets and cuckoos, mosquitoes, mice, donkeys, dogs and nightingales. There was no sleep or peace till the sun rose, and then it was too late and I was too stiff.
At seven I drank my bottle of water, cooled by the night, and took to the road. I was some two hours from Greve, the heart of Chianti, and there I planned to drink a lot of coffee.
I was in high deserted country, with vast views sparkling all round me. Wild wheat grew everywhere, hanging its frail bleached spears. The sun was remorseless in the sky. I went down into a deep valley of oakwoods, past sad shut farms with shell-pocked walls, over broken bridges shored up with tree trunks. This is a country of broken bridges, and almost every house has its wound. Up all these valleys the long war ground its lacerating way, leisurely dynamiting, negligently tearing off roofs, harrowing the face of the land like the passage of an ice-age. That is also the tragedy one senses in these shot-up farms, in the tommy-gun scars on the cemetery walls. Murder done quietly, passionately, with rescue bogged down on the other side of a mountain, arriving so seldom in the nick of time. No neat dreams of Hollywood but the casual truth of war.
At the bottom of the valley I found a green river and bathed in it. Soap-suds floated down among the pebbles from a washerwoman upstream; and white-smocked children, as neat as cherubim, walked along the banks on their way to school.
On this road I met a vast flock of sheep, driven by a cloaked shepherd and a mad-eyed dog. The sheep tinkled with bells. Their hooves thudded in the dust like thunder-drops. An occasional ram slunk by, his head low under the coiled weight of his horns. And one single remarkable sheep caught my eye – was it mascot or mystic symbol? – its shorn hide tattoed with an elaborate crucifix and scarlet fleur-de-lys.
Here also among the wheatfields stood a crude memorial to a young man murdered there in 1899. A wayside cross decorated with flowers and skulls, and a legend lamenting the deed. And nearby, cutting the hedge, a merry roadman in a brilliant waistcoat embroidered with stars and roses.
At nine-thirty that morning I entered Greve, a town smelling of pure wine. Its outside walls were shattered with dynamite, but within was an ancient piazza quiet and arcaded like a cloister. Here I rested and took a late breakfast, while a woman set up a stall of cherries and a dog sniffed a snake-skin in the road. There was no one else to be seen.
Later, with a bottle of Chianti, some bread and fruit, I climbed four miles through the blazing morning and entered Panzano, a village roosting like a red hen on the top of a sharp hill.
I found Panzano full of fête and excitement. It was the day of the annual bicycle race. Young men, with brown legs and very short shorts, were limbering up or pinching their bicycle tyres. In the square there were stalls selling ice-creams, medicine, balloons, copper jars, looking-glasses, and American chewing-gum. There were flags and summer-looking girls everywhere. It was to be a great day.
But I left it and came down a steep hill that coiled into the heart of another valley. And my feet began to ache and thirst to plague me. The road forked, and there was no signpost. I asked an old woman for Castellina, and evilly she bade me take the left one.
In this valley I paused at midday by a stream that came tumbling cold from the hills. In this water I cooled my wine, put my cherries to wash in a little whirlpool, and hung my burning feet in the chill current among the tickling fishes. It was an ecstasy of mirage and delirium – to be experienced only after four hours of footing a white-hot mountain road. I drank the cool wine and ate my bread and cherries, then stretched myself out among the wheat which grew to the water’s edge. The depth of the wheat was a tangle of wild flowers: moon-daisies, gentians, scarlet poppies; with columbines twining up the wheatstalks and hanging their blossoms among the ripening ears. It was a good place to be. Nearby, a charm of nightingales flooded the daylit branches of a wood. Slightly drunk, crooning and groaning, I sang myself to sleep.
When I took to the road again, and had walked some miles, the sun was not where it should have been. I had a feeling I was walking in the wrong direction. And I was.
Two country policemen appeared, unshaven, brandishing rifles, who bid me halt, examined my papers, sucked their teeth at me, inquired why in God’s name I was walking, on foot, and then told me Radda was just round the corner. I didn’t want Radda; it meant I had come nearly ten miles out of my way. But there was another road back to Castellina, along the top of the hills. ‘Pleasant?’ I asked. ‘No, brutish,’ they said.
They were right. First I climbed the cliff into Radda, sucking sharp lemons and grunting under my burden. Then for two and a half hours I walked the hog’s back, through dust and rocks and thorns, but on top of the world, with the great blue distances south of Siena appearing for the first time.
It was hard going, but I wanted to sleep south of Castellina that night. I met no one on that road but snakes and lizards. I walked with sweat in my eyes and the devil of thirst in my mouth. But I passed through one of the most wild and beautiful stretches of c
ountry in the whole of middle Italy, the roof of those green and secret valleys where the grape-bubbles of Chianti swell and sweeten in the sun. That night I camped on a high plain two miles south of Castellina, on a platform of ground commanding great views. When the blue night came, the distances below me, with their many villages, sprang into clusters of light, like diamonds scattered on velvet. I lay down with my head against a bush, and in the bush there was a nesting bird. For some time she fluttered nervously with her wings, but in the end we slept at peace together; and I slept well.
When I woke late on that last morning the first thing I saw was a fantastic town of golden towers, surrounded by oak woods, lying some fifteen miles to the west. It was San Gimignano, that medieval parody of Manhattan, soaring, glittering, and unbelievable.
Then, as I moved my head, suddenly I discovered Siena, hiding behind the bush. I had been waiting for my first sight of it, and I had somehow missed it in the twilight of yesterday. It stood far off, but clear, a proper city, rose-red and ringed by a great wall, with cathedral and palaces topping its trinity of hills and all the green country rising and breaking round it. It was a city compact as a carved Jerusalem held in the hand of a saint. And behind it hung a folded mountain, blue, like a curtain nailed against the sky.
So I took the road once more – the last leg of my journey, and of my strength. The sun was inexorable, the landscape already quivering like water in the heat. I walked in a dream of thirst and aching muscles. Lizards and dragonflies sprang from beneath my toes. White oxen, with horns like swords, ploughed drunkenly in the fields, slicing the chocolate earth.
Then I spied a farm on the skyline, with two women herding pigs. I decided to beg for water. I came up the hill, blond, burnt, in my khaki slacks, bowed by my fool’s burden. But the women saw me coming. ‘Tedesco! German!’ they screamed. Pigs, goats, poultry were driven into the farm, doors slammed, windows shuttered. Guiltily I passed the shell-shot buildings, and silently they watched me.