Once

by McNeillie, Andrew

  Ifor was an all-weather amphibious man. He had slightly bulging eyes, permanently surprised by the world, and wore his iron-grey hair slicked with Brylcream or Brilliantine back from his temple. His nose was round enough for him to look like a seal, or perhaps an otter, especially on a wet day. He was a kind of freshwater seal, a wet-fly man for all seasons and conditions, and an indefatigable, taciturn foot-soldier, who had been an infantryman in the war. Nothing deterred him and once at the lake he would fish and fish, casting and casting, the same three flies if he could, with rarely a rest all the day, but for a reluctant brew, and pause to check his barbs were intact, and not ripped off in the back-cast, among the rocks, a great hazard of the place and cause of lost fish:

  To fish there you wade in air among

  the rocks angling for your balance.

  Black water chops ashore and the torrent

  holds you bubble-rapt in its sound-warp

  like a dipper submerged in a rushing pool

  intent on caddis larvae.

  If one of the others came by to know

  your luck it could startle you to death.

  Ghosts as they are, or not. They haunt here

  like the stories they told of ones that got away.

  The steep cwm will catch your cast more

  than ever those wily fish might rise before you

  to a hook ripped of its barb on a rock.

  I learnt in this place, from the age of ten,

  to curse like a man, ‘God damn it to hell,’

  to brew tea in a smoke of heather stalks and downfall,

  to tie instant bloodknots and a noose

  round the neck of the Bloody Butcher

  while the fish moved out of range

  as now that world has veered forever

  and every finger’s a thumb, my reading glasses

  beaded with rain, and not a fish to be seen.

  Ifor was a durable man, in the best way, as soft and gentle, shy and humorous, as you’d wish. He was palpably shy and would regularly blush, as if he was innocent. As if anyone was innocent. Don’t we dwell in a fallen world? I assure you we do whatever your religious view or view of religion. But you always felt he was a man to be in a tight corner with, if ever you found a tight corner to be in. He had a stubborn streak. You felt you’d have to kill him to succeed against him. He caught fish. He knew how to do it. He had no fancy rod or reel, just old tried, trusted standbys of indeterminate vintage. He kept his own company mostly, as did we all, though sometimes if fate brought us in each other’s way, the men might pause for a joint brew and a little metaphysics, about light and temperature and wind-direction and the feeding habits of the Black Lake’s trout, a dour race, denizens of a dour place, about prospects, about likely fishing flies.

  Solitaries we might be but we kept common worlds. We each had our trinity, our three lives: the one we escaped at home, work and school; the one we lived, here and now, in common things and the trance of thought; and last the dream-come-true by evening, weighed down with brown trout, none less than three-quarters of a pound in our creel, a full creel, never an empty creel, to cut into your shoulder for your trouble. We were nothing if we weren’t dreamers, dreaming meaning into being.

  ‘Diw,’ Ifor winked at me, his lips pursed to smile, and chuckling to himself and to my father as he climbed in, ‘I see you’ve brought the tea-boy, then...’.

  Tea-boy I didn’t take to. But the beauty of boyhood among men is that it has no voice, or hadn’t one, in those days, when you were seen and not heard. Like a subject people, boyhood must be content to endure and bide its time. Boyhood dreams. It bears witness. It stares. It is capable of murderous brutality, with its airgun in the killing fields, its snares and hooks. (Or so it was all that time ago.) It is an eye. It is a soul and soul is never more fierce and beautiful than in its first encounters with the world.

  Ifor and I had another thing in common. We had both passed the eleven-plus. That was one of the first things people would tell you about him, in some wonder. He had gone to the grammar school at Abergele. Would you believe that when you met him? The wives of the village would tell you, Ifor was a truant dreamer and a wastrel. There were those who claimed he wasn’t all that bright. His eleven-year-old success must have been a mistake on the part of the examiners. Did they make the same mistake with me? (Don’t ask.)

  Sometimes at home things turned bad for Ifor now and then. Too many pints at the Sun, too many games of bowls or too much fishing. On these occasions he sometimes slept the night on a bench in the village hall. We seemed to know when he was in the dog-house and waited for him there. The prison-house of the grammar school had done little for him, perhaps, unless it inspired him to dream, as it surely did for me. You took him on to paint your house and one moment he was up the ladder and the next moment nowhere to be seen. It was as if the ladder gave him a leg-up away somewhere into the mountains (perhaps to Llyn Anafon, one of his other favourite haunts, haunted, as haunted me, by the story they used to tell of a fisherman who drowned there).

  He knew the lakes at first hand, and he knew them from a classic book, a fisherman’s Bible, that one day he’d give my father, The Lakes of Wales (1931) by Frank Ward. But he never talked to me about the book and nor did my father. I’d set eyes on it but I only discovered it to read after they were all dead, Trefor, Ifor, and John.

  Who has not complained at not asking enough questions when young while the dead were living? The explanation is simple: we don’t know what the questions are until too late. Here for whom I do not know, I am writing down my answers. So it goes round. And the truth is even harder, for hindsight’s no more 20:20 than first sight.... Memory’s selective, and writing must be more so, being founded in omission, where at best less might mean more.

  We went to the Black Lake to fish and not to reflect on folklore and myth. The only myths we had time for concerned 6lb fantasy trout that no one ever caught. Though who never saw such a one, rising with a swirl like an oar’s puddle? My father saw them all the time.

  But here is what Ward’s book had to say (his spellings preserved):

  “The Black Lake” is about half a mile in length and lies in a remarkable rock basin at the foot of the precipices of Craig-y-Dulyn between Y Foel Fras and Carnedd L’ywelyn. Bare rock walls from 150 to 600 feet in height practically enclose it, descending steeply into the water. The outlet is very narrow, just wide enough for the small stream flowing from the lake, and the general aspect is decidedly sinister, suggesting a deep flooded crater. Dulyn may be reached in about three hours from Bedol Inn on the road from Trefriw to Tal-y-cafn. The trout here are shy but there are some good fish. Average weight is 1/2lb., with a chance of anything up to 1 lb. or more. The water is very deep (it has been sounded up to 189 feet), black and cold, and contains many rocks and stones. It is a late lake and fishes best at dawn and sundown in June, July and August, but owing to its remote situation, and the fatiguing walk to and fro, is not often visited by anglers. It is one of the impounding reservoirs belonging to the Llandudno Town Council. Permits are issued at a charge of 5s per day by the Waterworks Engineer, Town Hall, Llandudno. There is no boat available for anglers.

  In the seventeenth century a belief prevailed that whoever, on one of the three “spirit nights” – All Hallows Eve, May Day Eve, and Midsummer Eve – watched beside this lake, would see who were to die in the coming year.* There were unfounded stories of deformed fish and of birds avoiding the lake, also there was a causeway running into it, of which the farthest stone was called the Red Altar. It was believed that in hot weather, to stand on the causeway and throw water on to the Red Altar would cause rain before nightfall.

  This is what Ifor knew, along with whatever else he kept to himself.

  (There was no charge levied to fish there in our time. 5s each a day would have been preventative.) Marie Trevelyan reveals that the lake was also said to be a point of entry into the Celtic underworld, Annwn or Annwfn, and tells that a dove appearing by
those ‘black and fateful waters’

  foretokened the descent of a beautiful but wicked woman’s soul to torment.... Fiends would arise from the lake and drag those who had led evil lives into the black waters. Those who had led good lives would be guided past the causeway leading to the lake, and vanish in spirit forms robed in white.

  It was for all of us an entry into the underworld of the heart and mind, the soul itself, both when we were there, and when we were not, the place we haunted to stave off the world’s demands and stresses on our time, the place that haunted and possessed us. It was my first love affair. The real thing, at first sight, and, in this case, at first hearing. For I heard tell of it of course before ever I saw it, and I saw it first in the mind’s eye.

  I knew only one Black Lake myth in those days and believed it for fact, as did the others who told it me, and who died before I could tell them the truth. We believed that the aircraft flattened into the high crag, like a moth buckled and splattered on a car windscreen, was a German bomber that had lost its way returning from a raid on Liverpool. Here was the war haunting my world again, like the Laundry Hill siren, but no warning for those men and no all clear above the mountain, just the ghosting mist and the rock behind it. I used to wonder about the rear-gunner, looking back into the night, as the plane concertina’d exploding into the crag. Who was he? What were the last seconds of his life? By what fraction did he outlive the others in the cockpit?

  You might still see wreckage up there now, for all I know. It is some years since I was there (as in the poem above) and I could see none then, the mist being down, tumbling back into the cauldron. But it held great fascination for me in those years and when we fished at the far corner below the cliffs I would sometimes tire of catching nothing and clamber up through the rocks and search among them, among the bilberries, the myrtle and heathers, for bits of aluminium, misshapen nuggets from the furnace of the impact, or meccano-like strips of aluminium from fuselage, wing or tail.

  Once I found a twisted piece, the size of my thumb, a slug of light alloy forged in the flames, from which protruded, miraculously, an intact light-bulb, something from the instrument panel, I suppose. I hoarded these little treasures in a cardboard fishing-reel box, for some years. But now when I’d like to cast my eye over them again, I find they have gone the way of all things, into the dark, into the underworld, where those airmen, or whatever burnt offering remained of them, fell to their doom.

  They were Germans. They were the enemy and as a callous boy and youth I shed no tears for them or their nightmare fate. Hadn’t ‘The Dambusters’ been one of the first few films I ever saw, in ‘The Supreme’, Old Colwyn, through a fug of cigarette smoke, the projection room like a gun-turret under fire, spluttering and flickering, and stuttering suddenly to a halt, as if hit, and the world gone black a worrying five minutes or more, while they spliced the celluloid back together or fixed a fuse somewhere, and we got into the smoke-filled air, airborne again, aboard one of those Lancaster bombers my grandfather had helped make, in an underground factory near Guiseley, banking up at the last minute on practice runs over the English lakes? Night-scenes, black lakes. Wasn’t the war still the stuff of our comics and our lives? The Krauts, the Hun... our boyhood enemies, fought to the death in the Fairy Glen?

  Now I know the true story: the plane was an American Douglas, not a German Heinkel, of the 27th Air Transport Group, bound on a flight from Le Bourget, Paris, to Burtonwood, on the morning of 12 November 1944. But Burtonwood was fog-bound and the flight was diverted to RAF Valley on Anglesey. It never arrived. Ten days later, tail overhanging the cliffs all that was recognizable of the plane, the scene of the crash was found, with mail scattered all around, blown here and there by the blast and then on the wind.

  There died on the cold mountain: second lieutenants William C. Gough, pilot, and his co-pilot Richard Rolff; radio operator Corporal Hyman Livitski; and their flight engineer Staff Sergeant Kirk McLoren. RIP. What other memorial do they have than this? But that day in June I didn’t know about them, though I knew about the plane, for my father had already brought bits of debris home, for me, and so began my macabre collection.

  * * *

  No one went into the mountains with greater fortitude and purpose than Ifor. Not even Moses. Not even my father who also never seemed to register physical discomfort, least of all in the name of brown trout. Though he once approved a retreat from just below eagle crag and the red rocks greatly to Ifor’s disgust. I think he did it thinking of me, skinny-wiry wee man as I was, mindful of the time when I nearly caught my death of cold on a day of bitter unrelenting rain and had to be carried in to the house, running a temperature, feverish. At which my mother railed.

  We’d not been at the Black Lake that day but fishing for salmon smolts in a little lake at the head of the Lledr, high up above Dolwyddelan. When we caught them we snipped off their adipose fins and put them back. It was a pioneer scheme to identify hatchery-bred salmon. I believe I was not yet ten but I’m not sure. We still lived on Red Wood Road then. But what I see clearly in my mind’s eye is the old split-cane rod I used there, with its green bindings. And why would I have used it if I already had Scotia? I’m sure therefore this was an early expedition, predating Black Lake times by a year or more. We went there twice. The second time was a sunny day. I remember snatching a dragon-fly out of the air so as to be able to see up close what this beautiful thing was that I’d never seen before. And I remember that because I remember my father praising me for being fearless, not thinking such a vivid thing, as vivid as a wasp, might sting me.

  Ifor’s other passion was crown-green bowling. The first place vexed housewives would look to find him when he was truanting from painting their houses was on the bowling green. Though he bore no physical wound, like Laurence Sterne’s character Uncle Toby he had seen action at the gates, something they said he’d been involved in, of men burnt alive in a tank. After which a man, windfall of war’s storm, might be forgiven anything, and I wonder if it wasn’t the trauma of battle detained Ifor’s thoughts, and turned his head from house-painting, and led him to the bowling green, or into the mountains, the backside of the desert on a very different campaign. There was no out-of-battle counselling for his generation, any more than for those in Caesar’s legions, or the tribe of Israel, or the heroes of Bannockburn.

  When we became a foursome, after picking up Trefor down at Min-y-Don, a South Walean draftsman, he worked with my father at Ratcliffe’s, and was a most melancholy and inexpert fly-fisherman, the first to put on a worm and sit forlornly with a fag and a brew. We would drive the empty road down the Conwy valley, past Bodnant road end to Tal-y-Cafn.

  The river ran broad and tidal here, and stirring to the heart as waters are in the first of daylight. Herons fished there, and cormorants would ride the tide, and shelduck pattered about in the mud, and any number of scolding gulls harried in the quick flood of the morning. Rarely was there so much as a milk lorry or a bread van on the road, or a tractor, or a herd of dung-splattering cows crossing to or from early milking. So early would we be.

  We crossed the river and wound up towards the hills, to Tal-y-Bont. This was the way – thirteen miles – my father used to cycle from the village, before he bought the ‘brake’, leaving his bike at Y Bedol (the horsehoe pub: lucky for some, on the way home). From there he’d set off up the steep and narrow, hairpin hill, past Tan-yr-Allt on the corner, and up another wooded hill – an allt a word like holt and meaning the same – the three-hour footslog to the Black Lake. Then all the way back he must come at the end of it. Were we physically harder then? We were, and what dreamers of the dream: that life is more than our betters ordain.

  It was a talking point for my benefit on this first trip that I ran by Ifor in the Fairy Glen on the very day the eleven-plus results were announced and didn’t stop to tell him I had passed. I still remember my surprise at being teased about this. I can still remember running past him. He had barely entered and I was almost out, runn
ing late for school. I didn’t think it right to say.... It seemed like showing off. Nor did I know Scotia was in the offing. Nor did I know this day would dawn and that my apprenticeship in the art of fly-fishing was shortly to begin, and that I’d go to the Black Lake with my father and the other men for my initiation into the rituals of manhood come June. This was the beginning of the poem and its meaning, to sustain me against the abuses of the modern world, and so to resist them. As I do now as best I can and will to my dying day.

  I could never hear the word Dulyn enough. And that was just as well because it had even begun to vie in my father’s repertoire of hallowed places with Clutag, the farm in Galloway where he had spent crucial childhood and boyhood years. Dulyn, the black lake... Dulyn the mysterious, stubborn, unyielding and unforgiving black lake... the ‘sinister’ lake, where they said, untruly, no birds crossed; and where no one ever went and if anyone did, you knew he was the shepherd from Llanfairfechan, out with his jack-russell and mongrel terriers and folding four-ten shotgun, in pursuit of foxes among the rocks, to protect his flocks. Though once up there, one late summer afternoon, we met two elderly ladies in grey tweed suits, perspiring from their exertions, like sheep before shearing. They had come to see the lake. Refined Welsh ladies, students of myth, perhaps, ladies from Llangollen, maybe. Another time we met the engineer from the Water Board (there was a small pumping house tucked away under the slope beyond the overspill), the lake also serving as a reservoir as Ward says.