Once

by McNeillie, Andrew

  But I don’t remember seeing another angler there and god knows what would have happened had we done so. The sky would have fallen. We might have stoned him to death or drowned him. So primitively territorial did we feel regarding that place. Though it wasn’t really that we laid claim to it but that it possessed us.

  * * *

  You could only drive so far up in an ordinary vehicle, and how far depended on the time of year, in those days, in the fifties. Hard on winter’s onset, the frost and snow would break up the bed of the track and shift boulders and create new potholes and perils. We used to stop way down after the first gate, above Rowlyn Isaf farm, a place that stood scarcely visible below the single-track road beyond a raised drystone wall. It was either a glorified hafod (a summer place) now, or a place on a Sunday where no one ever seemed to be about to be seen. Perhaps the occupants were huddled in the kitchen over their breakfast, or having a lie-in, on the day of rest, getting ready for chapel, or snoring off last night at the Bedol, oblivious of any sermon anywhere that morning.

  What text would it have been? ‘Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro... and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God’? Or: ‘I do set my bow in the cloud...’? ...Though now and then it’s true I remember catching sight of a man there, disappearing round the corner of a building, the farmer or his son, or son-in-law, and once or twice a sheepdog barked, as we girded ourselves to be off, in the chill of dawn, as if we’d read Moses’s tablets of stone. Then we would walk through the little wood, into which the road bowed.

  The first stages in a walk of any ambition, any duration, out in the wilderness, seem always the same to me in this respect. They force you into yourself, your native self, to get the measure of it all, the reality of putting one foot in front of the other, the first steps of how many? The reality of the cold and unaccommodating air hits you. You must be your own upholder, within yourself. And how many steps before you have any rhythm and hope of making it to your destination? Steps that divest you of your daily life and deliver you into your body and out of mind, and into mind deeper than you know, deep as life itself. As if you are walking into yourself.

  In this case it was also a matter of making it in time, in time for some passage if not the whole of the morning rise. The early bird catches the worm. Or in Trefor’s version, the early worm catches the fish. O the crooked worm, the sinful serpent. Like members of some impossible religious sect, we wanted to be purists, to fish with the fly, and in my father’s case a dry one – one that floats on the surface – given half a chance, and of his own designing. Poor Trefor was an apostate in our midst.

  There were three trout rises in the day: morning, meaning first thing, not at that elusive fine-grained monochrome moment known as the scraich (blink and you miss it) but shortly in its wake. At some points in the season the morning rise lingered a little towards nine, sometimes beyond, on mild mornings. Then there were noon and evening. The first and last were the best, and if the first was always early, the noon rise was usually the most understated, the subtlest and the most elusive, some fish it seemed preferring to skip lunch or to sit under a rock with their sandwiches. Setting yourself to fish between the rises was more a matter of dedication and prayer than reason for hope. Though a rise might suddenly come on, stimulated by a hatch of insect life, and that is what we’d keep a weather-eye on as we toiled. There were seasons within the season too: March to early May, when the icy water began to warm and the fish were lean; late May and July, among the best days; August for dog days, not so marked up there (and when for two weeks we’d usually be elsewhere, on our holidays, on the Lly^n peninsula at Llanbedrog or away in Galloway); and soft and cooling September, for me always and still the best of them all, when the fish are ripe as fruit.

  So keep up, run a step or two already, as the hare in the little wood, not a mountain hare, slender and blue, but an old bog-standard brown hare, delays you, as it sails zig-zag out of view among the regenerate bracken, in the shadows of silver birch, here and there stunted oak, rowan, thorn. This is a place of damp and moss, moss on boulders, on branches, and grey lichen, of sheep track, and low branches tagged with wool. That’s not a blackbird flitting there but a ring-ouzel up from the stream. That’s a wren, the king of all birds, and even there a robin, from the midden below at the farm. It’s colder here at this time of day. The night has lain later here.

  But run a step, your bag slapping your hip, wee boy, wee bachall, your breath visible on the cold air. Catch them up. The day is very young, younger than you are. Step up. They’ll pay you no heed. They’ll not wait for you or for your benefit. They have their minds on the time, on the light on the water away up there, miles of gasping miles ahead, where the kettle takes all but an hour to boil, especially if the heather’s wet and the bleached waftage from the lake jammed in among the rocks, soggy.

  Can you hear your father’s voice as he anticipates the day with Trefor? They’re speculating about a rippling breeze, so vital to fair casting and concealment, and a dimpling fish feeding at the point or in the little bay, or far round at the northwest corner where the stream feeds in off the cliff, from the windblown waterfall. They’re thinking about trout and talking together about them, your father’s voice the prevailing one. I can still hear it. (I’m sure it’s close enough to call my own.) Fall in with Ifor if you can. He prefers more to march in silence a few steps behind the others. He’ll look after you in his fashion. He won’t see you as you see yourself. None of them does. But you’re a boy soldier none the less, as if you lied about your age when they signed you up, to take the trout’s shilling.

  Then up on the brow now where the little quarry or cut would be the next place accessible for parking once the winter’s new perils were mended. It’s breath-taking now, literally, as the air is suddenly filled to bursting with buffets and tugs and the wilderness, north and south, opens before you, wide and barren, and the track narrows to a distant point away towards Llyn Eigiau. Here is our covenant, our bow in the clouds. Here’s the poem of it:

  Air and cold light to take the breath

  from your lips, as if those looming clouds

  wanted moisture and the llyn didn’t

  mount and brim with melt and downpour

  away up there at the head of the cwm,

  March mad to be there as cold as winter.

  They halted and parked up; jammed

  a rock under a wheel, and set off.

  The first stretch of potholed track across the bog

  took ten gallon strides out of the boy,

  and his oilskin chafed and the new boots.

  But the Greenhart sweetheart Scotia

  his rod and staff to hand, did comfort him,

  before the full force of the wind

  in the shock of his hair, at the red rocks,

  and the distance was a dream to step into,

  and none of it beyond his little strength

  his stronger pliant heart determined.

  When I wrote it I called this flawed effort ‘Prelude’. Now I’d call it ‘Scotia’. But ‘Prelude’ was no careless allusion. Though I was years from knowing it then at tender ten years old, seven or eight years away from it, I suppose. Discovering Wordsworth’s epic was a revelation to me, not just as to the territory of the Black Lake either, but as to everything I lived, at the Wooded Hill with its winter woodcock, and everywhere I went, and every dream I dreamt, along the shore.

  It could have been a poem about my childhood, a poem about me. It gave me a shock of pleasure to find that poem when I found it such as few things discovered at school ever did, except Charles Baudelaire and the history master’s daughter. I didn’t realise it at the time, but life in the ‘unknown world’ would shortly prove it, I lived a poem as I grew up, between the Red Wood and the Wooded Hill and at the apex of our days, stood the Black Lake, and in their district I circled more besides, ar lan y mor down on the estuary (wild with all regret, now), where no longer do the bass pre
ss in like sex on the adolescent tide, as it chokes the river back upstream.

  * * *

  A ten-year-old perspective is barely sustainable even if it could ever be convincingly achieved by any other than a ten year old. Then how much of it could you take? Not much, not for long. Otherwise, who’s to know it’s not a nine-year-old or an eleven-year-old one, or just fiction, a gesture in the direction of the beginning, from, in my case, the vantage and disadvantage point of sixty years. Just let me try to hold my pen to the idea of it, and to hold you to it, on your first trip to Dulyn now, as if in the month of June, in 1957, whether you’ve been back since or not. Fifty years divides the truth of it (to the very month of June as I write) and adds it up again, making what?

  Nor is it as easy as it might have been. It would be easier if that first trip had been the only one, the one and only time of vivid sensation in that place: once not often. Once and never again. I would remember it starkly. As I did when I went to that other black pool of water, Dublin – the same word with Dulyn – when I was four. The fact that no sooner had I been to the Black Lake for the first time than I was back again a week later, complicates the matter, and compounds it with superimpositions, like a negative multiply exposed. The single experience in a series is lost to the gaze and to remembrance.

  The future reveals the unoriginality of all we attempt and all our vanity. It exposes the wiring invisible now on which we’re strung. It is the granary floor. It is the ground on which we’re winnowed. There’s no originality but survives that process, and we don’t know what it is or might be, from our perspective here and now, for every age has its take on such matters, and its own take on beauty, its vogues. But originality there is and truth will ring out and ring true forever. As only a base fool and empty relativist smart alec would deny.

  Embarking on this writing, from the ground of my being, I saw clearly at once that the Black Lake should hang at the centre of the triptych. (Though I’m writing it first of the three.) I see it as the middle passage, a rite of passage, the zone of imagination and innermost being, the water-zone of wilderness and wet. My mind’s I and my mind’s eye. It is the trig-point at the apex of a telling triangulation. Telling being the word. (Tell me the story of your life, my father used to bid me, laughing, as we waited for the kettle to boil, huddled away up there among the rocks. Give me the benefit of your crack.)

  But even otherwise the Black Lake occupies a border place, being the region that spills into the Red Wood and the Wooded Hill, whether by cloudburst over them, precipitated by the mountains, or by pipeline, into them, into your quickfire morning’s groaning and wheezing kettle on its orange-and-blue bleary blurting gas flame and your first comforting cuppa, into that huge percentage of you that is water and water alone. At what point might you be water from Caw Lwyd, or water from the Black Lake, discernibly to forensic science? I have been both. Though now I am neither, except in mind, and that is more than enough.

  As we go and pause for breath, or to enjoy the view, or both, I’ll fill in any flashbacks I might have, as for example up at Clogwyn in knifing rain by 7am. I’ll try to be as seamless as water, flowing this way and that, through time and truth. My witnesses on that day and all those days up there are dead. I could lead you a merry dance up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen, to my heart’s delight if not to yours, and you’d be none the wiser, for there’s no one to gainsay me.

  But I won’t. And wouldn’t you be the wiser? I have too much respect for you to doubt it. The farthest cry though it be from your own experience, it wouldn’t be the first time you spotted a falsehood at a thousand yards, or where have you lived in the unknown world all your life and what have you been up to?

  * * *

  Now it is serious. Now you know you have scarcely begun and the world seems huge, and there is some kind of fear in it, as you step manfully on behind the men, hurrying next to pass them, because you want to open the gate. But can you lift it up on its hinges and draw the ice-cold bolt at dawn? At the iron five-bar on the mountain road they’ll take an early breather, to consume the long view home, the foreshortened view up ahead. It’s still no nearer now, or easier, than when in those days they’d pause, to speculate about the weather and the rise, while I’d sail by to scoot the gate shut, swinging it to, with a clang that still jars through me, and as I grew older and with my youthful strength, kicked my heels to be off.

  Now here I am like them, at the gate again with you, pausing with my pen, remembering how the year my feet grew big enough to wear my father’s cast-off boots, I took giant manful steps ahead, hobnailed, to hell with waiting, perfecting the gait that still marks me out on life’s road?

  How I love a mountain road, its disappearing line, as if headed for eternity. The image of this one has haunted me ever since I used to walk it all but every week from chilly March to cool September. Though headstrong I am no more, if ever I really was. My head’s weakened by the world’s tragedy these days and I write from a consciousness of my own weakness, and loss. The already-fallen world lost, like paradise before it. What is there to lose next? Sense perception... the beloved. So make good your losses while you can.

  I made that gate sing out on the mountain road, and went scooting in an arc round its tether, at first light, hinged to life. Now as I say I’m unhinged by remembrance and wrecked by grief at the horror, the horror of man’s inhumanity towards the world, the devastated globe. But was it the first day I did that first? It’s a long road and it has no turning right or left, until you’re at its very end, where the spine of broken green floods out into boggy ruts grazed by sheep, or in those days it did, to more-or-less a sheep-path way, down to Llyn Eigiau, a shallow, silty, shrinking water under Craig Eigiau, not up at the head of its cwm. You can just make out from here the long retaining wall with the gap punched through it, the gravity dam that so gravely gave way and sent the billowing lake hurling all before it, down into Dolgarrog village, one tragic night of disaster in 1925. (The Deluge my father had called it in a tale he published in 1951.)

  But the road was a rough track, and potholed, and broken, and if you ventured down it in the brake, you’d ground your sump, crack your – what was it? – your differential, wreck your exhaust. Now you can drive with ease to the parking place and join the centipede army of mountain boots, enemy of heather and myrtle, of moss and peat and stone and all wild life and nesting birds such as the heart has known.

  Make no concessions? Take your stand against the heartless progress? Maintain it forever? It will be to no avail, drones the wind-turbine, and burns the laser-sun. Rome fiddles while we burn. But the stones know better and have the patience of Job, such as modern western man has not, in any measure, and what if he had, with his time running out? When the last home in China exchanges its old refrigerator for a new one, the balance will be tipped, the ozone game will be up, in the Oh! zone of a grief too late. Or will all this prove to have been a rhetoric of crisis as the West loses its way and Rome begins to retreat from its frontiers and to topple again?

  But global disaster’s what I hear, preacher man. What matter if the light comes on when there’s no one left to open the fridge door? When there’s no one to read the poem? Let alone write a new one. When the game is up, when all games are up, for poet and scholar, common humanity, honest poverty....? For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun? Almost anyone, now: ruined settlement, roofless hafods of our time, decline and fall re-run, aeons before the game begins again, in the mists of time.

  * * *

  By the time he reaches what we called Eigiau Corner, a boy of ten has taken many steps from the farm back there; and must be up to as many and, being tired, more again at the back end of the day, all the heartbreaking way back from this next, old, rusty gate that you cannot ride shut, or open, but must struggle to lift on its hinges and buck over boulders and rough grass and rushes, or otherwise climb.

  Now you are climbing a little and the roadbed is like a streambed, and running on the
wind along it and rocking on both sides, as far as a boy of ten can see, a sea of heather and bog and rock and rushes, and copper and gold coils of dead mountain grasses, and the wind blustering through it, flinging up a skylark, a meadow-pipit in search of a cuckoo, a blue wheatear. Early in the season the dead heather there in grey March light had the look of a bed of kelp seen at low water. When it’s raining steady cold rain and the mist is rolling off Eigiau crag you feel as if you are under the sea, down there on that stretch of track over the bog.

  There’s yet another gate, the penultimate gate, and the ultimate one might be open. This one is firmly shut. The rocks in my memory mount up more here, the track is almost lost among rocks, and then beyond the gate it zig-zags, between two lumps of outcrop, heather and gorse in their clefts, and a mountain ash. There’s a bit of an old sheepfold here. There’s a little-used fork just discernible to the right, below the ridge and round its base, leading to the dam on Afon Dulyn, east of Hafod-y-Garreg and Hafod Fach, ruins that speak of other lost worlds. Come this way I say to myself as I write, and disappear, never to be heard of again.

  But to the left the way we’re going, the track winds round and climbs along the length of the crag above, a terrace rising steeply. Here we might not stop before we reach the first brow. We’ll pass the standing stone, a sometime gate post I think, with a blind cyclopean eye, and ear-holes right through it, and either climb the steep short-cut or go round the long elbow up to meet the new brunt of weather, a new seriousness, a new distance from the world below, a new isolation, and renewal of our covenant.

  I never forget how this point in the way – this threshold – seemed to fill me with renewed resolve.