Gulls wheeled about the bulldozers to strengthen the sea-going simile, and flew in their wake, raucous airborne litter, day-in-day-out, a billowing conflagration, burning intensely at sunset, in summer from the wooded hill. In the middle ground, the gasometer went up and down like an iron lung, according to the tides of consumption and supply, high and low water, breathing in sea-air corrupted by the tang of refuse, endless garbage from the town’s hotels. But it was all beautiful to me, the salt air and the windy town, the mountains, the islands, the estuary and the running sea: my province to find beauty in ugliness. Why wouldn’t it be?
For Nature is everything and nothing without the human entanglement. Or who’d sing and celebrate it and all its wonder and waste? Who’d pay it homage? Apart from the shorebirds with their starry chatter, the song-thrush in the dark wood, the blackbird – those immortals of our parish? Though you’ll hear them sing out of season more often now, thrown out of kilter as they are by their body clocks. Wind them on, wind them back. What’s happened to the Spring?
* * *
Here and now, under the wooded hill, we were confirmed in our unbelonging: cultural and social borderers, within and without the town, newcomers, ‘Mcs’ not ‘aps’. We’d stepped from Denbighshire into Caernarfonshire. This was a marked difference most simply expressed in terms of Sunday opening. Our Sundays must now be dry. We were in hellfire Wales proper, if with limestone not brimstone. Though that hardly concerned me then, as to drinking. By the time it did, the populace had voted, or was on the brink of voting, to join the twentieth century, good or ill.
Had we not moved, and at the very threshold of my teens, it always strikes me hard how my life would have been utterly different. My social roots would have been stronger. I would have been a different person, with quite other stories to tell of that time, and I’m sure even as to subsequent adventures. So vital and determining was it, and for me at least, so perfect in its timing: as I left boyhood behind and embarked on youth, wildly unworldly by today’s standards, but an honest-to-god sinner in those times. So chance makes us and becomes choice, or seems to. Who was it said those who voyage across the seas change their skies but not their souls? (The poet Horace.) But my soul underwent a sea-change none the less and how could it not with the skies the way they were now in our westerly and northerly seascape?
Not that uprooting from the Red Wood didn’t have its hurts. Nor was it complete, for my father still worked there, and we always kept our family friendships there, and knew great ties in heartening reciprocity of affection.
Like the Red Wood too, the wooded hill was a place of jackdaws. They nested on the cliff, they nested in our chimney, and cackled continuity, immortal markers always in my mental map. So it is even as I hear them in the evening now in suburban middle England, flying in loose flocks home to roost, wherever home might be for them here, not down our chimney, anyway. Homage to them, local shades, and their sudden blissful crescendi and shimmer above the wooded bryn.
Not that coming to a new school didn’t have its traumas. Flashbacks from my original educational shellshock disturbed me at John Bright Grammar School. There I found my education much less advanced than that of my fellows. I was behind in everything, except cross-country running. Even in English, otherwise my only academic salvation, I lagged. For here it was more about drawing columns and parsing sentences than anything else. You hardly saw a poem or read a book or had a chance to write an essay in those middle years, and there lay my emerging interest, blessing or curse, my only possible salvation.
For a while, I couldn’t work out what on earth they were doing. It was disturbingly like not being able to read. I regressed into that earlier hypnotised-rabbit state caught in the headlights of what I couldn’t construe. Such misery. The shade of it can hover about me even now, if I have to do anything remotely testing with numbers. I can feel my ears burn this minute at the mere thought of it.
I knew then what a sentence was, and an adjective: a thing to purge, according to my father, and an adverb, and so on. Writing is just what’s in your mind, he’d say. You don’t need to know any of that. Though damn me for a fool when an end-of-term report suggested I took him at his word. But even when you roughly got the hang of it, filling columns, treating sentences as if they were formulae in chemistry, was the soul of boredom. What was the point of it? What was the point of any of it – the so-called education? I preferred chemistry. I did very well in chemistry. How on earth I do not know. In reality though I preferred the word, spoken and heard. As I do now. But now I add the printed word, as the alpha and omega of all.
On Mondays, in the trout fishing season, I’d sometimes be so tired anyway and distracted by the reverie of yesterday and the promise of next Sunday, there was very little I could work out at all. I spent a lot of lesson-time in speculation, in considering the ways of the brown trout and the secrets held along the shores of the Black Lake. Nor was my homework likely to have been done.
If I wasn’t daydreaming about trout, it would be about a hare I’d seen that sudden frosty morning, in the low field, quite unusual to see there. Or it was a pheasant that had rocketed into our wood from next door. Would it be there – somewhere to intuit and stalk in the fading light – when I got home? Or in winter when snow fell in the hills I’d rehearse how I’d steal up on the woodcock I knew to be haunting the bottom of the dark wood, as soon as school was over and I could hurry home.
The school I now found myself in had no time for that kind of thing. I don’t suppose any school ever had, not even a hedge school, the only kind of school I’ve ever liked the sound of. More hedge than school, I’d hope. It was a highly ambitious school and gave no resting place to the idle dreamer, nor so much as a hint of laurel for the proud scholar to rest on. Not that it ever told us much about John Bright himself. You’d never have guessed he was a radical deeply reviled by the establishment of his day. That might have been something encouraging to know.
But it liked the high-minded association with Mancunian Liberalism and being on the right side of the Corn Laws. That is: the wrong side to the powers that were, with some gesture of sympathy implied, at least, for those who perished in the Great Hunger. Virtue with the benefit of hindsight is all too easy. But I suppose it’s better than its opposite. None the less, every year the school sent people to Oxbridge, in the best Welsh tradition, builder’s son, butcher’s son... nurse’s daughter.
In my year and the years immediately above and below, they schooled future professors of botany and history, medical consultants, lawyers, doctors, in considerable number, relative to the local population. They even schooled me, far better than I knew or wanted to believe, holding me back a year that I might develop and come to my senses. Which is a nonsense to say in my case. For I needed to come away from my senses, from my intense sensual pleasure in the world about me, if I needed anything, that is. An institution is only the sum of its individual representatives at a given time. Not even its sum. Only one of all the schoolmasters I suffered under had a life-altering effect on me, and that was the late J.K. Warburton (a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge) who introduced me to the nineteenth-century French writers, the poets especially, Baudelaire above all. He used to say he slept with a portrait of Baudelaire pinned to his bed-head. He was a bachelor, a Methodist lay-preacher, a gay man at a time when it was illegal to be so and lead a fulfilled life.
By way of salvation, right on my first day, I found myself in a class with an older youth, Michael-John Thomas – they were all older youths and older girls; girls always being older in mind than youths, and my birthday falling in August: they’d never look twice at me, no matter how many times I looked at them.
Himself a transplant, from the South Wales valleys, Mikey-John was a great sea-fisher. By chance we’d already met fishing on Colwyn pier the summer before. He was just short of a year my senior. We’d hit it off at once, both of us fanatics for fish, swapping local knowledge, telling tall tales about how good the fishing was in our res
pective territories.
His fishing already extended to Anglesey, and Llandwyn Island. I was still in the nursery compared with him, with his tales of tope- and conger-fishing... and skate as big as grand-pianos, in the deeps at the far reaches of Llandudno Bay. The happy accident didn’t help my studies, but it improved my fishing no end to have a local guide to the estuary and the Orme, a youth who went on to work in the fisheries at Conwy. His approach to fish and fishing even then was much more an exercise in field science than an intuitive shot in the dark of Davy’s locker, dreaming under the heavens, such as I preferred.
Apart from Trefor Samuels, Mikey was the first South Walean I ever got to know, he and his mother who worked for her mother in the general store on the council estate. I recognize now, there was a different kind of sociability to them and solidarity, and so with Mikey’s South Walean stepfather, who worked in the Junction at Hotpoint. Trefor had it too, lighting his fag in the mountain rain, a warmth first and last. They showed they liked you. They put the human first, in all its fallibility. ‘Macky’ the Thomases called me, and ‘Macky-boy’, until it became universal in the known world. To begin with my family looked askance at Mikey’s turquoise luminous socks and black winkle-pickers, at the expense of the soul within. But they took him to their bosom in the end.
* * *
Unlike the one in the hymn, ours was not a green hill exactly. It was literally a wooded hill, or more properly a cliff and a bluff, limestone scarp with outcrop cliffs, terraces, rough grasses, gorse, larch, and thorny scrub. Nor was it far away. I could see it from the schoolyard, and in some cases the classroom. The wood itself, though, was largely evergreen, but the green was broken, relieved by a limestone backdrop, a stone full of brightness and glare, on sunny days above all, and moonlit nights, and never dour but only a little drab in rain.
Great Norwegian pines, forty foot high and more, swept in a tide, a turbulent strait, round the base of the hill. They filled out, up beyond our cottage, into a deep, steep wood, an evergreen sea, a sea-chasm, where the cliffs fell back raggedly, to form the wood’s high margin. It was a high and for much of it a very steep wood, petering to a little strand of sporadic hazel, ash and yew, along the southerly boundary, and at its topmost southeast corner, where the tawny owl liked to roost in the ivy.
Not that the wood was coterminous with the property to the east. A little more ground, rough and stony and steep, clambered beyond it to the back wall, the land’s most open border, in regular need of repair against our neighbour’s wandering sheep. Farther back still from the wood’s northern edge, putting an L-shape in our boundary, rose an isolated outcrop of wind-bent larches and pines, Tam O’Shanter Scots pines among them, bonnets set askew by the prevailing westerlies. This wild planting was more-or-less hemmed in by gorse and bramble entanglement and penned back to right-angled walls, the outermost cape or point to our territory.
It was a good place to go if you wanted no one to find you. As I often wanted no one to find me, I was often there. It was a hard place too from which to dislodge wily sheep. The jay tended to skulk here, and the magpie made a nest. Quite often on a warm day a cock pheasant would pick his way in and sun himself beyond the far gorse, a challenge to stalk him there. The place was like a little island, remote, and rarely visited, unless by the sheepdog from the pig farm that neighboured us near there.
Next, beyond, in this back-country lay the disused gulf of Nant-y-Gammar limestone quarry, and farther round, a continuation of our limestone seascape, the Little Orme. Also across that direction but hidden from view, the high village of Pen-y-Bryn where nearly every householder was a pigeon fancier. These men were like poets in their passion for the homing bird. Place-names like Gabowen, Craven Arms and Frome and, beyond the channel: Rennes, La Rochelle, Nantes, Poitiers, Bordeaux... from whence their birds raced home were poetry on their lips and in their hearts.
Pines stood right over our cottage, within a few feet of it at the nearest, and over the yard. Some of them grew straight out of the rock, even out of the face of the cliff itself, having seeded in crannies and grown out and up, crook-handled to the sky.
The cliff immediately behind the house – about sixty feet or so off through the trees at its nearest – was like a land-bound headland, as was another crag in our neighbour’s property. More markedly, so was the high-domed bryn known as Fferm. In time, as we observed, the crags of this bryn were colonised by fulmars. Fferm loomed beyond our southern march wall, in Gloddaeth Estate, the demesne of Lord Mostyn. For we had march walls here, on three sides, containing five tilted acres.
Our northern or seaward boundary was discontinuously marked. It ran fenced through a walled orchard, and there was a gate across a path, a strand of barbed wire across a footpath at the very height of the cliff. But no walls make best neighbours, and our neighbours were good neighbours, a family of smiling Christadelphians called Collins. Irish perhaps they were by descent? Kindly folk, they turned the other cheek and a blind eye to a trespassing youth who stalked and hunted pheasants and wood-pigeons and skulked and mooched, and come spring plundered their cliff for herring-gull eggs, as pleased him, in the upper part of what was called ‘Collins’s Wood’, some nine mostly deciduous steep but at the top more open and rolling acres.
The combined properties had once been a single pocket estate, the ‘big house’ most recently a hotel, our stone-built slate-roofed cottage belonging then to the gardener. In our fiefdom therefore we had an old stone deep-cellared shed called the potting shed, opposite the house, bounding a crazy-paved blue slate courtyard, above which loomed a flotilla of pines. What a thing it was to have a fiefdom, how absorbing and securing. It became part of my consciousness, an outward manifestation of my imaginative life. It haunted me as I went to sleep and in my absences, as at school. I haunted it.
Just beyond the rose-bed there was greenhousing of commercial proportions, including a series of three long, linked, lean-to greenhouses against a plastered wall, and a vinery. Joined together in a ‘T-shape’, the long greenhouse and the vinery enclosed the top end of an orchard. All a little dilapidated now, they were patched and repaired as best makeshift could do. But the great arterial pipes and the underground boiler-room meant to heat them lay defunct and beyond repair. Yet another big greenhouse stood between the potting shed and the vinery. Here my grandpa had indulged his passion for cacti, and brought on other pot-plants, and it remained for us the cactus house. Who otherwise could never have dreamt of such a thing in our wildest dreams in Red Wood country.
If the greenhouses were serviceable enough, so was the orchard of espaliered apple trees. The staves of wires on which the trees had once been trained were rusted now and broken from their stansions. But gnarled and wired through, reaching out finger-tips to each other, the trees could yet with due pruning fill with blossom in spring and bear more apples than we knew what to do with come autumn. And there were pears a-plenty on trees trained against a sunny stretch of high wall, down beyond the long greenhouse, where my father kept his bees.
These fruit trees and greenhouses stood to the north, seaward of the cottage. They were walled off above the lane by a high wall, in summer topped by that succulent import, red-flowering and white-flowering valerian. The stuff grew anywhere it might seed and root and it flourished in the limestone. So did the great fuchsia, outside our gate, under the gable end of the potting shed. A ground-hugging plant with evergreen leaves and red berries I cannot remember to name claimed much of the lower terrace of the cliff in the same burgeoning fashion.
To the south, inland, below the wood proper, was an area variously used for keeping fowls and growing vegetables. It was skirted by a long hazel hedge running atop a wall, beside a footpath, all that became of the lane at this point, leading, via a stone stile, into the Gloddaeth Estate. Pheasants from the Estate liked to pick along the bottom of this hedge. I was always on the lookout for them and sometimes shot one from the bathroom window, or otherwise slipped from the house to stalk one.
> Here, across the way, beyond the little farm, rose the wooded Bryn Maelgwyn, an ancient bardic allt, east of Deganwy, itself a legendary location. Both are to be discovered in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the Mabinogion. But the Maelgwyn and related stories are omitted by modern scholars as belonging elsewhere, not in the branches of those legends. Yet I wish they would provide them anew. For they are a wonder and of the genius of that part of the world, worthy an appendix at least. I could see these places every day when the leaves were off the high hazel hedge, as I stood to clean my teeth. Idle window-haunting filled much of my time. It was a male pursuit in our house, sometimes shared and accompanied by spoken observation. Then at any moment it might become intensely purposeful, as I’d be despatched with the gun, at my father’s direction, in the hope of putting one delicacy or another on the menu.
The terrain of Gloddaeth – of the entire known world, in outline anyway – has been described by that intrepid Welsh traveller, and explorer in the Western Isles, Thomas Pennant:
From hence is a short walk to GLODDAETH... placed on the slope of a very extensive hill, or lime-stone rock.... The upper walks [reaching the heights of Fferm, beyond our wooded hill], having fortunately a steep and stubborn rock for their basis, checked the modish propensity to rectitude; so there was a necessity to deviate from it; but in no greater degree than the flexure of a zigzag would admit. Notwithstanding some blemishes, corrigible at an easy rate, these walks may be considered among those of the first rate of this island, for such beauties of view as nature can bestow; and, from those spots favoured by the sight of Conwy, I may add the majestic ones of ancient art. Every flight of path presents new and grand objects; first the great windings of the river towards Llanrwst, the lofty towers of Conwy, and the venerable walls of the town; and beyond is a long extent of alps, with Moel Siabod, the Drûm, and Carnedd Llewelyn and Dafydd [Black Lake country], towering with distinguished height. From a little higher ascent is opened to us the discharge of the Conwy into the sea, sublimely bounded by lesser Penmaen, and the immense Orm’s Head, or Llandudno; between which appear, a fine bay, the vast promontory of Penmaen Mawr, the isle of Priestholm, and the long extent of Anglesey. After gaining the summit, beneath is seen a considerable flat, with the estuary of the river Conwy falling into the Irish sea on one side, and the beautiful half-moon bay of Llandudno on the other: one of whose horns is the great head of the same name; the other the lofty head of Rhiwleden, or the little Orm’s Head. A little farther progress brings us in sight of a great bay, sweeping semicircularly the shores; and beyond are the distant hills of Flintshire, and the entrances into the estuaries of the Mersey and Dee, frequently animated with shipping.
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