Once

by McNeillie, Andrew

  Like Robinson Crusoe on his island, we could have subsisted under the wooded hill, had we really been pressed to. And for several years we produced and kept more than we could consume, honey from the honey-bee too. Asdaville and its like hadn’t been invented. We lived a little closer to nature, but fortunately not out of necessity. My father still had his day job and wrote and wrote away, books and journalism, as if there might be no tomorrow, as I often wished at the end of Sunday, or when the holidays were on their last legs.

  Tan-yr-Allt was a land of milk and honey, except we kept no cow. It was Eden. Though we toiled and moiled hard there, for our potato crops, early and late, our peas and beans, cabbages and sprouts, spinach and leeks, tomatoes, courgettes and pumpkins, squashes and grapes, our fresh eggs, and against the predations of mouse and rabbit, foraging wood-pigeon, egg-stealing jay, magpie and crow.... Wasn’t Adam a gardener and didn’t he delve? It was paradise gained and full of firewood. It was deliverance from the shipwrecked world. It was heaven on earth, especially to a youth of my inclination, head turned by the Black Lake.

  I was now the luckiest person I knew, self-sufficient there in mind too, up the rocky unmade lane, off the last easterly back-road of the town, beyond the pale. My luck would run out at school as you know and I would run adrift there. Yet, to no one’s greater astonishment than my own, I passed my exams and got into the sixth form. There ahead of me, a year my senior, and destined for medical school, the history master’s daughter could no longer quite look down on me. I’d fallen off the cliff for her the year before. But even as I left the precipice, I knew my passion and devotion were absurd.

  At that stage I was as nothing, utterly unaccomplished, disreputable even, one of the ‘lads’, if a little on the edge of them, by dint of living where I did and being a bit of an odd one. I was young for my years too. So I hope I am still and still postponing to be wise. A scholarly girl, part of the school establishment, a master’s daughter, a girl who listened to classical music and played Chopin and Rachmaninov on the piano, who knew her vocation, and so beautiful besides, was hardly going to deign to consider me when she could have her pick of the scholarly boys.

  No matter everyday I aligned myself in assembly so that I could fix her with my eye, and steal glances between the heads of other boys, as we sang our hymns: ‘There is a green hill far away’... etc, and listened to the announcements.... I was a hobbledehoy who reared racing pigeons, kept a ferret called ‘Gorgeous’ (who turned out to be afraid of rabbits), reared a pet owl (if one cosmopolitanly named ‘Hibou’*), procured by a half-gipsy acquaintance who left school early to become a deckhand on the Conwy trawlers. But watch this space.

  The bright ‘snowcemmed’ cottage, cream not white, stood perched high above the lane, rising directly up a fair height from it, its westerly frontage like the side of a fortress. The house itself caught the light. Once you closed the gate behind you, a solid wooden gate too high to see over, affording no view through it, and climbed the slate steps, you left the world and its worries, shut away at your back. There was no need ever to return to either, except the law of the land obliged you to go to school.

  Except the estuary beckoned and Gogarth’s shore, the Orme’s west side, with promise of fish: flounder and plaice, bass and mackerel. The pierhead, too, sang its siren song, a nightfishing song above all, lunging and booming as it waltzed to the tide’s motion, like a night out at the Winter Gardens, dancing the conga, and ten sheets to the wind at the Northwestern. It stalked on its centipede legs in the Orme’s shadow, wading up to its chest in winter shoals of codling and whiting. Except that from 1 March to 30 September the Black Lake pined for Sunday.

  Down below us ran another pinewood in the grounds of a huge crescent-shaped building of grey stone, and glaring orangey-red paintwork, a convalescent home called Lady Forester’s, for industrial workers from England (how different their pale dressing-gowned and pyjama’d lives, as you might glimpse them, taking the air on the fire-escape, stealing a smoke). So we had the sea-sound of pine-trees all around, and the sea itself to see at a glance, and to sense in the air, and on wild nights to hear its long drawl, swept up with the roar and crash of pine-masts. On such nights, our bedrooms being in the roof, I’d be rocked to sleep, and startled awake by sudden powerful blasts, and wonder if it mightn’t prove my last night on earth. It was very like being at sea, timbers taking the strain, bulwarks and roof-tree, against the house-high waves and crashing breakers of packed air.

  We took a westerly and southwesterly full on, and a northwesterly too, even a northerly quite directly. But cold easterlies couldn’t get at us at all, though they do their worst, and so we were snug and warm when they blew, tucked up there cozily, safe and sound. One furious night when the wind was in the northwest, some thirty or forty giant pines were levelled down in Lady Forester’s. The calamity sounded like the end of the world, just below my bedroom window. A high dormer window, like a lookout in the roof, it always took the brunt of things. Our trees howled and crashed, in great waves running like the sea, but they stood firm, rooted in rock as they were. The greenhouses took a battering, though, with the loss of many panes, and much work to do to repair them as in a poem by Theodore Roethke, brought to harbour at dawn.

  Then with the dawn came the aftermath of purest essence, a distillate, in the high tops, the trees thinned of dead branches, the yard and paths and slopes littered with needles and cones, a harvest of kindling thrown ashore. The jackdaws would be cackling as if for the first time in creation, and gulls mewling, and somewhere a pheasant might crow in the wake of the storm, as on summer days you’d hear one, in David v. Goliath style, answering the quarry-blast at Penmaenmawr.

  But the air would still be boisterous and billowing, and the sea-horses stampeding, rearing, the morning after the night before, all the way to and fro between Anglesey and our shore, out round the Isle of Man and back, and down the Irish strand by Wicklow where the fishing fleet rode out the night, Frenchmen among them... L’Etoile, Le Guillemot and their sisters later known to Seamus Heaney, tuning in to the shipping forecast, just across the sea in Ireland from where we were in Wales: the known world, district and circle.

  The wooded hill was not new to me. I had known it from the early fifties, when my grandpa bought the place, on retirement. A blacksmith-next-tenant farmer’s son who’d left school in Galloway at fourteen for an apprenticeship on Clydeside, he had since risen in the aircraft industry, to become a production manager for Fairey Aviation and then AVRoe. Now he turned his hand to running his smallholding and like a good Scottish engineer built things to last forever, a henhouse as stout as Noah’s ark, a place for them to roam in as secure as a prison yard and as ugly as a concentration camp; and if a thing was broken he repaired it, in the same spirit, calling on my father for labour at the weekends.

  There was a peasant’s mentality to what he did and a barbarism to his building. Nor would he give us anything but like someone in a story by Maupassant sold us our eggs and wrote the sale up with a pencil in his little notebook. As to landscaping, my father inherited something of his father’s blindness. But under our occupancy the brutalism was softened and some more thought given to the look of things.

  In grandpa’s time, we would go there regularly on a Saturday, or a Sunday in the trout-fishing close season, and have a direct injection of Scotland, under the wooded hill. There wide-eyed I began my explorations and developed my skulking, mooching, stalking, day-dreaming, solitude skills, as brought to perfection at the Black Lake. Where nothing happens, everything begins to happen, nothing being a contradiction in terms.

  In those days much more of formality survived to be seen in the grounds. Gardens and pathways echoed something of what Pennant called ‘the modish propensity to rectitude’, but not without the redeeming ‘flexure of a zigzag’. There were garden beds, and just below the big wood, on a terrace, steps led to a sundial. Pampas plumes rose from clumps on either side, like silver-white torches, at the entrance to the dar
k wood, where I was so happy to be lost. As night fell, how ghostly visible those torches would be: you could use them to steer yourself down the path after a night-time adventure.

  Back along the way by the long greenhouse, a blind turret stood above the path. In through the bottom of the wood ran the remains of a chain-link fence, and its gate at the top end, at the wood’s southerly entrance, beyond the sun dial, could still be closed, though with difficulty. It was the kind of fence you’d find round a tennis court in the grounds of a country estate. What this one had been intended to keep in, or out, wasn’t clear. Now it ran rusted and wrecked under the pines, through clumps of elder.

  But the height of all formality and gothic grandeur was the tower at the top of the cliff. You reached it by a zigzag path whose flexure Pennant would have surely approved. It climbed up through undergrowth, round to the south of the main cliff, where the rock dropped back, beside the northerly edge of the big wood. At last it reached a terrace and ran along a couple of hundred yards or so, a little crooked and uneven way, between bramble and scrub, thorn and larch and gorse. By the time it reached almost to the open clifftop, the gorse towered six and seven feet high in places. In wild weather it lunged on the wind and stabbed you in the face and about your head, if you didn’t shield yourself with a raised elbow and duck down.

  Then you emerged and the known world lay spread out before you, just as if you were looking down from the window of an Aer Arann plane or a post-war Dakota, bound for Galway or Dublin. The tower commanded the breath-taking view described by Pennant, the full panorama. It was an eyrie, a lookout, a bird’s eye view. And it was capacious. You could easily accommodate half a dozen or more people in it, for a picnic. In those early days the remnant of a flagpole survived there.

  From the tower you could look down not just on the town – the Naples of the North, with its beautiful crescent bay – and the wider land- and seascape across to Anglesey but also down at wheeling jackdaws and gulls too. And as they swept up you found yourself among them. It was the most exhilarating place on earth. There were the mountains. There hidden away among them was the Black Lake. When my grandpa lay dying in the town’s hospital, all exhilaration spent, just beyond the gasworks, we once or twice went up to wave a huge Scottish flag as big as a tablecloth, not the more beautiful Blue Saltire, which was too threadbare to survive the exercise, but the one with the rampant lion, to make him smile, if we could. Though we could not tell if we succeeded.

  The tower stood right at the northern boundary of the property. Just a couple of steps beyond its entrance and you entered Collins’s wood, my favourite territory. I preferred it partly because it was a mixed wood, largely deciduous, low and wind-combed in its upper reaches. Hunting was better there. And partly I loved it because, strictly speaking, I wasn’t supposed to be there, with or without a gun. It was a trespass, and trespass in pursuit of game, I could exaggerate with impunity, yet register the thrill of needing not suddenly to bump into Brian Collins, or his father, so as not to embarrass either party.

  Fire a shot in there and watch, and listen, and steal to another part of the wood, lie low and watch, and listen. Hadn’t I read The Poacher’s Handbook by Ian Niall? Didn’t its author bring me up by hand? Let a little while go by unless another opportunity to fill the pot springs up or passes. Then retreat right along the back of the wood, and loiter there as evening falls and the wood-pigeons come to roost, or refuse to. Just so...

  I waited in those days until the evening thinned

  All light away to distant strings and

  Starry clusters, and a green pier-light

  Blowing, like a bird’s bright eye,

  Away below, starboard on that seaboard.

  It’s not that I let anything distract me

  At that wood’s edge where I stood sentry.

  Though I heard the odd one flutter home

  Far behind me, and remembered the scent

  Of cropped clover and barley.

  And caught a kestrel briefly, anchored at

  The corner of my eye, but kept my watch unblinking,

  Through thick and thin, though rain spat sharply

  And night loomed in. Still they wouldn’t come.

  As if something warned them I was there.

  I’ve waited for poems in the same way since,

  At the edge of things, in the heart’s dark border.

  And just as shrewdly they’ve stayed away.

  Though I’ve caught sight too late

  Of their shadows passing, on the way home.

  Or I’d spend the entire day there with the .22 airgun called Meteor with its telescopic sight, and make a little fire and cook a blackbird, or a wood-pigeon breast in a piece of foil. Follow your circuit like a fox. Be invisible. Dream of never needing to go home again. Relish nightfall and the winter air descending cold on that beautiful country, sharpening the outline of everything in sight, until night rises up, for it is a mistake to speak of nightfall. Night’s of the earth and rises up to fill out shadows as the sun goes down.

  By the time we moved in, the formal qualities of the old hotel grounds had fallen a good deal farther from view since the day my grandpa bought his portion of them. Wilderness had taken over more of the place. We kept the paths open, but in a rough and ready way. It was a kind of benign neglect, as far as I was concerned, making it a better place of escape, a better place for bird-life, a better country to stalk. But it wasn’t all benign and it wasn’t all neglect.

  Soon some trespassing youths burnt the remaining stump of the flagpole, and just about as soon, my father converted the tower into a more-or-less impenetrable fortress, its walls coiled with tangles of barbed wire, its entrance barred with a gimcrack portcullis. Theoretically you could raise and lower this great metal contraption through tracks of angle-iron, especially if your name was Hercules, and didn’t mind grazing all the skin off your knuckles in the attempt.

  It was easier to climb the wall and find a way through the barbed wire. At which I soon became so expert I could do it in the dark. And regularly I had to, but usually only when the very worst storms blew off the coast. For my father, frustrated by our limited television reception installed a TV-aerial up there, elaborately guyed and wedged to hold its alignment to the signal from Manchester or wherever it was it came from in England.

  Up until then, down below, under the cliff we were better served by RTE than any other station, something that gave us ‘The Riordans’ soap opera, the tolling ‘Angelus’ at six, ‘Gay Byrne’... from across the Irish Sea, though we also got the basic BBC. The trouble was no guys or wedges could do anything when a storm hit the cliff head on. Then the aerial would invariably wrench itself out of alignment with all signals. That such winds could be accompanied by lashing rain had nothing to do with the sleety picture-quality or anything that my father heeded. His imperative – as if our lives depended on it – was to restore reception. It was a calamity. So off I’d be despatched, with a heavy mole wrench, a hammer, and a lamp, up to the dark tower, as if I was Childe Harold turned aerial man.

  Given the serious nature of the emergency, I paid no heed whatsoever to the long route, but went straight up the cliff, no matter the cold blast and the wild roar of the pines. I’d done it often enough in daylight I could have done it blindfold. First I had to clamber round by the jackdaw’s nesting hole, a deep round hole, about the diameter of an apple, created by some flaw in the rock, then struggle on along the first terrace, round up the next step of cliff, often through rainy squalls, and then the second step, more deafening bluster, at last to the tower.

  Here the struggle to get in was the more difficult not simply because the coils of barbed wire shook in the wind and were all the harder to negotiate, but because I’d know my father’s impatience was itself reaching storm force. I scarcely took time to look out into the storm, to see the town-lights all blurred and blowing, the sea surging, white and broken through the dark, and, perhaps, if the wind was in the west, the bleary lights of a
vessel riding out the storm in the lee of the Orme.

  Once in the tower the task was to turn the mast into what I guessed was the right position, and to secure it as best I could. The cottage being invisible, away down under the cliff, I had then to climb out, and climb down the first step of rock, to the edge of the next terrace to flash the lamp, requesting a signal. A fully drawn curtain signalled success, a curtain swept impatiently to and fro meant back to the drawing board.

  Could the TV be so important? I assure you it could, and every minute lost was viewing never to be recovered, I suppose. So to the dark tower back I came, climbing its wall again, fighting through the barbed wire, getting hooked up on it and scratched by it, struggling with the cold metal mast, hammering and wrenching, not to say swearing, against the deafening wind. Then back down to the ledge again and so on.... What was the code? Was that an opened curtain, way down there? It was no good my father coming out and shouting, as sometimes he chose to. The wind just snatched his voice away, like a hand over his mouth. (How I wished that hand was mine.) You couldn’t begin to guess what he was trying to say.