I tried not to bore myself. I borrowed a bicycle, explored the town and some local countryside, and fell off three times. Once when the wheel slipped in between the tram lines. Then again when a sudden gust of wind came out through a gap in the buildings and caught me unaware. And then I forgot that you had to back pedal to brake and tumbled off the edge of a dyke.
It was late September and the beginning of autumn. I loved the feel of the westerly wind on my face.
19
A Short Intermission
My sister, Pam, once said of me: Richard lives like there is no tomorrow. Well, as it happens, there is no tomorrow. My future outlook is bleak and I should do what I can now. But the truth is that I have always been a cautious man and her words were way off the mark. What she was referring to was my tendency to change my job from time to time and not follow a career path. I have had, it must be said, a quite a few over the years. I would like to tell you about some of them.
One of my first jobs was in a builder’s merchants with the unlikely name of Gridley Miskin. I was a forklift truck driver of the dreamy, contemplative type. I always carried a classic novel in the pocket of my donkey jacket and when I had the yard tidy I would park up behind a huge stack of bricks and read Zola or Hardy or DH Lawrence. Once I turned the truck over by carrying too big a load too high. I jumped clear but the truck was damaged. They didn’t give me the sack.
Later on I gardened for the rich and famous in my home town, Weybridge, in Surrey, for a while. I met Cliff Richard’s dog but failed to recognise the famous man on the other end of the lead. I trimmed the roses and swam in the pool of the comedian, the late Dick Emery, and also tidied the gardens of two of his ex-wives (I believe he married five times). And when I worked for the National Trust at a landscape garden nearby, my boss (who was getting on a bit) told me that he had to eject a young long-haired man who wouldn’t leave at closing time. Don’t you know who I am? the man had asked, good naturedly. I didn’t know him from Adam, my boss told me. George something, Harris was it, Harrison, I don’t know. Have you heard of someone called George Harrison? I can’t remember what I said in reply.
Quite early on in my career I achieved one ambition – that of being paid to go for a walk in the countryside. On a mixed farm in Sussex where I worked my first job of the day was to walk around the fields checking that the livestock, the cattle and sheep, were OK. Four legs pointing at the ground, good; four legs pointing at the sky, bad – as George Orwell might have put it. My sister, Margaret, visited at lambing time and was amused to see me carrying a shepherd’s crook. You look like something out of a nativity play she said.
Some of my farm worker memories are not so happy. One cold March I did a month of night shifts as a lambing assistant on a farm here in west Wales. The farmer was a brutal Englishman who had a fascination for breeding animals but a particularly unsentimental attitude towards them. If I remember rightly he ran over one of his dogs when it wouldn’t get out of the way quickly enough and then had to shoot it. He didn’t seem upset. In the evenings I would drive an old Land Rover up to some fields on the hill to check the mountain ewes that were lambing out of doors. On the way I often stopped at a telephone box to phone my girlfriend who lived in Hereford. I remember snow blowing in and around my feet where a window pane was broken at the bottom of the door and I remember the particularly mournful sound of a telephone ringing far away in an empty room. Empty, I might add, because she was out having fun with another young man.
So much for country farms; I have also worked on a so-called city farm in Kentish Town, London. It was really a community project and my job title was stockman/youth worker. I was in charge of one cow, seven goats, four sheep, two pigs, a goose called Maverick and shed full of chickens. I got on well with local kids and took school groups around. And I got most of the animals pregnant, not personally I might say, but by taking the goats and sheep to be served (that’s the farming euphemism) and by getting the AI (artificial insemination) man in for Ermintrude the cow.
It was a strange thing for me to live there, in the city, far from any wild open spaces, but I used to go up onto Hampstead Heath at the weekend. I once took Ermintrude with me; she was very tame and was used to being led around on a horse’s head-collar. We walked down to Gospel Oak, stood by the zebra crossing and waited for the traffic to stop. It was a summer’s afternoon and a few people were sitting outside the pub. One or two of the guys looked at me and the cow and then down at their glasses to see if there was anything wrong with the beer. Something, somehow, was not quite right. I led Ermintrude up onto the heath and drew a few more stares. After a while a police car drove up one of the broad tarmac paths and stopped nearby. The policeman wound down his window and spoke to me: Excuse me, sir. Is this your cow?
My sister Pam has a memory of my time on the city farm. I had borrowed a billy goat for the purpose of serving my female goats; they would then have kids and give milk – the whole purpose of a dairy animal. I had to take the billy back to a farm in Essex and the only available vehicle was a minibus. I filled the vehicle with a random selection of people who were hanging about the city farm: one or two rough-or-ready folk who were doing community service with us having committed minor offences, drug dealing, housebreaking and so forth; and some kids (two-legged ones) who had been excluded from school for being too high spirited to conform to petty rules like not hitting the teacher. We turned up at my sister’s house in nearby Bury St Edmunds without prior warning and piled into her kitchen. We left the billy goat in the minibus but after an hour in its company we smelled so strongly that we might as well have taken it into the house. She had been baking and was pleased to offer us tea and cake. A good time was had by all. Pam reminded me of it recently. I’ve never forgotten that day, she said.
My worst job ever? Possibly when I was staying on a kibbutz in the seventies. It was an agricultural community and I worked in the banana plantations on the flatlands below the settlement, in the orchards of apples and pears on the hills close by, and once in their commercial rose gardens. But sometimes I was required to work in the broiler houses, catching chickens and boxing them up to go to the slaughter house. We started at midnight, when the birds were asleep, and worked until we had caught the required number, something in the thousands, by which time it would be early morning. Then a breakfast of roast chicken, a freshen up in the kibbutz swimming pool, and bed – at the time when everyone else was getting up.
My best job ever? It was my last one, teaching practical skills at the agricultural college, then part of the university, in Aberystwyth. I worked with the legendary Bob Shaw (you might remember him being described as one part man, one part tree in chapter fifteen) and the multitalented Geoff Oldrid (fluent in French, Spanish and Scouse among other things), two of the best work companions you could hope for. We taught drystone walling, hedgelaying, fencing, a little carpentry and suchlike to enthusiastic (that’s what we told them) countryside management students. In the fifth year of the job I was getting clumsy and awkward and I was limping badly at times. I struggled to hide the symptoms of what appeared to be a neurological disease but I really couldn’t carry on. I was sad to leave that job but I thought that other opportunities would arise and that life moves on. And so it has, with both disappointments and achievements. There is a long list of things that I can no longer do and, believe me, being unable to work is not the worst one.
I have interrupted the story of our travels here because I felt the need for a break – a short intermission. It is hard for me to go from India to Peru in a couple of pages or a couple of hours. The truth is that eighteen months separated Rishikesh on the Ganges from Lima on the grey Pacific where we started our next big trip. We were here, at home in Wales, where we have lived for twenty-something years. This book makes my life and the life Flic and I have lived together sound like one long traveller’s tale. But at the heart of our story is our time as a family here, in a small village in the countryside and close to the sea.
&nbs
p; We moved here from Bristol where I had a poorly paid job digging holes and filling them in again; commuting from the city to the countryside and planting trees and doing other estate work. I applied for what must have been the worst paid job ever to be advertised in the Guardian: estate worker on nature reserves in west Wales for the then Nature Conservancy. Yes, digging holes and filling them in again but for less money but in a beautiful place. They gave me the job and we moved out here with a new baby making us a family of four. Our lives were disrupted by illness (you remember Flic’s cancer in chapter thirteen) for seven months and then we settled in Wales properly.
It has been a wonderful place to live and a great place to bring up children. Some of my happiest memories ever are of family days out in, for example, the Rheidol valley or by the Mawddach estuary, and of weekends away in Pembrokeshire or the Lleyn peninsula.
And in the eighteen month intermission between great foreign adventures Flic and I, when my health has allowed it, have walked and cycled and sometimes paddled (in kayaks) very happily here. Recently it began to feel as if those days out were to become a thing of the past. I felt sad but at the same time very pleased that we had done so much while we still could. But last week (as I write this) with Flic’s help, I was on my bike again and enjoying the landscape around Dolgellau, Barmouth and Cregennan Lakes. Phew...
Wales has been the place we come home to and that’s been good. It seems different each time and, I have to admit, can look a little grey in winter if you have just returned from India. But it seems pretty good at other times of the year: in the summer of 2006 I returned from an unbearably hot New York, and later from an unbearably hot Barcelona, to a cool green Wales and it felt like the best place to be.
Coming home from abroad does make things look different. I remember arriving back in Britain after just a few weeks in Tanzania and Uganda and catching a bus from Heathrow to Bristol. I travelled down the M4 in the dark. There were just lights, hundreds of lights: white ones travelling in one direction and red ones in the other. No people. No people on foot or on bicycle or in little roadside shops. No people standing chatting or nursing babies or herding goats. No children playing. Only the lights hurtling along like some vision of the future: a science fiction movie in which the world has been taken over by machines.
And Wales after India is similarly unpeopled. Stand on a hill here and you can look over well-tended farmland, healthy-looking animals grazing, hedges trimmed, farmhouses and outbuildings dotted here and there. It all looks so organised but so empty. You might walk for some hours and see no-one, just a single tractor in the distance. Where have all the people gone?
I come from the south-east of England where people must be among the unfriendliest in the world. Speak to a random stranger in my home town and you get a look that says, do I know you? So rural community life in Wales seems particularly good. I am, it must be said, a bit of an outsider here as I have been everywhere else; it’s part of my nature. Perhaps a little more so having tried to learn the language and failed. And I am aware of the cultural differences between the English and the Welsh. Here’s something, for example, that I find strange. The new summit building on Snowdon is engraved with the words of the distinguished poet Gwyn Thomas:
O’n cwmpas ni y mae camp a gwae hen, hen genedl.
All around us are the grandeur and the anguish of an old, old nation.
To me, as an outsider, this is difficult to understand. They are curious words to use to describe one’s country. Grandeur I’m fine with, it’s the combination of age and anguish that gets to me. I can think quite easily of twenty-five other nations (they are listed in this book) who would never chose those words to describe themselves. Then I think some more and guess that Thomas’s anguish is about the continuing loss of the Welsh language, yr hen iaith, and the culture that goes with it. I can try to imagine, but can never really understand, the enormity of this loss as experienced by some Welsh people. There are only a few times when I have had just a little insight into how this feels.
I remember a tiny incident that I experienced some years ago in the doctor’s waiting room. A local man was speaking quietly to the receptionist, a rather loud, middle-class English woman who had recently moved to the area. Dafydd Williams, she said, Dafydd, what a strange name, how do you spell that? Poor Mr Williams spelled out for her one of the most widely used Welsh Christian names. Can’t find your records at all, she continued, have you just moved in? The man replied with quiet exasperation, I have lived here all my life. I could imagine him muttering under his breath the words bloody English and I sympathised. He was feeling ill and it was not a good time to experience his language, culture and sense of community disappearing from underneath his feet.
The very nice man who tunes our piano described his first meeting as a local councillor and his dismay at finding that he was obliged to speak English, not Welsh, the language in which he best expressed himself and which was the first language of his family, friends and the community he grew up in. I didn’t tell him that I had recently heard an Englishman say, the Welsh language, they only speak it to be bloody minded. Of course, as the Italians speak Italian and the French speak French, only to be bloody minded. Enough said.
I must admit that I sometimes find Welsh culture more inclined to look inward and to the past than that of the countries that I have recently visited. I prefer to look to the future, towards change and renewal. But I’m happy here in Wales. There’s nowhere else I would rather be.
S is for Skopje (Macedonia)
I was twenty-one years old and travelling to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I didn’t know anything about the country, I just wanted to stay abroad for a while. I could have flown all the way but then I would have been certain about arriving at my destination. I preferred uncertainty, the possibility of the unexpected, so I decided to hitch to Athens and get a boat or plane from there. I was in a country then called Yugoslavia, hitching from the coast to Skopia, as it was called then, and on to Greece. But the area was too beautiful and I had to stop and spend a day walking in the hills. Then I set out from the small town where I had stayed the night and started walking down a road signposted for Skopia.
I intended to hitch but there was almost no traffic at all. I walked and hoped and was passed by the occasional donkey or motorbike. The road surface deteriorated as it looped up into the mountains. Still no traffic. I guessed then that this was not the main road or was an old road that had been replaced by a new one. Then a car came around the bend and stopped. It was being driven by a German woman determined to travel on the most minor roads from her country to a destination in Greece. She was very surprised to see me on that road and she gave me a lift.
We wound up into the mountains through a wild, little-inhabited landscape, high enough for there to be patches of snow on the ground even though it was April. Then down to Skopia where people were celebrating the birthday of President Tito. I think they had to; he was that sort of president. Someone said that the country would go to pieces when he died. There would be bloodshed. I couldn’t understand it. It seemed peaceable enough to me.
20
A Very Short Story
No-one can say that we’re not decisive. I believe that we decided never to go back to India a few times and changed our minds; one time returning within weeks. But that’s India for you. Then we decided that we wouldn’t be able to travel again; my health was far too variable. And as for South America, we thought about it more than once and decided, more than once, not to go there. Then we booked return flights to Lima, in Peru, with the intention of seeing some of that country and a little of Ecuador and maybe Bolivia. We were to be away for fourteen weeks. And why South America? I hear you ask. Well, we liked to tell our stay-at-home friends that we were stuck in a rut, having been to the Indian sub-continent three times in a row. We needed a change.
Reasons for not going to South America:
a) too much crime, some of it violent – what if my medication got stolen?
b) we couldn’t speak Spanish
c) flights cost a fortune
d) my health was getting worse
Action to be taken:
a) leave some spare tablets at the first place we stay and carry two weeks’ worth in zipped pocket at all times
b) learn Spanish
c) spend money
d) it’s now or never – go to South America ASAP.
From my blog for Saturday, 3rd September, 2011:
8.30 in the morning, at Casa Ana, a friendly damp guest house in a cold grey dirty city. Lima is grim but we are excited and happy somehow because we are off again on an adventure. And because we had a good flight yesterday.
It took about 26 hours from Casa Catherine [Flic’s mum’s house] to Casa Ana – Pickwick to Heathrow to Sao Paulo to Lima. The last bit was brilliant. We flew right over the continent. First there was countryside: irregular patterns of woods and fields and scattered settlements, a bit more like Sussex than Brazil. Then, after a sleep, we looked down on huge square clearings in the forest, regrowth or primary forest, I don’t know. Then, much later, steep hills turning into snow-capped mountains – the Andes. And then the sea, much sooner than we expected and so close to the mountains. But no, there’s a further shore and we realise that it’s a very big lake, hundreds of miles long – El Lago Titicaca. More mountains then a hilly high-altitude desert, uninhabited, uninhabitable, seemingly endless. Then a blanket of cloud like a sea against a shore with the real sea, the Pacific, underneath. And Lima.
The Road to Zagora Page 16