Island of Lightning

by Robert Minhinnick

  So, drink up. But know that glass for either a piety or an enchantment. They are similar conditions. Which is something you should not ponder too long at the Trehafod Hotel.

  We’re now either ahead of ourselves or behind. But don’t worry. We’re all going to the same place. And Trehafod is instructional for those attuned to the lessons of history. Here’s what’s left of Lewis Merthyr colliery, but unlike the hundreds of other coal mines in the valley, it has not been grassed over or turned into a superstore. It’s now the site of the Rhondda Heritage Park, dedicated to mining.

  A brief visit will confirm two suspicions. First, winning coal was a terrible trade. Second, existentialism never made it to the coalfield. The miners were heroes, but obedient heroes, as their wives were heroic and obedient in their turn. And together, men and women mined the inexhaustible seam of their own loyalty. Even as the walls collapsed, even as their children were scalded to death or were wasted by rickets and diphtheria, even as the money haemorrhaged south into the starry boudoirs of Castell Coch and on to the Mount Stuart banks where the world’s first cheque for a million pounds was penned, they remained paragons of obedience. Instructional, traveller? Oh yes, at Trehafod we might learn a good deal about ourselves.

  But whose heritage is this? Mine, indubitably. Who was never down a pit. In his life. Who will always refuse any invitation to the memorial shafts. So at Trehafod I visit the fan engine house.

  Of all colliery equipment, the fan engine was the most important. Here, I think of the draughts the engines blew underground and imagine those purifying blasts travelling through darkness on the way to the lungs of the thousands who cut the coal and filled the drams. Of fresh air invading the colonnades and the dead ends, its incense chilling the skin; fresh air from the censors of the fan engines blowing down the coal roads. Fresh air lengthening the sentences of those already condemned.

  There’s no amnesia at Trehafod. But even here, or especially here, when I try to think of the coalfield, that tumour intrudes. The tumour on the map. Maybe I was a fool to hang it on my wall, that map of an unpeopled Wales, the map of the arbitrary grains beneath our feet: a free Wales indeed of mudstone and volcanoes and the physics of rock, a pre-Cambrian Wales, a pre-Wales Wales.

  I pass them every day, those western peninsulas with their psychedelic geology, on my commute from study to kitchen. Then there is the limestone of north and south, and a pagan rainbow in the east: the witch country around Church Stretton. And last the coalfield painted in grey and etched with a forest of faults.

  The pits are closed but coal cannot be escaped. I walk on the southern beaches every afternoon and find coal mingled with the sand. There’s a seam that runs a mile under the sea near where I live. The old Newlands pit was worked for decades, so clean was that coal, the miners curling themselves like trilobites into the seabed, taking light and language and their own hot blood into places where they didn’t belong, into places where no life belongs unless it is blind and cold and unnameable.

  And on those beaches I hear the fairground, the cries from the SkyMaster, the Ghost Train, and yes, the coalfield will always be a ghost train to me, a ghost train shuttered for the night and the winter, but where as if in a dream I am leased to wander through its corridors, passing the faces of legend in their shrines, the dead and the undead, the eyes, the mouths, the victims, the victorious, all fossils together in those dungeons, and every passage indistinguishable from the last.

  If it’s a labyrinth there is only one guide who can take us through. Because if the coalfield is a labyrinth only Jorge Luis Borges knows the way out. Yes, maybe that’s how I see the coalfield now. A labyrinth with a dead minotaur. A labyrinthine library whose books are fossils. A library of Babel where everything is written but nothing is read.

  Yes, let Borges take us through, and let us search with him for the last miner, the lost miner whom only Borges can find in these circular ruins, because only a Borges can bring back our Taff Steet Theseus who has let go the thread, but who still clutches his snap, his lamp, his vocabulary of extinct trades, and who hews at the rock every day beneath our feet.

  “Could have come in from there,” gestures the thin man, waving at the east and the Rhondda Fach. “Over the mountains from Llanwonno.”

  I know the road. It comes through a forest, melancholy at the best of times. But it’s drama he describes. Because there’s drama at every entry to these valleys. You have to fight to get into the Rhondda. You have to want to be there. Whether it’s over Bwlch y Clawdd to the west, the Rhigos and Llethr Las to the north, or scowling Trebanog where the mastiff lurks, it’s what a pilgrimage should be.

  I know another way, said the thin man, and now we’re looking down over the momentous vale. There are the roofs of the Rhondda Fawr, and when we turn there is the waste tip that is coal’s sarcophagous, the colour and shape of Silbury Hill.

  “I used to know its name,” he says. In this light there’s a sinister geometry to the tip. I shake my head.

  We had come through Wattstown and Ynyshir, then taken the hill. Now on Penrhys we stare and listen to the dogs. There’s no chance of refreshment. At the top of the estate we call at the Pendyrus RAOB Social Club but the doors are barred. Above us are the conifers but this is as high as we get. A burned out bus shelter. The blackened satellite dishes hanging like wreaths.

  There’s a cry in Heol Teifionydd, a whisper in Heol Pendyrus. And then a silence. Somehow here we are out of the world. We passed a boundary somewhere or blundered through a forcefield and now stand beyond what’s familiar. Children are playing in a puddle, there’s washing on the lines, but it’s clear we’ve crossed a frontier. It’s a different world and I don’t belong. Traveller, may it be otherwise for you.

  All I know is that Penrhys was designed like a village overlooking the Tyrrhenian sea. Yet often the wind that blows here feels as if it has crossed Iceland. And that when the locals stare at me I cannot meet their eyes. Yes this is as high as I will ever reach above the Virgin on her lawn.

  I look at the statue. It’s a glum and bone-coloured Mary we find, this virgin of the oaks. Nearby are ruined chapel walls where once the medieval poor came to worship. Visitors should bring their own exultancy to this place. They will find little here. If their Welsh is good enough, they’ll learn that the original statue was destroyed – dinistriwyd – such an emphatic word – on September 26, 1538. This replacement was erected in 1953. A little nun from Porthcawl, brown as a fieldfare, was one of those who suggested the restoration of the shrine. She took a party of schoolgirls up the windy hill. One of the pupils walked with a leg-iron. The other girls waited for the miracle.

  John Newman in his Buildings of Glamorgan wrote that the statue would seem to belong “in Ecuador”. With which we should all disagree. Exquisite it is not, but its creators should be allowed their bold design. How well we’ve been trained to ridicule the pretentious. Remember the monkey puzzle, hisses a ghost.

  We’re finished here. And begin again. I leave the valley by another way, the road north into Ferndale and on to Maerdy. Poor Maerdy. Little Moscow they used to call it. But now they don’t call it very much at all, this part of the Rhondda Fach being somewhat on its uppers, and there’s North Terrace which is where the Rhondda ends, and there is Institute Street where its ghost laments.

  Because here is the sad baroque of the Institute itself, one of the great remaining buildings of this world, a library, a theatre, and a statement made by workers’ pennies if ever such a statement was made, and if you come this way remember it was the thin man who suggested it, and note the lesson of Pant y Brad. Yet if you still decide to take this road, push open the Institute’s metal doors and step inside. Then gaze at what remains of generations of self-sacrifice.

  This will happen under the shadow of Cefn Craig Amos. I promised you that ridge and here it is: a bulwark that hides the sun and chills the waters of the Rhondda Fach. There’s a school built in its shadow. No place for a school, I think, looking at the unr
emitting rock, thinking of the classrooms dark in the morning and those cliffs shuttering their glass. But already we are leaving it behind. We’re going beyond.

  Because what are any of us if not pilgrims? For me, at least, that’s an attractive thought. An explanatory thought. It clarifies a good deal about my life. Whether in the museum or Gwaelod’s limestone maw or the slumland shrine of Penrhys, all of us pursue a sacred commute: white van-man, Kayleigh from the Call Centre, and the crachach of the Beeb breathing into their Samsungs. Yes, even Pontcanna will know its Pentecost.

  And remember that the Taff, first pilgrim to be encountered in the hereabouts of this essay, on the way to an ignominious end, must begin somewhere out of our reckoning. In a droplet no bigger than a grain of rice.

  The Sunflower

  In the coffin lay Santa Margherita. A holy ape. She was green as an olive. So this was what death did, reducing the body to earth, but an earth without rainshine or windflash.

  The pious too craned to see. For them the seven hundred year survival of the body of Saint Margaret is a miracle. But there was nothing for me in that church. So I climbed further, as far as the town allowed.

  At the top was the Fortezza di Gyrfalcon which had become an art gallery. Through the window I watched a hawk, not the gyrfalcon yet a thrilling predator. As it swept the hill its wings gleamed like willow leaves, bronze and silver, light and dark. Over the plain the view stretched into immensities.

  I had been following the poet John Ormond around Cortona, the impossibly-positioned Tuscan town he had come to love. Ormond adopted Cortona as a spiritual home, the place where he felt most true to himself.

  I had with me the hardback (only) edition of Requiem and Celebration, published by Christopher Davies in 1969 when the writer was 46. This is a book worth considering, not least for its sleeve notes by Glyn Jones. These constitute a critical essay and are a world and a culture removed from the hyper-bole that disfigures so many new volumes of poetry. Because an editor these days must exist in a state of slight but permanent nausea, surrounded as s/he is by the hagiography concocted by publishers, agents and the writers themselves.

  Beyond Cortona stretched fields of sunflowers. These sunflowers had died. Each one was tall as a scarecrow, every face a black zodiac. But their seeds were sharp in their satchels. Sunflowers must die of course, but not uniformly. And surely these sunflowers were for harvesting. Maybe they had been gassed. How like an army they paraded in their phalanxes. An army bowed in defeat.

  John Ormond has no new readers. His public is a wilting band. I know this because Ormond’s Selected Poems is technically available from Seren. But no more than a handful of copies exist. Until there is public or academic pressure no Collected will appear. This is an irony because it was writers such as Ormond whose examples created the literary world we have today: apolitical, and founded on a private vision dependent upon global reference. John Ormond’s role model in this was Dylan Thomas, whose life suggested that the artist could combine happy-go-lucky rootlessness with intimate belonging.

  Yet John Ormond also had a career as a BBC film maker. Typically, his best work features other poets. However, his admiration for their achievements led him to doubt his own powers – to engender what Glyn Jones describes as “dissatisfaction”, Ormond’s career exhibiting “an unrelenting struggle to find his own true subject-matter”.

  Or maybe the sunflowers had been poisoned. Sunflowers must die but I find their deaths grievous. On my allotment under the church of St John the Baptist in Porthcawl, the sunflowers were vigorous last year. One day in September I climbed the entrance stile and there lay a ten foot specimen, its stem a mast, its face a pub-sign, the whole apparatus ridiculous as a broken speak-your-weight machine. But by late October a grove of sunflowers still survived the wester-lies. Black and thistley, they hummed like a substation, faces glum as rusted Sky TV dishes.

  When I lived on my own in Saskatchewan I used to talk to a sunflower. It grew in the garden and nodded from its bench like some green-wigged JP. As Fall progressed it declined, shrivelling with sunflower osteoporosis, its seeds ripped out by buff-coloured waxwings. Yet this sunflower seemed to retain its wisdom. Then the first night of real cold reduced it to a saint in a glass casket. By the second it was an X-ray of itself. That was how sunflowers were supposed to die. With dignity. But the Cortona sunflowers seemed snuffed out overnight in shameful conformism.

  To find John Ormond’s ‘Note from Cortona’ readers will have to track down that elusive Selected Poems. Thus they might learn how and why Italy inspired such a niggardly poet. Yet the pity of it is that younger writers have almost no access to the bulk of his writing.

  What we need is a film maker of Ormond’s precision to create a biography of the man and the artist. For that ‘dissatisfaction’ is the antidote to what can appear to an editor as the cynical promotion of mediocrity. Because in John Ormond writers today might find a role model. And that is of no mean significance.

  Being a Description of Those I Encountered during my Sojourn on the Island of Lightning

  1. A Catalogue of Ships

  Increasingly I seek out Omar because he knows things. In fact Omar seems to understand most that happens on the island.

  Because the city is an island. I’ve proved that to myself in my increasingly ambitious expeditions. But Omar also understands what has already happened, and I’m sure that’s the key. That’s the secret to this place. And that’s the secret that interests me. Because the past will explain the gods. The gods of this island.

  One day I join the party of Germans Omar is leading around the ramparts. With two blonde fraus in leather and mimosa I have my photograph taken beside a cannon. The barrel points out to sea, the cannon balls are piled in a pyramid at our feet. Black seed, I think. The iron hearts of the papaya fruit.

  There’s a cat, one of the island’s orange cats, curled on the cannon balls. All the cats here, so my scouting tells me, belong to one clan; the skinny, manky, orange clan. And how they love the sun. Even this scabby tom is sleek in its beam.

  After thanking their guide, the party drifts away. I join Omar at a table in Café Leone and we talk about the weather. How unseasonably warm it is. I want to ask Omar about the gods, but he seems determined that I should learn about the island’s ships and the captains of those ships.

  Yes, says Omar. Our fortune is built on such men. So God help us. First there’s Oscar, who lives in a hovel on Mediterranean Street. Oscar’s family have been sailors since the beginning. But Oscar likes the marsovin too much. He owns a paint-bleached barkazza and a broken gondola, and he sails out of an evening, looking for octopus.

  Then there’s Georgiou of St. Ursula Street, who steals lobsters from the pots under the western ramparts. That used to be a capital offence, I’ve seen men keelhauled for such. But of course, a sailor is a man and a man must live. So don’t mind Georgiou. His barque is worse than his bight.

  Have you met Manoel from Eagle Street? Ah, Manoel, he braves seas so rough in that old ketch of his, you think he’s never coming back. Force nine is a child’s breath to Manoel. But as I say, fishermen must live and Manoel casts nets for bristling and white pilchard.

  And you must have seen the African from the warren in the walls? He’s made a boat from the planks of other boats, bits of driftwood and floats. He sets off in that raft with his five-tanged fork searching for angel shark. Maybe he was a great captain in his own country, which is Sierra Leone, a kingdom of cruelties where most of the murderers are children. Or so I’m told. And yes, there are scars on his back, healed violet. And burns on his wrists and ankles. But sometimes I look at him and see a stateliness in his eye.

  Then there’s Hilario of South Street who puts to sea in a gharbiel, the water coming through the joints, a real sieve, hardly a bucket, more like a nightsoil barrel, yes a pisspot with a crack in it, that’s Hilario’s galleon, mad old Hilario who couldn’t catch himself but one morning came back with a mermaid, and friend I tell you, H
ilario married this mermaid and she lived with him on South Street. Well, that’s the story. Dispute it with Hilario when he’s sober. He comes out with us sometimes when we go after flapperskate. Bloody old Hilario, he’s fathomless to me, bobbing out there like a cork, an old man astride his mustardiera, the wind taking the sail of his trousers. Old Hilario, blown along by his farts.

  Of course you can’t forget Marcello, coming across the harbour in his scutch. That’s Marcello of St. Elmo Street where there are more boats than headlice and the nets hang like spiderwebs.

  Now Michelangelo, he lives on Old Theatre Street and works on the dredger, ‘Sapphire’ in the grand harbour. He borrows his brother’s gondola and rows to the islet where the softbodied crabs live in the rock pools. Sometimes he brings us a coffeesack full, the whole bag wriggling and the crabs wheezing like tiny bellows. That’s a peculiar music to hear at dawn.

  Don’t forget McCale, the nostromomu. He doesn’t usually come on our voyages. But he offers us stories. Once, marooned on the Black Isle, he milked a cowfish. That’s how he survived. The milk, he said, tasted as diamonds might taste, though salty as caviar. Yes, yes, McCale we say, go back to your cactus juice and Neptune save the ships you steer towards port. Why not sleep it all off in St. Pawlu Street with your fat wife?

  Then there’s Aurelio, a good boy from the poorest barrakka on the western side, who will dive from the side of any boat and bring back cowries. Once he came up with an oyster filled with a rainwater-coloured pearlseed that somehow Hilario swallowed when he was sniffing it. May it grow to choke that imbecile. Or maybe I think, maybe Hilario is not as stupid as he pretends. That gumboil of his…

  Of course, there’s the Macedonian too. He cannot swim nor sail and once went round all night under the moon. We found him the next morning in the same place and that Macedonian moonstruck, babbling away in his abominable Greek. We gave him espressos in the QE2 bar, and the next day he brought us aubergines from his garden, and sweet peppers he had grown in a window box. Stay home we told him, and water your seeds, or we will be lighting a candle in a red glass for you down at the shipwreck church. The fool had seen meteors all night and had thought them portents of his own death. Ah, we laughed there in the tavern, you must be a great man for heaven to fill with fire for you. Look, we’ll take you to the fishmonger in the suq so you can learn why we sail out. Why we do what we do. But no more ragtime with ragworm for you.