Because it was mid-week and late in the evening, because there was this prevalent fear that petrol would soon be rationed, the A49 was emptier of traffic than Pete had ever seen it. They shared their northward stretch of it principally with long-distance lorries travelling well under the regulation 50mph. After Craven Arms they’d turn north west towards Welshpool and then Llanfyllin. This small town with a square at its centre is the Gateway to the Berwyns from the south. Had they not been travelling on so misty and cloudy a night, they would then have seen the range they were headed for looming against the (invaded?) night sky. But in truth they were to have little awareness of the proximity of the mountains until they had actually gained their destination, Don Parry’s home-town of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant…
And how would they both respond to whatever was awaiting them there, above their heads or, even more alarmingly, before their very eyes? What figures would they cut in future UFO annals? Would they be classed with those Swedes who ushered in a whole era by looking up aloft at a cigar-shaped trajectory? Or with the Mustang-flying mates of Lieutenant Thomas F. Mantell who perished through following an irresistible shining whiteness – which might have only been the bright shine of the planet Venus? Or would the historian place them with Carl-Gustav Jung who didn’t mind whether his UFOs belonged to the dreaming or the waking world?
For the first ten miles of their northward journey, Sam was in full narrative spate: ‘So there’s old Don Parry making for home along the B4391 worrying not only about what he’s left behind in Llandrillo, but about what lies ahead in Llanrhaeadr. All the tremors and explosions could well have scared his poor mother out of her wits! Anyway he couldn’t be sure they’d come to a stop, could he? Still wasn’t when last he spoke to me…
‘Once, Don says, you’ve left Llandrillo and the Dee valley, it’s high and really desolate country until you descend to Llangynog and get back down into the Tanat Valley. So he’s going across the southern flank of the Berwyns: treeless moor, not a house in sight, only rock. And he thinks to himself, so where’s that bloody blue-and-orange mass gone to? Is it still hanging above Cadair Bronwen? By now he’s nearer the other great peak of the range, Cadair Berwyn, which is higher still. So what does he do but park the car? He’s got guts, Don has.’
So much had Sam absorbed Don Parry’s intense relation to his own experiences of an hour back that Pete, by this time somewhat disoriented himself, began to wonder if this ‘character’ hadn’t taken over Sam’s body, voice-box and all. ‘Yup, Don not only parks the car, but gets out of it, looks up into the sky. As you can see for yourself, it’s not clear tonight, but this UFO – and maybe that’s what we should start calling it, Pete – was so goddam brilliant its light pierced the cloud layer. Don says what he saw was about 1,500 feet up, and moving ever-so-slightly along. More orange, even orange-red, than blue, and shaped like a rugby ball (which would please old Don, who’s a Wales afi-cionado). At its base those very small lights he’d noticed earlier were twinkling and dancing about in zigzag formation. Don just stood there beside his car watching them, hardly knowing whether he was frightened or happy.’
‘Fucking hell!’ said Pete again.
‘But by the time he’d got back down to Llanrhaeadr, he couldn’t see this any more. On the other hand lots of people were out and about in the main street. Practically everybody he bumped into had met somebody from Llanderfel and Llandrillo, or spoken to ’em over the phone, and were gobsmacked at what they’d heard. Llanrhaeadr itself had felt some shakes and bangs too, though not everybody there had done so, and never as badly as at Llandrillo. Quite a few in the district had rung the police – in fact the cops must be fucking inundated this night with all the 999 calls they’ve had. And Don himself felt he had a duty to tell as many people as he could asap about what was going on. That’s why he got in touch with his new young friend, Sam Price. He knew he’d be the guy to take his news seriously.’
Pete’s head swam as Sam his ventriloquist came to the inconclusive end of Don Parry’s tale. Were they really out on something as prosaic as the A49? Was it the mapped workaday world of road signs and traffic lights on either side of the car windows or had he exchanged it for another that Sam Price and Don Parry’s fused imaginations had brought into being? Small towns, villages, hamlets, farms, lonely houses, were all entering that state of rest supposedly central to night times – even though, were he still at home, he would not have gone to bed yet, would be still, maybe, struggling with Thomas Cromwell as viewed by G.R. Elton… Would his parents have noticed his absence yet?
Now he was in the doghouse, they’d even stopped calling out: ‘Good night, Peter, sleep well!’ as they always had done, his life long. (Or had they, after all, gone on wishing him this, and he’d not heard them, because he’d shut his ears even more determinedly than he had his bedroom door, over which he’d now hung a sign: WORKING. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU!)
Don’t think about Woodgarth, he told himself, it’s too late now. What’s done’s done! ‘Tell me more about Don Parry,’ he asked Sam to distract himself. If the land around him was really under the dominion of this magnetic guy, he might as well be better informed about him. ‘Apart from his sexual prowess.’ This was the right note to hit; Sam grinned collusively. ‘Does he only work for your father?’
‘Hell, no – though the Old Man thinks highly of all he does for us.’ Pete noticed (not for the first time) Sam’s casual, unconscious use of the first person plural when talking about Price’s Menswear. ‘He does all manner of freelance work, Don does: for a local builder’s, getting material at low costs, because of all his many contacts; for a bakery shop in Llanfyllin (which we’ll be passing through later); he’s quite an expert on flour. But his real interests are artistic. He’s the creative type. He wants to make a huge mural of the King Arthur story, with glass and minerals inserted in it, and install it right in the middle of Llanrhaeadr. Minerals, because they’re basic to Britain, and glass, because it shines with promises for both this world and the next.’ More ventriloquism, obviously.
‘Why the next world?’ queried Pete. This nocturnal expedition smacked too much of that already, he thought. After all hadn’t even the UFOs chosen this one for their activities?
Sam turned to him with a knowing smile of curious, uncharacteristic sweetness. ‘Because the next world starts near Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, my friend. At the waterfall above the town, Pistyll Rhaeadr – a 240 feet drop, highest in England and Wales…’
Pete grunted impatiently here, implying it was unnecessary for Sam to tell him this sort of fact. (‘Peter Kempsey, what is the name of the tallest single-drop fall in England and Wales?’)
‘You could describe the fall, to quote Don, as Nature’s equivalent to the Pearly Gates. Climb to the top of it, and you could find yourself in Annwn.’
‘Annwn?’ Here was a name Pete did not know, here was info he definitely didn’t possess.
‘A.N.N.W.N. Annwn. The Celtic Otherworld. The Land Above the Falling Water. The country ruled benevolently by Gwyn ap Nudd.’
‘And who’s he when he’s at home?’ He felt a decided pang of jealousy. Sam had clearly been spending a deal of time recently with this Don Parry character, had been the recipient of many of the guy’s more unusual stores of knowledge (as well as of his tales of women) which – until this minute – he had not thought fit to share with Pete. Besides it was just a tad irritating that Sam should be now addressing him as some expert on Celtic lore when he was no such thing.
Yet who knew better than Pete how you can feel at home with a subject after a very short acquaintance with it?
‘Gwyn ap Nudd is the head of the Good Folk (or to give them, as Don does, their Welsh name, the Tylwyth Teg) and that made him a natural for the ruler of this realm, though he had competition for the post. It’s all feasting and fun in Annwn, no kind of disease or misery…’
‘Like Heaven!’
‘Yes, very like Heaven. But whether it actually is Heaven or not is a moot point
, Don says. You just go there when you’ve kicked it, as far as I can make out; no question of judgement, or whether you’re worthy. Well, that isn’t the traditional Christian view, or wasn’t at one time.’
Pete had never been quite sure what this Christian view entailed. He’d long noticed that newspaper announcements, as well as the Sunbeam Press’s condolence cards and the subse-quent gravestones, spoke of folk who’d just died as going straight to their eternal rest, as being under God’s good care, so perhaps the alleged judgement wasn’t as severe as some were pleased to make out.
‘The Berwyn’s local saint – St Collen, who gives his name to the town of Llangollen – was a bit of a puritan, I gather, a hermit-like bloke, and he believed that there was a strict test for where you went after death. But simultaneously there were all these arrivals into Annwn, just down the road; not over the rainbow but over the waterfall. So he thought he’d better do something about it, and suggested Gwyn ap Nudd and himself had a meeting. Which they did. The Church has it that Collen came off better in their debates, but Don Parry says it’s a toss-up about who came out top, and in fact posterity has given both of them crowns.’
‘I see,’ said Pete, ‘and this Annwn itself…?’
‘Is the place of utter peace and joy. For any and everybody who goes there.’
‘I get it!’
And he did. For though he was positive he had never heard the word spoken or seen it printed, what lay behind its two syllables was surely something he had known about all his life, even before he could speak? But it alarmed him to think any more like this.
To help him move his mind on he inquired: ‘And – what does he look like, this Don Parry bloke?’
There followed a pause, during which Sam let a Long Vehicle overtake them. Perhaps he hasn’t heard what I just asked, Pete thought, and anyway it doesn’t really matter because I’ll be seeing him for myself shortly. Then – ‘You’re not going to believe this, Pete,’ Sam said, ‘but he looks like you. Oh, I know, he’s twelve years older, and he wears a small beard, while you’ve just turned eighteen and ain’t got no beard, though with your kind of stubborn stubble, you might think one day of growing one. But otherwise I reckon you look pretty alike. Same build, same colouring, same habit of slouching, and of stooping when you run.’
Pete was astounded hearing this. Never had he imagined that this hero in Sam’s eyes would resemble himself. He could think of nothing appropriate to say back.
Anyway Sam had, for the time being, worn himself out with talk. Shropshire was all about them now. Hills swept upwards to culminate in vapours rolling down from the sky, farmhouses presented themselves as randomly spaced dark shells of one-time habitation, which might or might not reassert their normal activities when, many hours later, morning broke. If it ever did!
Woods were fringing the country roads now rather like reeds do ponds. Shropshire has far fewer real woods than the boys’ Herefordshire; night accentuated this, while making what woods there were seem denser, more inimical. Once an owl flew out, with a fierce, intent, insouciant face, a surreal white for the seconds of his visibility to them by the car’s headlights – and probably both boys thought of the badger which had lumbered to safety not so very far from here on their previous drive through this territory… And then here, almost on cue, came another of its kind. Once again Sam had to brake while the animal, his great white stripe all but glowing in the darkness against the black of his long-snouted face, moved across the road, but at a far greater speed than his cousin of January 4. On this occasion Sam, his head full of Don Parry and his tales, was less interested by the creature though just as concerned that it crossed the road unscathed.
Pete, on the other hand, positively welcomed the badger. And in retrospect was to welcome it even more heartily. This sight of this animal, eager to get over the road, to reach the safety and warmth of his or her sett on a raw yet damp night on which extra-terrestrials might or might not have visited the planet, gave him a needed sense of perspective: there was clearly satisfaction to be found just accomplishing little tasks essential to preserving existence. Once again he resolved that when this adventure was over, he would pay badgers the kind of attention he had hitherto given to less sensate subjects. There were lessons to learn from even a glimpse of so self-possessed a being.
The boys half-expected Llanfyllin, which stands within sight of the Berwyn Mountains, to have some, if not all, of the atmosphere of a town on the edge of a danger (even a war) zone. Police cars (hadn’t Don Parry said that the constabulary had already received an overwhelming number of frantic calls?), ambulances, a taxi or two bearing eager newshounds, reporters and photog-raphers … but where were any of these? Answer – nowhere; this could have been any freezing January night, with every right-minded person tucked up in bed. Even so, as they drove three or four miles away from the town along the B4391 and then exchanged this road for B4580 (by means of a sharp, ill-signposted turning that Sam very nearly missed), expectations of seeing preternatural lights in sizes and shapes that would blow their mind assailed them – and how could they help this? Their gaze moved constantly to the partially fogged-over massif that was the Berwyn Mountains. Nor could they refrain from speech. ‘Hey, wasn’t that a ray of red light? Just over there? To our left?’ ‘No, look straight ahead, Pete – I’m sure my eye just caught – well, something like the bright zigzag in Don Parry’s story? Gone now, fuck it!’ ‘That doesn’t mean, it won’t come again. In fact, if you…’ ‘For Christ’s sake, moron, let me keep my eyes on the road, can’t you? This is hardly the M1 at high noon, you know.’
Very true, it certainly wasn’t. The road was taking them over a little bridge, beneath which audibly rushed the swollen waters of the River Tanat. This formed the long awesome valley separating the Berwyns from their lower foothills. The sound of the river was good to the ears, sweet, musical: Pete liked it. It made him experience a rush of gratitude to Sam for having brought him all the long way out here, even if they never were to see a UFO – and God knew, there was a quite reasonable chance that they might not. A bigger chance surely, for all Don Parry’s story, than that they would.
But just assuming they were fortunate enough, if that was the right expression, to be granted a vision, wouldn’t it be far better for Pete to have got off his chest the matter of his subject for High Flyers? Of course! A hundred thousand times ‘of course’. He repeated to himself but more emphatically his earlier sentence: ‘After we’ve arrived in Llanrhaeadr, I will fucking force myself to tell him!’
He himself was not as clued up about the mountains in front of them as he had been about the Shropshire hills, though he did know quite a few facts… They were not so staggeringly ancient as sections of the Long Mynd and the Strettons, yet ancient enough in all truth, from the Ordivician age, 500 million to 430 years ago, and the Silurian, 430 to 410 million years back. They had seen much violent volcanic activity, and contained many examples of tuff – rock formed from volcanic ash. They contained no fewer than twenty-four peaks of over 2,000 feet, and the two highest (the two Cadairs above which this mysterious brilliant mass had been seen) neared 3,000 in height. As Sam had already reminded him, their famous waterfall, Pistyll Rhaeadr, had the longest single drop of any in both England and Wales, at 240 feet, and was situated at the back of the township that was their destination, and was now at last visible as an almost lightless huddle, Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant.
And at some point on the range you could apparently wander into Annwn, even when still living…
‘Next task! Finding old Don. I’ve got the address of his house, don’t you worry, and its whereabouts, I gather, couldn’t present less of a problem. Right in the main street just before you get to the turning to the right which says ‘Waterfall’. Don said, more than once, for us not to worry what hour we arrive. Someone or other, probably himself, will be up and around, even on a shitty night like this, so help us! He was bloody fucking insistent we came, believe you me, Pete! But in fact, we’ve made r
eally good time, I’ve done us all proud. I’ll become a chauffeur if all else fails me. Fourteen minutes past eleven.’ Pete looked at his own watch on which you could press a little knob so it was luminous in the car dark. Yes, truly, fourteen minutes past eleven it was. 23.14. Three hours one minute since he’d crept out of his bedroom at Woodgarth.
By now surely his parents would know he’d gone out? Were they worried? Mystified? Angry? Dad certainly would be home from the Civic Society; he might easily have taken it into his head to bid Pete a stiff if kindly good night. Or again the wretched Julian might have noticed the complete quiet behind the shut door, and come into Pete’s room to investigate; he was the noticing, prying sort all right. Would make a fine private eye! But did Pete care about all this compared with the great adventure still ahead? Like hell he did! Had the family shown care for Pete in the only way that mattered, understanding of his temperament and tastes? They had not. So why should he bother himself about causing them a few minutes’ anxiety?
The little town proper of Llanrhaeadr was heralded by a Victorian school building after which the road swung right, then left into the main street. ‘Girls’ and ‘Boys’ said the letters over the doorways, bringing back bad old days when the children of the place were rigidly separated by gender and not allowed to use words in their own first language. Even if anarchy was about to descend on the UK because of governmental stubbornness and incompetence, even if this part of the country was being disturbed by aliens, there were a few things, Pete thought, to be said in favour of being alive now rather than back then…! Unlike Llanfyllin, Llanrhaeadr was not deserted, despite the hour. Men and boys stood in talking groups in front of the grey-stone, slate-roofed houses of its principal street, with only a few women among them. All turned round as they heard – loud enough in the dead quiet of the hour – the engine of Sam’s Beetle, as though, thought Pete, they were afraid an extra-terrestrial might be driving it. Or, failing that, the Head of Scotland Yard himself with tidings of further visitations… Off the very tarmac of the street worry, insecurity, fear rose up, and these qualities had also barricaded the houses, so that their drawn curtains looked like so many metal portcullises.
After Brock Page 18