On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  Not long afterwards, Sarah ran into Lizzie outside the chemist’s in Rhulen. They agreed to have a coffee in the Hafod Tearoom, each hoping the other would dispel a dreadful rumour: that Meg had a fancy man.

  47

  THEO THE TENT was his name. He was the red-bearded giant whom Lewis Jones had met in the lane. He was known as ‘The Tent’ on account of a domed construction made of birch saplings and canvas, and pitched in a paddock on the Black Hill, where he lived alone with a mule called Max, and a donkey to keep Max company.

  His real name was Theodoor. He came from a family of hard-nosed Afrikaners, who had a fruit farm in Orange Free State. He had quarrelled with his father over the eviction of some workers, quit South Africa, come to England, and ‘dropped out’. At the Free Festival near Glastonbury, he met a group of Buddhists, and became one.

  Following the Dharma at the Black Hill Monastery made him calm and happy for the first time in his life. He shouldered all the heavy labour; and he enjoyed the visits of a Tibetan Rinpoche who came, now and then, to give courses in higher meditation.

  His appearance sometimes put people off. Only when they realized he was incapable of hurting a fly, did they take advantage of his gentle, trusting nature. He had a little money from his mother, to which the leaders of the commune helped themselves. During one financial crisis, they ordered him to collect his entire annual income from the bank, in cash.

  On the way to Rhulen, he stopped by the pine plantation and stretched out on the grass. The sky was cloudless. Harebells rustled. A peacock butterfly winked its eyes on a warm stone – and, suddenly, everything about the monastery disgusted him. The purple walls, the smell of joss-sticks and patchouli, the garish mandalas and simpering images – all seemed so cheap and tawdry; and he realized that, no matter how hard he meditated, or studied the Bardo Thodol, he would never come, That Way, to Enlightenment.

  He packed his few belongings and went away. Soon afterwards the other Buddhists sold up and left for the United States.

  He bought his paddock, on a steep pitch overlooking the Wye, and there he made his tent – or rather his yurt – from a plan in a book on High Asia.

  Year in, year out, he roamed the Radnor Hills, played his flute to the curlews, and memorized the tenets of the Tao Tê Ching. On rocks, on gate-posts and on tree stumps, he would carve the three-line haikus that came into his head.

  He remembered, in Africa, seeing the Kalahari Bushmen trekking through the desert, the mothers laughing, with their children on their backs. And he had come to believe that all men were meant to be wanderers, like them, like St Francis; and that by joining the Way of the Universe, you could find the Great Spirit everywhere – in the smell of bracken after rain, the buzz of a bee in the ear of a foxglove, or in the eyes of a mule, looking with love on the blundering movements of his master.

  Sometimes, he felt that even his simple shelter was preventing him from following The Way.

  One wild March day, standing on the screes above Craig-y-Fedw, he peered down and watched Meg’s tiny figure, bent under a load of brushwood.

  He decided to pay her a visit, unaware that Meg had already been watching him.

  She had watched him winding his way over the mountain in the grey winter rain. She had watched him on the skyline with the clouds piled up behind. She was standing, arms folded in the doorway, as he tethered up the mule. Something told her he was not the kind of stranger to cringe from.

  ‘I was wonderin’ when you was a-comin’,’ she said. ‘Tea’s in the pot. So come on in and sit down.’

  He could hardly see her face across the smoke-filled room.

  ‘I tell you what I done,’ she went on. ‘I was up with the sun. I foddered the sheep. I gave hay to the horses. Ay! And a bit o’ cake to the cows. I fed the fowl. I fetched up a load o’ wood. And I was just havin’ my cup-o’-tea and thinkin’ to muck out the beast-house.’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Theo.

  The black cat jumped on to her lap, clawed at her breeches and scratched the bare patches of thigh.

  ‘Ow! Ouch!’ she cried. ‘And where be you a-goin’, little black man? What be you a che-asin’, little darkie doll?’ – squealing with laughter until the cat calmed down and started purring.

  The beast-house had not been cleared for years; the layers of dung had risen four feet above the floor; and the heifers scraped their backs on the roofbeams. Meg and Theo set to work with fork and shovel and, by mid-afternoon, there was a big brown pile in the yard.

  She showed not a trace of being tired. Now and then, as she pitched a forkful of muck through the door, the bows on her sweaters came undone. He could see that, underneath, she had a nice tidy body.

  He said, ‘You’re a tough one, Meg.’

  ‘’Ave to be,’ she grinned, and her eyes narrowed down to a pair of Mongolian slits.

  Three days later, Theo came back to mend her window and rehang a door. She had found a few coins in Jim’s pockets, and insisted on paying him a wage. In fact, whenever he did a job of work, she’d reach for a knotted sock, untie it, and hand him a ten-penny piece.

  ‘Ain’t much pie in it for you,’ she’d say.

  He took each one of these coins as if she were offering a fortune.

  He borrowed a set of rods to clean her chimney. Halfway up, the brush snagged on something solid. He pushed, harder, and clods of soot came tumbling into the grate.

  Meg chortled with laughter at the sight of his black face and beard: ‘And I’d think you was the divil hi’self to look on.’

  As long as her gentle giant was around she felt herself safe from Sarah, or Lizzie, or any outside threat. ‘I’ll not ’ave it,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll not let ’em lay their ’ands on one o’ m’chicks.’

  If he stayed away a week, she began to look terribly dejected, imagining that ‘men from the Ministry’ were coming to take her away, or murder her. ‘I know it,’ she said gloomily. ‘It’ll be one o’ them things in the papers.’

  There were times when even Theo thought she was ‘seeing things’.

  ‘I see’d a couple o’ townees’ dogs,’ she said. ‘Black as sin! Coursin’ down the dingle to buggery and che-asin’ ’em little lambs! And I’d be gone out and find ’em dead and thinkin’ ’em dead o’ cold but them was dead o’ fright o’ the townees’ dogs.’

  She hated to think that he would, some day, go away.

  For hours on end, he used to sit by the fire listening to the harsh and earthy music of her voice. She spoke of the weather, the birds and animals, the stars and phases of the moon. He felt there was something sacred about her rags and, in their honour, composed this poem:

  Five green jerseys

  A thousand holes

  And the Lights of Heaven shining through.

  He brought her little luxuries from Rhulen – a chocolate cake or a packet of dates – and, to earn an extra pound or two, he hired himself out as a drystone waller.

  One of his first jobs took him to The Vision, where Kevin had backed the tractor into a pigsty.

  Kevin was out of favour with his uncles.

  He was due to take possession of the farm in a year and a half; yet showed not the least inclination to take up farming.

  He mixed with the ‘county’ set. He drank. He ran up debts; and when the bank manager refused him a loan, he demonstrated his disdain for life by joining a parachute club. Then, to compound the catalogue of his infamies, he got a girl into trouble.

  Usually, his grin was so infectious that the twins forgave him everything: this time, he was white with apprehension. The girl, he confessed, was Sarah’s daughter Eileen; and Benjamin banned him from the house.

  Eileen was a pretty, purse-lipped girl of nineteen with a freckled nose and a head of bouncy russet curls. Her normal expression was a pout; yet, providing she wanted something, she could assume an air of saintlike simplicity. She was mad about horses, won trophies at gymkhanas and, like many horsy people, her financial needs were large.

 
She first met Kevin at the Lurkenhope Show.

  The sight of his trim figure, perfectly balanced astride the bucking pony, brought her flesh out in goose-pimples. She felt a lump in her throat as he collected the prize. On learning that he was rich – or would be – she methodically laid her plans.

  A week later, after flirting through a Country-and-Western evening at the Red Dragon, the pair crept into the back of Sarah’s Land Rover. Another week went by, and he had promised to marry her.

  Warning her to tread warily with his uncles, he brought her to The Vision as a prospective bride, and though her table-manners were excellent, though she studiously admired every knick-knack in the house, and though Lewis thought her ‘quite a little piece’, it made Benjamin far from happy to think she was one of the Watkinses.

  One sweltering day in early September, she scandalized him by driving her car in a bikini, and blowing him a kiss as she passed. In December, on purpose or otherwise, she mistimed the pill.

  Benjamin stayed away from the wedding, which, at Sarah’s insistence, was held in an Anglican church. Lewis went alone, and came back from the reception tiddly, saying that even if it had been a ‘shotgun wedding’ – an expression he’d picked up from a fellow-guest – it was, all the same, a very nice wedding and the bride had looked lovely in white.

  The couple went on honeymoon to the Canaries and, when they came back, brown and beautiful, Benjamin relented. She failed to charm him: he was immune to her kind of charm. What did impress him was her common sense, her grasp of money matters, and her promise to calm Kevin down.

  The twins agreed to build a bungalow for the youngsters at Lower Brechfa.

  In the meantime, Kevin moved in with his parents-in-law – who proceeded to run him off his feet. Either Frank’s truck needed a spare part from Hereford, or Sarah’s show-jumper had a sprain, or Eileen would have a sudden craving for kippers and send her husband off to the fishmonger.

  As a result, in the last weeks of Eileen’s pregnancy, Kevin hardly had a moment for The Vision; missed the sheep-drive, the shearing and the hay harvest; and because they were so short-handed, the twins employed Theo to help.

  Theo was a magnificent worker, but because he was a strict vegetarian he made a scene whenever they sent an animal for slaughter. He refused to drive a tractor or operate the simplest piece of machinery, and his opinion of the twentieth century made Benjamin feel quite modern.

  One day, Lewis questioned the wisdom of living in a tent – whereupon the South African got extremely nettled and said that the God of Israel had lived in a tent; and if a tent was good enough for God, it was good enough for him.

  ‘I expect,’ Lewis nodded, doubtfully. ‘Israel’s a warm climate, isn’t it?’

  For all their differences, Theo and the twins were devoted to one another and on the first Sunday in August, he asked them over to lunch.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Lewis said.

  Coming up to the skyline above Craig-y-Fedw, the two old gentlemen paused to catch their breath and mop their foreheads.

  A warm westerly breeze was combing through the grass-stems, skylarks hovered over their heads, and creamy clouds came floating out of Wales. Along the horizon, the hills were layered in lines of hazy blue; and they reflected how little had changed since they walked this way with their grandfather, over seventy years before.

  A pair of jet fighters screamed low over the Wye, reminding them of a destructive world beyond. Yet as their weak eyes wandered over the network of fields, plotted and painted red or yellow or green, and the whitewashed farmhouses where their Welsh forbears had lived and died, they found it hard – if not impossible – to believe what Kevin said: that it would all go, any day, in a great big bang.

  The gate into Theo’s paddock was a mishmash of sticks and wire and string. He was waiting to greet them, in his homespun jerkin and leggings. His hat was crowned with honeysuckle, and he looked like Ancient Man.

  Lewis had crammed his pockets with sugar-lumps to give to the mule and donkey.

  Theo led the way downhill, past his vegetable patch, to the entrance of the yurt.

  ‘And you live in that?’ The twins had spoken in one breath.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fancy!’

  They had never seen so strange a structure.

  Two tarpaulins, a green one over a black, were lashed over a circular frame of birch branches, and weighted down with stones. A metal chimney poked from the centre: the fire was out.

  Out of the wind, Theo’s friend, a poet, was boiling water for rice, and some vegetables were sizzling in a pot.

  ‘Come on in,’ said Theo.

  Squatting down, the twins crept through the entrance hole and were soon sitting, propped up on cushions, on a ragged blue carpet covered with Chinese characters. Pencils of sunlight filtered through the holes in the tarpaulin. A fly droned. It was all very tranquil, and there was a place for everything.

  A yurt, Theo tried to explain, was an image of the Universe. On its south side, you kept the ‘things of the body’ – food, water, tools, clothing; on the north, the ‘things of the mind’.

  He showed them his celestial globe, his astronomical tables, a sand-glass, some reed pens and a bamboo flute. On a red-painted box sat a gilded statuette. This, he said, was Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of Infinite Mercy.

  ‘Funny name,’ said Benjamin.

  On the sides of the box were some lines of poetry, stencilled on in white.

  ‘What does it say now?’ asked Lewis, ‘I canna see a thing without my proper specs.’

  Theo flicked his feet into the lotus position, half-crossed his eyes, and recited the verse in full:

  Who doth ambition shun,

  And loves to live i’ the sun,

  Seeking the food he eats,

  And pleas’d with what he gets,

  Come hither, come hither, come hither:

  Here shall he see

  No enemy

  But winter and rough weather.

  ‘Very nice,’ Lewis said.

  ‘As You Like It,’ said Theo.

  ‘I wouldn’t like it for winter, either.’

  Theo then reached for his bookstand and read his favourite poem. The poet, he said, was a Chinaman who also liked to roam around the mountains. His name was Li Po.

  ‘Li Po,’ they repeated, slowly. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘All.’

  Theo said the poem was about two friends who rarely saw one another and, whenever he read it, he remembered a friend in South Africa. There were lots more funny names in the poem and the twins made neither head nor tail of it till he came to the last few lines:

  What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,

  There is no end of things in the heart.

  I call in the boy,

  Have him sit on his knees here

  To seal this,

  And send it a thousand miles, thinking.

  And when Theo sighed, they sighed, as if they too were separated from somebody by thousands and thousands of miles.

  They said the lunch was ‘very tasty, thank you!’ and, at three o’clock, Theo offered to walk them back to Cock-a-loftie. All three walked, in single file, along the sheep tracks. No one exchanged a word.

  At the stile, Benjamin looked at the South African and anxiously bit his lip: ‘He won’t forget Friday, will he?’

  ‘Kevin?’

  Friday was their eightieth birthday.

  ‘No,’ Theo smiled from under his hat-brim. ‘I know he hasn’t forgotten.’

  48

  ON FRIDAY THE 8th of August, the twins awoke to the sound of music.

  Coming to the window in their nightshirts, they parted the lace curtains and peered at the people in the yard. The sun was up. Kevin was strumming at his guitar. Theo played the flute. Eileen, in maternity clothes, was clinging to her Jack Russell terrier, and the mule munched a rose-bush in the garden. Parked outside the barn was a red car.

  Over breakfast, Theo g
ave the twins their present – a pair of Welsh love-spoons, linked with a wooden chain and carved by himself from a single piece of yew. The card read, ‘Birthday Greetings from Theo the Tent! May you live three hundred years!’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Lewis.

  Kevin’s present had not yet arrived. It would be ready, he said, at ten, and it was an hour’s drive away.

  Benjamin blinked. ‘And where would that be?’

  ‘A surprise,’ Kevin grinned at Theo. ‘It’s a mystery tour.’

  ‘We canna go till we fed the animals.’

  ‘The animals are fed,’ he said; and Theo was staying behind to keep an eye of the place.

  ‘Mystery tour’ suggested a visit to a stately home; so the twins went upstairs and came down in starched white collars and their best brown suits. They checked their watches with Big Ben, and said they were ready to go.

  ‘Whose is the car?’ asked Benjamin, suspiciously.

  ‘Borrowed,’ said Kevin.

  When Lewis got into the back seat, Eileen’s terrier took a nip at his sleeve.

  He said, ‘Angry little tiddler, ain’t he?’ – and the car lurched off down the track.

  They drove through Rhulen and then up among some stumpy hills where Benjamin pointed out the sign to Bryn-Draenog. He winced every time Kevin came to a corner. Then the hills were less rocky; the oak trees were larger, and there were half-timbered manors painted black and white. In Kington High Street, they got stuck behind a delivery van, but soon they were out among fields of red Hereford cattle; and, every mile or so, they passed the gates of a big red-brick country house.

  ‘Is it Croft Castle we’re going?’ Benjamin asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Kevin.

  ‘Quite a distance, then?’

  ‘Miles and miles,’ he said and, half a mile further, turned off the main road. The car bounced down a stretch of bumpy tarmac. The first thing Lewis saw was an orange wind-sock: ‘Oh my! It’s an aerodrome!’

  A black hangar came into view, then some Nissen huts, and then the runway.

  Benjamin seemed to shrivel at the sight of it. He looked frail and old, and his lower lip was trembling: ‘No. No. I’d not go in a plane.’