A Writer's House in Wales (3 page)

We called the building Trefan Morys, partly after the estate, partly after the Welsh spelling of my surname; and so it was—I told you to be patient!—that this modest old structure, built for livestock, became instead a Writer's House in Wales.

At first sight, I'm sure you will agree, it is nothing much to look at. There are lots of such buildings in our part of Wales—solid old stone-built farm buildings, apparently timeless, built of big rough boulders and roofed with slate from the mountain quarries. Many of them are crumbled now, but many more still shelter cattle, and some have been converted like mine into dwelling places. Whatever their condition, they are impregnated with Welshness. Their very stoniness, their modest strength, their moss-grown stones and wooden doors—their texture, substance and style are all organic to this particular corner of Europe.

Frank Lloyd Wright, of Welsh origins himself, said of his architecture that it was not
on
the hill, but
of
the hill. His famously beautiful houses in America, sometimes with Welsh names, do sit among their rocks, deserts and prairies as though they are geological outcrops, and similarly these vernacular buildings of the Welsh countryside, even if they have been given a touch of fastidious grace by a Zaccheus Hughes, still look as though they have sprung out of the Welsh soil, without benefit of architect or laborer. My house has certainly been architect-free, which is why a buttress of hefty boulders we added to one end of it, intended to stop the whole thing falling down, turned out to have misinterpreted the nature of stress, and to stand at the wrong side of the house.

Trefan Morys is embedded in farmland, and since it stands in one of the wettest corners of Europe, its purlieus are sometimes so slobbery and congealed with mud that they suggest to me a battlefield of the First World War. If you don't mind getting your shoes messy, though, you can walk pleasantly to the house from the village of Llanystumdwy by following the Dwyfor upstream, and clambering up a wooded bank. On the other hand to get there by car you must drive up a winding, bumpy, potholed and unsurfaced lane, puddled in winter, dusty as Spain in high summer.

It is June now, so as we take the second alternative a cloud of dust billows behind us, suggesting the djinn-like clouds that pursued Lawrence of Arabia's armored cars across the deserts of Nejd. It is a moot point whether it is wiser to drive carefully up our lane, to spare your shock absorbers the worst of the bumps and the most savage of the holes, or to drive as fast as possible, so as to fly over protrusions and declivities alike without the car noticing them. I belong to the latter school partly because I enjoy a helter-skelter drive, but chiefly because I am always in a hurry to get home. It is accordingly a somewhat shattered or fragmented pleasure for me when I turn the last corner of the lane, always hoping that the exhaust pipe hasn't fallen off, and race up its most uncompromisingly bucolic slope to the house.

It's the one on the left. The one on the right is Zaccheus Hughes's old coach house, now inhabited by my son Twm, a poet in the Welsh language who runs, as a poet should, not a Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn, but a 1959 Morris Minor. On the coach house roof is its original white cupola, with ZH on its weather vane, and the letters of the English compass points. On the left, though, is Trefan Morys, and this now has a cupola too. JM are the initials on
its
weather vane, and—look, d'you see?—the points of the compass below are bilingually Welsh and English: G and D for
Gogledd
and
De
, E and W for East and West. This is partly because the Welsh names for East and West also begin with G and D, but it chiefly is a declaration, on my part, of the nature and meaning of my house.

Stop now! Do you smell it? A sweet elemental fragrance, fragile but intoxicating, that hangs upon the air? Nothing could be more fundamental to the place. It is the smell of burning wood, gathered from the woodland that lines the bank down to the river, and it has haunted Trefan always, since the bards entertained the uchelwyr in the stone-flagged halls of antiquity. And now do you hear a steady rushing noise, gently rising and falling? That is the voice of the Dwyfor, tumbling down to the sea just over the ridge there. The Swazi kings are interred in a cavern in the hills of Swaziland which stands similarly above a rushing river, and they say there that when the noise of the stream suddenly seems to fall silent, you will know you have reached the hallowed enclosure. Here I like to fancy it is the other way round, and that when that watery burble reaches your ears, it says you are entering the sanctuary of Trefan Morys. We dump the car, and pass through a pair of tall oak gates into an enclosure beyond.

 

Until a year or two ago, I must tell you, the gates were more interesting. They were far more ramshackle then, old boards clamped and nailed together with bits of wood, with rusted iron hinges, and splintered patches here and there. The gaps beneath them were so wide that a cat could pass through almost without wriggling, and to keep them closed they had to be propped up with stones. I loved them because they always reminded me of gates on the island of Crete, whose age-old fabrics, repeatedly patched, always seem to me to be sheltering mysterious secrets within. Trefan Morys's gates used to suggest the same, but they had not weathered the Atlantic centuries as well as their Cretan counterparts had defied the Mediterranean, and so they were replaced by gates of oak so solid that they will last a thousand years, and to the annoyance of Ibsen our Norwegian Forest cat, take a bit of squirming under.

Anyway we pass through the gates (noting as we go various anomalous knobs and handles inherited from their predecessors—I think of them as generational) and we find ourselves in a stone-walled yard. One side of it is filled by the house, built of assorted undressed granite boulders. It is long and low, with one door downstairs, and a second on the second floor, reached by a flight of stone steps dripping with toadflax. The doors are dark blue. There are half a dozen rather churchy-looking windows on this side of the house, and a clutter of gray plastic downpipes which would look anomalous to architectural purists, but strike me as engagingly functional.

At one end the second floor opens onto a deck or terrace, balustraded with slate slabs, planked with wood, and above it all rises my own white wooden cupola—well, off-white generally, between paint jobs, and cracking a bit in some places. Long ago I dreamt of settling a colony of storks in it, forever paying honor to my initials above their heads. When I learnt that their wings would have to be pinioned, to prevent them migrating in search of Hans Andersen, I imported instead some fan-tailed doves from England. These turned out to have a strong homing instinct, and promptly flew back to Gloucestershire, so in the end I made do with housing our television aerial inside the woodwork. The weather vane makes a slight grating noise, as the wind revolves it, and I like to fancy the points of the compass rustily replying—East West, groan the English ones, Gogledd De, squeak the Welsh pair slyly in reply.

There's a bold iron bell beside the door, embossed with the date 1842. We brought it with us from the big house. In Victorian times it was used to summon the fieldworkers home for their victuals, rather like the slave bells of the American South: now it is meant to be a doorbell, although since it is so stately-looking hardly anybody ever dares to ring it, preferring to knock on the door instead. We'll use it ourselves, though, to tell Elizabeth we're here—but no, wait a minute, isn't that the whine of a vacuum cleaner? She is hastily cleaning up for your arrival—there have been grandchildren about, and at this time of year Ibsen is inclined to moult his luxuriant northern fur. Elizabeth is the designer of Trefan Morys as it is today, and if for me the building is some kind of symbolical abstraction, for her it is essentially a living machine. Give her a moment, then, wait until the motor winds down, and then—Clang! Clang! Clang! sounds the big bell.

 

The door is a stable door still, opening in two halves, top and bottom, so that a horse could watch the passing scene through the top part. It now leads directly into the kitchen, which is also the dining room. The dining room indeed! Up at the Plas, in its great medieval days, doubtless the uchelwyr ate grandly enough, but to the stablemen who lived in this house before us I suspect the very notion of an
ystafell fwyta,
a dining room, would have seemed grandiose. I'm sure they were splendid drinkers, but anything but gourmets.

Times are changing now, but until very recently most people in this part of Wales, far among the western seas, remote from newfangled ideas of cuisine or even edibility, were never terribly interested in food. Just as the people of Sardinia declined to taste the carrot until the 1950s, so to this day many of my neighbors, living beside waters rich in shellfish, have never eaten an oyster or even a mussel. Within the memory of living people herring was the only fish they would touch. Elsewhere in Wales people subsisted largely on potatoes, and the quarrymen in the mountains ate mostly bread and butter; but for centuries a staple of the rural diet up here was a dish called
sgotyn
—break a slice of bread into a bowl, pour boiling water over it, add salt and pepper to taste and serve at once. When they were eating roast peacock and oyster pie in the great hall of Plas Trefan, their stable-serfs were deep into sgotyn, so that the advanced cuisines with which Elizabeth experiments, though thoroughly organic, always seem to me a little anomalous to the house.

Nevertheless, when we open the door the kitchen does look inalienably Welsh, because its floor is of big Welsh slate slabs, and it is dominated by a high Welsh dresser loaded with Welsh crockery. “Ho,” I cry, spotting a book of contemporary Polynesian cookery beside the cooker, “What's this? Bring me sgotyn!” For my own eating preferences are basic too. I like single malt whisky with bully beef, and marmalade with sausages, but in general I hate anything too fancy, whether of cuisine or of décor—anything to do with gourmetcy or epicureanism—candlelit dinners, elaborate sauces, fashionable interethnic stuff, sun-dried mushrooms or blackened tuna. Give me sgotyn every time. I boast of having drunk a glass of wine every day since the Second World War, but young and simple wines are the ones I most enjoy, fresh from the vineyards, with none of your vaunted bouquets of leather or of pomegranate—wines, as Evelyn Waugh once wrote of Cretan vintages, “lowly esteemed by connoisseurs.”

Still, the Tahiti chicken in the oven really does smell rather good, there is a bottle of Australian red on the table (no pedantry in this house about white wine with white meat), and after that hair-raising drive up the lane you look as if you might welcome more than a slice of peppered bread in boiling water, so let us sit down on a bench at the table, and have a little lunch.

 

Ah, hospitality! To my mind it is much better for the giver than for the receiver. I have not dined in anybody else's house for several years, far preferring to eat in restaurants, and I would stay in the scruffiest hotel in Zagazig rather than accept the offer of a room for the night from the dearest of friends (“but believe me, you know us, we'd never bother you, we'd leave you quite alone.”
Oh yeah?
). Nor am I by nature gregarious, cherishing my privacy and my solitude. But I love welcoming people to Trefan Morys. Sometimes, if I hear strangers walking down the lane outside, I leap out upon them and drag them in for a glass of wine or a cup of tea. It is the duty of a house to be hospitable, and especially a Welsh house, for kindness to visitors was compulsory here long before the days of tourism. There is even a sort of folk-saint of Welsh hospitality—Ifor Hael, Ifor the Generous, who was poetically immortalized for his generosity in the fourteenth century, and is still hazily remembered in houses named Llys Ifor, Ifor's Court, or pubs called the Ifor Arms.

The kitchen has always been the theater of this style—the Welsh kitchen, where, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins thought in the nineteenth century,

It was the center of every cottage, where the hearth was, where the children slept in cots beside the fire, where the cat dozed among the sheepdogs and the saucepans hung polished from the wall. A thousand Welsh fables are set in the kitchen. Here the
tylwyth teg,
the Fair People, came knocking at the door disguised as beggars, to reward generous housewives with supernatural favors. Here strange old men crouched in the firelight, telling tales of revenge or recompense. Sinister fairy-harps appeared in the kitchen, driving people mad with their insensate music. And when in the distant past Elen, a young mother, was disobliging to the tylwyth teg, she found her lovely child gradually transmuting, day after day, into a malignant elf, leering at her from its cradle beside the ancestral hearth.

By and large, though, the kitchens of Wales have happy connotations. They were the rooms where families got to know each other, friends met and children grew up from babies to fellow-workers. When Welsh people were far away from home, it was chiefly the kitchen they remembered with fond nostalgia, and when they were old and prolix they talked incessantly of childhood evenings by the kitchen fire. Our kitchen has been a place of children too, and the house is full of their mementos: children who are now men and women, and are represented here by the books they have published, the music they have recorded, the pictures they have drawn or painted, and also children who are children still.

For those grandchildren that Elizabeth was cleaning up after often come here during their holidays. On the wall beside the door there we have penciled a register of their heights, from babyhood to adolescent: from the days when Jess or Sam could scarcely stand to be measured, to the times when Ruben or Angharad were taller than we were ourselves, and no longer worth the recording. We did it always as we said goodbye to them, and I can still remember the mingled hilarity, sadness and anticipation of the occasions: they were amused by the ritual, they were miserable to be going back to school, they were happy to think they would soon be in their own beds at home (and some of the same emotions, I fear, passed through our own minds, as in loving exhaustion we offered their mothers a last cup of tea for the road).