A Writer's House in Wales (7 page)

Anyway, look out there now, through the trees into the sea. Away to the right is Ynys Enlli, where we are told 20,000 saints lie buried (a sort of honorary sainthood, I think, acquired by being there at all). A little closer are the islands of St. Tudwal, inhabited only by sheep. To the left is a promontory that shelters Porthmadog, once the chief exporting port of the Welsh slate trade—the slate was brought there from the mountain quarries by a narrow-gauge railway which still operates for the tourist trade. And sailing across our line of vision, backwards and forwards, ever again there pass the Porthmadog schooners known as the Western Ocean Yachts. Do you see them? They were built in Porthmadog, owned by local syndicates of farmers, clergymen, bank managers, doctors, manned by local crews, commanded by local captains. They were among the most beautiful little ships ever to sail the western seas, none of them more than 500 tons, but of a grandeur beyond their size.

They were the ships that carried the slate, the very substance of Wales, all around the world, to all the ports of Europe, into the Indian Ocean, round Cape Horn, up to Newfoundland, coming back to London or Cardiff loaded with fruits, wines or olive oil, and so home in ballast to Porthmadog. Just for a few years they made men of these parts, once so isolated, marvelously well-traveled. In 1897 a boy named David Jenkins signed on for the first time as a deck boy and cook, and this is how his maiden voyage went: to Buenos Aires in Argentina, to Galveston in Texas, around the Horn to collect guano from Peru, to Liverpool, to Newcastle, back to the Gulf of Mexico and sunk in two minutes in a storm off Tobago. Jenkins was shipped back to Wales in another vessel, but after a fortnight at home found himself a new ship and was off to South America again. The Porthmadog schooners, like their crews, were so irrepressible and indefatigable in their brief time that in June 1899 seventeen ships from this remote haven of the Irish Sea simultaneously lay below the Rock of Gibraltar.

There they go now, swift and sturdy, their white sails billowing, their deckmen waving goodbye to relatives on the shore, or even to us if they notice us at our window—off on voyages that will take them from our little backwater into the farthest corners of the oceans. You can't see them there? They don't stir your heart as they stir mine? That is because they are only dreamships. The last of the Western Ocean Yachts sailed out of Porthmadog almost a century ago. One alone is still afloat, as a mastless hulk in the Harbour of Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where she had gone in search of guano. All the rest are scrapped or at the bottom of seas—except only for those phantom fleets outside my window, which I can summon into view whenever I like. In their honor long ago I commissioned a nautical craftsman living nearby to build for me, from the original builders' plans, models of three of them: And if you look around now, and raise your eyes to the ceiling, there they are, standing on the crossbeams. All three were once familiar to watchers standing in my window, and one ended her life out there, aground on a rock a mile or two from home, after sailing all the way back from Valparaíso. The two-masted
Sara Evans,
sails spread, is on the beam nearest the window: I once met the widow of her last captain. Then there is the two-master
Edward Windus,
sails furled. And on the third beam is the grand three-master
Owen Morris,
a true miniature clipper, and she is the ship whose rotting timbers can still sometimes be seen, when the tide is especially low, among the shallows of Porthmadog Bay.

I had never seen model ships mounted high on beams, when I first raised them there, but later I discovered that in Carpaccio's “La visione dei martiri dell'Ararat,” painted in 1515, there is a model galley perched above the processing martyrs in just the same way. Encouraged by this example, I later put those two wooden models of Venetian fishing boats up too, and their bright red sails, enlivened with stripes and arcane symbols, and with devices on their bulbous hulls to ward off the evil eye, provide an allegorical contrast to the severe copper-bottomed grace of the three Welsh schooners. I cherish all these vessels, silent there upon their beams, and it is a constant disappointment to me that most of my visitors, while they all admire the beams, never seem to notice the ships.

You're different, of course. You realize that they are not just models, but icons of a kind, testament to the pull of that wider world beyond the gates of Trefan Morys, beyond the coasts of Wales. Ships are all over this part of my house. Propped here and there are models of an American harbor tug, of a China junk, of a paddle steamer from Gdansk, of fishing boats from Greece, the Faeroe Islands and Chesapeake Bay, of a Hong Kong ferry, of a sailing-freighter from Dalmatia, of a gondola, a bottled one of HM Brig
Badger
that I found in Sydney, and an elegant one of a catamaran that Elizabeth has saved from her childhood in Sri Lanka, where she was born. There is also a French fishing boat immured in a plastic cube, like a bee in amber, and trapped in there beside it is a single hair of its maker's head, which fell in during the hardening process: because of this irreversible error he reduced the model's price for me, but I would happily have paid him extra for the curiosity of it.

Ships sail through many a picture here, too. There is a pierhead painting of the brig
Exchange
(Master, Robert Ashton) homeward bound from Genoa in 1812; a watercolor by A. G. Vickers (died 1837) of coastal sailing-ships rocking in the swell off the Admiralty in St. Petersburg; a picture of the Isle of Man packet
Cambria,
painted on china in 1908 and cracked amidships; a colored sketch by a Victorian army officer of a felucca struggling against a hot wind upriver beside the Pyramids; a large oil painting of herring boats lying in the shelter of Cricieth Castle. The colored oleograph of the liner
City of New York
(10,500 tons) is, I have reason to believe, one of those given to every first-class passenger on the maiden voyage of the ship, from Liverpool to New York in 1888. The Cairo river scene in the bathroom, in oils, was painted by an Egyptian artist from the deck of the houseboat we used to inhabit there: It was done for a friend of mine, David Holden, who took over the boat from us, and when he was murdered in the city in the 1970s I found he had left it in his will to me.

There is a ship of peculiar rig in one picture. It seems to be a double lateen rig, with a jib, and behind it there is a boat that looks rather like a double-ended lifeboat, with a tall mast amidships. These queer craft are seen sailing into a very peculiar harbor, with a mosque in the foreground, what looks like a Chinese pagoda, a castle on a hilltop, Russian-style spiral domes and a massive waterfront building resembling a railway terminal. I know well what I am describing for you, because I myself invented these strange vessels and this ill-assorted collection of buildings. They figure in a novel of mine about an imaginary Levantine city, and when the publishers commissioned a painting for its jacket, they gave its original to me.

Do please forgive me my conceit, but I cannot resist also drawing your attention to the meticulous image of the Italian helicopter cruiser
Vittorio Veneto
at the bottom right corner of this picture over here. I did it myself, laboriously copying it out of
Jane's Fighting Ships,
but if you will run your eye to the left you will see it is only a grace note, so to speak, for a much larger artistic project. Five feet long, in ink on seven pages of copy paper stuck together, this is a panoramic view of the city of Venice which I drew during a few idle summer days here at Trefan Morys. It is a Venice squashed flat, to make it long and thin, but a Venice drawn in such besotted detail that with a magnifying glass you can even see my little son Henry hastening back from school over the Academia bridge, in the days when we lived in the city. Isn't it fun? Isn't it wonderful? I am so proud of it that I spent months going from framer to framer, trying to get the damned thing framed, until I discovered a sufficiently indulgent house decorator.

And here is another odd one. Back in the 1980s I was doing some work for
New England Monthly,
and in the magazine I came across a nautical caprice so entertaining that I asked its artist, Bruce McCall, if I could have its original. It hangs beside my desk now. It records an apocryphal event of a century before, when the Vanderbilts and other billionaires of Newport, Rhode Island, decided to invest in enormous seaborne replicas of their own vast mansions, and took them out to sea in a competitive regatta. There in my picture those palaces sail to this day, puffing and pounding toward my writing desk, domed and pinnacled and cupola'd, with smoke streaming from their tall chimneys, pinnaces on davits beside impeccable floating lawns, imposing watergates at their prows and enormous Stars and Stripes streaming from their flagstaffs. The race was won, Mr. McCall says, “in a legendary sprint to the finish,” by William K. Vanderbilt's four-chimney, forty-six-room
Dunroamin.

 

All these pictures have specific meanings for me, as you see, but as a whole they are simply emblems of open spaces and far horizons. Maps equal symbolism here, too. Do you see that brightly colored filing cabinet, there in the corner? I bought that years ago specifically for its colors—blue and yellow—because I thought it would represent, in its somewhat garish vivacity, the spirit of Opportunity, as against the spirit of Content which is paramount elsewhere in the house. It is stuffed full of maps from countries all around the world. Some are up to date, some rather forlornly decline in practical value as new motorways are built, national boundaries change and place-names shift. I keep them all anyway, the new ones because I use them, the old ones as mementos. On top of the cabinet that long row of box files contains city plans, stacked alphabetically from Aden to Zanzibar, by way of Melton Mowbray, and at the end there is a box of panoramic or geodesic maps, which I particularly like: fancifully artistic aerial views of Gdansk or Manhattan, Hamburg or Stellenbosch, some touchingly amateurish, some highly professional in direct line of descent from the city-view painters of the sixteenth century.

Then there are several stacks of bookcases full of guidebooks, old and new, and fifteen atlases varying in date from the 1860s to the day before yesterday—I have no interest in maps, however beautiful, historical, entertaining, quaint or instructive, that were produced in the days of geographical ignorance. Over there on the table is a mass of miscellaneous road atlases, aerial photographic atlases and gazetteers, varying from the huge
National Atlas of Wales
(area 8,015 square miles), which I can hardly lift, to a
Handy Atlas of the World
(area 196,938,800 square miles), which is about as big as a pocket diary. Finally, just try opening a drawer of that chest of drawers in the alcove under the stairs. You can hardly budge it, can you? That is because for half a century I have been more or less indiscriminately stuffing into it every brochure, handbook or publicity pamphlet I have ever picked up during a lifetime of wandering the world.

The treasures that I find in there, when I can summon the resolution to open the drawers! There are sad ill-printed propaganda brochures from the Workers' Paradises of the lost Communist Europe, all dowdy spas and fir forests. There are American pamphlets displaying couples in double-breasted suits and dirndl skirts, with ineffable sweet children waving out of fin-tailed convertibles as they swing down to Miami Beach. Here is a civic brochure from Addis Ababa in the days of the emperors, here happy Caucasian citizens drink delicately from gleaming wineglasses in the South Africa of apartheid, and here unmistakable British colonials in floppy hats sprawl in the sunshine of Down Under. It is as though the whole world that I roamed, during the second half of the twentieth century, has been encapsulated here, and I have sometimes thought of offering the whole lot to the National Library of Wales, as a traveler's ephemera.

All of these, models and pictures, maps and atlases and guidebooks, brochures and pamphlets, attached to the walls, hoisted on the beams, stuffed in such profusion into the chests and shelves of Trefan Morys, are really expressions of liberty. They are tokens that I can, at any time I want, say au revoir to Trefan Morys, jump in the car and be in Ireland by lunchtime, France before dark. And I am reminded poignantly of the true meaning of liberty, too, by that small framed holograph on the wall, above the Cinzano bottle. This is what it says:

 

I have fortunately never heard the call to enter a convent, and Trefan Morys is the very opposite of a monastic institution or retreat. It is a working writer's house, and quaint though it sometimes seems to outsiders, rustically innocent in its style and preferences, it is in fact linked with the far corners of the planet by all manner of electronic device. Fax? Naturally. E-mail? Of course. Five telephone outlets, on two separate lines, plus a mobile. Television and radio, it goes without saying. The world wide web is on call. You would not guess it, as the wood fire lazily burns, and the kettle simmers on the kitchen range, but in and out of this house, night and day for years and years, an incessant flow of messages has been invisibly passing.

If you could hear them they would be an endless murmur of bleeps. If you could see them they would be as laser beams across the sky, flickering like searchlights, converging from the four quarters of the weather vane, direct from Sydney or New York or Hong Kong, and plunging at last unerringly down the chimneys of Trefan Morys—the marvelous precision of it, from the other sides of the world, direct, without a waver, to this small house in a backwater of Wales! Only the other day an e-mail flashed in from New York asking me for permission to reprint in a South Korean magazine an essay about a German city that I had written for an American publication! When I was writing a book about Manhattan, long ago, I was thrilled to imagine the host of unseen rays which crisscrossed the great city to stoke up its powers and keep it informed. Thirty years later just the same energizing web enmeshes this small house too. Primitive? Simple? Why even the clock on the wall there is governed by radio beams from Frankfurt in Germany, and is the only one in the house that remembers to put itself forward an hour when summertime comes in.