An Audience with an Elephant (8 page)

So much wealth has turned up it poses another mystery: why was Britain so rich? Historians who have studied the Roman Empire all their lives cannot account for the fact that most of its treasure has been found in what, even 50 years ago, was still considered a frontier province. In 1942 a ploughman found the Mildenhall Treasure, which included the Great Dish, a silver plate of such a size he was unable to stuff it into a sack. It was four years before the authorities caught up with this, a farmer in the interval heaping fruit on it at Christmas and using silver Roman spoons to eat his puddings. At that point, of course, the puddings, and much else, hit the fan.

The finds in East Anglia are becoming an embarrassment. When the Hoxne Hoard
of 1500 Roman coins
was found in 1992, the first reaction of Catherine Johns, curator of the Romano-British Collections at the British Museum, was, quite simply, ‘Oh s***.’ For four years ago the Museum was obliged to open a new £1.76 million gallery just to accommodate what was coming out of the ground. As its curator, Ralph Thomas, put it, ‘You ask what it’s like to find something like the Hoxne Hoard. I’ll tell you. If we had anything on that scale again, in
view
of the sheer amount of work involved for us, it would be
disastrous.
’

But it is the West which is fascinating, for here you encounter not the riches of the Empire, but what Rome
meant
to men long after it had gone. I grew up in Carmarthen where behind the front door of the museum they had this huge tombstone, next to the exhibit marked, ‘Dylan Thomas’s cuff-links. It is believed this is the only pair ever owned by the poet.’ At the time, alas, Thomas’s cuff-links intrigued me more than the stone, which is the most important single thing any provincial museum has on show.

On it is written in Latin ‘The monument of Votepor the Protector’. Now we know something about this Votepor: he was one of five British or Welsh kings mentioned by Gildas, the one man in sixth-century Britain to write a book, in fact the only man known to have been able to write. Gildas thought all five kings an absolute shower, but no matter. What is remarkable is that when he died, 150 years after the end of Roman Britain, the proudest title Votepor could claim was not that he had been a king, but that he had been a protector, or member of an imperial bodyguard. But there had been no imperial bodyguard, or emperor, in Britain for 150 years. It is just as though, centuries after a nuclear disaster, some local gang boss in a wasteland might still proudly be calling himself a town clerk.

The stone was found in a dingle, in the tiny church of Castelldwyran some 3 miles from Llandissilio on the A479 from Narberth to Cardigan. This is part of a farmyard now, and ducks walk through the church, but in the late nineteenth century it had its own vicar, Richard Bowen-Jones. He stole the stone and erected it in his own garden, possibly because he did not want to share top billing in a graveyard with a king. He had himself buried there in 1887 in a very grand tomb, but the vicar’s son, who for some reason couldn’t stand him, spoiled the effect by adding yet another one, an alternative tombstone for his father.

On this he had cut: ‘Richard Bowen-Jones / Born 1811, Transferred 1887. / Here lie the remains of a Classical Ass / The accursed of his sons by the name of Jabrass / In the earth he is Ammonia and Triphosphate of Calcium / On earth a Home Demon and ferocious old ruffian.’

In the dingle Bowen-Jones, his boy and the old king await the Last Judgement, when they can get their hands on each other. Just as 15 miles away in the church at Steynton, near Milford Haven, a Roman called Gendilius will be waiting to get his hands on one Thomas Harries, who, when he died in 1870, had his name put on Gendilius’s gravestone. The most outrageous monument in Britain is now hidden behind a pillar near the font.

But the most touching moment in this musical chairs of the graves in the west is the tombstone built into the wall of Llandissilio church, though it is centuries older than this. It had stood nearby until yet another Victorian vicar decided to use it as building material. The inscription in bad Latin and straggling capitals reads: Clutorix, son of Paulinus Marinus of Latium. Just as with Dervacus on the moor, someone had decided to bury Clutorix in the old way.

But the proudest thing they could find to say about him was that his dad was the genuine article, having come from the Imperial heartland. It is a small and fleeting moment of snobbery in the darkness of Rome.

R.S. Thomas

E WAS THE
strangest bundle of contradictions. This was the poet who wrote of country clergymen that they were ‘Toppled into the same graves / With oafs and yokels,’ but was a country clergyman himself, the oafs and yokels the ancestors of his own parishioners. ‘I suppose that did shock the bourgeoisie,’ said R.S. Thomas.

A poem started, ‘Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales / With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females / How I have hated you. . .’ — and the man who wrote that was such an extreme nationalist that he could not support Plaid Cymru because it recognised the English Parliament.

If he was a puzzle to his English-reading public, just think how much more so he was to his own countrymen, for this was a Holyhead man, the product of the town’s schools, who spoke the English language without the trace of a Welsh accent — spoke it, in fact, with all the coldness and weariness of its own ruling class. For almost half a century he was married to an English woman, and, when I asked him once if she had not objected to his banging on about her race, he said, ‘
Amor vincit omnia
.’ His son went to an English boarding school.

He was in
Who’s Who
, but at one point that would have told you more about the private lives of the old Soviet leaders. There was a name, ‘
THOMAS
, Ronald Stuart’, followed by the reason for its inclusion — ‘poet’ — but, after that, just a list of church livings and of books, also an address, for he was a vicar after all. But there was no record of parents, marriage, fatherhood, not even a date of birth. In old age he relented and supplied most of these, even throwing in his Queen’s Medal for Poetry but, unlike the gardening, fishing, motoring princes of his church, never did add ‘recreations’. There was only one, birdwatching, and this was there in the poems — just as everything else was there in the poems.

It is the dilemma of the lyric poet that his material is his own life, his commodity intimacy. Thomas Hardy in old age sent up a smoke-screen against future biographers by guardedly writing an autobiography which he got his wife to publish after his death under her own name. R.S. Thomas wrote his in Welsh, and called it
Neb
— nobody. There was mischief in this, for the answers his admirers sought were in a language they could not understand. But it also reflected the bitterness which danced attendance on him as he grew old, that he had learnt his native language too late in life to write poetry in it. ‘All those words, and me outside them.’

To adapt what someone said of De Gaulle, Thomas had one illusion, Wales, and one hate, the Welsh, who had been born into a tradition they neglected, and which he, like a tramp at Christmas, was doomed to stand outside. He said once that there had been no personal influences on his life, no guiding schoolmaster or tutor — and little contact later with anyone who could be considered his peer. He took no newspapers, entertained no friends. He was the loneliest man I ever met.

It was partly the loneliness of the country priest, cut off by his cloth and learning, but a lot more was deliberate. He felt so cut off from the modern world, with its cult of personality, that, in the autobiography, he referred to himself throughout in the third person — as ‘the boy’, ‘R.S.’, ‘the rector’ — as though watching himself, often with startled interest, from space. He could take this sense of distance to hair-raising lengths, as when, asked whether he felt lonely after the death of his wife, he said he sometimes felt lonely when she was alive. It is one thing to encounter bleak honesty in the poems, but quite another to encounter it in conversation.

‘It was difficult to talk to Mr Thomas,’ a reporter wrote disgruntledly. ‘He makes it almost obsessively clear that he does not suffer fools, or foolish things, easily.’ He would not have recognised the self-portrait of the autobiography, of a figure encased in innocence, who accommodated the ambitions and needs of others. Thomas’s mother, a possessive woman, thought the priesthood a safe career: he became a priest. His wife wanted a child (‘the possibility of this had not entered his mind’): the child was born, ‘with his huge hunger,’ wrote the poet who could also start a poem, ‘Dear parents / I forgive you my life.’

He was a sea captain’s son, read Latin at University College, Bangor, where he also played rugby — the forbidding initials stemmed from the team lists, which contained more than one Thomas — was ordained, and married the painter Elsi Eldridge, then an art teacher at Oswestry high school. They had one son, Gwydion, a lecturer in education, who never learnt Welsh, unlike his father, who did so at the age of 30. The relationship between Thomas and his country was a strange one. It began and ended in Holyhead, so what lay between was an odyssey — from Chirk, his first curacy, on the border, to Manafon, a border parish, to another in mid-Wales, and to the last, at Aberdaron, at the western edge of Wales. This should have been a progression into the heart of Welshness, only it wasn’t; there was much black comedy in the odyssey.

Those who knew only the public figure of his later years, with his bitter pronouncements on English incomers — ‘the cantankerous clergyman’, ‘the fiery poet-priest’ — would have been startled to meet him in his beginnings, the curate trudging dutifully towards his weekly lesson with a copy of
Welsh Made Easy
under his arm. But then, there was also comedy about the later years, when, in the Welsh heartland, he met English pensioners in their holiday homes (‘an Elsan culture / Threatens us’). This produced the public figure, when the press picked up the chance remark that he could understand the motives of those who burnt down these cottages.

There were many interviews then, and many photographs of a wild, gaunt face against the sky, or scowling over the half-door of the sixteenth-century cottage to which he had retired. Controversy surfaced again when he was nominated for the Nobel prize in his 82nd year, for it had been largely forgotten that this ogre was also the finest living lyric poet, ironically, in the English language.

Acclaim came late. Thomas was 42 when Rupert Hart-Davis brought out
Song At The Year’s Turning
, before which there had been just one book, printed at his own expense, and a few poems in magazines. John Betjeman contributed a preface, in which he wrote, ‘The name which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public will be forgotten long before that of R.S. Thomas.’ There were some generous reviews, Kingsley Amis calling him ‘one of the best half-dozen poets now writing in English’, and, by the time
Selected Poems
appeared twenty years later, an anonymous reviewer in the
TLS
was starting to use words like ‘major poetry’. Suddenly, nobody was making the old charge that Thomas was a ‘limited’ poet.

Yet it was easy to see why it had been made. He wrote about the hill farmers he had met in his first parish, a people and a way of life very few of his readers would have encountered. He wrote about religious faith, when, for many, this would have held only an historical interest. He attacked modern life, modern technology, the English encroaching into Wales and the Welsh responsible for the decay of their own culture and language.

There is no comfort in any of these poems. ‘Too far for you to see / The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot / Gnawing the skin from the small bones / The sheep are grazing at Bwlchy-Fedwen, / Arranged romantically in the usual manner / On a bleak background of bald stone.’ The hill farmer, at one moment a cosmic symbol of endurance, is also greedy, joyless, physically repugnant.

There is no comfort in the religious poetry either, and no answers. One, called ‘Earth’, begins: ‘What made us think / It was yours? Because it was signed / With your blood, God of battles?’ Yet there is a grim compassion for the hill farmer, and there is the odd abrupt burst of lyricism, when the poet is caught off-guard by the beauty of the natural world.

But the tone is inevitably the bleak, ruthlessly honest note Thomas had made his own. There is a hardness about his rhythms, and a clarity about his words and images (‘Who put the crease in your soul, Davies?’) that preserved him from the misanthropy and the ranting into which some of his attitudes could have betrayed him. Later, he added God to his dramatis personae, a cold figure indifferent to His creation, and there were small collections with titles like ‘H’m’, in which the main emotions seemed to be weariness and disgust. ‘Just souring old age,’ said Thomas. ‘My mother used to ask my father, “Haven’t you a good word to say about anybody?” He thought for a long time and said “No.”’

But it was an industrious disgust, for he wrote on and on, and it was startling to be reminded of just how many small collections there had been when the
Collected Poems
appeared, a volume of 500 pages, of near-Victorian dimensions. In old age the poems were increasingly abstract, God increasingly absent — though much addressed — so the bursts of lyricism were winter sunlight. This is on the death of his wife: