My First Colouring Book (27 page)

I was staying in the country's oldest youth hostel, due to close that autumn. Standing on Gospel Pass I surveyed the wooded cleft of the Vale of Ewyas, scraped out by meltwater and bearing almost as many Christian symbols as a saint's festival in Spain. But I felt nothing of its holy past, not up there. Great change was afoot. I met a farrier-publican who told me that the old families were disappearing rapidly and centuries of border Welsh tradition were coming to an end; as if to illustrate his words, I noticed a large farm being renovated meticulously near Cwmyoy Church, at huge expense. A millionaire, I was told. New money was flooding into Ewyas, as it was pouring into the rest of
Wales; it was a time of plenty for builders and a time of lean for the old and tetchy as they witnessed a disappearing world.

On the first day I walked down to Hay with the Bluff on my right and Lord Hereford's Knob on my left, on a morning as sharp and bright as fresh linen drying in a sunny garden. Bullfinches and goldfinches flitted upwards into the hawthorn bushes as I walked on, and there were warblers everywhere. I snacked on wild strawberries shaded by the roadside flowers – including yellow archangel – and my spirits roared. Down below the pass I met a tall man with a white moustache standing by his camper van; he willingly took my camera and snapped me with Hay Bluff rearing up behind my back. Five years previously I'd spent one of the happiest hours of my life sitting up there with the patchwork fields of Wales at my feet and a miniature farmer on a Lilliputian horse whistling to his dogs in the amphitheatre below. I'd travelled without a camera then, and this was an effort to recapture the past, but it didn't work, because the image was sterile – in fact I felt rather like a revisionist, distorting history for my own ends.

Having your older body photographed as you stand awkwardly in revisited places is the closest you'll ever get, probably, to experiencing multiple lives, as a new image – a palimpsest – overlays an older one in the memory. On the way into Hay I encountered two attractive women taking a small dog for a walk, and felt smitten. Maybe the sunshine was infiltrating my hormones; maybe the change of scenery was sharpening my senses. Maybe I was in the mood for love – or maybe I was just an old fool, I thought to myself as I surveyed a broad reddish weal slashing the countryside from left to right – the new gas pipeline. Traversing South Wales, from Milford Haven to Gloucestershire, this 197-mile tube was due to cost about £700 million when completed. A few men would make a lot of money and the plebs would pay, as usual. Trying not to get upset over the rape of Wales (a full-time occupation these days) I reminded myself that the Amlwch-Stanlow pipeline which went through North Wales in much the same fashion thirty years ago is almost completely anonymous now, in fact few remember it's still there. Back to the here and now: Italian welders working on the new pipeline were getting £500 a shift, I was told by locals. Rumours abounded of fabulous wages, and the natives were agog as they passed the news from ear to ear.

Down in Hay I popped into a store and chatted to the woman at the till; she was a Welsh-speaker from my own region and I asked her what she was doing among the southren folk. She'd traced her father after more than thirty years' separation, she said, so she'd settled here. Wondrous news; a new life superimposed on an older one; a picture within a picture. I wanted to hear her story, but she was busy dealing with an infestation of bookworms attending the annual Hay Festival.

On the second day the youth hostel was full of people from the Central London Outdoor Group, who were trying to recreate the capital's rush hour traffic conditions in the kitchen, as if they were an urban re-enactment society. It was Sunday and the heavens had opened in the night – we had the wettest day of the month loitering outside the windows of our hostel, a squat old farmhouse lodged on a sharp incline. There are otters in the area, apparently, and I considered joining them for a good soak in the nature reserve close by. Instead I onioned myself in a double skin of coats and walked down to Llanthony Priory. Conditions were dramatically different from the previous day: I bobbed through a waterfest extreme enough to suit Noah himself, and my ears were caroused by the splish and splash of a trillion raindrops. The road-tunnel through the dripping trees gleamed with sheets of shape-shifting floodwater, and hawthorn blossom, dashed from the trees, lay all around me like confetti at a mermaid's wedding. Because this is a region of red sandstone (in the deep past it lay at the delta of a vast river) the water was terracotta red where it stood in puddles. The valley is also a busy equine centre and hoof-prints decorated the ground here and there in red crescents. The ever-present cow parsley plants, weighed down with water, bowed their umbelliferous heads penitently on either side of me. Wet? You know it's utterly wet when there's no point sheltering under trees. First stop was the entrancing church at Capel-y-Ffin, a pocket venus with teddy bears on the organ and lovely posies in the windows. Two small headstones in the churchyard were carved by the typographer, artist and pervert Eric Gill.

At Llanthony I joined an American party who ignored me studiously in the ribcage of the ecclesiastic skeleton, then I padded around the drab little church alongside, built on the site of St David's early cell. What did they live on, those holy men – handouts from the local serfs? No Tesco, no weekly Giro. Still, they didn't have to hang around waiting for planning permission, or a delivery from Jewsons. There's a hotel glued incongruously to the side of the priory complex, and the whole place is a sort of Blue Peter cut-and-paste model gone wrong. If you want to learn how the arrival of someone with loads of dosh and big ideas can seriously piss off the locals, read about the Victorian writer Walter Savage Landor's involvement with this site. Famously temperamental, he is caricatured in Dickens' Bleak House.

Onwards and downwards I stumped to the fantastical little church at Cwmyoy, bent out of shape by convulsions in the bedrock below – the tower leans drunkenly and ‘no part of it is square or at right angles with any other part'. A seventeenth- century monument to a local man, waiting to be called up to heaven, bears this verse:

Thomas Price he takes his nap in our common mother's lap waiting to heare the bridegroome say awake my dear and come away.

Charmingly, the words mo/ther, bri/degroome and a/wake are all broken, signifying an age which was less obsessive-compulsive about straight lines, superficial appearances and passing fads.

Just like my own photomontage near Hay Bluff, histories have been superimposed onto each other within this building. I quote a church pamphlet:

The medieval cross in the centre of the church was discovered in 1871 at the nearby farm. It is thought to be one of the crosses on the Pilgrim Way to St David's. It was transferred to the Vicarage garden, and eventually in 1935, placed in the Tower inside the church. In 1967 the cross disappeared, but not before a photograph of it was taken. This photograph was shown to the Keeper of the Sculptuary at the British Museum, and the Keeper not only dated it as being 13th century, but also said he had seen the cross in an antique dealer's shop in London. From there it was recovered. The original thieves were never traced.

From Cwmyoy I laboured over the ridge to the Grwyne Valley to visit the famous church at Partrishow, in a field by a farm. It was too wet to visit St Issui's famous well because the rain had become passionate; besides, I remembered that Issui was murdered by an ungrateful traveller who had received hospitality in his humble cell, and such stony fables as these can gather much moss on wet green Sundays in Wales.

The church, which has a magnificently carved screen, also has a starkly medieval representation of Time painted on the west wall of the nave – a skeletal figure with a scythe, hourglass and spade, meant to be a macabre reminder to the illiterate peasants that the wages of sin are death. Again, I quote the church pamphlet:

The artists were itinerant painters. Their range of colours was limited. We find a lot of red and ochre. These were earth colours, easily dug up. Black was provided by soot from lamps. James I ordered that all such ‘Popish Devices' should be white-washed over, and suitable texts painted there instead. At Patricio today, we have a number of such texts, but if you look carefully you can still see traces of these pre-Reformation paintings pushing their way through the white-wash around the texts.

Tired by now and half soaked, I realised that I'd bitten off more than I could chew, and getting back was likely to be an ordeal. The ridge loomed above me Everest-high and the rain intensified, seething in drainpipes and overpowering the pathways. But fortune smiled on me, as if I had offered prayers and been rewarded (though I am a rank atheist, oddly invested with a great love of churches). I was joined in the chamber by two marriage-related families and we all poked around politely, trying to make room for one another, tinkling money into wall safes and studying ancient artefacts in the gloom. I must have looked forlorn, for mercifully one of them, a Maesteg physiotherapist, offered me a lift back to Cwmyoy, his family cramming into the back of their steamy car so that I could be accommodated. Their children looked at me as if I were a strange antediluvian monster or a coelacanth netted during a storm at sea. But boy was I grateful. I stuck my thumb out at Cwmyoy and the first car which came along took me all the way up the valley to the youth hostel. I outdid the sky in outpourings, in my case a deluge of gratitude.

After I'd peeled off everything soggy I put wedges of cheese in some bread donated by departing people and chewed contentedly, greeting the London lot as they dribbled back to the glimmering kitchen. A sheep and her lamb stared cynically at us through the window, unimpressed by this moving tableau in their upland Tate. Soon I was in a scene from Good Companions, or sheltering in a smoky inn of old as travellers found sanctuary, a safe house secreted in a gauze of wet white mist. One of them had a fresh round face which reminded me of the gilded angels down there in the churches, painted in vegetable dyes by local artisans; the bright naive colours are still optimistic and fresh, but the painters' formula was lost over 150 years ago. A woman among our company, Jewish and musical, made the magnet in my compass lurch around and the bread was dense in my mouth. Too late, I thought. Too late on a wet day in Wales. If there's such as thing as regret without melancholy, but with a touch of hiraeth perhaps, I felt it then. Like the walk I had planned along the tops of the Black Mountains that day, it was best left to that part of the brain which deals with what might have been; the mind's draughtsman, sketching glorious plans for an idle master who never goes beyond the dreaming stage. The older version of me sitting at that table thought of the young man who had been able to contemplate such things. I was a coat of whitewash daubed over him. My desire was merely an old fresco on a church wall, seeping though to the surface many years later.

On the third day I walked down to Hay Festival, in sunshine again. This time I knelt by flowers in a field by the Craswall turn-off and took photographs of spotted orchids with slender green beetles nosing around their nectar cups. My sojourn was drawing to an end and my name was being called out in the classroom again. Society needed to check my credentials: it was time to sign on for my small dole of public recognition. My attempts at self-expression had engendered a strange baby – a book which had little resonance among the people around me (and was therefore a failure, presumably) while winning the approval of competition judges (and was therefore a success, presumably). I did the interviews and played the game, but I was unconvinced by my own patter. I watched the literati come and go, talking of Michelangelo, many in long gabardines and bushwhacker hats; I felt inadequate and micro in this macro setting, this town-sized Petri dish gathering clumps of etymological growths. I watched throngs of people in bookshops and on pavements, within pubs and in large white literary tents, patterns of iron filings grouped around hidden magnets. Words were important, yes I knew that. Probably our last stab at democracy. But their piling up in this place was an artifice and a conjuration; the festival tents were a glossy dental enamel painted on the yellow teeth of literary endeavour: a snowstorm of words come to earth without wonder. There was a sense of over-feasting, of the castle hiding its caried teeth with a genteel hand and sighing; when the belch came it would be described fulsomely, in the chatter of the cover blurbs,
extraordinary
or
vivid
, or even worse, the dreaded
remarkable achievement
.

So I took my smallness away homewards. I hitched a lift to Abergavenny and it was good to walk around the busy streets. Alexander Cordell listened to these people and was inspired. Among them I saw relics of the past, walking as if they were ghosts: rustics with check caps aslant and sticks in their gnarled hands – the farmers of old, a hobbitry of endangered beings, each taking with him, to be burnt, a book of discreet knowledge, the lore of planting and reaping, hedging and husbandry.

In the train, almost alone, travelling in heavy sunshine, I saw the south recede, hedgerow by hedgerow, stream by stream, sheep by sheep. On my map of the Black Mountains I had smoothed down a new transfer tracing my spoor – fresh signs and markings, a gloss on the earlier chart. I would keep that new picture of myself by Hay Bluff to mark the lesson it had taught me in emotional triangulation, and for no other reason. But again and again I would seek to recreate the experience of sitting on the bluff on a summer morning in 2002, with a year of living dangerously spread out to dry below me.