Once (11 page)

This is what Ifor knew, along with whatever else he kept to himself.

(There was no charge levied to fish there in our time. 5s each a day would have been preventative.) Marie Trevelyan reveals that the lake was also said to be a point of entry into the Celtic underworld, Annwn or Annwfn, and tells that a dove appearing by those ‘black and fateful waters'

foretokened the descent of a beautiful but wicked woman's soul to torment.... Fiends would arise from the lake and drag those who had led evil lives into the black waters. Those who had led good lives would be guided past the causeway leading to the lake, and vanish in spirit forms robed in white.

 

It was for all of us an entry into the underworld of the heart and mind, the soul itself, both when we were there, and when we were not, the place we haunted to stave off the world's demands and stresses on our time, the place that haunted and possessed us. It was my first love affair. The real thing, at first sight, and, in this case, at first hearing. For I heard tell of it of course before ever I saw it, and I saw it first in the mind's eye.

I knew only one Black Lake myth in those days and believed it for fact, as did the others who told it me, and who died before I could tell them the truth. We believed that the aircraft flattened into the high crag, like a moth buckled and splattered on a car windscreen, was a German bomber that had lost its way returning from a raid on Liverpool. Here was the war haunting my world again, like the Laundry Hill siren, but no warning for those men and no all clear above the mountain, just the ghosting mist and the rock behind it. I used to wonder about the rear-gunner, looking back into the night, as the plane concertina'd exploding into the crag. Who was he? What were the last seconds of his life? By what fraction did he outlive the others in the cockpit?

You might still see wreckage up there now, for all I know. It is some years since I was there (as in the poem above) and I could see none then, the mist being down, tumbling back into the cauldron. But it held great fascination for me in those years and when we fished at the far corner below the cliffs I would sometimes tire of catching nothing and clamber up through the rocks and search among them, among the bilberries, the myrtle and heathers, for bits of aluminium, misshapen nuggets from the furnace of the impact, or meccano-like strips of aluminium from fuselage, wing or tail.

Once I found a twisted piece, the size of my thumb, a slug of light alloy forged in the flames, from which protruded, miraculously, an intact light-bulb, something from the instrument panel, I suppose. I hoarded these little treasures in a cardboard fishing-reel box, for some years. But now when I'd like to cast my eye over them again, I find they have gone the way of all things, into the dark, into the underworld, where those airmen, or whatever burnt offering remained of them, fell to their doom.

They were Germans. They were the enemy and as a callous boy and youth I shed no tears for them or their nightmare fate. Hadn't ‘The Dambusters' been one of the first few films I ever saw, in ‘The Supreme', Old Colwyn, through a fug of cigarette smoke, the projection room like a gun-turret under fire, spluttering and flickering, and stuttering suddenly to a halt, as if hit, and the world gone black a worrying five minutes or more, while they spliced the celluloid back together or fixed a fuse somewhere, and we got into the smoke-filled air, airborne again, aboard one of those Lancaster bombers my grandfather had helped make, in an underground factory near Guiseley, banking up at the last minute on practice runs over the English lakes? Night-scenes, black lakes. Wasn't the war still the stuff of our comics and our lives? The Krauts, the Hun... our boyhood enemies, fought to the death in the Fairy Glen?

Now I know the true story: the plane was an American Douglas, not a German Heinkel, of the 27th Air Transport Group, bound on a flight from Le Bourget, Paris, to Burtonwood, on the morning of 12 November 1944. But Burtonwood was fog-bound and the flight was diverted to RAF Valley on Anglesey. It never arrived. Ten days later, tail overhanging the cliffs all that was recognizable of the plane, the scene of the crash was found, with mail scattered all around, blown here and there by the blast and then on the wind.

There died on the cold mountain: second lieutenants William C. Gough, pilot, and his co-pilot Richard Rolff; radio operator Corporal Hyman Livitski; and their flight engineer Staff Sergeant Kirk McLoren. RIP. What other memorial do they have than this? But that day in June I didn't know about them, though I knew about the plane, for my father had already brought bits of debris home, for me, and so began my macabre collection.

No one went into the mountains with greater fortitude and purpose than Ifor. Not even Moses. Not even my father who also never seemed to register physical discomfort, least of all in the name of brown trout. Though he once approved a retreat from just below eagle crag and the red rocks greatly to Ifor's disgust. I think he did it thinking of me, skinny-wiry wee man as I was, mindful of the time when I nearly caught my death of cold on a day of bitter unrelenting rain and had to be carried in to the house, running a temperature, feverish. At which my mother railed.

We'd not been at the Black Lake that day but fishing for salmon smolts in a little lake at the head of the Lledr, high up above Dolwyddelan. When we caught them we snipped off their adipose fins and put them back. It was a pioneer scheme to identify hatchery-bred salmon. I believe I was not yet ten but I'm not sure. We still lived on Red Wood Road then. But what I see clearly in my mind's eye is the old split-cane rod I used there, with its green bindings. And why would I have used it if I already had Scotia? I'm sure therefore this was an early expedition, predating Black Lake times by a year or more. We went there twice. The second time was a sunny day. I remember snatching a dragon-fly out of the air so as to be able to see up close what this beautiful thing was that I'd never seen before. And I remember that because I remember my father praising me for being fearless, not thinking such a vivid thing, as vivid as a wasp, might sting me.

Ifor's other passion was crown-green bowling. The first place vexed housewives would look to find him when he was truanting from painting their houses was on the bowling green. Though he bore no physical wound, like Laurence Sterne's character Uncle Toby he had seen action at the gates, something they said he'd been involved in, of men burnt alive in a tank. After which a man, windfall of war's storm, might be forgiven anything, and I wonder if it wasn't the trauma of battle detained Ifor's thoughts, and turned his head from house-painting, and led him to the bowling green, or into the mountains, the backside of the desert on a very different campaign. There was no out-of-battle counselling for his generation, any more than for those in Caesar's legions, or the tribe of Israel, or the heroes of Bannockburn.

When we became a foursome, after picking up Trefor down at Min-y-Don, a South Walean draftsman, he worked with my father at Ratcliffe's, and was a most melancholy and inexpert fly-fisherman, the first to put on a worm and sit forlornly with a fag and a brew. We would drive the empty road down the Conwy valley, past Bodnant road end to Tal-y-Cafn.

The river ran broad and tidal here, and stirring to the heart as waters are in the first of daylight. Herons fished there, and cormorants would ride the tide, and shelduck pattered about in the mud, and any number of scolding gulls harried in the quick flood of the morning. Rarely was there so much as a milk lorry or a bread van on the road, or a tractor, or a herd of dung-splattering cows crossing to or from early milking. So early would we be.

We crossed the river and wound up towards the hills, to Tal-y-Bont. This was the way – thirteen miles – my father used to cycle from the village, before he bought the ‘brake', leaving his bike at Y Bedol (the horsehoe pub: lucky for some, on the way home). From there he'd set off up the steep and narrow, hairpin hill, past Tan-yr-Allt on the corner, and up another wooded hill – an
allt
a word like holt and meaning the same – the three-hour footslog to the Black Lake. Then all the way back he must come at the end of it. Were we physically harder then? We were, and what dreamers of the dream: that life is more than our betters ordain.

It was a talking point for my benefit on this first trip that I ran by Ifor in the Fairy Glen on the very day the eleven-plus results were announced and didn't stop to tell him I had passed. I still remember my surprise at being teased about this. I can still remember running past him. He had barely entered and I was almost out, running late for school. I didn't think it right to say.... It seemed like showing off. Nor did I know Scotia was in the offing. Nor did I know this day would dawn and that my apprenticeship in the art of fly-fishing was shortly to begin, and that I'd go to the Black Lake with my father and the other men for my initiation into the rituals of manhood come June. This was the beginning of the poem and its meaning, to sustain me against the abuses of the modern world, and so to resist them. As I do now as best I can and will to my dying day.

I could never hear the word
Dulyn
enough. And that was just as well because it had even begun to vie in my father's repertoire of hallowed places with
Clutag
, the farm in Galloway where he had spent crucial childhood and boyhood years. Dulyn, the black lake... Dulyn the mysterious, stubborn, unyielding and unforgiving black lake... the ‘sinister' lake, where they said, untruly, no birds crossed; and where no one ever went and if anyone did, you knew he was the shepherd from Llanfairfechan, out with his jack-russell and mongrel terriers and folding four-ten shotgun, in pursuit of foxes among the rocks, to protect his flocks. Though once up there, one late summer afternoon, we met two elderly ladies in grey tweed suits, perspiring from their exertions, like sheep before shearing. They had come to see the lake. Refined Welsh ladies, students of myth, perhaps, ladies from Llangollen, maybe. Another time we met the engineer from the Water Board (there was a small pumping house tucked away under the slope beyond the overspill), the lake also serving as a reservoir as Ward says.

But I don't remember seeing another angler there and god knows what would have happened had we done so. The sky would have fallen. We might have stoned him to death or drowned him. So primitively territorial did we feel regarding that place. Though it wasn't really that we laid claim to it but that it possessed us.

You could only drive so far up in an ordinary vehicle, and how far depended on the time of year, in those days, in the fifties. Hard on winter's onset, the frost and snow would break up the bed of the track and shift boulders and create new potholes and perils. We used to stop way down after the first gate, above Rowlyn Isaf farm, a place that stood scarcely visible below the single-track road beyond a raised drystone wall. It was either a glorified
hafod
(a summer place) now, or a place on a Sunday where no one ever seemed to be about to be seen. Perhaps the occupants were huddled in the kitchen over their breakfast, or having a lie-in, on the day of rest, getting ready for chapel, or snoring off last night at the Bedol, oblivious of any sermon anywhere that morning.

What text would it have been? ‘Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro... and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God'? Or: ‘I do set my bow in the cloud...'? ...Though now and then it's true I remember catching sight of a man there, disappearing round the corner of a building, the farmer or his son, or son-in-law, and once or twice a sheepdog barked, as we girded ourselves to be off, in the chill of dawn, as if we'd read Moses's tablets of stone. Then we would walk through the little wood, into which the road bowed.

The first stages in a walk of any ambition, any duration, out in the wilderness, seem always the same to me in this respect. They force you into yourself, your native self, to get the measure of it all, the reality of putting one foot in front of the other, the first steps of how many? The reality of the cold and unaccommodating air hits you. You must be your own upholder, within yourself. And how many steps before you have any rhythm and hope of making it to your destination? Steps that divest you of your daily life and deliver you into your body and out of mind, and into mind deeper than you know, deep as life itself. As if you are walking into yourself.

In this case it was also a matter of making it in time, in time for some passage if not the whole of the morning rise. The early bird catches the worm. Or in Trefor's version, the early worm catches the fish. O the crooked worm, the sinful serpent. Like members of some impossible religious sect, we wanted to be purists, to fish with the fly, and in my father's case a dry one – one that floats on the surface – given half a chance, and of his own designing. Poor Trefor was an apostate in our midst.

There were three trout rises in the day: morning, meaning first thing, not at that elusive fine-grained monochrome moment known as the
scraich
(blink and you miss it) but shortly in its wake. At some points in the season the morning rise lingered a little towards nine, sometimes beyond, on mild mornings. Then there were noon and evening. The first and last were the best, and if the first was always early, the noon rise was usually the most understated, the subtlest and the most elusive, some fish it seemed preferring to skip lunch or to sit under a rock with their sandwiches. Setting yourself to fish between the rises was more a matter of dedication and prayer than reason for hope. Though a rise might suddenly come on, stimulated by a hatch of insect life, and that is what we'd keep a weather-eye on as we toiled. There were seasons within the season too: March to early May, when the icy water began to warm and the fish were lean; late May and July, among the best days; August for dog days, not so marked up there (and when for two weeks we'd usually be elsewhere, on our holidays, on the Ll
y
^
n peninsula at Llanbedrog or away in Galloway); and soft and cooling September, for me always and still the best of them all, when the fish are ripe as fruit.