Once (17 page)

From our vantage beneath the cliffs, we oversaw the known world, 180° of it anyway, wild Wales and beyond, from the Carneddau and supporting cast – Black Lake country – in Eastern Snowdonia to the Isle of Man itself (a speck on a very clear summer's evening), taking in Penmaenmawr, Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and Ynys Seiriol (Puffin Island
aka
Priestholm), across the Conwy estuary, and the Great Orme, in a single westerly panorama of chastening beauty.

Though before you get carried away, I should say too that the panorama included, slap in the middle of the picture-postcard, the town's rusty gasometer and the rubbish tip. Over the tip yellow bulldozers sailed all day like trawlers on high seas. Beyond them according to the tide, year in year out, real old-style wooden-hulled trawlers came and went in the estuary, haloed by gulls as they ran home, their Ailsa Craig engines beating like my heart to see them from my high vantage point. Fare forward! What kind of youth was I, to be so hooked? What was written into me to set my course like that?

Gulls wheeled about the bulldozers to strengthen the sea-going simile, and flew in their wake, raucous airborne litter, day-in-day-out, a billowing conflagration, burning intensely at sunset, in summer from the wooded hill. In the middle ground, the gasometer went up and down like an iron lung, according to the tides of consumption and supply, high and low water, breathing in sea-air corrupted by the tang of refuse, endless garbage from the town's hotels. But it was all beautiful to me, the salt air and the windy town, the mountains, the islands, the estuary and the running sea: my province to find beauty in ugliness. Why wouldn't it be?

For Nature is everything and nothing without the human entanglement. Or who'd sing and celebrate it and all its wonder and waste? Who'd pay it homage? Apart from the shorebirds with their starry chatter, the song-thrush in the dark wood, the blackbird – those immortals of our parish? Though you'll hear them sing out of season more often now, thrown out of kilter as they are by their body clocks. Wind them on, wind them back. What's happened to the Spring?

 

* * *

 
Here and now, under the wooded hill, we were confirmed in our unbelonging: cultural and social borderers, within and without the town, newcomers, ‘Mcs' not ‘aps'. We'd stepped from Denbighshire into Caernarfonshire. This was a marked difference most simply expressed in terms of Sunday opening. Our Sundays must now be dry. We were in hellfire Wales proper, if with limestone not brimstone. Though that hardly concerned me then, as to drinking. By the time it did, the populace had voted, or was on the brink of voting, to join the twentieth century, good or ill.

Had we not moved, and at the very threshold of my teens, it always strikes me hard how my life would have been utterly different. My social roots would have been stronger. I would have been a different person, with quite other stories to tell of that time, and I'm sure even as to subsequent adventures. So vital and determining was it, and for me at least, so perfect in its timing: as I left boyhood behind and embarked on youth, wildly unworldly by today's standards, but an honest-to-god sinner in those times. So chance makes us and becomes choice, or seems to. Who was it said those who voyage across the seas change their skies but not their souls? (The poet Horace.) But my soul underwent a sea-change none the less and how could it not with the skies the way they were now in our westerly and northerly seascape?

Not that uprooting from the Red Wood didn't have its hurts. Nor was it complete, for my father still worked there, and we always kept our family friendships there, and knew great ties in heartening reciprocity of affection.

Like the Red Wood too, the wooded hill was a place of jackdaws. They nested on the cliff, they nested in our chimney, and cackled continuity, immortal markers always in my mental map. So it is even as I hear them in the evening now in suburban middle England, flying in loose flocks home to roost, wherever home might be for them here, not down our chimney, anyway. Homage to them, local shades, and their sudden blissful crescendi and shimmer above the wooded bryn.

Not that coming to a new school didn't have its traumas. Flashbacks from my original educational shellshock disturbed me at John Bright Grammar School. There I found my education much less advanced than that of my fellows. I was behind in everything, except cross-country running. Even in English, otherwise my only academic salvation, I lagged. For here it was more about drawing columns and parsing sentences than anything else. You hardly saw a poem or read a book or had a chance to write an essay in those middle years, and there lay my emerging interest, blessing or curse, my only possible salvation.

For a while, I couldn't work out what on earth they were doing. It was disturbingly like not being able to read. I regressed into that earlier hypnotised-rabbit state caught in the headlights of what I couldn't construe. Such misery. The shade of it can hover about me even now, if I have to do anything remotely testing with numbers. I can feel my ears burn this minute at the mere thought of it.

I knew then what a sentence was, and an adjective: a thing to purge, according to my father, and an adverb, and so on. Writing is just what's in your mind, he'd say. You don't need to know any of that. Though damn me for a fool when an end-of-term report suggested I took him at his word. But even when you roughly got the hang of it, filling columns, treating sentences as if they were formulae in chemistry, was the soul of boredom. What was the point of it? What was the point of any of it – the so-called education? I preferred chemistry. I did very well in chemistry. How on earth I do not know. In reality though I preferred the word, spoken and heard. As I do now. But now I add the printed word, as the alpha and omega of all.

On Mondays, in the trout fishing season, I'd sometimes be so tired anyway and distracted by the reverie of yesterday and the promise of next Sunday, there was very little I could work out at all. I spent a lot of lesson-time in speculation, in considering the ways of the brown trout and the secrets held along the shores of the Black Lake. Nor was my homework likely to have been done.

If I wasn't daydreaming about trout, it would be about a hare I'd seen that sudden frosty morning, in the low field, quite unusual to see there. Or it was a pheasant that had rocketed into our wood from next door. Would it be there – somewhere to intuit and stalk in the fading light – when I got home? Or in winter when snow fell in the hills I'd rehearse how I'd steal up on the woodcock I knew to be haunting the bottom of the dark wood, as soon as school was over and I could hurry home.

The school I now found myself in had no time for that kind of thing. I don't suppose any school ever had, not even a hedge school, the only kind of school I've ever liked the sound of. More hedge than school, I'd hope. It was a highly ambitious school and gave no resting place to the idle dreamer, nor so much as a hint of laurel for the proud scholar to rest on. Not that it ever told us much about John Bright himself. You'd never have guessed he was a radical deeply reviled by the establishment of his day. That might have been something encouraging to know.

But it liked the high-minded association with Mancunian Liberalism and being on the right side of the Corn Laws. That is: the wrong side to the powers that were, with some gesture of sympathy implied, at least, for those who perished in the Great Hunger. Virtue with the benefit of hindsight is all too easy. But I suppose it's better than its opposite. None the less, every year the school sent people to Oxbridge, in the best Welsh tradition, builder's son, butcher's son... nurse's daughter.

In my year and the years immediately above and below, they schooled future professors of botany and history, medical consultants, lawyers, doctors, in considerable number, relative to the local population. They even schooled me, far better than I knew or wanted to believe, holding me back a year that I might develop and come to my senses. Which is a nonsense to say in my case. For I needed to come away from my senses, from my intense sensual pleasure in the world about me, if I needed anything, that is. An institution is only the sum of its individual representatives at a given time. Not even its sum. Only one of all the schoolmasters I suffered under had a life-altering effect on me, and that was the late J.K. Warburton (a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge) who introduced me to the nineteenth-century French writers, the poets especially, Baudelaire above all. He used to say he slept with a portrait of Baudelaire pinned to his bed-head. He was a bachelor, a Methodist lay-preacher, a gay man at a time when it was illegal to be so and lead a fulfilled life.

By way of salvation, right on my first day, I found myself in a class with an older youth, Michael-John Thomas – they were all older youths and older girls; girls always being older in mind than youths, and my birthday falling in August: they'd never look twice at me, no matter how many times I looked at them.

Himself a transplant, from the South Wales valleys, Mikey-John was a great sea-fisher. By chance we'd already met fishing on Colwyn pier the summer before. He was just short of a year my senior. We'd hit it off at once, both of us fanatics for fish, swapping local knowledge, telling tall tales about how good the fishing was in our respective territories.

His fishing already extended to Anglesey, and Llandwyn Island. I was still in the nursery compared with him, with his tales of tope- and conger-fishing... and skate as big as grand-pianos, in the deeps at the far reaches of Llandudno Bay. The happy accident didn't help my studies, but it improved my fishing no end to have a local guide to the estuary and the Orme, a youth who went on to work in the fisheries at Conwy. His approach to fish and fishing even then was much more an exercise in field science than an intuitive shot in the dark of Davy's locker, dreaming under the heavens, such as I preferred.

Apart from Trefor Samuels, Mikey was the first South Walean I ever got to know, he and his mother who worked for her mother in the general store on the council estate. I recognize now, there was a different kind of sociability to them and solidarity, and so with Mikey's South Walean stepfather, who worked in the Junction at Hotpoint. Trefor had it too, lighting his fag in the mountain rain, a warmth first and last. They showed they liked you. They put the human first, in all its fallibility. ‘Macky' the Thomases called me, and ‘Macky-boy', until it became universal in the known world. To begin with my family looked askance at Mikey's turquoise luminous socks and black winkle-pickers, at the expense of the soul within. But they took him to their bosom in the end.

 

* * *

 
Unlike the one in the hymn, ours was not a green hill exactly. It was literally a wooded hill, or more properly a cliff and a bluff, limestone scarp with outcrop cliffs, terraces, rough grasses, gorse, larch, and thorny scrub. Nor was it far away. I could see it from the schoolyard, and in some cases the classroom. The wood itself, though, was largely evergreen, but the green was broken, relieved by a limestone backdrop, a stone full of brightness and glare, on sunny days above all, and moonlit nights, and never dour but only a little drab in rain.

Great Norwegian pines, forty foot high and more, swept in a tide, a turbulent strait, round the base of the hill. They filled out, up beyond our cottage, into a deep, steep wood, an evergreen sea, a sea-chasm, where the cliffs fell back raggedly, to form the wood's high margin. It was a high and for much of it a very steep wood, petering to a little strand of sporadic hazel, ash and yew, along the southerly boundary, and at its topmost southeast corner, where the tawny owl liked to roost in the ivy.

Not that the wood was coterminous with the property to the east. A little more ground, rough and stony and steep, clambered beyond it to the back wall, the land's most open border, in regular need of repair against our neighbour's wandering sheep. Farther back still from the wood's northern edge, putting an L-shape in our boundary, rose an isolated outcrop of wind-bent larches and pines, Tam O'Shanter Scots pines among them, bonnets set askew by the prevailing westerlies. This wild planting was more-or-less hemmed in by gorse and bramble entanglement and penned back to right-angled walls, the outermost cape or point to our territory.

It was a good place to go if you wanted no one to find you. As I often wanted no one to find me, I was often there. It was a hard place too from which to dislodge wily sheep. The jay tended to skulk here, and the magpie made a nest. Quite often on a warm day a cock pheasant would pick his way in and sun himself beyond the far gorse, a challenge to stalk him there. The place was like a little island, remote, and rarely visited, unless by the sheepdog from the pig farm that neighboured us near there.

Next, beyond, in this back-country lay the disused gulf of Nant-y-Gammar limestone quarry, and farther round, a continuation of our limestone seascape, the Little Orme. Also across that direction but hidden from view, the high village of Pen-y-Bryn where nearly every householder was a pigeon fancier. These men were like poets in their passion for the homing bird. Place-names like Gabowen, Craven Arms and Frome and, beyond the channel: Rennes, La Rochelle, Nantes, Poitiers, Bordeaux... from whence their birds raced home were poetry on their lips and in their hearts.

Pines stood right over our cottage, within a few feet of it at the nearest, and over the yard. Some of them grew straight out of the rock, even out of the face of the cliff itself, having seeded in crannies and grown out and up, crook-handled to the sky.

The cliff immediately behind the house – about sixty feet or so off through the trees at its nearest – was like a land-bound headland, as was another crag in our neighbour's property. More markedly, so was the high-domed bryn known as Fferm. In time, as we observed, the crags of this bryn were colonised by fulmars. Fferm loomed beyond our southern march wall, in Gloddaeth Estate, the demesne of Lord Mostyn. For we had march walls here, on three sides, containing five tilted acres.