Senor Nice (30 page)

In fact, the change in law was slight. Although penalties for individuals consuming cannabis were less, those for other cannabis offences remained the same. The government had
not downgraded cannabis from Class B to Class C; it had formed a new and different class. Subject to police officers’ discretion to arrest or not, cannabis possession, sharing a joint, allowing someone to smoke a joint in your home, consuming cannabis in certain areas and cannabis cultivation were all still arrestable offences and punishable by up to fourteen years imprisonment. Nevertheless, there had been progress of a kind. Other European countries debated following the British initiative. The tide was changing.

But this swell of shifting attitudes could not help Scott. After months of interrogation and several unsuccessful bail applications, the Swiss, under pressure from the Australian embassy, moved Scott from the Mendrisio bunker to a more civilised prison near Lugano. The spartan conditions of the underground prison had taken their toll on Scott’s health, but now he had access to a gymnasium and quickly regained his fitness. He was also earning 400 Swiss francs a month ironing clothes in the prison laundry.

Eventually Scott was formally charged with contraventions of the Swiss federal law on narcotics ranging from smoking marijuana – which he wasn’t about to deny – to smuggling tons of the stuff – which simply wasn’t true. The trial took place in March 2004.

The judge found there was nothing to suggest that Scott had sold marijuana or had made any economic gain from its sale, as the prosecution had repeatedly claimed. The judge also ruled that Mr Nice Seedbank’s commercial activities were perfectly legal. Scott’s only offence was to bring into Switzerland his plant genetics (seeds) and his expertise – which happened to lead to great improvements in the quality of the marijuana grown generally in Switzerland. For that Scott received a sentence of four years imprisonment followed by ten years expulsion from Switzerland and an undisclosed fine. This reasoning is typical of both the Swiss and the American legal codes. If you should have foreseen or accept
the possibility that the outcomes of your actions might incidentally cause or aid criminal activity, then you have broken the law, even if your actions themselves were legal. In other words, if they want you, they will get you whatever you didn’t do.

Everyone who knew about Scott’s case was appalled at the obvious injustice of his punishment, including the Swiss Court of Appeals judges, who a few months later reduced the sentence by half. To the relief of all, especially his three-year-old daughter, Scott was released in October 2004. Mr Nice Seedbank continues its legitimate business.

Other than fleeting visits of a couple of hours each to attend to matters relating to my mother’s death and ensure the house stayed clean, burglar and weather proof, and in one piece, I had not visited Kenfig Hill for over two years. It was time to break my self-imposed exile. I took a train from York to Bridgend, where I rented a car and drove the familiar five miles to Waunbant Road. I parked outside the house expecting to be drowned by waves of sadness, pierced by pains of nostalgia and disoriented by déjà vu. Instead, the house twinkled in the twilight and glowed with welcoming winter warmth. The door opened easily without a creak, revealing spotlessly clean rooms. My parents looked at me from their portraits on the walls, as they always did when I entered the living room, but this time their faces did not arouse in me intense feelings of everlasting loss; they smiled with relief, robbing death of its dominion.

The attic was in the same state as when I had visited when performing at the Porthcawl Royal Pavilion. Bric-a-brac and pamphlets still littered the bookshelves and overflowed from cardboard boxes and suitcases. Would it ever be sorted and classified or would it just wait until irrelevant to anyone left alive and end up in a skip? Poking around aimlessly, I found a stash box I must have left behind years ago. Inside was a
matchbox containing enough hashish for a strong joint. It was reddish brown. Could it be Red Lebanese, the favourite smoke of the 1970s? Had it lain here for over a quarter of a century? I started rolling a joint, and the hash crumbled into tight little buds. Perhaps it had decomposed beyond use; I had no idea how many years hashish remained fit to smoke. Despite repeatedly resolving to keep a sample from every consignment I imported, I hadn’t managed to hold on to any for longer than a few months. If it was good, it had to be smoked. As the tiny buds disintegrated, I smelt a familiar odour, and my heartbeat quickened.

Memory is seemingly unable to conjure up a smell from the past in the same way it can recall sights and sounds from long ago, and whenever I recognise an old smell, I am shocked and surprised. This dope reminded me of the Panama Red given to me by Living Stone in Panama three years before. I had smoked some in Bocas del Toro and Portobelo but had forgotten I still had it with me in Jamaica. I must have unknowingly brought it to Kenfig Hill on one of my brief visits. Or had my father or some other cool ancestor acquired it in Panama decades earlier? I smoked it and still couldn’t determine which.

Beautifully stoned, I rummaged around for hours, picking up bits and pieces and reliving the times I had last seen them. I found a boxful of Elvis Presley 78 rpm acetates, sheet music of his early hits, some Elvis badges and a collection of Elvis cards given away with bubblegum from slot machines. I came across a tin cabin trunk stuffed full of
National Geographic
magazines, maps, charts and guidebooks to countries all over the world, and began sorting into one box anything relating to South America.

There were ashtrays inset with moth wings from Brazil, ceramic figurines from Peru, a marble statuette of Christ of the Andes, a Uruguayan basket made from the carapace of an armadillo, guide booklets to Inca, Aztec and Mayan
monuments, and cheap souvenirs from most of the continent’s capitals. My obsession with Welsh–South American connections went into overdrive and butterflies started dancing in my guts. I felt excited and adrenalised, but safe and secure as if surrounded by guardian angels. I saw a small battered brown leather wallet, opened it and found a spread-out caul affixed to a small white envelope. A caul is the shimmery transparent membrane that on rare occasions covers the face and head of a child at birth.

In cultures throughout the world, the presence of a caul means the child has supernatural abilities, such as sight into the future or a third eye. The child is intended for greatness. Jesus Christ was born with one. Cauls are considered protection against drowning at sea and are therefore prized and sought-after by sailors, who pay large sums of money to own these talismans. Gathering the caul onto paper was an important tradition. The midwife would rub a sheet of paper across the baby’s head and face, pressing the caul onto the paper. This would then be presented to the mother to keep as an heirloom. I knew my father had always carried a caul with him when at sea as he had often referred to it, but I had no idea whose it was.

On the back of the envelope was written ‘Patrick McCarty’. Both my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were named Patrick McCarty. Had one of them been born with a caul? The wallet also contained a small, faded black and white photograph of a narrow channel of rough sea bordered with sharp-pointed mountains. On the back was written ‘Patagonia’, the seeming home at various times of ancestors on both sides of my family. A feeling of comforting tiredness enveloped me.

I awoke about nine o’clock, my mind full of thoughts of Patagonia, and switched on the radio. It was St David’s Day, 1 March, the only Welsh holiday. I had completely forgotten, partly because February is always catching me out with its
meagre ration of twenty-eight days, but mainly because I hadn’t spent a St David’s Day in Wales since I was a teenager. In other countries the patron saint of Wales is paid scant notice.

Both Merlin and St Patrick, another Welshman, foretold the sixth-century birth of St David, whose mother Non was a niece of King Arthur. St David was baptised by his cousin St Elvis, an effeminate bishop who had been suckled by a she-wolf, assisted by a blind monk named Movi, who held the young David underwater. Some of the water went in Movi’s eye and miraculously healed him of his blindness. St David went on to become a pupil of St Paulinus, whose blindness he also cured. Paulinus’ first sight was of a field of daffodils. David was tall, strong and gentle, and led a frugal life, eating only bread and watercress and bathing regularly in a lake of cold water, the only liquid he would drink. During a battle against the Saxons the saint advised the Welsh to wear the same clothes as the enemy but to put leeks in their hats so they could identify one another. The Welsh won the battle. He became Archbishop of Wales, restored Glastonbury, where his remains now lie, and raised a widow’s son from the dead on his way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. David lived for over 100 years. His last words were, ‘Do the little things.’

The Welsh remember him by wearing a leek or a daffodil on 1 March, the anniversary of his death. I resolved to do so today, for the first time in forty-five years. I thought I might drive to St David’s. It would take no more than two hours. I could even check whether there was a parish of St Elvis, as Eddie Evans had told me three years ago. I telephoned Marty Langford and asked if he wanted to come with me. He couldn’t; he had promised to take his mother for a drive to the seaside.

The radio played a few Welsh hymns and then broadcast a ten-minute programme on Patagonia, stressing that there too St David’s Day would be celebrated. I telephoned Gruff Rhys
to wish him a happy St David’s day. He told me he was doing a solo tour of North Wales, but that he and his girlfriend Cat had just come back from Patagonia. They’d had a fantastic time; the place was wild. I told Gruff I was about to drive to St David’s, and he asked me to pay his respects to Haverfordwest, a small market town on the way, where he was born.

I drove west, stopping in Carmarthen to buy a daffodil for my lapel, sang a hello to Haverfordwest and reached St David’s by noon. Despite being the world’s smallest city and despite today being its very own day, St David’s had ample room to park. I joined the crowds, many in traditional Welsh costume, visiting the cathedral, and found a café serving my favourite Welsh dish of lava bread, bacon and cockles. Then I drove to a tourist information centre just outside the city and enquired about St Elvis. The woman in charge said there was a farm called St Elvis four miles away on the road to Haverfordwest near a place named Solva. So Eddie Evans was right after all. I asked if she had any books or pamphlets on St Elvis; she didn’t think so, but there were some on Solva – maybe they would help. I looked through the racks but none mentioned Elvis. By way of compensation, I found
Solva Blues
, the autobiography of Meic Stevens. A quote from Gruff Rhys, ‘A world-class guy – he’s my hero’, was on the front cover. Meic is one of my heroes too.

Known as the godfather of Welsh folk, he has been in the forefront of Welsh music since the 1960s. A Valium addict married to a chronic schizophrenic, Meic grew up in Solva and jammed with Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett before crossing the Atlantic to look after the Grateful Dead’s touring stash of half a million acid tabs. He became a close friend of Bob Dylan, who described him as Britain’s greatest songwriter. I bought the book.

Solva lies around a natural harbour at the mouth of a winding river valley of small fields which have obviously been
farmed for centuries. Its position made it ideal as a base for trading ships in the eighteenth century, and a strong seafaring and smuggling tradition developed. Now it is populated by painters, writers and gourmets. The chapel has been converted into an art gallery, and the old chemist’s and printing shops are restaurants, but the streets still stink of that ancient and fishy smell common to seaside villages. There are several pubs, including the Cambrian Arms, where I popped in for a pint hoping to run into Meic Stevens. The place was rammed, but he wasn’t there. I gathered from one of the customers that he was now living in Cardiff. A picture of Elvis – the pelvis rather than the saint – hung above the bar mantelpiece, and the radio, accompanied by thirty drunken Welsh people in full song, was playing Elvis’s ‘Crying in the Chapel’. We were reminded the song had first been released exactly forty years ago.

I asked the landlord for directions to St Elvis Farm, drove off and found a small sign on the roadside about a mile away stating I was entering the parish of St Elvis. Comprising two farms and fewer than 200 acres, it is the smallest parish in Great Britain. I turned right, came across a farm, stopped the car and rolled a joint. A young farm worker in denim jacket and jeans approached.

‘Lost, are you?’

‘No, not all. I was trying to find St Elvis Farm. They told me at the Cambrian Arms it was down here.’

‘Fair enough. You’ve found it all right. But the boss is away today, gone to St David’s for a bit of a booze-up, like, for the holiday. He’ll be too pissed to drive back tonight, that’s for sure. Can I give him a message or will you come back tomorrow? Are you from the university? What’s your name?’

‘No, it’s all right, thanks,’ I answered. ‘I haven’t come to see your boss. I was just looking around for anything to do with St Elvis.’

‘Well that pile of stones over by there is St Elvis Cromlech, and that pool is St Elvis’s Holy Well, and that’s about it. My dad, God bless him, a bit of a nutter, like, used to talk about it lying on the intersection of ley lines or something and being magical, but I think he just wanted to believe that because he was a fanatic Elvis fan. Are you an Elvis fan?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Thought so. You didn’t strike me as an academic researching Welsh saints. We get a lot of those wankers here. We get a few Elvis fans too, but nothing like as many as you would expect, given he’s a descendant.’

‘What! Elvis Presley is descended from St Elvis?’ I felt sure the kid was having a laugh but was enjoying the story too much to stop him.

‘Yes, on his mother Gladys’s side, according to my dad. And he was right about that. All sorts of people checked it out. Gladys’s great-great-grandfather, William Mansell, was a Welshman descended from St Elvis.’