On the reverse side he has the name John Parker.
There’s a little boy standing by Parker’s bed, dressed as Oliver Hardy. He has a puckish face, with a couple of teeth missing, and what appears to be a giant fake nail sticking through his head, and a massive hammer in his hand. Round his neck he has a board which says: THAT’S ANOTHER FINE MESS I’VE GOTTEN ME INTO. His name is Edwin – Edwin Summers, Edwin the lovable, laughing carpenter who leaves Christ sleeping in a pub overnight.
There are two beds facing the camera in the centre of the photo, one with a boy in it and the other with a girl.
Between them there is a wicker chair with wheels, and swathed in it there is a small boy, the smallest of them all. He is the only one not looking at the camera – his eyes have slid down to the floor in front of him. He has a little hat with a skull and crossbones on it, a black patch over one eye, and a wooden sword resting across his legs. This is Julius Rodenberg, the son of interned Germans.
The girl on the left of Julius lies inside her bed but her upper part, above the folded-down cover, has a brocade dress with bows, and she wears a bonnet. There is little of her face to be seen, but it appears regular and attractive, with a wariness in the eyes which I associate with the physically maimed. Her hair is cut in a bob and she wears a ribbon in it; she has a pert, snub nose and she wears those round glasses which make people look intelligent. She has a small shepherd’s crook festooned with ribbons, and she holds up a cardboard depiction of a woolly sheep on a stick. This is Bo Peep. The back of the photo bears the name Esmie Falkirk.
The boy on Julius’s right lies flat on his back and his legs are below the coverlet, but on his torso he has a shimmering tunic and a matching cap with a pointy peak, of the type you see Robin Hood wearing in films. He has a cowhorn draped around his shoulders on a leather thong and he is holding it to his lips, as though he’s blowing into it. This is Little Boy Blue, who has come to blow his horn. On the back of the photo his name is given simply as Vogel! with a big exclamation mark.
Here, in one photograph, were almost all the characters in the Vogel Papers. My hunch had been right – the Vogel Papers were fictional, but had been based on actual events. Who had written the papers? Surely the author had to be one of these children in the photograph.
Waldo looked at me with lizard eyes throughout my perusal. There was a lengthy silence after I had propped the picture between the two teddies sleeping on my mantelpiece. He made no effort to retrieve it.
‘Cuppa?’ I suggested.
He nodded and went into the kitchen. I heard him fill the kettle and prepare the mugs. He knew I took tea with a half-spoon of sugar. He takes coffee with five spoonfuls of sugar, which partly accounts for his corpulence.
‘Got what you wanted?’ he asked when we settled again. His dog lumbered into my side-table and knocked my tea, spilling liquid over the carpet. Waldo mopped up, wordlessly. The carriage clock ticked and tocked resolutely and we both looked through the window, out over the water, at Wales in her small vastness, as an equinoctial sea roared into the shore, attacking us with all the weight of accumulated anger, in churning billows of great white froth-water – a mad cavalry charge, flooding in on a roaring, rearing, bit-champing, nostril-flared gallop, wide-eyed and spumed, onto a shore dulled and waiting to surrender. The sky behind this huge sea-gob had unconvincing patches of bright blue and looked like a newly-painted film set with clouds still drying and slithering on the canvas.
The sudden knowledge conveyed to me by that photograph electrified my skin; my flesh felt taut under the goose pimples.
The cloud factory was in full production: a ragged convoy of inkstained cumuli glowered in from the west like vast bursting toadstools, splattering wetly onto the window, and I contemplated what was going on in the world around us: the fields behind us, clambering towards safety, swimming in a raw umber stew of mud and mould, drenched sheep bobbing on the surface like dumplings; moles passing like thrombotic clots through their sinking, creaking submarine gangways in the ground below us.
A man walked like a crooked nail through the field nearest us, with his dog, and I could see the field seep into him, insinuating its nucleic acids, its genetic information – its fairy rings, pre-Christian cowpats, murders, eyeless lambs, raven-picked bones, rusted ploughshares, its Durex-bursting Springs, its countless footprints criss-crossing the weave of time.
‘What’s that field called out there?’ said Waldo, as if reading my mind.
‘I think it’s called Maes.’
Every field in Wales has a name – I presume it’s the same in England.
‘If you had a telephone directory with every field name in Wales I suppose it’d be that thick,’ said Waldo, holding an imaginary brick between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Which reminds me, I know how Vogel got his name. It was nothing to do with telephone books and choosing an odd name so that naughty children would make nuisance calls, as the Vogel Papers say.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘I’ve got so used to his name that I couldn’t imagine any other. D’you mean to say he had an ordinary name? I find that quite disappointing.’
‘Yes, well, we must expect these little disappointments. It’s going to be very difficult to make any sense out of all this – someone has deliberately smudged over the truth, to make everything sound romantic and strange.’
I waited for further illumination.
‘His real name was not Vogel. It’s in his notes. His father was a Welsh hill shepherd until they decamped to Manchester, and he was known as Ieuan Fugail, John the Shepherd. But when the boy was taken to Robert Jones’s Sunday clinic that German woman who helped out, Mrs Wimpfheimer, the one who translated the article on X-rays from the Frankfurter Zeitung, kept calling for Vogel instead of Fugail – and it stuck. Apparently she referred to him as “my little lame sparrow”. So the reason for the name is quite prosaic.’
The crooked nail man urinated against an oak tree in the corner of the field and his cur squatted by his side. I imagined it quivering, anxious for a quick return to the fireside.
Waldo looked at him through the window.
‘By Christ,’ he said, ‘it’s the man below you, the cloud-worshipper. He’s got himself a dog. Don’t think the dog is much of a cloud-worshipper though.’
With the wind grinding its gears outside we formed a plan for the coming weeks. Waldo had been granted special dispensation to use the Health Sciences Library at Gobowen, but unbeknownst to everyone he was melting in and out of the records room with a lock-pick. On his first visit he had managed a cursory look at Vogel’s papers and a proper study of Julius Rodenberg.
Little Julius, inquisitive and interested in his new surroundings, had been ‘adopted’ by Esmie, as her letters to Vogel had hinted. They had become close friends – perhaps she reminded him of a sister, or his interned mother. His parents had not been allowed to see him for security reasons, Shropshire having a number of military bases which they might have seen. Such cruelty. Julius had a club foot and had come in for a small corrective operation, scheduled for Dr Robert Jones’s attention. But Julius had a tendency to wander and get lost, and one day, whilst searching for Esmie, he had wandered into a tent. Inside it lay the sole remaining victim of a diphtheria outbreak, a little girl who was well on the way to recovery. But there must have been a few lingering bacteria, because within a day or two he was displaying the usual symptoms – fever, weakness and throat inflammation. The growing concerns of his nurses are chronicled in his notes, as his disease was first suspected and then confirmed. Julius was sent to isolation in a part of the hospital called Harley Street, ironically named because it was extremely spartan. He had been ministered to by a lone nurse, probably spending many hours on his own. I find it particularly sad that so many children have lost so much in one fleeting moment, either through accident or infection; I have thought long about this supremely decisive moment in our lives, this shivering of the human ship on rocks, when a momentary action or accid
ent changes the whole course of our existence.
The First World War, which was a war waiting to happen of course, was sparked by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The Archduke was delivered right to the hands of his assassin by his driver, who took a wrong turning in a tiny lapse of concentration. That war alone cost the lives of about 20 million soldiers, and led directly to the Second World War, which cost at least 30 million lives. So a few seconds of bleariness, maybe caused by one last glass of beer the night before, or a row between the driver and his wife before leaving home that morning, killed off 50 million people. I know it doesn’t quite work like that, but you know what I mean. I’ve come across a number of lives which have been blighted by one little act, one tiny action. Perhaps you too can look back to a fulcrum, a hinge in your life which changed it for ever. Julius paid dearly for his few minutes of wandering.
The last line of his notes says merely: ‘Parents informed. Funeral on Monday. Wooden cross made by the Factotum.’
There was a great stillness and silence in the world when I awoke the next day.
The sea, now passive and calm, looked almost embarrassed, like a hung-over partygoer who had behaved crazily the night before and needed to send out a number of apologies. Waldo had left me to it. No doubt he wanted to catch up on local news, since he is the local Reuters and chronicler, having an encyclopaedic history of the town and its environs. Nothing, but nothing, gets past him, and he’s the first to know about any goings-on or misdeeds.
I had the wanderlust again. It sent hot bubbles through my blood. I had to get going. I felt like Princess Marya in War and Peace, feeding pilgrims as they passed her home, and longing to go with them:
Often as she listened to the pilgrims’ tales she was so fired by their simple speech, natural to them but to her full of deep meaning, that several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and running away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself dressed in coarse rags and with her wallet and staff, walking along a dusty road.
I knew it was time to continue my walk around Wales. As the Mongols say, better a wandering fool than a sitting scholar.
I can have a proper row with Emmeline whilst I’m on the road. It’s easier to have a good shouting match with someone, especially if they’re not there, on a lonely shore, miles away from anyone. I’ve been caught quite a few times, once by a young man walking his dog; I think he was more embarrassed than I was, and he detoured me in a wide arc. Wordsworth taught his dog to warn him when people were approaching, so that he could avoid being taken for a lunatic.
Enough said.
Since we Welsh have a great liking for the number three, and group things in threesomes, or triads, I must choose a third Healer to join us for that shindig at the Blue Angel. The choice is quite obvious – Agnes Hunt, who will sit next to her old friend Robert Jones (my, how she adored that man!) in the snug. I don’t think there’s much more I need to tell you about her.
Let’s see now. Born to a landed family in Shropshire, large household, eccentric mother ‘who pursued her family and friends with malignant fidelity’ and, after the death of her husband, took her family Down Under to seek a new life. As you know, Agnes was crippled as a young girl – when she got a blister on a heel she was so afraid of telling anyone it became infected. Here was another person whose life had been decided in a few hours.
Agnes Hunt had experienced pioneering adventures in the outback, cooking kangaroo tail soup and roast wallaby, and returned to study nursing at Rhyl and various English hospitals. Her training was sporadic, due to breakdowns in her health, or further mad quests with her mother.
Then came the Baschurch adventure in Shropshire. They found a property, aptly named Florence House, and turned it into a home for crippled children.
Water came from a well under the scullery floor and the drains were faulty, but it was the first open-air orthopaedic hospital in the world. This is the epicentre of our story.
This is the Jerusalem of British cripples; the matrix of their deliverance – and it was only a century ago.
Florence House was a success. I quote:
A curious fact appeared: the Home exerted a magnetic attraction for cripples, for whom it was in no way suited. For instance, the staircase, leading up to the two large rooms, ambitiously called wards, was never meant for the transport of cripples. After carrying down one particularly helpless child, Goody said to me: This is much too dangerous. We shall probably kill some of these infants, and most certainly ourselves.
They built a shed in the garden and Agnes slept there with the badly crippled, whilst the more able slept upstairs. Agnes transported children to and from the hospital in a contraption which she described as a perambulator so that the crippled children could travel cheaply. She describes one trip thus:
The journey was two hours by train and then over the ferry at Birkenhead... whilst taking a party of twelve children of all ages and stages of crippledom across the ferry I was accosted by a lady, who in a voice of horror demanded if I were responsible for all those children. I blushed to my ears and bashfully replied that I was, whereupon the lady sternly pressed a tract into my hands and left. The title of the tract was: The Wages of Sin is Death...
In 1921 all patients were transferred to the Shropshire Orthopaedic Hospital which was established on the site of an old military hospital at Gobowen. Hundreds of thousands of people have been treated at this hospital, and it is world-famous. A great pioneering venture, after-care, spread into the neighbouring counties, including Wales, and Welsh children went there in their droves. ‘Goody’ died in 1920 and a chapel was built at the hospital in her memory. Her motto had been:
Do the work that’s nearest,
Though it’s dull at whiles,
Helping when you meet them
Lame dogs over stiles.
Agnes had one last task to fulfil before she died, and that was to establish the Derwen Cripples’ Training College in a nearby house to train the stream of cripples issuing from the hospital, so that they could earn their living and lead as normal a life as possible. This is where the Bo Peep letters were written. Agnes Hunt was well ahead of her time in so many ways – she abolished visiting hours and encouraged parents and relatives to drop by whenever they wanted to.
Agnes Hunt achieved everything she did with few rewards, and despite being a cripple. Agnes, your presence is requested at our party!
THE CHASE
A SIMPLE farmer steering his cart through the rutted mire of a country lane anywhere in Wales two centuries ago might have encountered some very strange noises coming from a very strange man.
The farmer, knowing only one language, might have said Bore Da.
The stranger, knowing 35 languages, might have answered Bonjour, Guten Morgen, Buon Giorno, Goddag, Buenos Dias, Good Day to You Sir, or he might have simply astonished his fellow wayfarer by pulling out a ram’s horn and bellowing the Songs of Moses in Hebrew
This strange person, Dic Aberdaron, will be my fourth guest at the Blue Angel feast, as a representative of all the people who have walked around Wales throughout history. I know there will be quibblers, and I sympathise with their misgivings. Why not one of the itinerant court poets, someone like Dafydd ap Gwilym, or a drover, or a saint? No, I want Dic. He was quite spacky, completely off the wall, but I like them unconventional. And he certainly was that.
He had a mop of black hair tied back with a green ribbon made from ferret skin. His face was covered in hair and on his head he wore a ‘Davy Crockett’ cap made from the skin of a hare. He was called the Welsh Jew, and draped over his shoulders was a shawllike garment embroidered with quotes in Hebrew and Greek.
His multi-coloured coat had numerous pockets into which he stuffed his many books. Dic Aberdaron was a walking encyclopaedia and during a lifetime of wandering he became famous for his outlandish appearance and eccentric habits. He had an extraordinary talent: he spoke up to 35 languages, both ancient and modern ??
? and it was said he could summon and command devils.
With a cat by his side and a ram’s horn slung around his neck he travelled the length and breadth of Wales and England.
If we leave the highways and byways of early nineteenth century Wales and travel back to the present we can still marvel at the feats of Dic Aberdaron, or to give him his proper name, Richard Robert Jones. The son of a smallholder and carpenter, he was born ‘when the sun was in cancer’ in a mud-walled house at the tip of the Lleyn peninsula in 1780.
As a child he loved books, and although unschooled he could speak his native Welsh from an early age. He was fluent in English by the time he was ten, taught himself Latin by the time he was 12 or 15 (accounts vary), Greek when he was 18 and Hebrew the following year. Poor Dic was naturally averse to work and spent most of his time pursuing languages; this failed to impress his father who eventually threatened him with a poker. Dic was forced to seek gainful employment and he headed for Caernarfon and then Bangor, where he was befriended by the bishop.
But he neglected his job, tending the bishop’s garden, and he was forced to head for Anglesey, where he found time to learn French and Italian. He went to live in Liverpool in 1806, by which time he had developed an enviable range of eccentricities. He had an instrument carved from a ram’s horn with which he used to sing the Songs of Moses in Hebrew. When it was not used for this purpose he kept his money in it. Someone gave him a cat which followed him everywhere; this cat was called Miaw and always received the first bite at meal times. Dic could not sleep unless she was by his bed, and his books were covered in pictures of her.
He also carried a small harp, a telescope he had made himself and an enormous map of Wales tied to a pole. He wore two sets of spectacles with an additional device, attached to the lenses, to further improve his view.