‘But what was he doing at an orthopaedic hospital – surely he should have been in general,’ said I.
‘No, as I said, there was worse to come. Luther wasn’t showing any further symptoms yet, which is probably why they liked to keep him on the move, but in time the disease would attack his skeletal structure, leading to bone malformations. He was probably there short-term for an evaluation. Poor little Luther. His brain had already been eaten into. Poor little boy. One stupid act by his father. What a price to pay. Try believing in a god who does that to children.’
‘No siree,’ chimed in Paddy who was laying into a half bottle of cheap whisky.
‘No mercy on the menu up there in the celestial boardroom when Luther went up for his interview, was there? Ole Hera must’a been on a heavy period and Zeus must’a swigged a rake of ouzo the night before. Bad business, boys, I don’t mind telling you. I’m glad as hell I turned out as normal as a squid in a tent. Bent me pegs on the morning dew and tied me groundsheet to a periwinkle’s knickers, but I’m right as rain.’ Here he drivelled on for some time as we watched the nymphets on the shore.
‘Time to get going,’ I announced, and I got ready to go.
‘Too fucking right,’ said Paddy, who started slinging pebbles at me, so Waldo wrestled him down and told him to behave. Seeing that the party was getting boisterous I headed off towards Bwlchtocyn (ah, what poetry in that name) but had my head so full of mud I went way off course, wandering about like a man in Paddy’s state, and ending up at a farmhouse door asking for directions. A complete false start. By now, of course, the day was dwindling so I headed for the Sun Inn at Llanengan, where I could while away the late hours jangling with the locals and keeping myself warm, before heading for a night on the dunes. Well alackaday, the first thing I see outside the Sun Inn is Waldo’s wagon; Pedro his dog is sitting up in the driver’s seat and Paddy is slumped by his side, sleeping. Waldo is having a jangle inside with his cousin, so I join them until they go, then try to find the ‘visitor’ spot in the pub, which I get wrong (not a good day) and end up listening to a group of settlers drinking wine and Being Intelligent.
Then a group of young Welshmen come in but two are pretty out of it and they’re talking mainly chainsaws, so I go into shutdown mode and just sit there, wondering about tomorrow and trying to be pleasant until 11 o’clock, when I head for the dunes and find a nice sandy slope in the shade of the maram grass, where I can lie back in my sleeping bag looking at the stars and listening to the tush of the night-surf in Porth Neigwl, the great skillet-bottomed bay called Hell’s Mouth.
It’s great to be out in the amphitheatre of the night, waiting for the play to begin: the shadows will form a chorus around the bay and I will lie in the auditorium with the shorebirds and the snuffling creatures of my nocturnal world. It’s not too cold to sleep, and I’m nodding off when the mobile goes off in the rucksack under my head, startling me. I’ve forgotten to turn it off, so I scrabble about and answer it.
‘Hia me old peculiar. It’s me. Paddy. Just phoning to say goodnight.’
I didn’t even answer. In the next four hours I got sick and tired of stars and nature and longed for a nice warm bed. Nature’s all right when you’re in the mood.
AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAY
I DRIFTED in and out of the night, like the waves lapping a short way from my head.
When I woke properly, stiff and cold, under an inky sky seeping with new light, I found that I was damp with dew, and my sleeping bag was blubbering with water.
I shook off what I could of the wetness and stuffed everything into my rucksack. I had slept in my boots, so there was little to check. I stepped out of the dunes into a gimlet dawn and started along the lip of Hell’s Mouth, with the breaking waves gleaming toothfully by my side. I felt like a fly crawling along the lip of a huge saucer.
I would like you to daydream with me, as the dawn’s eyeball rolls feverishly in the night’s black socket. I am a wrecker with a lantern, luring ships onto the shore, like the 18th century wreckers of Crigyll on the west coast of Anglesey. I thought wreckers were illiterate ruffians living in caves until I read about these Welsh mooncussers: on the contrary, they were upstanding members of the community – a farmer, a weaver, a tailor, a housewife, and children were among them; a chapel elder discovered some of his own congregation at it.
If you visit Beaumaris Courthouse you will learn about the famous case of 1741 when four of the robbers were arraigned before the island’s chief justice, Thomas Martyn, who also happened to be a notorious lush (like that magistrate in the Vogel Papers, who was kidnapped by pirates and taken across the sea). The wreckers’ families disrupted the trial and Thomas Martyn made a drunken hash of things, so the men got away with it. But the wreckers had committed a particularly heinous crime, and they had a grim avenger on their trail. William Chilcott, captain of a sloop called the Charming Jenny, had been lured onto the rocks in a storm and had witnessed the wreckers murdering his wife by holding her head under water until she drowned. They broke a finger to remove her gold wedding ring and her body was stripped of valuables. Despite setbacks, Chilcott eventually got the men tried at Shrewsbury, and two were sentenced to death (although only one seems to have been hanged). When I first read this story I thought of Paddy, lured onto the rocks by his addiction – while we were forced to watch, helplessly, as he drowned in alcohol.
But back to the present. I am walking on a beach, and the dawn is seeping in from the east. There was a time when the seashore communities and the farmers inland had virtually no contact with each other – they were separate nations, almost.
Walking alongside this wine-dark sea has another connotation: there was virtually no travel by land in pre-medieval times, it was simply too dangerous, so humans moved about almost exclusively on water; the Irish sea on my left was their main artery, and the long shoreline of West Wales, my walkway today, was the equivalent of a motorway hard shoulder.
When the light took hold I discovered that the tide was coming in, and I eventually had to traverse the muddy, fissured falls of earth which had been dislodged from the shoreland. It wasn’t enjoyable, especially since I had to scurry along the edge of a long field in full sight of a farmhouse before I reached a road near the pretty National Trust house at Plas-yn-Rhiw. Farmers have had too many bad experiences with walkers to wave at everyone cheerily; I have been directed peremptorily to the nearest footpath on more than one occasion, despite my Welsh greetings. I sometimes feel a bit guilty, swanning around the country decadently while they’re doing proper work. The farming families are the real core of the country, the spine. They are the respirator which gives Wales its deep, ancient breath. They’re the real people; in comparison I feel so ersatz, so poorly reproduced on the great photo-copier of my nation’s genetic pool.
As I walk slowly up the steep hill from Plas-yn-Rhiw, with the bay descending down an escalator behind me, I consider my next guest at the Blue Angel party, who will be another walker. Will it be the first person to walk around the Earth, Dave Kunst? Now there’s a man I tip my hat to. Dave set off from Minnesota with his brother John and a pack mule called Willie Makeit (get it?) on June 20, 1970 – but only Dave returned. John was shot and killed by bandits in Afghanistan. Dave resumed his trek after recovering from his wounds, this time accompanied by another brother, Pete. They crossed India and went on to Australia, where their third Willie Makeit died in the desert. An Australian teacher, Jenni Samuel, volunteered to haul their baggage behind her car and guess what – she and Dave fell in love. They married when he completed his walk on October 21, 1974. He got through 21 pairs of shoes and took about twenty million steps. What a hero.
Not to be outdone, a god-fearing man called Arthur Blessit (no, I’m not pulling your plonker) has circumnavigated the globe carrying a full-scale cross. And of course there’s Ffyona Campbell, who walked the 1,000-mile length of Britain at the age of 16 and then marched around the world at the rate of 50 miles a day.
But the one who really wins my respect is a great-grandmother called Doris Haddock (you couldn’t make it up, could you) who decided, at the age of 89, to walk across America in a campaign for political reform. She became a celebrity, with big-name Republicans and Democrats joining her on her 3,200-mile meander from Pasadena in California to Washington DC. Doris, standing a mere five feet tall, had emphysema and arthritis. She got through four sets of shoes and had to ski part of the way because snow threatened to disrupt her trip. Way to go, Doris.
There are other freaks – Gary Hause belted round the globe in turbo-charged style: he ‘did’ America in 87 days and Europe (yawn) in 147 days.
No, I’m not going to choose any of those.
Here we go through Rhiw, home of that cantankerous old genius R.S.Thomas, who made great word-potions from the glistening trail of a glow-worm in his bosom-bower, and who had all the synonyms for sadness nestling like butterflies’ eggs under the leaf of his tongue.
The day’s fine and I’m hitting my stride, though there’s a slight panic frosting my spirit; will the Englishman beat me to my finishing point near Bangor? How much Norman blood has he in his ventricles? How much desire has he to seize my terrain and plant my head on a fencing post, leaving me there like a trophy mole?
I reach the top of Mynydd y Graig and wander in the heather, stepping on whitened rocks which surface on the path like whales in the fish-lanes of the Atlantic.
The sea glitters; my eyes follow the contours of my country, along her headlands and her coves, and I am smitten by her seemliness, her gleaming grandeur. She appears through the veils of her morning mists to welcome me, and to lead me to sweet anchorages on this wayward journey of my heart.
So, I’m a jollyman now, hoity-toity and a-swaggering on the dusty road like Dick Whittington with all my worldly possessions wrapped up in a polka-dot bandana on a stick swung over my shoulder like a cartoon character, and I’m getting sea-drunk and fizzy with bubbles of glee blown landward specially for my own consumption, and I’m hawking my happy pills down through a Marie Celeste farm, large but abandoned, above Porth Ysgo, wondering: what happened here, why was this tribe scattered to the four winds, what became of the children who said naughty words by the duckpond and fell about giggling and dizzy in the hayrick after doing too many headstands?
Onwards, into the day, and I find an old roadside church high above, looking down on Aberdaron, a charming little church which would look great in a film set on a stormy west coast with a crazy priest who’s a cross between Trevor Howard in Ryan’s Daughter and a Welsh ranter with a name like Easter Evans, white-haired and red with Christ’s blood swigged secretly from a bottle hidden in the organ, preaching to the seals all sat up like a regular congregation down there on the rocks.
I sit in the churchyard, with the dead, and share the sun with them. My sleeping bag steams on the headstone of an old Welshwoman who would have been flabbergasted by my sleeping bag and by my dissipated notions.
Who, in God’s name, I ask my captive audience, will I invite to the ball?
Who will be my second walker?
I might, I might just choose an oddity. How about William Gale of Cardiff, who recorded his greatest walk in the late summer and autumn of 1877, when he covered 1,500 miles in 1,000 hours. He walked for six weeks solidly at the rate of 36 miles a day.
Or how about the great American temperance leader Weston, who set himself the task of walking 5,000 miles in 100 days, in a non-stop trek during 1884. On his final day, when he walked from Brighton to London, he was cheered by large crowds patrolled by mounted police.
I’ve a liking for Foster Powell, who covered his first highspeed trek, a 50-mile endurance test along the Bath Road, in just seven hours. To make it more interesting he wore a heavy greatcoat and leather breeches. Powell did a 402-mile ramble from London to York and back in six days, and he walked the 112 miles from Canterbury to London Bridge and back in 24 hours, with thousands of astonished spectators awaiting his arrival. He became famous throughout Britain and decided to attempt the Canterbury walk in a faster time, but lost his way and felt so ashamed of his failure that he went into a decline and died a bitter and disappointed man.
We must feature a Scotsman, and who better than Captain Barclay? One August morning he started from the house of a colonel friend in Aberdeenshire at five o’clock and walked at least thirty miles to shoot grouse in the mountains. By five in the afternoon he had returned to dinner, and then he set off for his own home sixty miles away. He walked it in 11 hours, without stopping once for refreshment.
In the days when ordinary people couldn’t afford stagecoach travel many had to go long distances on foot. I rather like the tale of a Keswick woman, known only as Molly, who walked all the way home from London carrying a small table. It is recorded that she said “I’s niver sa tired of anything in my life as that auld table” when she finally got to Keswick.
In the same league we have Old Mr Eustace, who at the age of 77 walked from Liverpool to London in four days. Pow!
Perhaps I should choose one of the 500 or so ramblers who took part in the 1932 Mass Trespass at Kinder Scout in the Peak District as part of a growing campaign to gain open access to mountain and moorland. Confronted by the Deputy Chief Constable of Derbyshire and his men, they sang the International and other revolutionary songs as they set off. They were met by a posse of gamekeepers with sticks, who battled with them but who were disarmed (a couple got a taste of their own medicine). Later, after their upland victory, six of the ramblers, chosen at random, were tried at Derby Assizes, charged with unlawful assembly and breach of the peace; pro-rambling witnesses were too poor to attend and the jury were mostly country gentlemen and military types. It was a farcical political trial and those found guilty were meted heavy sentences. Similar rallies became common, and those pioneers of freedom eventually won the day. We have a lot to thank them for.
No, as I sit in the churchyard, I decide it will be none of these.
I start off again, down to the little fishing village of Aberdaron, at the end of the old pilgrim’s way, which starts at Clynnog Fawr. Three pilgrimages to the offshore island of Bardsey were considered equal to a pilgrimage to Rome in the Roman Catholic world. The nearby church at Pistyll, of which more later, had leper huts within its enclosure to harbour those seeking a cure, or preparing to meet their maker. Salvation lay over the water, on Bardsey, reputedly the home of 20,000 saints. It is a dangerous channel, though I have never seen any records of the hundreds who must have drowned during the crossing. That turbulent stretch of sea, which boils like a great cauldron, is a suitable Welsh place to represent all the other aortic valves between life and death, ranging from the Styx to the Ganges. Pilgrims were regarded as a different breed to the rest of mankind; they lived secundum Deum, and were therefore aliens in this world, belonging to the city of God rather than the temporal world.
The point I make, in a secular world, is that the pilgrim, in transit between a previous state and a new condition, is irreversibly changing his life either for better or worse, and in temporarily removing himself from worldly matters he is suspended in a state of deferment or adjournment. He is also attempting to escape from mundanity, to free his spirit, to forget that he is merely a channel for excrement, as Leonardo put it. Leonardo was a man who bought cage-birds in the market place and set them free – the pilgrim, romantically speaking, wants also to rise from Leonardo’s palm.
My mobile trills as I walk down the slipway by St Hywyn’s Church. I squat by the sea wall, and the shingle hurts my bottom.
‘You OK?’
It’s Waldo.
‘Fine.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Getting a numb bum on the beach at Aberdaron. What about you?’
‘In the disabled toilet at the hospital library. They loved your story about the photo with those celebrities – they checked it out and found it pretty quick. Impressed them no end. The scar on my finger went down pretty well too. Can’t talk
for long in case someone comes in. I’ve got a few more facts for you. Jack, the little strongman, was suffering from dwarfism. He was actually quite a few years older than the rest of them – have another look at his face in the picture.’
So Jack was one of the Little People. My memory handed me pictures of the dwarfs who had crossed my path: real ones, not Disneymen or Diddymen; a man in my home town with a wonderful sense of humour; actors in the film Willow, partly filmed in Snowdonia and starring a reluctant dwarf who saves a special baby from an evil queen.
Mythology has its fair share of dwarfs, such as the Nibelungs, northern dwarfs in a German epic whose king had owned – and then lost – a great but cursed treasure trove of gold and precious stones (Tolkien’s dwarfs came from this family, quite clearly). Dwarfs are people with average-sized bodies but small-scale arms and legs, whilst midgets are all in proportion but much smaller than everyone else. Dwarfs tend to suffer more as they grow older, I seem to remember, when their skeletal structure starts paying the price for their unusual shape. Famous dwarfs include Snow White’s little friends, who are common figures in the folklore of the world. Traditionally, dwarfs are short and stocky with long beards and they work in mines, digging for minerals and metals. They are exceptionally skilful with their hands and make beautiful objects which greatly surpass man-made objects. Norse mythology has two famous dwarfs – Brok and Sindri, who made many magical objects including Thor’s hammer and Odin’s magical ring.
‘You still there?’
‘Yes Waldo.’
‘I’ve got something on Edwin too. Poor little sod was being knocked about by his father, a former soldier. Very difficult to read between the lines. Edwin had a number of old fractures when he was admitted. There’s a line in his notes which says something like: Disturbed family background. Father injured by nerve gas during military service, unable to co-operate. Mother very nervous, unwilling to volunteer information. That’s all I can find. Edwin seems to have been a deceptively happy boy. Might have been happy because he’d been saved.’