She’s crying again, soundlessly, and her shoulders look as small as a child’s. I feed her sweets as we snake down the pass, and she smiles little wobbly smiles sometimes when I hand her one. Her tears are torn silk, a snapped cobweb falling to earth.
This is our personal history: a private liquid which hardens as it leaves our spinnerets, then holds us in place. Tenuous yet surprisingly strong, a web from which we view the world, tremble in its winds. Waiting for something to happen, waiting for it all to fall apart.
A distant sun blowlamps the sea, and the upland fields are green phosphorescent seas crashing in giant waves onto the hillsides: their crooked walls are tidemarks flotsammed with sheep. I lie back in my seat and I dream…
Arthur is all around us: he’s above us and he’s below us. Last night, as I scanned the sky with my telescope, I dwelt on the brightest star in the northern hemisphere – Arcturus, to the left of the Plough in the constellation of Bootes. This star has been connected with Arthur for a very long time: its name is rooted in the Greek word for bear. The Welsh word for bear is arth...
Arthur’s warriors sleep in a cave in Snowdonia, according to legend. There are many stories about him ‘living’ underground: in the fourteenth-century English poem A Dispute between a Christian and a Jew, he and his knights live in a magnificent dwelling reached by a path under a hill. In many of the tales Arthur and thousands of his men sleep in a circle, waiting until a bell hanging in the cave is tolled to wake them so that they can lead Wales – the Britons – to glory again. This subterranean abode or kingdom is magical and otherworldly; the Celtic Otherworld is always underground, located with great difficulty within elusive hillside caverns. These legends have beautiful touches.
In the Chronicon de Lanercost, Peter de Roches, Bishop of Winchester, saw a magnificent house while hunting and accepted an invitation to dine with the master, who turned out to be Arthur. The bishop wanted to convince sceptics that he had truly seen the ancient lord of Britain, so Arthur gave him the miraculous power of producing a butterfly whenever he opened his closed fist.
From Merlin’s crystal cave to St Benedict’s bolthole, caves are full of meaning (if nothing else). A dictionary of symbols includes these connotations:
A symbol of the universe; the world centre; the heart; a place of union between the Self and the Ego; where the divine and the human meet; where dying gods go and where saviours are born; inner esoteric knowledge; that which is hidden; a place of initiation and second birth; the womb of Mother Earth; a place of burial and rebirth; a place of mystery; a place of sacred marriage between heaven and earth; a place of obscurity and illusion.
When Carl Jung recorded his first active imagination experience in 1913, he sat at his desk and decided to let himself drop. He felt as though the ground had given way under his feet. He plunged into dark depths. After a while he ‘landed’ on soft ground. When his eyes adjusted he began to see details in the gloom. Before him was an entrance to a cave, in which stood a dwarf with leathery skin. Jung squeezed past him and waded through icy, knee-deep water. At the other end of the cave a red crystal glowed on a rock. When he lifted the crystal he saw a hole which allowed him to overlook a river. Soon he saw the corpse of a boy with blond hair floating by, followed by a gigantic black beetle; then a red sun rose from the water. Blinded by its rays, Jung wanted to replace the crystal but blood poured from the hole.
In his second active imagination experience Jung descended into a ‘cosmic abyss’. He saw something like a moon crater and felt he was in the land of the dead. Near a steep rocky slope he saw an old man and a beautiful young girl. He approached them and listened. A large black snake slithered by…
The car weaves to left and right, a shuttle in Snowdonia’s moss-woven carpet, as we head down the pass towards Beddgelert. I’m voyaging towards a prism in my past: towards my own very little bang. Singularity. Will it be an event in time, or in space, or in fantasy? Why worry about it… after all, life’s just a bout of insomnia before the big sleep. What did Fernando Pessoa say? Madness isn’t the failure to make sense but the attempt.
‘Enough petrol, have we?’ I venture.
‘Yes.’ Her response comes in a hiss, and I realise immediately that I’ve put my foot in it again. Her whole mood changes. Suddenly her shoulders tighten, the sinews in her neck tauten. She blowpipes her mouth and fires a fruit gum at me; it hits my cheek in a warm green splat. Cheeky little madam.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘Well just think before you speak again,’ she says. ‘I told you it’ll never happen again, right? Don’t treat me like a bloody kid.’
‘Sorry Olly.’
I clam up, hoping I haven’t ruined the morning. Olly’s tense again; she’s nervy and jumpy. Thin, tired, hollowed out. But why?
A few miles further on she floors me with a lightning question which has me on the canvas.
‘Do you believe in God?’
I look across at her, running through all my databanks, my head’s whirring as I try to establish if she’s serious.
‘Well, do you?’ she asks again.
I’m flummoxed.
‘Does he believe in me?’ I counter. I don’t like talking about God. Makes me nervous. There’s a pause, and then (stupidly) I ask: ‘Why?’
She pushes a loose strand of hair back into place and lets out a long stream of air, making a whirring noise with her lips.
‘Don’t really know. I’ve been thinking about it recently, that’s all. A lot of people say they’re not religious, then they turn round and say all this can’t be here by chance,’ and she waves her hand at the scene around us.
I keep mum. I don’t want to get involved. I’ve lived long enough for everyone around me to say the same thing twice – in completely contradictory ways.
Instead, I admire the russet bracken breaking in waves on the slopes around us. The fields have been ironed by an amateur or a drunk, because all the folds are in the wrong places. A huddle of hills looks like a tug o’war team, braced, straining at the rope of the horizon. The road is a glistening snail-trail of silver after a shower. Fortunately for me, the crisis passes. No more talk of God because soon we’re there; Gelert the hound is leashed, and we’re booted and coated ready for our excursion.
We face a rotunda hill, tortoise-napping by the side of the road near Llyn Dinas – the lake in which Vortigern hid the throne of Britain, allegedly (the case hasn’t come to court yet). There’s a girl canoeing with her hair in bunches and she looks like a grebe. Skirting a row of caravans, we climb along the vertebrae of a wooded ridge which takes us towards the top of Dinas Emrys. We’re in a kingdom of luxuriant mosses which cushion and constrain a soft green half-light. The path is surrounded by sessile oaks and their rheumatoid branches are festooned with water droplets which light our path – candelabra in the hallway of the mountain king; we walk through a tree-lined vestibule decorated tastefully in the muted colours of bark and lichen. It’s the sort of place you’d expect to meet a woodwose, a wild man of the woods. Long ago they were thought to live in the forests which covered Britain, and they make frequent appearances in medieval art. Naked, clothed only in their hair, they appeared in masques to portray rustic or primitive folk. The Speculum Regale (the King's Mirror) written in Norway around 1250 says:
It once happened in that country (and this seems indeed strange) that a living creature was caught in the forest as to which no one could say definitely whether it was a man or some other animal; for no one could get a word from it or be sure that it understood human speech. It had the human shape, however, in every detail, both as to hands and face and feet; but the entire body was covered with hair as the beasts are, and down the back it had a long coarse mane like that of a horse, which fell to both sides and trailed along the ground when the creature stooped in walking.
Above us, on the slopes of Craig Wen – the White Rock – I hear dogs barking and the faint sound of a bugle: the Eryri Hunt is out. The whipper-in is trying to recall three
muddy hounds which have become detached from the hunt and lope along the valley floor. Meanwhile, we examine the remains of the fortress on Dinas Emrys. Archaeologists have found evidence of human activity during the Roman occupation and in the ensuing Dark Ages. They also discovered the site of a pool, a small waterhole which lies at the centre of the most important Welsh myth.
History of a hole: Once there was a king called Vortigern who fled from his enemies, to the remotest part of his kingdom. He decided to build a fortress at Dinas Emrys, but as soon as any building took shape it sank without trace into the ground at night. Wise men told Vortigern that this could be prevented by pouring the blood of a fatherless boy into the foundations. Such a boy, Ambrosius, was found in Glamorgan. Transported north to Dinas Emrys, this wonder-child declared that two dragons, fighting in a pool below, were the cause of the problem. Digging down, masons discovered a red dragon fighting fiercely with a white dragon. The red dragon won. Impressed by the boy, Vortigern named the fort after him (Ambrosius equals Emrys). Some use this episode to explain the red dragon on the Welsh flag; others compare the dragons’ fight to the conflict between the Britons and the Saxons. Mediterranean pottery found at the site points to a rich Christian household from the fifth or sixth century: the shards may have been mistaken for broken dragon’s eggs, or the container in which they fought. The fabled pool, now little more than a reedy hollow near the summit, was a water cistern, probably. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth who muddied the waters. In his epic work, The History of the Kings of Britain, the most influential book ever to emerge from Wales, he welded the story of Emrys to the British myth about a madman in the woods. Geoffrey of Monmouth was a literary alchemist who turned a collection of folk tales into a major book which kick-started the golden age of the Arthurian cycle. He was to have a profound effect on the whole of Europe, and still exerts a magical influence via Hollywood.
I stood on Dinas Emrys, enjoying the view. For although it appears to be little more than a hillock from the road, it commands a glorious view of the pass. As I looked down on Llyn Dinas, which shone like a burnished shield, Gelert lunged forward and very nearly disappeared over the ramparts. He squealed to a halt on the edge of a 200-foot drop, and his target – a black and white billygoat – romped away from us towards a flock on the other side of the river. I screamed at Gelert but he took no notice of me. Then a single whistle rang out and he froze to the spot. Olly took control and he was on his leash almost immediately. Long dribbles of saliva drifted from his mouth as he looked longingly at the goats. In the silence we could hear the hunters’ bugle drifting away from us, up the mountain. And I was reminded, suddenly, of the Demon Hunter and his seven magic bullets.
Turning to view the valley floor again, I saw a huge spotlight of sunshine beaming down from a chink in the clouds, capturing a green field by the river and turning it instantly into a brilliantly-lit stage. The river, the roadways, and all reflective surfaces glittered in this dazzling light. Then a pair of choughs passed by, the light waned and the slopes of Cnicht blued over in a wintry haze; in the darkening woods a purple hue of regret and melancholy fell in folds over the ribs of the silver birches. A great tit sawed in the branches below me. Fallen trees all around me testified to the many storms which had buffeted this eyrie, but it was preternaturally still that day. I ate my sandwiches, leaving a crumb or two for the sparrows, and Gelert left a pint of dog-drool for the ghosts of Dinas Emrys. As I ate my dill pickle bread on that blue-forgotten hill I thought I heard children at play, their fluid shapes moving along the bole of a wind-snapped tree. You may think I’m being fanciful, but that was the mood of the moment. The loss of my children hit me with a deep pang; they should have been there with me – playing in my present, not in my past. I had taught them to love the light, and birdsong, and darkness and silence too… today they would be encased in breeze blocks, listening to hoodlums from the Bronx.
I am a ghost to them now as they play in this country inside me, this lost terrain.
Olly pointed over the valley, to the Sygun Copper Mine, now a tourist attraction.
‘That’s where they filmed The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, isn’t it?’
I’d never heard of it – apparently it’s a film starring Ingrid Bergman, set in China, about a real-life missionary called Gladys Aylward. When the Japanese invaded she led about a hundred Chinese kids to safety over the mountains.
‘I had her hat once,’ said Olly.
‘No kidding. What hat?’
She ignored my superciliousness.
‘The coolie hat which Ingrid Bergman wore in the film.’
‘What’s the sixth happiness, anyway?’ I asked. ‘And what were the other five?’
Olly seemed to know all about it. This Gladys Aylward was a missionary who opened an inn out there for muleteers, and when it was time to put a name on the sign above the door she chose The Inn of the Sixth Happiness because Chinese people traditionally wish each other five forms of happiness – health, wealth, virtue, longevity and a peaceful death in old age. The sixth happiness, presumably, was the Christian message.
The sixth happiness. I wondered if it was possible for mankind to discover previously unknown forms of happiness; after all, a tenth planet had just been discovered revolving around the sun. It might be a simple form of happiness, spinning around inside us; we could announce it proudly to the world at a crowded press conference.
Ladies and gentlemen: today we bring you the seventh form of happiness – discovered yesterday by Duxie the well-known but generally disparaged former football player. The World Happiness Forum has verified the name of this new happiness as Duxieness. Please feel free to laugh or express joy and contentment.
‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’
This time it was her turn to be supercilious, pulling a silly face. I ignored her.
‘Remember those seven rainbow messengers in my crazy dreams?’
She nodded. ‘How could I forget?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’ll aim for the seventh happiness. That’s what we’ll look for at the end of this rainbow of ours – the seventh happiness. Deal?’
She dropped her head and looked at her sandwich, then tossed it into the reedy water below us.
‘Yeah, if that’s what you want.’
‘Hey,’ I complained, ‘I could have used that sandwich myself.’
‘Tough shit.’
We got up, and she stuffed the remains of our picnic into her rucksack. I started to move away, but she stopped me.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ The hand which had halted my progress remained on my chest, and I pushed against it gently… provocatively?
‘What?’
She jerked her head towards the reeds, and the murky water beneath them.
‘Go on.’
I didn’t get it. ‘What?’ I said again, pushing against her hand.
‘It’s time to put your penny in the pond, dummy.’
Of course. I laughed quietly and moved away from her, then ferreted about in my pockets. No cash, not a single bloody penny. She put her rucksack down and scrabbled around in a side-pocket, then handed me a twopenny piece.
‘That’s all I’ve got, I’m afraid. It’ll have to be a very small wish.’
She was already on her way when she heard the plop.
‘If it’s about the seventh happiness you can forget it,’ she said. ‘I need some of the others first.’
Our mini-quest over, we turned the car eastwards, drove through the piled-up mountains and dropped to sea level again. On the way, Olly told me she was going to delay the wedding. Big fuss, lots of pissed off people. Her father had been playing up again; he’d made a number of impossible demands. He was being a pig, as usual. There was a medical problem, too. The blood tests had revealed an unspecified illness. She was having sensory tests… the doctors were concerned about her eyesight. Her peripheral vision was impaired; the world in front of her was clouding over. But there was no easy diagn
osis. They thought the problem was psychological.
I’d heard of artists going mad or losing their eyesight because of the pigments in their paints; Olly was losing her vision because of a pigment in her history. Her brain, apparently, might be trying to block out the present, as mine was blocking out the past. I tried to understand what was going on, but it was difficult. I don’t have much experience of this sort of thing. Away from the bar and the bedroom, sportsmen have pretty one-dimensional lives. As I’ve told you already, I’m a professional footballer, retired. The end-game was a bad experience. Ageing player-managers don’t get much sympathy:
Duxie laboured towards goal like a pit pony released from the shafts after a lifetime lugging coal: half-man, half-carthorse, he looked more like a centaur-forward than a centre-forward – Cambrian News.
Duxie’s boys eat, drink and sleep football – what a shame they can’t play it. In the end they lost five nil, and they were lucky to get nil – Rhyl Journal.
My wife ran off with a younger model three years ago. Barry Town goalkeeper. Safest pair of hands in Wales. Too damn right. He’d had plenty of practice juggling with my wife’s tits. The papers had a field day. I was standing in the front room when I found out, looking at a trail of wet footprints on the carpet, and I was shocked to the core. The handset was brittle and chilly against my ear, and my legs – up to my knees – were cold and wet because the phone had rung as I was stepping into the bath. This time it was The People. Long-distance camera shots of her in a hotel room, fuzzy, but I could see it was her behind the net curtains. The way she was holding him told me everything I didn’t want to know. I had a bad time with it all. Perhaps I took her for granted, I can’t tell you for sure. Other beds, yes, but they meant nothing and she knew it. I never fell in love, that must count for something, mustn’t it? But she had to go the whole hog, didn’t she? She remarried as soon as the decree absolute arrived. I’d been forced to move into a particularly gruesome flat and I remember vividly the morning I went down to check the mail and found the envelope lying on the cracked hallway lino. It was one of those cold, dirty hallways shared by half a dozen people who hardly ever spoke yet knew more about each other than they did about their own brothers and sisters. You learn a lot from the mail: Save the Sardine, Royal Society for the Protection of Bison. Penis enlargements, hospital appointments, dole cheques, summonses, debt claims, double-glazing, the endless folderol. Banks, charities, governments, aliens, the multiple horrors of bedsit-land. Moans, groans, rows, silences, all of them as revealing as my own centre spreads in the Sunday papers. We hit a disastrous losing streak and things were never the same again on the pitch. Confidence, I suppose. I felt as if the whole damn crowd, every single one of them, were grinning and thinking of her at it in that hotel room. I had the kids most weekends, though it was hard moving all five from her place to mine. The smallest lay in the well in the back of the car in case the coppers saw I was overloaded. They don’t come now. They’re doing their own thing. Their interest ended, pretty well, when I fell to earth.