Out on the sea that day, aboard the Balmoral, our trip became a journey into smoke, a nether world of Hadean gloom. Even out there, on the wide watermass, man is encroaching. Wind farms and oil rigs clutter the water meadows of the wine-dark sea. Our last clear horizon is becoming obscured by man’s relentless colonisation.
And then we came to land again, and the dream was over. We docked at the Pier Head after a calm and uneventful passage into the Mersey estuary, with an elderly and very lame Liverpudlian excitedly pointing out all the landmarks.
After that journey into Liverpool Bay I was to embark on a series of mini adventures, in search of something which was intangible. First of all, I was determined to conquer my fear of flying so I flew out to Italy with my teenage daughter. It’s never going to be my number one hobby, but now I can take to the air without going to pieces. Bravery was never my strong point.
Rome is a gigantic ruin, a huge heap of stones, a coliseum within a coliseum within a coliseum. And a parable too: the Vatican City is encrusted with precious stones, a citadel of wealth, while outside its massive walls the city is awash with beggars, alcoholics and thieves. While the Pope fiddles, Rome burns; twice we were robbed. After four days of stumbling around this great ruptured mausoleum we found Florence and Pisa besieged by humans, vast termite mounds of tourists being hassled into culture. We escaped to the west coast and found a place to relax, a nice little clifftop town called Castiglioncello, on the rim of Tuscany; just about everyone hit the beach during the day to swim, sleep, or to parade their physical wares; then the whole town came to life at night in a warm, dreamlike sanctuary of bar babble, book stalls and fairy lights. It was nice to be with normal Italian people. Close by are the ‘mountains of marble’ from which Michelangelo ordered his raw materials. I know it’s a beautiful country, but I couldn’t live in Italy for long. All that heat. So little damp greenery. So few sheep. So many excessively right-wing people…
Whilst flying over the Dolomites I became aware how childish my geography is. Looking at a map or a globe, I still think of the north as ‘higher up’ than the south, and I think of Cardiff as being lower down, geographically, than Bangor – as if I were observing the south from an eyrie in Snowdonia. Of course I know this is nonsense but I can’t dislodge the notion without making a conscious effort. These are the misconceptions of childhood, echoing down the years.
After our trip to Italy the wandering continued. I jumped on a plane with Edwin and Ella, the youngsters in my life, and headed for Prague. We meandered around this beautiful baroque city, lost in another world. I realised during those five days why I’ve been such a poor traveller all my life. I’m not good at moving between worlds. Maybe this has something to do with my upbringing, on a remote hill farm; maybe not, since I’ve seen TV footage of Amazonian tribesmen wandering around New York, completely unfazed. Prague reminded me a little of Britain thirty years ago; the Czech people are mostly conservatively dressed, friendly but dignified. The great god Mammon hasn’t quite got the place by the throat yet. Another thing that’s really noticeable: there are hardly any black people. We ‘did’ Prague – the famous clock, the churches, the puppet shows, the jazz bands; we sauntered along Charles Bridge at dusk and watched hot air balloon flights over the river; we listened to musicians, we made way for a Hare Krishna sect snaking its way through the crowd, chanting and beating drums. It was nice to get my first sight of onion domes with the kids, since it made me feel young and still capable of wonder. Then I stood in St Vitus Cathedral, within the castle complex, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the place. It’s vast by any standards. Huge. Standing inside its hush, I became aware of the importance of stone in man’s journey through the world. All around me lay millions of tons of dressed stone, piled into patterns which have different meanings for each succeeding age. I was overwhelmed by stone – its bulk, its martial presence, its dictatorship over the senses. I became aware of the enormous reservoirs of human energy tapped to make all the stone buildings of man. Standing in this gothic edifice, which took almost 600 years to complete, I was numbed by stone. On a lesser scale, perhaps this was how my ancestors felt when they first engineered the masterpieces of Neolithic Wales – the 150 or so cromlechi in the country.
We stepped out of the cathedral and wandered around the rest of the castle buildings.
Inside the White Tower we learnt about Katerina Bechynova, a cruel woman who murdered fourteen people, mainly young girls (she was said to cut their skin with a knife and put salt in the wounds). Katerina was lowered to the bowels of this tower to die of starvation, thirst, and cold. One of its more famous prisoners, according to legend, was the bogus necromancer Edward Kelly, nemesis of the Welsh-blooded alchemist John Dee, who has a chapter all to himself in history.
But I was more interested in the tale of the Dalibor Tower, named after a man who was sentenced to death and imprisoned there for giving shelter to rebel peasants. It’s a sad but lovely story. Every day, as he waited to be executed, Dalibor played his violin, and the people of the city were moved deeply by the beautiful music which poured from his lonesome tower. He became famous and the authorities repeatedly delayed the execution, fearing civil disorder. But then, one day, Dalibor’s fiddle fell silent and the people of Prague had a little less light in their lives. By his silence, they knew he was dead.
My wanderings were nearly over: the year was coming to an end. Our last trip was to Robin Hood’s Bay on the eastern seaboard of England, for a reunion and birthday – nine of us, ranging from fogies like me to young Tom, aged four, staying in the youth hostel at nearby Boggle Hole. We wandered around the quaint streets and narrow ginnels of this old fishing town, which suffers from exactly the same second homes problem as most of Wales.
Smuggling was a way of life here once and the womenfolk apparently poured boiling water from their bedroom windows to fend off the excise men; contraband could pass from one end of the town to the other without leaving the houses.
We admired their homes, charmingly quaint and huddled close together as if forever awaiting the last tempest; we ate fish and chips and we borrowed a bucket and spade from the street-side repositories provided by thoughtful locals; we built sandcastles, caught crabs, joked and bantered, took photographs. At some stage my daughter and I peeled off to comb the crumbling cliff-edge for fossils, an east coast speciality.
As we stumbled around in the scree, heads bowed, scanning the stones, our hands met and curled around each other: we hadn’t done that for a while and the sudden convergence of fingers felt natural and good, surprising us both with its power and warmth. We became father and child again, rather than two people orbiting each other. We looked at each other and smiled, acknowledging this moment. At the same time I noticed many other things held in an age-old clasp around us: sea meeting shore, shells closing and knitting, the people around us darning friendships, using new words to bind old feelings. During the ensuing night my daughter and I both had nightmares about each other, dreams of danger. Was there a significance in that? Every time we experience a perfect conjunction, hand meeting hand unexpectedly, does the inner mind always freeze the final frame and imagine the worst possible scenario that might follow? Do we pause to think, unconsciously, about that final moment when each of us, from mammoth to trilobite, from human to mouse, is grasped by mud and stitched into place, a knot of bone in the rock-hard Bayeux of the untouchable past?
The journey has ended for now; I still haven’t finished the voyage around Wales by water. Perhaps I never will. Winter came and we all went back to our homes. I rather like the eleventh century Irish story about Athairne going on a journey in the autumn to the home of his foster-father Amhairgen. As Athairne prepares to leave, Amhairgen finds a reason to detain him because he doesn’t want to lose his company; so Athairne stays for the whole season, and when he prepares to leave, Amhairgen finds another ruse to keep him there for the winter, and yet another for the spring too. But when Athairne prepares to leave in the early summer
Amhairgen lets him go, saying: A good season is summer for long journeys; quiet is the tall fine wood, which the whistle of the wind will not stir; green is the plumage of the sheltering wood; eddies swirl in the stream; good is the warmth of the turf.
The year’s restlessness has been quenched, the door has been locked and the fire lit. There will be no more a-roving before the spring. So I’ve started playing the violin again. It’s not the first violin I ever owned, though I still have that too – I bought it when I was a young boy, from a man living in Llanfairfechan, little thinking that years later, when I was twenty-six, I would come to this town again for a day visit and stay for the next thirty years. I often pass that house where I bought my first violin and see a little boy in an upstairs window, with a fiddle tucked under his chin. Our eyes meet. I wish I could ring the doorbell and meet that little boy, tell him that everything will work out all right, that life will be worth living. I want to tell him that he will surge through later life in a when I am old I shall wear purple sort of mood.
Yes, that little boy is me. Never wanting to be far from each other, we both still live in the north.
south
I WENT south to the Black Mountains in May, when the whole country lay as still as moss on a tombstone, and the greens were countless. Tawny owls sounded all night in the cloisters of Capel y Ffin and a green woodpecker cackled by day. I knew from the first morning that a special time was upon me: I felt a calm clemency below the wide blue sky. For the first time in many years I met a woman I desired, an old-yet-new feeling which arrived, embarrassed and flustered, like a latecomer to a concert.
I was staying in the country’s oldest youth hostel, due to close that autumn. Standing on Gospel Pass I surveyed the wooded cleft of the Vale of Ewyas, scraped out by meltwater and bearing almost as many Christian symbols as a saint’s festival in Spain. But I felt nothing of its holy past, not up there. Great change was afoot. I met a farrier-publican who told me that the old families were disappearing rapidly and centuries of border Welsh tradition were coming to an end; as if to illustrate his words, I noticed a large farm being renovated meticulously near Cwmyoy Church, at huge expense. A millionaire, I was told. New money was flooding into Ewyas, as it was pouring into the rest of Wales; it was a time of plenty for builders and a time of lean for the old and tetchy as they witnessed a disappearing world.
On the first day I walked down to Hay with the Bluff on my right and Lord Hereford’s Knob on my left, on a morning as sharp and bright as fresh linen drying in a sunny garden. Bullfinches and goldfinches flitted upwards into the hawthorn bushes as I walked on, and there were warblers everywhere. I snacked on wild strawberries shaded by the roadside flowers – including yellow archangel – and my spirits roared. Down below the pass I met a tall man with a white moustache standing by his camper van; he willingly took my camera and snapped me with Hay Bluff rearing up behind my back. Five years previously I’d spent one of the happiest hours of my life sitting up there with the patchwork fields of Wales at my feet and a miniature farmer on a Lilliputian horse whistling to his dogs in the amphitheatre below. I’d travelled without a camera then, and this was an effort to recapture the past, but it didn’t work, because the image was sterile – in fact I felt rather like a revisionist, distorting history for my own ends.
Having your older body photographed as you stand awkwardly in revisited places is the closest you’ll ever get, probably, to experiencing multiple lives, as a new image – a palimpsest – overlays an older one in the memory. On the way into Hay I encountered two attractive women taking a small dog for a walk, and felt smitten. Maybe the sunshine was infiltrating my hormones; maybe the change of scenery was sharpening my senses. Maybe I was in the mood for love – or maybe I was just an old fool, I thought to myself as I surveyed a broad reddish weal slashing the countryside from left to right – the new gas pipeline. Traversing South Wales, from Milford Haven to Gloucestershire, this 197-mile tube was due to cost about £700 million when completed. A few men would make a lot of money and the plebs would pay, as usual. Trying not to get upset over the rape of Wales (a full-time occupation these days) I reminded myself that the Amlwch-Stanlow pipeline which went through North Wales in much the same fashion thirty years ago is almost completely anonymous now, in fact few remember it’s still there. Back to the here and now: Italian welders working on the new pipeline were getting £500 a shift, I was told by locals. Rumours abounded of fabulous wages, and the natives were agog as they passed the news from ear to ear.
Down in Hay I popped into a store and chatted to the woman at the till; she was a Welsh-speaker from my own region and I asked her what she was doing among the southren folk. She’d traced her father after more than thirty years’ separation, she said, so she’d settled here. Wondrous news; a new life superimposed on an older one; a picture within a picture. I wanted to hear her story, but she was busy dealing with an infestation of bookworms attending the annual Hay Festival.
On the second day the youth hostel was full of people from the Central London Outdoor Group, who were trying to recreate the capital’s rush hour traffic conditions in the kitchen, as if they were an urban re-enactment society. It was Sunday and the heavens had opened in the night – we had the wettest day of the month loitering outside the windows of our hostel, a squat old farmhouse lodged on a sharp incline. There are otters in the area, apparently, and I considered joining them for a good soak in the nature reserve close by. Instead I onioned myself in a double skin of coats and walked down to Llanthony Priory. Conditions were dramatically different from the previous day: I bobbed through a waterfest extreme enough to suit Noah himself, and my ears were caroused by the splish and splash of a trillion raindrops. The road-tunnel through the dripping trees gleamed with sheets of shape-shifting floodwater, and hawthorn blossom, dashed from the trees, lay all around me like confetti at a mermaid’s wedding. Because this is a region of red sandstone (in the deep past it lay at the delta of a vast river) the water was terracotta red where it stood in puddles. The valley is also a busy equine centre and hoof-prints decorated the ground here and there in red crescents. The ever-present cow parsley plants, weighed down with water, bowed their umbelliferous heads penitently on either side of me. Wet? You know it’s utterly wet when there’s no point sheltering under trees. First stop was the entrancing church at Capel-y-Ffin, a pocket venus with teddy bears on the organ and lovely posies in the windows. Two small headstones in the churchyard were carved by the typographer, artist and pervert Eric Gill.
At Llanthony I joined an American party who ignored me studiously in the ribcage of the ecclesiastic skeleton, then I padded around the drab little church alongside, built on the site of St David’s early cell. What did they live on, those holy men – handouts from the local serfs? No Tesco, no weekly Giro. Still, they didn’t have to hang around waiting for planning permission, or a delivery from Jewsons. There’s a hotel glued incongruously to the side of the priory complex, and the whole place is a sort of Blue Peter cut-and-paste model gone wrong. If you want to learn how the arrival of someone with loads of dosh and big ideas can seriously piss off the locals, read about the Victorian writer Walter Savage Landor’s involvement with this site. Famously temperamental, he is caricatured in Dickens’ Bleak House.
Onwards and downwards I stumped to the fantastical little church at Cwmyoy, bent out of shape by convulsions in the bedrock below – the tower leans drunkenly and ‘no part of it is square or at right angles with any other part’. A seventeenth- century monument to a local man, waiting to be called up to heaven, bears this verse:
Thomas Price he takes his nap in our common mother’s lap waiting to heare the bridegroome say awake my dear and come away.
Charmingly, the words mo/ther, bri/degroome and a/wake are all broken, signifying an age which was less obsessive-compulsive about straight lines, superficial appearances and passing fads.
Just like my own photomontage near Hay Bluff, histories have been superimposed onto each other w
ithin this building. I quote a church pamphlet:
The medieval cross in the centre of the church was discovered in 1871 at the nearby farm. It is thought to be one of the crosses on the Pilgrim Way to St David’s. It was transferred to the Vicarage garden, and eventually in 1935, placed in the Tower inside the church. In 1967 the cross disappeared, but not before a photograph of it was taken. This photograph was shown to the Keeper of the Sculptuary at the British Museum, and the Keeper not only dated it as being 13th century, but also said he had seen the cross in an antique dealer’s shop in London. From there it was recovered. The original thieves were never traced.
From Cwmyoy I laboured over the ridge to the Grwyne Valley to visit the famous church at Partrishow, in a field by a farm. It was too wet to visit St Issui’s famous well because the rain had become passionate; besides, I remembered that Issui was murdered by an ungrateful traveller who had received hospitality in his humble cell, and such stony fables as these can gather much moss on wet green Sundays in Wales.
The church, which has a magnificently carved screen, also has a starkly medieval representation of Time painted on the west wall of the nave – a skeletal figure with a scythe, hourglass and spade, meant to be a macabre reminder to the illiterate peasants that the wages of sin are death. Again, I quote the church pamphlet:
The artists were itinerant painters. Their range of colours was limited. We find a lot of red and ochre. These were earth colours, easily dug up. Black was provided by soot from lamps. James I ordered that all such ‘Popish Devices’ should be white-washed over, and suitable texts painted there instead. At Patricio today, we have a number of such texts, but if you look carefully you can still see traces of these pre-Reformation paintings pushing their way through the white-wash around the texts.