Cain the city dweller killed his brother, a countryman, out of envy for his freedom and his life amid beauty.
But it’s too simplistic to boil it all down to a country mouse/town mouse bedtime story. As I lugged a dead and smelly sheep into the back of my cousin’s Land Rover in the pouring rain, I realised that my flight to town and desk had been an escape from all this shit and mud too. It’s all too easy to file the past under Golden Age: as Raymond Williams demonstrated, humans have been rose-tinting their temps perdu since the father of history, Herodotus, started writing it all down in 450 BC.
As I stood in a pair of borrowed green Wellingtons, examining an ooze of cold blood from the sheep’s behind, I remembered something else from my childhood: that disease and death stalk the farmer constantly. Nature wasn’t created in the image of man’s compassion, someone once said. Too bloody right. So I chose the other sort of Nature, the one I could visit on sunny days – a more agreeable sort of nature, dressed in pretty flowers, more appealing to aesthetic sensibilities.
Looking at the pitiless landscape of my youth, from the comfort of the Land Rover, I felt like a hermit crab who’d wandered back into a previously occupied shell. But another thing became apparent. For although I felt no rapport with these fields and hedges, which I knew so well, I also realised that all my internal maps were configured to match the patterns of this territory, its land and water: and if indeed I had sung the world into existence all those years ago I had taken my songlines with me into adult life – and they were better than any OS map in existence. Family pictures show a wild boy, dirty and unkempt, with his own shotguns at the age of ten, tilling the land as a boy-child, milking cows before school, going to lessons with sheep’s afterbirth still on his boots. His internal chart plotted the many lives which came into existence around him and then disappeared just as quickly under the land’s contours.
And finally I saw – with a lovely clarity – a truth which had evaded me because I hadn’t looked in the right places. The roles of town and country dwellers have been reversed. My cousin and his wife were drifting down the Danube towards Beethoven’s birthplace (he’s a farmer with classical tastes), having snatched a few days’ respite from the never-ending call of the land, 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day, but even while they tried to relax, on this rarer-than-hen’s-teeth holiday, they’d be worrying about events at home. I realised that the modern pastoralist is more tied and trussed than ever; I realised that today’s bucolic lifestyle is more confined than the nomadic shepherd of yesteryear could ever have imagined. Every day is a workday. Almost every animal is a dependent child. A day a week is given over to documentation and form-filling; our grandparents would be shocked and enraged. At the same time, the city dweller is freer than ever; his life is an exercise in liberty and leisure, no matter how much he moans. He can throw a sickie; the farmer never can. Society has become so fluid that the urbanite is now the true nomad; almost all roots have been torn from the ground – townspeople roam the land, far and wide, looking for peace, or property bargains, or a better lifestyle. They fly abroad at the drop of a hat. Yes indeed, the tables have been turned. As a Caribou Eskimo told a European traveller: What can we do? We were born with the Great Unrest. Our father taught us that life is one long journey on which only the unfit are left behind.
I left the farm on a wet Saturday morning, and eventually boarded a bus in Llanddulas. It was full of dreary people talking urban pidgin and oozing Big Brother incontinence. Am I being snobbish? Fascist? Reactionary? Yes, perhaps you’re right. But I’m also trying to be truthful… the fields of Llanddulas, where once I ploughed, have disappeared under ugly little estates filled with a generation which has no concept of the people or the wildlife they’ve supplanted. What I see is the end of a certain way of life and the end of the vernacular tradition, throughout Britain. For what? For the nothingness of modern urban existence? I could be wrong, and what does it matter anyway, because the rural voice is weakening all the time. The Welsh hills have bred hordes of fierce little autodidacts like me – socialistic, anarchistic, opinionated, consumed with egalitarian principles, melancholic, too sure of their home-grown beliefs. The rural communal memory, from which I draw part of my world picture, will fade eventually. It was rich and multifarious – a hoard of expertise and craftsmanship, hedged around with fable and lore. But it’s already a receding memory. My own memory console blew a fuse some time ago. In a poem called Access, written a long time in the past, I looked at a faded Kodak Brownie picture of myself on the farmyard of my youth and addressed myself thus:
Like a dungfly
You squat in sepia on a handful of shit
Slung on a mountain – your birthplace,
Your midden on vertical slurry,
Your winter palace,
Your cowpat farm in ossified dung.
Pot-bellied snotboy
Smeared with my history,
You cannot destroy all my records:
I know of snowswirls in your bed,
The dogs you beat and wild strawberries
In your filthy childhood Wellingtons.
I have memories
As thin as wool snagged on scrubland gorse;
A deep dell, the little Amazon
Where your father,
Sent mad by mud,
Hid his dead whisky bottles, their insides
Fermenting a new culture:
His life in miniature within the glass –
Emerald moss, delicate and fated
Floating on slime, the musky smell of adult failure.
You are too young to keep my files:
Forty years is too long to sequester
Those secrets in your eyes.
Why deny me access,
Does it matter to you
Which trees I climbed,
Which nests I robbed
In the vertiginous years
Between you and me?
Yes, the past is a different country. But what country is this?
west
I TRAVELLED to the west in search of a tiny country, a nation-state lying off the coast of Wales and I found it, though it bears no resemblance to the island so fabulously described by countless travellers. Like Venice of old it once had a king or doge. Like Venice it was a centre for holy crusaders, and like Venice it had an ambivalent liaison with ships. Forever reliant on them for essential goods, the islanders also feared what their holds might contain: sometimes rapid change, sometimes pirates too.
Many people have identified a timeless air of mystery on this island, which like the Venetian repubblica marinara was a repository for holy relics. And since the words quarantine and ghetto were coined in the Italian city state, I was struck immediately by a similarity between the two places: a lonely beauty, a seclusion from the rest of the world, and an apartness. They even share the same outline in the sea.
We entered the rocky harbour shortly after noon on a bright May morning. I was ready for magic and mystery, as promised in so many books and personal accounts, so when I heard eerie sounds as we landed I thought they were the cries of the water monster mamba mutu – a fish-tailed human which raids villages and dines on the blood and brains of everyone it catches. But the grunts and groans came from a colony of very fat seals, about two dozen of them, sunbathing on nearby rocks.
I can hear you say Ahhh, there’s lovely.
But they looked like a bunch of football hooligans on a World Cup bender – and they quickly dispelled any fairytale notions I had in my head. They sounded drunk and boorish; I wouldn’t have been surprised if all of them had been clutching a can of lager and generally swearing, belching, farting and scratching their huge beer bellies. Seals behaving badly. When I hear young male seals having a pop at each other while lounging around I tend to think of Millwall or Cardiff City supporters, rounded up after a match and waiting for the Black Maria. Sentenced to a bit of mild corrective therapy, they’re sent on an outward bound course at Aberdyfi, where one fateful day th
ey’re handed wetsuits and taken down to the shore for a spot of snorkelling. Unaccountably, they take to the briny like ducks to water and head off to sea, finding homes along the Welsh shoreline. Under those wetsuits I know they have smelly beer-stained football shirts, and the weird grunts they make are football chants horribly slurred after twenty cans of Special Brew. They’re shifty and vulgar and they treat everyone like a referee. Or they’re overweight divas with throat infections, never letting anyone forget they’re ill by emitting a constant recitative of operatic moans and groans. At other times they remind me of blown-out lorry tyres abandoned on motorway verges. When they float in the creeks they always look inland, as if they were spies.
I saw a party of people arriving by boat and they passed those seals without seeing them. You could tell the seals were miffed. I could hear them hurling insults. The visitors were supposed to throw flowers at them and clap ecstatically as if they were at Glyndebourne, but they went straight to a little beach and loafed around themselves, as if they were method actors learning how to imitate seals for a Pingu voiceover.
Anyway, after that encounter with the seals I saw the island as an island and not as a grandiose chunk of mythology rearing out of the sea. Next stop was the lighthouse, a large complex posing as a whitewashed hacienda somewhere in Spain with a tower stuck in the corner. Here’s an interesting fact about the modern lighthouse: it can never be allowed to rest. So the generators throb away day and night, and that poor light inside the tower goes round and round 24/7. Why? Because if it stopped rotating it might come to rest on a house or a sleeping baby or even worse, a sleeping sheep – and scorch it to a frizzle. I quite like the notion. Much more interesting than roulette: you could bet on where the beam finally settled and land a small fortune if a cat went up in flames. Apparently the lighthousemen of old used to draw curtains around the reflectors by day to prevent such carnage. Of course, there aren’t any men up there now so the generators chunter away all day long, wasting vast amounts of fuel. A parable for the age, I hear you say. Indeed. Apparently scientists are trying to develop solar-powered lighthouses but things aren’t going smoothly. There’s an air of despondency and abandonment about this complex because the non-essential buildings have been allowed to decline, and one of the houses I entered looked as if it had just been ransacked by Vikings. A page three girl pouted and thrust her dusty bosom at me from an old copy of the Sun in the corner. The whole place is a photographer’s paradise. Built in 1821 – and still the tallest square lighthouse in Britain – its completion marked the first major exodus to the mainland.
Wherever there are humans you’ll find politics, scrap metal and myths. The island has all three. The boatmen who ferry visitors to and fro are at odds with each other: there’s an English camp and a Welsh camp. Historians tussle over the true facts; one says this, one says that. And the spats go on...
Ornithologists, who flock to the place in migratory swarms which quaintly reflect the movements of the birds themselves, generally look up to birds and down on other people. They’ve replaced the druidic cast of old, believing that a little esoteric knowledge gives them special powers. That’s my general impression of twitchers the world over. The bird people who visit this island are as pleasant as you’ll find anywhere, but I’m not sure about all that bird-netting gear lurking in corners everywhere. Are a few statistics worth the trauma felt by a little bird which has flown halfway round the world and desperately needs a nap?
Yes, the island is a tiny political state: an offshore Vatican and a microcosm of the world, as William Golding might have warned me. They knew my business; they knew why I was there. They have passwords, such as look out for the icterine warbler. And throughout my visit Mr Seal the Spy kept a baleful eye on my every movement.
Two mysterious islands are marked on old maps of Britain: insula avium and insula arietum. One was an island of birds which held a fayre tree, full of bowes, and on every bow sate a fayre birde, and they sate so thycke on the tree that unnethe only lefe of the tree myght be seen. The second island was the ilonde of shepe, where every shepe was as grete as an ox and where there was never colde either but ever sommer.
The island I went to is a marriage of these two places: I am talking, of course, about Bardsey off the Lly^n peninsula. Or to use its much sweeter Welsh name, Enlli.
I went on the back of a giant pondhopper – a twin-hulled boat which scuttled across the famously dangerous sound with alacrity. Bright yellow, it carries the colours of the Evans family, who spend half their year on the island and half on the mainland.
Ernest, a fisherman and boat builder, can trace his Enlli roots to 1770 and was the last child to be taught at the one-room school; his wife, Yorkshire-born teacher Christine is a noted poet, and their son Colin has followed in his father’s footsteps while also dabbling in a whole range of other activities; in the tradition of the Welsh farmer-fisherman he can turn his hand to just about anything.
Chatting with Christine in her wonderfully peaceful home on the island, and heading for seal-size fatness myself thanks to her delicious fruitcake, I revealed that I’d been compelled – most unusually for me – to compile a list after a few hours on the island. She laughed. It was quite common, she said. Many people felt the same urge. I suppose it’s because the island is smallish – about 440 acres – and almost everything can be quantified. So here’s my own little list...
Three dogs: I saw only one, and he was sleeping in the sun. Bardsey had three ‘kings’ between about 1800-1926, the most famous being Love Pritchard, and the crown is still kept at the Liverpool Maritime Museum. Here’s how one of them perished, as related in the Caernarvon Herald of April 17, 1841:
Having some business to transact at Pwllheli, John Williams, ‘Master of the Bardsey Light Tender’ and ‘King of Bardsey’, instructed his servant that morning between five and six o’clock to get a small boat ready, with a sprit sail, for the purpose of crossing to Aberdaron. But after the two men had gone some distance John Williams landed the servant on the island, saying that he could manage the boat very well alone. The servant went home but he glanced back and saw that the boat had capsized, John Williams struggling in the water. The servant dashed to get help and another boat was launched immediately and manned. The ebb-tide had already drawn John Williams a long way out to sea, his only support being two small oars, which he had managed to get under his arms. When taken into the rescue boat he was said to have been much exhausted. He spoke but a few words and expired. He was about forty-two years of age and his wife had given birth to a child the Sunday evening prior to this accident which made her a widow.
Apparently every dog belonging to successive kings was called Nol. Nice name for a dog, don’t you think?
Twenty thousand saints: Not a sign of them, but I saw a red tractor harrowing a field and sending a curtain of dust out to sea... I couldn’t help but wonder if that drifting soil contained the remains of at least some of the saints. Their ashes were being scattered at sea, in a way: not quite the ending they expected.
Three Muscovy ducks: Which showed their arses to me whenever we met.
Countless rabbit holes: But no rabbits, which were wiped out by disease. Some of the holes are now used as second homes by the island’s A-list celebrity bird, the peculiar Manx Shearwater, which does a decent David Blaine impression and goes underground for a period during parenthood. Like the seal it emits a spine-tingling sound, a ghastly strangulated cry – Enlli’s a good place for that sort of thing.
Fourteen caves: Including one for visiting robbers (Ogof y Lladron). My favourite was Ogof Gwr, named after an unhappily married man who spent a lot of time in hiding. Did some of these caves serve as boltholes for the religious community in times of trouble? Where else would they hide?
Lots of houses: A throng of them, at least eleven, but only one of them an original Welsh croft – the rest were transformed into grandiose town houses by Lord Newborough’s men. Absolutely hideous and completely out of place. Their complet
ion marked another major exodus from the island: some say that the locals never got used to their swanky new palaces, others say that the promise of big money and bright lights lured many away to the mainland.
Three hundred and fifty types of lichen: The clean air fosters a plethora of wildlife. I saw a splendid colony of yellow flag iris, and ragged robin, and blue carpets of spring squill everywhere.
More litter than you’d expect: Quite a lot of it on the shore. But no shipwrecked vessels, though many have been sundered on the rocks. Tomos Jones, who lived on the island for many decades, recounted some of his memories in a book written by Jennie Jones. Tomos recalled one stormy night when a barrel of brandy was thrown up on the shore after a ship foundered. After rushing up to it and tapping it, the men realised they had no receptacle to drink its contents; they wore wooden footwear in those days, so one of them removed a clog and they drank from that. Nowadays, Bardsey’s human waste is recycled in earth privies. I came across only one conventional toilet, in the lighthouse complex – and you’re not supposed to put any loo paper down the pan. There’s a bucket for it. A small amount of household waste is burned and the rest is taken back to the mainland for recycling at Cwrt Farm. Am I being too prosaic for you? Should I be twittering on about Arthur’s last resting place or Merlin’s magical kingdom? Sorry...
A few generators: Don’t expect eternal peace and quiet on the island. When night falls there’s a good chance you’ll hear a generator churning the silence to shreds. The lights flicker when power is supplied in this way, giving the impression that the house you’re sitting in is a ship at sea.
Not many lobsters in the pots: May is a bad month for lobster fishermen. There’s a tradition that lobsters go into hiding when the young bracken is emerging from the ground in green swans’ necks.