‘By making a bath for me by the side of a river, and by putting a roof over the cauldron, and thatching it well and tightly, and bringing a buck [a male goat], and putting it beside the cauldron. Then if I place one foot on the buck’s back, and the other on the edge of the cauldron, whosoever strikes me thus will cause my death.’ ‘Well,’ said she, ‘I thank Heaven that it will be easy to avoid this.’
To cut an ancient story short, a plan is duly hatched and carried out, with Gronw waiting in ambush by the river and casting the Sunday-forged spear at his unguarded love rival. The consequences are not exactly as intended, for Lleu’s own godlike nature is now revealed; when the projectile’s poisoned tip pierces him, he undergoes metamorphosis into an eagle and flies away. Still, the lovers assume they have seen the last of him, ruling over his lands in his absence.
But it is, of course, not the end of things.
The wizard Gwydion relocates the injured raptor, turning him back into a man to undergo a period of recuperation under the care of the region’s finest physicians. After that, Lleu, along with a huge army, marches on his former home. Blodeuwedd flees but is captured by Gwydion, who as punishment transforms her into an owl:
For I will turn thee into a bird; and because of the shame thou hast done unto Lleu Llaw Gyffes, thou shalt never show thy face in the light of day henceforth; and that through fear of all the other birds. For it shall be their nature to attack thee, and to chase thee from wheresoever they may find thee.
In recompense Gronw reluctantly agrees to suffer the same riverside, spear-tinged fate as Lleu. The returning husband allows his rival to hold a large stone in front of his body as the projectile is hurled. However, the shield is no match for the weapon, which pierces straight through the unfortunate Gronw’s back. ‘And thus was Gronw Pebyr slain. And there is still the slab on the bank of the river Cynvael, in Ardudwy, having the hole through it. And therefore is it even now called Llech Gronw.’
Alongside an interest in this ancient tale of lust and revenge from the Mabinogion, in 1960 Garner was eating a meal at his future wife’s house in Cheshire. The food was served on a Victorian dinner service with an unusual petal pattern that, when rotated, resembled owls.‡‡ The author perceived in them the story of Blodeuwedd, the woman made from flowers who is transformed into the cursed bird of the night – and in The Owl Service the plates become a receptacle in which the valley’s menacing force is held until the introduction of the three young protagonists, who provide the catalyst which leads to it once again being unleashed.
In a further coincidence, Garner’s future mother-in-law described to him the circumstances under which she had received the china: her sister had been storing the set in a barn because she thought that the owls they depicted were watching her eat and causing her to have indigestion. Later, during the 1969 filming of The Owl Service’s TV adaptation, there were a number of further coincidences, including a rescued tawny owl that was sheltering in the stables where shooting took place. Garner ascribed these twists of fate to ‘selective perception’, adding: ‘It seemed at times that I was discovering, not writing, a story. It was all there, waiting, and I was like an archaeologist picking away the sand to reveal the bones.’
Red Shift, too, came to Garner as a result of various stories, deep-buried memories and found objects, including the tale of the lost ‘Spanish’ legion who might just have ended up atop a south Cheshire quarry, the Civil War massacre at Barthomley Church, and even ‘Bunty’ – the name given to the axe head by Jan after her fondly remembered budgerigar – which was what Alan’s own childhood pet was called. Most tellingly in its effect on Garner, however, was this:
In 1966, four months after hearing about the Spanish slaves on Mow Cop, I was reading graffiti in the waiting room at Alderley Edge Station. One, done in chalk, was: ‘Janet Heathcoat = Alan Flask. It is true.’ Somebody had added, in silver lipstick, without punctuation or a capital letter: ‘not really now not any more’. And the sky fell on me. The result was the novel Red Shift, six years’ work, finished in 1972.
The final stimulus for The Owl Service came in 1963, when Alan Garner holidayed with his family in southern Snowdonia. They stayed in an isolated, rather grand, seventeenth-century house, Bryn Hall (it was, of course, said to be haunted), just outside Llanymawddwy. The seventy-five-year-old caretaker and gardener, Dafydd Rees, had worked at the hall since 1898, when he was ten, and possessed an intimate knowledge of the local area and its timeworn stories. He became the inspiration for the character Huw Halfbacon – in the book a kind of idiot savant intricately tied up with the doomed, repeated events of the gloomy valley – who offers up enigmatic declarations and is treated with surprising deference by the locals in a way that seems far above his station as a handyman. Huw, it turns out, is an unwitting version of Gwydion, the wizard from the Mabinogion – the meddling trickster whose actions precipitate the tragedy that will unfurl now that the late-teenage Gwyn (Lleu), Alison (Blodeuwedd) and Roger (Gronw) have been brought together, once more, in the valley. ‘Always it is owls, always we are destroyed.’
The afternoon is grey when I arrive in Llanymawddwy. I have come in from the west, across one of the highest passes in Wales, Bwlch Oerddrws – a lonely wind-raked spot that in earlier centuries was notorious bandit country – before the route drops me into pine-clad, almost Scandinavian scenery around Dinas Mawddwy. As soon as I turn north off the main road, following the left bank of the River Dovey, the landscape opens up and takes on a kind of familiarity: I am entering the haunted, insular location which, more than half a century ago, provided the canvas for the book. With one key character, Huw, in situ, and with the perfect setting in which to anchor its events, over the next three springs and autumns, Alan Garner and his young family returned for their holidays to Bryn Hall: the place where the strands of the idea mingled together and took strange, silent flight on the way to becoming The Owl Service.
On the face of things there is little to see in Llanymawddwy. It’s not much more than a hamlet, a scattering of slate-roofed houses that hug the old drovers’ road, looking across to the low, sheep-grazed fields that line the narrow waters of the fast-running Dovey. There’s no shop and no pub, though at one time, when it was a stop-off on a pilgrims’ route, there were seven inns; the contemporary focal point is the simple, plain church. I potter around its graveyard, annoying a barking sheepdog with my presence, hoping to find the last resting place of the giant Llywelyn Fawr o Fawddwy who’s said to be buried beneath its hallowed ground, but no obvious oversized headstone stands out (nor indeed any smaller one). None the less, it’s an attractive, peaceful spot, with the hillside at the back of the churchyard sloping upwards and away to wilder country.
Carrying on, I cross a bridge that marks the edge of the settlement, after which the road starts to rise. The trees become thicker and on my right is the shade-filled entrance track to Bryn Hall. Frustratingly, it’s hard to see anything more than the back wall and sloped roofs of the house, as the building sits below the road in the lee of the hillside. I’m excited, however, to see on the crest of the ridge up to my left the pine copse that plays such an important role in The Owl Service – the spot from which the fateful spear is hurled: ‘He is standing on the bank of the river, see, and the husband is up there on the Bryn with a spear: and he is putting the stone between himself and the spear, and the spear is going right through the stone and him.’
The Stone of Gronw is a real historical object, though it’s not found in this valley, but further to the north, close to Ffestiniog;§§ close to where we stayed on our own family holiday. A trip of which I possess no solid memories, just those contained within the small yellow plastic box – which I have beside me now on the passenger car seat – labelled ‘WALES 78’ in handwriting that’s still achingly familiar despite the passage of time.
Sunlight illuminates the image on the Kodachrome slide I pull from the box, bringing the past out of shadow. A slate-roofed, single-sto
rey cottage somewhere in Snowdonia fills the frame, and a low stone wall angles across the foreground. Behind this stands a small boy, his hands in his pockets. He’s wearing orange shorts, a white T-shirt emblazoned with cartoon zoo animals, rust-brown sandals from Clark’s and a blond pudding-bowl hairstyle. He looks serious. A woman is at the boy’s back, her legs hidden by the wall, her hair cut in an up-to-the-minute, centre-parted feathered bob, with big Jackie Onassis-style sunglasses covering her eyes. She is pretty, with a kind face. The ghost of a smile pulls at the edges of her mouth, which is fitting.
She is my mother; the boy is me.
Despite criticism from some that Garner’s setting of the story’s events didn’t chime with the source material, he knew perfectly well that he was relocating the action to a place better-suited to allowing him to tell his own version. The Owl Service is not a simple rehash of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, but a re-imagining that adds fresh ingredients into its potent mix, including the confusion and immediacy of teenage relationships, class and societal tensions between the holidaying outsiders and the house’s Welsh staff, and the complicated dynamic that exists between parents and children – particularly where second marriages are concerned.
We see, too, a near-perfect example of the distancing that education can bring, in the fraught relationship between Gwyn and his emotionally controlling mother – something that’s also vividly on display between Tom and his parents in the present of Red Shift. Alan Garner was the first member of his family to complete a formal secondary education, getting a scholarship to the prestigious Manchester Grammar. But what should have been a triumph had the unfortunate consequence of closing him off from those dear to him – a moment movingly captured in his memoir when the mother of one of his friends says, after he has won his scholarship, that he won’t want to speak to them any more: ‘I didn’t understand. I felt something go and not come back.’
It would be good to be able to see more of the place that had such a bearing on the story. But Bryn Hall is a private home and I have the distinct sense that its occupants wouldn’t appreciate unsolicited callers. The building was meant to feature as the key location in Granada Television’s version of The Owl Service, adapted by Garner (who has a minor non-speaking cameo in the drama as a tall local) into eight twenty-four-minute episodes. Shortly before production began, however, the owners refused permission to film. The series producer and director Peter Plummer, who had visited the hall while Garner was writing the book, described it as, ‘A house among dark trees, a house without electricity, but a house with more electricity than most people found comfortable.’ A suitable last ditch stand-in was procured on the Wirral and used for the interiors, though many of the outdoor scenes were shot in the valley (and nearby Dinas Mawddwy) that I passed through on my way here.
The series does a great job of capturing the book’s atmosphere – particularly in its striking title sequence, which assaults the viewer with the jagged silhouette of the fir trees up on the Bryn, accompanied by the discordant sounds of a motorbike, an emptying bath, and the scrape of claws, all set against lilting harp music. Although The Owl Service was shot in colour, when it was first shown (at the very end of 1969, running into February 1970) it was transmitted in black and white due to a union disagreement; the colour version wasn’t aired until the summer of 1978. It has an art-house feel, with strong production values and performances from its cast – and to my mind it dates well. Like so much television of the period, it seems surprisingly adult in its content for a Sunday tea-time children’s drama – if anything the sexual tension that simmers between the three main characters is more heightened here than in the book.¶¶
Much as I enjoyed the adaptation, for me it can’t compete with the novel, though perhaps, as is often the case, if I’d seen it before I read the print version the opposite would be true. What really strikes me when reading The Owl Service again is how it snaps along. A great deal of the book, like Red Shift, is made up of dialogue: talon-sharp exchanges between the sympathetic, working-class Gwyn and the harder-to-like Roger and Alison. Yet where we do have passages of description, they are succinct and poetic. The ending is clever, too, in the way our previous sympathies are brought into question. All the teenagers feel real, quite a feat given that they represent figures from a mythic folk tale. Certainly, by this point in his writing career – more than a decade in – Garner had learned to capture believable, rounded characters on the page. Figures far removed from the flatness of Colin and Susan in the Alderley Edge novels: not that their deficiencies were something I noticed as a boy, because the atmosphere of the setting – the half-real, half-imagined world the siblings were sucked into – was, and remains, the thing that beguiled me about those first two books. Here, though, in The Owl Service, that authentic sense of place comes together with memorable characters in an alignment as perfect and cryptic as the flower-owl plate design.
I’m loath to leave this curious valley. An afternoon seems inadequate even to begin to become acquainted with its bewitching scenery, its brooding secrets. When finally I go, I head out on the old pilgrims’ route, past sedge-filled rough pasture streaked in shadow by scattered ancient oaks, turning off at the steep pass of Bwlch y Groes – where at the end of the TV adaptation Gwyn’s mother abandons him. A moorland track takes me alongside the waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the half-submerged willows that rise from the shallows of its north-eastern corner like the trees in Algernon Blackwood’s story. I keep expecting some hidden force, like that in The Owl Service, to turn me back towards Llanymawddwy. But nothing comes.
So I beat on, against the encroaching darkness.
Past events reverberated in my own family too. Nine months after Dad, you followed. Out-of-season sunflowers travelled beside you on the slow drive and, for a time, until they began to fall apart in the February dampness, lay on the mess of earth that covered the space the two of you shared.
That you still share.
‘What’s the point?’ you asked your doctor, a sympathetic man younger than I am now, as he visited you in the emptiness of the house after Dad died. It wasn’t a general question about the nature of existence – though it may as well have been – but a reaction to your own updated prognosis: he’d just told you, and this would not have come as a surprise, that your cancer was unremitting. That it could not be cured.
‘But there are ways of fighting a battle, Lesley,’ he said, which I think was meant to give you hope that the inevitable could be postponed. That it could be taken on nobly, with honour. And you tried, you really did, but it’s hard when your body is breaking down: when you’ve lost the sight of an eye, when to walk more than a few steps makes you breathless and debilitated, when the epileptic fits that offer you no warning – a condition shared by Thomas Rowley in Red Shift – become increasingly frequent and terrifying.
But you carried on as best you could. Because what else is there?
Lying on your bed, you and I would enjoy films together on the tiny portable TV. And the three of us – you, Chris and me – tried to celebrate my eighteenth birthday, silently pretending the empty chair at the restaurant table didn’t remind us about the fourth not present. Still we went together on drives along Our Bank, to look for owls.
Because always you wanted owls.
And we were lucky, because there were so many near where we lived – as least the way I remember things. We saw them often, too, as they ghosted those flat fields.
Towards the end, after Chris and I could no longer look after you at home, you did not have to become a pilgrim in Boston but were given your own quiet room in the skeleton-crewed Victorian hospital just up the road from my school; two kindly ambulance men carried you down our stairs in a wheelchair on the evening you left the house for the last time. I snuck across to see you in the few weeks that followed when I had free periods, though still I didn’t tell any of my friends, any of my teachers, about where it was I kept disappearing to. About w
here you were.
So, when history’s repetition reached its inevitable end point and you were no longer speaking, when we were no longer sure if you even knew we were there, at least you looked at ease. Hardly anything had changed in your outward appearance those past nine months – you weren’t thin, or pale, or pained. We were lucky, I suppose. Because it wasn’t like it had been with Dad and we were spared the agony of watching you erode before us. Only now, your breathing was metronomic, with a high-pitched, harrowing wheeze.
You’d fallen into a fairy-tale slumber from which you would never awaken – not even if Chris and I were in peril. Not even if we desperately needed you to come to our aid.
Yet, however hard I try, I cannot remember if, at that final moment – when you were no longer owls, but flowers – my brother and I were beside you.
Not really now not any more.
* In silent contrast to Alan Garner’s cousin Eric, I hear no bagpipes sounding from the space under my feet; in 1941, seven-year-old Eric, along with a friend, claimed to make out strange music that emanated from and moved beneath Stormy Point – a story not dissimilar to one I’d heard in Edinburgh about an unfortunate ghost boy who plays the pipes in a tunnel-bound limbo below the castle and the Royal Mile.
† The website doesn’t mention whether this should be carried out in a clockwise or a widdershins direction, though I suspect the first option might be safer in terms of what might result …
‡ A shadow land accessed from our own flesh and blood one – in its case, via the slum clearances of post-war Manchester – featured in Garner’s next novel for children, Elidor (1965).
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