by Lloyd Jones
Tired by now and half soaked, I realised that I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and getting back was likely to be an ordeal. The ridge loomed above me Everest-high and the rain intensified, seething in drainpipes and overpowering the pathways. But fortune smiled on me, as if I had offered prayers and been rewarded (though I am a rank atheist, oddly invested with a great love of churches). I was joined in the chamber by two marriage-related families and we all poked around politely, trying to make room for one another, tinkling money into wall safes and studying ancient artefacts in the gloom. I must have looked forlorn, for mercifully one of them, a Maesteg physiotherapist, offered me a lift back to Cwmyoy, his family cramming into the back of their steamy car so that I could be accommodated. Their children looked at me as if I were a strange antediluvian monster or a coelacanth netted during a storm at sea. But boy was I grateful. I stuck my thumb out at Cwmyoy and the first car which came along took me all the way up the valley to the youth hostel. I outdid the sky in outpourings, in my case a deluge of gratitude.
After I’d peeled off everything soggy I put wedges of cheese in some bread donated by departing people and chewed contentedly, greeting the London lot as they dribbled back to the glimmering kitchen. A sheep and her lamb stared cynically at us through the window, unimpressed by this moving tableau in their upland Tate. Soon I was in a scene from Good Companions, or sheltering in a smoky inn of old as travellers found sanctuary, a safe house secreted in a gauze of wet white mist. One of them had a fresh round face which reminded me of the gilded angels down there in the churches, painted in vegetable dyes by local artisans; the bright naive colours are still optimistic and fresh, but the painters’ formula was lost over 150 years ago. A woman among our company, Jewish and musical, made the magnet in my compass lurch around and the bread was dense in my mouth. Too late, I thought. Too late on a wet day in Wales. If there’s such as thing as regret without melancholy, but with a touch of hiraeth perhaps, I felt it then. Like the walk I had planned along the tops of the Black Mountains that day, it was best left to that part of the brain which deals with what might have been; the mind’s draughtsman, sketching glorious plans for an idle master who never goes beyond the dreaming stage. The older version of me sitting at that table thought of the young man who had been able to contemplate such things. I was a coat of whitewash daubed over him. My desire was merely an old fresco on a church wall, seeping though to the surface many years later.
On the third day I walked down to Hay Festival, in sunshine again. This time I knelt by flowers in a field by the Craswall turn-off and took photographs of spotted orchids with slender green beetles nosing around their nectar cups. My sojourn was drawing to an end and my name was being called out in the classroom again. Society needed to check my credentials: it was time to sign on for my small dole of public recognition. My attempts at self-expression had engendered a strange baby – a book which had little resonance among the people around me (and was therefore a failure, presumably) while winning the approval of competition judges (and was therefore a success, presumably). I did the interviews and played the game, but I was unconvinced by my own patter. I watched the literati come and go, talking of Michelangelo, many in long gabardines and bushwhacker hats; I felt inadequate and micro in this macro setting, this town-sized Petri dish gathering clumps of etymological growths. I watched throngs of people in bookshops and on pavements, within pubs and in large white literary tents, patterns of iron filings grouped around hidden magnets. Words were important, yes I knew that. Probably our last stab at democracy. But their piling up in this place was an artifice and a conjuration; the festival tents were a glossy dental enamel painted on the yellow teeth of literary endeavour: a snowstorm of words come to earth without wonder. There was a sense of over-feasting, of the castle hiding its caried teeth with a genteel hand and sighing; when the belch came it would be described fulsomely, in the chatter of the cover blurbs, extraordinary or vivid, or even worse, the dreaded remarkable achievement.
So I took my smallness away homewards. I hitched a lift to Abergavenny and it was good to walk around the busy streets. Alexander Cordell listened to these people and was inspired. Among them I saw relics of the past, walking as if they were ghosts: rustics with check caps aslant and sticks in their gnarled hands – the farmers of old, a hobbitry of endangered beings, each taking with him, to be burnt, a book of discreet knowledge, the lore of planting and reaping, hedging and husbandry.
In the train, almost alone, travelling in heavy sunshine, I saw the south recede, hedgerow by hedgerow, stream by stream, sheep by sheep. On my map of the Black Mountains I had smoothed down a new transfer tracing my spoor – fresh signs and markings, a gloss on the earlier chart. I would keep that new picture of myself by Hay Bluff to mark the lesson it had taught me in emotional triangulation, and for no other reason. But again and again I would seek to recreate the experience of sitting on the bluff on a summer morning in 2002, with a year of living dangerously spread out to dry below me.
The woman in the Spar, who went south to find her father, will stay with me – as will the Jewish viola player. Their footprints are on my map, moving away from me at the crossroads. But the people I will remember best are nameless, faceless.
One of them is the unknown carver, perhaps Welsh, perhaps Flemish, perhaps Italian according to some sources, who carved his soul on the Irish oak screen at Patricio Church for considerably less than £500 a shift; a craftsman who worked a pattern of wooden flowers of great delicacy, and imprinted on his bresummer beam a dragon, signifying evil, consuming a vine, the emblem of good. And when I consider the figure of Time on the wall, faded but still clearly discernible, I think of the unknown painter in that greatly underrated film, A Month in the Country. Those travelling artisans will forever be unknown, but their anonymity carries a certain power, a voltage which still illuminates a rare and singular lamp, unwired to any mains.
There is another figure I will remember, with golden hair and golden wings, a girdle of gold around her plump waist too. Hovering in mid-air, she blows a golden trumpet but still she manages a lop-sided smile from a rubicund face; her dress billows around her, and her cheeks are flushed with girlish effort. She is a country girl going to heaven; she is a medieval angel painted on a memorial at Cwmyoy Church.
A few days after I wrote these words – a fresh inscription on the walls of my own life – I became aware that the anonymous, long-dead artisans of the Black Mountains were already seeping though my handiwork, just as their murals had re-emerged through the pious scripts in the Church of Merthyr Issui at Patricio. It is their work which will survive, not mine – and that’s just fine with me.
So I will make myself busy again, and move on.
east
I WENT east to the border country, where I saw the biggest box of cornflakes in Wales, possibly the universe.
They could have filmed Aliens in it. An immense hangar full of flaked-out people working for a corny old American corporation – the Kellogg’s factory.
Other industrial units lie all around: as I passed by I couldn’t help wondering how many people actually enjoy working in them. Not many, I suspect. Instead of tricking people into a lifetime’s servitude with baubles and mirrors (the old slavery) the trick nowadays is to get people to labour all day making baubles and mirrors which they then buy back for ten times their value (the new slavery). What do the words freedom and democracy mean in such a context?
As I entered north-east Wales along the Expressway I felt the arteries tighten and clog with dirty lorries (also available in white scrawled on one of them) and stressed-out company men bumper-surfing, scuttling between the mass-produced tin shacks they work in nowadays, their cars badging their status: you’re no-one unless you drive a BMW. All of them trying to look busy in one of capitalism’s eddy pools. And if I sound like William Cobbett repeating his rural rides in t-shirt and trainers, so be it. In my nice bauble-filled flat I’m a beneficiary like everyone else, and I’ll acknowledge the h
ypocrisy. But deep down I know the price is too high, and so do most of us. What happens when people take a wrong turning? They end up on the industrial estate. That’s an urban joke, by the way.
I’m in Wrexham Maelor to meet a man who was born way out west, on Bardsey Island, a place with no factories or pollution, and almost no people either. A place of dreams and flowers, saints and birds of passage – mystical and part mythical.
His name is Bob Williams, and his journey from a mini-paradise on the western seaboard to a landlocked industrial city is a paradigm for the age we live in.
Now, for the first time in man’s complicated history, more people live in urban areas than in the countryside. And look at the consequences.
Bob was the last boy-child to be born on Bardsey, and I’m visiting him at his home in Maes Brenin, Pentre Maelor, on the outskirts of the industrial estate, near Wrexham. We’re only a couple of miles from the confluence of the Clywedog and the meandering Dee, which doodles a slow squiggle – the border with England.
Bob lives on a large and well-designed estate, airy and confident, built for key workers who went there to work in the new factories after the last war.
The name, Maes Brenin, means king’s meadow. And I’m reminded that Bob’s old home, Bardsey, had its own elected kings – complete with ornate crown – from about 1800 onwards. The last, and most famous of them, was Love Pritchard, who died in 1926. Apparently he volunteered himself and all the men of Bardsey for military service in the first world war, but was rejected – at seventy-one he was considered too old. According to legend he was so incensed he declared Bardsey a neutral power and may even have sworn allegiance to the German Kaiser.
But I’ve rushed into the story, and that’s a mistake. I’ve careered along the Expressway and charged willy-nilly into a half-baked critique of modern life. So let me start again, only slowly. That’s the trick: to take a stroll around the garden, sniff the early morning air, wash the dishes, tidy up a bit, have a little read. Let’s slow it all down.
This is how my day starts: with a summer dawn gathering strength on the other side of the multi-coloured curtains in my bedroom. The hues in the fabric embolden slowly, giving a soft stained-glass effect. Then I go back to sleep, until seven or thereabouts. As I get older I’m slowing down, and the waking process is less dynamic. I’m turning into a sloth, after years of springing out of bed, getting the kids ready, making their lunch boxes, getting them ready for life in the rat race. But now I drift into the world on my own stately bashed-about barge. As the world comes into focus I sense an oxygenated freshness and a new sky, after days of summer rain – there’s a cool fresh smack to the airflow gushing in through the windows. The sky hasn’t cleared completely: it’s a milky blue, and what catches my eye immediately is a towering cathedral of cumulus clouds in the west, a fantasy backdrop for trumpeting angels or retributive gods winging earthwards. The cloudbank is a vast candyfloss tumult and it’s awesome. Then I turn my head to look the other way, and amazingly, there’s another one – a twin – out to the east over Rhyl, big and brash, a bouffant hairdo snatched up by the winds and hung over a peg in the sky. I get ready for the day slowly with a bath and a shave, clean shirt, lots of tea, and a bowl of cereal (not Kellogg’s).
I’ve borrowed my ex-partner’s car for the journey, since I’m trying to be eco-friendly and she’s trying to be reasonable.
There’s no point dawdling on the Expressway so I put my foot down and get there quickly, though I get lost for a while in the Borras Hall area; I’m surprised by the leafiness of this lacuna between town and country.
I was welcomed at the door by Bob’s wife Doris – Dot to family and friends.
Bob is nearly blind, and I could sense him checking me out with his other senses as I sat down in their front room and made small talk.
The couple were looking forward to their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and Doris provided a helpful commentary as I began to question Bob about his boyhood on Bardsey. In a conversation embroidered with the shy humour of the old western folk, he revealed that he was brought into the world on a tempestuous night – with his father as midwife. Bardsey wives were normally taken to Aberdaron on the mainland before the birth, but heavy storms kept his mother Jane on the island. A neighbour from Carreg Farm was enlisted to serve as midwife, but the occasion proved too much for her – so Bob’s father, William Hugh, came to the rescue as the storm raged around them and he delivered the child himself. Although he lives on the other side of Wales by now, Bob still feels half-rooted in his old cynefin. To accentuate this duality, he’s known as Gwyndon on the Lly^n peninsula while in Wrexham he’s called Bob.
He was born in 1929 at Nant Farm, one of five children. He remembers playing happily for hours with his siblings. They’d play in the fields or along the shore, collecting firewood or helping their parents with the churning.
One of his chores was to run along to Mrs Murray Williams the schoolteacher, where he’d collect the weather forecast scrawled on a piece of paper after she’d listened to it on the radio – the only one on the island.
We were very happy – it was an ideal place for children because we didn’t know any other sort of life, though it must have been terrible for teenagers, says Bob.
He has few memories of those times. He recalls a pianola at the school, and the skin of a huge snake on the classroom wall. ‘It must have been an anaconda or something because there were no snakes on the island,’ he says. There were no rats either – but there were mice, and they were extra large, he seems to remember.
He recalls saying Bible verses in chapel with the grown-ups towering above him and the minister looming like a giant in the pulpit. There was no established home for the minister – he went from hearth to hearth, sleeping where there was a bed for him.
There were three lighthousemen, says Bob, and they gave all the children a gift at Christmas.
But life on the island was very harsh and took a heavy toll on its occupants, who eked out a living by farming and fishing.
A year or two before the second world war, when Bob was about eight, his family left the island for good, taking all their animals with them on the boat. The shadow of the first world war had continued to loom over them, and with the threat of another war the Bardsey people decided that enough was enough. They nearly all left at that time.
The Williams family rented a farm on the Lly^n peninsula but tragedy struck almost immediately – Bob’s father died in 1938 at the age of forty-two. He’d worked himself to death, says Bob. We were extremely poor after that.
Almost destitute, the family moved around, battling to survive. Two of the boys went off to war, while Bob’s sister Mary was forced to leave school at fourteen to look after her ailing mother.
Bob did his National Service and then moved to Wrexham, where he found work as a labourer. After marrying Doris he settled down in Pentre Maelor by the industrial estate and they have five children. Bob has returned to Bardsey three times: in the 70s with a television company, aboard a helicopter, to make a documentary, and twice since then with his wife, who also loves the place. They hoped to return again to mark their anniversary.
I talk about Bardsey all the time, but you can’t go back into the past, can you, says Bob. There’s something special about the place in January and February, when it’s dark and lonely.
His face breaks into a smile whenever he mentions the island, and he’s requested his ashes to be scattered there.
Migration from the country, mainly to the English cities, has been a dominant theme in recent Welsh history. And there has been a counterflow: in the last ten years a tide of refugees, fleeing English urban conditions, has flooded rural Wales.
Before my time there were four main avenues of escape for those who didn’t want to work the land, or couldn’t: they became teachers, preachers or soldiers – or they emigrated. My own generation was the first to go en masse to the universities and then chase jobs all over the world. The decision to stay o
r to leave was a fundamental rite of passage in young people’s lives, equivalent to circumcision in many early societies. I decided to go. Born on a hill farm in wildest Welsh Wales, I left the land for a medley of reasons. I’m glad I did. Farming has to be in the blood for it to be a happy occupation, and it’s not in mine, not truly. It destroyed my father.
Recently I returned to spend five days on the farm, alone – the first time in forty years I’d been that close to my past, and for so long. I was standing in for my cousin Morus and his wife Gwenda, who were taking a very rare break from their endless workload, with a foreign holiday. For me there was no sense of going back to a biblical paradise – the Garden of Eden merely symbolised the home of early man, when he was nomadic. But his ideal state of existence was rendered impossible by population growths and mass migrations. Too many people on Planet Earth. Today, as Gordon Brown’s government makes plans for another three million homes in Britain, hardly anyone considers other possibilities: proper use of the stock we have, containment of speculators, or an attempt to curb the population. It’s quite simple: humans are bad for the environment. More people equals less nature.
But let’s go back to the biblical past for another parable: Cain and Abel.
Abel was a shepherd who moved around on the landscape: his name signifies breath or vapour in Hebrew, meaning that he was a living, moving, transient being. His brother Cain got his name from kanah, meaning to acquire, own property, and ergo to rule or subjugate. Bruce Chatwin points out that Cain also means metal-smith, and there’s a link in many languages between the discovery of metal and resulting violence or subjugation. The legend of Llyn-y-Fan Fach is our own equivalent.
