by Norman Lewis
Life at St Catherine’s, as I had suspected, turned out to be a game of chance, offering mixtures of mystery, frustration and adventure. There were times when I felt halfway on the road back to early man with none of the tools he had been able to make for himself to tackle the problems of his day. I was unable at first to discover how the gas system operated and caused an explosion. This left me deaf for a few seconds, after which I gave up and fetched an expert who came grudgingly from the town to demonstrate the working of the battery of gas cylinders and their related equipment kept at the bottom of a dark cellar.
On the first night I slept in a bed in one of the town’s pubs, and next morning Eiluned Price and her eighteen-year-old daughter Rose of Sharon arrived at the fort. I heard an unidentified sound I first ascribed to the soughing of the wind through the immense keyhole of the baronial doors and went out to find my new housekeeper and her daughter in full flight of the well-known hymn Let Us With a Cheerful Mind (praise the Lord for he is kind), sung in this case in Welsh in robust contralto voices. This at an end, Mrs Price explained that the hymn was their standard preliminary to any job they took on. A kind of prophylactic, as she explained beamingly, against the power of evil which was everywhere to be encountered. Both ladies were dressed in brightly flowered dresses worn with short, religious capes in the style of the Salvation Army, but after the initial burst of religiosity the capes came off and the pair got down to work with such vigour that by the end of a hard-slogging day, most of the grime of five years had been expunged. Rose of Sharon, despatched to the town for essential provisions, returned with blood sausage and unleavened bread specially made by one of the bakers for the sect. Mrs Price hoped that it would be the first of many meals she prepared for me. I was relieved to learn that her sect, the Beth Miriams, followed biblical dietetic rules and the Welsh standby, over-salted bacon, was out.
Rock-climbing, the announced reason for my presence in Wales, was not to be avoided, but being a bad performer at sports of all kinds, I was convinced that no good would come of it, and this proved to be the case. Westward of Tenby, the road through Solva to St David’s frequently passes close to the edge of the cliffs, offering seascape views unchanged since pre-history. On my first exploratory day I tried an unambitious preliminary climb and found myself in an uncontrollable slide among shale which brought me within yards of a hundred-foot drop. From this dangerous amateurism I took refuge in long and hopefully invigorating walks and bird-watching. This, in an area devoid of the human presence, was extraordinary, with peregrines to be seen at their nesting-sites on cliff ledges, and on one occasion a parliament of ravens, as described in the bird books, with fifty of these excessively rare birds gathered to perform some mysterious social ritual in a farmer’s field.
In a way the fort was a good place to work in. Weather in Pembrokeshire was a little worse than in Southern England. The massive stone pile on its rock top seemed to draw on itself the full bluster and rage of storms, and for days on end the town, so close when the sun came out, disappeared behind sheets of rain. Bad weather freed me from the obligation to go ashore and take long, lonely, beneficial walks, and I would settle to work in the central redoubt of the banqueting hall. Here I escaped the worst of the gale’s shindy, although the living rooms reverberated and clanked endlessly and the wind whimpered through keyholes and round the edges of loose-fitting panes of glass. On these days of strict confinement, I plunged deeply into the books and documents I had brought back from Guatemala and planned the structure of my book on pre-Colombian culture although with every month that passed its completion date became more problematical and remote. Almost by way of light relief I began my first novel, based on my war-time experiences in Algeria. It was now nearly two years since peace had been declared, and I wanted to write about the war while it was still fresh in my memory.
In the meanwhile the loneliness and sense of isolation lying in wait in such a place was kept at bay by the presence of the two Prices, scrubbing woodwork, polishing windows or over-cooking off-the-ration scrag-end of neck to the accompaniment of resounding and triumphant songs of praise.
‘Mr Lewis, bach, please say if we are disturbing you with our singing.’
‘You never do that, Mrs Price. I enjoy it.’
‘Very kind of you to say that. Pity, but there was only kidney in the butcher’s shop today.’
‘Then we’ll have to make do with it, Mrs Price.’
‘With all the fish in the sea funny it is we can’t get fresh fish. Are you a fisherman, Mr Lewis, bach?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not, but I’ll have a go.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll bring a line and some bait and you shall try.’
‘I certainly will.’
She was going then stopped. ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern,’ she said. ‘We could sing them in English for your benefit. Better it would be if you understood the words.’
‘Not at all, Mrs Price. They sound splendid in Welsh. Quite like Latin.’
‘Well, that is a compliment indeed. Something we much appreciate. Mr Lewis, bach …’
‘Yes, Mrs Price.’
‘You heard the rumour that the last occupant but one hanged himself from the hook under which you are now sitting?’
‘I’ve heard it, but I’ve paid it no attention.’
‘I am sorry but I have reason to believe it is true.’
‘In that case I’ll get someone to take the hook down, Mrs Price.’
Next day Mrs Price arrived with a line and a can full of bait and I fished with it in turbulent seas but caught nothing.
‘You tried,’ Mrs Price said, ‘which is the best any of us can do, but Almighty God hasn’t given you the knack. I see you here working hard. You can’t be good at everything.’
They were to spend the afternoon at a funeral at which Mrs Price would officiate and spent much of the morning practising passionate laments. I listened to Mrs Price’s flow of the noble oratory of the funeral service.
‘Mr Lewis, bach, do you really believe that your redeemer liveth?’
‘It’s something many people would like to believe, Mrs Price.’
I missed them, but by way of compensation the sun came out while they were away. The herring gulls resumed their joyful hysteria overhead, and Tenby with its soft, rain-washed colours came layer by layer into focus through the sheaves of mist.
I watched the streets of the town through my binoculars. After the cold rectangles of Carmarthen, the featureless and identical terraced houses and the blunt facades of chapels, Tenby seemed frivolous. This was the capital of an English enclave that had been named Little England Beyond Wales. According to a body of opinion, the English had moved in and taken it over because they saw that it had the makings of the only pleasant seaside resort reasonably accessible to the coalfields and iron foundries of South Wales, where they dominated the scene. When I was in Carmarthen as a child the choice of the summer holiday lay between Llanstephan, which although exceedingly romantic in appearance was small and somewhat dreary, and Tenby, a real town and a metropolis of pleasure. There was nothing here of the Wales of the stubborn, silent whitewashed villages. To Tenby the English had brought colour and fantasy, with fanciful little buildings that could have been French or even pseudo-oriental stuck into odd corners to drive out the last of the Celtic monotony.
There was no money anywhere else in South-west Wales but the English spenders had brought money here, and walking in the streets you could pick them out not only by their well-cut clothes, but by their size. As the Western Mail had noted, the people of English stock who had come to live in Pembrokeshire were taller, on average, by 1½ inches than the Welsh natives of the country. Tenby had dress shops, pubs that admitted ladies to the saloon bars, a single prostitute lurking near the bus station on Saturday nights, and a public urinal with a fine cast-iron screen. It also had an antique shop and in this I was offered a cannon ball which inspired me to take a closer look at the history of St Catherine’s Fort, largely to be disco
vered from old newspaper cuttings. It was clearly a folly of the most expensive kind, built in the fifties of the last century when, improbably enough, the government of the day believed that they had reason to fear a sudden attack by the French and ordered the erection of this and three other such forts at vulnerable points along the Pembrokeshire coast. There could hardly have been any area in the south of the British Isles, even supposing the French had suddenly fallen victims to expansionist madness, where an invasion could have been more pointless. Nevertheless the project was carried out at huge cost, and the forts when complete were advertised as the culmination in defensive military architecture, with a sea-facing curtain wall sixteen feet thick through the embrasures of which twenty-five guns of the largest calibre to that date pointed in the direction of the enemy that never appeared. Shortly after completion a ship attempting to navigate between the rock and the shore carried away the bridge joining St Catherine’s to the land. This brought about long confinement of the garrison to the rock, inducing in the end a form of claustrophobia so acute that the fort’s batteries bombarded the town. There is no record of the outcome of this mutiny, unique in British history. At the time of my stay cannon balls were still being recovered from the gardens of houses fronting the sea.
A week or so later I went to collect my letters from the post-office, where I was received by a small Welsh lady, with an outburst of melodious astonishment. ‘The Fort is it? Quite a collection of them we have, some of them dating back for donkey’s years.’ The letters were those abandoned by the solicitor. There was one waiting for me from Singapore from a Chinese, Loke Wan Tho. I had met him in unusual circumstances outside a pub in Epping Forest where I had stopped to allow my Alfa Romeo racing car to cool down. The car had won a Le Mans race, and I had had the good fortune to acquire it for an absurdly low price in Italy. It attracted Loke’s attention and he pulled up alongside. He was driving a new Mercedes, of which only two had been made, and was accompanied by a beautiful young English girl whose main claim to distinction was her possession, as I later learned, of a hundred or possibly two hundred pairs of shoes. Loke took a fancy to the Alfa and I was dazzled by the Merc, which was the most astonishing car I had ever seen. We each took the other’s car for a short spin, and then, as though it was the most ordinary of propositions, Loke suggested a swap. ‘You mean here and now? On the spot?’ I asked, wondering if this could be some oriental form of joke. ‘Certainly,’ Loke said. ‘You can have my car, and I’ll take over yours. Our people can fix up all the legal details.’ If it had been possible to put a price on the Mercedes I would have put it at three times that of the somewhat battered Alfa. I had no way of knowing that what was proposed was to a very rich man no more than a trivial whim. For the first time I was encountering great wealth, which was so unfamiliar that it seemed almost incomprehensible. I explained to him that it was not a matter of relative values but that I had half committed myself to a project by which the Alfa was to be converted for racing at Brooklands. The explanation satisfied him. He was at that time an undergraduate at Cambridge and he gave me an address in the town in case I should change my mind.
This I did, for the Alfa proved unsuitable for conversion, and a letter went off to Loke to enquire if he were still interested. Several months passed before a reply came. He had been away touring in Germany and a photograph enclosed with the letter showed the wreck of the admired car. It had been hit by a train at an unguarded crossing and the impact sliced away the rear wheels. Loke had taken me seriously, for the car was now under repair in Frankfurt. There it would naturally be completely repaired and he asked, ‘Any particular colour you prefer?’
Years were to pass before we were in contact again, for the Munich crisis was upon us, changing both our worlds. Loke, obliged to drop everything, was called back to Singapore. Escaping the Japanese invasion, he was on the New Moller when it was sunk in an air attack, and was rescued from the water with severe burns and temporary loss of sight. Now, for the first time, he was back in England, and was pleasurably astonished to learn that I was rock-climbing in Pembrokeshire, a famous venue for bird-watchers, of which he was one. He said he would like to come to see me, and I invited him down.
For all its zany charm and modest comforts, Tenby was not in fact bird-watching country. This was to be practised at its best some thirty or so miles along the coast, further to the west, and after a quick reconnaissance I found a tiny, semi-derelict cottage in the village of Little Haven which I rented for the period of Loke’s proposed stay. The cottage, which would have suited me quite well had I known of its existence in the first place, was primitive indeed, possessing neither electric light, running water nor sanitary arrangements of any kind.
Thirty yards back from the high tide mark lay the frontier of the twentieth century, but down by the shore it was Britain before the Romans waded ashore. Mysteriously, this was one of the Pembrokeshire ‘English’ villages with an inhabitant even in possession of a double-barrelled name. But whatever the real or assumed family trees Newhaven was a scruffy place, for waste of all kinds that the villagers were too lazy to bury was tipped along the shore in the certain knowledge that apart from tin cans it would be consumed by enormous and confident rats. The contents of latrines were disposed of more discreetly at night, being emptied into the sea at a reasonable distance from the beach when the tide had turned. Some illegal slaughtering went on in times of continuing food shortages and rationing, and small piles of tripes left after sundown on the shore were neatly removed by a pair of foxes tripping delicately over the rocks at dawn.
Loke arrived brimming with enthusiasm and, apart from areas of glistening pink skin round the eyes, little changed in his appearance. The Little Haven scene was one into which he plunged with relish after a brief flicker of surprise at the sight of the house-rat ascending the stepladder to the bedrooms. The fact that the villagers appeared not to notice the presence almost everywhere of the rats seemed to him evidence of a latent Buddhism in the Welsh character. The reverse of the primitive coin displayed summer life by the sea in its most brilliant guise: seals in every cove, a stream with an otter at the back of the hill, and a bluster of wax-white gulls always in the sky. None of the boats from Milford Haven bothered to come here to fish and such, in season, was the largesse of the sea that there were mornings when villagers who could put out of mind what the night tides carried away, brought buckets to the water’s edge to scoop up swirling masses of whitebait trapped in the shallows.
In this scene Loke was in his element. At the time of our first meeting, he had been on his way to photograph birds, and now bird photography had become the principal interest in Loke’s life. With all the ravens and peregrines, and even the rumour of a Montagu’s harrier breeding somewhere in the vicinity, it came as a surprise to find Loke occupied with his first love, the common wren, to be seen hunting its microscopic prey just out of reach of the spume. Ensconced in brambles and bracken he trained his twenty-inch telephoto lens on a one-and-a-half inch bird and there were soft exclamations of triumph when, perhaps once in an hour, he got the shot for which such weighty and sensitive apparatus had been brought huge distances to this spot.
Three island sub-species of troglodytes—the family of wrens—were to be found on St Kilda, the Hebrides and the Shetlands, he informed me, the differences arising largely from the variations in their song performed in the ends of sexual attraction against the never-ending thunder of the surf on such islands. His hope was to identify a fourth variation based on the island of Skomer, which lay only a few miles from Little Haven. This, despite some days of field work in which I assisted, he never did.
Most of the nearby islands showed traces of ancient settlements. On Skomer a sizeable farmhouse, now partially in ruins, had not been occupied for possibly a century, but shortly before our arrival Reuben Codd had taken it in hand and begun a partial restoration, and had recently been joined by his wife and child. Using stones collected from the old ruins, he had patched the holes in the far
mhouse walls in such a way that it now stood up to any weather. He kept a cow and a calf, a few sheep, and chickens that were recovering ancestral powers of flight. Where it was evident that crops had been grown in the old days he dug in seaweed to renew the fertility of the soil and planted the basic vegetables. The Codds gave every appearance of enjoying their life-style, and their house was full of laughter. To outsiders such as us this came close to an idyllic existence, and it was clear that this was an experience that had a considerable effect on Loke.
Reuben had made two rooms habitable, and a trickle of visitors who were inevitably interested in bird-life had begun to arrive. The island possessed immense colonies of seabirds, in particular Manx shearwaters, and our presence coincided with the end of a successful experiment carried out in connection with these. R. M. Lockley, the famous ornithologist then living on the neighbouring island of Skokholm, had carried out a study of the shearwaters living and nesting by the tens of thousands in the burrows on the grassy slopes of the cliffs of the island. During the breeding season birds were taken from their holes and released at various distances from home. It was found that a bird released 220 miles from the nesting hole took ten hours to find its way back, and one released in Spain was found in its burrow after two weeks. The Skomer experiment was more ambitious, for a bird was taken by plane to South Africa. This time it took just under 3 weeks to cover the enormous distance. The bird arrived in good shape, with the loss of a few ounces, but clearly anxious to resume its nesting routine. What was even more extraordinary, according to our informants, was that the shearwaters’ powerful homing instinct was not exclusively directional, for it had been proved that in preference to a direct flight overland a bird might choose a longer and circuitous oceanic route.
