* * *
The two hinges of the year, spring and autumn, are the sweetest, surely, when the door opens and closes, when change turns the heart on its axis. Climate change now necessitates the re-writing of everything. Annotation is required to know the shepherd’s calendar, to know what March and April or October and November, Spring or Autumn, once meant to Edmund Spenser, John Keats or John Clare. But I still catch myself registering the aura of spring as I used to, foretasting it, in light as it lingers in a bare wood, loath to go under and earlier to rise. The little finger-hold of daylight clinging on beyond its time, before its time, the first of birdsong, sometimes misplaced, make me look up and look, now, in my sixtieth year, to those old-fashioned bird-nesting days when the carrion crow, inveterate egg-robber itself, began to mate and brood. It would sail in its windy crow’s nest, come the end of March and early April, to hatch four or five blue-green eggs, magically blotched and spotted orangey-brown, way out on a limb. So the rook would rebuild, and the bare-knuckled hedges come into bud. What though that little light’s probably an illusion now, some freak moment of false November or December?
Time comes round none the less, however out of joint the day, and the need to reproduce coursing in the blood prompts the birds to build and whistle and sing, cry or crow, mewl or honk, coo or quack, twitter or chirrup, as ever they did, since the start of time, proclaiming their territory. On such burgeoning mornings, to step out across the road to the Glen, and to wind up away on Dolwen or Llanelian hill, or the gorse-blowing Marian, the known world of Wales in view below, and sky swept cloudily grey, in downpour or in dry, and the sea running on the coast with its seascape sky, was a dream come true, a dream nurtured at bedtime and hatched once more with the day, head full of hedges and banks to comb and search, in vivid intimacy.
It was an education without the intervention of a master, an absorbing study of birdlife, habitats and habits, in my native heath. It was natural religion with yourself alone and the god-in-things to lift you and keep you, an outlaw now as you’d be, a wicked disgrace, a thief of those extraordinarily beautiful eggs, never quite the same in their markings even within species, from nest to nest.
So much that was possible then is impossible if not unimaginable now. So much that was legal then is now against the law, and if we broke the law in little ways, the law slept or turned a blind eye, and no harm done give or take a small egg, a speckled trout, an apple.... I remember how for a time we had a sawn-off double-barrelled four-ten shotgun in our possession, to a boy’s eye a beautiful little weapon with hammers, like something in a Western. It was given to my father or lent, I don’t know which, by the postman. He used it to shoot pheasants from his Royal Mail van as he did his rounds out in the back country.
It didn’t seem at all a serious matter that the postman should behave in such a way, or that such a lethal and illegal weapon should come into my father’s hands: so did barbed snatching hooks for taking salmon, and a barbed tine for spearing them, both with a socket that would fit on a hazel stick and a cord through a hole in the socket to draw it tight and secure it in place while you snatched or speared. So when you had cunningly done the deed you could dismantle your tackle, wrap the cord round it, and slip the incriminating device into your pocket and concentrate on hiding the fish.
I don’t know when the concept of protected species arrived, but it wasn’t illegal, at least as far as we understood, to possess the blown eggs of wild birds. Game-birds I suppose were always off limits. Not that that deterred me, if I came on a hen pheasant incubating eggs in the bottom of a hedge. The bird might slip away, but an egg, if not too far gone, might be taken and blown. The whole clutch might well have been taken and eaten. I never did that but I’m sure that was not upon any principle, but a matter of fortune. The only eggs I gathered to eat were the herring gull’s. The egg from which might have hatched the original English Chinese restaurant joke, only we had scarce a Chinese restaurant then, to wit: waiter, this egg is rubbery. And lovely-rubbery they were too.
I had inherited two boxes of the eggs of many species my father had collected as a boy and youth in Scotland. Just to prise the lid off those flat shortcake tins and gaze at the eggs in their partitioned squares and nests of cotton-wool was enough to inspire a hundred adventures, not least flights of fancy to North Clutag and to Galloway. But it wasn’t possessing the eggs or adding ever rarer ones to a collection that really mattered, but discovering nests, stalking, observing the comings and goings of birds, their startled departures as you happen on them, their fearful or fearless sitting tight until you can all but touch them, the looping arrival of a greenfinch into a holly hedge and its circumspect diversions; to find a nest in process of being built, to watch as building materials, fine moss, slender grasses, a feather, mud, twig, shavings of silver birch bark like fine foil, are carried... where? Here... in this branching fork, this mossy nook or cranny, thorn thicket, eave or outhouse gable, limestone cliff-ledge, or without building at all on a sea-pink thrifty pebbled shore.
This was knowledge won with patience and it fostered intimacy of seeing and being, absorption into the world, one thing leading to another. There was you might say nothing to distinguish between a boy’s eye and a bird’s eye view for watchfulness, and time stood still, attention undivided. Though I think there was boredom involved too, of a unique order in rural life, not self-conscious like the town’s ennui, but something integral to the whole, a form of biding time and being bound by it. Here life could seem all in-waiting, the known world too well-known, the horizon beyond reach, a prison, and time spent killing time, in the hours between tides, between dawn and dusk, when the best fish move, and life bestirs most.
I remember enough discoveries, enough arduous climbs and clamberings to fill a book with episodes. But would you want to climb through them, through a tangle of sentences, as up into the branches of a hawthorn you might struggle, torn and pricked, spiked hard suddenly in the top of your head, cut down your cheek, your knuckles raw, your limbs scratched and grazed as doggedly you ascend to worm a hand into a magpie’s thorny, domed house, to retrieve an egg – sometimes a bluish egg, sometimes an olive one.
Now somehow slip it into your mouth and keep it floating safely there, safe from every jolt and slip, safe from filling your mouth with an explosion of egg and yolk and shell, the dry birdlime taste already there to spice it. Rather a dull egg for so much trouble. But I took the trouble, as if I knew I was stashing away meaning for my future self, but knowing nothing of the sort and never a second thought, the process of selving being predetermined.
You wouldn’t want to follow, but follow me just this last step down under the high wooden bridge. Lower yourself carefully through the rails and pick your way down the slipway where Colwyn stream enters the Glen proper, to reach the grey wagtail’s nest in a hole in the walled bank, a teaspoon tied to a stick to help you fish out your little speckly-marble egg, with its squiggle hair-line, not unlike the devil’s signature on the egg of a yellow-hammer, but an obvious forgery.
The stream is loud and the light in the trees above and in the saplings, in the stone itself, seems to close round you. The stream is louder than usual. The wagtail calls from downstream, wagging and wagging. You can see it trying to distract you but you can only intermittently hear its clear note ring out against the rush of the stream. The water seems louder than usual today, and it is because there’s been sudden subsidence since you came this way last year. Now there’s a great rectangular hole in the slipway, perhaps twelve feet in length – and how many feet deep? – into which the stream plunges and accelerates, cold and seething, cut water, bravura. It amazes you to see such turbulence and distracts you as the wagtail failed to do, as a sixth sense tells you here is a place to come back to at once and to lay a line for a trout.
So one thing follows another, and off you go, and before the day’s much older you are back with a few worms and a little number 12 hook on a length of nylon and a stone for anchor, and cord line to j
oin your tackle to a secure place, carefully concealed in the ivy. The anchor twists and turns in the force of water, then finds a hold, and your bait hangs in the stream. There it swims to await your return, perhaps before evening has fallen, perhaps quite early next morning. Pull the line in to find a little trout on your hook, beautifully spotted and green-backed, luscent, and cream-bellied. Just stare at it there, as your mind takes its indelible snapshot impression, ever bright to see again, the speckled fish. And don’t now forget the wagtail’s nest, fish meanwhile for your pretty speckled egg as well.
Everything was inward and immediate, and called forth ingenuities. How did I know how close to hatching an egg might be, if I hadn’t found the nest before the clutch was complete? By experience and guesswork, by the week of the month, by the parent bird’s reluctance to desert, by holding it up to the light, weighing it in the palm, or, if the ditch nearby had water enough to support it, or if there was still-water anywhere near, by testing to see would the egg float, or sink. If it floated the embryo was too highly developed to blow it through the pinprick hole. Better put it back and hope for the best.
The conventional way to blow an egg free of its white and yolk was to prick a hole at either end, a hawthorn or a wild rose thorn from the hedge was handiest for pricking, and then to blow through it, from the rounder ‘big-end’ until its contents came out, over your fingers sometimes, over your chin if the wind blew, and sometimes back into your mouth. You could blow the eggs of larger species through a single hole about mid-way down the egg, through a fine straw or grass stalk. There was a coarse kind of grass you could find by the stream. Pull it and it came like a joint from its socket, and with a careful cut from your penknife you could get a treasured length of three or four inches with the finest bore to blow through.
You could wish for nothing better. But either method the hazards were the same. When what was in proved too thick to come out, you must blow harder, and the exertion might cause you to grip the egg too tight and so break it, especially if it was a small egg, like the delicate egg of a warbler, a whitethroat, a blackcap, or a wren, a dunnock or from up at the farm a swallow. Or you might suck the last of it out into your mouth. Or the embryo was too advanced to come out, or the egg was addled, a too-early egg, or the nest recently abandoned, perhaps because of prying boys, like that much coveted greenfinch’s that you came upon too late.
There was a code, never to take more than one egg from any nest. But two or three boys might together exceed it, boys being boys, nasty, brutish and short, with no savagery too base. So I remember being one of a righteous trio who found a young cuckoo in a dunnock’s nest. The sight of the decayed corpses of its fellow nestlings on the ground being consumed by ants and other creatures, inspired collective indignation. Until, like a crowd that has worked itself up into beating someone to death, we removed the fat cuckoo chick from the nest and killed it. I will not name the boy who sat on it. But it was not I. I daresay I’d have killed it with a stick, or stamped on it. The RSPB would have found all three of us guilty. It didn’t seem that way though. We weren’t tender or squeamish. We were fighting the cause of the dunnock. But really we were murderous brutes.
* * *
As to tender or squeamish, I am sure there would be health and safety rules and regulations, and laws against it now, but in those early years, a special treat was to go with Dick’s father in the back of the van to the slaughterhouse when he had business there.
The extended family had a farm at Llysfaen. Their best meat was home grown and killed just down the road at Abergele. I can remember wandering around the slaughterhouse, while Dick’s father attended to business. We’d see cattle shot with a bolt gun, great beasts toppling, suddenly weak at the knees, and sheep rolled onto a wooden cradle kicking their stiff legs as the gun was put to their heads. We saw their carcasses disembowelled – what a membrane sac a bowel is – steaming, hanging from hooks, all in a mayhem of bleating and lowing and bellowing and squealing and clatter and skid of hooves, and the shouts of men, and the rattle of crush bars and pens, and aisles, and urine, bowels and dung everywhere under foot and in the air, reeking healthily, before the purging hose.
It was life. It was everyday. So was the man in the basement back at the butcher’s shop, sitting on a stool in his vest, under a bare light-bulb that dangled from a long flex, plucking away in a room caged off with wire netting, surrounded by feathers and Christmas chickens and turkeys. When he’d finished plucking one, he’d lunge, arms spread, to snatch up the next one and wring its neck, as we stood by, feathers billowing everywhere, and a sudden cacophony of gobbles and squawks and frenzy.
We’d watch the scene fascinated a while. It was like a sideshow in hell, down there in the dark cellerage. Once in a kind of dumbshow for our benefit, the man held up a plucked bird by the neck and easing his hand down its body to the rump, produced an egg. Either it was a fowl on the brink of laying, which is quite likely, or a clever bit of conjuring, if not as clever as Dick’s baked-bean trick. As to the chicken and egg, I always believed my eyes, whereas with the baked beans, you couldn’t, so fast Dick moved, defying time.
* * *
To everything its season. There were shoreline seasons too, and tidal passions that came to fill my waking thoughts, to distract me from lessons, to keep a weather-eye on the window, to worry not about the timetable but the tide-table. A prospect of the sea within sound of the sea, piers and jetties and harbours, boats inshore and ships on the skyline, tugs at me now as I write, like a mooring, hauling me back into the solitude and unlonely loneliness of those shoreline days. This was my self in the making.
By the time I was ten, about three years before we moved to the wooded hill, when a different balance between the hill and the sea was struck, the coast took strong claim on my free time. It is hard to accept now what fishing there was to be had on Colwyn shore, between Penmaen and the point of Rhos when I was young. Nothing like it survives, just as nothing like the freedom to come and go remains today for children as young as we were. ‘Drive carefully, free-range children at play’, I saw on a sign remote in Argyll the other day. We were free-range children in every way, except as to word from the unknown world.
It was quite early one morning would be the way to start to tell you.
But it started well before morning. It was afternoon, is closer yet, if there’s a beginning to find, the day before, in the backyard at ‘Thornfield’. Eleven going on twelve, twelve going on thirteen, I’m a free being, too young to be employed in a holiday job. With all the time in the world on my hands, except the time of the tides that rule my thoughts, I’m away in my dream, trying my hand at a nightline.
My ambition is unlimited. I’m all imagining without a thought in my head of failure. Every hook I’m tying to the line on its little length of 12lb breaking-strain nylon will take a fish in the course of the night. You believe it. I bite through the nylon droppers at the knot, tough bite through tough line for young teeth. I’m so hooked I think of nothing but being ready for the night, as the afternoon softens in the yard and my mother calls me for tea.
This boy that I was – I remind you – is eleven going on twelve, at the youngest. The ages of eight, ten, thirteen are defining points of moment in his story and make it possible to relate it with some degree of accuracy, as to what happened when. He won’t reach thirteen before his world is transformed and he’s transported elsewhere, away, seven miles off, under the wooded hill. There nightlines will lengthen unimaginably, dreams deepen and fish multiply. What he’s doing now in the Red Wood is merely preparatory. He thinks it is the real thing. And so it is, until he learns otherwise. And as you’ll realise when you reach ‘The Black Lake’ he’s begun to harden just a little now, and has a slightly clearer sense of purpose, resolve discovered in the mountains at the Black Lake.
Soon you’ll see him emerge with his nightline over his shoulder. The line consists of a length of stout, domestic electrical wire, rescued from the tip at Fairmount, hung with
hooks on ‘droppers’, and wound round three sticks. He’s slung the silvery canned-fruit bait-tin along the handle of his spade. And off he sets, both hands full, his spade over his other shoulder. The can slides now and then and bangs against the step of the spade as he walks, then slides back onto his shoulder. He’s like a one-man band. There’s a way to go to the shore, though not far as the crow flies. But he’s no crow and he has to round Pen-y-Bryn and make his way down Llawr Pentre, daring the dank shadows under the viaduct where the rats come out in the evening, to reach Beach Road and follow the stream to the sea.
It takes some determination, certainty beyond doubt, to go to so much trouble, at such an age. What does he have in his head? And he still has to dig his bait: at least a dozen lugworms for his dozen and a half hooks. He knows he must pitch his line as near the margin of low-tide as he can, to maximise the time it’s under water. That will make his night longer, his night of disturbed sleep and watch-checking in the dark between submarine slumbers. He has an Ingersoll pocket-watch on a leather strap, like an old man before his time. It ticks as loud as a bomb on the chair by his bed.
He must come down as early as daybreak to inspect the line, to see it come to light, or be pipped at the post by the gulls. They’ll swim round his surfacing tackle and hack at his catch with their blood-tipped beaks if they can’t snatch it away from the hooks. He knows this from experience already. He’s learning every step of the way lessons never to be had in school, things too that he doesn’t know he’s learning: resolution and independence and how to survive on Inis Mór, though as yet he’s never heard of the place, on which his future’s converging and his folly, at thinking to resist the world and its business.
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