Once

by McNeillie, Andrew

  Meanwhile the wind roared, the rain pelted, and abandoned homework festered. The tower wall grazed me, the barbed wire tore me, and the cold metal of the mast and guys numbed my hands, all so that my father might lie on the sofa and watch whatever it was he generally slept through or otherwise condemned as rubbish.

  So we settled from the Red Wood under the Wooded Hill, and made our new lives there, complete with grandpa’s TV.

  * * *

  For me, in those first three to four years, before and as I fell hook-line-and-sinker for the Welsh girl, the wooded hill held me in its thrall. It did so even more than the Black Lake, being on my doorstep, a place more than big enough to disappear in, beyond sight and earshot. It was the dream, the realm of escape, of resolution and independence. No doubt it entailed labour and being at my father’s beck-and-call. But that was no price to pay, and I loved it the more the stronger I grew. So the more independent I could be, at working the slope with the two-stroke rotovator, planting the spuds, and so on, thinking on stories of life at North Clutag, authentic peasant life close to the earth. I can think of no happier times, however shadowed by school, however desolate the last day of holiday. There’s no mystery in it. What boy primed as I had been wouldn’t have felt he had died and gone to heaven under the wooded hill?

  There is familiarity and there is intimacy. Intimacy is never familiar but always new. But familiarity can afford it shelter and foster it, as it might foster love. At first to steal from the house with my gun was unfamiliar, an unaccustomed freedom. Before long, gradually, as if stalking step by step, entering that world became like putting on my old army surplus jacket, jeans and boots. I wore the place about me. I smelt of the earth there. It sheltered and fostered me, warped round me as the Black Lake did on Sunday. Black Lake water ran through me, animated me, but this was all present to my eye, each day, school or not.

  This was my element. My clothes breathed it. They were worn by it as I wore them, torn, scuffed, grown into the place and earthy. My gun was a tool, an accessory, an extension of me, a talisman. This was especially so when quite soon I graduated to use the Damascus double-barrelled gun my father had used in his youth at North Clutag, a gun discharged by my great grandfather and my grandpa in their day, a twelve-bore gun that spoke to me of many an exploit and occasion. I could lurk cradling it and enjoying it with affection as part of my inwardness.

  Talk about worn. Talk about Damascene moments. Its beautiful Damascus steel barrels were paper-thin and would not have survived proofing. They weren’t made with modern powder in mind. But my father, I know not how, had hoarded a big cache of black powder wartime cartridges, in old metal ammunition cases, and I used these until I fired the last of them. They weren’t too dodgy but sometimes you got a dud that failed to go off. They left more soot up the chimney than their modern counterparts too. Then my father latched on to a lighter modern cartridge that did as well, if no better, except there were no damp squibs. All this reduced the range at which I might knock a wood-pigeon or a pheasant out of the air. In consequence I became a quick snap shot, which suited our tight terrain, if not an exceptionally good shot for the long, deliberate interception. (I had my moments, none the less.)

  But the point of it all was I shot for the pot and had the best of whatever I shot, first served, whatever it was, but especially if it was at all exotic, like a woodcock, when I’d have the whole thing to myself, of course. Woodcock are hard to come by. They know the flexure of a zigzag to be sure, when they startle up from the wood floor. But in the evening when they fly in circuits round their territory, in a habit known as roding, they do so steadily, and can be hit more easily. They were scarce, though, scarce as serious snowfall.

  Even the pheasants were scarce, unless in the autumn, and after Gloddaeth’s first shoots of the season, when survivors sought refuge under the wooded hill and in the grounds below us. The pheasant had to be earned. I became expert in the terrain. Sometimes my father and I would be window-haunting, he talking to me as we stared out, and we’d see a cock bird shoot up and fly away up through the wood, or onto the cliff.

  I’d take the angle of it and my father would despatch me, as if I was a dog. And like a sheepdog I might go a big deep circuit, up through the bottom of Collins’s wood, and round, fast at first and then come on stalking moccasin-light to where experience told me the bird was likeliest to be by the time I got there. I was all eyes and ears and moved as if preceding myself by the range of a gunshot or two, in the zone with my prey. It was as if I dispensed with physical presence. I have to say little escaped. By the time I was sixteen, my speed and stealth, my animal knowledge of the territory saw to that.

  It would be a while before the hammered single-barrelled gun came my way, a long gun with a very tight choke. With the heavier cartridge known as a Maximum it had far greater range than most guns. My father had no equal at the very outer limits of its range, as suggested in this poem called ‘Cormorant’:

  I remember the day the old man shot one

  high over the house and how it folded,

  like a winded umbrella, and came down

  in a thorn bush, stone dead, neck collapsed,

  wings hooked up to dry for the last time.

  But why still, that nervous, apprehensive wonder,

  the word skart on my tongue for pleasure?

  Why couldn’t I settle to sleep that night

  for thinking about it? I wasn’t upset.

  I didn’t weep. It got what was coming to it.

  It was the devil, the thief on the cross, of fish

  that we might catch. Way out of range it swerved,

  but the old man was a dead-eyed dick.

  I’d seen him perform such miracles before.

  And even if I smiled, when he laid it out

  for my education in the life and death

  of birds, and distinguished it from the SHAG

  I kept my school-yard smirk to myself, so he had

  no cause to curse me for a tom fool.

  Perhaps it was just those three dabs,

  the size of half-a-crown, that came

  flipping from its gullet alive, alive O

  O, O as moist as eyes? … Maybe.

  ‘Skart’ is a Scots word for a cormorant, Gaelic ‘Sgarbh’ (derived I believe from Old Norse-Icelandic). Satan metamorphosed into the form of a cormorant in Eden. That’s all you need to know.

  The Damascus gun could not have hit the cormorant, whoever fired it. But it was legendary, and legend has always stirred me and stolen into my heart. No matter it is a dangerous thing, as Plato would surely have agreed, seeing the poetry of it, its power, in fact, to bring us down to earth. But Plato or no Plato, the gun itself bordered on the dangerous. If you cocked both its hammers at once (only one was original to the gun), firing one could trigger the other, if not reliably, unreliably, which of course in such a case is worse. Still I loved the Damascus gun above all others, even if the trigger guard all-too reliably chopped back against my second finger every time I fired and made it swell and bruised the bone, after two or three shots.

  So with my gun as part of me, as quick to come to my shoulder and fire as you might blink an eye, I’d step in under the wooded hill and up into the dark wood and beyond until it was all second nature and only first nature left, the zone of intimacy, where I was, out there, beyond where I stood, with what I pursued. What I pursued might be either prey or simply the observable world in close-up and slow-motion, flora as much as fauna. For stalking imposed slow-motion on everything, and enlarged everything to the gaze. It was a country with extraordinary plants and flowers to find, according to their season. Shelter from the east, the drainage typical of limestone, a coastal warmth and a north-south westerly aspect, bred a rare fecundity.

  Botanists have listed numerous varieties to be found on our hill and in its vicinity. I will not list them all (Pennant catalogues very many of them), but of the names I knew to identify, I remember most the dark orchids, the speedwell and the
gentian. In the blackthorn and ivy-floored entanglement to the south of the tower great beds of violets flourished, and in a meadow beyond, at the northernmost end of Collins’s wood, carpets of cowslips flowered such as I’ve never seen anywhere else in my life. It was a floral paradise. And a myriad bird species flitted and nested there, from the goldcrest to the tawny owl and the herring gull. And the raven lunged overhead, crossing from the Little Orme, and the cormorant winged it fast as it could back to the Little Orme, after fishing expeditions up the estuary or in the mountain lakes, or simply at sea, one eye on my father, the other far away.

  The first full season we had there was autumn. For me it is always the first season, the elegiac best and worst. Worst because it heralded back-to-school. I cannot tell you the gloom that prospect gave rise to, a gloom heightened by the fact that I could see the school from the cliff, appropriately located just this side of the gasworks and the rubbish tip. Best because the birds fattened and the warmed sea in the mouth of the estuary ran with fish as at no other time of year.

  It was a while yet before I awakened to the literary, in any conscious way. But by sixteen I began to find myself detained by poems, distracted by them, abstracted by them. The works of the poets began to seduce me and the lives of writers generally: authors of nature and wilderness writing above all, whether in verse or prose. I started now to save to buy books and not so much simply to feed the racing pigeons I’d begun to keep a little earlier. To which end, and to my father’s disapproval, I made myself a bicycle from an old frame and bits from the tip, painted it bright yellow, and took on a paper-round. Nor was it just any round but the round of rounds: the one, there was no other, with the singular virtue of including in its compass the Welsh girl’s home.

  So I could go to her door every day, and deliver the Guardian (which had been as recently as 1959 the Manchester Guardian), and a little monthly magazine her father liked called Sea Breezes, a ‘Worldwide Magazine of Ships and the Sea’. He’d served in the navy, escorting convoys, during the war. Digressions about the hardships and horrors of war endured upon the cruel sea were ever the best part of his lessons in history. In time the family would often get their papers late on Saturday morning, in the hope the Welsh girl might be up-and-about to be seen. Slip them the wrong paper and she might come out to catch you. But she never did, only her kid brother or her father himself. Sometimes if I was lucky I’d catch a glimpse of her, or hear her playing the piano. It was enough.

  Then at some doomed point in my sixteenth year I started to attempt to write verse. Soon I’d be stealing home hurriedly, not always to change into my old clothes and escape with the Damascus barrelled gun, but to use my father’s typewriter, laboriously to type up what I’d written, just to see it at that remove from my hand, ever an important material stage. This had to be done secretly.

  Above all my father must not know. The pressure of his gaze on my words would be too much to bear. I can understand my fears. The poems were too bad. To describe them as juvenilia would be to abuse the term. Until recently I thought they’d all been destroyed, except one or two that by editorial misjudgement found publication. I binned or burned everything I could lay hands on in my late twenties, except my account of the Aran Islands.

  That proved to be at the commencement of a two-decade depression, not induced by the hopeless poems but more generally at not living the dream, not writing it, with the pram in the hall and all that. But such things are all to the good in time. You must just know your mind and keep your course at heart, no matter. Either it is in you and will out or it isn’t. It was a good decision and not baleful, to burn those paper bales. But some poor things from that time slipped the net. Copies survived, as have recently been brought to light by an old schoolfriend, now a retired professor, who won’t relinquish what he has, except in photocopy. So I can’t put them out of their misery.

  Attracted at first by Keats, I began with the view that a real poem should be a poem of some length. I had little or no idea what they were about but I liked to flirt with ‘Hyperion’ and ‘Endymion’ as much as read the more accessible poems, ‘To Autumn’ and the odes. But I wasn’t a well-wrought urn man. It was the idea of length I liked, and the promise of being able to talk.

  I was ambitious. I kept two artless long poems on the boil at once, in this time of my first fumbling after the muse’s favour. One was about a road across the moss to Alticry shore in Galloway (my lost sphagnum opus), the other about the Conwy estuary. Not a line of them do I have to look at now, at least not in their earliest form. They weren’t remotely like Keats, either, as cannot be surprising.

  A revised fragment of the estuary poem was published. It was a passage revamped when I was nineteen and approaching twenty. Conscripted into the service of a shorter poem, it appeared after some delay in the American magazine Shenandoah. A man called Richard Greer facilitated publication, a Fulbright scholar, and another man whose surname was Dabney. To the very best of my recollection the following from that illustrious periodical (even Homer nods) bears some resemblance to the same lines in the original, begun, I believe, when I was sixteen, and continued over a year.

  He walks out to the sea with a barbed spear

  Follows down the channel that is empty

  Looks over the horizon to the sun

  Waiting for the tide to turn back inland

  With its haul of silver and green-backed fish

  Already nosing at his heart’s gravel.

  The sea breaks out from the slack of low tide;

  Far against the sky, between the headland

  And the island, the big september flood

  Limps in its beginning, chokes the river

  Back with salt, thrusts heads of water forward

  As fast as the careful man retreats,

  Slips forward, runs back from beneath itself;

  The foam, mud-brown, dries down into the sand

  About to vanish, is pushed on and grows

  Swings deceptively in, now ankle deep

  Sucks the white foot down, down the pooling land

  Behind him, to more than man-deep holes.

  He once saw, out beneath the point of rocks

  As the tide sprang, the heavy-headed bass

  Press in upon the shoaling land

  Fixed to the current of the sea’s hunger;

  And now these fish push against him, spines bared,

  Driving in the flash of the sea’s teeth...

  Who was that youth, writing those lines, secretly, as if hiding them under his hand? I take some pride in him, to think of my younger self, so intense, so fixed to his current, so fixated, if only descriptive. Such hope heaped in him, I wish I was in his boots today. No matter the deaths he had to face and disappointments, until he made his way to me. (I still have the head of his barbed spear, more properly a tine, used for stabbing flounder, at risk of stabbing your white foot. Also used for spearing salmon.)

  I was too intense, a friend of my father once told me. No friend of mine, I thought. But the headland and the island, the point of rocks, those shoaling bass, how they chastened my eye. How the sea’s hunger consumed my heart. How it all led me astray beyond reason or comprehension. How strange it is to have been someone else, and to feel even the slightest pulse of his purpose so many years later, like something from another life, an earthquake’s tidal aftershock.

  What really increased the intensity was the copy of J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands I found among my father’s books. The effect of this work on my mind defies rational explanation. It so touched me it couldn’t have been more affecting if it had been written by the Welsh girl herself. But she was a scientist and literature didn’t cause her to lift up her heart to the stars – though music did – or lead her from her path.

  It would have led me from my path, if I’d been on one. Instead it became the path, the way, the road to nowhere, whether sea-road, shore road, high road or low road – I’ll be on Inis Mór before you, became my philosophy. It wasn’t any
of Synge’s twilight fairy-host stuff that took me, or the story-telling of Old Pat, reputedly founded in models from antiquity, but passages like this one:

  When we set off it was a brilliant morning of April, and the green, glittering waves seemed to toss the canoe among themselves; yet as we drew nearer this island a sudden thunderstorm broke out behind the rocks we were approaching, and lent a momentary tumult to this still vein of the Atlantic.

  or this:

  The rain continues; but this evening a number of young men were in the kitchen mending nets, and the bottle of poteen was drawn from its hiding-place.

  One cannot think of these people drinking wine on the summit of this crumbling precipice; but their grey poteen, which brings a shock of joy to the blood, seems predestined to keep sanity in men who live forgotten in these worlds of mist.

  I sat in the kitchen part of the evening to feel the gaiety that was rising, and when I came into my own room after dark, one of the sons came every time the bottle made its round, to pour me out my share.

  I liked the sound of Michael, Synge’s guide on Inishmaan, but I wasn’t hooked as Synge was by a primitivist ideal. I was more taken by those ‘half-civilized fishermen’, as he chose to call them, individuals he encountered on a visit to Inis Mór, the big island. These men were inclined to despise the simplicity of life on Synge’s preferred middle island, Inis Meáin. They wanted to know, what still interests me: how Synge passed his time ‘with no decent fishing to be looking at.’

  But it was the overall Synge-song of the prose I really liked. Its rhythms soon stole my attention from itself. Strong tributary streams I found elsewhere, in late Dylan Thomas, and early, among those boys of summer in their ruin and in his estuarine ‘Author’s Prologue’; in the T.S. Eliot of ‘Prufrock’, especially the closing paragraph, and ‘Dry Salvages’; in Lawrence’s ‘Ship of Death’; in what eventually I could understand of Baudelaire, and a very little Tristan Corbière, which I think I got at through a reference in Eliot. But you must understand these things were all seen as through a glass darkly. I was seduced symbolically. I didn’t have precocious powers of understanding. I didn’t need to stop to ask if I understood. The thing was different. Something in it ran away with me. I ran away with it, like a thief. I was more interested in my sensual life, which now, most passionately, included the sensual life of words.