A very little went a long way with me. So it does still. So it does here, in the same sense that often can mean rarely, and once is more than enough, as you know. A glance from the Welsh girl, for example, a dismissive glance no less than a longed-for come-hither. When I read my favourite writers I could hardly hold my eye to the page without shooting off in my own direction. I wasn’t a good reader. I’m still not a good one. Nor am I a scholar any more than I am a gentleman, please my maker.
Then last of all in the genre, beyond the end of school, Richard Murphy’s Sailing to an Island which I bought in Dublin at Green’s Bookshop near Trinity College, on just turning nineteen, after a pilgrimage on my summer dreyman’s Border Breweries wages, to Inis Mór, prospecting. I have the copy still, as I have most of them, above all among them: John Bright’s ‘Charles Jones Memorial Prize for Literature’ – winner’s choice: The Plays and Poems of J.M. Synge; but The White Goddess, and Six Existentialist Thinkers... are more recent replacements, the originals going the way of all books, as life takes one here and there. But what days they were, for that wide-eyed boy of summer in his ruin.
A longer catalogue of reading there was, but these works and authors were the most telling ones, and also fragments of MacDiarmid put my way by a Welsh nationalist autodidact, Meirion Roberts, a man who did more than anyone to broaden my reading, except perhaps the late Charles Jones, but that’s a story for later, just round the corner. Meirion put Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That in my hand, and I loved it for the good riddance of it, the rejection of the world as ordained by one’s supposed betters and the powers that be.
Your country needs you! But what ish my nation? Wales, I was born there.
Meirion would travel with my father when he came to visit me on Inis Mór to disturb my universe, to comic effect. Here’s a poem that tells you more about him, and explains something of his interest in Graves’s book, more concisely, ‘In Memory of Private Roberts: British Soldier’:
Crossing the square in early spring,
Wreaths withered on the memorial,
Poppies bled by frost and snow,
I met Private Roberts reading
The roll call of the town’s fallen.
‘Armistice day? My pet aversion,’
Turning to me, his lip moist,
His thorny eye narrowed like a sniper’s:
‘Ior Evans? He’d never spent
A night away from home before,
Buried in Mad-a-gas-car.
Corner of a foreign field?
I doubt he’d ever heard of it.
Dei Sam? on Manchester
United’s books in thirty-nine:
Buried in France. I bet
He’s never remembered
At the going down of the sun
Or in the morning... Duw!
You know, I often contemplate
Siegfried Sassoon, chucking his medal away.
Never applied for mine.
All the way to Tobruk without
So much as a lance-jack’s stripe,
I’m proud to say.
And Francis Ledwidge, born
The same day as Hedd Wyn,
And killed, you know, the same day
And in the same place too.
His comment: “To be called
A British soldier
While my country has
No place among nations...”
He’d marched to Vesuvius
With Marcus Aurelius
In one breast-pocket and
The Mabinogi in the other,
An old campaigner
Over bog and heather
To find and fish the Serw stream:
Elusive, stubborn thread of water,
Of stygian glooms and mountain glances,
Its limpid, garrulous medium,
‘Full,’ as he said, ‘of small trout
The length of a youth’s hand.’
Meirion also lent me in their slender and deeply moving first editions The Stones of the Field, first published by the Druid Press in Carmarthen in the year of my birth, and An Acre of Land, printed in Newtown, Montgomery, in 1952, by R.S. Thomas. There was hardly anything Meirion hadn’t read, from a slender essay by Virginia Woolf about going to purchase a pencil, to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, to Logan Pearsall Smith’s Trivia, from the work of Mary Webb (O Precious Bane!) to that of Alun Lewis and In Parenthesis by David Jones. He was an inspiration, his gates wide open to the written word and his insight into the colonial situation light-years ahead of the view elsewhere. For sheer intelligence, humour, passion and rootedness he had no equal. He was a postcolonialist avant-la-lettre and so was I under his influence, whether I knew it or not; and I certainly knew it if not in name when I entered the unknown world. It was a revelation, and one that has never waned.
It was the sea and the literature of the sea I loved most. I remember particularly being stirred by Joshua Slocum’s marvellous sea-going story: Sailing Alone Around the World. But it’s not so much that I was so taken by the writings I refer to, which in the wider world is something unremarkable, but that as to Aran I held to my resolve. More than once or twice I’d tell my parents, at sixteen and seventeen and more, that one day I was going to live on Inis Mór. How was this? It seemed so unlikely a thing they merely smiled, in the spirit of ‘one day you’ll grow up’ my son. How pleased I am now to know how wrong they were, especially about the growing up. The way to grow is circular, longest way round, shortest home. Up is a big mistake. Down into mind and round is best.
Who says poetry makes nothing happen, Synge being all poetry, verse or prose? There is no circumstance in which nothing happens. But the assertion burdens poetry with irrelevant expectation. There’s the strongest case for saying it makes everything happen, that it’s prior to all other verbal forms of expression, vision, and thought. The poets precede the theologians and philosophers and stand elsewhere from them, looking awry. Here’s my poem of it. I call it ‘Synge-Song’:
I was one after your own heart
or so I thought, neither landed
nor gentry, but blew ashore
aboard your limpid pages,
to Inis Mór and there I stranded.
My mind blown away
and all at sea for nevermore.
The curragh also wears a thin partition.
I’ve felt the sea-pulse beneath it
through my hand, life itself,
inside out, outermost to be
inmost in the world.
Get out more, you who say
poetry makes nothing happen.
Be-in-the world and see:
the poem is earthbound
and elsewhere to the day
as any playboy knows
down the passage of recorded time
through calm and storm
the first to make landfall.
There is or there was once a strong case for saying all mental landscapes in the western world would be profoundly different if Wordsworth hadn’t written his Lyrical Ballads and its preface, or ‘The Prelude’, which also overtook my life at this time, no less than is clearly true in the case of Homer’s Odyssey, no matter nothing happens without hearer or reader. One or two of either at critical historical moments are enough to bend the world’s bias and change the horizons of humankind.
Just a small work of words can set the world atilt. Forget your global network. When the power goes down in the post-apocalypse, and the visionaries rise from the rubble what use your password and your headlong hurry, you intel-pentium? Where is your digitized archive now? You need no password to encounter a poem, spoken or read, oral or written, to nourish your soul before whoever your maker is. Remember that as you scavenge among the ruins of Rome? But those scavengers won’t be of your kind. They’ll be the descendants of those who scavenge now. Of whom there is no shortage and never has been down the course of time.
To be sure, a little can go such a long way it can reach to the crack of doom, like the An
glo-Saxon poem ‘The Wanderer’.
* * *
Or the ‘Sea-farer’.... An element to account for here, beyond the shore, is the sea itself. The sea plays with horizon more thoroughly than anything on earth, than night and day together. I first took to its magical perspectives in yet another ritual connected with my passing the eleven plus. Not only did that singular occasion entail the Black Lake, as you know. It also saw an unprecedented act of extravagance and expenditure by my grandpa. He was otherwise, you know already, rightly deemed the very epitome of a penny-pinching Scotsman. But my little success so pleased him he stunned the known world and took me out for the day, aboard the St Tudno, from Llandudno pier, a steamer as they say, though there was no steam involved, to Menai Bridge on Anglesey.
Forget that we played bowls there or before coming home stopped at the fun-fair and rode the dodgems by the gates to Llandudno pier – all staggering indulgences, never witnessed before or again in grandpa’s company.
The important thing for me is that I made my foundational sea-voyage then, my maiden voyage. I had been out off Ynys Enlli in a little mackerel-fishing boat. I’d whizzed a circuit of the inlet at Traeth Coch, powered by a Seagull, as you know. I had a taste for it. But this was a voyage, such as on a more dramatic scale the Naomh Eanna made to Kilronan pier and the islands, as later I would love. And it whetted my appetite and fuelled my longing. I’ve never forgotten it, even if we never lost sight of land. (That would come, on trips to the Isle of Man, as also sailed from Llandudno for a time.)
Often is one thing, once another. I saw the Orme swing round and shrink in our wake. I saw the Creuddyn sink in sea-haze, islanding the Orme, as fascinated and delighted me. I saw the seabirds – the razorbills, and puffins too, the different gulls, the cormorants – whizz in and out from the headland cliffs. I heard and saw the sea run and break, and felt the sure foot of the vessel slide and gather. I breathed the hot air of the engine room, mingled with the salty ozone of the sea. I saw Penmaenmawr, and Puffin Island close up, crowded with seabirds, and the lighthouse, and heard the clang of the bell at Penmon. I saw the pretty doll’s house frontage of Beaumaris. I saw Snowdonia on the other shore roll and shift, rearranging its ranges, as we went by. I experienced the strange dream-element that is the world at sea, on a halcyon day. I saw the straits narrow and its currents race on Menai’s shore. It whetted my appetite and more. I went under like a cormorant that’d not surface again until it reached Galway Bay, however many years away, in November 1968. My life over again. So breath-taking was it and heart-stopping, it drowned me for good and ill.
The St Tudno was my maiden voyage, innocent and virgin. The few trips that would follow later, putting out from Conwy on the fishmonger Mr Arundale’s trawler were last nails in Queequeg’s coffin for me. Call me Ishmael. They still haunt me, above all biding the tide after nightfall, to enter the river and come home to harbour. The What-Ho! was a decked lugger of a once-popular local design. I doubt she was much more than a forty-footer. She had a mast and a short brown sail. Above all she was powered by an Ailsa Craig, over-powered it might be said, but all to the good, by a big engine.
The name ‘Ailsa Craig’ meant a lot to me, the mysterious, burdened way names can mean to us. I had seen the Ailsa Craig, also known as ‘Paddy’s Milestone’, with the naked eye of childhood, the granite dome off the Ayrshire coast, from which the engine took its name. This pleased me and merged the two in my mind. It made me remember the harbour at Girvan, with its trawler fleet of those days.
Curling stones are traditionally made of Ailsa Craig granite. I have two for heirlooms on my doorstep at home. My Wigtownshire farming relations and their like used to put such stones on the gateposts to their retirement bungalows. So the name ‘Ailsa Craig’ weighs for me resonantly, the full weight of its granite. What’s in a name? Worlds of meaning, ‘Ailsa Craig’:
I voyaged with you once
beating like my heart
right through me,
whatever the opposite is
to weak knees, weakness,
a balancing act, and now
I anchor in memory
on those wild seas.
I cannot ground but fathom
where I am, sitting on
a doorstep, here at home,
running a hand over
a granite curling stone,
an heirloom and horizon
sixty million years ago,
I remember seeing you.
Mr Arundale had been a commander in the Navy during the war. He loved the sea and knew it like the back of his hand, saw into it with his grey eyes, and read the weather as if he knew it by heart. He had just that much of Ahab about him to keep you guessing. I suppose he was a hobby fisherman, but it was a hobby that served his shop with the freshest fish on the coast.
So it came that I shipped aboard the What-Ho! under Mr Arundale, first with my father and then, far better, on my own. I remember being early and killing time on the quay, haunting there, relishing the expectancy in the morning air, as the tide rose in the river and the river rose in the tide, and the vessels beat a foot to the gathering rhythm and kicked their keels to be off. I felt myself into it, into the role of the sea-going fisherman, deckhand trawler-man. Compared with the all-weather real thing aboard the boats that would go away for several days, it was like poaching in Collins’s Wood: all the kicks without the risks. But drowning is drowning. Just as you might say never trust a horse, never trust the sea.
Nor was there anything half-hearted about it when Mr Arundale arrived amid the bustle of fishermen and mid-morning idlers and holidaying lookers-on. He took command. You had to look lively and haul in the pram and lower the supplies and lower yourself. The pram only took two, oarsman and crew of one at a time. It sat deep in the tide at that, quick to turn on an oar, like a gull on its webbed foot turning smartly to feed on something passing swiftly by in the stream, the flood from the mountains. There across the way where the river ran hidden the What-Ho! rode at her mooring, all ship-shape. She looked somehow businesslike, as if a vessel might put on its experience and purpose and wear them with vigour, restless as a thoroughbred for the tide-race, throwing her head up against her mooring.
So then you got aboard her and looked back across the waters at the floating harbour and riding castle town. Who’d ever want to live ashore again? Who’d want to come back to the humdrum world of the dull lubber, the hidebound burgher? Except that coming and going, putting out and making landfall, are heart and soul of it. In which spirit I commend to you the fare forward of it, and fare well but not farewell, as the Ailsa Craig starts up with a great throb, like a heart throb, and the waters rouse with a deep churning as she gets the bit between her teeth. Is this the death-wish under us as the stern bites in and takes a step down, to bring the prow up, or so it feels, like an orgasm, an acceleration, a surge? I always think so. And so too at this moment, as away we went, it felt not so much as if we were bound to our fishing ahead, as rushing from our haven astern.
Down the channel we ran between the now submerged shellfish banks, out by Morfa, and round beyond Penmaen-bach to shoot our net down the Fairway, down to the Lavan Sands, beyond Penmaenmawr. There are few things more intoxicating, in all the fishings I’ve undertaken, than being slewed there between trawl and tide butting down that sea-road, like driving with the brakes on, as the otter boards resist the flow and keep the wings of the net wide. From where you are, the sea runs round the world, and you feel part of its immensity, suspended in time, until it’s time to haul and gravity returns for a while, against the backdrop of the floating world.
We’d have a couple of shots down that way, the bulging sock of the net when we swung it up, spilling plaice, flounder and thornback skate, barnacled crabs and cobbles, shocks of glistening weed, a bather’s plimsoll but happily no bather, and so on. Then we’d run out round Puffin Island, trolling for mackerel, with hand-lines, four and six at a time, and if we hit them, pause to wallow and hit them hard, feat
hering vertically, so the boxes rattled and splattered with them as they filled, before we shot again by Table Road, out off Traeth Coch.
It seemed we had all the time in the world there, shoaled together. But the tide waits for no man, and with one last haul on board, we’d beat for home, the Ailsa Craig drumming hard, vibrating under us, the What-Ho! with the bit between her teeth, galloping, and night rising up and the stars shoaling so near you’d think you might shoot your net at them, in the topsy-turvy seaborne world. Now we’ve been too quick for it and must hove-to, to nose forward little by little. Mussels crunch under us. At the water’s edge, all round, oyster-catchers and sandpipers make their music, pipe their chorus to the stars, as the dark engulfing tide chivvies them. Up they wheel into the chill night air, piping and whistling, to re-alight and fish for their supper and sing for it, again. Over and over they retreat with the water, heard but not seen, unless as a faint glimmer or aura, until the tide is in, and silence seems to fill the world, for a moment if no more.
So it was. There in the midst of it, the Ailsa Craig chugged and spluttered and sang to us, and the What-Ho! told us the story of her life, in every creak and dark recess of her, wooed to it by the river at her shoulders, the sea at her stern. We had our catch all gutted and sung for, except not all the thornback skate were skinned. So we worked on at them, feeling the cold now, hands cut and raw, the very dream itself, except for the one behind it.
Once Page 16
