Everything I Have Always Forgotten (10 page)

However, much of my school holidays (four months a year) were spent alone, dreaming. I would take the dogs Lanta, a black Labrador and one of my sisters' dogs Iago, for long walks down the estuary and out onto the remote salt marshes near the sea. Lanta was named after Atlanta; for some reason, it had been decided that she was very vain. She was a rather stupid, good-natured pedigree while Iago was an intelligent mongrel cross between a collie and a terrier. He was a handsome smaller dog with fluffy white breeches, a black patch ‘saddle' a bit askew, and a little brown around the eyes. The two of them would chase seagulls for miles, the gulls seemed to play with them by gliding along ten feet off the ground, never far ahead of the dogs. The dogs became frantic with the ‘hunt' and ran and ran. They almost never wore collars and leashes and when they did, would pull incessantly, making them cough pathetically.

Lanta was a very strong swimmer and before I learned to swim she would pull me along in water far out of my depth. She swam only with her front paws and tail, swishing it to and from to add power – her hind legs neatly curled up like the retractable wheels on an aircraft. In those days, I would stay in the water for hours on end, until I was blue – hypothermia must have been close at hand for Mother to put me in the huge bathtub all alone in the afternoon. Lanta was also an excellent diver and could swim out and dive for a heavy bone we threw for her. She had the soft mouth of her breed and enjoyed carrying my sisters' dolls around the house, never chewing on them but getting them thoroughly wet with her saliva. Diving nearly cost her her life: I took her out with a bone to dive for in mid-winter and, like me, she also caught pneumonia. I suppose there was no hot tub for her, when she got too cold. I really bonded with her as I nursed her back to health, feeding her by hand, mostly from my own plate.

Whenever Lanta was in heat, we kept her carefully locked up and sometimes tried to influence her choice of lovers with the introduction of a ‘suitable' pedigree Labrador. That never worked. She always managed to escape and follow her heart to the wiry black Welsh sheep dogs so valued locally for their highly intelligent herding skills with sheep. Her offspring were much favoured by local poachers, who said her puppies were stronger than pedigree Labs. I never knew how Father came to do business with these disreputable hunters, but by the time Lanta had raised some fifty puppies, homes with poachers were running short.

I remember one old poacher particularly well for his collection of accidents, though he never got one of our puppies – Father said he was such a fool, he was bound to shoot the dog by mistake. This was not so far-fetched: he carried an old muzzle-loading shotgun that had to be loaded with a ramrod and did not use pre-packed cartridges. One day he could not remember whether or not he had loaded the gun, so he put the ramrod in to feel how far down it would go. It seemed to get a little stuck, so he gave the ramrod a smart tap with the palm of his hand. It was loaded and went off, shooting the ramrod right through his hand. When he had recovered, everyone hoped he would not be able to go shooting with only one hand, but not at all – he just became even more of a liability.

One day the fool crawled through a thick hedge, leaving his gun on the other side, then reaching back through the gap in the hedge, he grabbed the gun by its muzzle and started to pull it through after him. A twig caught on the trigger and he shot off his own shoulder… which finally put paid to his poaching days. After that we would see him sadly gimping along his old haunts, mercifully unarmed.

The hunting around us was so poor that the landowner only had one old gamekeeper nearby. Not only did I never see him out patrolling for poachers, I have no recollection of the man. I only remember his small cottage and always gave it a wide berth. I presume we were considered sufficiently ‘gentry' to have permission to hunt there, but the really poor folk who desperately needed to hunt could be prosecuted for doing so on private property (as all the land was).

When any of us shot a rabbit, we gutted it at once, on the hillside. Otherwise, there was nowhere to throw out such offal and it would have to be taken down to the tide and fed to the seagulls. Mind you, it would have been much kinder to the remaining rabbits if we had thrown out the guts on the marsh, it was thoughtless of us to leave them
in situ
where they would be discovered by their relatives. When Father shot wild duck, he hung them by the neck from a tree, without gutting them. In theory, he said, he should leave them there until they fell to the ground with rot in the neck. That was called ‘hanging game'. In point of fact, every time one finally fell to the ground, it was already so full of maggots that there was no question of actually consuming it at table. I suspect that this was a medieval custom forced by the lack of refrigeration. In those days they used a very salty, spicy sauce called
Garum
, introduced by the Romans, to season and mask the taste of rotten meat.
Garum
still exists; its modern form is
Nuoc Mam Pha San
, the Vietnamese sauce made from the juice of rotted salt fish.

IX

BERSERK JEEP HITS LONDON

S
ometimes I would take a large umbrella out into the middle of the estuary and sit under it on the sand, dreaming in the pouring rain. I forget of what I dreamed the most, but sex (in some warped, childish and uninformed version) and cars had a prominent place. I could not bear the wait until I would be seventeen and old enough to drive. I imagined that the young Queen of England would make a special dispensation allowing me (and only me) to drive when I was eight or nine years old. As it was, I had to be satisfied with being allowed to drive our Willys American Army Jeep the mile of our drive to the main road. I was only allowed to do this when we were going somewhere, petrol being still rationed and scarce. As for driving alone, that was permitted when I was transporting horse manure from the pile behind the stable to Father's vegetable garden. I would load up the small heavy trailer and then drive it cross country, through a small stream and a couple of narrow gateways. I soon learned to back the trailer through the third and last gateway without backing over the cliff, which went down the rocks to the line of the high tide. Loading and unloading the manure was backbreaking work for me at that age but seemed well worthwhile if it meant I could drive at all… at eight or ten years old.

Later, when finally I had a licence (at seventeen), each time I met a tourist car on one of the narrow walled lanes in the mountains, I would unhesitatingly race backwards to the last passing place, even if it was two or three hundred yards back, while the other car would have only had to back a few feet – I had found from experience that tourists were hopeless at reversing and it was much quicker to do it myself.

For many years, that Jeep was our family car and Father even drove it 240 miles all the way to London and back. Nowadays, such a trip would seem trifling, but then the roads were very poor and narrow. One had to drive through every town and its market along the way and besides, the Jeep never could go over 50 mph. Its seats were barely upholstered, the suspension felt as if it was non-existent, and the track rods so worn that the front wheels wobbled ominously. They literally flapped between thirty and forty-five miles an hour. Policemen would stop us to say that our front wheels were falling off. Father would reassure them the wheels were safe enough (road worthiness tests were not yet invented) and we would be dubiously waved on. Nor did the drama end when we reached London. Taxi ranks were often in the middle of wide streets and I was sitting beside Mother as she drove closer and closer to the line of taxis. I told her she was getting too close for safety and she scolded me for distracting her attention as she proceeded to scrape the sides of five of them in a row. Being left hand drive and driving on the left side of the road was certainly a handicap, but all her life, Mother was a better horsewoman than driver. The taxi drivers were distraught and a policeman stopped her. After a long discussion and exchange of addresses, he told Mother to “Carry on regardless, but at least get off my beat”. She refused to drive any further saying something about “not being responsible for the behaviour of the Jeep!” I admit that there was so much play in the steering, she was not exaggerating. Father had to come and get it.

Another problem of being left hand drive in England was that it was impossible to make hand signals. Of course the Jeep was not fitted with direction indicators for the field of battle, so Nino had fitted it with little red flaps on each side, carved out of wood, which could be raised to indicate a turn by pulling on a string. That was the job of the passenger and I thoroughly enjoyed the responsibility.

Before I started going away to school in 1951, I was mostly ‘home schooled'. Mother gave me endless writing exercises of neat loops and twists in a copybook. She taught me to read, but her spelling was so atrocious that I have maintained the same affliction all my life. I started on Beatrix Potter, then
The Wind in the Willows
and fairy tales such as those by Hans Christian Andersen. She taught me about English history, which she enjoyed enormously and we stuck pictures of knights in armour of different eras and styles on pages for different centuries. She tried to teach me the dates of the Norman Conquest and other great landmarks in history. The lives of the average peasant or even the priest were ignored. ‘Life' was defined as a catalogue of catastrophes such as death and destruction (for some) and ‘successes', for others who had done the killing, raping and burning. There was no mention of what most of us call ‘Life'. She also versed me in the Romantic Poets such as Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley.

When it came to arithmetic, sometimes Father would teach me, showing amazing patience and giving clear, methodical explanations so that even I could grasp long division and multiplication in the end. Usually, though, he was too busy writing and I would go to the house of a retired teacher in a village two miles away. I would walk to the Halt or tiny train stop a mile away and take the train for the next mile. Then I would walk up the steep hill behind the village and sit with a bored old lady who had already seen too many reluctant students in her long career…

Occasionally, Mother would invite boys from the village to tea and to play with me but everything conspired against the success of such attempts at assimilation. We lived in a ‘Plâs' or large house and travelled to London regularly. Despite Father's efforts to learn and speak Welsh, he only used it in Church to read the Lesson – and I heard that no one could understand him when he did! These boys were painfully polite and respectful. They spoke with a very different accent to ours. Their horizons were circumscribed by their position in society. Yes, they could theoretically break out and move on, but they would certainly have been the exception, not the rule – there has only been one Lloyd George, the only Prime Minister of Britain whose first language was Welsh and who had hired a young Welsh-speaking secretary to correspond with Welsh Constituents. There were many young Welshmen who escaped the drudgery, danger and low pay of working as miners in South Wales by going to America and starting coalmines in Pennsylvania, hiring Irishmen and Poles to work the Face, while the Welshmen now ran the business.

Yes, there are the poets, theologians and other creative people who broke away, but of the boys with whom I played, they all stayed at home, spoke more and more Welsh and some became Welsh Nationalists, virtually refusing to speak English. This, I discovered years later when I met some ‘old friends' in a pub. How humiliating they must have remembered their ‘play dates' with me!

Years later, in the early sixties, I worked as a labourer on farms, gravel pits and in forestry (first, to pay for my journey to Iran, then across North Africa). My workmates were kind to me, accepting me for the same muddy boots and thermos of hot tea that they all had, although I was ‘apart', with my English accent and my 1931 touring car that I had saved from the scrap heap and almost completely restored (it still needed a windscreen and a bonnet – which I could not yet afford), while they came in ‘old bangers' or small new cars bought on the ‘never-never'. Sometimes they asked me if I lived in a ‘Plâs'; I prevaricated, not at all sure that our chaotic, bohemian house really was a ‘Plâs' – so they knew… but they didn't seem to hold it against me and we would meet up in the evenings to play Bingo at a Village Hall.

I was never expected to stay in Wales and if I had, I might have been successful in business and so quickly reviled as part of the ‘ruling class'. To this day, I cower in shame at the memory of teasing them about their accents… perhaps enough to foment their Nationalism. As much as Father sought integration in church, he could never be considered a real local. I have a niece who now lives there, whose children went to the local school and speak Welsh. Both she and her husband work locally. They are widely liked and relatively integrated. They live in a small house. The divide is not the chasm I knew as a child. The very fact that our neighbours heard Father speaking on the BBC, set us all apart as foreigners. We did not feel wealthy, but in comparison with our neighbours, we most certainly were. We went to private schools, first my Parents and later the rest of us, travelled extensively and spoke one or more European languages.

We spent some Christmas holidays in London for the social and artistic stimulation it afforded and to be away from the cold and damp of Wales. For some years we rented converted stables in Carlton Mews, just off Trafalgar Square. The ground floor had been coach houses and was now used as garages. Access upstairs for the horses was up a long, gentle ramp and then there was a wide balcony or walkway connecting the different stables above. I remember that the wooden loose-box dividers had been removed but the floor remained paved with small stone blocks draining towards huge floor drains. The bedrooms were up a narrow spiral staircase in the haylofts above and in the coachmen's quarters. This was loft-living in London circa 1950. We were right in the centre of the city and I am sure the rent was paltry. It lit my fire for the day when I would move into lofts (and develop them) in New York City in the 1970s.