Everything I Have Always Forgotten (19 page)

Then, Father had been close friends with Sir Dick White (who probably came to some of those parties at Carlton Mews), first Head of MI5 and then MI6, who probably ordered the diver Captain Crabb to investigate the propeller of the Soviet cruiser that brought Khrushchev to Britain (he disappeared, either defected, shot by the Soviet sailors on board or killed by his diving partner because he knew too politics and East-West espionage had reached even this far into this remote cottage on a hot summer's day in North Wales… James Bond never deigned to visit the area, but his real-life colleagues most certainly did!

The honey bees buzzed lazily in the heather flowers amongst the rocks and the scent of dry herbs hung in the heat as we dozed lazily after lunch and before the trek back down the railway line to the station where the jeep was parked. Downhill, the wagon coasted by itself; it no longer had brakes so stopping its gentle progress took some adult strength.

XVIII

PONY TREKKING

O
n the horse front, 1954 was to be my last equine experience for many years. Mother sent my youngest sister and myself on a pony trek. My sister must have been twelve or thirteen and I, about ten. We made lists of things to pack and loaded everything into makeshift saddlebags and two small knapsacks for our own backs. We had read of Western horsemen carrying ‘bed rolls', but sleeping bags and modern tents do not drape so conveniently over the pommel. Our saddles were conventional English ones, devoid of hooks for tying things on, so we would be continuously having to pull things up straight again. I was to ride our stolid old Welsh grey mountain pony, Nancy. My sister had borrowed a black, skittish three-year-old gelding that was scarcely broken in yet. Our Mother told us exactly where we were to spend the first, second and third nights and promised she would meet us by car on the second day, to see if we were all right. That way we would not need to carry a change of clothes. Naturally, by the time we could read and write, we knew how to map read and no doubt an adult had helped choose our route, so there would be a minimum of roads – which are dangerous on horseback, besides being boring and not at all adventuresome.

We were told to stop at the blacksmith's shop to have Nancy's shoes tightened and the colt shoed for the first time. We were wary of blacksmiths having heard of the altercation Father had had with another, recalcitrant one.

Under duress, he had agreed to come to the house to shoe an old racehorse with a broken wind (from being galloped full out by a stable hand when she was only two years old) besides a pony as well. When he said he did not have a car, Father offered to come and pick him up and he accepted. Father arrived at the designated hour, only to find the smith busy with other work. The smith refused to come with him, saying he had a lucrative job to do in his own shop and he'd prefer to stay there. Father tried to argue about one's word and something known as ‘commitment', but the smith just became angry, threatening to fight Father over the matter. He took one look at the smith's huge forearms and work-hardened hands and declined, with the words: “Sir, the hands that wield the pen are no match for those that wield the hammer on the anvil.” Surprisingly, the blacksmith capitulated, sulkily climbing into the old American Army Jeep with his tools – but he never uttered a word and Mother had to find a more obliging smith in the future, so it was to this kinder man that we were to go.

We were lucky with the weather, but I was not entirely enthusiastic about this trip. First, it was the horses. Then, I had not chosen this adventure and my sister seemed to have absorbed all our Mother's huge enthusiasm for herself. Lastly, as if I were not already captive on an expedition, Nancy was as pig-headed and bossy as a dozen mothers and sisters.

Once, when Nancy bit another sister on the bridge of the nose, removing her frown for ever, the sister turned and tried to bite her back, hard on the hindquarters… she came away with her mouth so full of thick pony fur that it looked as if she'd swallowed her own grey beard. Not only that, but pony skin is mostly stretched too tight to get a decent bite in with human teeth, so the attempted counter-attack held neither satisfaction for her, nor retribution for Nancy. My pretty sister looked funny with a grey beard, she had asked for it and now she had it. The blood running down from the frown at the bridge of her nose, was less amusing, though there was no drama, no doctors, no stitches and it healed – though she still cannot frown!

I twice saw Nancy discomfited: once on a summer's day, when all the doors were wide open for the breeze, she came into the kitchen and devoured a whole dish of sandwiches prepared for some illustrious guest at teatime. Caught red-hoofed, she was cursed roundly, and guiltily tried to make her hurried exit through the front hall. Unfortunately, iron shoes on smooth tile are like skates on ice. She slithered to and fro and knocked the Italian marble mosaic table in the hall to the ground, smashing it to a million pieces. It took the introduction of Epoxy glue and a couple of kind artist friends a couple of winter months to restore.

The other time was when I saw Nancy desperately cleaning her teeth on the top of the half-door in the stable. It was designed for larger horses and Nancy, at 12.2 hands, could hardly reach it with her teeth, let alone hang her whole head and neck out as larger horse would. She looked pathetic and I confess that I was glad to see her plight – nasty, sadistic little boy that I was. My sisters had decided to make toffee but overcooked it until it was more like caramel. They tried it on our Father who promptly lost two teeth in it, so they tried it on Nancy… who simply loved it, until she got her own teeth stuck together and was forced to try and clean them off on the stable door.

So I was not going to be really riding Nancy, so much as she was going to be taking me for a three-day ride, with incessant pit-stops to savour tufts of grass along the way – inevitably throwing the bag on the pommel of the saddle over her neck so that it hung about her ears. At least Nancy was so unflappable that she didn't seem to mind having a bag on her head as she ate, as long as I didn't annoy her by pulling on the reins and trying to interrupt her snack.

We took the way up the estuary, much as the Koestlers had, in order to get back to their car after dinner, though we kept further out than the sea grass, where streams had eroded deep gullies. On a normal day, we would have enjoyed jumping these little ravines, but inefficiently loaded as we were, we knew that a jump would mean losing our camping gear in brackish water. We rode carefully around to where the original road to our house had been along the shore. Half a mile or so of it had been washed away by a great tidal wave in the 1930s and never repaired since… The tidal wave had flooded farmland that had not been sea for the last few hundred years. When people alighted from the evening train during the tidal wave, at the local ‘halt' or un-staffed platform with room for just one carriage, it was already pitch dark and the little platform was surrounded by water. Since this is Wales, the natural reaction was that this was the end of the world. Everyone started singing hymns in four part harmony… until rowboats appeared out of the night to take people home to their houses. A friend in the village of Ynys was born that very night and so was always known as ‘Mary Mor Don' or ‘Mary Sea Wave' – she was born upstairs at home and her parents found stranded flat fish on the floor of the kitchen when they came down in the morning! I would surely have forgotten her story, had I not happened to attend her funeral quite recently. Appropriately enough, the eulogy included the story of her birth. In the Baptism Registry she is even recorded as ‘Mary Mordon Roberts'.

From there, we had half a mile of asphalt, across the flats that had once been sea, past the train ‘halt' (scene of the supposed apocalypse) and then up a track into the hills. My sister's pony found everything new and frightening. He shied at a bee, a stream in the valley below, the glinting of the sun through the oak leaves – anyone would think he'd never been for a walk in his life. He did all the worrying for plodding, phlegmatic Nancy, who couldn't care a hoot.

Soon we were above the tree line and cutting north along the Roman Road, which was surely much older than the Romans. By late morning (we had started at dawn), we were down from the high land and crossed the river Afon (river in Welsh) Dwyryd (which fed our branch of the estuary, the Traeth Bâch, or Small Beach) using the stone bridge at Maentwrog for the crossing and so reached the blacksmith's shop. This was an important scheduled stop because the young pony had never been shod before and would need shoes for riding so far and hard, especially on roads.

The blacksmith might just as well have been Joe from Dickens's
Great Expectations
. Like ourselves, he did not have electricity and used a hand bellows as he worked. He was rail-thin with great knots of sinew and muscle rippling up and down his bare arms. He had a full head of wavy grey hair and a way of whistling in two parts, the tenor part coming from his side teeth and the alto from his lips. Like Joe, he too ‘did not have his letters'. Father had once done a meticulous drawing of a pair of strap hinges he needed for the well cover, but when he showed them to the blacksmith, he was impatient and just said: “I never had my letters. Tell me what you want and I'll remember the size until my dying day.” “Oh no,” cried Father, “you mean it's going to take you that long to make them?” He was reassured that if he went for a pint, they'd be ready afterwards. I happen to know that the pint Father would drink would be a bottle of Worcester Sauce with a Guinness chaser. That was his well-known foible.

So the young pony led us on quite a dance. He kicked incessantly, until the blacksmith told me to hold up the hoof diagonally across from the one he was working on. Meanwhile, my sister held his head down to stop him rearing. That way, he could no longer kick – for, try as he might, he simply could not stand on one leg to kick! Like so many animals, horses cannot bear ridicule and the very thought of falling flat on his face, forced him to calm his protests. Nevertheless, it took a full three hours to shoe him – even with the blacksmith's calming whistle in harmony. Nancy, on the other hand, was ready to go in a few minutes and couldn't wait to be back out of the forge and in the land of green grass again.

We finally picked up the continuation of the Roman Road along the high ground above the tree line. In places there were large paving stones (which the ponies avoided as one avoids a patch of ice). They could have been laid by the Romans when they came to try and conquer the Welsh, but the road must also have seen two millennia of repairs. Alas, today it has been asphalted over, though it is still single track.

I sat, tired and mindless on Nancy, brought back to consciousness from time to time when she veered off the track to check out another tuft of grass. I would pull on her reins as hard as I could and she would do her best to ignore me. Suddenly I realized that the knapsack on my back was empty. It had split open at the bottom and gradually disgorged its contents, bit by bit over the last six miles.

My sister, ready to take command, said she would sew it up again… until we saw that the sewing kit had been in my pack! It had also contained what snacks we might have had, some apples and perhaps even a little precious chocolate. The visit to the blacksmith had taken so long, that it was getting late, and though the sun would only set at ten o'clock (being summer and this far north), we did not now have time to go back in search of a few small possessions. We rode on dejectedly to the farm where we were to camp for the night and graze the horses. It was down on the edge of the flat land at the bottom of the hills and we were exhausted when we finally reached it and introduced ourselves to the farmer.

He showed us the paddock with an old bathtub as a drinking trough, where we could leave the ponies for the night. We pitched our tent quickly (we had often practised when we went camping for a night on the hills near home) and walked off to the village of Gareg in search of food.

XIX

A SHEPHERD SWIMS

W
hen our Mother had set us on our way, she had casually mentioned that she had no cash on her and that we would have to charge things we needed, such as grazing and food for ourselves. Since credit cards did not yet exist, we would have to ask vendors to give us credit, to send our Mother a bill and she would pay it. Such a request would have been perfectly normal in those days.

Few people carried much cash – nowadays, armed with a small plastic card, things can be easier – though they may encourage profligacy!

We went straight to the village shop, but of course it was closed (it must have been after 8 pm). The only other business that might have any food was ‘Yr Ring', the pub. We were much too young to be allowed in and Mother disapproved of such places, but we went around to the kitchen door at the back. The English called it The Brondanw Arms, after the large house (or ‘Plâs') where Clough and Amabel Williams-Ellis lived, but it was a hotbed of Welsh Nationalism, and they stubbornly called it ‘Yr Ring' and only Welsh was spoken at the bar.

The back door was opened by the publican's wife and my sister explained our predicament. She told us to wait a moment while she talked to her husband, and soon came back and ushered us into her kitchen, sat us down with beer mugs full of milk and started cooking a feast for hungry children: fried bangers (sausages), eggs, bubble-and-squeak (fried potato and cabbage) and fried bread. She was making us ‘tea' and that was probably what anyone nearby with enough money would be eating. Not that they were fat, they walked everywhere and most were manual labourers. As we ate, she gently asked us a few questions and from time to time went out to the bar – from which came the sound of hymns being sung in Welsh, telling us that a good time was being had out there. Once one has reached that degree of inebriation, the morose stage, there's nothing like a good hymn sung in four-part harmony to drown the soul in melancholy. She would come back with beer mugs to wash at the kitchen sink, then she would wipe her hands on her apron and chat a little more.