Everything I Have Always Forgotten (23 page)

I swam ashore again and tried to irritate Alan with “He was too scared to swim out and save the boat” – he responded with a mature: “Someone had to light the fire and start cooking dinner, while you were messing around out there. Now what are you going to do?” The irony that it was a Flying Dutchman Class that had washed up and the ghost legend of the Flying Dutchman, was not lost on us.

Next morning, before the tide rose again, I went out to admire my catch. She was lying on the sea grass, in a bed of rose sea-pinks, buzzing with honeybees which only sting when you tread on them. Poor things, we often got our bare feet stung and pulling out the bee's barb disembowelled them, so they died. It was not their fault if we clumsily trod on them, and it was very painful – I seem to remember that we followed up with an intense blue dye that we used to tint the whitewash for the outside of the house – I suppose the dye was alkaline and relieved the pain. This time I was careful where I set my bare feet and was not stung.

XXIII

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

N
ow that we had the wherewithal to travel, five whole pounds of it, we packed our rucksacks and set out to walk back to the house where Father was holed-up to write. It was about fifteen miles over the mountains, around the head of ‘our' estuary and across the head of its twin – the one that had been reclaimed as farmland in the early nineteenth century.

As we set out, we must have looked like Hobbits, with our small, boyish statures and large rucksacks, but at that moment, we felt more like Tolkien's Aragorn, the Strider. We were well rested, the day was bright and a great trek lay ahead of us so there was purpose in our strides. True, after a few miles in the heat of the day, we really would be again reduced to Hobbits: tired, short-legged folk, out of their depth on a long journey, but nevertheless stubbornly trudging on.

We were two little boys in shorts. As we plodded ahead, sights evoked stories from the past but once we were in unfamiliar country (on our third day), my memory kept itself busy with all the miscellaneous thoughts that tumble higgledy piggledy out of the dusty, disorganised attic of my mind.

I had only one pair of long trousers that I had inherited. They were chequered and my family had dubbed them my ‘Newmarket Bags' – Newmarket being one of the most famous horse racecourses in England, with many shady ‘bookies' or illegal betting agents who wore flashy clothes, hence Newmarket Bags. So of course we wore shorts. We had no sophisticated all-weather gear, ‘Gortex' didn't exist and whatever was available for the Everest expedition (no doubt ‘oilskins') was not available because of clothes rationing – not to mention price. I had a cheap plastic mackintosh which I had shortened so it would not get in the way of my legs and stuck the hem to the collar with paper glue to make a hood – of course it fell off the first time I used it. There was no plastic glue around. As for our footwear, Alan had a pair of real leather boots because his father said that his feet had stopped growing, so it was worth buying good ones. I wore high-top plimsolls with very thin soles. I wonder if they were invented by Samuel Plimsoll, who perfected the Plimsoll Line – that you may see on the side of every commercial vessel. It shows the safe water line of a laden ship in waters of varying salinities.

One of Father's secretaries was called Miss Plimsoll, and she assured us that it was indeed her great grandfather who had invented ‘the line'. I wish I had asked her about the shoes as well, I do seem to remember that she was fleet of foot. By then they were manufactured by Dunlop and were also called ‘daps' (Dunlop Athletic Shoes) – but to me they were ‘plims'. I must have walked and climbed through quite a few pairs.

It was many years before Father hired a year-round secretary to take care of the business side of being an author, so he took to hiring a secretary for a short period each year. There was a woman who came from London and stayed at our house. The first morning, he showed her to her small office where a year's unopened mail awaited her attention. He asked her to open every envelope and sort it all out, making a list of questions for him to answer. When she did not come down for lunch, he went in search of her and found her crumpled over the desk in tears. There was not a single letter in sight – she had burned the lot in the boiler in the kitchen! The very sight of a year's mail had been too much for her… he used to say that it took him ten years to sort out the problems created by all that unanswered mail.

Then there was Mr Bigger. He had been Father's secretary at the Admiralty during the War. He lodged with two spinster sisters in the village, rare birds in that they were Catholics. There were very few Catholics in Wales, where non-conformist chapels and the Anglican Church covered the spiritual needs of most people.

Mr Bigger was a flabby, mild-mannered little man and he would have to walk over the hill to our house to work every day – perhaps three-quarters of a mile. The first morning he did not arrive. Mother suggested that the walk was too far. Father pointed out that during the War he had walked to work and back, several miles, all the time that there were no buses at all, for want of petrol and drivers. Eventually Mr Bigger telephoned from the village to say that the geese at old Mr Edward's little farm would not let him by… we all thought that hilarious. Even I (the smallest) knew that if you charged a hissing, threatening goose, it would turn and run. But Mr Bigger was a city man and very much a secretary at that. From then on, he had to take the long way round, by road and then up our rocky driveway. There were no geese loose at the larger farm on the hilltop.

As an extreme counterpoint to Mr Bigger, there was Candida, the daughter of John Betjeman (the poet and crusader for the preservation of Victorian architectural buildings). She was a quite different kind of secretary: a blond Bardot bombshell before Bardot made the scene. She was in such awe of Father (what had Betjeman told her?) that she wore silk miniskirt suits of the most brilliant colours that she had bought specially to come and work for Father. She fitted into our crazy lifestyle by being barefoot all the time, but she still wore the tight little silk suits to go sailing. If she was impressed by Father, I was doubly impressed by her…

Alan and I walked half over, half around, the small hill behind the house, following a tiny path created more by sheep than by man – the very path attempted by Mr Bigger a few years before. The hill was overgrown with gorse bushes, their dark green thorns a strict warning to keep our distance, their deep yellow flowers a brilliant contrast to the green. In between the gorse there were bare rocks and patches of short grass, grazed by hardy little Welsh sheep that had left wisps of their wool on the gorse thorns. In other places the hill was covered in bracken, a wild fern that overgrows the grass. In those days, farmers burned it or cut it for use as bedding for their cattle, but nowadays its smoke is considered carcinogenic and such practices are illegal. When young, bracken closely resembles fiddleheads, but as far as I know, it was never eaten. In the autumn, it goes an orange brown, so whole hillsides look as if they are aflame.

We went through an old iron kissing-gate (devised by farmers to withstand sheep) and looked down into a little barrel-shaped glen that led down to the tidal beach. The small valley was shaded with a few old oak trees that leaned in towards each other from the sides, almost meeting at the top. In the eighteenth century, ships were built here, as the natural shape of the narrow valley allowed men to work up the side of the ship without much (if any) scaffolding. When I was younger, perhaps still at the harness age, Mother took us on picnics there in the shade of the oaks. She loved to sketch the gnarled old trees in pastels, no doubt the offspring of the original oaks used to build the boats in days gone by. The place had a whiff of magic to my young mind, a place associated with elves, fairies and goblins.

Now we bounced down into the valley and up the other side, then skirted a couple of hay fields, keeping strictly to the sides so as not to trample the crop. There were foxgloves growing along the edges of the fields, their tall stalks hung with purple trumpets the size of fingers – hence the name ‘digitalis'. As children we had been warned about how poisonous they are, but that never seemed to stop us from wearing them on all ten fingers – and probably sucking those fingers afterwards. The morning was already warm and a skylark hovered high against the blue sky, as if held up by its own frenetic song, rather than constantly beating wings – invisible from such a distance.

We passed the little grey church – Eglwys Llanfihangel-y-Traethau – with its walled cemetery grown with tall yew trees. There I had dozed through many an interminable sermon. Near the west door stood a strange vertical gravestone, about five feet high and roughly square (8 inches or so to each side). It was engraved with letters – just recently deciphered by an archaeologist friend – in abbreviated Latin and mostly Roman characters. It was a tombstone from the twelfth century and read: “Here is the grave of Wledr, Mother of Hoedliw who first built this Church in the time of Owain Gwynedd.” King Owain ruled Gwynedd from 1137 to 1170, so the walls of the Church are some 150 years older than those of nearby Harlech Castle's Norman masonry.

The church itself had been rebuilt and repaired so many times over the centuries, it now looked like a non-descript little chapel, built in the nineteenth century, its very ancient origins covered over with pebble-dash and plaster.

We went down the lane between high stone walls, from the church and past the large, square rectory (forever dour beneath its great dark pine trees) it was said that a man, jilted at the altar, had hung himself from the great old, gnarled oak tree. That was where my brother had fallen over a sleeping cow as he ran down the lane in the dark of night on his way to catch an early train, giving him quite a fright since he was just thinking of the jilted suicide at the time. From there we carried on down the hill to the hamlet know as Ynys (pronounced ‘un-iss'), which means ‘island' in Welsh.

From the small sprinkling of cottages, the road runs across flat land that had been sea when Harlech Castle was built over seven hundred years ago. When my namesake Owain Glyn Dwr (the renowned Welsh Nationalist-separatist hero and ‘guerrilla' – Father even claimed he was an ancestor) captured (in 1404) and held the castle for four years, it was still on a tidal sea and remained so until 150 years ago. Now it is rather marshy farmland. After half a mile we crossed the railway line at Ty Gwyn Halt, the one with a platform long enough for one door of the local train, where benighted passengers had thought it was the End of the World when they alighted in the dark only to find themselves surrounded by seawater from the great tidal wave. After that flat land, we walked up into the ancient highlands of the geological Harlech Dome. We trudged up a pretty lane which followed a small cascading river in its narrow valley, heavily wooded with 300-year-old oak trees with their very dark green canopy of leaves and lush green, moss-covered rocks below, where jagged edges of splintered rock were wrapped and cushioned by a velvet carpet of moss. The trees were clad with lichen, but only on their north sides. In this dark shade, the air smelled cool and fresh. The great roots of trees writhed, clutching piles of river rocks to their wooden embrace. The small river tumbled white and foaming down to its more peaceful way on the flat land, on down to the ocean. Bright rays of sunshine sparkled here and there, where beams of light found a path through the heavy foliage.

We walked past the tiny one-room cottage that Father had rented as his first house in Wales – when he was sixteen. It had been built as the first school in Meirionnydd. Now it was overgrown with trees. Just as it had been when he first rented it, there was still a small spring that came up in front of the hearth and ran across the floor and out of the door. He had kept his food in red and white spotted handkerchiefs, their corners tied together and hung from nails in the low rafters – out of reach of the rats. His annual rent had been two pounds, four days work on the farm and two pounds of honey – the cash had come out of his school pocket money. In those days, he thought little of walking from his school in Surrey to North Wales.

From there we followed a track down the bottom of a hanging valley, known locally as a
cwm
. This valley was wooded with oak, with some green fields surrounded by great dry-stone walls. Now another stream ran alongside us. The track led us past a small lake full of water lilies, a lush contrast to the barren landscape above, into which we were about to climb. We climbed up to an ancient, lonely church on a hill, where a service was held only once or twice a year. The view from the graveyard is spectacular and panoramic, so we stopped a few moments to take it in.

Our progress was much as it had been the year before, when my sister and I were riding the ponies – except that we did not have to stop to be shod at the blacksmith's, nor did we stop to graze, just to catch our breath and drink deeply from the rivulets that, despite the drought, still tinkled out of the bogs. But there was this vast difference: I had chosen this expedition, I had financed it, if I suffered it was my choice. Again, we had a hot, sunny day, too hot for comfort. I remember the toil of climbing steep slopes with my knapsack, the drudgery of putting one foot in front of the other, an automatic movement that somehow invoked the image that I was an overloaded truck with a 16-speed gearbox with which I was for ever ‘changing' gears up and down. On this ancient road, we were above the tree line. The way was surely chosen to be in open country where brigands and highwaymen could not easily hide. Nowadays, law and the welfare state had put such dangers behind – but the view from up here was spectacular.

We looked down over the flat land that had been sea, the land across which we had just walked. We looked over to the hill behind my home, the Ynys, and we could see how it had been an island, all it took was to replace the wet green fields in our mind's eye with tidal sea water – for the fields were as flat as any water ever was. We could not see the house; the hill hid it from this angle. South and west of Ynys was the great sweep of depositional sand that holds Cardigan Bay in its arc