Everything I Have Always Forgotten (25 page)

While he was still cooking, I recounted the story of saving the ‘Flying Dutchman' and how I had been paid five whole pounds for it. That was when he told me that I had been robbed, for I was entitled (under the International Laws of Salvage) to one third of the value of the vessel, probably a few hundred pounds. He made me feel stupid and naïve but I am quite sure that in my shoes, he would have accepted nothing at all. I had only accepted the £5 because the owner insisted so forcefully and as Father pointed out, he had every reason to insist: because once I had accepted the £5, I could no longer make further claims of salvage rights! I've never had the opportunity to salvage another vessel so that knowledge has not advanced me one whit.

As we sat down to table, he came to sit at the head, bearing an Ordnance Survey 1 inch/mile map and another bottle of wine. Suddenly he was all enthusiasm, saying: “Well, of course you could follow the Path of the Saints: the twenty thousand saints who are buried on Bardsey Island after their pilgrimages there. Even the Great Wizard Merlin is said to be among them, but he's been ‘buried' in a dozen places that I know of. Did you know that three pilgrimages to Bardsey used to be worth a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or was it just to Rome? I forget. Did you know that ‘Bardsey' (or Ynys Enlli, in Welsh) was also called ‘Island of the Saints' – besides ‘Island of Birds' and ‘Island of Currents'?” At this point, he spread out the map, pushing the dinner things to one side. “If you go straight from here north to Clynnog where Saint Beuno is buried, then follow the north coast of the Lleyn Peninsula down here… to Aberdaron – that's where they might have found passage to Bardsey, so I expect you still can [it was only 1400 years later in history]. There's nowhere else you could get a boat to take you. Then, when you get there, you will see the remains of the abbey. There's a lighthouse there too – I forget the timing of its flashes – but it's an essential light when you're sailing round the point of the Lleyn up to the Menai Straits between Anglesey and the mainland. The tides run hard further out into the Irish Channel, so you want to keep in close to the coast, but that point there is very rocky, so you won't want to come in too close.” He became so animated, it was as if suddenly he was back in his sailing boat with bare feet, instead of slippers – his old-fashioned climbing boots still had nails on the soles and jagged incisor teeth on the toes and heels. If you walked on a slate floor in them, you could slip up as if on ice (not to mention scratching up the floor). Now they sat waiting patiently for him by the front door: like old dogs hoping to go for a walk.

With that, we had Father's blessing – not that it would have occurred to me that anyone might think it a bad idea. I wasn't brought up to think that doing anything adventurous was a bad idea… short of some suicidal folly.

Alan and I washed the dishes as best we could in cold water, by the light of a guttering candle and staggered off to bed up the stone stairs. The treads were so worn by 400 years of feet that the risers hardly existed in the centre. To the sides, where the risers still stood, bright green moss grew on them year round, even during hot summer spells, such as the present one.

We slept in the bedroom above the kitchen, the one where smoke sometimes seeped up through the floorboards, and could be mistaken for the ‘real' ghosts that pervaded the house. It was somewhat warmer there than in the master bedroom (where Father slept anyway), whose bed (in my experience) never dried more than to a heavy dankness. The next stage would be outright dampness, its usual state.

The ‘priest holes', I had been told, were to hide Catholic priests during the Reformation, but I have since learned that, while they may sometimes have been used for such a purpose, they were originally put into large houses as safes in which to hide valued pewter ware and any silver they might own (which was little in the sixteenth century – the vast silver resources of Latin America were not yet fully exploited).

The ghosts came from stories of the violence and shame of past occupants. As a matter of fact, the family that built this house named ‘Parc', was so wealthy, educated and informed, that the master of the house had a standing order with a bookseller in London, to send him every new play by Mr. Shakespeare, as soon as it was published.

One story told about Parc related to two brothers, tenant farmers, who lived there alone, farming the rough, highland fields around. One was perhaps not strong and certainly lazy. He did the accounts and a spot of cooking, but it was his brother who worked from before dawn to after dusk, trying to eke a living out of the poor soil and hazardous grazing. One night, he came home in the dark to see his brother leaning over the cauldron hanging above the fire. On a table, stood a candle and their account ledger. One glance at the accounts was enough to tell him they were bankrupt. Mad with rage at his lazy brother, he took up the great axe used for splitting wood and cleaved his weak brother in two, as he stirred the stew… then he hanged himself in remorse – from the kettle chain, that one right there, in the fireplace.

There were other stories, of young people disappointed in love and so on, but Mother was told one, when she was alone there one night. It was soon after my Parents' marriage and she had two wolfhounds with her at the time. Father had announced that he felt he should go and sit with an old neighbour who was dying and alone. He promised he would be back by morning, whether the neighbour died or not.

On the way down the valley to the dying man, he met another neighbour who lived further up the valley. He asked him if he would mind looking in on Mother, who was alone. “Perhaps you could chop a little wood for her?” He suggested. Well, the neighbour promised he would and indeed soon knocked at the door.

Mother invited him in and gladly accepted his company for a while. She accepted his offer to split some wood. But each time he came in with another armful, he would say things like: “So you're all alone in the Parc, by yourself, indeed. You couldn't pay me to spend an hour alone at night here.” The wolfhounds were uneasy and kept pacing around (who knows if they had any kind of bedding to sleep on? Wolfhounds are skinny and hate sleeping on hard, cold, stone floors).

Finally, she had made him a cup of tea and he accepted it in front of the crackling fire: “Ever seen the legs of the fellow who chopped his brother in half with an axe? They say he hung himself in shame from this very kettle chain here.” No, Mother said she hadn't seen the legs yet.

Then he continued: “Mind you, they say there's a great treasure buried here just below on the terraces where the orchard used to be in my granddaddy's day. They say that if you strike the lintel of this house with steel, at midnight, if you are the chosen one, a white dog will lead you to the treasure and start digging for you. But there again, they say that if you are not the chosen one, two great black dogs with fire in their eyes will hunt you over the mountains until you fall from a cliff and die. The ravens will find you in the morning…

“Well Missus, I'll be going. But no, you would never ever get me to stay here by myself alone. Not me. Well good night, Missus…” and he was gone in the dark.

As a teenager, I later regaled a small barbeque party, in this same house, with some of these tales. One guest, brought by neighbouring friends, burned his hand cooking hotdogs and listening to the stories at the same time… It was Mick Jagger – he still had a country accent, but the Stones were already making quite a name for themselves. The stories that we enjoyed so much together were not such fun for my young Mother, all alone and with no one to go to for company.

XXV

INTO THE WILD

I
n the morning, we both overslept and I was shocked when Father carried me out from my bed and dropped me in the ‘laundry', a slate-lined pond in front of the house with steps down to the water where a spring came out – the water source for the house. We no longer used it as a laundry, since we used the water to drink. The spring water was an icy shock, but less of a shock than his playful gesture and above all, the human contact with Father, who had not carried me since I was an infant…

Confused by such intimacy and playfulness, I helped Alan to pack up. Somehow, I had become accustomed to the fact that once we are no longer infants, parents do not touch their children. They send their children away to school to be chastised with corporal punishment. Strangers, teachers were hired to touch them with brutal strokes of the cane, lash or whip. Parents don't touch their children – for fear that they become ‘soft' or perhaps develop an Oedipus Complex? And here was Father actually carrying me outside to dunk me in icy water! It was not the icy water that shocked me but the warm grasp of his strong arms holding me.

The next time I remember touching him was some twenty-two years later, when I came to spend time with him as he died. I took his hand, huge but feeble by then. In those twenty-two years, there had been occasions, such as when I returned, hitchhiking, from many months in Iran and I knew he was excited that I was coming home. When I knocked on his study door, he must have been standing almost behind it, for it opened immediately – I would have embraced him as I had learned to do in the Middle East. I would have even settled for his hand – yet his hands were tightly clasped behind his back and his greeting was only a broad smile and “Hello”.

We were on our way again, our purpose blessed and confirmed, back up to the ancient track we had been following the day before. We were not stiff from the exercise of the day before, we had been walking all day every day for weeks already. The weather continued hot, dry and sunny. The landscape was changing as we went further into the younger geology of Snowdonia, into ever sharper crags. Far below, on our left, the Traeth Mawr estuary was flat as the sea, green with marshy fields. I had been devouring Tolkien, volume by volume, as Father reviewed first
The Hobbit
and then the three successive volumes of
The Lord of the Rings
and I imbued the cloud-robed crags to the right with goblins, elves and of course, my hero, Strider… I admired Gandalf as well, of course, but more as a father figure – and even Father's beard was not long and white enough for that role.

Ahead and slightly to our right, the great sharp peak of Snowdon itself stood against the sky, the eastern side sharp and craggy, the western rounder, smoother. We even considered walking to the summit (yet again) but decided that we could not get distracted at this point but should press on with our objective. Besides, where could we safely store our packs while we made this diversion? The tree line in North Wales is naturally very low, higher than 200 metres above sea level there are almost no trees, probably because the earth is too shallow at that altitude. Perhaps the tree line was once higher, but when the forests were cut or burned, erosion washed out the earth and new trees could not take hold – much as the Dalmatian coast has been eroded since the woods were cut down to build Venice and its fleets. Homer wrote of Ithaca as a very green and wooded island but that was before the Venetians and goats arrived like locusts, denuding the island, leaving it defenceless against erosion. There are exceptions, such as some sheltered hanging valleys or some government highland plantings of conifers, but in general the mountains are treeless – making for spectacular views, quite unlike the mountains of north-east America, which are so heavily wooded that views are few and far between. The sharp peak of Snowdon, seen from the south, is pure rock and on that side is a sheer cliff that has been used for training for Everest mountaineers. The side flanks of the mountain give way to grass and heather that clothe the rugged slopes in softer forms. Trees only survive down near the bottoms of valleys.

We followed the ancient track over the foot of Cnicht, forded the headwaters of the Afon Dylif at a waterfall that can be seen as a splash of white for miles around… so once again there was a spectacular view down the hills to the coast and Cardigan Bay. Here the slopes were steep, but our track kept to the contours, so the going was easy enough. Then it dropped downhill into ancient natural woods of oak and beech, where we reached a farm track that turned into a single-lane road. Here we changed course from the way I had come on horseback, so as to avoid having to walk along two miles of main road, over the bridge at the Aberglaslyn Pass and up the west bank of the River Glaslyn. Instead, we stayed on the east bank that falls sheer into the water, except that an old, disused narrow-gauge slate railway had been carved into the rock. We could not have taken it with ponies, because it entailed going through a few fairly short tunnels. The roofs of these tunnels dripped constantly, despite the general drought of summer and naturally we went back into Tolkien and threatened each other that: “Gollum is living in here, in this dark, damp tunnel. He'll soon jump out on us, thinking that we're carrying his ‘Precious' and tear at our flesh with his filthy claws and rotted teeth.” Only much later was I to learn that the mountains and old mines of Wales were indeed an original source of inspiration to the writer.

The ponies may have been terrified by passing buses belching diesel fumes but they certainly would have refused point blank to go into these dark tunnels, Gollum or no.

The pass is spectacular, for the river Glaslyn has carved out a gorge through the mountain and both sides are sheer rock, with a few brave conifers holding on here and there. Besides, we felt infinitely superior walking alone on our side of the river, while tourists in cars and buses were all on the road on the other side. In 1955, there were no rails (they had been salvaged for iron in the War), but today the line has been restored and opened as the Porthmadog-Caernarfon Welsh Highland Railway.

We walked through the tourist town of Beddgelert with its grey stone buildings, hotels and shops. Some time prior to the mid-nineteenth century, a legend was created to attract tourists. George Borrow recounts it in his book
Wild Wales
(1862). In the legend, Prince Llewelyn went out hunting, leaving his baby son in the custody of his faithful dog Gelert. Upon his return, he could not find the child and his dog's muzzle was covered in blood. Mad with rage he killed the faithful hound, but then found his baby son safe and sound – and the corpse of the wolf that Gelert had killed to save him. The Prince buried his dog and you can visit its ‘grave' – the ‘Grave of Gelert'. Apparently the name Gelert actually comes from St Gelert, a local saint who lived in the sixth century. Living in Wales myself, I felt superior to the tourists who came to ‘Ooh and aah' at the magnificent scenery. So we just walked on through the little town without stopping, though Borrow himself said that the Aberglaslyn Pass (the gorge though which we had just walked) rivalled in beauty any such gorge in the Alps or Pyrenees.