Everything I Have Always Forgotten (3 page)

The next year, in this peripatetic, half-homeless life, we spent the winter in a real medieval castle called Naworth, also part of the Howard fiefdom in Cumberland. It had been converted into four living units, each with a corner tower and one long, narrow, habitable wall of rooms. Father wrote in the great gallery, a room perhaps a hundred feet long, lined with portraits of ancestors – ideal for pacing to and fro as he cogitated.

Alas I was too young to participate in a battle, organized by my older siblings. The children of the castle defended it against an onslaught of neighbouring friends and cousins. They used paper bags full of flour and the fire hoses and stirrup pumps intended for serious defence of the castle in a conflagration. Everyone finished up looking like papiermâché puppets. The courtyard was partially flooded from the fire hoses and in the night it froze. Next day I went sliding on the ice and Mother broke her coccyx, falling on some outdoor stone steps. She had to sit painfully on a doughnut-shaped cushion for many weeks thereafter.

I do not know if we were really hungry in those days (as one of my sisters tells me), but I do remember where Mother had hidden the precious, rationed ingredients to make a Christmas pudding. There were raisins, sultanas and lots of sugar. I had never before seen such sweet bounty and soon made myself thoroughly sick out loud (as Mother too graphically termed the act of vomiting!) I am sure I was severely punished and no one, myself included, was happy with the greatly diminished size of the pudding. However green I looked after being sick out loud, it did not stop me from going to Mother one day and saying: “Owain's pale and weakly, Doctor says he needs more choccy.” Disgusting child that I was…

On Christmas Day, I was in bed with my youngest sister. We were exploring our stockings – what could be more wonderful for two very young children to find in their Christmas stockings than a whole fresh honeycomb from a neighbour's hives? We scooped out the honey with our fingers until they went right through the wax on the other side and honey flowed stickily everywhere. I particularly remember how delightful it felt between my toes… until some grown-up came with harsh words and clean sheets.

That winter, I often played with a boy of my age and eventually caught whooping cough from him. His father owned a four-seated air taxi. At the time, the favoured cure for whooping cough was to fly in an unpressurised plane to 5 or 7,000 metres… so, from whom better to catch the wretched bug than the son of the owner of an air taxi? I loved the flight, soaring over the rolling lush green hills and dark, almost black tarns or inland meres of the Lake District and buzzing Naworth Castle until people came outside and waved… but I came back still whooping, while my friend shook it off.

There was a biochemist friend of my Parents, who had inherited some vast expanse of highland with its peat bogs. There was an old tradition of cutting blocks of peat and drying them for sale as a heating fuel. I remember the miles of narrow-gauge railway tracks across the moors with small wagons pushed by men to bring in the harvested peat blocks. This friend decided to set up a factory to make other products from the peat. After each product was produced, there was always a by-product left over which he made into something else until finally there was a colourless, odourless, slightly viscous material with high heat-retaining properties – he sold it to an ice cream factory as an additive filler. That was the part I remember so vividly, though it would be some years before I actually tasted this mythological treat known as ice cream.

Soon after the whooping cough interlude, Mother and I flew down to North Wales with our friend the air taxi man. I remember clearly how we circled low over Snowdonia. The day was sunny and clear; each rock and each path stood out vividly below. The grass was emerald green, the lakes the deepest blue and the craggy rocks in greys and blacks. There were many tiny walkers and climbers below, wearing bright clothing, hiking up the easier paths. The exhilaration of flying over this scene was god-like. I caught another bug up there in that tiny plane: from then on, I wanted to know those rocks and crags and precipices intimately. I wanted to break them as one breaks a wild stallion. I wanted to learn to conquer them by scaling their rugged heights and scrambling over them.

Almost twenty years later (as a young man) one Easter day in Paris, I flew once more over those brilliantly clear mountains, crags and lakes – this time without a plane, just on the power of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony which entered my eyes as a full-spectrum rainbow and left through my outstretched arms, from under my fingernails. The rainbow flowed through me and supported my flight as I turned left and right, sweeping up like a raven on the updraft, then gliding down into the valleys. Later that day we ran through the courtyards of the Louvre and saw the significance of architecture as it defines the open space within it, just as much as it exists in the form of walls, floors and windows. For the first time, I saw and appreciated
empty
space as architecture. Now I came to understand that you can construct empty space as an edifice by defining that space with walls.

Suddenly, the bouncing of the aircraft on the multiple up and downdrafts over the mountains took its toll. The pilot quickly handed me a paper airsickness bag. Once used, he slid open the cockpit canopy and tossed it out… I had a dreadful image of the bag landing squarely on the unsuspecting head of a passing, sweating hiker… but was assured that it would disintegrate on the way down. Anyway, when those hills did indeed become my playground and I hiked for days and nights on end, I never feared being crowned with a vomit-laden paper bag. For one thing, it's very tricky flying in these mountains, with such violent thermals and I have no recollection of ever seeing light aircraft flying low over those mountains. Many a mountain rescue helicopter has crashed. Endangering oneself is one thing, but doing so endangers many others.

We flew on south towards our house on its estuary and located a field a mile or two away, where the locals said a small plane had landed during the War. It turned out to be surrounded on all four sides by power lines, besides having high banks underneath with hedges growing on them. The surprised pilot said it was quite impossible to land there. Even if he could fly under the wires and over the banks and hedges, he could never take off again. We flew on and tried the beach of the estuary in front of our house. We must have radio-telephoned Father, because he was already on the beach with our American Army Jeep, waiting for us.

The pilot thought he could land where there were ‘car tracks' on the sand, but one very tentative touch-and-go threatened to flip the plane over in a somersault and he was not prepared to try again… Father in his Jeep had been driving on soft sand which was totally unsuitable for landing. By this time, most of the anti-aircraft poles (of which, more later) had been removed, but the sand remained stubbornly deep and soft.

We flew west, towards the open sea and there, by the salt marshes where I would later spend happy hours trying to shoot wild duck, we found an unobstructed field. Hoping that there were no rabbit holes to catch our wheels, we landed with some wrenching bangs, bumps and bounces. That was where Father finally chased us down. Later, we learned that the famous field where we had first tried to land had killed the pilot and crew of the only aircraft to land there – a fatal crash-landing due to engine trouble! A small detail that was missing in local lore which might well have made all the difference in the recommendation…

III

HOME

O
n the edge of a great tidal estuary, twice daily transformed from sea to sand to sea again, sits a simple square white house. It was to become our long-term home over the next thirty years. The tides from the estuary come in from the Irish Sea, which is warmed by the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean. It sweeps all the way up the east coast of the United States, then across the North Atlantic, before embracing the coasts of Brittany, the Scilly Isles and up between Wales and Ireland. Yet it remains a current warm enough to temper these latitudes. At sea level, a freeze is exceptional; a few hundred feet up and away from the sea, it's a very different story. The opposite shore is a rocky promontory (dividing twin estuaries) that had belonged to a wealthy amateur botanist in the nineteenth century. He had brought back specimens of rhododendron from Nepal, bamboo from China and redwood from California and had planted a lush forest garden on the promontory, to this day called the Gwyllt (or ‘Wilderness'). His large house, with its tall, barley-sugar chimneys, nestles down on the edge of the tidal estuary, constantly changing from sand to sea or sand and sea. The property was bought by the celebrated architect and environmentalist, Clough Williams-Ellis in the mid-1920s and converted into an eccentric hotel, his ‘Experiment in Sympathetic Development': Portmeirion. From our house, a mile away, it looked like a brightly coloured Italianate village in the distance. He denied being influenced by Portofino (which he must have known, even then, but the parallel becomes more evident further on in this story). As a very young child I had precociously declared that Portmeirion had been built during the ‘
Early Ice Cream Age
'… what did I know of ice cream at the time? The hotel remained a magical mélange of architectural styles, a mirage in my mind. As for the frozen dessert, I had to wait for refrigeration and the end of sugar rationing… for Britain maintained food rationing until 1954 largely because of the cost of maintaining its armaments (three full Naval fleets and one-hundred-andtwenty RAF squadrons worldwide).

The estuary is a mile across and some days, when the sun shines, the shadows of clouds chase each other across the brilliantly-lit expanses of sand and water, bringing a rapidly-changing light, like a fast-forward film of clouds. Ever changing from grey to bright light – moody as Mother. It was true that Father could also explode like a thunder-clap when disturbed by children's games. He had a huge voice and large presence. His anger was an avalanche or violent squall, driving us noise-makers into submissive silence and seclusion. Some child once remarked that: “Daddy's thundering again.”

The situation of the house was remote and wild beyond what one might imagine of Britain – and indeed remains largely unspoilt to this day. True, we could see the hotel a mile away across the estuary and a few other houses appeared as tiny dots still further off. On the far side of the twin estuary stood the small, silted-up harbour town of Porthmadog, but that is two miles away. On a very still night, one might hear the train a mile and a half away, but otherwise there were no sounds of civilization, no cars, or trucks, or buses. Our neighbours on either side were several hundred yards away. To the east was old Mr Edwards (the farmer) who had no motor, save his son's old lorry for the hay harvest. To the west stood the house of old Mrs Thomas who must have had some money because she drove a little old Ford from the 1930s, but with petrol rationing, she used it only once every two weeks. Since none of us had electricity, motor mowers, chain saws or today's other noisy contraptions, the only noise was the sound of the seagulls, the wind and perhaps the waves at high tide. In the isolated silence, we could hear the blood pressure pounding in our ears – a rhythmic reminder that we were alive, but certainly no proof that anyone else in the whole wide world was also alive…

Then the clouds would pour rain here and there on the scene, while all the rest remained in bright sunlight. Much of the time, the mountains to the north were shrouded from view by thick cloud and sometimes, even the mile-away coast opposite disappeared completely and rain would pour down for many days on end. We spent day after day reading, until our Parents went out. Then, in holiday times, when some of my siblings were around, we could burst out with our raucous indoor games.

Behind this little oasis of lush gardens and colour on the opposite shore, rise the sharp peaks of the Snowdonia range, craggy summits soaring from treeless slopes, snow-clad during the winter months, an ever-changing view of spectacular depth. Squalls of grey rain clouds would veil the brilliance of blue sky. The mountains themselves turned from pale blue in the misty light to deep blue in clearer light or were veiled completely, those sharp crags far away, inaccessible as a Romantic painting of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, frameless as the open sky. They were intangible in their distance. The very concept of access, the idea of walking their slopes, climbing the crags seemed quite inconceivable – yet in fact is so very real. At times, there was a brooding calm but again later, it could be fierce and tempestuous, ferocious, magical. It was a constantly shifting scene. This is no theatre backdrop, but natural scenery. This is the view from our family home. Sixty years later, it is a view that still takes my breath away when I get out to open the farm gate at the top of the hill behind the house and look down over the vast panorama when I visit it again, (after an overnight flight from New York to Manchester). This is the view that I have left behind. It belongs to another life, a could-have-been life that I do not, for a moment, regret not having pursued.

This white house was built in 1911 to serve as a base for a headmaster (John Chambers) and his family, while his pupils camped in a field next door. An additional wing was added after the First World War. It was never intended as a year-round residence, so our eight-bedroom home was very simple, even utilitarian – but the situation spectacular. Behind it rose a small hill, the ‘Ynys' or Island – for it was a tidal island until the end of the nineteenth century and going back seven hundred years (when Harlech Castle was built) it was a full-time island with access only by boat or perhaps at low tide over the sands.

In those early days, Arthur Koestler (the intensely
engagé
Hungarian writer) and his wife Cynthia had come to dinner with us in Wales, despite the difficult access to our house. Afterwards, Father escorted them the half mile, in the pitch-black night, along the sea grass that was carved by deep gullies where the tide ran out and edged the estuary, to where the old driveway was washed out and came to an end, where their car was parked. The tide had risen, leading Koestler to remark that he was almost drowned on the way back. “Nonsense,” said Father afterwards, “he never stopped talking for a second, I would have known at once if he was drowning, there would have been a moment's peace!”