Everything I Have Always Forgotten (4 page)

The estuary used to be forked, the northern part having been dammed in 1811 to create arable land on that reclaimed branch. The southern fork, where our house stands, is still tidal: twice a day, the seven by one mile estuary is transformed from sand with a few streams in it, to being completely full of water. At spring tides there can be a vertical rise and fall of up to 11.5 metres. Tides governed whole sectors of our lives and respect for the lethal currents was in our veins. To this day, tourists drown where we children played. For one thing, the warning signs are usually illegible and, even when they are decipherable, often only in Welsh. At home, the tide table always hung on a string in the ‘telephone room', to be consulted before planning a dinner, accepting an invitation or making any other daily plans, whether building sand castles, setting and cleaning the nets, baiting the night-lines, collecting the fish, going sailing, riding or shooting.

Our family was broadly divided into two camps: sailors and horse people. Father headed the first, though he also rode well enough to have gone pig-sticking for wild boar in Morocco, where a fall during the chase could be fatal. The second camp was under Mother's tutelage, though she too could row a dinghy with the best in an emergency. My brother (the eldest of the family) and my eldest sister were sailors, while the next two sisters, horsewomen. As we were of an uneven number, I fell between the two camps, though it was impractical to be a member of both sides. The amount of upkeep demanded by old clinker-built wooden boats on one side, and ponies and horses on the other, made adherence to both at once just too much work. There are not enough hours of light in the day. We could all do both, but we had our preferences and priorities.

I wanted to be a sailor (and have been all my life) but my horse-riding sisters could not resist the urge to use me as a jockey in one-mile pony races. I was young enough to be in a special class and light enough to race the smallest pony. Apparently, I had cold feet at the last moment before my first race at the age of seven, and had to be given Dutch courage in the form of hard cider, which was more alcoholic than beer. After a large glass of that, I forgot my fear, raced as if the devil was on my back, missed the last post in a haze of alcohol and started to retire – only to be told that everyone else had already missed several posts. I turned back into the race and just won it anyway. My sisters had another red rosette to hang in the tack room!

There were occasional squabbles between the two factions. Had the boat people stolen the grain scoop to use as a bailer? Had the horse people stolen a line to tether a horse? I never bonded with horses and later experiences have done nothing to elevate things equine in my estimation. I rented a knock-kneed skeleton of a horse in the Taurus mountains of southern Turkey, only to have it fall off the path we were on and roll down the mountain with me and my camera underneath. The camera fared even worse than I. In fact, nowadays, I think: “
the only animals more stupid than horses are the ones that sit on top of them
.”

Both hobbies involved escape in several forms. Horses and boats themselves escape and have to be brought home. Such moments required an ‘all-hands-on-deck' response, so the horse people joined in rescuing boats and vice versa. Besides, sailors and horsemen alike revel in the joys of solitude and evasion, whether sailing away for a few miles on a high tide, or riding along the vast open sands, or up into the wild mountains. Cousins and friends came to stay and frequently needed rescuing, either from a cantering pony as they called out: “Where are the brakes?” or a boat they had taken downstream on an ebbing tide. Father showed them no compassion or sympathy. He would just say, peremptorily: “You'll have go back and get it on the next tide,” even though that might well have been at midnight or later. One of us would have to go with them to help them retrieve the boat or the pony, west, down the estuary to the sand bar before the open sea or east, up the estuary to a tidal island called Ynys Gifftan.

On that island, there was a tiny farmhouse where a tenant farmer and his wife tried to make a living by grazing sheep and cattle on the salt flats, where the domesticated animals lived a ‘turf war' on the salt grass with the Canada geese. Cows would often drink the rainwater out of our boats at low tide, the only trouble being that they would try to climb into them, and sharp hooves on the floor of a wooden dinghy on dry land can cause a great deal of damage – so we would chase them off. The farmer had a small horse and cart for going to and fro at low tide. One day, he and his wife could no longer bear the isolation (like us, they were without electricity but did not even have a telephone) so they decided to move to Chicago. They held a sale and sold everything they owned. A short time later, they returned, saying that: “they would rather cross the estuary at night on a rising spring tide, than traverse the smallest street in Chicago.” News went around that they were back and, knowing that they were flat broke, everyone brought back what they had bought at the sale. No one asked for their money back, everyone knew they had none left. Everyone, that is, except Father, who had bought a china bowl, which had only lasted a week in its new home before being broken, to our shame. In the end, they only moved off the island to the cemetery and the adventure of Chicago lived on (as a somewhat embarrassing attempt at escape) in their own minds.

IV

THE HOUSE

T
he outside of the house is pebble-dash, painted with whitewash. We painted it ourselves every few years, adding a touch of blue or pink dye to the white – unnoticeable in sunlight, but coming through in the rain – a joyful relief when everything was grey and sodden. One wing might glow in the rain the palest shade of blue, another just hardly pink. The roof was of fine local slate, so dark it was black when wet.

As a teenager in the late fifties, I had wire brushed the rust from the cast-iron gutters and was painting them with an extension ladder leaning on the gutters. Going up and down two high storeys on the ladder was a bore, so I tried bouncing the ladder over so that I could paint the small patch where the ladder had been. It bounced nicely and landed on wet paint and
swoosh!
away it went! Sailors are half monkey, so clinging to the sturdy cast-iron gutter, I caught the ladder with my toes and managed to haul it back up and out onto the gutter again. A close shave! Saved by the great strength of those gutters (today's aluminium or plastic would never have held me – but then, neither would they need scraping and painting!)

When we first arrived at the house in 1946, the large sash windows were criss-crossed with heavy black tape, a precaution in the event of enemy bombing during the War that was only just over. This gave the vivid impression of being imprisoned behind thick steel bars. It was quickly removed, but their image still haunts me. Prison. Being imprisoned. Behind bars. Incarcerated.

Indeed when we arrived, the estuary was still thickly forested with naked trees: half telegraph poles planted deep in the sand, creosoted to stop rot, and connected to each other by heavy fencing wire. This was to stop enemy aircraft from landing in the estuary or landing craft coming in from the sea. Soon enough, most of the poles were dug up, scavenged for more constructive peacetime uses. A few poles remained for some years and we used them for navigation. Sometimes, when suitably located, they even served as one of the stakes for Father's fishing nets.

There was really nothing worth bombing nearby, except of course the Roman Camp. On British Ordnance Survey maps, historic sites are marked in gothic font. When the German army was planning targets, they found such a site marked Military Camp (not even Roman Military Camp) and sent out a very small mission to bomb it. The greatest damage (it was high up on the hills, far from any modern dwelling) was to a mound that turned out to be a huge pile of oyster shells. The Romans loved their oysters. Oysters have since disappeared from this part of the coast and have only recently been re-introduced. Either the climate has changed enough for them to have gone, or two thousand years ago, the Romans had eaten every last one! I discount theories that they could have been brought all the way from the South coast of England on mules… without ice? Even bringing them from the Welsh coast to their hilltop fort without spoilage must have been quite a feat. The stupid mistake by the Boche command delighted us, the exhausted, impoverished victors.

Within, the house had bare floors – the institutional brown linoleum having been mostly torn up by my Parents, exposing the bare pine planking beneath. The exception was Father's study. The frequent rain meant that mud and sand were perpetually tracked inside, so carpets would have been impractical. The scene was set as you entered the front door: a large square hall with the floor tiled in black and white squares set on the diagonal. On one side stood a full-sized rocking horse that had seen the abuse of many generations. On the other sat an iron chest, said to have been captured in the Armada. It had a remarkably complex lock that took up the entire lid, though the key was missing. In front of the entrance was a round marble mosaic table from Italy. On the walls hung three de Chirico paintings, setting a truly surrealist scene.

On either side of the front door, in niches backed with glass to the outdoors, were two white marble busts: a beautiful and fashionable lady in
décolleté
and a handsome young man with classical features and no shirt. The front door was never locked. There was no key until finally our insurance company told my Parents that they could not claim theft of any of their valuable paintings, without a ‘breaking and entering'. Father took off the lock and brought it to the locksmith to have a key made. A few months later, they were planning a trip to the Mediterranean and Father went in search of the locksmith. He was told that the man was at a hill farm fitting a lock. Finally Father found the locksmith and he was in fact just fitting our lock to the farm door. When Father protested, he said: “Well I made up a key and then I couldn't remember whose lock it was, so it just sat around the workshop until I needed a lock for someone.” There was no argument and Father finally brought back the lock, this time with a key!

We never had newspapers in the house – Father listened to the BBC news on a succession of bulky ‘portable' radios with valves and two large, heavy batteries. I do, however, remember one newspaper, laid out carefully on the round mosaic table: it was heavily edged in black and it bore the single headline: ‘His Royal Highness King George VI died last night
'
– which would date it as: February 7, 1952 (when I was eight). Mother had a lifelong admiration for the Royal Family (her youngest sister was lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth for almost fifty years). I wonder why I was not at my new weekly boarding school in London. There was no knowing what special arrangements my Parents might have made due to their eccentric lives, their travels – or perhaps I was at home sick at the time. At all events, the family's plans were in continual flux, ever changing, like the weather, with moods and circumstances, but never as foreseeable as the tides which keep strictly to their moon cycle.

Giving onto the front hall to the left were two rooms with spectacular views across the estuary to the barren, sharp, rocky mountains of Snowdonia beyond. One was Mother's painting study, its bare pine floor painted sky blue, stacks of paintings leaning against every wall. A large 1930s modernist desk of pale wood stood to one side.

The other room was Father's inner-sanctum: lined floor to ceiling with books, carpeted from wall to wall, Moroccan rugs as well, heavy Empire furniture, heavy velvet curtains, the air thick with pipe smoke. Behind the door, rested two or three 12-bore shotguns, a Winchester .22 (with silencer and telescopic sights), two Moroccan flint-lock muskets, a rapier and a sabre. On the mantle piece were a couple of Moroccan daggers with 30cm blades – the kind of useful ornament carried by most robed gentlemen there. Indeed, a few years later, when I was leaving for points East, I showed Father the sheath knife I wanted to take. He at once discouraged me (and I followed his advice) saying: “they carry and use knives all their lives, a man attacked will wrest your knife from you with ease and then will know how to use it. Go off without arms, because even if you think they will protect you, they will be turned against you.”

There was also a stuffed baby crocodile – a memorial to the two baby crocs he tried to bring away from Jamaica in the washbasin of his cabin. Ratted on by his steward, the captain had them thrown overboard – they would have needed a whole bathtub each by the time they reached England, and then what? First alligators in the New York sewage system, now crocodiles loose on the hills of Snowdonia?

Piles of typescripts covered every horizontal surface, from a beautifully polished round table, to a well-worn leather button couch, his huge desk and even the floor. Unless Father was out working on his fishing nets or in the kitchen garden, that front entrance hall was totally forbidden to us children during the day lest we disturb his train of thought, in the muffled cocoon of his study. Even the noise of Canada geese on the salt sea grass or the sound of the black Labrador, breathing rhythmically in her sleep by the fire, was too much of an interruption for him. The breathing upset his literary stride that moved to a different drummer. The honking just startled him out of his absorbed reverie. We could come in by the back door to the pantry and from there to the kitchen or up the back stairs to our rooms. Besides, even though there was a kind of ‘lock' at the front door, with a small space between the actual front door and an interior door, opening them both at once during a south-westerly gale erased any attempt at warming the house.

There were the front stairs that led upstairs in two flights. On the landing windowsill was an assemblage of stuffed Caribbean birds and another of white corals – both under huge, fragile glass domes. At the top, there was a landing where a couple of paintings by Winifred Nicholson, wife of the famous painter Ben Nicholson, whose brother, architect Christopher Nicholson had designed the dining room table which I have in New York to this day. The Nicholson family were old friends of my Parents, but we did not have any of Ben's work – it was already too geometric for their tastes. Nancy, his sister, was married to Robert Graves. There were also paintings by Kate Nicholson, daughter of Winifred.