Everything I Have Always Forgotten (24 page)

– the beaches ironing out the irregular, jagged interjections of rock from the ancient mountain formations. As for the Bay itself, it was the beginning of the open ocean, the beginning of the outside world, beyond Britain and all that Britain meant. Over the horizon was Ireland, some say that you can even see it on a clear day, though I never saw more than haze upon the curved horizon.

By the same token, a seventeenth-century traveller who climbed Snowdon, claimed that you could see the whole of the British Isles and the coast of France – in which case, either the mountain was higher or the world flatter in his day – clearly he did not think there was much risk of anyone else being so foolish as to climb that peak again to verify his information… then again, perhaps he was merely practicing ‘poetic licence'.

We picked up the same Roman Road I had taken the year before with my sister on horseback. Here we were above the tree line, the moors dried out and burned by the long drought. While the bogs in lower ground were still waterlogged and bright green, up here the still air smelled of dried herbs and parched heather. The usual wayside foxgloves and nettles could not survive up here. The vegetation was stunted, with wind-whipped heather, short reeds in wet boggy hollows, even a little bracken here and there. Our packs were minimal, but all the same they felt like lead: I carried my sleeping bag and most of the food, while Alan carried his own sleeping bag, a tiny camping gas stove and a small pup tent, of which he was very proud. We carried little water, knowing that there would always be a mountain stream wherever we went. It was years later that we all learned of fatal diseases from sheep manure or carcasses that make those crystal-clear mountain streams potentially lethal. Meanwhile, we enjoyed them in happy ignorance.

We passed Llyn Tecwyn Uchaf, a reservoir for some newer houses below. There were some ruined houses higher up, roofless, door-less, windowless shells built like the stone walls, of big stones and boulders – mostly without any mortar in-between. The highlands of Wales are dotted with these skeletons, once lived in as upland farms (no longer profitable or desirable) or groups of them where miners and quarrymen used to live during the week, then hurry down to their families and homes on the lowland for a square meal and chapel on Sundays… and who knows, perhaps a spot of beer (well, it was beer or chapel, not both – not worth the scolding from the Minister in front of everyone) and even some slap and tickle beforehand on the Saturday night?

From the reservoir, we plunged downhill into a recently planted government re-forestation project of fast-growing conifers for paper pulp and other junk uses. The bureaucrats had no use for slow growing oak, ash or beech trees. These single-species plantings were much maligned locally as prone to disease, not ecological, unnatural and ugly. Right now, the trees were not much taller than ourselves, yet already so deep green that they were dark and foreboding. We still walked on grass but soon, without sunlight, the growing trees would blanket the ground in needles and there would be no grass, no flowers, no heather. Evergreens seemed indeed like a deathly blight on the landscape.

At the head of the valley of the Dwyryd (which lower down became ‘our' estuary), we came down through real deciduous woods again and briefly trudged the road to use the bridge at Maentwrog to cross the river, just as I had done on horseback. There is a single track toll bridge much lower down the river and had we been hitch hiking, that would have been the shortest, quickest way to go. Now however, we were determined to avoid walking on roads as much as possible. Besides, this longer way round was much more beautiful. So from this old stone bridge, we walked back up through more great oak woods, but this time with a heavy undergrowth of wild rhododendrons, and again out onto the open highlands to pick up the ancient track again. This time, we were further from the highest point, for here the Harlech Dome is replaced by the younger, more recently bent and folded mountains of Snowdonia. We skirted the flanks of Moelwyn Bâch – where, higher up, Alan had almost been killed, that time when he slipped on a cliff we were traversing. Amabel's magic herbs had by now totally healed his injured thumb. Now the view to the left was southwest down the larger valley of the Glaslyn, which had been dammed with the Cobb and reclaimed as farmland. The foothills still seemed to end in the flat sea, but in fact it was a green sea of grass crisscrossed by banks with hedges on top and ditches to drain the low-lying fields. Down there, it was an oasis beyond stone wall country which was everywhere else on higher ground. Down there, drainage was the issue. Up on the hills, stones were the issue. The stone walls were built to clear the surface of the fields so that grass would have a little more space to grow, besides defining property lines.

Oh yes! This view was my view. This was the landscape that I had chosen to wander and admire. The visibility was no clearer today than it had been when I passed this way on horseback the year before… but now it sang! From now on, I hoped that I would choose my views, whether they be of a slag heap outside Essen (Ruhr) one foggy, freezing December night or the brilliant bird's-egg blue of enamel on the Shah (or Imam) Mosque in Esfahan, the windows of the Sistine Chapel as the sun sets behind them and a chamber orchestra plays Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
, the dirt-floored, filthy house of a crack-head in the Mexican desert. To each view I say: “Seize this view, for this I may never see again.” It took cancer, forty years later, to see just how truly fundamental is that thought. “We are on Earth but for a brief span of time, if we lose our lust for life, we lose our lives.”

We passed the sharp little point of Craig Ysgafn and then over the rounded flanks of Moelwyn Mawr, a particularly round, grassy mountain with few sharp rocks visible. Below its surface it is honey-combed with old slate mines that were used to store artworks in, from the major museums of London during the War. It is still a mystery to me how they kept them dry, for whenever I had gone inside those mines, water poured, rather than dripped, from the roof and ran down the floors where there had once been narrow gauge tracks for slate wagons. We came down into the
cwm
between Moelwyn Mawr and the next mountain Cnicht, totally different from the Moelwyns. It looked like the Matterhorn, or a dinosaur lying on its belly with its scaly back the long sharp ridge of rocks.

I used to enjoy walking up the ‘dinosaur's back' to the summit and then, rather than retrace my steps, would continue a short way down the other side, before turning right and scrambling down a ‘chimney' or narrow cleft in the vertical rocks. At the bottom of this cleft was a perfect scree slope, stone debris broken off from the cliff above, lying at 43º – the angle of repose. You could run and jump down this slope, the stones sliding under your feet as you landed, absorbing the shock and hastening your descent. Scree-riding is a summer form of skiing, but it is best done on rarely travelled slopes because each passer-by reduces the angle of the slope a little until the stones will no longer slide under your feet. It is not for the faint-hearted and you have to keep concentrating on your next landing place, for if you hit a solid, stationary rock you are likely to break a leg.

It is always easier going up mountains formed by glaciers, than down them. This is because the rounded, armchair-shaped valley known as a
cwm
or
cirque
frequently drops away into nothing at its bottom end (where the giant's legs would be if one were sitting in the
cwm
). They are cut off by a transverse glacier lower down. There are often lazy, meandering ‘mature' streams in these high up, hanging valleys, which suddenly turn into wild, tumbling torrents when they reach the end of the valley. Climbing up to such a hanging valley is clear walking, you can see how steep it will get ahead and skirt the vertical parts. Going down, on the other hand (especially in cloud or in the dark), the way may seem almost flat, but when you reach the end of the valley, there is no way to tell where it leads to a vertical drop and where a descent may be negotiated without breaking one's neck.

As I had leapt and slid down this rock-strewn slope, I thought of a story Father had told of when he was a boy, climbing Cader Idris near Dolgellau and meeting a shepherd looking for a lamb on a scree slope. The old man said to him: “Come along with me, young gentleman, I'll show you something you've never seen before.” Father followed him to a spot where a mountaineer had missed his footing while scree-riding, tripped on a large rock sticking up through the loose stones and fell forward with full force and cracked his skull on another rock. The shepherd asked. “See where his brains come out all over those stones?” Father pocketed a small one with plenty of blood on it, though he was less sure of the brains, and kept it in his ‘museum' – a child's collection which disappeared over the years. So I never did see the bloody, brain-splattered stone, though the story remained engraved on my mind, as if the dangers of scree-riding were not already sufficiently obvious to keep all of my attention.

Looking up at these relatively parched mountains, there were still a few boggy patches where water pools in rock depressions and the grass and stubborn little reeds there keep their emerald colour despite the drought. There were no other hikers to be seen. Everyone climbs Snowdon, but many ignore its remarkable minor cousins. There were white spots here and there; if they moved they were sheep, if they were stationary they were mushrooms (scale at this distance is difficult to gauge), but with the present drought, there were no mushrooms. Sometimes, if we were really lucky – and on this trip we were not – the white spots could be a herd of wild goats. These goats are superb. Their hair (neither fur nor fleece) is long and hangs down half way to the ground, especially when groomed. Not that they are ever groomed in nature. The bucks sport great horns as long as 45 cms, which sweep back in a proud arc. I was told that a few individuals are sometimes caught by professional rugby players to serve as mascots for the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. A herd is corralled into a narrow valley trap, and there a few are tackled like the opponent team in a rugby match. Alas, they do not last long in the stressful life of London, with their horns polished and their hair shampooed and groomed into silver tresses. Life on the parade ground is not worth living when compared to life on the cliffs of Snowdonia.

From where we were, the nearest visible house was half a dozen miles away, down on the coast. Closer by, the next village was hidden below in a valley. Our feeling of isolation was exhilarating: we were alone and capable. We could keep on walking until we could walk no more and camped. The independence we felt was thrilling. We were proud of our strong little legs.

Where our track reached its lowest point in the valley was the tiny hamlet of Croesor with a shop-cum-post office, chapel and primary school, all built of slate. For fencing, slate was taken from rejected slabs up to 2m long and 60 to 90cm wide, which were slightly buried at one end (the earth was so shallow over the rocks below, it was impossible to bury them deeper) and then held together with the next piece by means of heavy twisted wire. In those days, where the slabs of slate had fallen down or where a gate was needed, farmers used Victorian iron bedstead ends to fill the gaps. This curious stop-gap solution had led an uncle who farmed a rich successful farm in the west of England to ask Father: “… if the farmers slept on gates, since their bedsteads were already used as gates?” Later, with the mode for gentrification, antique shop owners came all the way from London. They bought the bed ends for a song and had them restored, to sell to a new generation of Yuppies moving into renovated slum houses in London. Sometimes they even stole them when the farmer was not around, leaving a gaping hole in the fence.

At Croesor, we turned left and walked down the lane wide enough for one vehicle at a time, the last half mile to Parc, the sixteenth-century house where Father was writing. It was late afternoon, though the summer sun would not set for a few hours yet. Alan and I were hot, thirsty and hungry, but we knew very well that there was no such thing as a refrigerator to raid in this house. As in our family house, there was no electricity (not to mention that this house still had no drains or running water either). Food was still scarce and scarcer still when Father was the caterer.

He was sitting in the big dark kitchen, hunched, bear-like (menacingly or protectively?) over his little Olivetti 22 typewriter, hardly any larger or heavier than a modern laptop – an invention he would have loved to work on, had he lived another thirty years. His big hands were pounding away fast with four fingers, interspersed with long periods of silent reflection. The fire was smouldering in the huge fireplace (where one brother had “cleaved his sibling in twain with an axe”). He was a little confused to be interrupted by us, thinking he had just got rid of us ten days before, but he seemed not so displeased either. And so ended our first long day's trek.

Once we had slaked our thirst, we set about collecting wood and reviving the fire, knowing that this was the first step towards dinner. By then, he had put away his typewriter and marshalled his typescript into a neat pile. He poured himself a glass of wine and started making a very hot curry with cooked cold lamb and vegetables. I told him of our plan to walk to Bardsey Island. Far from saying we were too young to be travelling so far alone, the idea seemed to light his fire.

XXIV

THE JOURNEY BLESSED

F
ather, a notoriously meticulous writer, was never noted for his speed (whether writing, gardening or cooking – it was only the immediate urgency of sailing that got him really moving), but the setting sun still shone in through the big stone-mullioned window over the dining table in the kitchen when we finally sat down to his highly-spiced curry, complete with rice, pappadom, mango and lime chutneys and his favourite: Bombay Duck – dried and somewhat putrid small fish which are normally baked, but which, for want of an oven, we had toasted. They are illegal in the U.S. on grounds of food hygiene, but could also be illegal on the grounds of odour. All these delicacies, he must have brought from London. I never knew him to make a curry when Mother was around, so it was a personal indulgence. We ate everything with enthusiasm and burped rotten fish all night.