Once (18 page)

Our northern or seaward boundary was discontinuously marked. It ran fenced through a walled orchard, and there was a gate across a path, a strand of barbed wire across a footpath at the very height of the cliff. But no walls make best neighbours, and our neighbours were good neighbours, a family of smiling Christadelphians called Collins. Irish perhaps they were by descent? Kindly folk, they turned the other cheek and a blind eye to a trespassing youth who stalked and hunted pheasants and wood-pigeons and skulked and mooched, and come spring plundered their cliff for herring-gull eggs, as pleased him, in the upper part of what was called ‘Collins's Wood', some nine mostly deciduous steep but at the top more open and rolling acres.

The combined properties had once been a single pocket estate, the ‘big house' most recently a hotel, our stone-built slate-roofed cottage belonging then to the gardener. In our fiefdom therefore we had an old stone deep-cellared shed called the potting shed, opposite the house, bounding a crazy-paved blue slate courtyard, above which loomed a flotilla of pines. What a thing it was to have a fiefdom, how absorbing and securing. It became part of my consciousness, an outward manifestation of my imaginative life. It haunted me as I went to sleep and in my absences, as at school. I haunted it.

Just beyond the rose-bed there was greenhousing of commercial proportions, including a series of three long, linked, lean-to greenhouses against a plastered wall, and a vinery. Joined together in a ‘T-shape', the long greenhouse and the vinery enclosed the top end of an orchard. All a little dilapidated now, they were patched and repaired as best makeshift could do. But the great arterial pipes and the underground boiler-room meant to heat them lay defunct and beyond repair. Yet another big greenhouse stood between the potting shed and the vinery. Here my grandpa had indulged his passion for cacti, and brought on other pot-plants, and it remained for us the cactus house. Who otherwise could never have dreamt of such a thing in our wildest dreams in Red Wood country.

If the greenhouses were serviceable enough, so was the orchard of espaliered apple trees. The staves of wires on which the trees had once been trained were rusted now and broken from their stansions. But gnarled and wired through, reaching out finger-tips to each other, the trees could yet with due pruning fill with blossom in spring and bear more apples than we knew what to do with come autumn. And there were pears a-plenty on trees trained against a sunny stretch of high wall, down beyond the long greenhouse, where my father kept his bees.

These fruit trees and greenhouses stood to the north, seaward of the cottage. They were walled off above the lane by a high wall, in summer topped by that succulent import, red-flowering and white-flowering valerian. The stuff grew anywhere it might seed and root and it flourished in the limestone. So did the great fuchsia, outside our gate, under the gable end of the potting shed. A ground-hugging plant with evergreen leaves and red berries I cannot remember to name claimed much of the lower terrace of the cliff in the same burgeoning fashion.

To the south, inland, below the wood proper, was an area variously used for keeping fowls and growing vegetables. It was skirted by a long hazel hedge running atop a wall, beside a footpath, all that became of the lane at this point, leading, via a stone stile, into the Gloddaeth Estate. Pheasants from the Estate liked to pick along the bottom of this hedge. I was always on the lookout for them and sometimes shot one from the bathroom window, or otherwise slipped from the house to stalk one.

Here, across the way, beyond the little farm, rose the wooded Bryn Maelgwyn, an ancient bardic
allt
, east of Deganwy, itself a legendary location. Both are to be discovered in Lady Charlotte Guest's translations of the
Mabinogion
. But the Maelgwyn and related stories are omitted by modern scholars as belonging elsewhere, not in the branches of those legends. Yet I wish they would provide them anew. For they are a wonder and of the genius of that part of the world, worthy an appendix at least. I could see these places every day when the leaves were off the high hazel hedge, as I stood to clean my teeth. Idle window-haunting filled much of my time. It was a male pursuit in our house, sometimes shared and accompanied by spoken observation. Then at any moment it might become intensely purposeful, as I'd be despatched with the gun, at my father's direction, in the hope of putting one delicacy or another on the menu.

The terrain of Gloddaeth – of the entire known world, in outline anyway – has been described by that intrepid Welsh traveller, and explorer in the Western Isles, Thomas Pennant:

From hence is a short walk to GLODDAETH... placed on the slope of a very extensive hill, or lime-stone rock.... The upper walks [reaching the heights of Fferm, beyond our wooded hill], having fortunately a steep and stubborn rock for their basis, checked the modish propensity to rectitude; so there was a necessity to deviate from it; but in no greater degree than the flexure of a zigzag would admit. Notwithstanding some blemishes, corrigible at an easy rate, these walks may be considered among those of the first rate of this island, for such beauties of view as nature can bestow; and, from those spots favoured by the sight of
Conwy
, I may add the majestic ones of ancient art. Every flight of path presents new and grand objects; first the great windings of the river towards
Llanrwst
, the lofty towers of Conwy, and the venerable walls of the town; and beyond is a long extent of
alps
, with
Moel Siabod
, the
Drûm
, and
Carnedd Llewelyn
and
Dafydd
[Black Lake country], towering with distinguished height. From a little higher ascent is opened to us the discharge of the
Conwy
into the sea, sublimely bounded by lesser
Penmaen
, and the immense
Orm's Head
, or
Llandudno
; between which appear, a fine bay, the vast promontory of
Penmaen Mawr
, the isle of
Priestholm
, and the long extent of
Anglesey
. After gaining the summit, beneath is seen a considerable flat, with the estuary of the river
Conwy
falling into the
Irish
sea on one side, and the beautiful half-moon bay of
Llandudno
on the other: one of whose horns is the great head of the same name; the other the lofty head of
Rhiwleden
, or the little
Orm's Head
. A little farther progress brings us in sight of a great bay, sweeping semicircularly the shores; and beyond are the distant hills of
Flintshire
, and the entrances into the estuaries of the
Mersey
and
Dee
, frequently animated with shipping.

 
Like Robinson Crusoe on his island, we could have subsisted under the wooded hill, had we really been pressed to. And for several years we produced and kept more than we could consume, honey from the honey-bee too. Asdaville and its like hadn't been invented. We lived a little closer to nature, but fortunately not out of necessity. My father still had his day job and wrote and wrote away, books and journalism, as if there might be no tomorrow, as I often wished at the end of Sunday, or when the holidays were on their last legs.

Tan-yr-Allt was a land of milk and honey, except we kept no cow. It was Eden. Though we toiled and moiled hard there, for our potato crops, early and late, our peas and beans, cabbages and sprouts, spinach and leeks, tomatoes, courgettes and pumpkins, squashes and grapes, our fresh eggs, and against the predations of mouse and rabbit, foraging wood-pigeon, egg-stealing jay, magpie and crow.... Wasn't Adam a gardener and didn't he delve? It was paradise gained and full of firewood. It was deliverance from the shipwrecked world. It was heaven on earth, especially to a youth of my inclination, head turned by the Black Lake.

I was now the luckiest person I knew, self-sufficient there in mind too, up the rocky unmade lane, off the last easterly back-road of the town, beyond the pale. My luck would run out at school as you know and I would run adrift there. Yet, to no one's greater astonishment than my own, I passed my exams and got into the sixth form. There ahead of me, a year my senior, and destined for medical school, the history master's daughter could no longer quite look down on me. I'd fallen off the cliff for her the year before. But even as I left the precipice, I knew my passion and devotion were absurd.

At that stage I was as nothing, utterly unaccomplished, disreputable even, one of the ‘lads', if a little on the edge of them, by dint of living where I did and being a bit of an odd one. I was young for my years too. So I hope I am still and still postponing to be wise. A scholarly girl, part of the school establishment, a master's daughter, a girl who listened to classical music and played Chopin and Rachmaninov on the piano, who knew her vocation, and so beautiful besides, was hardly going to deign to consider me when she could have her pick of the scholarly boys.

No matter everyday I aligned myself in assembly so that I could fix her with my eye, and steal glances between the heads of other boys, as we sang our hymns: ‘There is a green hill far away'... etc, and listened to the announcements.... I was a hobbledehoy who reared racing pigeons, kept a ferret called ‘Gorgeous' (who turned out to be afraid of rabbits), reared a pet owl (if one cosmopolitanly named ‘Hibou'
*
), procured by a half-gipsy acquaintance who left school early to become a deckhand on the Conwy trawlers. But watch this space.

The bright ‘snowcemmed' cottage, cream not white, stood perched high above the lane, rising directly up a fair height from it, its westerly frontage like the side of a fortress. The house itself caught the light. Once you closed the gate behind you, a solid wooden gate too high to see over, affording no view through it, and climbed the slate steps, you left the world and its worries, shut away at your back. There was no need ever to return to either, except the law of the land obliged you to go to school.

Except the estuary beckoned and Gogarth's shore, the Orme's west side, with promise of fish: flounder and plaice, bass and mackerel. The pierhead, too, sang its siren song, a nightfishing song above all, lunging and booming as it waltzed to the tide's motion, like a night out at the Winter Gardens, dancing the conga, and ten sheets to the wind at the Northwestern. It stalked on its centipede legs in the Orme's shadow, wading up to its chest in winter shoals of codling and whiting. Except that from 1 March to 30 September the Black Lake pined for Sunday.

Down below us ran another pinewood in the grounds of a huge crescent-shaped building of grey stone, and glaring orangey-red paintwork, a convalescent home called Lady Forester's, for industrial workers from England (how different their pale dressing-gowned and pyjama'd lives, as you might glimpse them, taking the air on the fire-escape, stealing a smoke). So we had the sea-sound of pine-trees all around, and the sea itself to see at a glance, and to sense in the air, and on wild nights to hear its long drawl, swept up with the roar and crash of pine-masts. On such nights, our bedrooms being in the roof, I'd be rocked to sleep, and startled awake by sudden powerful blasts, and wonder if it mightn't prove my last night on earth. It was very like being at sea, timbers taking the strain, bulwarks and roof-tree, against the house-high waves and crashing breakers of packed air.

We took a westerly and southwesterly full on, and a northwesterly too, even a northerly quite directly. But cold easterlies couldn't get at us at all, though they do their worst, and so we were snug and warm when they blew, tucked up there cozily, safe and sound. One furious night when the wind was in the northwest, some thirty or forty giant pines were levelled down in Lady Forester's. The calamity sounded like the end of the world, just below my bedroom window. A high dormer window, like a lookout in the roof, it always took the brunt of things. Our trees howled and crashed, in great waves running like the sea, but they stood firm, rooted in rock as they were. The greenhouses took a battering, though, with the loss of many panes, and much work to do to repair them as in a poem by Theodore Roethke, brought to harbour at dawn.

Then with the dawn came the aftermath of purest essence, a distillate, in the high tops, the trees thinned of dead branches, the yard and paths and slopes littered with needles and cones, a harvest of kindling thrown ashore. The jackdaws would be cackling as if for the first time in creation, and gulls mewling, and somewhere a pheasant might crow in the wake of the storm, as on summer days you'd hear one, in David v. Goliath style, answering the quarry-blast at Penmaenmawr.

But the air would still be boisterous and billowing, and the sea-horses stampeding, rearing, the morning after the night before, all the way to and fro between Anglesey and our shore, out round the Isle of Man and back, and down the Irish strand by Wicklow where the fishing fleet rode out the night, Frenchmen among them...
L'Etoile, Le Guillemot
and their sisters later known to Seamus Heaney, tuning in to the shipping forecast, just across the sea in Ireland from where we were in Wales: the known world, district and circle.

The wooded hill was not new to me. I had known it from the early fifties, when my grandpa bought the place, on retirement. A blacksmith-next-tenant farmer's son who'd left school in Galloway at fourteen for an apprenticeship on Clydeside, he had since risen in the aircraft industry, to become a production manager for Fairey Aviation and then AVRoe. Now he turned his hand to running his smallholding and like a good Scottish engineer built things to last forever, a henhouse as stout as Noah's ark, a place for them to roam in as secure as a prison yard and as ugly as a concentration camp; and if a thing was broken he repaired it, in the same spirit, calling on my father for labour at the weekends.