Once (5 page)

Words swam before my gaze. They were like the perch my father kept in a fish tank in the backyard. Their world was a silent mouthing world. They couldn't say their letters either, but at least they were full of life and a different, an absorbing, mystery. I could stand and stare at them for half a morning at a time, feeding them earthworms and slaters and other grubs I found under stones, watching them dart and turn and vie with each other, bold, bright, green, dark barred, ruddy-finned, spiky hump-backs, darting over the gravel bed of the tank. The word for them: ‘perch' – so odd after all, paradoxically sedentary, or more than five yards longer than any perch you saw. What sense is one to make of words? What not? The word is your oyster.

Then one winter the tank froze. The thaw came. The tank burst and the poor perch perished. Their silence now complete, they were like that 8lb pike my father caught and for half a day perhaps, but it seemed for ever, had hanging on a meat-hook from the cistern in the disused outside lavatory. It seemed to me that I peeped in at that door a thousand times to hear what the pike had to say out of his big unfunny grin – it would have been a she in fact, as the bigger pike are – a dark, browny fish the way an old one is, scales now dulled, eye set matt, before being cut up into lengths and cutlets. Pike a good word for a stiff fish, like a pikestaff. The pike I would know on the end of my line were greenish, barred and spotted, with pale bellies, lean young fish, not monsters. Though they spoke volumes to me, hooked from the Bladnoch below Crouse Farm, the Bladnoch in which it was said there were pike big enough to take the leg off a drowning horse.

I am now more or less as literate as the next person. I have earned my living scribbling, one way, or another, for most of my adult life: from births, marriages and deaths on local rags to national broadcasting, to the more extreme ends of pedantic scholarship. But beyond earning a living of sorts it could also be said I have lived for language and the word, quite wildly, to my cost now, as well as to my gain if not to my profit, more than most people I know, following my muse. For this reason this miserable period in my education intrigues me. It intrigues me all the more that when at last I started reading, sometime again when I was about eight, I did so as it were overnight, from nought to top speed. The thaw came and I was free at last. If only I'd been able to read earlier... and to have read Jean-Jacques Rousseau to boot. How I'd have rejoiced to concur with him that ‘reading is the curse of childhood'.

So the age of eight was a turning point, a seamark in my voyage. What had been going on meanwhile? What had not been going on? I am an eye. Stare at the world. Stare at the word. What a queer thing it is. What a queer fish that one is. What is it? A fish called ‘perch'. What is it doing, especially in oh so mutable, compounding and confounding Welsh?
Draenogiad
... the word for perch fish, meaning: hedgehog head [–
draen
=
thorn,
draenog
=
hedgehog,
iad
=
pate or skull or head]).
Penhwyad
... the word for pike, meaning: duck head [–
pen
=
head,
hwyad
=
duck]). How inspired that duck-head, how graphic and true. Don't ask me which tongue I'd prefer to think and live in. Duck-heads fond of a duckling dinner too.

Today I like my language textured and sprung. In poetry I like it to rhyme and half rhyme and alliterate and sing and delay about itself. Vertical a poem is and I like the path that winds down the mountain to go this way and that (as did John Donne, a Welshman some say, who profess to know), by way of vertiginous caesurae too. In prose also I want and need it to resist its horizontal, its linear path, to be rhythmic, and to hark back, with elliptical back-thraws, parenthetical whirlpools and eddies, bightsom in the aftergait, as Hugh MacDiarmid put it. So for as long as I can remember have I always.

I like to sound words with the eye. I still sometimes catch myself pausing, struck by their oddness, as if I've never seen them before. I don't say them audibly but say the words to myself as I read. Perhaps something in me wanted that then, or registered it even in such simple beginning phrases and sentences, and it got in the way of reading? Or perhaps it all was just delayed development of my wiring, complicated by attendant anxiety? Perhaps this preference for textured language is also a Welsh thing, a thing in my case derived from Welsh-in-English, partly alliterative, generally alien to English formations, with some residual trace about it that English is foreign in construction and sounding to the ear, if not in my case in vocabulary.

While I admire prose that's plain and even, simple, unaccented, measured, disinterested, I do love it to be deep and crisp and uneven, energetic and opinionated. I hate safety-first. I like sentences to go off at a tangent, or to have a little touch of opacity bred of thought's resistance to the expected, like jack-frost at the window, denying transparency. Such as now no one in our lost archipelago knows anything about. So frost-proof has our centrally-heated world become, so uninflected, so flat, so bland. I nearly wrote illiterate. (I
will
write illiterate.)

How deprived you westerners and northerners are who have never woken to the ice fern-lands and frozen forests, the deep tundras, the Siberias in the window pane, as you take the temperature of the lino through your bare toes. Life should not be choked with cotton wool, as for the immortal wretched of the earth it is not. Stare at the word. What might it not do? What might you not do with it? Step up and speak. Spare not a thought for the chorus of doubt and disagreement or the disciples of perfection. All that will always look after itself.

Whatever the nature of my encounter with the word, the thing missing from the account is day-dreaming. All children are great daydreamers, their minds always at play. (What are you
being
?... What are you
being
? my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter demands excitedly to know of me, when I get down on all fours. A tiger, I decide, having up to that point thought I was being just myself.) For my part, when pushed and punished for my slowness, when struggling, I diluted my misery and confusion, and only made things worse, by deliberate day-dreaming. I threw the switch on my heart's ejector seat. My eyes skimmed off the page and my gaze turned inward in no time and I was away. The more I stared out the more I stared in. In fact day-dreaming has been my modus operandi ever since. Just so it invents this page with its illogical optimism and momentum, and air of necessity.

My father was fierce but only meant his cruelties in the heat of the moment. We had many and frequent stormy episodes, with him ranting and raging at something, an inability to read, a pair of new shoes scuffed and battered on their first day out, or the need for new shoes in the first place, as if you could help your feet growing, a terrible school report (very commonly in my case), something and nothing, money, and work, Ratcliffe's, and writing books, writing and writing in the middle of the family: hammer, hammer, hammer of the two-finger typewriter rattling and thumping and dancing a jig, as with a swipe he raced the carriage back, spawning millions of words, on the fold-down bureau, in the alcove under the hot-water tank, below the window, beside the backyard where with a rash kick of small hard ball I once shattered the glass about his head.

But I got off lightly. An evening huddled in the dark on the stairs, on the rust carpet, with mother failing again to pack our bags and leave. I had a friend for whom a broken window meant the strap and the wooden spoon on his legs and three or four hours in the ‘spence', or under-stair cupboard, dark as a coalhole, and stale with the odour of town gas that hung about the meter. Nor did the boys I knew have a father who wrote stories you'd hear on the radio, one about a boy called Andrew, a man who wrote books and was, to a proud boy at least, different from everyone else, in this and many another respect. A man who loved the written word and loved no less to fish for trout.

But he did keep us a little strapped for cash. Not that we wanted for anything but that he made sure we did. These were the days in the lower middle classes of house-keeping money and the housewife, Monday washday, bubble-and squeak, Friday fish day, and penny-pinch through the week. As now seems glaringly clear, these were days in a system of oppression of women, and gross domestic injustice. If my mother found herself short, for whatever reason, she didn't dare ask for more. If she had no choice but to ask, because of some unlooked for necessity, she always paid the price, in reproach and blame.

Yet if he decided a new fishing rod, or some tackle, or other ‘essential' purchase was called for, the new fishing rod was bought, money no object, and the best money could buy. Such things could be justified in that fishing took him to the wilderness. The wilderness was the icing on our cake. It did more than pay the bills, in that my father earned half his income, above what he earned at the engineering firm, writing about it, writing about the wilderness and the natural world. (In all he earned a thousand pounds a year in those days.)

They were not the good old days. No matter the war did more to liberate the people than acts of parliament ever managed (than anything since the previous calamity), they were still relatively mean old days of deep inequality among nations and races, classes and sexes. (Housekeepers and house parlourmaids wanted.) Narrowness and prudishness tended to prevail. A divorcée was a fallen woman, little better than a whore. They were quaint days too, comic now to look back to. Businesses advertised for smart van boys. Sales ladies were required – for confectionary (experienced) – permanent position if suitable. Permanent? A thirty-nine year-old ‘gent' of smart appearance ‘will do anything'. What does he have in mind? Not much. And down at the pier the comedy was the same, served up by the like of Ted Ray, Terry Thomas (so confidingly
intime
), Beryl Reid, Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe (I thought your father was going to die), Jimmy James and Norman Evans ‘Over the Garden Wall' (...you can taste that cat in the custard).

If it seems quaint now, it seemed immortal reality then, like Bob Bananas in the Christmas pantomime, like Mr Alcock's homemade ice-cream, and the question you loved as you drooled to watch him stack up the cone and round it and firm it into place, deftly, generously, with the back of his scoop: ‘Any flavouring?' Flavouring being a kind of syrup, orange or strawberry, also used in milkshakes, that he'd drizzle over the ice, and you licked it before you were out of the shop, because it was so lovely. It was possible as a child to recognize the oddity of Mr Alcock, as clearly I did, for so I recall him, in his dairyman's white or some days buff coat, his little bit of a moustache, selling sweets and ice-cream, in a northern English accent. Two and fro he'd go between the shop and a kind of cold parlour backroom. But you didn't think of him as anything but a fixture in the world, a given, who'd always been there and always would be, in his little shop near the corner to school, on the Abergele Road, turning an honest penny.

In the fiscal regime my father oversaw, we McNeillie children had much less pocket money than most of our friends, with fewer and smaller increases. We made do. It was good for us. We weren't ground down as were many boys I knew at school, some of them heartbreakingly, living in post-war prefabs by the gasworks, fathers away, in the merchant marine or the forces, or just absent without leave. But to my shame I remember once at a hardware counter stealing a Christmas present for my father, for want of enough to buy a little green millstone, with a red handle and a bracket to fix it to a bench, having obtained from a bran-tub in the village hall, for all I had, bars of soap for my mother.

I found that millstone, still functional, the stone worn down low, among my father's tools, when he died. Like a ghost, the millstone round the neck of my childish guilt, stared at me, questioning my character.

So truth will out. And here it is, for a wonder, guilt become shame at last.

* * *

When Matthew Arnold visited an Eisteddfod in Llandudno in the 1860s, he famously described our strip of coast as anglicised, and wrote off Wales to the east as not really Welsh. Among many another misjudgement in his outrageously imperialistic essay, this view was a travesty of Wales, even in Wales as I knew it, so many years later. For anglicised Wales was only a coastal ribbon of resort conurbation, half a mile thick, at the most. It's largely white-settler mentality was as ignorant as any to be found elsewhere across the Empire. But being on England's doorstep, it was all the more overpowering because not only was it deaf, it was also invisible to itself... as could not be said of arrangements in Asia or Africa. There at least the white man stands out like a sore thumb.

Truly Welsh Wales was a short walk up the Red Wood road, and Welsh life itself existed in the towns, like an urban fox, and however abused and mocked by incomers, and slighted by Whitehall, it held its ground, in chapels, in bilingual versatility, and would not die, though it was hard to see how it could live, and impossible except as a daydream to imagine it ever flourishing again as now it does, as not so much miraculously as by sustained dissent over centuries, quiet community, native wit, and at last the winds of change reaching home, having nowhere else to go.

Matthew Arnold had wanted to see the ‘English wedge' driven into the heart of Welsh Wales. At the same time it was largely by his influence Celtic Studies came into being in Britain. He wanted Welsh to be a dead language, for academic study only. (Not that even the ancient dead languages are dead.) You can't be culturally murderous without being socially so, and why would anyone want to be?