Mr Vogel by Lloyd Jones
She believed me. She beamed. ‘Marvellous! I love those re-enactments. Go down a treat. You come and do one here. My castle’s doing well. Up this year again.’
She changed her mind again. ‘You sure you ’aven’t been in my castle?’
I tried one last throw of the dice.
‘Actually,’ I tried to look engagingly coy, ‘I’ve been to the woods. You know what I mean...’
‘Oh, you been for a...’ she finally believed me.
I liked her, and not just because I’d won an age-old tussle for a castle. She was going to a funeral, she had a migraine, she was human, and she was guarding her castle to the best of her ability, as all those poor dead sods did six hundred years ago.
As we travelled along the fringes of the Black Mountains into England Williams regaled me with a story about Cordell, whom he’d met a few years before he departed this life so tragically. He had been found dead, with family photographs at his side, by a stream in the Horseshoe Pass area.
‘Ever read Cordell?’ asked Williams.
‘Just the one – Rape of the Fair Country – though I’ve come across many extracts in anthologies,’ I replied.
‘Met him once,’ he said. ‘Told me a very strange story. So amazing I could barely believe it, and I’ve not come across it in other writings about him. He was in his early seventies when I met him – a smallish, dapper man with a toothbrush moustache. He was ex-military and looked it. He was getting tired but he was kind and he still loved Wales – it was like a love for an old flame,’ said Williams, folding his newspaper and halting his story while a trolleyman sold us both beakers of tea. Then he continued:
‘This is the gist of what he told me, after he had fetched out a beautifully-bound copy of Y Gododdin I think it was, from a cabinet. It had been presented to him as a thank-you for his lifetime’s work by one of the Welsh-interest societies. Never has there been a country with so many friends! He was immensely proud of this volume.
‘“I’ll tell you a story,” said Cordell. He had told me about his birth in Ceylon – his father was in the British Army. He talked to me in a pleasantly formal way.
‘He told me that he had a daughter who had married a Scandinavian orthodontist. She came over occasionally. She’d had children of her own but she and her husband had decided to adopt a child from a third world country. So they lodged their names with an agency and after being accepted as potential parents they had been told to wait for a suitable child to come up. That could be anywhere in the world. They would have to go there immediately, when notified, to pick up their new charge. Time passed by and eventually his daughter was summoned to fetch the child – remember, this could be anywhere in the world. And so she did. She flew off and collected the baby at an orphanage in Sri Lanka, the old Ceylon. Before she left she had a picture taken of herself, holding the child outside the orphanage. On her next visit to Wales to see her father she showed him the photograph.
‘“Do you know, Dr Williams,” he said, looking at me with a level gaze. “That was the very building where I had been born. It was the old barracks in Ceylon, which had been turned into an orphanage.”’
This incredible tale of chance had the suitable effect on me, and I had one of my own to tell, and so the journey passed swiftly through England and back into Wales, as a paradigm for the Welsh condition; so many of my countrymen have been forced to find work there, and have had such deep pangs of nostalgia when parted from their homeland, for it is true what they say, the jewel is best admired from afar. There is no greater Welshman than an exile. And some of our best friends – Saunders Lewis, Cordell, Firbank, Ffransis and Morris for instance, have either been born elsewhere or have spent long periods away.
I parted from Williams at Bangor station and made my way home. We’d agreed to meet at a church in Anglesey, near the farmhouse where he was staying. It was the parish church in Llanfairynghornwy, which I knew had a connection with Evan Thomas the bonesetter, and Williams wanted to find a memorial there too: he was still clambering up his family tree. That evening I tried to make arrangements with the vicar but couldn’t get hold of him. I phoned Williams to tell him. He sounded drowsily pleased, even when I told him we would have to fly blind, since I had been unable to find anyone with a key.
The next day presaged failure. A friend let me down so I had to go by bus, and the north-west corner of Anglesey is more accessible to bears and boats than it is to buses. I anticipated, and felt, a change as we crossed the suspension bridge. It is a truth universally acknowledged by my fellow mainlanders that the island is ‘different’. This difference is hard to define, even romantically. People say words like ‘strange’ or ‘supernatural’ or ‘old’ or ‘timeless’ or ‘spooky’. Those who feel a sense of otherness on the island fumble for a definition. I have travelled enough to detect a commonality with other parts of the world. In passing to an island there is a feeling of detachment and passage to another time and another place. Like Arthur’s conveyance to Afallon, or Orpheus’s descent into the underworld, one has a sense of transportation or transposition into another realm of the senses; of a spiritual transhumance. Islands can have a fairytale feel. Often they are sparsely inhabited and one can move for hours on the landscape without seeing any human movement. Then a carrion crow will descend slowly and observe you as a specimen, silently. The wind will moan slightly in a spinney of conifers huddled like winter mourners, and remind you slyly of your own mortality. Clouds will shift and pattern the fields in a cunning re-enactment of their exact movements a thousand years ago or more, hoping you will notice. Time will have no meaning; clocks and watches will play tricks with you. The sea will wash away all memories from the shore, and the ancient chambers of man – Barclodiad y Gawres, Bryn Celli Ddu – will press you to the ground and whisper in your ear.
Islands can be Hell and islands can be Heaven. I wonder which one it was for the writer of the Vogel Papers. Was that flight across the bridge a descent into the wormhole of Vogel’s personal little universe, or was it an attempt to find something – absolution, or a cure, or a prognosis?
I crossed over, below a uniform grey sky, perfectly still, as though it had been painted onto a glass cupola. I felt like a parrot whose irritable owner had thrown a grey sheet over its cage and told it to shut up and go to sleep. The landscape all around oozed sweatily with rainwater. Fields and meadows wallowed greyly in the ditches and dykes. Nature had gone to bed, and the trees stood around like hangers-on after a party. The bus rattled and felt like a crate of empties being taken away. Desperate-looking men got on at different bus stops and sat in the back, glowering moodily and picking their teeth like characters in search of a spaghetti western. An oily middle-aged man got on and talked incessantly into his mobile phone in a loud, flat, Lancastrian monotone; it was a surreal scene worthy of Waiting for Godot, since I felt sure there was no-one at the other end. He was infuriating. Hot ants, each carrying a molecule of hate as heavy as the universe before it banged, scurried hotly through my bloodstream. I wanted to hit him. It was a suitable day for cruelty. I imagined Suetonius Paulinus and his Roman soldiers driving nails into barrels and rolling the island’s Druids downhill to their punctured deaths. The very same Suetonius Paulinus who had been the first Roman to cross the massive Atlas mountain range near Marrakesh in north-west Africa, and had reported that nearby forests harboured all kinds of wild elephants, beasts and serpents, and natives who ate their food ‘like the canine race, and shared with it the entrails of wild beasts.’
I got there eventually – I hitched a bit, and walked the last two miles. I discovered there was a key with a churchwarden, Captain Roberts, but he wasn’t at home. I stood by the church waiting for a bit of luck. I saw a blue estate car winding down into the half-flooded dip by the church and I struck a pose, looking at the church with my chin in my hand, trying to look interested and interesting. The car stopped.
My luck had arrived. It was Captain Roberts with his wife, and they had the key right there with them in the car, as
if they were playing the part of Providence in a Miracle Play. Llanfairynghornwy has one of those dinky little Welsh churches which look like scale models. The great cathedrals and churches of England were made to impress Man and to reach out to God. The country churches of Wales reach out to man and try to impress God – not with their magnitude, but with their smallness and vulnerability. And who would want to work all day in a snarling gale on a grandiose edifice when one could be snuggled up to God in a cosy corner of the heavenly kingdom. Wales has always prayed to the God of Small Things.
Dr Williams now hove into view and we examined the church in the late afternoon sun. I found a memorial tablet, which started:
To the memory of Evan Thomas of Maes in this Parish who, in humble life, without the aid of education or any other advantage, by an extraordinary gift of Nature acquired such a knowledge of the human frame as to become a most skilful Bonesetter, whereby he rendered himself pre-eminently useful to his fellow creatures.
Underneath this tablet was the inscription in Welsh.
We pottered around the church and chatted with Captain Roberts, a spry ex-Merchant Navy man who had sailed out of Liverpool. He could have come straight from the Vogel Papers – he was a seafaring man, and had been treated himself by one of the bone doctors as a child. Outside, we went over to Evan Thomas’s gravestone and read the inscription. As I was about to turn away and head up the path to the road a fleeting notion passed through my mind; surely the dates on the white marble tablet inside the church were different to the ones on the gravestone. I was right – there was a disparity of 22 days.
We laughed over this and I dismissed it as a stone-cutter’s error. No doubt this was an afternoon job, and he’d had too much ale at lunchtime. Old gravestones have many errors of fact and grammar, with words sometimes corrected on the slate or carried over to the next line. Families of the deceased probably never noticed, because they couldn’t read.
Still, it was a peculiar thing to happen, and Williams and I discussed it in his hired car – he had offered to take me to Amlwch to meet a bus. For him it was the end of the affair, a diversion, and he was off to his symposium in a couple of days, and then, after a month’s adventuring, back to Tasmania.
‘Hobart?’ I asked.
‘No – Launceston, the second city. It’s at the head of the Tamar River, and it’s old – third oldest city on the continent, I seem to remember,’ he said. ‘Quite pretty. Hilly. A few fine buildings and a nice little chairlift. Lovely old watermill complex. I divide my time between lecturing on maritime history and taking tourists along our wine route. You’ll be delighted to know that I live in a suburb called Trevallyn – can’t get much more Welsh-sounding than that! – and my actual address is Beaumaris Court.’
I feigned astonishment.
‘Incidentally,’ I asked, ‘why did you start this maritime thing?’
‘Tasmania’s got more wrecks than most places – about a thousand at the last count,’ he said. ‘Comes from being smack in the course of the roaring forties. It’s no place to be in a storm if you’re a sailor.’
We arrived at Amlwch and he dropped me at the bus stop. After the farewells he prepared to go but then stopped the car and wound down the window.
‘Tell you what, if I hear anything else of interest I’ll get in touch. Got an e-mail address?’
After he’d written it down he floated off into the darkness, and I thought I’d seen the last of him. The first chapter was closed, and Williams had been a useful find. Like one of those historical characters in the Vogel Papers, he was about to disappear forever.
Or so I thought...
As I stood waiting for the bus a man walked up and joined me – it was the same man who had irritated me earlier with his Waiting for Godot conversation. He didn’t recognise me so I played a trick on him.
‘Dy’a know,’ I said nonchalantly after the initial greetings, ‘I’m a bit of a clairvoyant, have the gift of second sight and all that... give me your phone for a second – if I hold anything belonging to someone I can usually tell a lot about them.’
He handed me the phone, slowly and suspiciously.
I held it in my hand, closed my eyes, and regurgitated a medley from his conversations earlier on the bus.
‘You have an Aunty Mary... she is very ill... you need to go to see her in hospital tomorrow... your car is playing up... you need a new exhaust... the garage can’t fit you in... but I can’t tell you any more... it’s terrible... too horrible...’
It did the trick. He grabbed the phone and ran into the night.
Revenge can be very sweet.
I’m off to bed now, to dream great dreams. Yes, I know, I should be finalising my plans. Tell you what, you can plan the plans. Here are a few directions. I will be walking in the Roman style – three days on the road then one day’s rest. I will abide by Nicholas Crane’s four quadrants of survival: navigation, shelter, food and warmth.
That’s enough for you to get on with. Now leave me to dream. Like Mr Vogel, I want to get out of my one-horse town, where Time is a slow puncture and Hope is heavily bandaged.
Before I go tomorrow I will plant a tamarisk tree.
Why? To see how much it has grown by the time we’ve finished this mission of ours?
Certainly not – hubris ain’t allowed around here, my friends.
This is why I want to plant a tamarisk tree. Back at the start of this chapter, somewhere down there in the nether region of Wales, the bit that wallows like a big fat pimply buttock in the Bristol Channel, I mentioned a Big Issue seller who gave me a book. It was the memoirs of an American hobo called Hood River Blackie, who ran away from home at the age of 14 after some family troubles. I like this bit:
I guess it was only natural that I take to the rails, but my first ride in a boxcar was a terrifying thing. I swear, if that train had stopped I would have gotten off it and gone right back home. But after a few hours, I saw it wasn’t going to jump the tracks. I also noticed a strange feeling coming over me, a kind of pleasant swelling sensation in my chest that I now know was freedom.
About a week later I piled off the freight at the little California desert town of Mecca. I had a bedroll, a packsack, and a few dollars I had been saving to buy an old car. If anyone who ever reads this ever gets to Mecca, or if you live there, walk over the tracks and look at the big tamarisk tree located at the southern edge of the town on the west side of the tracks. Under this tree on a hot September day in 1940 I met Tex Medders. Tex was probably the finest human being I’ve ever known. He looked rather frail to me at five foot seven and 135 pounds, sitting on a rusty five-gallon can watching a stew cook over a small fire. I can close my eyes now and still see his old face and the merry twinkle in his faded blue eyes...
It didn’t take him long to get the story of my running away out of me, and to my surprise he tried to talk me into going back home and getting an education. By dark, though, I guess it had become apparent to him that I never would go home again, for all at once he looked across the fire at me and said, “Kid, let’s you and me head up north to Oregon and pick some apples.” I can still see the shadows of the fire flickering on his face. Never had I felt such happiness. At last I was going to be a hobo and travel with these strange wanderers.
And so started our 25-year journey across America.
When I found a picture of the tamarisk tree in a book I found something to my liking, and that is why I want to plant one in my garden. And I suppose, when I look at it in years to come, by the brook, when it whirls like a dervish in a winter tempest, when it dances to the roar, the trance-music of the storm drums, I can tap into its sap, switch off the gravitron and dance to the music of my own golden age.
AGNES HUNT
AT LAST, I can write it down:
March 1st: I start my walk around Wales. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a step! I meet a crimson fox, who watches me go by...
To begin at the beginning. It was very early (I like daybreak) when I st
ood by the newly-planted tamarisk tree and waited for the night’s purple curtain to rise, for the footlights to come on, for my play to begin.
Far out to sea, on the horizon, the lighthouse at Penmon slunk out of the shadows like a girl sneaking away from an all-night party, sleepy and still a bit drunk, the early sun blushing her white dress with a soft pink. I stepped away from the tamarisk, like its shadow leaving it; among the millions of steps being taken all over the planet it was no different, but to me it was the most significant of my whole life. Within minutes I had met my first fellow-traveller: peeking over a hedge, which was beaded with a million glinting droplets of cold dew, my eyes met the gaze of a fox; we stood and looked at each other for quite a few seconds before he vanished into the undergrowth. His coat was a deep red, almost crimson in that light. Briefly, a million dewdrops had each held a miniature snapshot of my first step, and a million tiny foxes had quivered in tiny bubbles on the thorns; my journey had already reached epic, kaleidoscopic proportions!
A clever man like John Parker, who so annoyed the Blue Angel barman, might say something fanciful: with that first step I tore through the placenta of my past, for instance, but I’m not clever, and it was just a step, just the start of a walk for an ordinary mortal.
I will not plot my course by the stars, but by the people I encounter, the places I see, and the events which will come to meet me. A strange current is flowing through my body, as if I had a Gulf Stream of my own, stirring my subterranean channels; electricity fizzles in tiny blue bursts of current on my skin: a thousand miles stretch out in front of me (though I’ve not mentioned my journey to many people in case I come a cropper).
If you’re not Welsh I must introduce you to three words (if you’re not, I’m sure you have other talents!). They are cynefin, hafod and hendref.
Cynefin means your home territory, your own patch – it’s the area of pastureland grazed by a particular flock, which stays there even if there are no fences. The flocks behave like this because farmers have spent centuries riding around their cynefin on horseback every morning and night, driving the sheep towards the centre of their territory. This gives each flock a Jungian collective memory of the homeland, which is seemingly passed on from ewe to lamb. The Welsh have a very strong sense of their own cynefin, as if an invisible farmer had also spent centuries herding them into their allotted place. This has seeped into the national consciousness, and is best put, I think, by the character Albie in Emyr Humphreys’ A Toy Epic:
She changed her mind again. ‘You sure you ’aven’t been in my castle?’
I tried one last throw of the dice.
‘Actually,’ I tried to look engagingly coy, ‘I’ve been to the woods. You know what I mean...’
‘Oh, you been for a...’ she finally believed me.
I liked her, and not just because I’d won an age-old tussle for a castle. She was going to a funeral, she had a migraine, she was human, and she was guarding her castle to the best of her ability, as all those poor dead sods did six hundred years ago.
As we travelled along the fringes of the Black Mountains into England Williams regaled me with a story about Cordell, whom he’d met a few years before he departed this life so tragically. He had been found dead, with family photographs at his side, by a stream in the Horseshoe Pass area.
‘Ever read Cordell?’ asked Williams.
‘Just the one – Rape of the Fair Country – though I’ve come across many extracts in anthologies,’ I replied.
‘Met him once,’ he said. ‘Told me a very strange story. So amazing I could barely believe it, and I’ve not come across it in other writings about him. He was in his early seventies when I met him – a smallish, dapper man with a toothbrush moustache. He was ex-military and looked it. He was getting tired but he was kind and he still loved Wales – it was like a love for an old flame,’ said Williams, folding his newspaper and halting his story while a trolleyman sold us both beakers of tea. Then he continued:
‘This is the gist of what he told me, after he had fetched out a beautifully-bound copy of Y Gododdin I think it was, from a cabinet. It had been presented to him as a thank-you for his lifetime’s work by one of the Welsh-interest societies. Never has there been a country with so many friends! He was immensely proud of this volume.
‘“I’ll tell you a story,” said Cordell. He had told me about his birth in Ceylon – his father was in the British Army. He talked to me in a pleasantly formal way.
‘He told me that he had a daughter who had married a Scandinavian orthodontist. She came over occasionally. She’d had children of her own but she and her husband had decided to adopt a child from a third world country. So they lodged their names with an agency and after being accepted as potential parents they had been told to wait for a suitable child to come up. That could be anywhere in the world. They would have to go there immediately, when notified, to pick up their new charge. Time passed by and eventually his daughter was summoned to fetch the child – remember, this could be anywhere in the world. And so she did. She flew off and collected the baby at an orphanage in Sri Lanka, the old Ceylon. Before she left she had a picture taken of herself, holding the child outside the orphanage. On her next visit to Wales to see her father she showed him the photograph.
‘“Do you know, Dr Williams,” he said, looking at me with a level gaze. “That was the very building where I had been born. It was the old barracks in Ceylon, which had been turned into an orphanage.”’
This incredible tale of chance had the suitable effect on me, and I had one of my own to tell, and so the journey passed swiftly through England and back into Wales, as a paradigm for the Welsh condition; so many of my countrymen have been forced to find work there, and have had such deep pangs of nostalgia when parted from their homeland, for it is true what they say, the jewel is best admired from afar. There is no greater Welshman than an exile. And some of our best friends – Saunders Lewis, Cordell, Firbank, Ffransis and Morris for instance, have either been born elsewhere or have spent long periods away.
I parted from Williams at Bangor station and made my way home. We’d agreed to meet at a church in Anglesey, near the farmhouse where he was staying. It was the parish church in Llanfairynghornwy, which I knew had a connection with Evan Thomas the bonesetter, and Williams wanted to find a memorial there too: he was still clambering up his family tree. That evening I tried to make arrangements with the vicar but couldn’t get hold of him. I phoned Williams to tell him. He sounded drowsily pleased, even when I told him we would have to fly blind, since I had been unable to find anyone with a key.
The next day presaged failure. A friend let me down so I had to go by bus, and the north-west corner of Anglesey is more accessible to bears and boats than it is to buses. I anticipated, and felt, a change as we crossed the suspension bridge. It is a truth universally acknowledged by my fellow mainlanders that the island is ‘different’. This difference is hard to define, even romantically. People say words like ‘strange’ or ‘supernatural’ or ‘old’ or ‘timeless’ or ‘spooky’. Those who feel a sense of otherness on the island fumble for a definition. I have travelled enough to detect a commonality with other parts of the world. In passing to an island there is a feeling of detachment and passage to another time and another place. Like Arthur’s conveyance to Afallon, or Orpheus’s descent into the underworld, one has a sense of transportation or transposition into another realm of the senses; of a spiritual transhumance. Islands can have a fairytale feel. Often they are sparsely inhabited and one can move for hours on the landscape without seeing any human movement. Then a carrion crow will descend slowly and observe you as a specimen, silently. The wind will moan slightly in a spinney of conifers huddled like winter mourners, and remind you slyly of your own mortality. Clouds will shift and pattern the fields in a cunning re-enactment of their exact movements a thousand years ago or more, hoping you will notice. Time will have no meaning; clocks and watches will play tricks with you. The sea will wash away all memories from the shore, and the ancient chambers of man – Barclodiad y Gawres, Bryn Celli Ddu – will press you to the ground and whisper in your ear.
Islands can be Hell and islands can be Heaven. I wonder which one it was for the writer of the Vogel Papers. Was that flight across the bridge a descent into the wormhole of Vogel’s personal little universe, or was it an attempt to find something – absolution, or a cure, or a prognosis?
I crossed over, below a uniform grey sky, perfectly still, as though it had been painted onto a glass cupola. I felt like a parrot whose irritable owner had thrown a grey sheet over its cage and told it to shut up and go to sleep. The landscape all around oozed sweatily with rainwater. Fields and meadows wallowed greyly in the ditches and dykes. Nature had gone to bed, and the trees stood around like hangers-on after a party. The bus rattled and felt like a crate of empties being taken away. Desperate-looking men got on at different bus stops and sat in the back, glowering moodily and picking their teeth like characters in search of a spaghetti western. An oily middle-aged man got on and talked incessantly into his mobile phone in a loud, flat, Lancastrian monotone; it was a surreal scene worthy of Waiting for Godot, since I felt sure there was no-one at the other end. He was infuriating. Hot ants, each carrying a molecule of hate as heavy as the universe before it banged, scurried hotly through my bloodstream. I wanted to hit him. It was a suitable day for cruelty. I imagined Suetonius Paulinus and his Roman soldiers driving nails into barrels and rolling the island’s Druids downhill to their punctured deaths. The very same Suetonius Paulinus who had been the first Roman to cross the massive Atlas mountain range near Marrakesh in north-west Africa, and had reported that nearby forests harboured all kinds of wild elephants, beasts and serpents, and natives who ate their food ‘like the canine race, and shared with it the entrails of wild beasts.’
I got there eventually – I hitched a bit, and walked the last two miles. I discovered there was a key with a churchwarden, Captain Roberts, but he wasn’t at home. I stood by the church waiting for a bit of luck. I saw a blue estate car winding down into the half-flooded dip by the church and I struck a pose, looking at the church with my chin in my hand, trying to look interested and interesting. The car stopped.
My luck had arrived. It was Captain Roberts with his wife, and they had the key right there with them in the car, as
Dr Williams now hove into view and we examined the church in the late afternoon sun. I found a memorial tablet, which started:
To the memory of Evan Thomas of Maes in this Parish who, in humble life, without the aid of education or any other advantage, by an extraordinary gift of Nature acquired such a knowledge of the human frame as to become a most skilful Bonesetter, whereby he rendered himself pre-eminently useful to his fellow creatures.
Underneath this tablet was the inscription in Welsh.
We pottered around the church and chatted with Captain Roberts, a spry ex-Merchant Navy man who had sailed out of Liverpool. He could have come straight from the Vogel Papers – he was a seafaring man, and had been treated himself by one of the bone doctors as a child. Outside, we went over to Evan Thomas’s gravestone and read the inscription. As I was about to turn away and head up the path to the road a fleeting notion passed through my mind; surely the dates on the white marble tablet inside the church were different to the ones on the gravestone. I was right – there was a disparity of 22 days.
We laughed over this and I dismissed it as a stone-cutter’s error. No doubt this was an afternoon job, and he’d had too much ale at lunchtime. Old gravestones have many errors of fact and grammar, with words sometimes corrected on the slate or carried over to the next line. Families of the deceased probably never noticed, because they couldn’t read.
Still, it was a peculiar thing to happen, and Williams and I discussed it in his hired car – he had offered to take me to Amlwch to meet a bus. For him it was the end of the affair, a diversion, and he was off to his symposium in a couple of days, and then, after a month’s adventuring, back to Tasmania.
‘Hobart?’ I asked.
‘No – Launceston, the second city. It’s at the head of the Tamar River, and it’s old – third oldest city on the continent, I seem to remember,’ he said. ‘Quite pretty. Hilly. A few fine buildings and a nice little chairlift. Lovely old watermill complex. I divide my time between lecturing on maritime history and taking tourists along our wine route. You’ll be delighted to know that I live in a suburb called Trevallyn – can’t get much more Welsh-sounding than that! – and my actual address is Beaumaris Court.’
I feigned astonishment.
‘Incidentally,’ I asked, ‘why did you start this maritime thing?’
‘Tasmania’s got more wrecks than most places – about a thousand at the last count,’ he said. ‘Comes from being smack in the course of the roaring forties. It’s no place to be in a storm if you’re a sailor.’
We arrived at Amlwch and he dropped me at the bus stop. After the farewells he prepared to go but then stopped the car and wound down the window.
‘Tell you what, if I hear anything else of interest I’ll get in touch. Got an e-mail address?’
After he’d written it down he floated off into the darkness, and I thought I’d seen the last of him. The first chapter was closed, and Williams had been a useful find. Like one of those historical characters in the Vogel Papers, he was about to disappear forever.
Or so I thought...
As I stood waiting for the bus a man walked up and joined me – it was the same man who had irritated me earlier with his Waiting for Godot conversation. He didn’t recognise me so I played a trick on him.
‘Dy’a know,’ I said nonchalantly after the initial greetings, ‘I’m a bit of a clairvoyant, have the gift of second sight and all that... give me your phone for a second – if I hold anything belonging to someone I can usually tell a lot about them.’
He handed me the phone, slowly and suspiciously.
I held it in my hand, closed my eyes, and regurgitated a medley from his conversations earlier on the bus.
‘You have an Aunty Mary... she is very ill... you need to go to see her in hospital tomorrow... your car is playing up... you need a new exhaust... the garage can’t fit you in... but I can’t tell you any more... it’s terrible... too horrible...’
It did the trick. He grabbed the phone and ran into the night.
Revenge can be very sweet.
I’m off to bed now, to dream great dreams. Yes, I know, I should be finalising my plans. Tell you what, you can plan the plans. Here are a few directions. I will be walking in the Roman style – three days on the road then one day’s rest. I will abide by Nicholas Crane’s four quadrants of survival: navigation, shelter, food and warmth.
That’s enough for you to get on with. Now leave me to dream. Like Mr Vogel, I want to get out of my one-horse town, where Time is a slow puncture and Hope is heavily bandaged.
Before I go tomorrow I will plant a tamarisk tree.
Why? To see how much it has grown by the time we’ve finished this mission of ours?
Certainly not – hubris ain’t allowed around here, my friends.
This is why I want to plant a tamarisk tree. Back at the start of this chapter, somewhere down there in the nether region of Wales, the bit that wallows like a big fat pimply buttock in the Bristol Channel, I mentioned a Big Issue seller who gave me a book. It was the memoirs of an American hobo called Hood River Blackie, who ran away from home at the age of 14 after some family troubles. I like this bit:
I guess it was only natural that I take to the rails, but my first ride in a boxcar was a terrifying thing. I swear, if that train had stopped I would have gotten off it and gone right back home. But after a few hours, I saw it wasn’t going to jump the tracks. I also noticed a strange feeling coming over me, a kind of pleasant swelling sensation in my chest that I now know was freedom.
About a week later I piled off the freight at the little California desert town of Mecca. I had a bedroll, a packsack, and a few dollars I had been saving to buy an old car. If anyone who ever reads this ever gets to Mecca, or if you live there, walk over the tracks and look at the big tamarisk tree located at the southern edge of the town on the west side of the tracks. Under this tree on a hot September day in 1940 I met Tex Medders. Tex was probably the finest human being I’ve ever known. He looked rather frail to me at five foot seven and 135 pounds, sitting on a rusty five-gallon can watching a stew cook over a small fire. I can close my eyes now and still see his old face and the merry twinkle in his faded blue eyes...
It didn’t take him long to get the story of my running away out of me, and to my surprise he tried to talk me into going back home and getting an education. By dark, though, I guess it had become apparent to him that I never would go home again, for all at once he looked across the fire at me and said, “Kid, let’s you and me head up north to Oregon and pick some apples.” I can still see the shadows of the fire flickering on his face. Never had I felt such happiness. At last I was going to be a hobo and travel with these strange wanderers.
And so started our 25-year journey across America.
When I found a picture of the tamarisk tree in a book I found something to my liking, and that is why I want to plant one in my garden. And I suppose, when I look at it in years to come, by the brook, when it whirls like a dervish in a winter tempest, when it dances to the roar, the trance-music of the storm drums, I can tap into its sap, switch off the gravitron and dance to the music of my own golden age.
AGNES HUNT
AT LAST, I can write it down:
March 1st: I start my walk around Wales. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a step! I meet a crimson fox, who watches me go by...
To begin at the beginning. It was very early (I like daybreak) when I st
Far out to sea, on the horizon, the lighthouse at Penmon slunk out of the shadows like a girl sneaking away from an all-night party, sleepy and still a bit drunk, the early sun blushing her white dress with a soft pink. I stepped away from the tamarisk, like its shadow leaving it; among the millions of steps being taken all over the planet it was no different, but to me it was the most significant of my whole life. Within minutes I had met my first fellow-traveller: peeking over a hedge, which was beaded with a million glinting droplets of cold dew, my eyes met the gaze of a fox; we stood and looked at each other for quite a few seconds before he vanished into the undergrowth. His coat was a deep red, almost crimson in that light. Briefly, a million dewdrops had each held a miniature snapshot of my first step, and a million tiny foxes had quivered in tiny bubbles on the thorns; my journey had already reached epic, kaleidoscopic proportions!
A clever man like John Parker, who so annoyed the Blue Angel barman, might say something fanciful: with that first step I tore through the placenta of my past, for instance, but I’m not clever, and it was just a step, just the start of a walk for an ordinary mortal.
I will not plot my course by the stars, but by the people I encounter, the places I see, and the events which will come to meet me. A strange current is flowing through my body, as if I had a Gulf Stream of my own, stirring my subterranean channels; electricity fizzles in tiny blue bursts of current on my skin: a thousand miles stretch out in front of me (though I’ve not mentioned my journey to many people in case I come a cropper).
If you’re not Welsh I must introduce you to three words (if you’re not, I’m sure you have other talents!). They are cynefin, hafod and hendref.
Cynefin means your home territory, your own patch – it’s the area of pastureland grazed by a particular flock, which stays there even if there are no fences. The flocks behave like this because farmers have spent centuries riding around their cynefin on horseback every morning and night, driving the sheep towards the centre of their territory. This gives each flock a Jungian collective memory of the homeland, which is seemingly passed on from ewe to lamb. The Welsh have a very strong sense of their own cynefin, as if an invisible farmer had also spent centuries herding them into their allotted place. This has seeped into the national consciousness, and is best put, I think, by the character Albie in Emyr Humphreys’ A Toy Epic: