My First Colouring Book (26 page)

North is one of the four cardinal points but let's not forget
here
as a place; neither should we forget the navel or
omphalos
, also an important spot on the map. Both Wales and Britain have a traditional north-south divide. England's halfway mark, famously, is Watford. There's a tradition that Wales' belly button is Pumlumon, which I see as a rather boggy centre circle on a football pitch, with the goals at Cardiff and Bangor. Aberystwyth is the spot where the ref blows his whistle to start the game. Historically, in Western culture, north is regarded as
the
fundamental direction and it defines all other directions.

But I tend to think of north as a place, not a direction. If you look at a political map of Britain it's clear that the north and west are more ‘liberal' and left-leaning than the rest of the island. There are almost no Conservative MPs in Scotland, Wales or South-West England, and socialism as a concept is stronger in those regions. No doubt the main factor is the historic poverty of the outlying areas; but I have a notion that the matriarchal Celts nurtured a healthy concept of fairness when it came to land ownership, since they practised gavelkind – the division of land between a dead man's sons, including those who were illegitimate. It was the nauseating Normans who brought the curse of primogeniture to Britain – the inheritance of all property by the eldest son. This led to great power and wealth being concentrated in a few hands, and set the scene for modern imperialistic Britain with its male-dominated, pyramidical power structures, ranging from companies with their managing directors to most families and societies. But I'm not talking about historical accuracy here; I'm describing my perceptions of the north. I was born in the north and I live in the north; I am in thrall to
the pale, unripened beauties of the North
as Addison put it. Besides, could David Lloyd George have been forged in Kent? I think not. Nonconformism also played a part in generating a breed of regional rabble-rousers, republicans, radicals and anarchists. Jac Glan-y-Gors is my personal favourite, a satirical poet and pamphleteer who spent much of his life running the Canterbury Arms at Southwark. Jac was a bar-room fundamentalist who led a spiritual and political pilgrimage to his own pre-communist version of the promised land. He was a six-pint socialist, as the South Walians say.

A ship's rail is a great place to enjoy a five-star reverie and I remember leaning and mulling, looking at the faint trace of the shoreline around my home in Llanfairfechan. I'd recently enjoyed a cuppa with the violin maker and restorer Dewi Roberts, who lives with his musical family on the foreshore at Aber. At some stage he handed me a violin and invited me to play it. It was such a sweet instrument I almost managed to sound competent. I asked where he'd acquired it.

It belonged to a Mr Melville Cooper, who died recently, said Dewi.

And my mind flew back, over forty years, to an upstairs room at Llanrwst Grammar School, where a peripatetic music teacher known to me as Mr Cooper, patient and kind, had instructed me in the basics of violin-playing – and instilled in me a lifelong love for a few bits of wood which, glued together, can make such a beautiful sound. I learnt the violin merely to dodge treble physics. As I played Mr Cooper's violin in Dewi's house I became aware that I'd been a young boy when I'd last held this instrument in my hands – deeply unhappy, and willing to spend many hours in my own company, with a fiddle, merely to escape from the world. A lot had happened in forty years, and Mr Cooper's violin was a link between two very different people, both of them me: a troubled teenager, on the verge of running away from his father, and a middle-aged man sawing away at wood and words, finding happiness in small things after a circuitous life-journey.

Out on the sea that day, aboard the Balmoral, our trip became a journey into smoke, a nether world of Hadean gloom. Even out there, on the wide watermass, man is encroaching. Wind farms and oil rigs clutter the water meadows of the wine-dark sea. Our last clear horizon is becoming obscured by man's relentless colonisation.

And then we came to land again, and the dream was over. We docked at the Pier Head after a calm and uneventful passage into the Mersey estuary, with an elderly and very lame Liverpudlian excitedly pointing out all the landmarks.

After that journey into Liverpool Bay I was to embark on a series of mini adventures, in search of something which was intangible. First of all, I was determined to conquer my fear of flying so I flew out to Italy with my teenage daughter. It's never going to be my number one hobby, but now I can take to the air without going to pieces. Bravery was never my strong point.

Rome is a gigantic ruin, a huge heap of stones, a coliseum within a coliseum within a coliseum. And a parable too: the Vatican City is encrusted with precious stones, a citadel of wealth, while outside its massive walls the city is awash with beggars, alcoholics and thieves. While the Pope fiddles, Rome burns; twice we were robbed. After four days of stumbling around this great ruptured mausoleum we found Florence and Pisa besieged by humans, vast termite mounds of tourists being hassled into culture. We escaped to the west coast and found a place to relax, a nice little clifftop town called Castiglioncello, on the rim of
Tuscany; just about everyone hit the beach during the day to swim, sleep, or to parade their physical wares; then the whole town came to life at night in a warm, dreamlike sanctuary of bar babble, book stalls and fairy lights. It was nice to be with normal Italian people. Close by are the ‘mountains of marble' from which Michelangelo ordered his raw materials. I know it's a beautiful country, but I couldn't live in Italy for long. All that heat. So little damp greenery. So few sheep. So many excessively right-wing people…

Whilst flying over the Dolomites I became aware how childish my geography is. Looking at a map or a globe, I still think of the north as ‘higher up' than the south, and I think of Cardiff as being lower down, geographically, than Bangor – as if I were observing the south from an eyrie in Snowdonia. Of course I know this is nonsense but I can't dislodge the notion without making a conscious effort. These are the misconceptions of childhood, echoing down the years.

After our trip to Italy the wandering continued. I jumped on a plane with Edwin and Ella, the youngsters in my life, and headed for Prague. We meandered around this beautiful baroque city, lost in another world. I realised during those five days why I've been such a poor traveller all my life. I'm not good at moving between worlds. Maybe this has something to do with my upbringing, on a remote hill farm; maybe not, since I've seen TV footage of Amazonian tribesmen wandering around New York, completely unfazed. Prague reminded me a little of Britain thirty years ago; the Czech people are mostly conservatively dressed, friendly but dignified. The great god Mammon hasn't quite got the place by the throat yet. Another thing that's really noticeable: there are hardly any black people. We ‘did' Prague – the famous clock, the churches, the puppet shows, the jazz bands; we sauntered along Charles Bridge at dusk and watched hot air balloon flights over the river; we listened to musicians, we made way for a Hare Krishna sect snaking its way through the crowd, chanting and beating drums. It was nice to get my first sight of onion domes with the kids, since it made me feel young and still capable of wonder. Then I stood in St Vitus Cathedral, within the castle complex, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the place. It's vast by any standards. Huge. Standing inside its hush, I became aware of the importance of stone in man's journey through the world. All around me lay millions of tons of dressed stone, piled into patterns which have different meanings for each succeeding age. I was overwhelmed by stone – its bulk, its martial presence, its dictatorship over the senses. I became aware of the enormous reservoirs of human energy tapped to make all the stone buildings of man. Standing in this gothic edifice, which took almost 600 years to complete, I was numbed by stone. On a lesser scale, perhaps this was how my ancestors felt when they first engineered the masterpieces of Neolithic Wales – the 150 or so cromlechi in the country.

We stepped out of the cathedral and wandered around the rest of the castle buildings.

Inside the White Tower we learnt about Katerina Bechynova, a cruel woman who murdered fourteen people, mainly young girls (she was said to cut their skin with a knife and put salt in the wounds). Katerina was lowered to the bowels of this tower to die of starvation, thirst, and cold. One of its more famous prisoners, according to legend, was the bogus necromancer Edward Kelly, nemesis of the Welsh-blooded alchemist John Dee, who has a chapter all to himself in history.

But I was more interested in the tale of the Dalibor Tower, named after a man who was sentenced to death and imprisoned there for giving shelter to rebel peasants. It's a sad but lovely story. Every day, as he waited to be executed, Dalibor played his violin, and the people of the city were moved deeply by the beautiful music which poured from his lonesome tower. He became famous and the authorities repeatedly delayed the execution, fearing civil disorder. But then, one day, Dalibor's fiddle fell silent and the people of Prague had a little less light in their lives. By his silence, they knew he was dead.

My wanderings were nearly over: the year was coming to an end. Our last trip was to Robin Hood's Bay on the eastern seaboard of England, for a reunion and birthday – nine of us, ranging from fogies like me to young Tom, aged four, staying in the youth hostel at nearby Boggle Hole. We wandered around the quaint streets and narrow ginnels of this old fishing town, which suffers from exactly the same second homes problem as most of
Wales.

Smuggling was a way of life here once and the womenfolk apparently poured boiling water from their bedroom windows to fend off the excise men; contraband could pass from one end of the town to the other without leaving the houses.

We admired their homes, charmingly quaint and huddled close together as if forever awaiting the last tempest; we ate fish and chips and we borrowed a bucket and spade from the street-side repositories provided by thoughtful locals; we built sandcastles, caught crabs, joked and bantered, took photographs. At some stage my daughter and I peeled off to comb the crumbling cliff-edge for fossils, an east coast speciality.

As we stumbled around in the scree, heads bowed, scanning the stones, our hands met and curled around each other: we hadn't done that for a while and the sudden convergence of fingers felt natural and good, surprising us both with its power and warmth. We became father and child again, rather than two people orbiting each other. We looked at each other and smiled, acknowledging this moment. At the same time I noticed many other things held in an age-old clasp around us: sea meeting shore, shells closing and knitting, the people around us darning friendships, using new words to bind old feelings. During the ensuing night my daughter and I both had nightmares about each other, dreams of danger. Was there a significance in that? Every time we experience a perfect conjunction, hand meeting hand unexpectedly, does the inner mind always freeze the final frame and imagine the worst possible scenario that might follow? Do we pause to think, unconsciously, about that final moment when each of us, from mammoth to trilobite, from human to mouse, is grasped by mud and stitched into place, a knot of bone in the rock-hard Bayeux of the untouchable past?

The journey has ended for now; I still haven't finished the voyage around Wales by water. Perhaps I never will. Winter came and we all went back to our homes. I rather like the eleventh century Irish story about Athairne going on a journey in the autumn to the home of his foster-father Amhairgen. As Athairne prepares to leave, Amhairgen finds a reason to detain him because he doesn't want to lose his company; so Athairne stays for the whole season, and when he prepares to leave, Amhairgen finds another ruse to keep him there for the winter, and yet another for the spring too. But when Athairne prepares to leave in the early summer Amhairgen lets him go, saying:
A good season is summer for long journeys; quiet is the tall fine wood, which the whistle of the wind will not stir; green is the plumage of the sheltering wood; eddies swirl in the stream; good is the warmth of the turf.

The year's restlessness has been quenched, the door has been locked and the fire lit. There will be no more a-roving before the spring. So I've started playing the violin again. It's not the first violin I ever owned, though I still have that too – I bought it when I was a young boy, from a man living in Llanfairfechan, little thinking that years later, when I was twenty-six, I would come to this town again for a day visit and stay for the next thirty years. I often pass that house where I bought my first violin and see a little boy in an upstairs window, with a fiddle tucked under his chin. Our eyes meet. I wish I could ring the doorbell and meet that little boy, tell him that everything will work out all right, that life will be worth living. I want to tell him that he will surge through later life in a
when I am old I shall wear purple
sort of mood.

Yes, that little boy is me. Never wanting to be far from each other, we both still live in the north.

south

I WENT south to the Black Mountains in May, when the whole country lay as still as moss on a tombstone, and the greens were countless. Tawny owls sounded all night in the cloisters of Capel y Ffin and a green woodpecker cackled by day. I knew from the first morning that a special time was upon me: I felt a calm clemency below the wide blue sky. For the first time in many years I met a woman I desired, an old-yet-new feeling which arrived, embarrassed and flustered, like a latecomer to a concert.