An Audience with an Elephant (6 page)

Saturday:
To Towyn and beyond. On the way he passes one of his old sleeping places, or rather what remains of it. The place, an old cottage, has been demolished by the local council to make a lay-by. George mourns briefly for it: ‘There was an old mattress there. I used to sweep the floor with my little brush.’ At Ysguboriau Farm nearby, Mrs Gwenda Jones greets George: ‘This was one of the old tramps’ calls. We gave them bread and butter and tea. But they’ve all gone. This one must be the last of them.’ We plod thoughtfully on, through Towyn, to a railway crossing house. But the night has come and is full of cars. George decides to stop at a rubbish tip a mile from the house. Using the pram he drapes his ground-sheet into a lean-to tent, lights a fire and fries some old bacon, ‘what you would call a rough lay-down’. The night is warm.

Sunday:
A rest day. George ambles the last mile to the crossing house. It is being modernised but the doors are still open. George does not like the modernisation. ‘Oh dear, all this was wooden once, wooden floors, wooden walls here. They’ve ruined it. I was quite warm. They’ve ruined it completely.’ He eats little today, some old bread and lard he has, and brews up. He plays his radio endlessly, pop, political reports and drama wafting into the bowed little head.

Monday:
Towards Machynlleth. He walks 6 miles, calling at two houses for some hot water where he is given some bread and a couple of raw onions. He stops the night at a cluster of modernised little cottages standing in a courtyard, all for some reason deserted. He makes a fire in the fireplace, fries his bread, and eats it with raw onions. So far in the week he has only once asked permission of a farmer to stay the night: nobody minds, says George, as long as he leaves the place tidy. Each morning he cleans up his rubbish.

Tuesday:
The last four miles to Machynlleth. He arrives early in the afternoon, having called in the morning on the Rector of Pennal, who gives him bread and butter, a cake and some tea, and tells me that he too doesn’t know what’s become of the tramps. At Machynlleth George goes to the Social Security office, and is given 40p.

‘I don’t feel envious at seeing a family through a window in winter. I hope they’re not the same as I am. I wouldn’t like anyone else to be out in the weather like me. I see how happy they are at their fire. It makes me happy. I had an experience once, about ten years ago, in an old mansion near Oswestry. It hadn’t been lived in for ten to twelve years. I got up to the attic. I’d just set out my candles, an old newspaper to read, when I suddenly saw the paper rise to the height of one foot, or thereabouts. When I saw that I went all cold and shivery, the coldest I ever was. There was no draught. I packed up as quick as possible and got out. There was something in that room, I went down the stairs into the pitch-black. But I think I would stay there now. I’ve slept in graveyards, in the coke holes of cemeteries, nobody bothers you there. Kids don’t come into graveyards, and the dead don’t do any harm. It’s the living you’ve got to watch.

‘The old-timers are all dead now, either found dead on the roadside or in derelict buildings. I’m not worried about whether I’ll be found dead. Everyone has to die, wherever he is, at sea, in a car, in a field, on a quayside. My ambition is to die in Wales, and be buried here.’

Like a swallow, he begins to move South. The holiday cars flooding into Machynlleth shy away from the intent little figure on the road, like horses shying from some creature which has somehow sidestepped the processes of evolution. He disappears into Wales.

Note: Mr Gibbs has now come in from the roads. Latterly he had taken to spending his winters in a hut at Lampeter Station, so the district council, seeking to raze the station, was obliged to offer him a home under the 1977 Homelessness Act. He was by then of pensionable age, and the council’s action had made homeless a man for whom homelessness was a way of life. It has to be the most wonderful of all bureaucratic ironies. Mr Gibbs has exchanged his pram for a bungalow in Lampeter, and the last time we met he gave me a visiting card.

The Lost Lands

Y EARLY AFTERNOON
it was clear we were in a frontier zone. The country lanes had gone. These roads were wide, the tarmac well maintained, and there was military traffic now, jeeps and trucks, the drivers of which did not slow down as they passed. And then there was some kind of crossing point, unmanned but with a red flag flying over it. I braked to read a large notice in the two languages. ‘Do Not Touch Any Military Debris. It May Explode And Kill You’, which seemed reasonable enough. I pointed to the red flag.

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said the Farmer. ‘They put those up to deter tourists. You’ll be all right on this road.’

And so it was, at just after 2.00 p.m., with a cold wind blowing the rain so the horizons kept coming and going, that we passed into the Lost Lands.

Just after the village of Trecastle, the A40, moving west from Brecon to Llandovery, enters a valley where the old coaching road has been straightened. On the skyline to the south is an even older road under grass and mud, along which Roman legionaries and medieval English kings passed. On the other side of the valley a lane runs up past Llywel church, and on to a part of Wales where in the 40 years I have used the A40 I have never dared go. Beyond that skyline lie the Lost Lands.

Epynt. . . You will not find it on any road sign, for this is an area which has disappeared from everything except the memories of the old and the schedules of the British Army, whose maps of a rectangle 12 miles by 15, not that much smaller than the Isle of Wight, are detailed. It was here that 60 years ago the Army compelled 219 men, women and children to leave 54 farms and smallholdings to make way for an artillery range. The Army is still there.

A truck went by, faces under red berets looking incuriously down at the car parked beside the road. ‘Paras,’ said the Farmer.

As they had driven along, the Farmer had been intoning a litany of names, the farms he remembered from when, as a young man, he had himself been forced to leave. Hirllwyn. . . the Long Tree. Gwybedog. . . the Place of the Gnats. Cefnioli. . . the Farmer stumbled over the translation of that one, for these were names old in his father’s time and in his father’s before him. One of those evicted claimed his family had been farming the Epynt when, had they existed, newspaper headlines would have been about the Wars of the Roses.

The Farmer was remembering people now. ‘The old gentleman at Cwmioli, John Owen, the Army still let him graze his sheep on Epynt but each time he went back, a hedge would be down, a wall gone. He died of a broken heart. He said, “It was an end for me when Cwmioli went.’” Thomas Morgan, Glandwr. ‘He was so convinced he would return one day that he used to sneak back at night to light a fire in the old farmhouse. The Army must have seen the smoke, for in the end they blew the house up. Mind you, I don’t know why he bothered, he and his brother had been too frightened to sleep there for years because it was haunted.’

‘What happened to the ghost?’

‘Oh, the Army blew that up as well.’

Sometimes the farms were a heap of stones among the trees, sometimes not even a bump in the ground showed that generations had lived there. Occasionally, and this was bizarre, the Army had rebuilt the farmhouse to provide bivouacs for their men, so these stood blank and empty, but far more immaculate than they had been in life.

The Army had also built shell houses to train their troopers to react to the snipers of Northern Ireland, and a folly of eighteenth-century proportions, an entire high-roofed East German village in which to rehearse street warfare against the Warsaw Pact. They went into such detail on this (adding a cemetery and, to the indignation of the devout, a church), they had only just completed it, at God (and the MOD) knows what cost, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact disappeared like snow in water. An East German village stands forlorn on a Welsh mountain, part of it used as a rubbish tip.

Under some pines, ringed by a huge sky, is the old Drovers Arms, at a crossroads where the paths of prehistory meet. ‘This inn was once a welcome resting place on the old drovers’ routes. . . . Renovated 1994.’ I could see the green tracks winding away up the mountain, but a pole had been lowered and there was another sign, not reasonable this time, but peremptory. ‘Danger. Keep Out.’ And more red flags.

‘There’s a view for you,’ said the Farmer. From where we stood we could see hills, and hills behind the hills, and mountains beyond these. Then. . . Ker-POW. A huge dull noise, as though a man 7 miles high, suffering from a smoker’s cough, had cleared his throat above the clouds.

‘Is that thunder?’ asked the Farmer. Ker-POW. ‘No,’ he answered himself. ‘Time to be off, I think.’

There had been some talk of visiting the East German village and the Farmer had thought this might be possible, for the cold war, he said with irrefutable logic, was over. The two of us stared at its red roofs below us, but at that moment a star-shell burst lazily over it. ‘Though not today,’ said the Farmer.

We passed a little graveyard and the perfectly repointed bits of wall, which were all that remained of a chapel. Here, private subscription has raised a plaque on which there is a translation from the Welsh.

We had reached a high point, where we stopped and walked, bent against the wind. ‘My old home is down there,’ said the Farmer suddenly. ‘Just beyond East Germany.’

He is in his 80s now, a merry, mischievous man, who in his long life has been farmer, milkman, caretaker, horse dealer and proprietor of a chip shop and, having flown over all these, still competes in sheepdog trials though he owns no sheep. ‘I find myself thinking more and more about this place now, and of what might have been.’

And I thought of the passage quoted by the historian, Herbert Hughes, in his
An Uprooted Community
, in which Iorwerth Peate, founder of the Welsh Folk Museum, records his meeting with an old lady. She was 82, and, as the two watched her furniture being loaded on to a lorry, she asked Peate where he was from, a question the Welsh always ask. He said he was from Cardiff. ‘My dear boy,’ she said, ‘go back there as soon as you can, it is the end of the world here.’

It was a time of national emergency. ‘They told us it was either them or the Germans,’ said Iorwerth Davies, late of Gwybedog. But there was still a great sense of injustice. At the time the Army had requisitioned 56,000 acres of England, 6,000 acres of Scotland, but they had taken 70,000 acres of Wales, so a country one-tenth the size of the other two had more land taken away than both of them together.

And there was something else. ‘In the London ministries they thought they were dealing with a largely unpopulated area on the Epynt,’ said Herbert Hughes. ‘But they weren’t.’ What they were dealing with was something they and their colleagues had never encountered, a Welsh community that had changed little since the Middle Ages. Many spoke no English. The former MP, Gwynfor Evans, remembers a court case involving some minor breach of wartime agricultural regulations in which two of the evicted Epynt farmers were forced to pay for the services of a translator. ‘I had been in courts where Arabs and Spaniards had appeared and had translators provided for them. But these men, speaking their own language in their native land, had to pay. The outcry eventually led to the Welsh Courts Act.’

It was a pastoral, self-sufficient society that medieval travellers would have recognised. There were no villages, no roads, and travel was on horseback, the women riding side-saddle. ‘My uncle used to come and visit us only in the summer, but only if it was a dry summer,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘I remember my mother taking us to market in a horse and trap, and, when it came to rain, pulling a leather blanket over us. I looked out and saw the moon, but when we came round a hill the moon was on the other side of us. “Mam, mam, the moon’s moved.” The only cars we saw belonged to the district nurse and the school inspector. If a plane came over, we were allowed out of school to watch.’

The only travel was with the flocks or to market. Every visit to a town was an opportunity to take on supplies, however small, before the wet autumns came, and with them a stock-taking of coal, flour, yeast, sugar and salt to see whether there was enough to get through the winter. One farmer, caught in a snowstorm with his wife while returning from market, reassured her. ‘Look at it this way, once we’re home we’ll be all right ’til Easter.’ Families saved broken crockery to embed the brightly coloured fragments in the mountain paths so children could find their way to and from school.

‘But it wasn’t lonely, that was the odd thing,’ said Iorwerth Davies. ‘You couldn’t go anywhere except to your neighbours, so people called on each other, my mother would kill a chicken, and there’d be an evening of singing and telling stories. Not everyone had a wireless, but we did, and then we had no end of people call on us.’