Everything I Have Always Forgotten (27 page)

Finally, we could walk no further and decided to camp for the night. Neither of us had a watch, so it could have been between midnight and three in the morning. The moon had still not risen and once we had found a gap in the walls, we literally felt our way with our hands. The grass was short here, no doubt heavily grazed by sheep. The ground was surprisingly level and apparently devoid of cowpats. We pitched the tent easily. By now, we could have done it with our hands tied behind our backs. Sleep came like a mugging from behind.

“Cor blimey! What yer nippers doing in mi' garden?” Yelled a puce-red face through the parted flaps of our tent.

“Oh, sir, we're frightfully sorry, sir. We really couldn't see it was private property, sir. We couldn't see anything in the dark, sir.” We pacified him with our stuttered apologies until he said he would go and talk it over with the Missus. We could tell from his accent that he was no local – probably a retired man from the Midlands and he could tell from ours that we were no local ragamuffins, but ‘toff tramps'. Such was the class distinction set by accent, usually defined by whether or not one's parents could afford to pay for a private education.

We peered outside our tent and saw the extent of our error: we were camped in the middle of a very small, immaculately tended lawn. Luckily we had not come through the flower beds of roses and hollyhocks, nor abused the plaster gnomes, mushrooms and fauns. The house was a neat little brick bungalow such as retired couples from England liked to build for themselves in Wales. We were trying to get dressed inside the tent (never an easy task, given its tiny dimensions) when the owner returned with a tray laden with mugs of tea and plates of good greasy breakfast food. He just admonished us to “Tidy up them tent-peg holes and not to leave any litter.” We knew all about that and didn't need the advice, but meekly nodded “Yes sir, no sir,” and then added, when he left: “My big toe, sir.”

That day, we decided to shorten our walk by trying to get a boat from Abersoch and save ourselves nine or ten miles walking, so we cut back south across the Lleyn Peninsula (much narrower here). Here, the land was flatter, more domesticated. Though still not rich land, fields were enclosed by dry stone walls so it was well nigh impossible to walk off road. We chose the smallest lanes that followed the boundaries of fields. The heat of the last few days had abated and walking faster was no longer such an ordeal.

We reached the small fishing port of Abersoch in the late afternoon. We asked on the pier if any boats would be going to Bardsey Island next day. There was none. Our hearts fell. Everyone said the usual boat went out from Aberdaron and we had better continue on to there. Tired, depressed and discouraged, we could not face walking further that night, so we decided to just sleep on the beach. We did not pitch our tent, but slept on the sand next to the pier. I forget what we ate, but it was certainly not fish and chips from the shop on the front, whose neon lights bothered us all night. Somehow, neither of us was used to the idea of ‘going to a restaurant', even if it was a cheap take-out like that. It just seemed too lavish.

Oh yes, in my second school in London where I had met Alan in the first place, there had been a few boys who wore glasses and were continuously teased for excelling in class. Some of them celebrated their birthdays in glitzy restaurants and invited all their tormenting classmates to join them. I admired their academic success and anyway was not inclined to tease them, on the principle of ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'. I suppose they were the sons of some of those lucky Jewish families to have reached London before the Nazis got to them. So yes, I had been to restaurants, but certainly never on my dime. That would come much later, when I was earning my own living.

XXVII

PASSAGE TO BARDSEY

I
n the morning, we hoisted our packs once more and set off down narrow twisting lanes towards our next great hope for a ferry. By now, we were not talking much at all and just kept walking silently, determinedly towards our arbitrary destination. As we stumbled along, we wondered what fool idea we had had, that we should walk to Bardsey in the first place? So, I had come up with the idea, but it was just an idea and then Father had confirmed it and it was sort of all signed and sealed. We were regretting it and here we were, within a few miles of a boat ride to our final destination. We could hardly stop now. Each of us worried what the other one would think if we voiced our exhaustion and need to quit at this point. Besides, where would we go – back to Father in Parc? We knew he did not have time for us. Back to the one-room cottage on the beach? To do what? Of course, we still had money, so we just kept on plodding, one foot in front of the other, again and again. There were no more mountains, not even big round boob ones, just a sight of the sea and the rocky coast to our left. At least it was not so hot any more, we could walk all day until we just dropped from exhaustion. We did stop from time to time to sprawl in a field by the roadside, perhaps to sleep a little. So near to our goal, we were becoming depressed with fatigue.

Finally, in mid-afternoon, we looked down onto the tiny hamlet of Aberdaron, mostly one big hotel right in the middle of the sandy bay. In the year 1115, a local Welsh prince, fleeing from the troops of Henry I of England took refuge in the church here. When the English troops arrived to break the sacred law of ‘Refuge in a Sanctuary' by dragging out the prince, they were ‘repelled by the local clergy'! Tough vicars they had in those days! Later he escaped to Ireland in a boat belonging to the local monastery.

Now we wondered if there was going to be a boat out from here for us. If there was not, this was the end of the line. There was no further hope of a ferry. We could see no real pier, no protected harbour. Where was a boat to go out from? Once down in the hamlet, the hotel looked far too large and grand for us to dare to enter and enquire about boats but a little past the great edifice there was a tiny cottage with a sign announcing that it was called ‘Y Gegin Fawr' (The Big Kitchen), the last place where pilgrims to Bardsey might get a meal ever since the thirteenth century – though they might have to wait for weeks to get safe passage across the perilous straits. This was not encouraging news for us. There seemed to be two minuscule rooms with very low ceilings on the ground floor and two above. We knocked and a little old lady came to the door – “A witch” muttered Alan. If she was so, she was kind enough and told us her nephew would probably be leaving next morning with the tide, about 8 o'clock from Porth Meudwy, a little over a mile further on around the cove. We thanked her and asked her to tell him we'd be there waiting.

“Mind you, young men, if the weather comes up, he won't be going at all. It does that all the time, you just never know,” she said as we started off again.

The fields around were so small and neatly mown by sheep, we decided to sleep on the beach once more. No-one could complain about us there. Though the heat wave had broken, it was still clear and sunny. It would not be very cold down by the water. In the end, we finished up almost under the big hotel, but we were out of sight in a little cleft in the rocks. Once again, we cooked up some fuel, slid into our sleeping bags and slept as if we were at our journey's end.

Next day, there was a good breeze blowing, waves were breaking on the protected beach. Whitecaps shone in the sun, so it was blowing over fifteen knots. We prayed the boat would still be going and hurried around the cliff line to Port Meudwy. The open fishing boat we were to take was bouncing up and down on the leeside of the little pier and we were the first passengers to arrive. Being young boys, of course, we took over the bow thwart and put our packs underneath it. The wettest seat on the boat, but ‘we would get there first'!

As we waited for the others to arrive, we discussed camping on Bardsey with the skipper. He told us that the owner did not allow any camping and that we would soon be run off the island if we tried. He did give us a good suggestion, though: he said there was a bird observatory in an old farmhouse on the hill, which had been set up a couple of years before, and that they had quite a few bunks where we might be able to sleep.

He also went on to tell us about the Kings of Bardsey. When the Barons of Newborough owned the island, they started crowning a King, the first being a John Williams in 1826. Another, John Williams II, was deposed in 1900 for alcoholism. The last, a John Pritchard, was outraged when he offered his services and the services of his subjects, at the outset of World War One in 1914 – and was refused, because he was already 71 years old. Disillusioned, he finally left the island in 1925 and died a year later. Perhaps it was about then that my own Father was asked if he would like to be King… although the duties were slight, the prospect of being obliged to spend most of his time on the island discouraged him and he declined.

One of the Newboroughs decided to rebuild the farmhouses and amused himself by building several pebbledash farm cottages on the island, all as attached pairs, with common outbuildings around a courtyard. When he died, he had meticulously left every pair of cottages to two different people whom he knew could not abide each other. He had designed a miniature Hell on his tiny, harbourless island with the idea that everyone would kill their neighbours when the wind came up and they could not get back to the mainland. The legatees were smarter than that and quickly sorted out the mess of their tenancies by swapping the properties, until there was some harmony on the island again.

In 1875, the Estate had offered the islanders either a harbour with a small jetty or a place of worship – they opted for a Methodist chapel, which was probably turned into a school thirty years later. Anyway, there still is no harbour or jetty of any kind.

Finally the other passengers arrived (they were all intending to return that afternoon) and we set off with the old inboard engine chugging away noisily. Bardsey seemed a good way off, though in fact it is only 1.9 miles from land and 5½ from Aberdaron itself. The crossing would take an hour and a half. It is an island just a mile long by 0.6 miles wide, two-thirds of it a steep little hill adequate for sheep grazing, the rest, land flat enough for cows and some poor arable land. There is also a rocky spit with a great lighthouse on the end – the one Father had told us about over our curry dinner together at Parc.

I have never been back, but in those days, there was no jetty or anchorage of any kind. Boats like ours came alongside some sharp rocks on which our skipper stood and held onto his bucking boat as passengers fell ashore. As we started off with our packs, he said he would be leaving that afternoon or would be back in a few days to take us back, so if it was not that day, he'd take us off soon enough. Little did we know just how long we would be staying…

Our first priority was to find out if indeed we could stay at the newly-created bird observatory, in a farmhouse called ‘Cristin'. Enquiries pointed us in the direction of a farmhouse larger than the others, built on the flanks of the hill (to spare flat land for farming) and with several large outbuildings. In my memory they were built of corrugated iron. The administrator was a wiry little man called Roy or something, with those unflinching, unblinking, piercing yellow-gold eyes of a bird of prey. He said we would have to pay for our bunks and food and work for the bird observatory as well – the other occupants were mostly university students interested in birds and a cheap summer holiday. When I pointed out that we did not have enough to pay for more than a night or two, he said he would settle up with my Parents. So we moved in.

XXVIII

STORM BOUND

T
hat night the weather changed. The wind came up and any idea of going back to the mainland was on hold, ‘at the pleasure of the Almighty'.

We slipped easily into the routine of mess meals (though no one trusted us with cooking), dishwashing duties, housework duties and above all bird duties. In the evenings, we sat around and our learned elders played guessing games about birds, one person writing down a specific bird, the rest guessing species, genus, family and so on until they found the bird. We often crawled off to bed before the game was over.

Around midnight or 2 am, if conditions were right, we would be rousted out of bed to collect migrating birds. Most birds cannot land in the dark, so when they are migrating for huge distances, they sometimes just fall, exhausted, into the sea. But a lighthouse beam that sweeps the side of a hill provides the perfect solution: for moments at a time, they can actually see where to land and land they do. Unfortunately they also tend to fly straight into the lighthouse. There are over 1,000 casualties a year on the Bardsey Light. They fall sound asleep with exhaustion just as we two little boys would after walking all day in the heat, with packs on our backs. We would take two-wheeled wheelbarrows out into the night with flashlights and literally sweep up the exhausted creatures, great and small, in our arms and dump them in the barrows.

Back at the observatory, there was a huge wire-netting cage into which we could empty them, checking to remove any raptors and taking those straight into the ringing barn to be processed at once and released. The harmless little fellows could wait until morning to be sent on their way. Being so young, we would be sent back to bed as soon as the big rush was over, but after breakfast, we would be back out there. Either we would help ring birds – I can still feel the thrill of holding a tiny goldcrest in my hand (the smallest bird in Europe at about 5 grams!), its back in my palm, its neck between my forefinger and second finger, one tiny ankle between my thumb and little finger, so I could snap on a miniscule numbered ring with my free hand. An adult would record the data and if it flew away of its own accord, that was fine, but usually they had to be taken out to the grass to go on sleeping. It was if we were operating on them under anaesthetic. Once they had recuperated, they would be off again.