Island of Lightning (8 page)

Yet something is barring the way. I've arrived at the heartbreaking sheds of the supermarket, so large they might hold aeroplanes. But this is no factory, and in I go under the cameras that caress all that enter, and at once with who knows what atavistic instinct, I find I've adopted the sleepwalkers' demeanour necessary to prove myself a supplicant of the store.

Half a mile away is Castell Coch. Which is where you might be now, rapping on the portcullis, imagining Lady Bute stepping out of her chemise as she looks down at the treetops from her bedchamber. But if you've followed me you'll see I'm pricing Leeward Island bananas, figs from Greece. Then energy drinks that Fed-ex caffeine to the blood; proteins that restore hope, vitamins that recover determination.

I'm down one aisle and up the next, eyes left, eyes right. We need it all, we need the world, its sunflower seeds rattling in my basket, the staff of fair trade chocolate to help me over what's to come. Now I'm searching for something to feed the imagination. Starfruit? Peccarino or paracetamol? Maybe pumpernickel, wheatgerm, or the phials of the detox shelves. Or lollo rosso, groundnuts, evening primrose. What about enchiladas, gewurztraminer, zinfandel? Perhaps chili dog, happy dog, slush, crush, the original Neapolitan peasant recipe with extra cheese? Because we're all ravenous in the land of plenty, lost in the supermarket's garden of forking paths.

It's not Castell Coch. But we might as well enjoy it. The place is big as a small town. At every hour it boasts such a town's population. This is a high street under striplights and people are here because other people are here and there's gossip and glamour and only for the dwindling few the memory of what existed before it was built, the voices under the ground: the shiggling lamps, the blackpats.

Soon, life before the supermarket will be an inconceivable past. And then, when it is sufficiently strange, when it is irrecoverable, we will make films about it and statues will be raised and historians will give judgement and the rest of us will shrug and think there but for the grace of God goes... but Lady Bute at the checkout is asking if I need cashback. Look, pilgrim, here's a miracle indeed. I'm leaving with fifty more than when I came in. Happy dog.

Immediately I stand in a predicament of roads. The straightest route is around Taff's Well and north on the minor road between ash trees whose black buds have yet to unfurl and more of those shirtbuttons rolling in the grass.

This week I met the poet, Landeg White, who left Taff's Well aged five and has not returned. Until now. I am reading his book,
Traveller's Palm
, which reeks of his time in Africa, of its maize porridge and prison cells, and of his Portuguese home with its carafes of green wine. No-one in Taff's Well remembers Landeg White. No-one in Wales remembers him. The poet made the mistake of becoming exotic. But now the son has returned. Ah well, I shrug, and turn aside from the road.

Instead I retreat towards The Garth. Up, over, and here is Efail Isaf and not a soul to be seen in the village. In a garden I watch a sparrowhawk alight. It seizes a young blackbird. Soon around the hawk is a circle of feathers. Outside that circle is a circle of silence where nothing can intrude. Outside that second circle is a circle of uncertain silence. And outside that circle is the grief of the cock bird's voice. It approaches the hawk as closely as it dares. But the two circles of silence are forbidden to it. It watches as its chick is torn apart and devoured. Then the hawk rises and takes a second bird. Looking around the lawn, it makes the killing with its spur, calm at the centre of the circles where the rite is performed. Soon there are two circles of feathers, each with two circles of silence around them. The world is forbidden to enter those circles. The blackbird is forbidden and I know I am forbidden. No creature, no magic or sacrifice can alter the power of those circles. They were drawn before we discovered the purpose of our minds.

When the hawk flies off the circles disappear and soon there's cuckoo spit on my legs and the pennants of lords-and-ladies beginning to thrust aside the litter, snake berries we used to call them, and here's a field full of milkmaids close to white-painted St. Illtud's at Upper Church Village and you might look a long time for milkmaids in the dictionaries and come away disappointed, but this is my childhood around me, smoking out of the dew, pollen poltergeists moving ahead and behind, and I can put a face and a name to every one of those ghosts, for these are my traveller's palms and at this instant it seems impossible to believe that anything lost will not eventually be returned.

Footsore, I'm in the lanes. There's a whirlpool of trails around here. I know a better way, said the thin man, but we're going west when I know east of Mynydd y Glyn is called for. There are S bends and empty road signs and if this is the way to Pontypridd it is the route I would take in a post-apocalpyse Wales when all former identities have vanished and there's no right and no wrong.

Here at a crossroads is another hollow sign, and tied to barbed wire is a cellophane bouquet. Someone must have died in this place. Somebody lost or travelling too fast, eager to leave this country that has no name. What should be happening now is our descent into Graig, dangerous for pedestrians, and our triumphant arrival in Taff Street.

But I travel with a companion who thinks he knows a better way and soon there's a notice on a wall that confirms my suspicions. ‘Pant y Brad' it says. Even I know that ‘
brad
' means treachery, and if you've been fool enough to follow us you will have already understood that something underhand is going on. Because if this is Pant y Brad we have come south-west of the Rhondda Fawr.

If this is Pant y Brad I've betrayed my own instincts. It means our road now must lead to Tonyrefail, dreary Ton that must have something going for it, and, be my guest, traveller, discover what's hidden here. Then up to Trebanog and the man with a pitbull guarding the entrance to the Rhondda. Cerebus is straining at both leash and belly-belt and its handler follows with his own pitbull's gait, the dog wheezing, the man in a white singlet pulling it back into the Rhiwgarn estates where I consider it unnecessary to follow, Rhiwgarn being Rhiwgarn.

Not that Taff Street's Easy Street. In its day it knew tumultuous trade. Maybe there are reminders of that past for those who know where to look. But the Queen of the Valleys is on librium now, and as you see, here's more
brad
.

I've doubled back, gone down the Graig. To find myself peering into the window of Mid Glamorgan Goldsmiths. Who must be pleased with themselves. Young Ponty men have adopted the fashions of The Bronx and East New York. They drip with chains and bracelets, their knuckles are fat with signet rings as they reach for their phones. See them best on the Friday night parade between the Market Tavern and Angharad's. Here are the Ponty girls too, in clingy gangs, crop-topped and pale-bellied. Shivering like eels come out of the stream.

The town looks exactly what it is. A place from which certainty has ebbed. The traditional life choices have vanished: men in the pit, the women at home or stitching underwear in The Rhondda, and on a Saturday night a visit to the Town Hall for ‘Billy Maxman the Wonder Fool' followed by ‘Yeaman's Famous Footballing Dogs'.

Yet maybe that's naive. Pontypridd was always the most middle class of valley towns. I used to teach evening classes at Coed y Lan and remember substantial villas with evergreen gardens overlooking the terraces. And there has always been money and elegance as well as radical politics in Graigwen.

But Queen of the Valleys? It's a republican age. What Ponty cries out for is exploration of its teeming history and problematical present by artists and writers. No town deserves it more. Alun Richards is Ponty's most famous literary son, while John L. Hughes's angry
Tom Jones Slept Here
is worth searching for in second-hand book shops. If any now exist.

Yet what we need is an urban lyricist with a pathologist's eye (but not a pathologist's mind); a bedsitter scientist who can interpret the genome of contemporary English. And if that sounds romantic, all well and good. Real writers are always romantics but rarely admit to it. Because to write today in Pontypridd is an exhilarating romantic act.

As to anger, choose it, use it, but get over it. Anger was never the most innovative search-engine of the writer's imagination.

Pilgrims grow thirsty. By chance, here is the Trehafod Hotel. It's ten years since I stood in the public bar and I'm trying to understand what's changed. Nothing, it seems. Nothing apart from everything. Because I'm a new man. Since I last stood here every cell in my body has died and been reborn. The carbon is new, the hydrogen new. Like those Hopkinstown homies I'm priceless with new gold.

Maybe minds too are reborn. Perhaps there is a renaissance of the imagination. Then why does the spirit fail? Why do we give up the ghost if the ghost too is a new ghost? Before me the atoms of the mirror are dead atoms. The uptipped double litre of London Dry with its juniper garland will never undergo rebirth. And there are my greyed hairs in that mirror that were never there before, while my thoughts conspiring now around the gin were not previously concerned with time.

Time? It's massing around me like Mynydd y Glyn, there to the west. It's building itself in the east like The Glôg. And squeezing me into it. Another fossil in its cliff. Now The Glôg I can stand. And maybe Mynydd y Glyn I might negotiate. But I know what's coming. Cefn Craig Amos, that's what's coming. Pilgrim, that's a brutal ridge. There'll be no shrugging off Cefn Craig Amos, no optimism about scaling that precipice.

But that's the future. That's the end of this journey. And what's ten years? A moment. So make your tribute to the god of thirst here in the Trehafod Hotel. And think of the moments of which The Glôg is built.

The pilgrimage progresses even as we rest. And soon you will notice that the Trehafod Hotel is no place for the pious. There are pieties here innumerable, but the pious should beware. And now it arrives. Your drink. The drink you have ordered but which in another reality has been ordered for you. It's been waiting a long time.

There is always something numinous about a pint come over the bar. Forget what it costs and ignore its antecedence. It will taste like the Taff yet reassemble your perceptions of self. It will instil holiness before the paranoia starts, but life is impossible without the delusions your glass will bring to you.

In Llandaff in the Butcher's you might sit under the Brain's diamond in your own blue diamond of smoke and know that the path taken is no more crooked than the path to come. In Graigwen at the Ty Mawr the regulars will know you for a pilgrim before you have carried your glass to your seat and they will understand entirely that pilgrimage but not easily illustrate their understanding. And at The Rickyard Arms coming down the hill towards Porth and its bazaar, selling Queen Elizabeth Jubilee street party union jacks (discount), we might stand Gwyn Thomas a drink. But choose a seat near the door. Exits are important to Gwyn.

Less garrulous than of old, he has his opinions.

“What's become of the Rhondda, Gwyn”?

“What indeed?”

“Who are these inheritors, Gwyn, in their NY ballcaps and Adidas training gear? In their white trainers with shock absorbers in the toes? No steelies now, Gwyn. Their feet are soft.”

“NY?” he asks. “Ah yes.
Not Yours
.”

“So who are these Rhondda men, Gwyn, heads shaved, faces ringed and pierced?”

“The sons of their fathers”, the maestro breathes, over his American cream soda. “No more, no less. But don't ask me what they do. Work has changed”.

And he thinks a moment. “Do people work these days? I know they're busy. Sometimes I watch the boys when their phones ring. That instant of bliss. Somebody's calling. Somebody cares. And there's me,” he says, taking a first sip, “who hasn't had a telephone call since 1981.”

“Mr Thomas,” I say. “Tell me one thing before you go. I've always wanted to know why people planted monkey puzzle trees in the Rhondda?”

“Ah! Our great conundrum,” he says. “I've counted them all. And each is a friend. A little misplaced, aren't they, but brave. It's their bravery I admire. And the pretention too. Which is always one thing we lacked. Pretention. How we were warned against it. That was our great virtue, see. Our unpretentiousness. But sometimes people make vices out of their virtues...”

And then he has to borrow a handkerchief because the cream soda bubbles have gone up his nose.

But as in The Rickyard, two miles closer to where we are heading today, or two miles further away, as Mr Thomas put it before slipping out, here in the Trehafod a word of advice. Be wary of the landlord's expression. Vacancy and animation are masks. Both angels and demons are found behind public-house counters and I have been obliged by both. The deranged inhabit these places. The deranged are people who do not share your derangement. The stupid too are found in here. The stupid are those who do not acknowledge your wisdom. There will be cowards also, who will not credit your courage.

Above all, admit the ritual. The nun with her Bristol Cream, the murderer with his low-cal, have sat where you sit now. Under the window in a torrent of spring light. Thirst is our dangerous blessing. It is as if our glasses were a pilgrim-age's reward and the pilgrim's absolution.

So, drink up. But know that glass for either a piety or an enchantment. They are similar conditions. Which is something you should not ponder too long at the Trehafod Hotel.

We're now either ahead of ourselves or behind. But don't worry. We're all going to the same place. And Trehafod is instructional for those attuned to the lessons of history. Here's what's left of Lewis Merthyr colliery, but unlike the hundreds of other coal mines in the valley, it has not been grassed over or turned into a superstore. It's now the site of the Rhondda Heritage Park, dedicated to mining.