Once (19 page)

There was a peasant's mentality to what he did and a barbarism to his building. Nor would he give us anything but like someone in a story by Maupassant sold us our eggs and wrote the sale up with a pencil in his little notebook. As to landscaping, my father inherited something of his father's blindness. But under our occupancy the brutalism was softened and some more thought given to the look of things.

In grandpa's time, we would go there regularly on a Saturday, or a Sunday in the trout-fishing close season, and have a direct injection of Scotland, under the wooded hill. There wide-eyed I began my explorations and developed my skulking, mooching, stalking, day-dreaming, solitude skills, as brought to perfection at the Black Lake. Where nothing happens, everything begins to happen, nothing being a contradiction in terms.

In those days much more of formality survived to be seen in the grounds. Gardens and pathways echoed something of what Pennant called ‘the modish propensity to rectitude', but not without the redeeming ‘flexure of a zigzag'. There were garden beds, and just below the big wood, on a terrace, steps led to a sundial. Pampas plumes rose from clumps on either side, like silver-white torches, at the entrance to the dark wood, where I was so happy to be lost. As night fell, how ghostly visible those torches would be: you could use them to steer yourself down the path after a night-time adventure.

Back along the way by the long greenhouse, a blind turret stood above the path. In through the bottom of the wood ran the remains of a chain-link fence, and its gate at the top end, at the wood's southerly entrance, beyond the sun dial, could still be closed, though with difficulty. It was the kind of fence you'd find round a tennis court in the grounds of a country estate. What this one had been intended to keep in, or out, wasn't clear. Now it ran rusted and wrecked under the pines, through clumps of elder.

But the height of all formality and gothic grandeur was the tower at the top of the cliff. You reached it by a zigzag path whose flexure Pennant would have surely approved. It climbed up through undergrowth, round to the south of the main cliff, where the rock dropped back, beside the northerly edge of the big wood. At last it reached a terrace and ran along a couple of hundred yards or so, a little crooked and uneven way, between bramble and scrub, thorn and larch and gorse. By the time it reached almost to the open clifftop, the gorse towered six and seven feet high in places. In wild weather it lunged on the wind and stabbed you in the face and about your head, if you didn't shield yourself with a raised elbow and duck down.

Then you emerged and the known world lay spread out before you, just as if you were looking down from the window of an Aer Arann plane or a post-war Dakota, bound for Galway or Dublin. The tower commanded the breath-taking view described by Pennant, the full panorama. It was an eyrie, a lookout, a bird's eye view. And it was capacious. You could easily accommodate half a dozen or more people in it, for a picnic. In those early days the remnant of a flagpole survived there.

From the tower you could look down not just on the town – the Naples of the North, with its beautiful crescent bay – and the wider land- and seascape across to Anglesey but also down at wheeling jackdaws and gulls too. And as they swept up you found yourself among them. It was the most exhilarating place on earth. There were the mountains. There hidden away among them was the Black Lake. When my grandpa lay dying in the town's hospital, all exhilaration spent, just beyond the gasworks, we once or twice went up to wave a huge Scottish flag as big as a tablecloth, not the more beautiful Blue Saltire, which was too threadbare to survive the exercise, but the one with the rampant lion, to make him smile, if we could. Though we could not tell if we succeeded.

The tower stood right at the northern boundary of the property. Just a couple of steps beyond its entrance and you entered Collins's wood, my favourite territory. I preferred it partly because it was a mixed wood, largely deciduous, low and wind-combed in its upper reaches. Hunting was better there. And partly I loved it because, strictly speaking, I wasn't supposed to be there, with or without a gun. It was a trespass, and trespass in pursuit of game, I could exaggerate with impunity, yet register the thrill of needing not suddenly to bump into Brian Collins, or his father, so as not to embarrass either party.

Fire a shot in there and watch, and listen, and steal to another part of the wood, lie low and watch, and listen. Hadn't I read
The Poacher's Handbook
by Ian Niall? Didn't its author bring me up by hand? Let a little while go by unless another opportunity to fill the pot springs up or passes. Then retreat right along the back of the wood, and loiter there as evening falls and the wood-pigeons come to roost, or refuse to. Just so...

 

I waited in those days until the evening thinned

All light away to distant strings and

Starry clusters, and a green pier-light

Blowing, like a bird's bright eye,

Away below, starboard on that seaboard.

 

It's not that I let anything distract me

At that wood's edge where I stood sentry.

Though I heard the odd one flutter home

Far behind me, and remembered the scent

Of cropped clover and barley.

 

And caught a kestrel briefly, anchored at

The corner of my eye, but kept my watch unblinking,

Through thick and thin, though rain spat sharply

And night loomed in. Still they wouldn't come.

As if something warned them I was there.

 

I've waited for poems in the same way since,

At the edge of things, in the heart's dark border.

And just as shrewdly they've stayed away.

Though I've caught sight too late

Of their shadows passing, on the way home.

 
Or I'd spend the entire day there with the .22 airgun called
Meteor
with its telescopic sight, and make a little fire and cook a blackbird, or a wood-pigeon breast in a piece of foil. Follow your circuit like a fox. Be invisible. Dream of never needing to go home again. Relish nightfall and the winter air descending cold on that beautiful country, sharpening the outline of everything in sight, until night rises up, for it is a mistake to speak of nightfall. Night's of the earth and rises up to fill out shadows as the sun goes down.

By the time we moved in, the formal qualities of the old hotel grounds had fallen a good deal farther from view since the day my grandpa bought his portion of them. Wilderness had taken over more of the place. We kept the paths open, but in a rough and ready way. It was a kind of benign neglect, as far as I was concerned, making it a better place of escape, a better place for bird-life, a better country to stalk. But it wasn't all benign and it wasn't all neglect.

Soon some trespassing youths burnt the remaining stump of the flagpole, and just about as soon, my father converted the tower into a more-or-less impenetrable fortress, its walls coiled with tangles of barbed wire, its entrance barred with a gimcrack portcullis. Theoretically you could raise and lower this great metal contraption through tracks of angle-iron, especially if your name was Hercules, and didn't mind grazing all the skin off your knuckles in the attempt.

It was easier to climb the wall and find a way through the barbed wire. At which I soon became so expert I could do it in the dark. And regularly I had to, but usually only when the very worst storms blew off the coast. For my father, frustrated by our limited television reception installed a TV-aerial up there, elaborately guyed and wedged to hold its alignment to the signal from Manchester or wherever it was it came from in England.

Up until then, down below, under the cliff we were better served by RTE than any other station, something that gave us ‘The Riordans' soap opera, the tolling ‘Angelus' at six, ‘Gay Byrne'... from across the Irish Sea, though we also got the basic BBC. The trouble was no guys or wedges could do anything when a storm hit the cliff head on. Then the aerial would invariably wrench itself out of alignment with all signals. That such winds could be accompanied by lashing rain had nothing to do with the sleety picture-quality or anything that my father heeded. His imperative – as if our lives depended on it – was to restore reception. It was a calamity. So off I'd be despatched, with a heavy mole wrench, a hammer, and a lamp, up to the dark tower, as if I was Childe Harold turned aerial man.

Given the serious nature of the emergency, I paid no heed whatsoever to the long route, but went straight up the cliff, no matter the cold blast and the wild roar of the pines. I'd done it often enough in daylight I could have done it blindfold. First I had to clamber round by the jackdaw's nesting hole, a deep round hole, about the diameter of an apple, created by some flaw in the rock, then struggle on along the first terrace, round up the next step of cliff, often through rainy squalls, and then the second step, more deafening bluster, at last to the tower.

Here the struggle to get in was the more difficult not simply because the coils of barbed wire shook in the wind and were all the harder to negotiate, but because I'd know my father's impatience was itself reaching storm force. I scarcely took time to look out into the storm, to see the town-lights all blurred and blowing, the sea surging, white and broken through the dark, and, perhaps, if the wind was in the west, the bleary lights of a vessel riding out the storm in the lee of the Orme.

Once in the tower the task was to turn the mast into what I guessed was the right position, and to secure it as best I could. The cottage being invisible, away down under the cliff, I had then to climb out, and climb down the first step of rock, to the edge of the next terrace to flash the lamp, requesting a signal. A fully drawn curtain signalled success, a curtain swept impatiently to and fro meant back to the drawing board.

Could the TV be so important? I assure you it could, and every minute lost was viewing never to be recovered, I suppose. So to the dark tower back I came, climbing its wall again, fighting through the barbed wire, getting hooked up on it and scratched by it, struggling with the cold metal mast, hammering and wrenching, not to say swearing, against the deafening wind. Then back down to the ledge again and so on.... What was the code? Was that an opened curtain, way down there? It was no good my father coming out and shouting, as sometimes he chose to. The wind just snatched his voice away, like a hand over his mouth. (How I wished that hand was mine.) You couldn't begin to guess what he was trying to say.

Meanwhile the wind roared, the rain pelted, and abandoned homework festered. The tower wall grazed me, the barbed wire tore me, and the cold metal of the mast and guys numbed my hands, all so that my father might lie on the sofa and watch whatever it was he generally slept through or otherwise condemned as rubbish.

So we settled from the Red Wood under the Wooded Hill, and made our new lives there, complete with grandpa's TV.

 

* * *

 
For me, in those first three to four years, before and as I fell hook-line-and-sinker for the Welsh girl, the wooded hill held me in its thrall. It did so even more than the Black Lake, being on my doorstep, a place more than big enough to disappear in, beyond sight and earshot. It was the dream, the realm of escape, of resolution and independence. No doubt it entailed labour and being at my father's beck-and-call. But that was no price to pay, and I loved it the more the stronger I grew. So the more independent I could be, at working the slope with the two-stroke rotovator, planting the spuds, and so on, thinking on stories of life at North Clutag, authentic peasant life close to the earth. I can think of no happier times, however shadowed by school, however desolate the last day of holiday. There's no mystery in it. What boy primed as I had been wouldn't have felt he had died and gone to heaven under the wooded hill?

There is familiarity and there is intimacy. Intimacy is never familiar but always new. But familiarity can afford it shelter and foster it, as it might foster love. At first to steal from the house with my gun was unfamiliar,
an unaccustomed freedom. Before long, gradually, as if stalking step by step, entering that world became like putting on my old army surplus jacket, jeans and boots. I wore the place about me. I smelt of the earth there. It sheltered and fostered me, warped round me as the Black Lake did on Sunday. Black Lake water ran through me, animated me, but this was all present to my eye, each day, school or not.

This was my element. My clothes breathed it. They were worn by it as I wore them, torn, scuffed, grown into the place and earthy. My gun was a tool, an accessory, an extension of me, a talisman. This was especially so when quite soon I graduated to use the Damascus double-barrelled gun my father had used in his youth at North Clutag, a gun discharged by my great grandfather and my grandpa in their day, a twelve-bore gun that spoke to me of many an exploit and occasion. I could lurk cradling it and enjoying it with affection as part of my inwardness.

Talk about worn. Talk about Damascene moments. Its beautiful Damascus steel barrels were paper-thin and would not have survived proofing. They weren't made with modern powder in mind. But my father, I know not how, had hoarded a big cache of black powder wartime cartridges, in old metal ammunition cases, and I used these until I fired the last of them. They weren't too dodgy but sometimes you got a dud that failed to go off. They left more soot up the chimney than their modern counterparts too. Then my father latched on to a lighter modern cartridge that did as well, if no better, except there were no damp squibs. All this reduced the range at which I might knock a wood-pigeon or a pheasant out of the air. In consequence I became a quick snap shot, which suited our tight terrain, if not an exceptionally good shot for the long, deliberate interception. (I had my moments, none the less.)