Everything I Have Always Forgotten

Everything

I Have Always Forgotten

OWAIN HUGHES

Everything

I Have Always Forgotten

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

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The right of Owain Hughes to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Copyright Owain Hughes, 2013

ISBN 978-1-78172-099-8

Mobi 978-1-78172-100-1

Epub 978-1-78172-101-8

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

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The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A
s Mother lay dying, crippled by pain and humiliated by incapacity, I asked her if she was worried about me when I walked to Bardsey Island with my school friend Alan, at the age of eleven. She closed her eyes and scrunched up her deeply lined face with concentrated thought. After a while, without opening her eyes, she said only: “I forget” and her face relaxed again, relieved not to have to try to remember any more. I had waited too long to ask. The smell of aseptic old people's home flooded back over my old memories of young health and strength, hiking in those clean mountains, now that I was forty…

Rarely do I talk of, or seek to remember, my childhood. Those who knew my circumstances say that it must have been ‘idyllic', but childhood is often pain and simple sadness. It is lost, as if shrouded in the clouds that hang about the summits of mountains. From time to time, those clouds may be rent with a tear, opening up a view of the landscape, oh so far, far below – or showing in this simile, just for one moment in time, a brief historical vignette. These are some such brief glimpses through the clouds that I shall try to show you, piece by piece. Perhaps they are not special, but they are mine. Though some of what I relate derives from the tales of others, even some of my own, I confess that many may be apocryphal – but what would be the interest in two people telling the same story? It would be mere repetition worthy of a parrot or a tape-recorder, not a large and creative family.

Bardsey was my first self-motivated trip in 1955. Of course, by then I had travelled by train alone to school, starting at the age of seven, but that was not my choice. Neither was the expedition which my youngest sister and I undertook on horseback. The true revelation came when I decided where I wanted to go. When I walked to Bardsey, financing the trip myself… that was the real beginning of my life. That led to 1963 (aged nineteen), when I walked and hitchhiked to the south of Iran, then across the Sahara, from Mauritania to Egypt. These were true expressions of choice. As politics have panned out, many of those trips could hardly be made today, as I made them then: with a backpack, a sleeping bag, a notebook and phrasebooks of Farsi, Arabic, Turkish and Greek. The trip to Bardsey was the last time I ever brought a tent. A tent is too great an advertisement of where one is sleeping. Of course, being eleven years old, Alan and I were insouciant, totally unaware of risk from other human beings. We were accustomed to the kindness and sharing that had sprung from the common suffering of the appalling Second World War. The war in which everyone was defeated except the Americans. Later I was to learn that better by far is to creep into the shelter of a bridge or unused drainage pipe after dark and there to simply slip into the sleeping bag, to rest unbeknownst to the world in general and the local populace in particular. Oh yes, Alan and I certainly respected cliffs, tides and heavy storms at altitude or at sea – but ‘Evil-Doers' were not in our lexicon, as they surely would be today.

As for training my Parents to allow me such liberty, it seemed to come to them quite naturally and, besides, I was the fifth child so I have my older siblings to thank for laying the groundwork, for raising our Parents so well and so liberally…

Before I could walk and climb, I had to crawl, so I quote the bard, Mr Thomas: “Let us begin at the beginning.”

This is a tale of a child's life before the concept of ‘Helicopter Parents' became so pervasive: those parents who continually hover over their offspring, watching that no harm could possibly befall their precious babies, their fledglings.

Before the Padded, Insulated, Protected – the ‘Bubble-Wrapped' World came into existence. I was raised under Father's principle of: “plenty of benign neglect”. Indeed, he himself had been raised by his widowed mother and spinster aunts and became obsessed with their cloying, over-protective care. He essentially left home at the age of sixteen.

So, I was always fed, had a roof over my head, was somewhat clothed, sent to private schools and my reports were read and remarked upon. With any more supervision than that, exactly what encourages a child to develop?

Recently, I heard that a friend's young teenage daughter had disappeared after a quarrel with her parents over her privacy from her three younger brothers. Desperate after searching for three hours, they called their neighbours – one of whom was the village mayor. It was a cold, drizzling, winter's day in this southern French village and night would soon be coming on. Their friend and neighbour, the mayor, told them that after three hours' absence, he was obliged by law to call in the police. After dark, they would have to call in a helicopter.
Gendarmes
and CRS officers, twenty vehicles full, combed the surrounding area until finally a tracking dog was brought from 100 kilometres away. The dog immediately found the child cowering under a bush in her parents' very garden.

As a toddler, I wore a little harness with round bells on it, so that Mother knew just where I was as I tinkled about like a little goat… oh the joy of cantering off alone amongst the gorse bushes, out of sight of authority! Mother never held the reins (I probably pulled at them too much, like an untrained dog on a leash), yet I was tagged as surely as if I wore a GPS microchip. Once I grew out of that harness, I could disappear in a rage or a mood and no one would notice I was gone. I would come home when I was hungry, cold and wet. True Refugees do not have the luxury of sulking.

So begins the unfolding of my life, like a snail, spiralling out and out and suddenly on and on into the great unknown to be discovered. Other places, other times – we start at point zero, and adventure, eventually, to the uttermost corners of the earth, but it is a spiralling thing that develops and finally spins out on its own – this is Life.

PART 1

THE BEGINNING

I

LEFTOVERS OF THE 1920s

O
h, that delicious first moment of six-year-old consciousness in the morning: when the bedroom wall is dappled by limpid sunlight, so clear and fresh, filtering through tree leaves that shiver slightly in the early morning breeze – their blurred shadows flickering and dancing upon the wallpaper by my bed. That delicious, warm first moment when there is a tremor in one's lower self and, since Mother is not there to say: “No wigwig”, one can indeed indulge in secret, delicious, forbidden wigwig. It could have gone on for ever and ever, but…

I heard the growl of a lorry outside and, even forgetting wigwig, sat up and looked out of the window. There was an old lorry in the garden outside, towing away Father's 1922 two-seater Bentley. It looked short and squat with its great barrel of a hood, held in place by a heavy leather girth and buckle – big and powerful as a steam locomotive to my child's eyes. It stood high and ungainly on its huge wheels, more like a motorized carriage than a car… wasn't it Etore Bugatti who once declared: “Mr Bentley builds the fastest trucks on the road today”? Only the day before, I had been playing in it where it stood in a stable, covered in chicken shit, its tyres flat, its windshield yellow from the ageing of the layer of plastic in the ‘sandwich' that was Triplex glass. It had been stored there throughout the great uncertainty of the Second World War. Now, ignominiously, the noble touring car was being dragged from its geriatric roost amongst the chickens, past the huge, stark ruins of the medieval castle that stood in jagged dilapidation in the garden: decayed, cavity-riddled fangs of former medieval military might. And now our beloved Benty was gone…