Once (6 page)

In those days, just up the road and beyond in the heartlands of the north – away, too, among the London Welsh – the language was like Glyn
D
w
^
r himself, always on the move, always there, unheard, unseen to the non-Welsh, like a well-kept secret. No matter periodically there were those who betrayed their compatriots in the name of an English tendency. Innumerable groups and organizations flourished to foster Welsh, ancient and modern: societies to nurture Welsh hymnody, singing festivals great and small, youth movements, eisteddfodau, local and national, for young and old. It was like religion and bound into religion still, as it had always been, since Elizabeth I commissioned a translation of the Bible into Welsh, perhaps the single act that did most in all history to keep the tongue alive.

Coed Coch Road in Welsh would be Ffordd Coed Coch (Road… Wood… Red), but it was a bilingual road in its denizens and knew it so. That's what it said on the sign. Even more than the all-clear it was a mystery. Who knew where the Red Wood stood? Was it the Fairy Glen? But the Fairy Glen was only at all red in autumn. Where was the Red Wood? In what way was it red? In a bloody way, as a site of battle in the long, long ago, some people have said, an encounter between Welsh and Saxon princes, Anarwd avenging the death of Rhodri Mawr against Athelstan of Mercia, or something of that sort, as could never be established, but might be true to the spirit and history of naming in that country. For sure, anyway, the estate of Coed Coch is on record back to 1246, exactly seven-hundred years to the year of my birth.

Of course, these weren't matters I dreamt of for a moment as a child. The beauty of childhood is that you don't know much and you don't know what's going on most of the time, because you're in a world of your own. Yet how vivid it was and enduring its experiences. How when you pause to examine incident and moment, sight and sound, they open up into detail to be reinvented.

I did come consciously to wonder once in a way about the wood being red and how it might be, and when I was a bit older I remember wanting to find it. I had only to cross the road to get into the Fairy Glen, which was at least a step in the right direction. A municipal garden in a dingle, the Glen was an arm of woodland tapering up into the country, carefully but not over-carefully tended and planted, with terraced paths, and Colwyn stream in summer burbling or in winter gushing brown at its foot. They'd created a diversion from the stream itself, higher up at the top of the Glen, to make a second shallow water-course, six or seven inches deep at most through most of its length, a foot and more at the sluice-gate where it began, crossed in three places by flat wooden footbridges. The little stream, as we called it, ran a few hundred yards beside the top terrace. It spilled down at last in a waterfall, back to rejoin its source, and flow round by Edwards' mill to the shore. Here were sycamores and elms, oaks and beeches, and lesser trees, conifers, shrubs of all sorts, yew trees, a run of cane along the upper stream, the occasional prickly berberis, a bank of trimmed laurel.

The Glen contained a whole world of hideouts and lurking places, for boys and nesting songbirds. Though it was tended by the little fat man we knew as Willie Winkie, it admitted wildness too. As long as we were back, or in sight, when we said we would be we could disappear there all day, if we wanted, playing at war and westerns, furtively curious about, but suspicious of girls, following and spying on courting couples, peeping through foliage, tracking and stalking Red Indian style.

Here I'd mooch alone down along the lower stream, setting lines for trout at evening, and sometimes catching them by the morning, sometimes catching eels. It's all run down now and you'd have a heart-attack if your eight-year-old, your ten-year-old disappeared into it for half a minute for fear you'd never see him or her alive again. (The place of harmless Willie Winkie with his padlocked hut, and of feral Hughie Bach, taken by the spectres of addiction and abduction now.) As for the delicate trout, the polluted stream probably gave them all heart attacks long ago.

As I grew older, I ventured beyond the Glen, by field and hedgerow, bird-nesting, in the lovely hilly countryside of what we knew then as Denbighshire. Then I might follow the feeder stream up beside Peulwys Lane and under the road, away into the woods and farmlands of Parciau, or in the other direction, up and along toward Pentr'uchaf, or far beyond, under the droning telephone wires, to Dolgau and to the Dolwen crossroad, or even to the hamlet of Dolwen itself, the ancient village of Llanelian too.

Here the hedges in the spring were full of songbirds: blackbirds, song-thrushes, dunnocks, chaffinches, greenfinches, goldfinches, yellow-hammers, robins, wrens…. Here swooped the sparrow-hawk. Here the kestrel hung breathtaking in mid-air, preying on vole or mouse. Here on the telephone wire the yellow-hammer called for a little bit of bread and no cheese, and swallows twittered snatches of composition, minims and crotchets on a stave.

It was up in the direction of Dolwen you might see Miss Brodrick in her bowler hat, trotting in her trap, drawn by a white Welsh Cob, of which variety she was a world-famous breeder, out at Betws where she lived, at the big house of Coed Coch, a person of note. I remember my parents pointing her out, as you might point out a rare bird, and a rare bird she was, with her sanguine cheeks and her black bowler. She owned Coed Coch... the Red Wood itself, wherever it was. Her white pony then would have been some descendant of ‘Coed Coch Madog', if not the aging beast himself, a grandson of ‘Coed Coch Glyndwr', legendary animals.

* * *

The two hinges of the year, spring and autumn, are the sweetest, surely, when the door opens and closes, when change turns the heart on its axis. Climate change now necessitates the re-writing of everything. Annotation is required to know the shepherd's calendar, to know what March and April or October and November, Spring or Autumn, once meant to Edmund Spenser, John Keats or John Clare. But I still catch myself registering the aura of spring as I used to, foretasting it, in light as it lingers in a bare wood, loath to go under and earlier to rise. The little finger-hold of daylight clinging on beyond its time, before its time, the first of birdsong, sometimes misplaced, make me look up and look, now, in my sixtieth year, to those old-fashioned bird-nesting days when the carrion crow, inveterate egg-robber itself, began to mate and brood. It would sail in its windy crow's nest, come the end of March and early April, to hatch four or five blue-green eggs, magically blotched and spotted orangey-brown, way out on a limb. So the rook would rebuild, and the bare-knuckled hedges come into bud. What though that little light's probably an illusion now, some freak moment of false November or December?

Time comes round none the less, however out of joint the day, and the need to reproduce coursing in the blood prompts the birds to build and whistle and sing, cry or crow, mewl or honk, coo or quack, twitter or chirrup, as ever they did, since the start of time, proclaiming their territory. On such burgeoning mornings, to step out across the road to the Glen, and to wind up away on Dolwen or Llanelian hill, or the gorse-blowing Marian, the known world of Wales in view below, and sky swept cloudily grey, in downpour or in dry, and the sea running on the coast with its seascape sky, was a dream come true, a dream nurtured at bedtime and hatched once more with the day, head full of hedges and banks to comb and search, in vivid intimacy.

It was an education without the intervention of a master, an absorbing study of birdlife, habitats and habits, in my native heath. It was natural religion with yourself alone and the god-in-things to lift you and keep you, an outlaw now as you'd be, a wicked disgrace, a thief of those extraordinarily beautiful eggs, never quite the same in their markings even within species, from nest to nest.

So much that was possible then is impossible if not unimaginable now. So much that was legal then is now against the law, and if we broke the law in little ways, the law slept or turned a blind eye, and no harm done give or take a small egg, a speckled trout, an apple.... I remember how for a time we had a sawn-off double-barrelled four-ten shotgun in our possession, to a boy's eye a beautiful little weapon with hammers, like something in a Western. It was given to my father or lent, I don't know which, by the postman. He used it to shoot pheasants from his Royal Mail van as he did his rounds out in the back country.

It didn't seem at all a serious matter that the postman should behave in such a way, or that such a lethal and illegal weapon should come into my father's hands: so did barbed snatching hooks for taking salmon, and a barbed tine for spearing them, both with a socket that would fit on a hazel stick and a cord through a hole in the socket to draw it tight and secure it in place while you snatched or speared. So when you had cunningly done the deed you could dismantle your tackle, wrap the cord round it, and slip the incriminating device into your pocket and concentrate on hiding the fish.

I don't know when the concept of protected species arrived, but it wasn't illegal, at least as far as we understood, to possess the blown eggs of wild birds. Game-birds I suppose were always off limits. Not that that deterred me, if I came on a hen pheasant incubating eggs in the bottom of a hedge. The bird might slip away, but an egg, if not too far gone, might be taken and blown. The whole clutch might well have been taken and eaten. I never did that but I'm sure that was not upon any principle, but a matter of fortune. The only eggs I gathered to eat were the herring gull's. The egg from which might have hatched the original English Chinese restaurant joke, only we had scarce a Chinese restaurant then, to wit: waiter, this egg is rubbery. And lovely-rubbery they were too.

I had inherited two boxes of the eggs of many species my father had collected as a boy and youth in Scotland. Just to prise the lid off those flat shortcake tins and gaze at the eggs in their partitioned squares and nests of cotton-wool was enough to inspire a hundred adventures, not least flights of fancy to North Clutag and to Galloway. But it wasn't possessing the eggs or adding ever rarer ones to a collection that really mattered, but discovering nests, stalking, observing the comings and goings of birds, their startled departures as you happen on them, their fearful or fearless sitting tight until you can all but touch them, the looping arrival of a greenfinch into a holly hedge and its circumspect diversions; to find a nest in process of being built, to watch as building materials, fine moss, slender grasses, a feather, mud, twig, shavings of silver birch bark like fine foil, are carried... where? Here... in this branching fork, this mossy nook or cranny, thorn thicket, eave or outhouse gable, limestone cliff-ledge, or without building at all on a sea-pink thrifty pebbled shore.

This was knowledge won with patience and it fostered intimacy of seeing and being, absorption into the world, one thing leading to another. There was you might say nothing to distinguish between a boy's eye and a bird's eye view for watchfulness, and time stood still, attention undivided. Though I think there was boredom involved too, of a unique order in rural life, not self-conscious like the town's
ennui
, but something integral to the whole, a form of biding time and being bound by it. Here life could seem all in-waiting, the known world too well-known, the horizon beyond reach, a prison, and time spent killing time, in the hours between tides, between dawn and dusk, when the best fish move, and life bestirs most.

I remember enough discoveries, enough arduous climbs and clamberings to fill a book with episodes. But would you want to climb through them, through a tangle of sentences, as up into the branches of a hawthorn you might struggle, torn and pricked, spiked hard suddenly in the top of your head, cut down your cheek, your knuckles raw, your limbs scratched and grazed as doggedly you ascend to worm a hand into a magpie's thorny, domed house, to retrieve an egg – sometimes a bluish egg, sometimes an olive one.

Now somehow slip it into your mouth and keep it floating safely there, safe from every jolt and slip, safe from filling your mouth with an explosion of egg and yolk and shell, the dry birdlime taste already there to spice it. Rather a dull egg for so much trouble. But I took the trouble, as if I knew I was stashing away meaning for my future self, but knowing nothing of the sort and never a second thought, the process of selving being predetermined.

You wouldn't want to follow, but follow me just this last step down under the high wooden bridge. Lower yourself carefully through the rails and pick your way down the slipway where Colwyn stream enters the Glen proper, to reach the grey wagtail's nest in a hole in the walled bank, a teaspoon tied to a stick to help you fish out your little speckly-marble egg, with its squiggle hair-line, not unlike the devil's signature on the egg of a yellow-hammer, but an obvious forgery.

The stream is loud and the light in the trees above and in the saplings, in the stone itself, seems to close round you. The stream is louder than usual. The wagtail calls from downstream, wagging and wagging. You can see it trying to distract you but you can only intermittently hear its clear note ring out against the rush of the stream. The water seems louder than usual today, and it is because there's been sudden subsidence since you came this way last year. Now there's a great rectangular hole in the slipway, perhaps twelve feet in length – and how many feet deep? – into which the stream plunges and accelerates, cold and seething, cut water, bravura. It amazes you to see such turbulence and distracts you as the wagtail failed to do, as a sixth sense tells you here is a place to come back to at once and to lay a line for a trout.