Quietly As Snow: Text

9 March 2004
QUIETLY AS SNOW
GWYDION THOMAS interviewed by WALFORD DAVIES

When I was a child and the soft flesh was forming
Quietly as snow on the bare boughs of bone . . .
WALFORD DAVIES What I’ve just quoted is, of course, the opening of one of the finest short poems in the English language, ‘Song for Gwydion’, which carries your name. Anyone interested in the facts will know that you were born on 29 August, 1945, the son and only child of the Rector of Manafon, R.S. Thomas and his wife Mildred E. Eldridge, who were gradually to achieve eminence in the fields respectively of poetry and the visual arts, both in Wales and further afield. Obviously, we shall return in some detail to your mother and father as they shaped, and still shape, the wider context for this interview, so may I suggest, if it is acceptable to you, that for convenience we use in the main the names Elsi and RS?
I want to start, though, by asking if you could give a brief outline of the broad trajectory of your own life and career.
GWYDION THOMAS Your word ‘trajectory’ is an interesting one. Nothing so forceful or bold could describe my life, so I wouldn’t want it to deflect us. Perhaps a rocket that sped very true for the first seven years, as is the way with many children, particularly those who believe they are having a 'happy childhood'; but then it whirled, dipped, fizzled and somehow tunnelled through the sludge until, at least in terms of personal happiness, it has rather amazingly and unsuspectingly, like an unpromising firework, produced what I take will be a final, if rather anguished, flowery flourish.
I say that it shouldn’t deflect us, mainly because I agree that most of the sometimes odd central aspects of my life cannot be divorced from the way in which they were shaped by my parents, or from the reflexiveness that their choices about me had in turn on their own lives. Against that background, however, I should like to record that whatever I myself as a young adult chose to do back then was pretty much greeted with either silent disbelief or incomprehension. You will recall my father late in life airily claiming that he never knew what I did, or where I was, both of which of course were quite untrue.
I think places had an unusual importance in the lives of RS and Elsi as well as in my own. The significance in their lives of Caergybi, Manafon, Aberdaron and ‘Sarn-y-Plas’ in Rhiw, but also Italy and France, and the West Coast of the Celtic fringe, has meant that both they and I measured the years by landmarks signified through places rather than people. In my own case, certainly, the issue of where, for example, to live has always been important. When I was young I very much wanted to live in Sarn-y-Plas - the house in Llyn leased in the early 1960s as a gift to Elsi by the three Keating sisters, Eileen, Honora and Lorna. But, of course, with no work in Pen Llyn, that for me has only become possible now and, while Sarn-y-Plas continues to be a magical place, there are other places I wish to spend time in, too. I have been lucky enough to live and work in other beautiful places of my choosing: Corsica, Arizona, Phuket and now the North of Thailand. Mostly, though, they remain hotter versions of Pen Llyn, with the jungle and the desert sometimes replacing the sea. As my wife Kunjana said about our house in Phuket – ‘Sarn-y-Plas with elephants!’
The topography of RS’s poetry has of course been much noted and explored, and Elsi’s own painted landscapes comprise an extensive record of those places. At the same time, that unpeopled landscape was fundamental in generating my inadequately fulfilled aim to ensure that my adult life, especially my relationships, in particular with my son Rhodri and now my daughter Elodie, would be as different as possible from my parents’ life. However, while much of my youth and middle life was peopled with a series of other significant people - none ever well regarded by RS and Elsi - I have lived somewhat in the shadow of their solitude, there having been no early models for the making and preserving of friendships. To quote Cyril Connolly, it was, for Elsi and RS, not so much the pram in the hall that was ‘the enemy of promise’ as anyone in the hall at all that threatened their space to create.
RS wrote extensively about his personal career and family, while Elsi’s attachment to her family, particularly her father and brother, was also very strong - there are almost no portraits by Elsi except of her family. And while RS and Elsi’s lives seem to have been extensively influenced by the dialogue with family, mine has really been only recently so influenced - by my son Rhodri and Kunjana and now our daughter Elodie.
Getting back to your question, though, I myself hardly think of my life in terms of career or work. Some people construct careers; indeed, that is now what Rhodri with most welcome normality is doing. I myself, however, constructed a journey through, mostly, carefully chosen real and fantastical places, in the company of people whom I unrealistically required to meet fairly batty criteria of empathy if they were to be my company. I discovered rather too late that, if I was lucky, those other people made better choices for me, and of me.
WD I agree that we shouldn’t think of a life as a ‘career’, collapsible into a hundred words, certainly not of allowing, in Larkin’s phrase, ‘that toad, work’ to sit oppressively on it. RS himself in the poem ‘Careers’ speaks of years ‘taken in/ growing or in the/ illusion of it’, where the warning of illusion regarding the chimera we call ‘careers’ is prefigured in that brilliant line-ending ‘taken in’. But, though we shall inevitably remain within the fuller context provided by the personalities and artistic eminence of your parents, I am still interested in hearing first of all - however briefly or outwardly and however fashioned - what became of that boy born with the magical Welsh name Gwydion to a home in Manafon in 1945.
GT The boring bits, then, about schools, universities, lectureships and academic entrepreneurship. I left Manafon to go to Packwood Haugh prep school on top of the hill at Ruyton XI Towns near Baschurch outside Shrewbury in September 1953. As a family, we moved to Eglwys-fach in Cardiganshire in 1956 when I was eleven. My parents moved to Aberdaron in 1963. Sarn-y-Plas arrived in 1962, though no one lived there full-time until RS retired from Aberdaron in 1978. I left Packwood in 1958 and went on a ‘scholarship’ - they painted my name on the oak honours board! - to Bradfield, a second- or third-rate public school founded in the middle of the nineteenth century. I left Bradfield in 1963, then went up in 1964 as an Exhibitioner to Magdalen College, Oxford to read English. I left Oxford in 1967, and went in January 1968 to teach at Henbury School, Bristol, an early, large Comprehensive. Then in the autumn of 1968 to take a PGCE at King's College, Cambridge, where I stayed on for another year to read Chinese. I went to work in Luton in the autumn of 1970, and then to work in Ealing in the autumn of 1973. I had the choice of going to London or to Cardiff; however in spite of being favourably interviewed by Professor R. George Thomas at Cardiff I think I felt no draw to Wales. Strangely, after working in London for four years my partner Sharon and I went to live in Whitebrook, between Chepstow and Monmouth, so maybe that was a wrong choice. In a series of tortuous moves what was then Ealing Technical College became Ealing College of Higher Education, then The Polytechnic of West London and finally the infamous Thames Valley University. By an equally convoluted process, I started in Luton as a Lecturer in English, went to Ealing as a lecturer in Educational Development, then effectively became Head of Art and Design (acquiring an MA from The Royal College of Art) and finally under a multitude of everchanging nomenclatures – ‘Curriculum Development’, ‘Academic Development’, ‘Modular Development’, even ‘Enterprise Development’ - effectively became a Director of Academic Affairs in the American mould.
After Rhodri was born in 1980, Sharon and I moved back to London to live in Kew where we stayed until I retired in 1995 and we then lived variously in Sarn-y-Plas in Rhiw, Tucson in Arizona and Sukothai in Thailand. So there you have a sort of shell of dates and places.
WD Good, let’s hold it there. Let’s take the earliest set of memories, those of Manafon, a place where not only your own life but in effect your parents’ artistic careers also first came into being, certainly into focus. Presumably, what goes in first goes in deepest, emotionally, physically and visually - even if words, like photographs, find it difficult to catch. I remember your father’s wise answer in a Welsh-language interview: ‘In Holyhead, I was a boy, not a “Welshman”’ (‘Bachgen oeddwn i yng Nghaergybi – nid Cymro’.) In that same spirit, in this interview I’d like to take Manafon as not only your own boyhood base but our main anchor. What would you today bring forward as physical memories of place from that earliest period – memories, that is, of the Rectory, of Manafon itself, and of the surrounding countryside, just as places?
GT So much of the early years are remembered in a dialogue with photographs. It isn’t clear to me how much I would remember without the photographs, though, as you say, even photographs have a way of denying the more evanescent memories.
Manafon? – well, a jewel of a house in the long grass by the river. Tall Abies Nobilis fir trees, high yew hedges, an orchard, a kitchen garden, a cobbled courtyard, outhouses and secret rooms; a little lane, pastures and fields of grass, hedges teeming with nests and creatures, trout, owls, red squirrels, mice, house martins, swallows; a skyline guarded by hawthorn and rowan in the Welsh border manner; trees to climb and always the river lapping in winter at the cellar stairs, greenly pungent and slippery in summer. In summer, too, harebells, columbine, roses, rhododendrons, moon daisies, curlews and lapwings, long-tailed tits and pied flycatchers and wagtails nesting in the doorways, strawberries and raspberries; tunnels in the hayfields; trout wrapped in leaves, gulls on the lakes on the moors.
In the autumn, showers of golden and brown leaves, foxes, apples stored in the garage; horse-drawn hay cutters and turners, the baler, rats, dogs and rabbits. Nectarines from the tree in the greenhouse, or what might now be called the conservatory, with its little red spiders; starry nights and then the roaring flooded river with tree trunks smashing down. The Berriew show, where I always win first prize for my display of autumn fruits. Rowan berries, blackberries, shiny black bryony berries, nuts and mushrooms, fungi and leaves, hops, rare spindletree berries. No-one else apparently has a clue where to find these things. In winter, the gravel at the front of the house floods and you can play with trains and Dinky cars in a veritable construction site of dams and pebbles.
Then the frost and the frozen pipes. It must be 1947. I do not remember it being cold, though it was the worst winter for many years. Frost patterns on all the windows. The long white woollen curtains, in fact blankets, the shutters failing to keep out the cold. The snow is high, the edges of the river freeze and all the bushes have spray icicles. The ground, rutted with cows’ hooves, bone-hard and ankle-turning. The mice thrive. Then snowdrops, sheets of white, narcissus and daffodils, apple blossom. Purple orchis and drifts of elderflower and cow parsley.
On the mantelpiece in the panelled hall, little wooden chinese junks and a glass bell. No electricity, no gas. The water came through an old pipe from a well up on Cae Siencyn where the sheep drink and shit. Elsi cooks on a paraffin stove. Open fires and Aladdin lamps with their beautiful filigree wicks, always breaking. My porridge in the big blue cup with the broken handle congeals on the windowsill.
There is a room. It has glass doors that led into the conservatory, which is large and smells (I later realized) like the Palm House at Kew. It has red tiles and iron gratings on the floor, but no heating. The paint on the doors is old and the undercoats peep through the top coat. The present colour is a sort of navy blue, but underneath, improbably, the wood appears to have been painted orange. This cannot be so in 1947. The paint is badly applied and is bubbled and rough. The room has wooden floors and wide skirting boards, with mouseholes in the skirting boards which I see in later years only in cartoons. There is a pram in the room. A bluebottle tries to buzz me. I scream and tip up the pram. Later there is a table on which I play post-offices with the stamp album I still have.
Sunday there is a leg of lamb (5 shillings, I recall), runner beans or peas when fresh, tinned vegetables if not, boiled potatoes, a tin of fruit and custard. Monday the lamb is cold, though the vegetables remain the same. Tuesday the lamb is warmed up in gravy; vegetables continue. Wednesday there are rissoles. Thursday there is a peculiar pie, which seems to contain eggs, tinned tomatoes and white sauce. Friday there is fried plaice or sometimes boiled in milk. Maybe a fish pie. Same as Thursday's pie. If a trout has been caught it had better be on Friday! Saturday is a red letter day if a rabbit has been sent in; there will be rabbit pie. If not, the butcher will have unfortunately supplied some stringy lamb's liver with the joint.
Breakfast is taken in the kitchen as we thaw out from the cold by the Rayburn. Everything else is eaten in the dining room. (Later, in Aberdaron, there was no room to sit in the kitchen, and no Rayburn or Aga.) There are no place mats or table cloth. The cutlery has yellow ivory-like handles. The dinner service is bright blue, which does not improve the appearance of the food. It is replaced later by a service of cream colour with little blue commas all around the edges. Later, in Eglwys-fach, everything turns sage green - the carpets, the walls, the dinner service - and there are even place mats of the same colour.
There doesn’t seem to be anything else to eat regularly. There is asparagus in the kitchen garden and peas and beans, but the mice eat most of these. There are no sweets or crisps until eventually Mars bars and Smiths’ crisps, with the little blue paper wraps of salt, appear as irregular treats. The dust accumulates in rolls under the dresser, watched unblinkingly by the two Portuguese ceramic chickens.
Upstairs in my bedroom I can stick my fingers into the plaster which is full of horsehair and pick it away to the laths. The room smells of paraffin from the Aladdin stove that burns all night and from the little oil lamp by my bed. From the window you can watch the red squirrels leaping in the chestnut trees. I climb into my mother’s little bed in the next room. There is a maze of front stairs, back stairs, servant-quarters stairs. At the top of the back stairs there is a loo. My father pees with me. I am not so interested! There is another set of rooms in a sort of annex above the kitchens.
WD And, beyond the house, do you still remember places more than people?
GT Yes. Places, things, birds and animals. One day RS brings home a wireless. It has a battery the size of a large book. I had only seen wirelesses before that had batteries you had to recharge. Gertrude Rowlands, my godmother had one, but then Dora Herbert Jones who lived with her had a harp, too, so I thought they were wealthy in their little semi in Tregynon. I remember the house better than I do them, though I remember Dora’s beautiful voice. Beebe, my nurse, and Idris also had a wireless, up on the hill at Glyn Uchaf above New Mills, but I don’t remember wirelesses in the farms, though they must have had them. The wireless batteries on the other hand were one of the treasures of the river and rubbish heaps that we used to salvage, along with all the beautiful glass bottles, of whose value we were quite ignorant, and the real treasures which for me were the shards of pottery smoothed by the river water.
WD ‘Smoothed by the river water’: in the fine early poem, ‘Country Church (Manafon)’ even ‘the church stands, built from the river stone . . . limbs the river fashioned/ With so smooth care’.
Yes, the river was a constant presence as were the two woods - the Lord’s Wood and the Moat Wood. There is a strange confusion between real places, real things, real people and their appearance in pictures, illustrations and poems. Even the furniture in the rectory at Manafon appears in all of Elsi's children's book illustrations, as do the windows of the kitchen and back kitchen, the garden and the gate, the river and the bridge over the river, the garage and outbuildings, the birds and trees and flowers of the garden and round about. Much of the furniture survived in the form of chests and cupboard, chairs and curtains. There were, however, no pictures on any of the walls in Manafon, and not many in the other houses, either.
But there were of course the goats, who ate washing and oranges and anything else edible, and whose little story is best told in the book published by Rupert Hart-Davis, Gwenno the Goat - or Angharad as her real name was – the original long version having been written by RS. They were for ever upping their stakes and running away to munch. Eventually they were more trouble than milk, and that was the end of 'pets'.
As to people, I remember most vividly other children. There were Melvin and Anne Jones from the Post Office. Melvin became, I think, a cleric or missionary in South Africa. Leonard Gethin, a boy called Neil, Hazel and Glenys from the Ffinant. Roy and his mother Beebe, my full-time nurse as a child, went home, I think, when I was about three or four years old, though I continued to see Roy and go to stay at Glyn Uchaf. There was Anna, Marcel and Olga Karciewski's daughter - was she? Some strange memory tells me she married the Labour politician Giles Radice - did she? There were Hugh and Neil Williams, the boys from Berriew vicarage, but they were older, as was Jeanie from up on the hill, who wore no underclothes and would paddle revealingly in the river on her way home. Ceridwen, poeticised and fancied by RS. No-one really. Certainly few adults other than those who worked in the village and the farms.
WD What would their language have been?
GT There was no Welsh. I never heard it spoken - not in Welshpool nor in Newtown, either. On the other hand, of course, the names were all Welsh and infused everything. And there was a sort of sense of history in the castle at Montgomery and up at Cefn Coch, Llyn Celyn or Llyn Go Gaer on the moors, or in the little churches, particularly the one at Bettws. Mostly, though, the churches smelt of bats, which caused RS more problems than anything linguistic or spiritual in Manafon. There was a memorable, ecologically unsound, day when the church in Manafon was fumigated, with what I remember as peculiar thick yellow smoke, to clear out the bats; they survived and the church continued to be full of droppings and evensong flutterings. The church appeared to be a nuisance. My parents complained about the music every week. Annie Morgan, who was a large lady from The Pump, played the organ, wheezingly. Few parishioners in church.
Whist drives in the school, unfortunately opposite the pub called the Beehive. How I came to be there one Saturday I do not know, but I have a memory of what resembles the Wild West. Drunken figures wheeling and fighting in the half light, overturned tables, cards littering the floor, bottles. Later, I quizzed RS on this: ‘About right,’ he said.
I don't suppose a policeman set foot in Manafon that often. Elsi used to say that, when they first went there, every week a cart used to go slowly down the road from New Mills to Berriew and people would toss produce into it for the black market. Occasionally, some days later a policeman would appear making enquiries. But that was wartime. RS would go collecting for bomb victims in London and the farmers would inquire with amazement why they had not enough food to eat: there was no shortage of farm produce in Manafon. When the Italian prisoners of war came they were at first astonished and later appalled at the quantity of bacon eaten. Elsi recalls one frustrated Italian, consumed with hunger, offered yet another plate of bacon saying: 'No, No. Pig in pan, she stink!' There had also been, before I was born, evacuees from London.
WD Hence, of course, the sensitive early poem ‘The Evacuee’ in which a young London girl wakes in rural Manafon fearful every morning of hearing an air-raid siren, and ‘slow to trust nature’s deceptive peace’ or to trust the natural kindness of her Welsh hosts.
GT Yes, except that they apparently lived on Swiss Rolls of which they had brought a large quantity with them. Manafon, I gather, considered their morals suspect and they in turn were all happy to return to the blitz.
Lamb and fish came by travelling vendors as did many household goods. Vegetables came from the garden, and milk and butter from the farms. No beef or pork was eaten and a chicken only at Christmas. There were gypsies, in proper caravans, with pegs and pans and buckets and brooms, tramps with trinkets. It was groceries and seeds that came from town. I don't know where Elsi’s paint and canvas came from - London I suppose.
Much of the closer detail of Manafon is, inevitably, a bit hazy. I am aware that whole stretches of time and minute sensations are being missed. The bathing in the river, with that peculiar smell of river water, the crayfish, the slime on the stones, the slippery feel of tickled trout. RS’s father, Tommy Thomas, when on a visit, used to wrap them in big burdock leaves to take home. He would fish in the mornings with me and then spend the rest of the day releasing all the tackle he had lost in the alder and willow trees along the banks of the Rhiw.
We used to go to buy anything significant in Pryce Jones's 'The Warehouse' in Newtown, a sort of primitive department store. Afterwards we might go up the hill to see my teacher Mrs Linhard, who was a German refugee. She had amazing silver hair wound round her head in endless plaits, and was like a lady out of a middle-European fairy tale. Or we would go to the Karciewski's house. He was another exile. A Polish Count, with a classic profile. His wife was elegant and fussy. He had some peculiar station wagon decked out with a lot of wood, which was usually full of books and which he drove at top speed round Montgomeryshire. He printed RS's second and third books. Later they moved to a huge house in Gloucester Crescent in London and later still had an even more beautiful mas outside Uzes in the Gard. I lay in that farmhouse all one summer reading hundreds of French novels, and English ones translated in the Livre de Poche series.
WD As I say, we can approach more detailed aspects of your parents’ creative life as such, gradually. But already amongst those more purely physical memories that you’ve given us so far - of period, home and immediate surroundings at Manafon - we’ve had glimpses of your parents. What other specific pictures of RS and Elsi, just as people about the house in those early days, come back to mind?
GT RS spending all day with an oil lamp thawing the pipes out before they froze again at night. Elsi making purses out of moleskins, berets and waistcoats out of rabbit skins; my having no choice but to wear these things. Elsi hanging two dead owls in the apple tree to have their skeletons and feathered wings, then placing the heads on the mantelpiece in the panelled hall; along with little wooden chinese junks, a glass bell, and huge marbles, there were the skulls of sheep, badgers, foxes, hares and stoats (later, in Aberdaron, she mounts the skulls on the wall). In the attic, boxes of dead birds awaiting their resurrection in her ‘studies’.
The mural for the hospital at Gobowen, painted for the most part in the drawing room at Manafon, being stretched out, wound up, and edged past doorways over many a month. I would appear and reappear in it as would the fields of Manafon and the Holyhead seaside, and a whole host of treasures and leitmotifs from the house and Elsi’s past life.
Elsi gardening and developing her love of old roses. In Manafon there was a splendid Gloire de Dijon growing on the back of the house, where too there was the conservatory I’ve mentioned, with a Nectarine tree which amazingly produced plentiful fruit.
WD I remember RS mentioning the Manafon nectarine, and referring to Andrew Marvell’s own marvelling lines in his poem ‘The Garden’ – ‘The nectarine and curious peach,/ Into my hands themselves do reach’, while also expressing his admiration for Elsi’s adept gardening skills amongst more native plants.
GT Even the outside garden at Manafon was something of a wonder. The orchard was filled with apple trees - Bramley, Cox, Worcester Pearmain, and underneath was an Alpine field of narcissus and small Leedsii Daffodils. There were wild strawberries and the rare white strawberry which survived transportation to Sarn Rhiw via both Eglwys-fach and Aberdaron. They made an exquisite kitchen garden, too. There was plentiful asparagus, strawberries, raspberrries, and blackcurrants. Elsi built an Alpine wall with stones from Afon Rhiw and there were gentian and other alpines there. When I was born, RS planted a larch tree next to the beautiful Abies Nobilis at the front of the Rectory. They produced the most beautiful cones, which were a better plaything than many a toy. The larch tree is still there, about 40 feet tall! There were rhododendrons and crab apples to bloom and swathes of marguerites. There was, over the front door, a yellow Rosa Banksiae in which the long tailed tits used to nest. The garden was full of birds and mice, which I used to hunt with a penknife until one day I fell over and stuck the penknife up my nose!
Elsi cooking on a paraffin stove in the slate-floored back kitchen. She made cakes for RS and was forever bottling fruit and making wines and nettle beer. Open fires and Aladdin lamps with their beautiful filigree wicks, always breaking. Elsi making lampshades out of some peculiar precursor of plastic, which she sews and pleats and punches holes in with a leather punch. RS washing the tall lamp glasses carefully as they are continually getting blackened. For some reason there are few candles. Not much housework was done. The dust curled in waves under the dressers.
RS sitting by the fire with his woollen socks off, full of holes, painting his toes with iodine against the chilblains.
One day in October, RS leaving the conservatory door open all night and in the morning the door blown inside-out. November brought Guy Fawkes parties. There were huge bonfires and RS kept the fireworks in an old red Oxo tin. Christmas, with a tree made from yew branches, decorated with real candles, red and twirly in little tin candle-holder clips. Sometimes in summer RS would paddle me about in the big pool in Afon Rhiw in an old wartime orange rubber dinghy.
Me sitting on the carpet at the other end of a room, where there is an open fire. RS feeding me poached egg on toast under the table. Later again, RS appearing to eat nothing except baked beans or tinned spaghetti for breakfast. Later, too, Elsi telling me he does not like sauces. It appears to be true. Me watching him wrestle the meat off a dry chicken bone, fastidiously dismembering a dry potato. RS eating bread and cheese every day at 11.00 am. Lunch at 1.00. Tea at 5.00. Supper at 8.00. Everyday without fail. Elsi feeding him like a robot. He is never early, never late, never cooks. The pattern of the week unvarying.
Later, RS opening his own tins, boiling his own eggs and frying his own chicken legs. Later still, Elsi going to give her classes for the Extra-Mural Department of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, when RS has to give me supper. A piece of cheese, mould not unknown, Caerphilly usually, and a jar of pickled beetroot. Tea was I think his favourite meal. He eats several slices of bread and butter, then several of bread and jam, a piece of malt bread or bara brith and then either a couple of iced buns or a piece of cake. Elsi feeding his sweet tooth unceasingly. He didn’t drink tea, though Elsi did, from her little silver teapot.
RS laying traps and red lead, putting gorse in with the seeds. The mice and rabbits thriving. Elsi making nettle beer and dandelion wine, elderflower champagne and sherry, jams and marmalade.
Elsi appearing to paint and paint; RS appearing to do nothing except read and scythe the grass.
RS sleeping in the big front bedroom which is freezing and has two single beds (I never saw a double bed). In this room when I am 11 my mother telling me we shall have to leave this beautiful house because RS is unhappy. Elsi crying. My grandparents coming to stay and sleeping in my father's room, he going into the attic, into the room that would become my play room. Our having no money for curtains, and my making Elsi buy two exotically coloured towels to pin at the windows.
In the other room on this third floor, Elsi painting. The smell of turpentine filling the air together with that of Gloire de Dijon roses. The boxes of oil paints, the canvases, the stretchers, the charcoal and the little spray for fixative are intoxicating.
RS at an old typewriter banging out poems on thin paper, already typing out only poems that he wants to keep. The fireplace full each evening with scrumpled pages. RS listening on a gramophone to Beethoven and Mozart, not much else. It is hard work. My liking the little HMV boxes of needles, and thinking the best use I could see for the gramophone was to put toys on it and watch them whirl round.
RS taking me up the hills into farm kitchens where flitches of bacon hung with washing from the ceiling. They were warm rooms with tiled floors and the smell of bread. In the yard unpleasant sheepdogs lurched at you. Later they chased me down the hill from Llwyn Coppa when I went to get buttermilk, of which RS was very fond. I would go no more; that’s where my hatred of dogs comes from. Up at Belandeg my making a friend in Tom Jones, though I now see that it was a wealthy farm and therefore suitable company for the parson's son. My other friends were simply tolerated, as there were no choices.
RS taking me to school, on the bar of his bike if lucky, and on a sledge in winter. I was not allowed to stay for lunch: no charity for the parson, thanks. RS picking me up again at the end of the day, scared of the contagion of those peasants. Yet I saw old Bullock dying in his bed all those years and the old man in his bed at The Mill. Job Davies, Darlington, Cynddylan - the Jones boy from Llwyn Coppa who would let me drive the tractor - these were all real. Prytherch is a sort of amalgam of the Wilson boys from the Ffinant, the Llwyn Coppa boys and the feuding Darlingtons, along with all those lone figures up in the fields above New Mills and Adfa.
WD You mentioned earlier that ‘much of the closer detail of Manafon is, inevitably, a bit hazy’. Yet you seem to me able to move backwards and forwards in time with ease, with vivid descriptive powers and detailed knowledge of natural life as well as insight into character and time and situation. May I ask whether, as the saying goes, ‘you yourself write’? At least, may I ask you whether you’ve been writing such memories down?
GT As you know, initially we compiled for my son Rhodri on his 21st birthday in January 2002 the little book Ringless Fingers. The title was taken from a poem RS wrote for one of Elsi's birthdays in the 1970s. It is true: their fingers were ringless, though Elsi had seven pieces of Celtic Silver on her wedding day, including a silver wedding ring. She wore it occasionally, when not to have done so might have appeared, even to her, simply unhelpful. RS never, to my knowledge wore a piece of jewellery. In that book called Ringless Fingers we tried to assemble, from the material we had to hand, in their own words and images, a narrative of the intensity of their relationship (especially as they aged), the extraordinary ambivalence they had about having a child and then a grandchild, the emotional attachment they had to those significant locations I have detailed - particularly Manafon, Caergybi or Holyhead and 'Wales', but also, in my mother's case, Italy - and the complete suppression of any display of love and of the mundane that their creative life apparently required. Ringless Fingers was also, obviously, an attempt to help explain to Rhodri, or help him understand, why and in what ways we were all so barmy! What would make me sad would be for him to puzzle over things that can be answered in ways I have puzzled over, things I myself have never fully understood as legacies from RS and Elsi.
Then, over the last two or three years, I have been writing down detailed memories, basically all again written for my family. What I did first was try and write a catalogue or list of all the people and places, events and ideas that I remember as having been significant in RS and Elsi’s lives and my own. It was inevitably rather a turmoil, without any real linear progression. Then I began to flesh out each entry. I see my memories and records, including my mother’s memoir, as being something of an antidote and a ‘humanising’ supplement to RS’s Autobiographies. Elsi’s memoir also contains a diary, which is in itself an interestingly alternative view of A Year in Llyn. So I gradually came to document my own perspective on both the period most directly influenced by my parents and the way in which even my life apart continued to be bound with theirs. What it really attempts, though, is no more than a simple provision for Rhodri of facts and locations, because he has often said that there are so many years, so many people, that he is simply ignorant of. In recent times I have also been writing a weblog, which seems to me an interesting way to record some of life’s ephemera. Of course, most of my writing has been dour academic stuff!
WD I don’t know what your own memoir will finally include or omit as it progresses, but if you were at this moment to encapsulate something quite general - your sense, this time, not of others but of your own self at the heart of that earliest period, even if that sense came through another’s view of you - what would you say?
GT Elsi used to say I never asked any questions, but that I was very voluble. Apparently, I used to put my back to a wall and hold forth. In fact, I don’t think I’ve changed much!
My sense of my own self at that early time? The photographs to most people's eyes demonstrate one thing clearly: that RS and Elsi were especially ambivalent about the birth of a son. My mother dressed me in dungarees, that most unsexing of outfits, and my cloud of golden curls was, to say the least, ambiguous. Add to that RS’s question in Neb ‘How can no-one be a father to someone?’ and the early poem ‘The Unborn Daughter’ and I might reasonably speculate on the construction of my self and sexuality. I do not know by what strange process all of that turned towards that characteristic scented by so many people in my life of possibilities of mediums and healers - which I have continued to downplay, even avoid - rather than towards the fashionableness of gayness.
For myself alone, what I think I learned most particularly back then was that death comes easily: all those creatures dying with great regularity. Also that fathers, though present, could be both absent and a nuisance. That books were an excellent source of fantasy and dreams. (By the way, it was Elsi who taught me to read, and I could read well when I was three or four, so that when I went to school at five I was bored to bits as no-one else could read well.) That you could play in the fields and the river until the sun set. That other people were irrelevant. That this closed world appeared to have no drawbacks. A golden age.
WD A golden age, indeed. And yet - I remember your phrase earlier, ‘the garden and the gate’ - it was a world you were to be sent out and away from.
GT Yes, everything changed in September 1953. Some visits to Shrewsbury to acquire clothes and other things made me vaguely aware something was up. I had already had my curls removed a couple of years earlier when I had my tricycle, so it was not the haircut. In May of that year we had visited Packwood, where I was introduced to a large gingery man in plus fours with a lot of hair in his nose. This was Mr McFerran. I watched a lot of boys playing cricket and running around. Mr McFerran asked me if I would like to be one of his bunnies. ‘Not likely,’ I said. Yet in September off to be a bunny I was despatched. Some bunny!
WD This is not the place for any detailed account of the obscene horrors of private boarding schools that started then for you, nor even of their simpler privations; as a Grammar Schoolboy, I doubt I could stomach hearing of them, let alone imagine taking them on. But, in more general terms, what was it like? That is, what was its effect on you at the age of eight? And do you remember any of your parents’ perceptions, if any, of what that effect on you might be?
GT Fifteen little boys in a bedroom at Packwood, lonely and frightened, watched over by a dragon of a matron with the physique of a Philipino wrestler who thrashed, with a hairbrush, those who cried and wet their beds - this started the long business of brutalisation that both Packwood and Bradfield had in common. When I was at Packwood, Elsi was incensed that I did not get my own sheets, as the maids were too idle to read the names. How could they!
Elsi would come and take me out some Sundays in the appalling little grey van. We would go up into the rainy hills above Llangollen, sometimes to Chester Zoo or the lakes at Ellesmere. She would cook fried Spam and instant potato on a Primus stove in the back of the van and buy me sherbet fountains. I think she knew if she took me home - it was only about 30 miles away - she would never get me back. At Guy Fawkes she would buy fireworks and we would let them off in some godforsaken lay-by. There were no half terms. Once, my father came to play football, in red and white socks, I remember, with his white legs, running up and down ineffectually. He remembered it, too. ‘What a buffoon that man Brooke is,’ he says, ‘You certainly aren't going to Shrewsbury!’ The man Brooke, who had a son at Bradfield, was a housemaster at Shrewsbury public school. He was only playing the fool in goal to try and amuse us!
After Packwood, Bradfield was yet more Lord of the Flies stuff. Vicious boys and masters with eyes and consciences averted. It was also very much as in Lindsay Anderson’s film If. Again, I found it all terrifying. By the late 1950s Bradfield was catering to new money and the gin-and-Jaguar belts of Surrey and the other Home Counties. There were no blacks, no orientals, no Hampstead, no ‘old’ money. These were the sons of Home Counties doctors, a German book publisher, gin distillers, teachers, some expat oilmen in Iraq, early caterers to tourists in Spain, gentlemen farmers. Bradfield was itself very much a child of its time as an institution. Those families with money took their sons out at 16 to get on with business. Those that survived in the top forms went to Oxbridge as though on a conveyor belt. My attempts to flout this – for example, taking English A Level as well as the ‘normal’ Classics ones, applying to go to the University of Wales in Cardiff or to read Textile Design at Leeds - were dismissed as eccentric by the School and firmly rejected by RS at home. Some 40 years later, when Rhodri, at Westminster School, wisely chose to read Law at Bristol rather than at Oxford, RS’s comment was ‘Well, Westminster can’t be that much of a school if it can’t secure him a place at Oxford!”
When I was about 14 I started running away from Bradfield. This was the Eglwys-fach period. I had a Welsh girlfriend, Sue, and it was fun to get on the train and spend the night in Welshpool station by the stove before catching the early morning train to Glandyfi to see her. It was she who saw me through most of Bradfield. I had already been warned off her by RS: they were ‘villagers’ and thus quite unsuitable company for the vicar’s son. I started meeting her under the railway bridge in Glandyfi; then up in the woods and on the hills above Eglwys-fach. We would lie against a big stone or in the bracken and kiss and talk from mid morning until it got dark in the summer. Once RS found us and hauled me off her. I think Bill Condry used to spy on us with his binoculars, RS also. How we managed not to sleep together I don't know. Ironically, Sue became a medical nurse and gained a degree in music and a PhD, which says something about the misplaced nature of RS's snobbery.
WD His own snobbery or elitism or whatever seems to have been recognized early by RS himself and built into the early poetry, as if he were striving to get on to more democratically acceptable terms with it - not least in the lines from his most famous poem ‘A Peasant’ about people and a way of life that ‘shock the refined,/ But affected, sense with their stark naturalness’. That phrase ‘but affected’ seems clinically inserted, as if as an afterthought, wanting to make social amends.
GT Yes, but the same divisions continued elsewhere and everywhere. RS said that he could smell evil when he used to get off the train in London. I rather like that smell, as it seems to me far truer to the human condition than the smell of manure in Wales. One of the things that emerged from the approach in the mid 1990s to his second marriage, to Betty Vernon, in 1996 was that in moving to be near her in Titley, Herefordshire, he was able to indulge his hankering to be an English country gentleman. He used to appear regularly in tweed jackets and cavalry twills like a retired Colonel.
WD And yet, paradoxically, that very period approaching his late marriage to Betty produced some of the most moving and poignant, because throw-back, poems about Elsi. It was a period when some of RS’s late poems attained a moving, remorseful power comparable to that of Thomas Hardy’s late 1912-13 poems to his first wife Emma Gifford. RS, like Hardy, seems to reach back, with self-reproach between the lines, beyond the second to the first wife.
But in turn, we too have jumped ahead, and should return. Let’s go back to the Eglwys-fach period.
GT Well, those Eglwys-fach years, from 1959 to 1963, were also pretty grim, for me as well as for RS and Elsi. RS has documented his problems with the retired military amongst his parishioners at Eglwys-fach, though the severe illness of Elsi must have contributed enormously to their misery there. Other than Sue, I had no friends at Eglwys-fach. I became an expert at playing darts and snooker with both hands so I could play against myself. Also, a variety of other extraordinary games that involved pitting right hand against left. I slept all the time else, listening to RS droning on in the kitchen below. There were endless escapades, with Sue and me snucking off on buses or whatever to movies in Aberystwyth and to friends’ houses, escapades that usually ended in some domestic fracas back home. There was simply nothing to do.
Back at Bradfield, I was clever, bored, lonely, good at games and unpopular. I disliked most people and had a sharp tongue. I was learning, though, to lie and cheat and dissemble - all those necessary attributes for running an empire. I learnt, too, some carpentry, how to hide a rhubarb jam sandwich, no butter, in your pocket until it could be disposed of later, and shame at not being like everyone else.
You ask what was the effect of all this on me. I just felt bewildered and abandoned. What on earth was I doing there? I tried to make friends with a few people and even went to their houses at weekends. There, I had an intimation of normal, or maybe just bourgeois, lives. There were sisters and brothers, dogs, normally furnished rooms, and conversations about work and holidays.
Elsi’s visits and ‘tailgating’ continued. RS would occasionally take a Sunday off and come down. We would sit in silence in the car and then eat a salmon supper in ‘an hotel’ as RS called them. He came to watch me in an athletics event once but my pleasure was diminished by spotting him at the top of the grandstand with his back turned to the track watching birds all afternoon!
And so began to grow that strange duality that I have towards it all. On the one hand, everything that Manafon itself in the first place, and RS and Elsi themselves, stood for was a sort of enclosed perfect world which was ‘other than’ everything else, and into which you could escape. On the other hand it was, as you say, an Eden from which I myself had been ruthlessly expelled, with little explanation and less salve. As a consequence, I nurtured a confusion. Did I belong to a world that valued things in a way no other world did? RS was fond of maintaining that writers and artists, and particularly himself, were classless. I don’t think he read much sociology or psychology. Perhaps he thought Bergson, Kant and Kierkegaard were classless, too! Packwood and Bradfield were intellectual and cultural deserts, so did I belong in that wasteland?
WD As it happens, Elsi’s memoir is wonderfully evocative of her own early school, yet she too writes a sad line - ‘I hated all my school days’. She recounts being punished, albeit with only ‘disorder marks’, for untidy work and bad deportment (apparently, not sitting up in class with a straight back), or for speaking idly on the stairs as she passed a friend, ‘or any other unplanned happening which was considered evil’. Though educationally too genteel to call Gradgrindian, all this still smacks of it. For example, Elsi was once punished for the ‘evil’ of having drawn in pencil around the pattern of bunches of grapes on the white tablecloth at lunch time. In response to the headmistress’s curt reprimand about the tablecloth - ‘You would not have done it at home!’ - Elsi records that she ‘truthfully replied “Yes, I think I would, for all kinds of drawings are good.”’ Good on her, I say. But this is my point: your mother’s London school was at least a local, non-boarding school; so why on earth did Elsi decide to send you, her only child, away to school?
GT I’m not sure how the dynamics of the decision really worked, but I think Elsi went along with a decision RS took. He always maintained that it was unthinkable that I should remain in Manafon until I was 11 and then go to school in Llanfair Caereinion, or anywhere locally. Presumably he always had it in his mind to leave Manafon, as the push westward was, according to Elsi, a constant of his life. Clearly, the schools of Aberystwyth or anywhere else in Wales were not to his liking, either.
WD Strange, because what you call ‘the push westward’, determined by a search for Welsh Wales, took RS next to Eglwys-fach, near Aberystwyth, where there were in fact, already, of all things, Welsh-language schools.
It prompts me to ask, as a means of evoking the detailed lights and shades of all this in terms of your parents’ lives, how useful do you think biography and autobiography have been? To date, of course, Elsi’s life and achievement have not received anything like the attention they deserve when compared to that accorded RS. He has had considerable biographical attention – not only incidental but copious - however strongly resisted any probing attention may sometimes have been by RS himself. Does such close biographical attention strike you as productive in finding the man who wrote the poems?
GT I used to wonder just how much of what I remember, and have myself been independently recording, that Justin Wintle would dig up, and, as I always guessed, now that I have read Wintle’s book, not much. In fact, I find Furious Interiors a strange mixture of irrelevant discursions, inaccuracies and waffle with some acute insights. I cannot conceive how he thought there was any point in writing the book without speaking with me. RS and others may not have relished his project; I might have transformed it. He seems, for example, to have singularly failed to penetrate the body of daily life, the life of what you rightly call ‘the man who wrote the poems’. For example, Ieuan Redvers Jones said to me, perceptively, that he independently sensed in the book the continual unexpressed influence and power of my mother: but that is pretty much unmentioned in Furious Interiors. All this despite the fact that, in the poems, my mother is a constant presence and inspiration.
WD And autobiography?
GT My mother’s impact is also neglected in RS's own autobiographical writings. I have now of course, in Jason’s translations in Autobiographies, been able to read RS’s Neb and Blwyddyn yn Llyn, works which again somehow fail, for me, to put any flesh on real life. But then I question for whom and why these autobiographical pieces were written – certainly not Elsi, or me, or my children. Like everything else, for himself, I suppose. I also find it typically evasive that RS should have written autobiographies rather than a single one. While it may be argued that such a practice is refreshingly reflective of the multiple faces, masks and selves of a poet, I just find it at once devious and imprecise. In my own autobiographical notes I suppose I am doing precisely the same thing. However, my justification is that my life has, if nothing else, been singularly devious, and I make no claims to having anything much to say, unlike RS.
WD Autobiographies, of course, was the translator and editor’s choice of title.
GT I appreciate that, but it still remains a set of ‘autobiographies’. Whether in Welsh or in English, separate ‘autobiographies’ opens a way for heterodox versions. In today’s terminology, I think we would say that RS sought deliberately to put his own ‘spin’ on his persona(e), leaving others to unravel it. I also dislike intensely RS’s use of ‘RS’ as his identity. It is at once the nominative ego and the third person in Neb. But it was very characteristic of him. He was possessed of that most irritating ability to be at once overbearingly opinionated and unflinchingly irresponsible. He was also the most sentimental of men. For me, the resulting effect of Neb is something of a whimsical attempt to divest himself of actual responsibility for anything. Everything ‘happened to’ RS! But he is clearly not alone in that rather alienated perception of contemporary life. Elsi was very critical of both the irresponsibility and the whimsy, but I think she indulged his appetite, his solitary ‘twitching’ pleasures, and his sentimentality. In a sense, that ‘tolerance’ bought her a space of her own and maintained her control.
If one accepts that Art requires space to compose itself, then RS achieved that space by consummate idleness. The most revealing passages in his Autobiographies are about 'mooching' around (a favourite RS word) in Sarn-y-Plas and elsewhere: Llangollen, Connemara, Scotland, Adfa, Ynys Edwin, Braich y Pwll, Cape Clear, Norfolk, the Coto Doñana, Norway, and later Alaska, Dubai and Egypt - they all got their share of being 'mooched' in.
It also appears to me that in Neb and Blwyddyn yn Llyn he actually overemphasises his life of mind and soul. Birdwatching, walking and 'mooching' were far more significant in his life than study. And yet ‘mooching’ is basically what the snob poet thinks the urban (in this case, the Birmingham and Liverpool) proletariat does when lost for entertainment at Butlins Pwllheli (‘Star Coast World’ as I think it then became). It consisted - in RS’s later cosmology - mainly, as he saw it, of wandering around Pwllheli minus T-shirt or with unsuitably sized shorts, stuffing crisps, ice cream and chips. However, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that what RS himself also did - and Elsi would have agreed with me here - was mooch around the house, cut a bit of grass, and mooch around Llyn and then go and bore people who were prepared either to entertain him or to be entertained by him. This would include the Roberts’s in Aberdaron, Will Sam, sometimes Will Ty Pellaf, the girl at Salfur, and the one in Mynytho (‘pink doileys on the loo seats,’ Elsi said), the Urbanskis in Llanbedrog. RS says somewhere that speaking Welsh made him garrulous. With the girls, the excuse was that he was teaching them to watch birds. Just before my mum died she said rather wearily: ‘Well, I have seen off as many of them as I can; but I fear there will be more. What more can one do to save people from themselves?’
WD There is a great deal in what you’ve said so far that is of relevance to an understanding of the personalities of two remarkable people. A great deal also about things that went, sometimes directly, sometimes at-an-angle, to the making of the remarkable writings and paintings that your parents produced over the best part of your early life. As far as the poems are concerned, we can probably mention only a few - but I know that many others of deep biographical interest to you lie behind each one. At the same time, we have to leave a major piece of visual art such as Elsi’s superb mural for the orthopaedic hospital at Gobowen to represent many other equally brilliant works. But what interests me is that the two different art forms represent, not just individual achievements, but surely an amazing creative relationship between the makers. It’s a point to which I should like to return.
But let’s set out again from Manafon by asking how your own personal circle first began to widen outwards from that mid-Wales border village.
GT Of course, at first we used to go to Welshpool or Newtown once a week and (I don't know why) to Oswestry once a month. In Oswestry we used to go to a lunch room – ‘The Coach and Horses’ - and eat the kind of mutton I was later to discover was school food. In Welshpool RS and Elsi would go to the dentist, an ogre of a man called Beetham, though he did lend her, because of her delight in drawing, the skull of a young Frenchman killed in the Franco-Prussian war. Later, we would go to Shrewsbury, where a man gassed me to the extent I was sure I had woken up in heaven. I can’t imagine why my mother didn’t look after my teeth and feet earlier, both wrecked by the time I went to Packwood; she set such store by physical perfection. We went, too, to a fair in Montgomery where I got my first inkling that there was more to all this than Manafon. There were grapes, bananas, little paper birds with spun-glass wings and candyfloss - which was of course forbidden, as vulgar.
WD Even so, these were the 1940s and 1950s: how come you were so mobile?
GT We went to these places in the little old Austin 7, reg. UJ 945. It had front wheels that stuck out beyond the bumper, sweet-smelling cracked leather seats and what I remember as a semi-manual windscreen wiper. It would not go up the hill called The Gibbet to Llanfair Caereinion if the road was at all icy. In those days cars had no heaters, so Elsi used to set off first with a hot water bottle to apply to the windscreen and then to wipe glycerine over the windscreen to stop it freezing. There were pretty well no other cars, though Jones Llwyn Coppa had one, as did the Ffinant family. There were one or two delivery lorries and the milk cart. One day, coming back from Berriew, a plank of timber slipped off a lorry in front and smashed the windscreen. I suppose we were lucky, but lucky anyway if we were ever going much above 20mph. For some reason, when she was in Chirk, teaching at Oswestry Grammar School and staying in John and Joan Marchant's House, where much of the early courtship occurred, Elsi had a Bentley and she later always resented the Austin 7 a bit. One day RS went to London and returned from Warren Street with a monstrous vehicle which, I think, was an Austin 10 or maybe 12, reg. DXU 881. I never got to the bottom of that story, but he had clearly been sold a dud, and Elsi never forgave him. It laboured on, regularly breaking down, until they started buying little grey Austin A45 vans, and subsequently minivans.
This was the transport in which they used to come to Packwood. It was the beginning of the crack in the façade of what I had imagined was their wealth. After all, we lived in an enormous house, we possessed, as far as I knew, most things, and no-one went to work. Though they moaned incessantly about the wealth of the farmers, at home it was not apparently necessary to do anything! Everyone else's parents appeared at Packwood in the expected Rovers and Jaguars. It was a long time before I made the connection between work and money.
WD Yet you were already at a school that represented money. What about other places and other people further afield?
GT I first went to London when I was five. It was Granny and Grandpa Eldridge’s Golden Wedding. I packed my little brown suitcase and off we went on the train from Shrewsbury. What I remember most is the smell of the green Southern Electric train we took to Leatherhead. I didn’t like it much and wanted to go home. Elsi's mother had an unpleasant dog and her father seldom spoke to me; and when he came to Manafon, and would not take me fishing as Tommy Thomas did, I was even less impressed. They lived in a flat above their jewellers’ shop and it was all very cramped. Elsi's mother smoked ‘Craven A’ cigarettes and drank two bottles of stout a day which was considered both common and scandalous; but of course she was French, sort of. Later, Elsi's mother was good to me when I was in Bradfield and was a source of funds, through, I suspect, an agreement with my mother. Anyway, it was worth both train fare and time to go from Reading to Leatherhead before zipping up to London. But that was 1960!
We went, too, to Holyhead, which was an improvement, not because of RS’s mother, Peggy Thomas, whom I disliked, but because we could go swimming at Trearddur Bay and play among the buoys and boats and prawn pools in Holyhead. On my birthdays we would go on a day trip to Ynys Las. It was always hot and a good treat. Of course, later, when we moved to Eglwys-fach, I would go to Ynys Las lots in the summers.
Kimla, the house in Garth Road in Holyhead where Tommy and Peggy Thomas went to live after Cardiff and Liverpool was a nasty little semi with pebble-dash as I remember. He had a tortoise called Tut, which was the one redeeming feature of the place, apart from the famous mirrors of course. The best that can be said is that Peggy Thomas used to take me walking down the town and threaten to ‘box the ears’ of Holyhead wide boys who did not much like the look of little Thomas. When Elsi went there for the first time from Chirk, RS had a ginger beard, and must have looked a lot like Elsi’s 1939 drawing of him. When they arrived, Peggy Thomas said ‘Go upstairs at once and take that thing off!’ - and he did.
The other memorable things about the house itself was the regular attendance of debt collectors, the absence of any possessions, and the DIY disasters brought on by Tommy Thomas’s ‘I'll fix it, Peg’ mode. Betty has the barometer and the little silver Victor Ludorum cup that RS won at Holyhead Grammar School (he was clearly something of an athlete). Tommy Thomas once brought back a brass plate from Ceylon or somewhere and a vase from Shanghai, and that was it. Otherwise, it was a sort of brown beige and dirty pink house, devoid of adornment.
WD It strikes me that a wide social difference lay between your parents, if one considers the different kinds of milieu from which each emerged. I mean specifically the difference in the ambience, style and opportunity created by their own respective parents. I don’t think it is a ‘class’ difference, whatever that may mean, though certainly ‘class consciousness’ later played a part on both sides, often where one would have least expected it. What strikes me about your mother’s early life in her memoir is, if I may say so, its relatively advantaged stylistic opulence and cosmopolitan feel. It’s not just a case of the exotic Hugenot background on her maternal side (from Lille and Poligny) or of the Bentley she once had claim to, but of the opulent Christmases and what she calls the ‘even lovelier’ Easters, her jeweller father being a Freemason, the summer holidays reached by the Flying Scotsman night express train, the good (non-boarding, yet not inexpensive) education, and the Continental travel (Elsi, for example, used to go back to Lille and the Jura a lot). This is not to raise any contest ‘pound for pound’, God forbid, but I think it’s fair to say that RS’s family background offered him nothing at all along those lines. That’s how it strikes me. How does it strike you?
GT Questions of difference, even of class, struck Elsi, too - but in a very different, almost inverse, way. I’d like to quote her in her own words. In her memoir, as you know, after describing the wonderful Christmases that you’ve mentioned, she records a cultural shock:
No wonder that I thought the first Christmas that RS and I spent together at Talarn Green was the dreariest that I have ever known. Many church services, and out to lunch at the churchwarden’s where we were put in a room, the parlour, alone to eat it. It was not considered quite proper for the farmer churchwarden and his family to sit down with us! Years later, a similar thing happened in Manafon. Mrs Wilson asked us to have supper at the Ffinant. We sat at a huge table with her, and while we ate, the door of the dining room was left open, and through it we could see the rest of the family, two girls and four boys, sitting motionless around the walls of the kitchen which was next to the dining room – silent so that they could listen to all that was said. That was for the same reason that it was not proper for working men to sit at the same table as the Rector!
On the other hand, I think that my mother had some unpleasant experiences of the ‘artistic world’ of London, which inclined her firstly towards a monastic life in Italy and subsequently to a more reclusive world on the Welsh Borders. I think she retained both a ‘nostalgia’ for the rather glittering world that the Royal College of Art opened up for her and a desire to avoid a cultural elite as strong as that of RS. However, I think that the pattern of their life meant that as she got older she was more and more deprived of friends and intellectual stimulus while RS moved into a world, most often Welsh speaking, which energised his later years. She once expressed to me the view that RS had ‘taken all her friends away’. Certainly, wherever she lived she had tried to construct or reconstruct a ‘social circle’, while RS became notorious for his offensiveness to callers at the door or on the phone. He saw off with studied rudeness many who had been stalwart supporters in earlier years. Brian Morris, for example, never spoke to him again after being ‘turned away’ at the door at Sarn-y-Plas.
WD Beyond your parents, it’s good to have also your impressions of your grandparents on both sides, in their own settings, and in terms of their own legacies. Personally, I’m particularly taken by your memories of RS’s father, Tommy Thomas. There are, of course, his large-scale experiences as a sailor on big ships in great waters, which bring to mind specific RS poems. I’ve always thought, for example, that ‘The Survivors’ from The Bread of Truth is an amazing poem, not only in terms of the event described but in that its opening lines mysteriously merge biography and autobiography: ‘I never told you this./He told me about it often . . .’ But the ordinary riverside fisherman in him also brings specific poems to mind - not least, Gwydion, the superb ‘Song for Gwydion’ with which we started.
GT Tommy Thomas’s father had bought a hotel in Llandysul, as the simplest way of solving the drinking issue. When laced, he used to stand on the balcony of the hotel and send money floating down into the square. This money was all from the inheritance of the coal mines: he had sunk mines with Davies of Llandinam, who bought Gregynog. RS was very close about all this. Tommy Thomas was I think the youngest of 11 or so children. His mother had long since been an orphan, to all intents and purposes brought up by a Canon David's family in Carmarthenshire.
RS's affection for his father was always tempered by his sorrow that he was ill, that he was unable really to talk about the great adventures that he had had, and of his being subdued by Peggy. The poem ‘The Survivors’ that you mention was inspired by an occasion in, I think, Argentina where Tommy Thomas had been shipwrecked. They spent many days - as many as twenty - in an open boat, and when beginning to give up hope, and obviously too weak to think much, they found themselves close to land, a man on horseback rode into the waves and lassooed the dinghy and brought them to shore.
WD To show how well life finds its further form in poetry, it is worth quoting the beautiful economy of the final lines of the poem itself:
From the swell’s rise one of them saw the ruins
Of all that sea, where a lean horseman
Rode towards them and with a rope
Galloped them up on to the curt sand.
GT Yes, and as you say, the Tommy Thomas I knew was also fond of fly fishing. His visits to Manafon were always memorable to me for the fact that he actually caught trout and, as I’ve already mentioned, wrapped them in big burdock leaves to take home, even if about four times a day for a week he also trudged forlornly back to the Rectory at Manafon to announce he had lost yet another set of tackle in some tree or other. The Afon Rhiw was a wonderful trout stream. Tommy Thomas taught me to tickle trout and to find the crayfish under the flat stones. And there was nothing I loved more than to hang on the bridge on a June morning or evening and watch the trout rising in the pool. He and RS also took me up to Llanfair Caereinion to watch the salmon leaping on the Banwy. RS himself was a diffident fisherman. Though the fish in the poem ‘Song for Gwydion’ were real enough, they were more likely caught by my grandfather.
WD Don’t you think, though, that in a longer perspective the poem takes that on board anyway? Isn’t it a poem that once again interrelates biography and autobiography, negotiating two generations? There’s the extra openness, for example, of the opening - ‘When I was a child …’, following as it does a title saying that it is a song for Gwydion, not exclusively by Gwydion. Isn’t it RS about his father as well as you, Gwydion, about RS? The poem seems generationally inclusive.
GT It certainly suits that the charms of trout fishing are themselves subtle and delicate. I think, however it is a poem about me and RS, rather than RS and Tom Thomas. It is, inevitably, a poem that has hung from my neck most of my life - together with ‘The Unborn Daughter’.
WD I suppose ‘The Son’ must have done the same:
It was your mother wanted you;
you were already formed
when I entered . . .
And when you appeared
before me, there was no repentance
for what I had done, as there was shame
in the doing it; compassion only
for that which was too small to be called human.
GT Yes, and in fact when I wrote the first version of my private memoir notes for Rhodri I took as title, from ‘Song for Gwydion’, a particular phrase - ‘chill lips’ -
My father brought me trout from the green river
From whose chill lips the water song had flown
which I suppose crystallises the significance of such poems for me.
Anyway, much later, RS and I would go fishing for mackerel at Penrhos in Aberdaron, a very different thing from catching trout. Catching mackerel six at a time on a feathered or silvered line and hauling them, fighting to the last, to the rocks is more robust. I do not think, by the way, RS ever ‘went out with the small men’, though he did go over to Ynys Enlli with Will Evans fairly often. We used to go catching wrasse, too - tiny little ones at Sarn. Had I discovered Thai cuisine in those days I would have known to deep fry them to a crisp; as it was, they were just a damp mouthful of bones. Later on, of course, I discovered that you could catch large ones, as well as pollock, dogfish and mullet, at Braich y Pwll. But after the ‘golden wrasse’ incident, when Rhodri caught two of the most unusually coloured fish and was distraught at their being killed and eaten, we never went fishing again.
WD Generationally inclusive indeed! Give me a few later pictures of RS and Elsi that come back into the mind.
GT In my second year at Magdalen College, I discovered the theatre and, for me, that saved Oxford. I spent the year acting and making new friends. In the spring of 1966 Professor Nevill Coghill pulled off his idea for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to appear in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to raise funds for Oxford’s Playhouse Theatre. I was cast as a student! My friends Maria Aitken, Jonathan Aitken’s sister, and Dick Durden Smith were good and bad angels, Simon Heffer, a student, too. The saturnine Andreas Tauber would, appropriately, be Mephistopheles.
One day Nick Parsons drove Shan and myself to The Bear Hotel in Woodstock, outside Oxford. Present for lunch, besides Shan and myself, were Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Burton's father and brother, RS and Elsi. It was a pretty excruciating occasion. RS talked about the weather and fish with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton tried to chat up Shan, Elsi kept her nose in her plate. Burton bragged that he would send RS a whole load of books of American poets - which of course he never did. The meeting of two great Welshmen was not a success.
WD It was a period, 1966, when one could see Burton and Taylor walking quite casually and unhindered down Broad Street, or hear Burton and W.H. Auden, formerly Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, reading poetry at a special Sunday morning event at the Oxford Union, with Nevill Coghill, formerly both Auden and Burton’s tutor at Exeter College, leaning appreciatively from the gallery with, I remember, a hand cupped to his ear. That lunchtime in Woodstock, in the rather elite ‘olde worlde’ English setting of ‘The Bear’, it must have seemed to you, to RS and Elsi, and to Burton’s father and brother, as if disparate times and decades and disparate worlds, not just Wales and England, had been brought together. From your description, they seem worlds that were in the event already pulling away from one another.
GT In my case it proved quite literally so because Marlowe’s play led on to the movie, and in the summer we were all shipped off to Rome to make it. I stayed in a house off the via C.Colombo on the way to the Dino di Laurentiis studios. The lot at Di Laurentiis was very odd. They had just finished filming John Houston's The Bible and the lot was full of that film’s props, including the Tower of Babel and Noah's Ark. In the Faustus film, I played Lussuria - Lechery - which seemed about right. I had a good wig and an excellent turquoise codpiece, which my friend Cinzia coveted. Cinzia's family had a huge and beautiful old farm outside Rome and we would rush off there as often as possible. Rather amazingly, her parents showed no perturbation at their beautiful daughter shacked up with this peculiar English youth. She had a beautiful bedroom with carved stone statues, wrought iron lamps and chandeliers and one of those chequered beam-and-plaster ceilings. There was another enormous bed, and tall mullioned French windows that opened onto their olive groves.
WD Another idyll, then.
GT Except that I got more and more fed up with the goings on, the continual bickering and bitching on the set. It was that time in Rome that turned me away from a career in the theatre, though I did reconsider after I had been more successful in Cambridge. During the filming, the shouting between the Burtons was continual, and Burton himself was often so hung over they had to stick his coffee cup to the saucer to stop it rattling while they were shooting.
WD And further on in time, getting back to RS and Elsi on the home front, what are your memories? What was the home front like?
GT I feel that at the end RS behaved disgracefully over the question of houses and rooms. In Manafon Elsi had a studio room at the top of the house as well as the room over the kitchen. In Eglwys-fach she had a dingy studio at the back of the house that was permanently lit with dire blue 'daylight' bulbs. However, it was space. In Aberdaron she had perhaps the most beautiful room. The downstairs rooms had huge windows facing South to the sea, and the light was overpowering. However, when they moved to Sarn-y-Plas she had to live in most reduced circumstances. As RS says, the new room they built at Sarn-y-Plas served as his bed-sitting-room. Mind you, it was without heat - except for a miserable little coal fire - and before he left he used to sit shivering and reading there. However, Elsi had a little dark room - about twelve feet by eight - with two tiny windows about eighteen inches square. The water used to ooze down the walls, and she had to put all her pictures in black plastic refuse sacks to try and keep the damp out. It was so cold and damp she used to paint with her feet inside a cardboard box which also contained a two-bar Belling Electric stove. Needless to say she burnt herself severely on several occasions. She would also sleep in this room - though, more often than not, she would climb a six-foot ladder into the loft, where you or I could not even stand up, the roof being only about 4' 6" high, and work and sleep up there, with the mice scurrying around her.
WD I must confess that RS once told me – it was at Gregynog, shortly after Elsi’s death – that he shouldn’t really have expected her to live, let alone remain creative, at Sarn-y-Plas.
GT RS would express that regret from time to time to me, too. He’d say that he had never got round either to securing a living with a decent house or to making sure Elsi had an adequate studio. He said to me once - something like what he said to you - ‘Maybe if I had done that, she would have gone on painting properly!’
And that, of course, raises a whole host of ghosts. Why did Elsi cease painting landscapes? Why did she stop painting in oils? Why did she take to churning out hundreds of ‘pretty’ paintings and illustrations? Why did she do not even more book illustrations until I persuaded her to do In My garden for Rhodri? Why did RS take not the slightest interest in her painting? And yet why, one the other hand, did painting become one of the central features of his own poems? And so on and so forth, as RS would say.
So at the end I am left with three late images. One is of Elsi, in her last year, sitting in the little room in Sarn-y-Plas, with her red flannel skirt, and with her ankles in a cardboard box, being burnt by a Belling stove trying to keep warm. The second is of RS, just before he died, in Minffordd, crying, saying 'Of course that one’ - Betty - ‘knows nothing about anything, least of all Wales. I was happy with your mother all my life, happy with this one for two years and miserable for three. It just goes to show one is never too old to make a fool of oneself!' And the third image, of Betty, cartoonly apoplectic, yelling at me and everyone else around in Ysbyty Gwynedd, while RS, bedridden, looked on, helplessly. But the earlier images are more instructive.
WD And richer and more productive, too. That’s often the way things go. Just as our parents’ individual lives lie apart from us, we have in turn to keep their day-to-day lives coolly apart from their own creative lives. Of course, there are many aspects that cannot be that tidily sliced or hived-off. That is certainly true when we are forced (God help us) to make a merely ‘aesthetic’ assessment of an artist’s work. Our concern in this interview, however, is mainly biographical. At least on that broad biographical front, I feel comfortable in splitting my questions.
So let me ask for your final reflections on the impact on you, first, of Elsi and RS as artists, and then as people and parents. First of all, then, when do you think you first even became aware of their distinction as artists?
GT For most of my life, certainly until my 20s, I was - I think fortunately - relatively unaware of their significance ‘as artists’. In any case, in those early years their fame was relatively minimal. A little later, I even got to wonder which of them, if either, would in the upshot achieve lasting recognition. In a sense, the verdict on that is still open because the extent of Elsi's work and achievements have quite clearly yet to find the critical champions I believe they deserve. She partly complicated this issue by turning away from oils and watercolours towards illustration. But, as I’ve suggested, there were, to say the least, contingent reasons for that. Anyway, why that should be any worse than turning from poems about real rural workers to an abstract concern with an absent God and the meaning of language and life, I do not know.
Also, fair play, neither of them really actively sought ‘fame’. I think RS’s ‘Welsh Nationalist’ persona contributed to his growing distinction, as did the fortunate emergence of a body of clerics - Donald Allchin, Michael Mayne, Michael March, Barry Morgan and Rowan Williams, who all recognised his unusual talent. Again, there emerged a group of academics - beside yourself, C.B.Cox, Tony Dyson, Brian Morris, M. Wynn Thomas and others - who placed his poetry in relation to the critical mainstream. Elsi’s light, though, was kept well under the barrel! And yet, among the small coterie of the Royal Water Colour Society, Spink and Medici, as well as the numerous purchasers of her cards, she was highly regarded.
WD There is an eminent tradition of the partnership of creative people, whether married (the Brownings) or related (the Rossettis) or not even related at all (Wordsworth and Coleridge, Eliot and Pound, Frost and Edward Thomas) and even where neither was a creative artist as such in the first place (the Leavises). I think it significant that these all merited, and got, published dedications of thanks, the one from the other. One thinks of F.R. Leavis and Queenie Leavis dedicating their one joint (late) book to each other – ‘as proof of . . . forty years and more of daily collaboration in living’. Perhaps one thinks, even more precisely in the present Elsi-RS case, since two different arts are involved, of Wordsworth saying of his differently-talented sister Dorothy, ‘She gave me eyes’. In your mother’s memoir, signs of her brilliant visual power, long before she reached the Royal College of Art in 1931, emerge in precociously wonderful ways: she made lampshades for her doll’s house out of Cape Gooseberries with the central large seed removed and torch bulbs inserted, lit from a torch battery; she relished the ‘lovely coloured beads’ of an abacus at school, made necessary because of her antipathy to arithmetic; she looked through every new school book to see, first, if there were line illustrations that could be coloured. Your parents were two equally fine artists. Did an important visual influence cross from your mother’s to your father’s work?
GT Yes, but in one sense it also crossed the other way. For example, the models for Elsi’s myriad paintings of birds and animals were mostly collected by RS as he mooched around the countryside, while the rest were gathered from roadkill. All dead of course, though there was a memorable collection of shelduck that arrived alive! Elsi used to draw them, stuff them with cotton wool and formaldehyde, and hope for the best. She started doing this in Manafon, where there was always an assortment of owls, moles, rabbits, and squirrels strung up in the orchard either to see off the worst of the rotting or to allow the skulls and skeletons to be revealed. The house was full of skulls, of sheep and rams and all kinds of birds (Elsi's own favourites were the badger and stoat). There was an assortment of shelves where wooden miniature Chinese junks and cheap but pretty painted Czech glasses shared space with an assortment of owls’ heads and stuffed moles.
But your point is undoubtedly true. When RS met Elsi he was visually illiterate. She opened his eyes to detail and colour, to shape and form. I even think she was much better read than he. His rather pedestrian attempts at self education, which he has documented, describing his early book purchases, were well precursed by Elsi’s quite wide reading in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. But, to return to the visual, her enthusiasms for Stanley Spencer and many other modern artists who could be mentioned, for Venetian and Romanesque Art - RS’s poem ‘Souillac:Le Sacrifice d’Abraham’, for instance, could not have been written without her input - were passed on to RS, as was her wide knowledge of Impressionism and Surrealism. RS’s volumes Between Here and Now and Ingrowing Thoughts are direct results of her knowledge.
WD To return to the bones and skulls, I’m reminded of Elsi’s comment in her memoir, about her time as a teenager in France when, having always thought that ‘everyone looks rather lovely when they are dead,’ she suddenly realized that, no, ‘not everyone’s bones are beautiful’. This insistence on seeing, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase about Webster, ‘the skull beneath the skin’ seems to have determined much in her art, not least the exaggeratedly bird-like gauntness of her portraits of RS himself. Similarly, it is presumably no accident that so many RS poems include images of bones and skulls, images of the ‘bony figure/ Without grace/ Of flesh’. More important, in the poems the skeletal seems to inform some of RS’s most potent cultural metaphors - ‘worrying the carcase of an old song’, for example, or his sense of the very social fabric of Wales, not just Welsh geography, being denuded under the ‘wind’s attrition’.
GT I would agree with that, but my mother’s influence also crossed in wider terms. Without Elsi, I think there would have been little poetry in other ways as well. I suspect that without her practicality and research tools, without her attention to detail, and not least her wide reading, RS might have progressed as an insignificant Celtic dreamer. He was possessed of no political skills and few interpersonal ones. It is a measure of her own skills, support and, indeed, eventual artistic sacrifice that she managed to help him forge his unique voice.
WD Whatever the two-way influence, and at the risk of prolonging a metaphor, I suppose by now there arises also the question of other kinds of ‘remains’ - the archival survival of poems and paintings by these two important artists, some known about, some conjectured, others not even known about at all.
GT I have not sought to preserve their heritage as a surviving body of work. I regret that, as Elsi's paintings were dispersed, we did not have the scanning technology that would at least have preserved copies. However, both paintings and poems were numerous and in the case of paintings there is a limit to the number of walls in any house. Elsi expressly wished that her paintings should provide for my son Rhodri's education, whereas RS destroyed the majority of the poetry manuscripts that survived. Elsi used to rescue them from the dustbin, iron them out and secrete them (shades of Paper Men!). But after her death they were 'discovered' by RS, and what remained destroyed a second time. Anyway, at least Elsi’s paintings are well dispersed and, I hope, widely enjoyed. The majority of the remaining poems in manuscript are in one collection. And, no, I am not going to tell you where!
WD And as people? In an earlier answer you understandably, and enviably, used, of your earliest years at Manafon, the term ‘a golden age’, a period when the life of things around you and the presence of your parents seemed inter-connected, as part of that golden world. Naturally, one grows, not only from, but away from one’s parents, but in another earlier answer you spoke also of a decisive aim to make your own adult life, in terms of relationships, especially your relationship with your own son and daughter, as different as possible from that of your parents’ lives. So how would you now distil the details of that direct, human contact with them?
GT RS and Elsi made no attempt to nurture in me any of the things that it appears to me now were fundamental to them. Apart from the brief spells in the house in Nantmor, where, aged under 5, I did speak Welsh in the street, I was explicitly shielded and excluded from the Welsh language and its culture. Elsi, in any case, had little interest in it. The language of daily life was always English of course, except when Elsi took it into her head to talk to me in French! No inclusion in any religious life was offered or expected. Elsi taught me to read, yet not to draw or paint; and neither of them played an instrument.
WD On that question of music, the art between the verbal and the visual, what memories do you have?
GT RS says somewhere that music was more important to him than painting. I think this misleading. True, there is the memorable poem about hearing Kreisler, but not much else. In Manafon, for the old HMV wind-up gramophone, there were some 78rpm sets of Beethoven and Mozart. There was also a very nice Lawrence Tibbett recording of ‘De Glory Road’, with which I was very much taken. But the gramophone was not played much. It was a house without music and dancing. There was no radio until 1952 or thereabouts, when a set was ostensibly bought so that I could hear ‘Listen With Mother’. Later on, we would all sit together and listen to ‘Round the Horn’ which RS did not like, and ‘The Navy Lark’, which he did. In Eglwys-fach Elsi arranged to have built for him a hand-made stereo player, which he never used but twice. I never recall him buying a single record. He once got from somewhere a recording of Fischer-Diskau singing Schubert which he played a couple of times, and I bought a South American Mass which he listened to, once.
At the same time, the natural world they delighted in was a fact of my existence, not just of theirs, but even there no instruction occurred. What happened was that - as I guess with many a child - I simply tagged along for those first seven years as they made their life, and I looked on.
Later, it became clear that RS and Elsi valued nothing that was not centred on 'Art': hence my use of that phrase, ‘how our art is our meaning', from RS’s poem ‘Sonata’ as epigraph to the collection Ringless Fingers that we did for Rhodri’s 21st birthday. The practical consequence was that they despised anyone who did not work as an artist. I do not use that word ‘despise’ carelessly. Everything I did, the normal business of working, getting and having and handing on, was, as far as they were concerned, a waste of time. I don't know at what point RS worked out that being a priest was a good way of achieving the space in which to write, but he was a very idle priest. The story of him hiding behind the hedgerows to avoid his parishioners is far from apocryphal. He was a good sick visitor, though, and I suppose that at the end of it all the church got as good a deal as he did.
What was significant was the constant critique, at many times just criticism, of nearly everyone and everything. I hardly remember hearing a good word about anyone. Indeed, for most of their adult lives they had no friends. Of course, from their position in parsonages, and later through Elsi's Extra-mural Art classes and RS's increasing 'Welshness', there came people to lunch or supper, but I don’t think anyone ever stayed the night.
WD You mentioned ‘Sonata’ just now. It seems odd that a poem specifically about music –

passionately proclaiming
by the keys’ moonlight in the darkening
drawing-room how our art is our meaning

- is about, not togetherness, but ‘a way/ that was laid down for her to walk/ which was not my way’. To what degree were you at least, as their one child, able to learn from the different arts of these two artists?
GT Later in life, I would sit and talk with Elsi as she painted, and she would talk much of how she painted. RS found it difficult to talk like that about his art, though he talked a great deal about his reading. What was less interesting was his fireside philosophy, which bored Elsi, too.
I think they both must have been quite lonely. But they would never admit it. So writing and painting needed to serve as dialogue and conversation and an emotional embrace. With such regular company as they ever had - Mary and Louis Behrend, Norman and Germaine Hunter, Monica Rawlins - there appeared little mutual warmth. Even RS's relationship with Bill Condry was always at arm’s length. There were few people’s visits, lunches, sherry parties that were not pretty much rubbished afterwards.
My final impression is of two people impatient of others' daily lives and concerns and disdainful of any activity other than Art, and what they identified as its necessary accompaniments.

Chill Lips What We Wrote, Actually!

Made for Rhodri's 22nd Birthday
At
The Frangipani Press
Sawankhalok
Sukothai

By Gwydion and Kunjana Thomas

5 copies only
on Japanese Paper
With Saa Paper Covers
This copy

No.....
January 11th 2003












CHILL LIPS
A Trout Speaks


Now I am not sure if this is the most recent version!! But make of it what you will. It is, of course, missing the pictures!
When you were younger I used to think I would write you unsent letters, so that you could read them after I had died. I thought there might be things that in your teen years it might be a help for you to know about a father who was not there. But I did not die!
Now that you are grown up I rather think all you might need is the bare detail of my life. Much of it you know, but plenty you do not. I have not tried to write of philosophical matters, nor to reflect overly!
I sometimes think that the greatest mistake I ever made was to agree with Sharon's belief that one should let everything go. Maybe she still holds to that principle, and so maybe that is why she seems to me today to have such an odd life. Mother Mira, the pink and black Adrian and walks in the rain. She had no choice, I suppose-though I am not entirely convinced of that- but to let Freddo, her father, go, if he was not willing or had not the courage to meet her.
Where did that come from? It was hardly born out of a monastic belief in abandoning the transient things of the world. More out of the sterile environment of Luton.
I had a friend, in Luton, called Nick Wellings, who used to say that the negative power of your mother and her family was terrifying.
Maybe I should have listened better. As it is, I am afraid that many of the things and much of the material that would have helped you understand me and everything better have gone into the blue. The books and pictures were sold to pay for your education. But in that critical few years when you lived alone with Sharon in Kew most of the letters and ephemera were destroyed or lost by her. And as I cleared the attics in Sarn and Kew after your Granny's death and before the disasters in Kew I sort of had a madness that thought every THING was a burden; so I am to blame too.
As it happens if stuff had been left in Wales it would have probably been destroyed or stolen by Betty.
So that seems a funny way to start to talk about 1945 onwards, by talking both about your mother, whom I did not meet until 1971, and events that happened in the 1990s! I suppose the madness, as I see it, of what Sharon did and what later your grandfather did will emerge!
Much of what I write about the early years you can find in a different version in either in RS's or MEE's autobiographies which will give you the background to their life in Manafon, Eglwys Fach and later Aberdaron and Sarn. I left Manafon to go to Packwood in Ruyton XI Towns outside Shrewsbury in the September of 1953. I think we moved to Eglwys Fach in 1956 when I was 11. They moved to Aberdaron I think in 1963, though I will have to check those dates. Sarn arrived in 1962 Though no one lived there full time until RS retired in 1978.
I left Packwood and went to Bradfield in 1958. Left in 1963 and went to France with your Granny. Went to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1964. Left in 1967. Went to teach in Bristol in January 1968. Went to King's College Cambridge in the autumn of 1968 to do PGCE then stayed for a year to do Chinese. Went to work in Luton in the autumn of 1970. Then went to work in Ealing in the autumn of 1973…the rest you know, sort of ..
So there you have the sort of shell of dates and places.
So much of the early years are in a dialogue with photos. It is not clear to me how much I would remember without the photographs; but the photographs have a way of denying the more evanescent memories.
The photographs to most people's eyes demonstrate one thing clearly; that RS and MEE were very ambivalent about the birth of a son. My mother dressed me in dungarees, that most ambivalent of outfits, and my cloud of golden curls was to say the least ambiguous. Add to that The Unborn Daughter and a father who in his own words wondered how 'no-one could be a father to some-one' and I might speculate on my sexuality. I do not know by what strange process all of that turned towards that characteristic scented by so many people in my life of possibilities of mediums and healers, which I have continued to downplay, even avoid-rather than towards the fashionableness of gayness.
But perhaps, too, it has played its part in an over-compensatory desire to win the favours of women, again and again. As it is not lack of success it must be a lack of confidence or self esteem, not uncommon in boys of my generation, and not helpful in relationships! In particular it emerges in that embracing of behaviour whereby men traditionally took a mistress but in my case has always been rather more like having a reserve in the dugout in case of injury!
Manafon. The jewel of a house in the long grass by the river. Tall Abies Nobilis fir trees, and high yew hedges; an orchard, a kitchen garden, a cobbled courtyard; outhouses and secret rooms; a little lane; pastures and fields of grass; hedges teeming with nests and creatures; trout, owls, red squirrels, mice, house martins and swallows; a skyline guarded by hawthorn and rowan in the Welsh border manner; trees to climb, history to hunt and always the gifts of the river lapping in winter at the cellar stairs, greenly pungent and slippery in summer. In summer, too, harebells, columbine, roses, rhododendrons, moon daisies, curlews and lapwings, long-tailed tits and pied flycatchers and wagtails nesting in the doorways, strawberries and raspberries, tunnels in the hayfields; there are trout wrapped in leaves, gulls on the lakes on the moors .
In the autumn showers of golden and brown leaves, foxes, apples stored in the garage, horse drawn hay cutters and turners, the baler, rats, dogs and rabbits. Nectarines from the tree in the conservatory with its little red spiders, starry nights and then the roaring flooded river with tree trunks smashing down. There is the Berriew show, where I always win first prize for my display of autumn fruits. Rowan berries, blackberries, shiny black bryony berries, nuts and mushrooms, fungi and leaves, hops, rare spindletree berries. No-one else apparently has a clue where to find these things. In winter the gravel at the front of the house floods and you can play with trains and Dinky cars in a veritable construction site of dams and pebbles.
Then the frost sets in. The pipes freeze, RS spends all day with an oil lamp thawing them before they freeze again at night. The bathroom has frost patterns on all the windows. As do all the rooms. The long white woollen curtains , which are in fact blankets, and the shutters fail to keep out the cold. The snow is high. The edges of the river freeze and all the bushes have spray icicles. The ground, rutted with cows hooves, is bone hard and ankle turning. The mice thrive.. Elsi makes purses out of moleskins and berets and waistcoats out of rabbit skins. I have no choice but to wear these things.
Then snowdrops, sheets of white, narcissus and daffodils, apple blossom. There are purple orchis and drifts of elderflower and cow parsley. My mother hangs two dead owls in the apple tree to have their skeletons and feathered wings. She already has the heads on the mantlepiece in the hall, along with the skulls of sheep and badgers, foxes, hares and stoats. Later she will mount them on the wall in Aberdaron. On the mantlepiece of this panelled hall there are little wooden chinese junks and a glass bell. In the attic she has boxes of dead birds awaiting their resurrection in her studies.
There is no electricity, no gas. The water comes through an antiquated pipe from a well up on Cae Siencyn where the sheep drink and shit. Elsi took a sample of the water to the chemist in Welshpool. When she went to collect the result he said: 'Oh, so you are still alive then?' They fenced off the well and put the water in an alkathene pipe. Elsi cooks on a paraffin stove. There are open fires and Aladdin lamps with their beautiful filigree wicks which are always breaking. Elsi makes lampshades out of some peculiar precursor of plastic, which she sews and pleats and punches holes with a leather punch. RS washes the tall lamp glasses carefully as they are continually getting blackened. For some reason there are few candles. RS sits by the fire with his woollen socks off, full of holes, painting his toes with iodine against the chilblains. My porridge in the big blue cup with the broken handle congeals on the windowsill.
Later I sit in this room, I suppose I am five, while he continues to paint his toes and inhale jugs of Friar's balsam to cure his colds, drawing little pictures of penises and vaginas, human and animal, to distribute in the playground. They are a great success. Glenys Wilson shows me so I can draw it better. We watch the bull in the field beyond the playground wall mount the cow, its huge pizzle waving, and reflect. This farm has a ram with huge balls, that a boar equally well endowed. The dogs are no slouches, nor the cockerels. This is simple country life where the animals get on with their own pursuits on the farm or out of it. There is a predictable cycle of copulation and birth and death, animal and human.
There is a room. It has glass doors that led into a greenhouse, or what might now be called a conservatory, which is large and smells like the Palm House at Kew. It has red tiles and iron gratings on the floor, but no heating. One day in October RS leaves the door open at night and in the morning it has blown inside out. The paint on the doors is old and the undercoats peep through the top coat. The present colour is a sort of navy blue, but underneath, improbably, the wood appears to have been painted orange. This cannot be so in 1947. The paint is badly applied and is bubbled and rough.
The room has wooden floors and wide skirting boards. There are mouseholes in the skirting boards which I see in later years in cartoons. Little grey house mice slip in and out all day. I put stones in the holes to see what happens. The mice are unperturbed. I feel bad about this. There is a pram in the room. A bluebottle tries to buzz me. I scream and tip up the pram. Later there is a table on which I play post-offices with the stamp album that we still have. I sit on the carpet in the other end of the room, where there is an open fire. RS feeds me poached egg on toast under the table. Later again he appears to eat nothing except baked beans or tinned spaghetti for breakfast. Later, too, Elsi tells me he does not like sauces. It appears to be true. I watch him wrestle the meat off a dry chicken bone, fastidiously dismember a dry potato. He eats bread and cheese every day at 11.00am. Lunch at 1.00. Tea at 5.00. Supper at 8.00. Everyday without fail. Elsi feeds him like a robot. He is never early, never late, never cooks. The pattern of the week is unvarying.
Sunday there is a leg of lamb. 5 shillings(25p) I believe, runner beans or peas when fresh, tinned vegetables if not, boiled potatoes, a tin of fruit and custard. Monday the lamb is cold, though the vegetables remain the same. Tuesday the lamb is warmed up in gravy, vegetables continue. Wednesday there are rissoles. Thursday there is a peculiar pie, which seems to contain eggs, tinned tomatoes and white sauce. Friday there is fried plaice or sometimes boiled in milk. Maybe a fish pie. Same as Thursday's pie! If a trout has been caught it had better be on Friday! Saturday is a red letter day if a rabbit has been sent in. There will be rabbit pie. If not the butcher will have unfortunately sent in some stringy lamb's liver with the joint.
Later RS opens his own tins, boils his own eggs and fries his own chicken legs. Later still, when Elsi goes to give her ExtraMural classes he has to give me supper. A piece of cheese, mould not unknown, Caerphilly usually and a jar of pickled beetroot.
Tea is I think his favorite meal. He eats several slices of bread and butter, then several of bread and jam, a piece of malt bread or bara brith and then either a couple of iced buns or a piece of cake. My mother feeds his sweet tooth unceasingly. He does not drink tea. Though Elsi does from her little silver teapot. Breakfast is taken in the kitchen as we thaw out from the cold by the Rayburn. Everything else is eaten in the dining room. Except in Aberdaron, where there is no room to sit in the kitchen and no Rayburn or Aga. There are no place mats or table cloth. The cutlery has yellow ivory like handles. The dinner service is bright blue, which does not improve the appearance of the food. It is replaced later by a service of cream colour with little blue commas all around the edges. Later still in Eglwys-fach everything turns sage green-the carpets, the walls, the dinner service, and there are place mats-same colour.
There does not seem to be anything else to eat regularly. There is asparagus in the kitchen garden and peas and beans but the mice eat most of these. RS lays traps and red lead, puts gorse in with the seeds. The mice and rabbits thrive. Elsi makes nettle beer and dandelion wine, elderflower champagne and sherry. She makes jams and marmalade. There are no sweets or crisps until eventually Mars bars and Smith's crisps with the little blue paper wraps of salt appear as irregular treats. She paints and paints. RS appears to do nothing except read and scythe the grass. The dust accumulates in rolls under the dresser, watched unblinkingly by the two Portuguese ceramic chickens.
It must be 1947. I do not remember it being cold though it was the worst winter for many years.
Upstairs in my bedroom I can stick my fingers into the plaster which is full of horsehair and pick it away to the laths. The room smells of paraffin from the Aladdin stove that burnt all night and from the little oil lamp by my bed. From the window you can watch the red squirrels leaping in the chestnut trees.
I climb into my mothers little bed in the next room. There is a maze of front stairs, back stairs, servant quarter stairs. At the top of the back stairs there is a loo. My father pees with me. I am not so interested! I never saw a double bed. My father sleeps in the big front bedroom which is freezing and has two single beds. It is in this room when I am 11 that my mother tells me we will have to leave this beautiful house because my father is unhappy. She cries. When my grandparents come to stay they sleep in my father's room. He goes into the attic into the room that will become my play room. We have no money for curtains so I make my mother buy two exotically coloured towels to pin at the windows.
In the other room on this third floor my mother paints. The smell of turpentine fills the air together with that of Gloire de Dijon roses. The boxes of oil paints, the canvases, the stretchers, the charcoal and the little spray for fixative are intoxicating.
RS has an old typewriter on which he bangs out poems on thin paper. He already is only typing poems that he wants to keep. The fireplace each evening has scrumpled pages. He has a gramophone on which he listens to Beethoven and Mozart; not much else. It is hard work. I like the little HMV boxes of needles. The best use I can see for the gramophone is to put toys on it and watch them whirl round.
There is another set of rooms in a sort of annex above the kitchens. One day my father brings home a wireless. It has a battery the size of a large book. I had only seen wirelesses before that had batteries you had to recharge. Gertrude Rowlands, my godmother had one, but then Dora Herbert Jones who lived with her had a harp too so I thought they were wealthy in their little semi in Tregynon. Beebe, my nurse, and Idris had one too up on the hill at Cefn Uchaf above New Mills, but I don’t remember wirelesses in the farms though they must have had them. The batteries were one of the treasures of the river and rubbish heaps that we used to salvage along with all the beautiful glass bottles, of whose value we were quite ignorant, and the real treasures which were the shards of pottery smoothed by the river water.
There is a strange confusion between real places, real things, real people and their appearance in pictures, illustrations and poems. The furniture in Manafon appears in all of my mother's children's book illustrations as do the windows of the kitchen and back kitchen, the garden and the gate, the river and the bridge over the river, the garage and outbuildings, the birds and trees and flowers of the garden and round about. Much of this furniture survived into your life in the form of chests and cupboard, chairs and curtains before Sharon managed to erase it all. Mother as Pol Pot.! Not seriously!
The mural for Gobowen was painted for the most part in the drawing room at Manafon. It was stretched out, wound up, edged past doorways for many a month. I would appear and reappear in it as would the fields of Manafon and the Holyhead seaside, and a whole host of treasures and leitmotifs from the house and my mother's past life.
There were no pictures on any of the walls in Manafon and not many in the other houses.
There were of course the goats too, with whose memorable adventures with washing and oranges and anything else edible you are familiar. And whose little story is best told in Gwenno-or Angharad as she was really named! They were for ever upping their stakes and running away to munch. Eventually they were more trouble than milk and that was the end of 'pets'. RS would take me up the hills into farm kitchens where flitches of bacon hung with washing from the ceiling. They were warm rooms with tiled floors and the smell of bread. In the yard unpleasant sheepdogs lurched at you. Later they chased me down the hill from Llwyn Coppa when I went to get buttermilk. I would go no more and that’s where the hatred of dogs comes from. Up at Belandeg I made a friend in Tom Jones, though I now see that it was a wealthy farm and therefore suitable company for the parson's son.
My other friends were tolerated as there were no choices. Melvin and Anne Jones from the Post Office. Melvin became, I think, a cleric or missionary in South Africa. Leonard Gethin, a boy called Neil. Hazel and Glenys from the Ffinant. Roy went I think when I was about 4 or 5 though I continued to see him and go to stay at Glyn Uchaf. There was Anna, Marcel and Olga Karciewski's daughter-was she?. Some strange story tells me she married Giles Radice..cannot be true! There were Hugh and Neil Williams the boys from Berriew vicarage but they were older as was Jeanie from up on the hill, who wore no underclothes and would paddle revealingly in the river on her way home. Ceridwen, poetised and fancied by RS. No-one really.
RS took me to school, on the bar of his bike if lucky, and on a sledge in winter. I was not allowed to stay for lunch. No charity for the parson thanks; and he picked me up again at the end of the day. Scared of the contagion of those peasants. But I saw old Bullock dying in his bed all those years and the old man in his bed at The Mill. Job Davies, Darlington, Cynddylan -the Jones boy from Llwyn Coppa who would let me drive the tractor were all real. Prytherch is a sort of amalgam of the Wilson boys from the Ffinant, the Llwyn Coppa boys and the feuding Darlingtons along with all those lone figures up in the fields above New Mills and Adfa.
There was no Welsh. I never heard it spoken; nor in Welshpool nor Newtown. Of course the names were all welsh and infused everything. There was a sort of sense of history in the castle at Montgomery and up at Llyn Celyn or Llyn Go Gear on the moors or in the little churches, particularly the one at Bettws. Though mostly the churches smelt of bats, which caused RS more problems than anything spiritual in Manafon.
There was a memorable ecologically unsound day when the church in Manafon was fumigated , with what I remember as peculiar thick yellow smoke, to clear out the bats; they survived as the church continued to be full of droppings and evensong flutterings. The church appeared to be a nuisance. They complained about the music every week. Annie Morgan, who was a large lady from The Pump, played the organ, wheezingly. Few parishioners in church.
Whist drives in the school, unfortunately opposite the pub called the Beehive. How I came to be there one Saturday I do not know. I have a memory of what resembles the Wild West. Drunken figures wheeling and fighting in the half light, overturned tables, cards littering the floor, bottles. Later I quizzed RS about this. About right, he saidI
I don't suppose a policeman set foot in Manafon that often. MEE used to say that when they first went there every week a cart used to go slowly down the road from New Mills to Berriew and people would toss produce into it for the black market. Occasionally some days later a policeman would appear making enquiries. But that was wartime. RS would go collecting for bomb victims in London and the farmers would inquire with amazement why they had not enough food to eat. There was no shortage of farm produce in Manafon. When the Italian prisoners of war came they were at first astonished and later appalled at the quantity of bacon eaten. Elsi recalls one frustrated Italian, consumed with hunger, offered yet another plate of bacon saying: 'No, No. Pig in pan, she stink!'
There were, before I was born, evacuees from London too. They apparently lived on Swiss Rolls of which they had brought a large quantity with them. Manafon, I gather, considered their morals suspect and they were all happy to return to the blitz.
We used to go to Welshpool or Newtown about once a week and maybe to Oswestry once a month,. I don't know why. In Oswestry we used to go to a lunch room and eat the kind of mutton I was later to discover was school food. In Welshpool they would go to the dentist, an ogre of a man called, Beetham?, later we would go to Shrewsbury, where a man gassed me to the extent I was sure I had woken up in heaven. I cannot imagine why my mother did not look after my teeth and feet, which were both wrecked by the time I went to Packwood, particularly as she set such store by physical perfection. We went ,too, to a fair in Montgomery where I got a first inkling that there was more to all this than Manafon. There were grapes and bananas and little paper birds with spun glass wings, and candyfloss, which was of course forbidden as vulgar.
We went to these places in the little old Austin 7 UJ 945, which had front wheels that stuck out in front of the bumper. It had sweet smelling cracked leather seats and what I remember as a semi manual windscreen wiper. It would not go up the hill called The gibbet to Llanfair Caereinion if the road was a bit icy. In those days the cars had no heaters and my mother used to set off first with a hot water bottle to apply to the windscreen and then wipe glycerine over the windscreen to stop it freezing. There were pretty well no other cars, though Jones Llwyn Coppa had one as did the Ffinant. There were one or two delivery lorries and the milk cart. One day coming back from Berriew a plank of timber slipped off a lorry in front and smashed the windscreen. Suppose we were lucky if we were ever going much above 20mph.For some reason when she was in Chirk Elsi had a Bentley and she always resented the Austin 7 a bit. One day RS went to London and returned with a monstrous vehicle which I think was an Austin 10 or maybe 12 DXU 881. I never got to the bottom of that story but, clearly, he had been sold a dud and Elsi never forgave him. It laboured on, regularly breaking down, until they started buying little grey Austin A45 vans, and subsequently minivans.
These were the cars in which they used to come to Packwood; and were the beginnings of the crack in the façade of what I imagined was their wealth. We lived in an enormous house, possessed, as far as I knew, most things, and no-one went to work. Though they moaned incessantly about the wealth of the farmers it was not apparently necessary to do anything! Everyone else's parents appeared at Packwood in the standard Rovers and Jaguars one would have expected. It was a long time before I made the connection between work and money
Lamb and fish came by travelling vendors as did many household goods. Vegetables came from the garden and milk and butter from the farms. No beef or pork was eaten and a chicken only at Christmas. There were gypsies, in proper caravans, with pegs and pans and buckets and brooms, tramps with trinkets. It was groceries and seeds that came from town. I don't know where paint and canvas came from-London I suppose.
Much of the detail of Manafon is, inevitably, a bit hazy. As I write i am aware that whole stretches of time and minute sensations are being missed. The bathing in the river, with that peculiar smell of river water, the crayfish, the slime on the stones, the slippery feel of tickled trout. Tommy Thomas used to wrapthem in big burdock leaves to take home. He would fish in the mornings with me and then spend the rest of the day releasing all the tackle he had lost in the alder and willow trees along the banks of the Rhiw.
We used to go to buy anything significant in Pryce Jones's 'The Warehouse' in Newtown. A sort of primitive department store. It probably did belong to the PJs. Oh really? Trade after all! The Bon Marche in Pwllheli still much the same! Afterwards we might go up the hill to see my teacher Mrs Linhard, who was a german refugee. She had amazing silver hair wound round her head in endless plaits, and was like alady out of a middle european fairy tale. Or we would go to the Karciewski's house. He was another exile. A Polish Count, with a classic profile. His wife was elegant and fussy. He had some peculiar station wagon decked out with a lot of wood, which was usually full of books and which he drove at top speed round Montgomeryshire. He printed RS's second and third books. Then they moved to a huge house in Gloucester Crescent in London and later to an even more beautiful Mas outside Uzes in the Gard.
I lay in that house all one summer reading hundreds of French novels and English ones translated in the Livre de Poche series.
I first went to London when I was five. It was Granny and Grandpa Eldridge's Golden Wedding. I packed my little brown suitcase and off we went on the train from Shrewsbury. What I remember most is the smell of the green Southern Electric train we took to Leatherhead! I did not like it much and wanted to go home. Elsi's mother had an unpleasant dog and her father seldom spoke to me; and when he came to Manafon and would not take me fishing as Tommy Thomas did I was even less impressed! They lived in a flat above their jewellers shop and it was all very cramped. Elsi's mother smoked Craven A cigarettes and drank two bottles of stout a day which was considered both common and scandalous; but of course she was French, sort of! Later Elsi's mother was good to me when I was in Bradfield and was a good source of funds; though I suspect she had an agreement with my mother about this!. Anyway it was worth the train fare and time to go from Reading to Leatherhead before zipping up to London. But that was 1960!
We went, too, to Holyhead, which was an improvement; not because of Peggy Thomas, whom I disliked, but because we could go swimming at Trearddur Bay and play among the buoys and boats and prawn pools in Holyhead. On my birthdays we would go on a day trip to Ynys Las. It was always hot and was a good treat. Of course later when we went to Eglwys fach I would go there lots in the summers.24/25.03.02
Elsi says I never asked any questions; but was very voluble. Apparently I used to put my back to a wall and hold forth; not changed much!? I think I learned there that death comes easily. All those creatures dying with great regularity. That fathers, while present, were both absent and a nuisance. That books were an excellent source of fantasy and dreams. I suppose I could read well when I was three or four; certainly when I went to school at five I was bored to bits as no-one else could read well. That you could play in the fields and the river until the sun set. That other people were irrelevant . That this closed world appeared to have no drawbacks-a golden age.
This all changed in September 1953. Some visits to Shrewsbury to acquire clothes and other things made me vaguely aware something was up. I had already had my curls removed a couple of years earlier when I had my tricycle, so it was not the haircut. We had been in I think the May of that year to Packwood where I was introduced to a large gingery man in plus fours with a lot of hair in his nose. This was Mr. McFerran. I watched a lot of boys playing cricket and running around. He asked me if I would like to come and be one of his bunnies. Not likely, I said.
But in September off to be a bunny I was despatched. Some bunny.
Packwood Haugh had been a school in Birmingham, where there is still a Packwood House. I think during or after the war it moved to a house on top of the hill at Ruyton XI Towns near Baschurch outside Shrewsbury. Shrophire was well endowed with prep schools. There was Kingsland Grange in Shrewsbury and Prestfelde, The Old Hall under the shadow of the Wrekin, and no doubt others.
The house was just a large country house on three floors, of recent construction, but with sufficient land to build classrooms, masters houses and provide reasonably extensive playing fields. I do not know why RS and MEE chose it. And I am not sure how the dynamics of the decision really worked. Whatever, I think MEE went along with a decision RS took. He always maintained that it was unthinkable that I should remain in Manafon until I was 11 and then go to school in Llanfair Caereinion , or anywhere locally. Presumably he always had it in his mind to leave Manafon, as the push westward was, according to Elsi, a constant of his life. Clearly the schools of Aberystwyth nor anywhere else in Wales were to his liking either.
We were some 15 little boys in a bedroom, watched over by a dragon of a matron, who had a physique like a Philipino wrestler. Everyone was lonely and frightened. She simply thrashed those that cried with a hair brush, thus starting the long business of brutalisation that Packwood and Bradfield had in common. The room smelt of bedwetters and dirty knickers, the weekly!, laundry baskets were not a pretty sight. My mother was incensed that I did not get my own sheets as the maids were too idle to read the names; how could they?
And so started that routine of cold baths, breakfast, prayers, latin and maths, games, prayers, prep and tears that is your average prep school.
There were 6 forms. You simply started at the bottom and ended at the top. If you were bright at the end you went to B Classical and then A, otherwise you spent two years in B Modern an ironic echo of the Secondary Modern.
Only four figures stand out. A Mr Soden who attempted to teach Maths.He did this with such success that I failed Maths O level, I think 6 times. He was another plus four gentleman with a temper best described as psychotic. He was also large and gingery and I think detested by the other teachers. He was totally incompetent and would shout to hide it. He had a large urine stains on the trousers of every one of his tweeds. While 'teaching' he used to clutch the material to the right of his lapels with usually his right hand. We reckoned he had his cock hanging over his shoulder.
A lady called Ma Digs, or Miss Davies. A middle aged lady of stern demeanour. It was she who told me every day aged 10 that I would be the first boy from the school to fail Common Entrance. She distrusted the catering and brought her own plate and cutlery to meals. She would bring a trug, gloves and a trowel to latin classes. Later my mother said she was OK really. I suppose they had some gardening thing in common.
Peter Evans was a young history teacher. Memorable for being able, funny and my first encounter with a human being in that world of retards. I was lucky there was one!
McFerran retired after his ginger tom bit the gardener. And along came a Mr. Edward Pease Watkin. I suppose he must have come from a soldiering family as there was I think a Haileybury background. He was a bachelor with enormous cheek muscles and astonishing calves. He must have been very young though he did not look it to us in his checked suits.
He had ideas. He organised the school into houses. There were merits and black marks. Games became competitive. He started Rugby and Shooting. He put terror into Ovid and Virgil. It was a this point we all started having to do our homework under the bedclothes with torches as it was simply impossible to do it in the prep time.
He had a penchant for beating people with his bare hands and with gym shoes. I think he had been a fives player. He packed a punch.
He acquired a new matron in the form of the lovely Miss Summers who we all loved and whom I think he married!
In the early days it was a terrifying experience. I had never been away from home. The culture of the school was Lord of the Flies-like. On Sundays the masters would abandon the school to the boys. The seniors would launch assaults on the babies classrooms with cricket stumps, air pellets, and any other weapon. Lots of people got hurt.
I wrote home postcards and letters saying I am not happy. We had to write home every week. The letters all arrived with the Not erased.
At night we would be terrorised by boys wanting to practise tortures, ranging from relatively harmless chinese burns to the the tonk, where someone hammered your chestbone with their knuckles until it was black and blue and the catch which involved tying a necktie to a boy's cock and flicking it hard until with a bit of luck the skin tore.
By eleven every boy in every dormitory had been taught to wank most of the night. There was buggery, but I managed at least to avoid that.
I was clever, bored, lonely, good at games and unpopular. I disliked most people and had a sharp tongue. I was learning, though, to lie and cheat and dissemble-all those necessary attributes of running an empire. I learnt too, some carpentry, how to hide a rhubarb jam sandwich, no butter, in your pocket until it could be disposed of later and shame at not being like everyone else.
My mother would come and take me out some Sundays in the appalling little grey van. We would go up into the rainy hills above Llangollen, sometimes to Chester Zoo or the lakes at Ellesmere. She would cook fried Spam and instant potato on a Primus stove in the back of the van and buy me sherbert fountains. I think she knew if she took me home-it was only about 30 miles- she would never get me back. At Guy Fawkes she would buy fireworks and we would let them off in some godforsaken layby. There were no half terms. Once my father came to play football. I remember in red and white socks with his white legs running up and down ineffectively. He remembered it too. What a buffoon that man Brooke is he says, you certainly aren't going to Shrewsbury. The man had a son at the school and was a housemaster at Shrewsbury. Seems to have changed his mind about all that by the time Oliver came to go there!
I just felt bewildered and abandoned. What on earth was I doing there? I tried to make friends with a few people and even went to their houses at weekends. I had an intimation of normal, or maybe just bourgeois, lives. There were sisters and brothers, dogs and normally furnished rooms, conversations about work and holidays.
And so began to grow that strange duality that I have towards it all. On the one hand everything that Manafon, in the first instance, and RS and MEE stood for was a sort of enclosed perfect world which was OTHER from everything else and to which you could escape; on the other hand it was an Eden from which I had been ruthlessly expelled, with little explanation and less salve. As a consequence I nurtured a confusion. Did I belong to a world that valued things in a way no other world did? RS was fond of maintaining that writers and artists, and particularly himself, were classless! I don’t think he read much sociology or psychology. Perhaps he thought Bergson, Kant and Kierkegaard were classless too! Packwood and Bradfield were intellectual and cultural deserts so did I belong in that wasteland?
Later it became clear that RS and MEE valued nothing that was not centred on 'Art', hence my use of that phrase…'how our Art is our meaning' in the little book I did for your 22nd birthday. The practical consequence of this was that they despised anyone who did not work as an artist. I do not use that word-despise-carelessly! So everything I did, you do, the normal business of working, getting and having and handing on was as far as they were concerned a waste of time. I don't know at what point RS worked out that being a priest was a good way of achieving the space to write. He was a very idle priest. He was a good sick visitor, though. And the story of him hiding behind the hedgerows to avoid his parishioners is far from apocryphal! I suppose at the end of it the church got a good deal as did he.
It was not until the late 1970s and 1980s that he made much money out of his books; in those last 20 years though he became, by his standards, quite well off. A result of this was that he took over from Elsi as the provider of funds. Originally Elsi ran the accounts, bought the cars, paid the insurance, the school fees and held the building society accounts. She resented very much the loss of her economic independence, which started with her being unwell.
One day in May of 1958 Pease Watkin took me in his Viscount to Bradfield. I stayed at the top of the hill in what must have been a 'modern' house. I don't remember much except that I had a septic spot on the roof of my mouth and coughed for three days. Every morning and afternoon about 40 of us sat in a gym and did exams. The following Saturday we were playing cricket at Kingsland Grange. The telegram said I had won a scholarship. I forgot my cricket boots. They painted my name on the oak honours boards. I left Packwood.
Bradfield was a sort of version of a Woodard school. It was a second or third rate public school founded in the middle of the last century. The buildings were pretty. Berkshire half timbered brick. A big lawn. A cavernous chapel, a dusty library. Acres of playing fields. Houses scattered up and down the hill. A charming stretch of the River Pang-more trout. The village dominated by the institution. By the late 1950s it was catering to new money and the Gin and Jaguar belts of Surrey and the other home counties. There were no blacks, no orientals. No Hampstead, no old money. There were the sons of doctors, a german book publisher, gin distillers, teachers, some expats-oilmen in Iraq and early caterers to tourists in Spain, gentlemen farmers.
I arrived with my embarrassing handmade tuck box to discover I was in a house presided over by a Mr. Philip Stibbe. A tall man with a formidable roman nose. Later I was to discover that he, Chenevix Trench-the headmaster- and several other 'beaks' , were individuals badly damaged by the experiences of being held prisoners of war by the Japanese. Trench in particular, a little man with a little dog, known as Offaly, presumably in deference to his Irish forebears, and a large pretty auburn wife was clearly badly damaged, physically and emotionally. Stibbe had independent means. We believed he had a sock factory in Leicester. Was it true? But whatever he was of a genial disposition and found it difficult to have his ineffectual anger taken seriously. Hell's bells Soutar he would shout when my Jewish friend, Michael, known as Slob, had been particularly aggravating. And that was about it. Stibbe later wrote a book called Return to Rangoon about his time in Burma. Had a little country house up in Norfolk at Leatheringsett where I once went.
Chenevix Trench on the other hand had a ambiguous mixture of wrath and sensuality in his dealings with us. He was fond of legs. 'Tuppence,' he would say, as his fingers strayed towards your groin. We all tried not to sit on the fireside seat next to him in his study and thus be exposed to fondles. I think it was Anthony Wells Cole who I adored for a while who got so fed up with this he sat there one day having lined his thighs with drawing pins. Trench taught classics, what Stibbe taught I can't remember. English, I suspect. One day he set us the task of writing something starting with 'The prospect before us..' I continued with the words ..' is one of unceasing gloom.' We all wrote much the same. This must have been about 1960.
Bradfield was more Lord of the Flies stuff. Vicious boys and masters with eyes and consciences averted. There was fagging and flogging, latin, greek and games. An arcane argot of slang and nicknames, and endlessly pointless niceties of rules and regulations and tribal markers . You could or could not have this or that button on your jacket undone; you could or not have one or two hands in your trouser pockets. The doorless loos were known as begans. Your locker a toyse. Learn all this by heart. If you fail the test both you and your minder got flogged. It was very much as in Lindsay Anderson's film If.
Again I found it all terrifying. When I was about 14 I started running away. I had a girlfriend and it was fun to get on the train and spend the night in Welshpool station by the stove before catching the early morning train to Glandyfi to see her. She saw me through most of Bradfield. Her fat pink letters would arrive with unceasing regularity; they were interspersed with the continuing parcels of cake that Elsi sent all through those years. Once Suzanne came to Bradfield with her father. I was very miffed to see her dad, but I suppose she could hardly have come on her own aged 15! It was amazing she came at all. I had already been warned off her by RST. They were 'villagers' and thus quite unsuitable company for the vicar's son. I started meeting her under the railway bridge in Glandyfi; then up in the woods and on the hills above Eglwys Fach. We would lie against a big stone or in the bracken and kiss and talk from mid morning until it got dark in the summer. Once RS found us and hauled me off her. I think Bill Condry used to spy on us with his binoculars, RS also. How we managed not to sleep together I don't know. I asked her last year, but she could not explain it either. Ironically Sue became a nurse and has a degree in music and a PhD. Which says something about the misplaced nature of RS's snobbery! I was very fond of her and was sad when last year we fell out over her attitude to Koy and that she seemed to have become totally obsessed with her personal problems. I think she had a very bad time with a doctor husband. However we have recovered the situation and write to each other a good deal now.
The saving grace of Bradfield for me was games. Why do games and sport have such different connotations? Again I was bored, lonely, idle and very teenage, unpopular and aggressive. Nasty little piece of work. I used to get flogged regularly for 'general attitude', which did not improve my general attitude. I learnt to be very rude and very obstinate, traits which you will recognise!
More by being there rather than by any ability I gained a swathe of O levels and the some A levels. Finally bored to tears with the whole things I took matters into my own hands. To Chenevix Trench's credit he went along with my rebellion. I refused to join the OTC and play at soldiers. Instead I did what is now called Community Service for juvenile offenders. In my case I spent every Wednesday building huge bonfires of brambles and leaves and firing them with enormous amounts of petrol. I refused to go to classes, got up late, read all day and most of the night, mostly in the bath, painted the walls of my study midnight blue, abolished fagging and flogging, discovered that cross country running was a better way to play games and won an Exhibition to Magdalen College, where the gay Michael Gearin Tosh declared my ears to be the second most beautiful he had seen after Maria Aitken's.
On such a basis is one admitted to the oldest seats of learning. This success did not go down well at Bradfield since no-one could take any credit for it. The astonishing thing about that school was that nearly everyone in my house got to Oxbridge. Charles George, who looked like a mini Adrian, Tony Pullman, William Marslen? Wilson, even Judge Welfare's sons and some half a dozen others all made it. Later my friends Donald MacIntyre and Roger Sworder who were a year below me came up. I suppose it was just a production line and it was difficult to get off. I did try once and applied to go to Cardiff-really just to play rugby. The form went 'missing'. I really wanted to go to Leeds and read Textile Design, but this was vetoed by RS --more's the pity.
The best thing about Bradfield was music. It was the golden age of pop music. Elvis, The Beatles, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard, The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Connie Francis. For some reason we were very fond of Bobby Vee and Ricky Nelson. We had record players, Dansettes and Bushes, with fancy, crude record stackers and changers. I had the little crystal radio that we used to plug into the light socket and listen to Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes. The electric cord got so hot it used to scorch the sheets. There was the New Musical Express, and between us we had every new record; however most of them were stolen on leave days from shops in Soho, particularly those that specialised in american imports or ex juke box discs. It was the golden age of the mackintosh with inside pockets too. I can't imagine how no-one was ever caught. It was not that we did not have money either, it was just better to nick the stuff.
It was a habit/skill??! that many people took to Oxbridge with them and transferred to bookshops. Slippage must have taken a heavy toll on Heffers and Blackwells in the days before bar codes and magnetic strips. But in those days all loutishness and crime was just 'young gentlemen living it up!' There is a nice Posy Simmonds cartoon of the changes. From larking around to criminal damage!
The Eglwys Fach years, else, from 1959 to 1963 were pretty grim. Other than Sue I had no friends. I became an expert ant playing darts and snooker with both hands so I could play against myself. Also a variety of other extraordinary games that involved pitting right hand against left. I slept all the time else, listening to RS droning on in the kitchen below. There were endless escapades of Sue and I snucking off on buses and whatever, to movies in Aberystwyth and friends houses, that usually ended in some domestic fracas. There was simply nothing to do.
The other good thing that came out of Bradfield was Phoebe and Dick Merricks. They had three sons, Richard, Walter and Jim. Richard was disabled and did not go to Bradfield. I became friendly with Walter and later more so with Jim. They invited me to stay in the beautiful farm it Icklesham between Rye and Hastings and in their beach house which they had built at Pett Level. Dick Merricks was an able and affable farmer and tolerated us. Phoebe though was interested in books and pictures. She had read RS poems and seen Elsi's pictures at the RWS. I don't know why she liked me, but after Suzanne's mother she was the second person who seemed to think that I needed looking after and educating. She was well enough off to do this. So she took me to good restaurants, taught me about clothes and manners! We used to stay in their flat in Lennox Gardens at the back of Harrods.
And so began a web of acquaintances. I used to go every holidays to stay. We were soon old enough to drive and there were endless parties in nice houses with pools all over Sussex and Kent and at the beach with Diana Ross at full volume. We danced until dawn or buried ourselves on sofas with stunning young girls in bikinis wondering to each other what they made of our erections. It was at one of these parties in Tenterden that I met Emma Hooper, who was briefly Jim's girlfriend. Her family had, too, a flat at the top of a building at Marble Arch. I was beginning to see what money bought! Emma used to write to me a great deal and one day she wrote that her great friend from school was coming to Oxford to do her A levels at Beechlawn and would I look after her. So one day I went to a house north of the Ring Road and met the blushing Alison Swan. It turned out that her brothers, Malcolm and Jonathan had been at Bradfield but we had not been part of the same circles So opened up another set of acquaintances as they lived in Storrington near Pulborough, near enough to go from Rye. Shan was at Beechlawn too and she and Alison detested each other. I was going through torments as then Shan did not love me and Alison did; but I did not want her. She spent a long time practising writing Alison Thomas on bits of paper and leaving them around for Shan to see in my room in Magdalen. Shan I met at a party in Magdalen in December 1964. I thought she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. She was small and dark with enormous eyes and hugely vivacious. She was clearly adored by dozens of lusting youths. By good fortune she came from Cardigan which was not so far from Eglwys Fach. And another circle opened. Her father Graham had a turkey farm on the hills above Cardigan. She was the youngest of five children Josh, Leila, Piers and Mark. Her mother Rhoda was a potter. Much later after Shan had been Anthony Maitland's girlfriend, too, Rhoda went to live in Norton, where Alice and Anthony lived.
Cardiganshire was county. We used to have excellent New Year balls in grand houses and I discovered some other skills. At one party at some castle or other I met the beautiful Mexican Mercedes Cardosa. The first girl I ever fucked, in an enormous bed in some attic of a Welsh mansion, while the county set did eightsome reels, on a fantastic sprung dance floor below, and drank in the New Year. Unfortunately we went to sleep and were, of course, discovered by our hostess. I was sent home in disgrace as was she. Mexico being a little further than Aberystwyth we did not manage to keep in touch. What on earth she was doing there amongst the wet dogs and punch I do not know. And I was learning that I rather liked smooth tawny skin and jet black hair! I was not therefore best placed to appreciate the attractions of the pink and blue Mary Pugh who threw herself upon me and pursued me from dance to dance and castle to castle. She was rather nice but unfortunately weighed in at some 150 kilos I should say.
The first year at Oxford was terrible. I was self taught. My reading of literature had been eclectic and untutored. We had to do Anglo-Saxon and Middle English grammar. I was way out of my depth with this and no-one to ask. Emrys Jones, the English tutor at Magdalen, disliked me for some reason and Gearin Tosh, who conducted his tutorial while lying in a bath practising his epee had other topics on his mind. I only just survived.
The second year I discovered the theatre and that saved Oxford. I spent the year acting and made new friends. In the spring Neville Coghill pulled off his idea for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to appear in Doctor Faustus to raise funds for the Playhouse. I was cast as a student! My friends Maria Aitken and Dick Durden Smith were good and bad angels, Simon Heffer, a student, too. The saturnine Andreas Tauber would, appropriately, be Mephistopheles.
One day Nick Parsons drove Shan and I to The Bear in Woodstock. Present for lunch, besides us, were Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Burton's brother and I think father, RS and Elsi. It was a pretty excruciating occasion. RS talked about the weather and fish with Elizabeth Taylor, Burton tried to chat up Shan, Elsi kept her nose in her plate. Burton bragged that he would send RS a whole load of books of American Poets, which of course he never did.
The meeting of two great Welshmen was not a great success.
However the play led on to the movie and in the summer we were all shipped off to Rome to make the movie. I stayed with Dick and Maria and Sheila Dawson or Ruskin as she became in a house off the via C.Colombo on the way to the Dino di Laurentiis studios. The house belonged to chap called Philips who had a luscious and vicious daughter called Edwige who one day nearly bit my finger off. The things one remembers! I think she later became Simon Louvish's girlfriend briefly! I had wanted Shan to come to Rome but she would not. During the year I had met Jenny Moss, whose father ran an advertising agency in Piccadilly and so strangely innocence was lost thrice in quick succession. But I could not get rid of my passion for Shan, however bad she was to me. Stupid. So the clever and exquisite Miss Jerusalem was lost.
The lot at Di Laurentiis was v. odd. They had just finished filming John Houston's The Bible and the lot was full of the props including the Tower of Babel and Noah's Ark. In the film I played Lussuria-Lechery-which seemed about right. I had a good wig and an excellent turquoise codpiece which my friend Cinzia coveted. Cinzia's family had a huge and beautiful old farm outside Rome and we would rush off there as often as possible. Rather amazingly her parents showed no perturbation at their beautiful daughter shacked up with this peculiar English youth all day and night. She had a beautiful bedroom with carved stone statues, wrought iron lamps and chandeliers and one of those chequered beam and plaster ceilings. There was another enormous bed, and tall mullioned French Windows opened onto their olive groves. Another idyll.
I got more and more fed up with the goings on, continual bickering and bitching on the set, and it was the time in Rome that turned me away from a career in the theater even though I reconsidered after I had been more successful in Cambridge. During the film the shouting between the Burton's was continual and Burton was often so hung over they had to stick his coffee cup to the saucer to stop it rattling while they were shooting!30032002Easter Saturday
I went back to Rome once to the studio but it had been taken over by La Lotta Continua and all the props were decorating the lot in a sort of morality play!
After all that I did not want to go back to Oxford and spent most of the Michaelmas term on a house boat beyond Christ Church. I was miserable and it was freezing. I had abandoned most of the friends I had made at the beginning, Richard Collins, Merlin Holland as well as Roger and Donald.
Now I abandoned the acting set too.
Finally in January it dawned on me that I had better read some books. So I retired to Wales with a library and read for 4 months. The upshot of which was I got 3 pure alphas three beta ++ and 3 gammas in finals. So at least I got a second. I had to try and track down a copy of The Times in Aberdaron to discover this!
It says something of the bad state of relations with Shan at this time that I went to the final May Ball with her best friend Judith Hemming while Shan went with her 'judo teacher'! which is one way of describing someone who lays you on your back.
I did not know what to do. Elsi did not help by telling me every day that she remembered graduates in the 30s sitting on the pavements of Oxford Street selling matches-bit like today-so unable to stand this I went to London and found a flat from an old family friend of Norman Hunter, who was a playwright and had lived outside Machynlleth. The flat was under the pavement in Wetherby Gardens off Gloucester Road. I made some ineffectual attempts to work. I set up meetings with film companies and publishers and even once went to the BBC television centre with John Betjeman, who was determined to find me a place. I was so priggish and ignorant in those days that I was shocked by the presence of a copiously stocked and heartily consumed drinks trolley in the TV studio!
What was good about the flat it was that I could walk to Glebe Place in Chelsea where Alison was living and also up to Allen Street where Antonia lived in the basement of her sister Clarissa and David Pryce Jones's house.
I had met Antonia, whose then boyfriend was Donald MacIntyre at Polly Toynbee's house in Pelham Crescent. Polly at that time was a good friend of Antonia's as were Alice Browne and Marietta Eustathiou. It was there too that I met Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso the beat poets; also George Melly and Kenneth Allsop, who later lived with Polly.
For a few months at the end of 1967 I worked in the toy department in Harrods, a strange precursor of your periods in Selfridges. Then in January I went to live and work in Bristol at Henbury School. It was one of the earliest and largest Comprehensive Schools in the country with well over 2000 children. I disliked it and was upset at the appalling levels of literacy and general education of which I had hitherto been completely unaware. There were 12 streams in each year and it was unlikely that more than the few pupils in the first and second streams would achieve an O level. The head of the English Department was a sympathetic man called Glover, who nonetheless was of the view that at an early stage with the lower streams it was a good idea to throw a whole box of chalk very hard from the front of the classroom to the back.
That at least was better advice than that given to my friend Philip Parsons, who later became head of the Aiglon College in Switzerland; he taught at an even more down market comprehensive in Bristol- which was given by his headmaster that it was a good idea to walk along the corridors with your hand behind your head and the elbow protruding as you might do some damage! Anyway by dint of substituting Bob Dylan lyrics for poetry and being very young I survived. I had a flat in Redland, which I loved, rented from an old Colonel Masterson. It had pale cream floors and white curtains at the big windows and was a weekend sanctuary. The kids were lovely and fond of me-Janice Cail, Georgina Self and Laura Davies I adored too. It was lucky I was so naive as they were all 15 or so! Otherwise I would no doubt have been jailed as the paedophile Beast of Bristol. Though I did have a scene with Janice much later!
Margaret came to stay a few times and the tangled mess of all that did not improve. I had met her through Roger while we were taking auditions for one of Roger's productions. She came from Tunbridge Wells and an evangelical family, so that way of life was an eye-opener. She was the eldest of four daughters and had had a pretty difficult life at the hands of her appalling mother. I did not realise how disturbed she was. She was pretty and clever but had regular depressive attacks. Also she was aggressively into God. This I tried to be sympathetic too but could not. However I learnt a sufficiently great deal about evangelical religion in Britain to have avoided it like the plague ever since. Not just the UK. We ended up once, while hitch-hiking at an international convention of evangelical gypsies in a chateau outside Montlucon S of Paris. Yanks and Russians, Iranians and Romanians all in enormous and stunningly ornate caravans, done out in chrome rather than traditional style singing Jesus songs in French. The music went on all night interspersed with peculiar displays of speaking in tongues. Given my memories of gypsies in Manafon and this and the Turkish adventure (see below!) I have always been sympathetic to travellers and envied them; maybe that is why I have kept walking too.
1968 was, as you know, the year of 'manifestations' and political action. The Vietnam war, Prague Spring, the Student Demonstrations in Paris, the coup by the colonels in Greece and the continuing oppression of Apartheid in South Africa were causes at the centre of our lives. Antonia, who had been expelled from Rhodesia in 1966, and after some time at the London Film School and The National Film School, was working with Andrew Tsehlana, Vus Make and Nana Mahomo on the magazine Crisis and Change in Grand Buildings in Trafalgar Square. 310302
Nana represented the PAC Pan Africanist Congress whose demonstration at Sharpeville had provoked one of the worst violent reactions by the white South African government. The leader of the PAC Robert Sobukwe was in prison on Robben Island. While it was the ANC-the African National Congress-who made the news the PAC was then still a significant force and reputedly a more honourable, and honest, one.
In the spring of 1968 Antonia, Margaret, Simon Louvish and I amongst others went to the International Student Film Festival in Prague. We drove there in Antonia's mini. It was still before the days of cheap air travel. Prague was exciting. There was a scent of freedom in the air. Many people thought that Dubcek would achieve a reasonable degree of independence from the Soviet Union and that the tanks would not be sent in as they had been in Budapest in 1956. I had never been to a communist country before and was struck by the lack of choice in simple consumer things. The people we met though were full of ideas and hopes. We sat for hours in cafes and restaurants reading newspapers and talking, and also in rooms on the University campus. I bought some beautiful old books in bookstores that were like english antiquarian bookshops 30 years previously, as I supposed.
We left about three days before the tanks came!
In December of 1967 I had been accepted to take a PGCE in Cambridge and at King's College too. I chose to do this because Shan had gone to Homerton to do a BEd. We had not seen each other for nearly eighteen months, except for one traumatic occasion in London in the autumn of 1966 after I came back from Italy, when she was living in Ashburn Gardens off the Gloucester Road. It is a terrible thing to sleep with someone who lies there like a sack of cold ricepudding! However when I went for interview with the charming Raymond O'Malley in Brookside I went to see Shan. To my astonishment her room was covered, every wall, with drawings and paintings of me. We went straight back to London. The sack of rice seethed and I thought all might be well.
In the autumn of 1968 Antonia, Roger Sworder and I went on one of our madder trips. There had been a military coup in Greece and the resistance was very short of radio parts. So were given what was needed by George Yannopoulos, put them in Antonia's mini and set off for Athens. We drove to Graz in Austria where Antonia had lived when her father, Harold Caccia, had been working in the post war years to ensure Austria too did not become communist. We went to the enormous hunting lodge where she had stayed.
In Graz it began to dawn on us that what we were doing was perhaps risky. We had to drive through Yugoslavia, a communist country, into Greece a country swarming with police informers, with all this stuff!
First we bought a suitcase and stuffed everything into it. Then we put Roger on a train to Thessaloniki hoping that at least if we were arrested and did not arrive someone would know about it! As we travelled through Yugoslavia it was autumn and the so called motorway was awash with mule carts loaded with sweet corn. It took forever to drive to Belgrade and then down to Split and Titov Veles. As we approached the Greek border we became even more alarmed. We had been keeping ourselves well informed and, apart from the news that Che Guevara had been killed, there were also reports of torture from Greece. We disposed of the suitcase and hid everything in the roof of the mini. We need not have worried. When we arrived at the border a Greek policeman looked at the car and its documents, looked at Antonia, and making a fatuous discovery burst into uncontrollable laughter saying ….mini car..mini skirt…mini car…mini skirt about twenty times while we watched him stony faced! That we both remember this so well must be some measure of the terror we were in! Anyway we found Roger and somewhere near Euboea as we drove along a very suave englishman in a Triumph Herald drove out to meet us and so we handed our gear over to British Intelligence and continued on our way to Athens! We wandered around, peered at the Parthenon, spent an amazing night at a stormy Sunium and then took the ferry from Patras to Brindisi and raced home through a beautiful Italian and German autumn to the UK and Cambridge.
I rented a room in a little terraced house from a bewildered old lady and set off in quest of Shan. I found I could not sleep in the room as the lorries thundered by on their way to and from Harwich and Felixstowe all night. So I spent the nights with Shan in the Cherry Hinton Road -the same road where your mum lived in Cambridge, and wandered home at dawn. We never worked things out and eventually she met Gary MacPherson and went to Vancouver in Canada. I think they have five children!
The PGCE was a farce and required little attention. Cambridge was in the throes of demonstrations which were often violent. The notorious Garden House riot being most memorable, We sat in on the lawns of Senate House too and were off to London to demonstrate. The evenements du Mai in Paris had changed the whole perspective of our group. We knew Althusser by heart. The Shilling Paper came out regularly. I became an anarchist. And still am. I started with George Woodcock's book The Anarchists and then read the whole of Herzen, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin. This position was not popular with Cambridge ideologues.
In the spring I borrowed an old Bedford dormobile and drove to St.Christopher's School in Letchworth to do my teaching practice. I hated it and persuaded the Department to move me to Cambridge College of Technology. I had read Robinson's the New Universities and reckoned I would be better off here than in either old universities or schools and indeed it was better. The Head of the English department was Sidney Bolt, whose brother Robert Bolt who had written A Man For All Seasons and both he and Ivor Davies, the Music Lecturer in the Department, wised me up quickly to the realities of Further Education. CCAT, being in Cambridge, was hardly a typical FE college of course. I took time off that spring, too, to sit with Margaret in the Beach House in Pett Level while she revised for her finals. She had a kind of breakdown in the winter and was living in a convent off The Parks in Oxford. Still she got her first in German and went in the autumn of 1969 to spend a year at the University of Munster before coming to Cambridge to do her PhD. I thought trips to Munster to see her would be a bit like visits on a motorbike to Heidelberg in Roger Peyrefitte's novel. Hardly. Though we had agreed that if we survived the year we would get married when she came back.
I went to live in the wonderful house that was or had been the vicarage in Jesus Lane, painted the walls mustard yellow and started to read Chinese. For a while that was a good period of time. The room was wonderful, I was more interested in Chinese than I ever had been in English, I had good friends. I met the once and future king, who was, already looking 40+ in tweeds and twills with his minder, doing his thespian bit at Trinity!. At that college too was Chris Curling. He and I put on a production of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape which even Cambridge and Harold Hobson thought definitive, except we made a mistake with the boots! In the Spring of 1970 we had been successful in getting a place in the finals of the Observer Student Drama Awards in Exeter. Nicky Graves and I had been for a while, about a month, in love from eating too many snowflakes together, or was that Candy Boyle in the wintry garden of a pub near Pangbourne-yes I think so- so it must have been from night dancing and little origami boxes-and off we all went. We won-pictures in the Sundays..wonderful darling. The arbiter was Moelwyn Merchant unknown to me and me to him who was thunderstruck to discover I was RS's son. For many years the tape of Krapp was in the back bedroom in Kew but I suppose Sharon binned it.
So back to what had become the grim nonsense of what passed for teaching Chinese at Cambridge. Clearly no-one was going to survive three years of that. Even though I met Mei-Li who taught me more Chinese in a month than Cambridge dons in a year I could not see a way forward. There were a couple of native speakers but they were useless, the audio-visual material was impossible and the other members of staff Michael Loewe, Carmen Blacker, Denis Twitchett, were on another planet. Even Cathy Sugden who was amazingly gifted at it struggled to cope.
Mei-Li was determined to go home. Her family had disappeared in the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai. Everyone said it was madness for her to go. Though they were officials of the Party, they were a well off, well educated family-not the best thing to be in China in the 60s. There was some suggestion that she should go back on a trip organised by SACU but even that looked liked scant protection. I was beside myself. I adored her. She was brilliant, vivacious and demure, slim and golden skinned with amazing freckles all over her. She tried to make me understand that there was no choice for her if her family were in danger. I wanted to go too; but she would not let me; as she said, even if I could get to Shanghai it would be far too dangerous; and it would be impossible for her to have a western boyfriend in tow.
She left on May 10th 1970.
I have never heard from her or seen her again.
In 1999 I went to Shanghai a couple of times to look for her. Impossible and mad.
I sat in Jesus Lane and knew it was madness to marry Margaret, but I feared for her sanity, I was fond of her and felt that we had made an agreement. In the event she came back and in Wales the week before we got married RS said to me: "Of course she is a complete psychological case, can you deal with that?" Oh thanks for letting me know what you think, Dad, that's really helpful! Noon April Fool2002/2545
So on a ghastly occasion at Pusey House in Oxford we were married by Donald Allchin. We spent a miserable honeymoon in Sarn and went to live in Cambridge; she to study at Darwin College and I to work in Luton. RS bought me a mini which was exhausted by the following spring. I bought another and that was wrecked somewhere on the A5 so in the autumn I bought a Triumph Spitfire, replace rapidly by the GT6 whose fame came from being the car driven down the pavement in Luton one Christmas with your mother unable to get off the brake where she was sitting! I loved that little car even if the solenoid switch kept jumping out of the top of the gear lever. The onset of respectability saw it off in 1974 but was replaced soon by the lovely little VW Sciroccos.
While all this was going on Antonia had met Chris Curling as well as Alison Swan. The Dryden Society, an acting society at Trinity College Cambridge, was planning to go on a most politically incorrect tour of South Africa. We hatched a plan whereby Antonia and Chris would take a film crew as part of the cast. So Antonia's acclaimed first African film The End of The Dialogue was made covertly. Alison and her partner Barrington Jones were going to go on this jaunt but pulled out at the last moment. It took Antonia a while to forgive them!
We lived in Cambridge for three years. In 1971 I met Maria, whom you remember, who came the Tech in Luton to do her A Levels and thus her best friend who is your Mum. In 1972 I got ill with Scarlet Fever and spent some three months in bed in Aberdaron and the following September in 1973 went to live in Middle Barton outside Woodstock and to work in Ealing. Margaret had finished her PhD and gained a lectureship in Birmingham. So the little station at Upper Heyford was half way between Birmingham and Ealing.!! I had a choice then of going to work in Cardiff or London.
When I went for interview in Cardiff the chairman of the panel was Professor R. George Thomas who had written a book about RS. He gave me a conspiratorial wink. I was anxious to get back to London even though we could not, as we thought afford a house there. In the event your Mum went up to Cambridge in 1974 and when her affair with Howard petered out in 1976 Barbara, your Empty Nana, suggested she write to me and in the March Margaret went to live in Birmingham and we started to live together. I lived on a mad triangle of London Oxford and Cambridge. I would go to London on Monday morning, stay the night with Christopher in Highbury, go to Oxford on Tuesday night, to Cambridge on Wednesday when tried not to work, back to London on Thursday, stay another night drive to Cambridge on Friday and then we might go to Middle Barton for the weekend! This madness went on even after you were born until we went to live in Kew.
When we moved to Whitebrook before you were born I would go to London on Monday Morning and again Thursday morning, spend Tuesday and Thursday nights in Barnes and the weekend with you. It was possible to go by train from Bristol but expensive and unreliable. No wonder we ate a car a year!
In 1973 Maria went to live with Antonia to be Jacob's nanny. Antonia was living in Clifton Hill in St. John's Wood and Jacob's father Barton Midwood had gone back to America when Jacob was six months old. In the summer of that year Maria and Sharon went to stay for the summer with Antonia in David Caccia's villa in Lucca. When did your mum and Maria go to Nice and then on to Gap and Barcelonette?. Cannot remember. You will have to ask her.
In 1977 Sharon graduated and went to work for Maggs, the antiquarian booksellers in Berkeley Square and we lived most of the time in Barnes until we sold Middle Barton in 1978 and bought Whitebrook. By 1979 we thought we knew enough about the antiquarian book trade and opened the little business called Lapis Lazuli. We had a lot of books from RS library when they moved to Sarn in 1978 and, alas, a lot of the furniture from Aberdaron too, but not the bookshelves! The business was quite a success and we made some money. We tried to keep it going as you know after you were born, whence your dislike of book fairs! But by the time you were 10 or so it proved impossible. No room, no time
In 1982 we bought the house in Kew and the following spring we moved there. While Kew was being renovated we rented a house in Greenford which was the Christmas you had your bell-bike.
I hated the house in Kew. It managed to be small, suburban, bourgeois, decrepit and expensive all in one. Though I know you were happy there. We did not have enough money to renovate it properly, which is why the roof was never done, nor enough to have the building work finished properly. Add to that a rogue builder! I was amazed the day it was sold. It cost us £50,000. We had about £30,000 from Whitebrook. RS and Elsi gave us £20,000 and we borrowed £30,000 from the Halifax for the rest. Later we borrowed another £20,000 to do the bathroom and survive the mounting shortfall of money.
Your mum did nothing until 1987 when she opened the ill-fated Kew Gardens Hamper which never really survived either the great gale of that year when Kew Gardens was closed all winter or the idleness of Diana Alleston.
Most people in Kew either had family money, were driving around in cars parents had given them, sending their kids to school on grandparental contributions and both husband and wife worked. My pathetic salary was far from enough and you were only able to go to Westminster because I worked my socks off, RS gave some money and we sold an endless succession of books and pictures. Still we had enough to go on the Corsican holidays that you loved and on that mad trip to Brindisi and the Trulli with Tina and Ray as well as your Empty Nana and Grandpa.
However it was very depressing. Sharon spent a long time 'thinking' about becoming a writer! She used to get very irritated with me when I suggested she got a job and made a career like everyone else. RS and Elsi kept us going but it was not enough and bit by bit the bank balances and credit cards got redder and redder, in spite of the fact that by the time I left Ealing I was earning nearly 40K.
The 1980s were peculiar. You were growing up, which was enormous fun. And whatever you remember I think we had very good times together. But the situation at Ealing/TVU was dire. There was the constant prospect of there really being no work. I kept re-inventing myself every couple of years. By good fortune I landed on the Art and Design work. That got me through most of the decade and to the Royal College of Art as you went to the Under School. Then I discovered the MSC-Manpower Services Commission and real salary increases.
In effect the 60s were a disastrous decade of adolescent confusion. The 70s were when I became well read and educated. I must have bought and read more books in those years than in the 60s and 80s together. The 80s were the 'you' years. I do not think I thought about much except you for10 years. The 90s were the 'orientalpussy' years.. well on and off. They were also the years of illegal oriental and Albanian immigrants, Brazilian and Chinese people traffickers, Thai and Kosovan sex slaves and Belgian drug dealers. Cannot say it was a boring decade.
I have not talked much about my passions. Partly because I know they are not much shared by you. I spent much of my life thinking that I adored the countryside. However actually I would rather live in Soho. And even now if I could manage to live in the middle of BKK or Singapore I would. Though it is not feasible with your sister. RS says that he could smell evil when he used to get off the train in London. I rather like that smell as it seems far truer to the human condition than the smell of manure in Wales!
I do not know where the passions for gardens, food, books, textiles and clothes, interior design, travel..to name some.. came from.
Most of them I have to some extent been able to indulge. Though I have always been too idle to write the books I should have! I should certainly have written the book about Food Illustration that arose out of The Royal College Of Art, and even more so the one about 'What's Done to Your Food'-Who owns the seeds, the land, the fertiliser, the chemicals that are used to treat, package and process food..etc...what is actually done to a carrot, a steak, a Chicken Kiev before you get it' When I talked to one publisher about it he said..."well if you start on that someone will kill you..." So maybe that is why.
Anyway there are still plenty of titles in the cupboard!!
Then in 1990 I got very ill. We still don't know what it was. It must have been some viral illness. I was weepy and my glands swelled and hurt; I could not concentrate on work. I really thought I might die! Fortunately at the same time I had prised a great deal of money out of the government for Ealing and we were able to go on the two trips to America in 1991 and 1992. I spent most of the second trip in the bookshops reading about viral illnesses and auto-immune disease. It was the height of the AIDS scares. And I had spent a large part of the late eighties travelling round Europe. Italy-Sicily, Germany, Spain, France, The Netherlands.
As I was no better I also thought that I was not going to pop off without having been to the Far East. So in November of 1992 I went to Singapore and that is how, in the week of holiday I had, I came to go to Thailand. I went to Changi (Singapore) airport and thought I will take the first plane anywhere that sounds OK. So I came to Bangkok, took a taxi into town and at the end of the trip said to the driver I think we will go back to the airport --it looked so horrible! So I did the same again-took the first plane out and that is how I came to Phuket. I was amazed. It was like Antibes 30 years previously. There were bars and cafes, beautiful sea, good seafood, motorbikes, scruffy roads and beautiful girls. Of course I nearly missed it all as I rented a jeep and first went to Phuket Town which at 3.00 pm was dead.
So I drove to Patong, parked the jeep and wandered down Soi Bangla, which at 5.00 pm was dead too! I could not understand what all these empty bars were doing! And there was no-one much about too. Just as I was getting back into the jeep, thinking where on earth to go, the beautiful Tew spoke to me. And the rest is history.
It was the day before Loy Kratong and everyone was making the little kratongs at home. We went to the house where she lived and they showed me how to make one. Then at about 11.00 we went down to the town which had transformed itself into a sort of Mardi Gras! Then we went to the Fancy Bar and Tew dressed up. Several westerners were looking ridiculous in northern Thai farmers clothes. Then off to the beach to send the kratongs with their candles and joss sticks and a few baht into the sea. That year it was calm and it was an exquisite night. In later years when Chulee, Lin, Li and I did the same thing it poured with rain and the breakers tore in which was not such fun!
For a week we danced and drank, eat and swam, played pool and listened to music. I discovered that the price of a room for the night at The Merlin was enough to rent a room for a month! So began my long learning curve. Of course when I got home I just wanted to go straight back. Which I did in January and again in April, having gone to the States first to try and organise the disaster that was The Fulbright Year. When I proposed to go back in the summer Sharon was not amused. However she did come later in that summer. Sarn with elephants was her view of Phuket. She was shocked at the Patong hookers, did not like Bangkok, tolerated Chiang Mai and left. I went back to Mae Hong Son with Buaphan and then came home. Your mum changed the locks on the doors and said she was afraid I would beat her up! So I went to stay with Kate and Simon and she never made another attempt to discuss it. She seemed quite unable to decide whether I was mad or bad; and she made no effort to take you or your feelings into consideration. She devoted much of September in trying to convince everyone I should be in The Priory.
Of course I behaved very badly. However I don't think the situation was irreparable-particularly in your interests. But I came to believe quite quickly that it was impossible to live with her. I think too she had mischievous and vicious advice from her friends. The two 'mistakes' I then made were to try and ensure that everything in Kew remained the same so that your environment would not be turned upside down and not to divorce quickly. This gave Sharon the opportunity to steal all my possessions and the rest of your Granny's pictures. It also allowed her, when I could go and live in Sarn later after RS and Betty left, to pretend to the courts and lawyers that I had a house!
And so I went to live in Acton for those few months before I went to Arizona. Going to Tucson was a mistake, too. I should have gone back either to work with Wes in Kansas or to Georgia where the people were nice. The people in Tucson were dreadful. Cold, rude, unhelpful and pompous. I stuck it for a while but after you cut your hand I decided to abandon Tucson for Phuket! I knew enough about what was going on in Ealing to see that I should be able to negotiate a deal to leave and so it proved. I light a candle to Mike Fitzgerald every week for if I had not done that I would still be there and with the prospect of not being able to get out with a decent deal until I am 65! And now it looks as though it might be 75!
So when I think what we have done in these 7 years I cannot regret that decision. Of course I would have had more money but most of it would have gone on buying a house in London. Also in those early days I might have made the mistake of buying one with Chulee. In fact it was her wish to create a version of Kew that put me entirely off the idea.
When RS decided to take up with Betty, this was about 1994, he came to see Sharon and you and me in Kew. He used to drop by every six months or so. He quite liked walking by the Thames there. On this occasion he said 'I am coming as I have something to tell you'. It was a most excruciating scene. The day before he arrived Betty had sent him a letter. I think it must have had Urgent or something on it. So Sharon opened it to discover it contained a ring. So we knew what was up. Anyway first of all he says-
'I am sorry but I wont be able to give Rhodri or you much money any more. I need it for other things'.
'Fine', we said. Then he says
'I have met someone and we have discovered we are fond of each other'.
' Oh good', we say.'Who is it?'
' Can't you guess who it is?', he says. 'You know her very well.'
' NOOO!' We say
….this goes on for a bit.
' Are you sure you can't guess?'
Sharon says
' You can always come and stay with us, if you feel alone in Sarn!'
'Oh,' he says, 'Thank you, but I am not much of a family man',
With that he says it is Betty and proceeds to become a family man devoting himself to Alice's children rather than Rhodri! Nice one Dad
So in 1995 RS abandoned Sarn for Anglesey and I went to live in Sarn, the house I had wanted to live in since I was 16! And of course once I got there and had been there for a while I realised it was out of the question to live there in the winter. The water poured through the walls, the damp rose, the sea seeped in and it rained for weeks. I spent fortunes on coal and electricity but just heated the hillside! The woodburning stove helped, but at a cost as there is not enough dry wood in Sarn for continual use.010402
RS had big problems with your Mum. She, too, like Alice, was small and dark and brown eyed and beautiful. So of course he fancied her too. However she presented him with some different problems. Firstly she was my girlfriend. We lived together and saw no reason for not doing this at Sarn. He went into Wuthering Heights mode on this-took Sharon off onto the edge of the cliff in a howling gale to try and deliver her a lecture on morals and the position of the Rector. She was not impressed, but rather came to see that he was a man who loved no-one but himself and used money and mean spiritedness to try and control people-often successfully unfortunately. From that moment on she had little respect for him and that rubbed off on me. When you were born it was with some reluctance that we took you to Sarn. It was something of a nightmare always. But in our firm belief that, in spite of his determination to deny love, he might be moved by something/someone that was undeniably part of him he might mellow. To no avail. He ignored you for the most part. When you were three or so he offered to look after you/play with you for an hour or so while we went to Pwllheli. When we returned Elsi was in a towering rage. RS had played with you for about 10 minutes. He was fond of dropping heavy books with a bang to make you laugh. After ten minutes he had got bored and gone off birdwatching leaving you alone…He later on, however got very intrusive in your life. He was generous to contribute towards your schooling at Westminster. However, we all wondered if we would have been better off without as he used to moan incessantly about whether it was worth it. When you left Westminster with 4 straight A's at A level he still was not impressed; and when you decided to go and read Law at Bristol he said. 'Well Westminster's not much of a School if it can't secure him an Oxbridge place. Even Bradfield and Chenevix Trench managed that for you'.
Once Betty had gone bonkers you remember we used to go and meet him for lunch or supper in Hotels in Cricieth, Porthmadoc or wherever. After the last visit, when you took Emily, and we all seemed to get on as OK as was possible in those unbelievable surroundings- one of the lunches took place in the George Hotel in Cricieth, where, for some reason, Dutch Radio was played loudly throughout dinner and you and I had a storming argument with RS over class and race, which emptied the dining room of those unfortunate enough to have booked the Historic Wales Coach Weekend.
After that RS says to me.' You know your mother and I could never see anything of you in Rhodri.' Thanks dad.
Three short excursions: one about 'faire l'autostop' or hitch hiking as we call it. The other about Death and the third about Books.
It was possible in the 1960s to get about by hitching. I cannot remember the exact times, years even, when I went for a walk around Europe. To begin with there were a couple of quick trips to Paris in I think about 1964. Then I went to Spain to the flat that the Merricks had in Fuengirola. I suppose it must gave been 1969 that I went to Turkey, which was a particularly bizarre journey. For some reason I had agreed to meet Alison and Barrington at Sofia station on some date in August. Of course they did not show. I had wandered slowly up from Thessaloniki into Bulgaria. It was the most beautiful journey with silver sandy rivers, fields of tobacco and orchards. I remember Sofia as a town of ochre and orange stucco and people in black clothes. Though many people must have passed through on their way to Kathmandu very few people had, I think stopped there. I made friends everywhere; in shopping queues in bus queues and just standing in the street. I was taken to endless homes, bought innumerable meals and given an unending number of unusual drinks-all for the sake of trying to talk English with a real westerner. I got a lift from a Turkish gentleman in a beautiful open top cream Isetta? From Plovdiv to Istanbul. Somewhere near Edirne he turned off the main road and drove into the wilderness. All of a sudden we came to an encampment of black tents. There was a wedding. My people he said; we will have a good time! There was dancing most of the night and fantastic barbecued food, salads, bread and washed down with coke. The bride was dressed in the most lovely red and black and white embroidered costume. I remember it as in a dream. After Edirne he took me to Istanbul and gave me a room in an old family house by the Bosphorus. It was wooden and decaying and eerily beautiful. I found Turkey aggressive and blue eyes a difficulty. I stayed long enough to see the Blue Mosque and wander around then left for Greece. I wanted to go on south to Izmir, Adana and Aleppo, but on my own I was a little uncertain. I suppose I have managed to walk/hitch through most of Europe, East and West. One used to meet up with other hitchers on roundabouts and at crossroads and travel a little way together. It was better generally to travel with a girl as guys, of course, were more likely to stop and sometimes pulled off again quickly when the boy appeared out of the hedge! I only once ever felt in danger when we were picked up by some psychotic ex paratrooper in France. He was a bad driver and was feeling up his squeeze all the time. We were stuck in the back seat of a Renault Gordini all night. We learned not to take lifts in the back seats of 2 door cars. I remember he had fingers like chisels.
It is a dead pastime. A shame. I saw places, places that now cannot be easily or safely visited-Bosnia, Macedonia, the Carpathians and things you do not see by driving and on trains and met many peculiar and generous people who often gave me a bed. To get home we used to go to the big routier stops. The haulage companies were obliged to buy two cross channel tickets as each lorry was supposed to have two drivers, but they seldom did, so they often had a spare ticket. Now I am afraid the driver will kill me and the drivers are afraid I will do the same. Mr.Wrong, the Elizabeth Jane Howard novel come to pass. The only alternative is country buses. Here in Thailand we do that. You are never quite sure how long any journey will take or exactly what the journey is, who you will meet. I love that.
Death
As I have told you, one of the bizarre features of my life-which I have not written about is the fact that all the people close to me-boys that is in the main-are dead. It started with Michael Whittingham at Oxford. Reaped in, among others, Richard Collins, Mark Rawlins and Jim Merricks. Even here it has consumed Andreas Kohler and Ivan Moser. So I am not inclined to befriend men. It has had a very peculiar effect on my life as it has removed regularly those whom I trusted and spoke frankly to.
The girls have not died, for the most part. Though one supposes Mei Li is dead and also Yudan. But, of course, they have married and thus ceased to be confidantes. Significant, too, that it is the ones with whom there were no relationships like Marietta, Di, Ann and Antonia who have remained good friends.
Books
I have been influenced by an eclectic mixture of writing. When I was small I loved, as you know, those Little Brown Bear books that you liked too. I think they were an early introduction to the virtues of waywardness. I moved from there to Enid Blyton-Cherry tree Farm and the Five in particular. Then Coral Island and Shadow The Sheepdog. Welsh and Irish Fairy Tales-followed much later by Arab and Japanese ones! I have always been absorbed by the metaphors and didactics of folk tales. So many unknown people trying to convey a sense of meaning and wisdom. Having to read Virgil and Ovid, Herodotus and Aristophanes rather turned me off classics. I was very influenced in my early teens by Leslie Charteris. In particular his belief that the real criminals were banks and insurance companies! I must have read every Saint book! I had a passion for Thomas Hardy, particularly The Return Of The Native, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Maria Edgeworth, Thackeray too. Dickens I could never abide, nor D.H.Lawrence's novels. Restoration comedy, the Elizabethan dramatists and even Pope. The 'great' English poets do not move me. Yeats is different as are Mallarme, Claudel and Baudelaire. I like Balzac, Stendahl, Proust and Zola . Most american literature leaves me cold. Henry James Ok. Edith Wharton too and Ring Lardner . I like Somerville and Ross The Irish RM, Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ian Buruma and Pico Iyer. Ford Madox Ford remains readable as do Maugham's stories. I particularly like the Japanese writers Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizake and also Kazuo Ishiguro. Another favourite is Austin Coates; not well known but City of Broken Promises and Myself a Mandarin are moving and funny books. When I was finding things for you to read I liked Eve Garnett and now Philip Pullman. Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson I like to read and MFK Fisher. I was trying to think of my ten favourite books. Later!
Yasunari Kawabata Palm Of The Hand Stories
Gabriel Garcia Marquez 100 Years of Solitude
Alejo Carpentier Explosion in a Cathedral
Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier
Sir Gawain and The Green Knight
John Webster The White Devil
John Gay The Beggars Opera
Thomas Hardy The Return Of The Native
W.B.Yeats The Tower
Austin Coates City of Broken Promises
Not really that is just today April 2 2002 in Bangkok. I can't remember so much!I plus a list on the Weblog! Is it the same?
Travel Books, Political economy, Other Cookery Books, childrens books…….Maybe I could do 10 novels and 10 others…
Anyway I do not know if this is a good idea. There is much more that can be written. If you find it embarrassing just throw it away. I would like to write more about the life of your mother and I. But maybe people like Lesley Watters and Diana Alleston could tell you more about that. The people who could really tell you are Kate Carr and Simon Cobley. But I suppose they will not. Maria could tell you about life in Luton; but who knows what she remembers. Antonia of course has seen it all! And your empty Nana, tutting away there all the time! That is not a version I would set much store by! My friend Annie will tell you all about TVU and Di about the 80s and 90s. But they did not see that much. Though they would both tell you true. Your dad in knee length tan boots and lycra stretch jeans being authoritative! And that was the late 70s. In the earlier part of the decade it was bat wing T shirts and Loons and before that turquoise velvet hipsters, red and also white PVC macs. Oh we been through the fashions. Shame no photies. Of course your mum was there for 30 years.!!
Of course, it is only my story. Others would see it all differently. But it was written for you. I never knew who RS thought he was writing his autobiographies for. Certainly not you, me nor your seaside granny. Like everything else, himself, I suppose!
I have left out most of the bits about Alice and Betty too. Alice is obviously part of the Death excursion. But she was never a proper friend. In spite of what others may like to believe we never had a scene together..nearly..but not. Who knows what Betty wants to pretend. Maybe Alice told her we did to annoy her. Maybe Betty married RS to take revenge for some event that never was. Sounds like a John Webster play already!!
I have left out, too, all the stuff about money. That is part of a different tale and you will find all that squirrelled away in some file, one day!
And now I sit with the tragedy of your little sister. I can only find it ironic that it took me 10 years to get here, only for that disaster to befall; when I thought I had pretty well sorted it out. Maybe it will turn out OK, but I am not too hopeful. It is three months, and I see no signs of healing.
Anyway you will see, too, from all of this why I am pretty barmy. I think it is just lucky that I came to believe the only thing that mattered was and is to love you. I am sure I have failed in many ways, and maybe you will think and feel other respects in which I have failed you. I am not finished yet, though!! What would make me sad would be for you to puzzle over things that can be answered in ways I have puzzled over things I have never understood as legacies from RS and MEE. Maybe everything cannot be explained satisfactorily. Maybe the question of why? Cannot be always answered. But we can have a go, if it is important or helpful to you.
As to was I, am I, happy? For the most part! There have been some very good years, though often like the curate's egg-good and bad in part! 1980, 1984-5, 1989-91, and recently 1995-8.and 2000-2002. Before the first six years were pretty good. Then 1960-1962. 1969-70 and 1972-3 also 1977-80. Well that is more than half. I did believe particularly through the 1970s and 1980s that to try and construct a very good personal life was more important than fame and fortune. I think both Sharon and I wonder about how things might have turned out-if there had been jobs in S.Wales in the 70s, or if we had moved to France-if I had got the job in Kingston in 1992-I think that is a critical miss. It would have changed everything. Good University. 15 mins from Kew £60K.....We probably would have had a quite different decade.
Sawangkhalok Sukothai January 2 2003