Rhiwddolion. Don’t Talk With Your Mouth Full
Tuesday. Since the Dark Ages, hunched crones and short-wheelbase Welshmen with low hairlines have trolled these ancient flagstones through enchanted forests, emerging at a crouch into the bruised gloom of Rhiwddolion; commonwealth of grumpy faeries, mossy crannies, knobbles, nooks, sheeted water like lead, where gnarled oaks frown with bassett-hound eyes that vanish into whorls of bark at a blink when you turn. First it was salty brigands, all twinkles in their eyes, eels in their trousers. Then smallholders, lead-miners, slaters, chundering up the sunken path below this cottage whose name must be spoken to be appreciated. Ty Coch. Back then this parade of cloggy peasants would cower beneath the gaze of women sporting top hats and faces like Crib Goch quarries, spinning yarn and smoking pipes on stools by the door. Now it’s just us; floppy-haired, limp-wristed, short-winded, staggering the last boggy yards under yoke of Spar bag and smokeless coal, of ukulele, Middlemarch, Battenburg, Mr Kiplings individual mince pies (85p a box after Christmas) and a one-layer box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray.
Thursday. At the height of the Victorian slate boom, Reverend Hugh Jones, affecting the bardic moniker Gutyn Arfon and mantle of Redeemer, arrived in all this murk to captain the tiny galleon of a new Calvinist chapel. Renouncing short-legged Welsh dourness, he pounded his pulpit with giddy abandon, evangelizing the benefits of group singing upon the downtrodden peasant, conscripting a choir which would transform taciturn troglodytes into barrel-chested Soldiers of Song, their Hymns of Praise echoing down the Conwy Valley from Betws-y-Coed to Pont-y-Pant and all stops to Blaenau Ffestiniog. He imported a harmonium – the first ever in Wales – and set about noodling his canticles, augmented by the febrile fingers of Miss Ann Roberts (schoolmistress and part-time organist) who massaged the swell and drop of his prodigious instrument with handmaidenly care. Thus Rhiwddolion, surfing a cataract of unbodiced ecclesiastical fervour, became a beacon of ecstasy lighting up grumpy North Wales, as the choir of Ty Capel belted out Gutyn Arfon originals in its outdoor auditorium of low-grade purple slate, and at Eisteddfodau the length and breadth of Caernarfonshire.
Friday. The bed is like soup. Creep inches from the meridian and marshmallow edges collapse into themselves, threatening an unseemly deposit onto three-hundred year-old pavers, pupating Kafka beetle in yesterday’s underpants waving its fat old translucent legs in the midnight air. It’s nights like these you miss the velvet anchor of a body, skein of chestnut hair at the nape of the neck. These plastic kettle mornings, forged on the anvil of letterbox skies and Armageddon auguries. Then, without fanfare, it is night again before it ever was day, the sun having merely poached the horizon like an egg, dribbled its yolk upon this blesséd plot, this skillet of tobacco-pipe Jumblies, all tucked up tight in our sieves and crockery jars with our hives of silvery Bees.
Saturday. Morning again snivels late and gray through the fogged bedroom window, drizzling across our tomb as we lie side-by-side across the stone aisle, twin kippers in effigy, ekeing out the final moments of blanket before the first pot of tea. This is a light no sun could own: granular, bruised: a puddled slip of clay, it seeps from slate and moss, bracken and black water, leaks under the door like a rumour. I used to loathe it. In satchel, school tie and Clarks Commandos, waiting for the bus, it was everything life ought not to be. Now it feels glorious, the strains of Cwm Rhondda sung by ghosts down this lost valley as I make my way through the mud alone, to Hugh Jones’s chapel, deconsecrated in the oaks like a stern reminder. A delicious, microscopic rendering of Blake’s satanic mills.
Sunday. And half a week into channeling Bilbo Baggins, trolling up and down the dingle through black sheets of rain, shouldering wine, wood, coal, tequila and the fixings of cullen skink and tofu vindaloo; you go bananas. You swore you’d scale Snowden, but from the torrid storm of this armchair she seems dark, dangerous, like Everest, so you set a fire and eight-hundred pages of Alan Bennett are crouched on the antimacassar glaring at you, a soft Yorkshire Gollum. Tomorrow you might split the difference; take a day trip to Llandudno, pillage Cancer Relief for a souvenir sugar-bowl, drive up Great Orme cliffs (‘three pound fifty? Nay lad, used to be a quid’) much like Alan and his Mam might have; and you’ll get to the top and The Captain’s Table will be shut for tea and a Jaffa cake and there’ll be no toilet and it’s mizzling so hard the Skoda’s door nearly bangs shut on Mam’s leg, and, oh Alan, I can’t be doin’ with it, I’m right mardy, let’s go home, make Teriyaki, couple of hands of rummy, get an early night; we’ll be off in’t morning …
Tuesday. Wake in the dark to the emphysemic kettle gargling pebbles. We’ll dry the dishes, tidy the grate and be gone through the mud and purple gloaming to the station where you stop the train with an outstretched arm. Don’t wave; they’ll think you’re Jenny Agutter, wave back cheerfully and sail on by. Later we’ll find two bean bags and toilet in the ferry town library, suffocate the hours before sailing with the murderous pillows of crossword and Alan. Feels like all we’ve done these past years is travel; motion, like film, affording a facsimile of reality. If only staying put offered the same illusion of wellbeing. Nevertheless, being in a constant state of escape is burdensome, flinching at every knock, lurking beneath the windowsill in a protection program for witnesses of life. Being on the run is as dogged by liturgy as sitting still; it’s not long before you begin to feel less like a pirate swinging through the rigging with a cutlass between his teeth, more like somebody’s fussy auntie from Frome. The frowsty cottage, drawn curtains, pootling into town in the car, the charity shops and veggie caffs, skim milk over whole, prim orthodoxies of cooking, shopping, fire-lighting, door open, door closed. Yesterday’s Papillon on his raft made of coconuts, a roll of French Francs up his bum, is today’s Cousin Charlotte easing her bony buttocks onto Mackintosh Squares.
•••
