Ymbapuroli

Slate gods

Translated by Angharad Price

Translation copyright: Angharad Price

My hand is too small to hold my father’s, so I clasp my fist around two of his fingers. We leave the smooth blue tarmac and enter rougher territory. Our journey will take us down Glan Gors lane and back up a different way, past the graveyard. Just two narrow paths located between our village’s marshy hinterland and our brand new cul-de-sac, a fifteen-minute trip for a short pair of legs like mine and for an absent-minded father. But it’s a great adventure for me; a visit to another dimension.

I realize now it must have been Mum’s idea. Dad wouldn’t have cared to go for a walk at the end of a working day, especially with a five-year old child. I wonder if my mother had sensed, even back then, that the walk-around-the-block would make a world of difference to us both?

As we leave the tarmac my father disentangles his hand from mine. He knows he can leave me alone and in so doing will be left alone himself. He assumes I’m obedient. In any case he needs his hands free to light his pipe. And he stops where the lane begins and rummages in his coat pocket, bringing out his pipe and knocking it against the heel of his shoe until the dottle’s black disc falls into the undergrowth. From another pocket he gets some fresh tobacco, Whiskey Ready Rubbed, taking a maggoty pinch out of the packet and pushing it into the pipe’s bowl with his stained thumb.

A yellow matchbox with a swan on it appears in the gloom. The sudden rupture of a match being lit. A whiff of sulphur. I watch my father holding the flame in one hand and the pipe in another, slowly bringing the two together. There’s a series of clicks as Dad sucks in sharply to get the pipe to light. Soon a spicy aroma mixes with the lane’s damp and earthy atmosphere, the frankincense of my father smoking.

Satisfied, he sets off down the lane, throwing his head back and tilting his gaze up to some distant horizon, somewhere far beyond the fields and hedges, perhaps as far as the sea in Felinheli; somewhere a tiny creature like me can never hope to fathom. But then, I have my own companions – those who are on the same level as me. And I don’t mean the lean and dark cypresses which form a monotonous hedge between the limit of our cul-de-sac and one edge of the path. No, these are homelier fellows. They are the crawiau – a row of rough-hewn columns made from slate running along the lane right down to the bottom.

I know each one of them intimately. And I know in what order they come. First the one with a wide brow. Then the jagged-crowned one. The third is lopsided. There is a thick-set one followed by a slim one, and the one after that has a hue of crimson. Number seven – though they’re not numbered in my head – has silver markings called ‘hen shit’. Then comes the one with a crack running across it like a spiteful grimace. There’s the scaly crawan, the smooth crawan, the lettered crawan (J.J. 1909) and the spindly crawan...

On and on they come, each column of waste slate distinctive and unique, woven into whole by a rusty wire. But something more than that unites them. They are a community. A host. A retinue in blue, standing guard over our village’s memory as it was when the slate quarry still worked, before they built our modern houses and poured tarmac over the marshland. The traces of the old village are still there. You can see it in the slate flags in front of scattered stone cottages. In the creak of cast-iron kissing gates. And in the awful scratching of old men’s breath. But most of all in the crawiau. They are the custodians of our ancestral past. They are the keepers of our slate inheritance.

My father loves the crawiau too. After all, he’s a historian. Thinking about the past is what he does. So about half way down the lane, as if suddenly remembering I’m there, he comes to a halt. Taking the pipe out of his mouth, he places his hand affectionately on the slate column in front of him and leans lightly over. He then starts telling me about our village’s history, usually stuff about the quarry such as how dangerous the work was, how much our slate was in demand worldwide and how devastating it was when the quarry closed and hundreds of men lost their jobs. All that just a couple of years before I was born.

It might as well have been another era. It seems a long, long time ago to me. I can barely comprehend it. Instead, I watch my father’s knowledgeable gaze run along the crawiau as he caresses their humble riches, the prospects they offer, the borders they denote. I watch as he puts the pipe back in his mouth and, pulling away now, looks over the crawiau out to the reedy, gorsey marsh extending as far as the eye can see. For this is Glan Gors lane, you see: the path of the marshland’s edge.

I watch him shake his head in wonder, muttering through one corner of his mouth while maintaining the pipe in the other: ‘Just imagine, that’s how all of Bethel used to be before the quarry.’

I’d like to imagine. I’d like to see. But I’m too small to do so. The crawiau are too tall. So I have to make do with studying my father studying the marshland, his tense jaw loosening, his face becoming lax as he watches the wide vistas of history open out before him, spreading like the pages of book beyond the crawiau’s hardback cover there under his hands. He’s reading the landscape, page after page, the layers of time lifting like word-crows from the swampy earth’s surface, and hovering there, black and articulate, before his keen gaze.

Who’d have thought it? All this significance – from a narrow, unassuming lane behind our houses.

Finally, without haste, the tobacco spent, satisfied with what he’s found, my father turns away and makes his way further. He seems to have forgotten that I’m there. I follow nevertheless – being obedient – though can’t stop myself from staring through the gaps between the crawiau, the rugged, glassless windows which speed past me, one after the other, as I trot behind him. They are like the slits of some primitive picture-wheel showing me the still, silent movie of a sepia landscape. The spectacle chills me to the bone. I glimpse a godforsaken land where kestrels hover and foxes lurk, where quagmires swallow little children who have trespassed. I shudder as I contemplate the wet, unruly wilds lying out there, pressing, pressing – yes, even today – against the boundaries of our safe and tidy village with its modern matchbox homes and tarmac pavements. Only the row of intermittent slates is what divides us.

And so, despite being my keepers and companions, the crawiau are also frightening things. They are slate gods, my genial tormentors, protectors and revealers in one, shielding and exposing in alternation. Afraid, I quicken my pace to catch up with Dad, seeking his hand for protection.

And I don’t let go until we’re in safety. There, at the bottom of the path, where the confines of Glan Gors lane yield to a wider alley; where the crawiau are made redundant.

The path which takes us home is different. While Glan Gors lane descends, the graveyard lane climbs gently upwards. As such, it demands effort. That’s partly why my father doesn’t like it. It’s also narrower and dingier. Its two defining hedges are thickety and tall and Dad barely fits between them. He has to slant his shoulders to get through, turning himself askew. He stoops into contortions. I watch the thorny branches reach out for his coat, his sleeves getting caught in the brambles. I’m slightly shocked to hear him swear. But still I follow, being obedient. And though not insensible to his pain, for once I’m glad I’m tiny. The struggle lies beyond me now, high above my head, towards that scrap of sky between the hedges where adults walk and sometimes get entangled.

Nothing lightens the gloom except shards of broken glass and a few sweet wrappers (there a shop at the far end). Father pushes onwards. It’s a race against time, you see. We’re in a hurry. Because if anyone comes the other way, if anyone has a mind to, we’ll all be doomed. There is no hope of traversing. The graveyard lane is single-file. Negotiations won’t matter. Insistence is vain. One party has to give in; that’s all there is to it. After the awkward face-off, there’s a silent squaring up. Then it’s submission. The shame of the retreat! The backtrack, down, down, to where the graveyard lane begins again. It’s like the snake in Snakes and Ladders. But real. This is a real game.

Only to start over, back up through the thorns and branches...

Of course, it is no big deal for me, being five and little. It’s Dad who minds. It’s he who hates the comedown.

He also hates the chapel at the other end (once we get that far). Lying just after the final corner of graveyard lane, it’s enormous, grey and box-like, dwarfing all our homes. It even gave our village its name, which is ‘Bethel’, which means ‘God’s house’ in Hebrew, which is a language from the Bible. Being historic, you’d think Dad would like it. But he hates its stony face. He hates its looming presence. It startles him each time. I can see his head jerk back as we take that final turn, and I’m sure I hear him cussing. And it’s not just the chapel he hates. There is the graveyard. Lying at the foot of the chapel, running along beside our path, it is filled with blue slate tombstones. This is the graveyard which gave the lane its name, just like the chapel named the village.

You’d think he’d like the tombs, at least. They’re not that different from the crawiau. For what you have is an assembly of slates, shaped and mounted according to a plan, fulfilling a public function, though the tombs – compared to the rougher lot – are more uniform and formal, more impersonal too, despite the names carved on their foreheads. You’d think Dad would like the dates, at least: that’s a historian’s daily fodder. But he can’t abide them either; can’t bear to see the details. He just hurries past. He starts to warn me not to dawdle.

The thing is, I love that chapel. It’s where I come on Sundays with my mum and brothers while Dad enjoys his lie-in. He’s not religious, he says, and it’s true he never darkens the door, not even at Christmas. That’s his loss I feel. To go to Sunday School is brilliant. You get stories that elasticate your mind, of whales swallowing men and the man in its tummy still speaking. Another man mended so he could see. And then Jesus whom God resurrected. You get to colour in as well – especially Joseph’s coat – and put names in the brackets they’ve left you. You get to sing and pray – which is a rare and special thing – and then you’re rewarded with Chewits. The teachers are all ‘aunties’ and wear lipstic and frocks. And at Christmas you get to be angels.

As for the graveyard, I like that even more. It’s so mysterious. The big boys of the village say it’s haunted. They say ghosts, white phantoms a bit like babies’ nappies, fly from the tombs at night and hover mid-space through the graveyard. And I do believe them, I believe those boys with my whole heart. For the things you can’t see are life’s big truth – for children.

And if Dad can ruminate away about his crawiau’s vertical frontier, so can I from the graves’ horizontal. There is a border between heaven and earth. I know and feel it. And anyways, there’s proof. Doesn’t the chapel’s upper floor (the ‘gallery’, out of bounds to kids) lead halfway up to Heaven? And the dungeon just outside the village shop, the one guarded by irons in which we delve with Bubbly on sticks, isn’t that heading straight to Inferno?

This explains my dawdling. For now I disobey. I want to stay there. I want to stand on tiptoe at the graveyard wall, and let my eyes see over. I want to study the place and wait. Just as Dad did earlier. I want to ponder borders marked by slates. I want to yield to wonder.

But He, I mean my dad, is losing patience. Religion’s not his thing. He’s happier with history. So now he’s nagging me again. He’s calling me ‘good girl’. I sense he’s getting tetchy.

‘Come on, now, hogan dda,’ he says. ‘It’s time. Supper. Mum’s waiting. The boys are going to bed quite soon.’

He thinks I’m unaware. It’s not about Mum, or supper, or brothers at all. He just doesn’t like the chapel. He detests that graveyard. I understand it all today, of course, now that I’m older. He’d lost his father only a few years before. Prematurely. Just as I did later.

Death was pressing down upon his life. The tombs were not a border, but an ending.

But what I felt back then was agitation. His and mine. I felt indignant as he raised his voice, telling me to follow. Indignation – and a sudden sense of my own power growing.

I remember standing my ground there. Just outside the graveyard. Resolute and angry. He’d had his time on Glan Gors lane. He’d had his pipeful. It was my turn now to seek my spirits. So I looked beyond the blue slate graves and waited for revelation.

By now Dad’s pleading: ‘Let’s go, Angharad bach, it’s time now.’

I sense him through the corner of my eye. He’s stepping towards me, his arm outstretched. But I stand determined.

In the end, I turn my head. I’m not sure why. Pity, maybe? Mercy – in a child? The muscles of his jaw are tensed again; there’s something hurtful in his eyes. His outstretched hand, large and stained with ink and spent tobacco, reaching for me and for protection.

I wait. I hesitate. And then, only then, tiny and exultant, I accept it.

Hand in hand and side by side, we now complete our journey. Away from our two paths and marshy hinterland, back to the blue tarmac and matchbox houses. To Mum. My brothers. Supper. Bed. Our safe routine. It was a fifteen-minute walk, that’s all. Down Glan Gors lane then back up past the graveyard. A small adventure. Yet something new had come into being on the way. It was a new dimension.

And now I recall reaching home, my hand in his hand – fully held. My own had grown a little larger in the meantime.

Translated by Angharad Price

Translation copyright: Angharad Price

Tynybraich: the name belongs to a house and a mountain; to a family too, at least in local speech. They have been farming Tynybraich for centuries, my mother’s forefathers. There’s a genealogy in the family Bible, branches of men’s names dating back to 1012.

We came to Tynybraich every school holiday, leaving the quarries of Arfon behind us and heading south. To Dinas Mawddwy, where we learned how to live with mountains, not against them. Turning off the main road, we saw flowers reaching for the car and rabbits running from it. Coming out from Y Ffridd we looked down at the Maesglasau valley and across to Tynybraich mountain, a pyramid of blue extending upwards from the narrow valley floor. In the distance, the rock of Maesglasau, its waterfall our vertical horizon.

We didn’t care for the mountain, which we took for granted. We cared only for the house. After all, it was the house that gave the mountain its name. Tynybraich: ‘House in the Mountain’s Arm.’ It was our grandparents’ home and we were keen to get there. But there was the steep hill to descend, the brook to cross, the other hill to ascend, seeing nothing ahead but the car bonnet and some sky. Dogs would rush and bark at the sound of unfamiliar wheels.

Only Nan could calm us again. Our mother’s mother, waiting for us at the farmhouse door, touched by the smell of food that came through the kitchen window.

She’d come to Dinas Mawddwy in wartime to visit a cousin. My grandfather, Taid, was newly widowed, nearly forty and a father of two. Nan never returned to her home in Cwm Nant yr Eira, the valley of the snowy stream, in neighbouring Montgomeryshre. On the day they were married she became a wife, a farm wife, a stepmother and a daughter-in-law all at once. Nan began her life at Tynybraich, soon herself to become a mother of two.

Taid insisted she learn to drive up and down the steep slopes of the mountain. She was to be self-sufficient. At her first outing, with fresh snow on the ground, the car veered off the mountain road and skidded to the edge of the ravine. Taid straightened the car and forced his young wife to drive back to the house. It was much later that she thanked him for his lesson. For the rest of her life, the car was her means of escape from Tynybraich. Every Wednesday she went to Machynlleth market, and every Friday to Dolgellau; and to her sister’s in Arthog on Saturday night. The car took her to the village on social visits, or in condolence. She delivered meals-on-wheels to old age pensioners until she reached her eightieth year.

She was at her most independent in the car. At election time, she’d draw out her Plaid Cymru poster from the glove compartment. When Tynybraich was out of sight she’d stick it on the windscreen and drive around - a raging nationalist. Returning to Tynybraich, just before Y Ffridd, the poster was folded up and put away. Taid was Labour. There would have been trouble, for there was nothing he liked more than a good debate, and nothing she liked less.

She was an even-tempered woman. The evenness spread out from her. She organised her world evenly around her. Her kitchen table was an even cosmos: planets of plates and saucers, lids of jam jars, Welsh cakes, the Victoria sponge, and rounds of bread and butter. Spoons and knives shone like stars between the planets.

She baked her Welsh cakes every morning, rolling out the speckled dough over the table, a continent whose boundaries stretched outwards from the middle, barely visibly, as the rolling pin moved lightly under Nan’s hand. I recall our anxiety as the rounds were cut out, and we were pained again as the golden dough was stained on the griddle. Nan just smiled and carried on. She must have made thousands of them in her life, those golden coins, but statistics would be meaningless. Nan wasn’t one to keep count.

The evenness of her handwork. The swift movement of knitting needles, the controlled loosening and tightening of the wool under her finger. She threw off the stitches carelessly, discarding them as she talked and laughed. But at cast-off and make-up time, the stitches’ uniform tension proved her even hand.

Remnants of clothing were transformed into patchwork quilts. We watched her do it. Her endless patience. Tracing the aluminium template. Cutting up the hexagons. Tacking. Stitching hexagon to hexagon. Time becoming space. Daily life made even.

Nan created a garden for herself at the back of the farmhouse, a patch of mountain enclosed by a wire fence. The Italian prisoners of war helped her, showing how to carve terraces into the earth, as they’d done in their own vineyards back home. Nan grew flowers and shrubs that lived in counterpoint to the mountain, just like the Latin plants’ names and her Welsh accent.

But the earth was rough and shingly, unfavourable to horticulture. The mountain tended to take back its own ground. The terraces became steeper and steeper every year. But Nan persisted. The garden was her pride.

Sheep would push through, eating all that was edible, trampling on the terraces, leaving behind them nothing but grassless patches. Of course, she’d been foolish to challenge the mountain. But she’d start again and soon the flowers were back. Nan also knew how to hold her ground.

She was even in walk and even in talk, and even also in grace. Who could have told that she’d spent her life between two steep and unforgiving mountains?

She’d watch us playing from the farmhouse window. The mountain had lessons to teach, especially to those of us who’d been reared on flat marshland up towards the coast. It pulled itself from beneath us when we least expected it, and made us somersault through thistles, wool and sheep dung, and it was only back at the house that we’d find our feet again. The quiet hearth there. As we stared into the everlasting fire, butter melting in a glass dish, Nan would lay the table.

Taid would come in cold from off the mountain, the stub of a Players cigarette between finger and thumb. He’d wheezed as he approached, our chatter stopping. Between snatches of breath we’d hear him talk of the mountain. At the top, he said, were bilberry bushes and pools of water where people had dug for peat. There were larks arising and peregrine falcons falling at the speed of bullets. The steep Oerddrws Pass, far below, seemed flat from up there, and above you, he said, there was nothing but summits: Waun Oer, Foel y Ffridd, Foel Bendin, y Glasgwm, Aran Fawddwy, Aran Benllyn, Cader Idris... Taid knew all their names by heart.

He’d talk of superstitions and fairy lore, and the terms were unfamiliar: ‘cotton grass’, ‘the bandits’, ‘causeway’.... There was that sprig of white heather he brought back, and the strange fly-eating flower. We couldn’t disbelieve him. That was disrespectful. Yet, we couldn’t quite believe him either. Taid’s testament was enigmatic, he himself so foreign to us.

After supper every evening he’d fetch his broken reading glasses and retired to the parlour. He adored analyses of history and politics, and reading was his passion. His horizons were so broad, you’d think he’d spent his life on mountain tops, and we’d look at him in wonder as we looked towards the peak of Tynybraich, obliquely and at a distance. And as with the mountain, we both longed for his attention and feared it. The steep gradients of his character. His strict attitudes. And his ready laughter at man’s folly.

Of course, tied as we were to Nan and house, we didn’t know of Taid the shepherd, and of his daily care for the sheep on the mountain, climbing through the seasons to perpetuate the work of his forefathers. Between winter and spring, billhook in hand, he’d cut off branches to feed the sheep, and later, during the lambing season, he’d be up there counting, protecting the weak newborns from crows and foxes. If a late frost threatened sleet or hail, Taid would come home with a lamb in his pocket, all damp and slippery, its breath irregular and its head hanging down in frailty. It would be placed on the hearth in a box lined with newspaper and nourished by Taid with milk from a rubber teat, Nan looking on at new life marking the hearthstone.

In spring, if the kitchen light suddenly dimmed, Taid would have to climb up to the reservoir at the mountain top. It would be frogspawn, stopping the steady flow of water down to the turbine, and so he’d move it away by the fistful, keeping one for the jar he’d brought up specially and which he’d hand over to the children on his return, a transparent treasure. And now the farmhouse kitchen would be lit anew.

At weaning time, Taid would have to separate the male lambs from their mothers. For days after, the mothers would bleat in anguish, and I remember seeing Taid watch them press their bodies hard against the mountain gate in longing.

With his neighbours he’d gather sheep for dipping and shearing, relaxing at the end of a summer’s day with banter at the kitchen table, with Nan attending half-listening as she refilled all the men’s dinner plates. But it was in winter that the mountain demanded most from Taid. Sheep were often be trapped beneath the snow and he would climb up, inserting a rod made of hazel through the thick white blanket. Prodding and poking, he knew from experience where the sheep had gone to seek shelter. There was no guarantee. It was an act of faith. But sometime, finally, Taid would feel the living softness and the far end of the rod and go down on all fours to free it. He’d watch the sheep run off with chunks of snow still in the wool, shining in the blue light of daybreak. Hours later, Taid would return home, lame with frostbite. Nan, relieved to see her husband back, would hurry to fetch a bowl of hot stock with which to warm him.

We didn’t know, back then in childhood, how much the mountain had demanded from Taid. Our uncle, my mother’s brother, had largely taken on the farm by the time we came along, and we were too young to comprehend the story of Taid’s three brothers, all born blind, who’d had to be sent away to boarding school in England, and of two other brothers who had died in childhood, as well as his only sister, dead at age eleven. Taid was the only one left to work on the farm, to continue as expected, as his forefathers had done for centuries before him. At eleven years of age he’d had to leave school and dedicate his life to Tynybraich mountain.

Gravity’s strict lessons; Taid learned them young. The mountain took possession of his life, his education, his wish to study medicine. But he slowly reached a compromise with Tynybraich, dividing his life between it and his fellow men. He became a local councillor, an NFU official, and travelled on Union business to London and Brussels. And it was this unwilling farmer who came to add his name to the Tynybraich genealogy, taking on the mountain’s name, at least in local parlance. And after their marriage, Nan shared that name with him. Tynybraich: the covenant of mountain and house.

I only climbed it once, Tynybraich mountain. Taid had been buried many years, Nan a few months only. In truth, his testament still lived on in the highland: the bilberry bushes, the pools of dark, dark water where the peat was dug, the rising lark and the falling falcon. There was the Pass. There were the bandits. And the cotton grass and causeway, as well as all those peaks whose names I’d never mastered.

But soon, a sense of trespass made me leave. In any case I had to go, and bid goodbye to my aunt and uncle. I had turn my back on Tynybraich and drive down all the way to Cardiff. There was work on Monday morning.

I picked my way through thistles, wool and sheep dung on the way down. And then, coming within sight of the house, I remember slowing down involuntarily, as Taid himself would have done, yielding to the pull of the farmhouse. In my head there was the sound of Nan laying the table.

Then I remember stopping, up there on the mountain, to wonder at the scene before me, seeing the narrow ledge on which the farmhouse stood and the precipice beneath it. And seeing, as Taid himself had seen throughout his life, the evenness radiating from it and filling the valley.