An Audience with an Elephant (5 page)

It is 9.30 a.m. in Machynlleth. A smell of fresh bread drifts through the town. In the sky the first of the day’s Royal Air Force jets are beginning their passes along the valley, as in the municipal rubbish tip George Gibbs is waking up. He has spent the night in an open shed which contains agricultural machinery, where across the entrance he has placed a series of planks and oil cans to deter intruders, so it is difficult at first to make him out in the gloom. Then there is a slight movement among a heap of old coats and sacking in the corner of the shed, and two large white eyes, like a lemur’s, peer out. Somewhere in the huddle a radio is switched on and pop music flares in the darkness. Mr Gibbs is awake.

All night he has slept on some planking, covered by his coats, his feet in an old dog-food sack. He has slept well, as he always does. ‘I can’t sleep in a bedroom any more. I roll around all night. But when I sleep on a hard surface I sleep all night.’ Gibbs has slept well in abandoned boats, in telephone boxes with his knees pulled up like a Mexican, even, he confesses shamefacedly, in public lavatories. But mostly he sleeps in far more comfortable surroundings, in empty houses, on dried bracken in snug barns. He walks some 8 miles a day. All over Wales he has places to sleep in at 8-mile intervals. After a week with him one begins to suspect that he has hides at such intervals to heaven.

It takes Gibbs a long time to get up. Finally, at 10.00 a.m., a small crumpled figure comes blinking into the morning. He is wearing an old black beret found on a rubbish tip, to which he has fixed a Women’s Institute of Wales badge found on the roadside, a cavalry twill sports coat given to him by a Caernarvon lady, and a sweater issued at the reception centre. On his feet he has a pair of ladies’ slippers found on Barmouth rubbish tip, which will be replaced that week by a pair of Wellingtons found on Machynlleth rubbish tip. Rubbish tips to Gibbs are the equivalents of all those marvellous wrecks bursting with consumer goods in
Robinson Crusoe
and
Swiss Family Robinson.
He scours them, poking about in the packing cases and ashes, the seagulls’ one rival. They clatter irritably up as he passes.

Gibbs is a curious, shuffling, knock-kneed little figure. He weighs very little, like most tramps — just 8 stone. Of a tramp found dead by the police, he told me: ‘The sergeant who found him said he was just like a sheet of cardboard to lift, a sheet of cardboard. He’d been dead a fortnight, I think. Poor old Paddy.’ He is bespectacled and bearded, and quite spectacularly grimy, a small boy’s dream figure of personal hygiene. He talks occasionally of romantic little morning dips in the River Conway but cannot quite remember when he last had one. ‘I prefer showers meself. It’s clean water. In a bath you’re lying in dirty water,’ says George with the cold objectivity of a man who has not been in either for a very long time.

He was born in Glasgow in 1917, the son of a sailor missing at sea during World War I; he himself went straight to sea after leaving school, ending up as a cook, and took to the roads after his own wartime experiences as a merchant seaman. He left the sea, having had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, ‘always thinking of the other ships that went up, the bombings and suchlike’. He told his mother he was off to look for work, and did work for a while as an itinerant agricultural labourer, but in 1948 he came to Wales and really went on the roads. He never told his mother he was a tramp: to the end of her life she believed he was a farmworker. The Gibbs family are not given to writing letters, and George does not know where his three sisters and brother are. Since 1948 he has been out of Wales twice, once when he went on a long tramp to Kent in the early 1950s, and contracted pneumonia, and once two years ago when he was given a rail warrant by the Stormydown Reception Centre to go home. On that occasion he found that his mother had died a few months earlier.

George is not very forthcoming as to the point when his itinerant labouring tipped over into tramping, but it seems to have been a quite gradual process. At first he worked regularly: now the last time he remembers working was over six years ago, for five weeks in a Flintshire brickworks. ‘Quite interesting work,’ he says airily. On tramping itself he says, ‘Once you get on to the road it gets into the system. It’s like smoking: you get a craving. I just can’t get off.’

At Machynlleth he has just lit his fire and is perched in front of it like a small Fisher King, dangling his billy can in the flames at the end of a stick. George puts his tea in the bottom of the can and allows the water to boil up through it so one can almost eat the resulting mixture with a knife and fork. As he sits he talks in a soft, unflurried monotone no incident can disturb. George says ‘Oh dear’ a lot of the time; as an exclamation it covers the gamut of his feelings, which seem to run from mild surprise to mild upset. When we found a huge black catamaran beached miles from anywhere on a remote beach near Aberdovey: ‘What have we here? Dear, o dear,’ he repeated in surprise. Again, when he saw some modernised buildings, ‘Ruined that, they ’ave. . . dear, o dear.’ George is like a whitewashed wall: one longs to scribble all over it, to make some kind of impression.

He is proud of being on the roads. On page after page of the occasional notebooks he keeps are reflections on the life and the lore. He lists the old tramping signs that were once scored on trees: does he ever make them himself? ‘No, I never do. Who’s to read them?’ The signs fall into two categories, invitations and warnings; the latter seem to be more numerous. Thus a circle bisected means that the householder could call the police Ø; Z indicates extreme warning, the tramp should move on at once. Others are amusing: two axe-like symbols mean that the householder will help the tramp, but will also expect work first; a triangle means the house is a police house. A circle is the symbol of a generous person, two small concentric circles of a rich person. Poring over this lore, George communicates it to nobody.

He did, however, earlier this year meet an Irishman travelling south. ‘He only had a little bag, no frying-up equipment. . .’. A long pause. ‘I think he was a hitch-hiker.’ This is George’s most telling recrimination against a fellow wanderer.

He himself is anxious to establish his credentials. ‘I think I must be the only fellow on the road with a radio.’ ‘I think I’ve got the only pram with two reflectors on it.’ ‘I think I must be the only man on the road who’s had six prams.’ On the sides of his pram he has written the names of the Welsh towns through which he passes. He was given it by a café owner in Caernarvonshire: the pram is battered and old, but to George it is wardrobe, medicine cupboard, desk, larder and trunk.

Today, as he begins to pack up after the night, it contains a ground sheet (a piece of wartime barrage balloon found years before on some forgotten rubbish tip), two radios (both of them gifts), a first aid box, an old cap with ear muffs, two very clean towels and a shaving kit (says heavily-bearded George of the latter, ‘It’s in case I go anywhere special’), mending threads and needles, a pair of sunglasses, the Bible, a camera (a gift for which he cannot afford films), a toilet roll, a knife, fork and spoon, some lard (which he prefers, as more nourishing, to butter), tea, sugar, an elderly pork pie, some cereals, a bottle of VP wine (his one alcoholic drink), a bottle of paraffin for his spirit lamp, a wrapped up frying pan, some lighter fuel for his stick lighter (another gift) and a pair of shoes too large for him to wear but too new to throw away. ‘I’ve got everything,’ reflects George, ‘except the kitchen sink.’

The pram also contains his occasional books, old notebooks he has found or been given. On one, in a large, round, child-like hand he has written ‘George Gibbs Esq., Scotstoun, Glasgow, Scotland’: it was the last time he had an address, a quarter of a century ago. He records in these books, in a weird macaronic mixture of Welsh and English, the deaths of his heroes: ‘Judy Garland found dead in her flat, Chelsea, Mehefin 22, 1969. Dydd Sul.’ In another I came upon the fruit of 25 years’ tramping, a neat list of Welsh convents, presbyteries and colleges with crosses, and circles to mark the degree of their hospitality. There is also a list of the best places to sleep (it includes a police cell).

Strangest of all there is a roster of police names: force after force, town after village, the constables, sergeants, inspectors. George notes their progress with the attention of a herald to a ruling caste, and supplements these with cuttings from local papers so the plump, untroubled faces beam out at one. Some have signed their own names. The police force has no more uncritical lay admirer than George Gibbs.

His passions, in fact, are two: the police and Wales. There are Welsh-English word lists, sad little dates from Welsh history, even this touching entry: ‘Give me the Welsh-speaking people any day. They are more kindly and friendly. I will stay in Cymru, and be buried here.’ The Welsh, he says, are sympathetic to tramps. ‘But don’t put that down,’ he says in sudden unfeigned alarm. ‘You’ll have the English coming over.’ He has taken all Wales to be his bedroom.

From Machynlleth George was turning south. In the three months since he had left Stormydown he had moved north in a slow arc towards Anglesey and was now going south along the coast. He travels his 8 miles on a good day, but intersperses these with rest days at intervals. ‘It’s not an easy life. I wouldn’t advise anyone to take to the road. It was really tough when I used to roam in the winter, maybe two to three inches of snow. I have difficulty getting my old pram through snow.’

He is fortunate in having good health. Apart from his pneumonia in the early 1950s he has been ill only once, when he went down with flu at Christmas time, 1969, having been soaked in a downpour on the way to Stormydown. The flu resulted in a spot on his lungs and he had to spend a month in hospital. He says of himself: ‘I’ve never been ill actually on the roads. Getting the air, day by day, and walking. . . quite healthy, me.’ Yet he has little energy and tires easily. His teeth are bad. In his pram he has a jar of home-made jam which he has not opened in two years. ‘Can’t. It would play holy mackerel with my teeth, that.’

There is an even tenor to his life, which all untoward events disturb, to send great ripples across it. Thus I came across the news of my coming on different pages of his books. Yet he accepted me the way he accepts everything, and was soon introducing me to policemen. ‘This is Mr Rogers. He is writing the history of my life.’ They looked incredulously at his Boswell as we shuffled by.

George plans his trips in a very loose way. He has a vague overall target, like Anglesey, but changes his route as it pleases him. ‘A man like myself going on steadily, not bothering anyone, bound for anywhere. Anywhere does me. A man who goes everywhere, bound for anywhere.’ This is the week up to his stay in Machynlleth.

Tuesday night
: A chicken shed, between Barmouth and Dolgellau. George has slept here before. The farmer, who has been here 20 years, says that, of all the tramps who once called, George is now the last. ‘We would think now that there was something missing from the year if he didn’t call.’ George sleeps just outside the chicken wire. Piled neatly are some old paperbacks he left the year before, and which the farmer has let lie. Before he sleeps, George, who is unable to light a fire here, asks the farmer for some hot water for his tea. The chickens grieve and scuttle. ‘Nice listening to the chickens,’ says George, ‘nicer than traffic.’

Wednesday
: Towards Dolgellau. First stop Barmouth rubbish tip, where George spends an intent half hour, disturbing the seagulls and finding only some week-old newspapers. He collects the week-old papers. As night comes on he settles down for the night in an open barn some 2 miles from Dolgellau: he has walked some 7 miles. He lights a fire, drinks yet more tea.

Thursday:
Towards Dolgellau. First stop Dr Williams’ School, a girls’ boarding school on the outskirts of Dolgellau. He always stops here. This time he knocks on the kitchen door and is given some roast beef sandwiches and tea. It is his first meal of the day. George reaches Dolgellau about midday and claims his Social Security benefit. This is the first breath of economics in his world. A tramp can claim a day’s requirement, the amount of which is left to the local office, but which in George’s case varies from 40p to 60p. At Dolgellau it is 60p. It is, in some ways, a cruel sum: just the minimum to keep a man alive. Yet to George it is a bonanza. Though he is entitled to the rate daily, the nature of his wanderings means that he rarely claims it more than twice a week. He encounters little difficulty at the Social Security offices as he is by now well-known to the officers. They fill in his name and age and seek to establish when he last claimed. Cases have occurred where the quick and the very quick among tramps have succeeded in getting to more than one office in a day, leaving a trail of benefit claims. With his 60p he buys milk, ten cigarettes, a packet of tea, and two pork pies. He begins the slow winding climb out of Dolgellau. The night is coming on as he wheels his pram over the pass towards Abergynolwyn, a slow little figure lost in an eternity of cloud and rock. He plays his radio. That night be sleeps in a barn under Cader Idris. It is his most romantic place, a foot deep in dried bracken. He lights his paraffin lamp, makes tea with hot water from a nearby guest house, and eats his two pork pies. And so to bed.

Friday:
To Abergynolwyn. He rises at 10.00 a.m., his usual time, drinks some more tea, again with hot water from the guesthouse, and starts. It is a glorious day. He wheels his pram along the perimeter of Tal-y-llyn lake to the village, where he buys a tin of rice and calls on the policeman. He and PC Edwards talk about the old, dead tramps. ‘They’re a dying race,’ says the policeman. His wife gives George some sandwiches and a pair of good old shoes. The shoes disappear into the pram. Everyone seems to be glad to see George. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ says one old man. ‘Now I know summer is really here. You’re the first swallow.’ George goes off the roads early, about 4.00 in the afternoon, as he is tired. Because of traffic, he is careful not to walk at night. He sleeps in an isolated little shed some miles from the village. As the dark comes in across the mountains, he lights a small fire, heats his rice and eats his sandwiches. He plays his radio into the small hours.