The Kingdom by the Sea (24 page)

We were riding up to Aberystwyth. The coast here was very slopey—the green cliffs slanted down toward the sea. In the little bays and near villages there were always acres of orange tents and caravans.

"These people come down from Birmingham and the Midlands," the lawyer Jones said, "and they pitch their little tents. They look around and decide they like it. So they see a farmer. Has he got a cottage for sale? He probably does—farmers are having a very tough time, not enough work for their laborers. He sells the cottage. They're very cheap. It's a second home for these people. They just come and go as they please. Those are the people whose cottages are burned by the nationalists."

I said, "Wouldn't it be simpler to burn the tents?"

He laughed at this. So far, I had not met anyone in Wales who objected to the burning of English-owned cottages, and some people seemed to find it considerate and humane, since they were always burned when the owners were away.

Welshness was also a look of orderly clutter, and Aberystwyth typified it—houses everywhere, but always on streets; the cliffs obliterated with cottages, but tidy cottages; a canyon of flat-faced and barren buildings on the seafront, but green mountains just behind. I stayed in a guest house, Eluned Williams, Prop. "You're not going?" she would say each morning after breakfast. Business was bad. But I wasn't going. I was doing my laundry. I was off to the beach ("well adapted for bathing, and yields cornelians, agates, and other pebbles") to look at the tar-stained stones. I was browsing and sometimes buying in the antique shops—I bought an old walking stick that had a tiger's tooth for a handle. I was looking at the bookstores—the University College of Wales gave Aberystwyth its studious air, but the Act of Parliament (1967) had made Welsh equal in importance to English, which meant that every municipal and university meeting was twice as long, since it was conducted in both languages. One day there was a Peace March in Aberystwyth. There were signs in Chinese characters, and Buddhist monks, and adults and children, protesting the building of a nuclear installation in Wales at Brawdy. "Join us," a man said to me. I was wearing my knapsack. I shook my head. "Can't," I said. "I'm an alien." That was the day I was doing my laundry. I was in my bathing suit, and every other article of clothing I owned was in my knapsack, to be washed.

I took the narrow-gauge railway to the Devil's Bridge, through the Rheidol Valley and the deep gorge of the Mynach. It was a toy train, and full of pipe-stuffing railway buffs and day-trippers. And there were rowdies, boys "in care," I was told, abandoned by their parents, patronized by the state; they were pale tattooed thirteen-year-olds smoking cigarettes and saying, "It's fulla fucken trees," where William Wordsworth in another mood had written,

There I seem to stand,
As in life's morn; permitted to behold
From the dread chasm, woods climbing above woods,
In pomp that fades not; everlasting snows;
And skies that ne'er relinquish their repose...

And there were parents, too. I treasured their angry remarks.

"Oh,
God,
Roger, can't you see he's just desperately tired!"

The child in question was spitting and kicking and crying, a furious little weevil who did not know where he was and perhaps thought, in his animal way, that he was going to die here.

And one mother, looking at the tormented face of her wet baby, grew very cold and sarcastic.

"Someone's going to have a warm bottom in a minute!" she said.

The baby groaned like a starving monkey and tensed its fingers, indicating fear and frustration.

The Welsh people on the train stared at this behavior and thought: The English!

***

Ever since Tenby I had noticed an alteration in the light, a softness and a clarity that came from a higher sky. It must have been the Atlantic—certainly I had the impression of an ocean of light, and it was not the harsh daytime sun of the tropics or the usual grayness of the industrialized temperate zone; daylight in England often lay dustily overhead like a shroud. The cool light in West Wales came steadily from every direction except from the sun. It was especially strong as a force rising out of the distance and reaching earth again in a purer way as a reflection from the sky. The sunsets in Aberystwyth were vast, full of battle flames, never seeming to move and yet always in motion. It was a severe shore, and those houses looked harsh, but the Welsh light—the immense cold mirror of the Atlantic—made it gleam, and made its sadness visible.

One evening strolling on the Front at Aberystwyth I remembered that, just a year before, I had stopped smoking my pipe. I had not had a smoke of anything for a year. To celebrate, I bought a cigar, but Mrs. Williams wouldn't let me smoke it at her house ("No one has ever smoked at Y Wyddfa"—it was the name of her house—"and I don't think I could stand it if they did"), so I took it out to the Front and set it on fire and smoked it until there was only an inch of a butt left, which I chucked into Cardigan Bay.

***

I took a tiny two-coach branch-line train out of Aberystwyth, up the west side of the Rheidol Valley, and around the bushy hills. The countryside here was tumbledown and beautiful. Dolybont was an old village of rough stone cottages and a squat church and thick hedges, and with his head out of his bedroom window a white-haired man was reprimanding his dog in Welsh.

The train climbed and paused. There were fifteen of us on it, and two got off. Then it picked up speed on a slope, and soon it was racing out of the hills, doing sixty or more, quite a speed for a little country railway train with squeaky wheels. We went on, tearing past the buttercups. We entered the plain that lay between the sea and the mountains, and on the plain's edge was the small seaside town of Borth, a straggling beachfront with the shadow of the Cambrian Mountains behind it. We swung east at the lip of the River Dovey, past Taliesin ("the grave of the Welsh Homer ... Taliesin, the greatest of the bards, Sixth Century...") and then along the riverbank. Aberdovey was under the hills at the far side of the estuary; this whole place was wonderful—the river valley about two miles wide and a great deal of it flat grassy marsh in which sheep were grazing, and the valley sides were gray hills and mountains.

It was muddy and majestic all the way to Dovey Junction, where the river and the valley were shrunken. Because of its steady level progress, a train was the perfect way to see a landscape—it was impossible to be closer to the ground. And it was an excitement to travel up a contracting valley, from the broad river mouth to the creek at its narrow throat—it was like being swallowed.

We came to Machynlleth ("believed to be the Roman Maglona"), where I saw a sign advertising the Centre for Alternative Technology. I asked directions and was told it was three to four miles up the road. I walked there through the woods and found it at Llwyngwern, at the southern edge of Snowdonia National Park, in an abandoned slate quarry. It was a settlement on a hillside and at first sight seemed no more than a jumble of ridiculous windmills and hand-cranked contraptions set among cabins and flapping plastic. The flapping plastic was part of the solar power units, but it was a dull day and no solar power was being generated. Here and there were signposts with homilies on little placards. I copied one into my notebook: "Waste is really a human concept, for in nature nothing is wasted—everything is part of a continuous cycle."

The Centre for Alternative Technology was an elaborate and messy reproach to middle-class tidiness, a kind of museum of compost heaps and enormous and unfamiliar-looking toilets. There were buckets everywhere. Nothing was thrown away, and it was boasted that shit could be turned into valuable gas, and eggshells into rich humus, and this tin funnel labeled "Pee Can" was for collecting urine, "another valuable fertilizer."

All of this was true, and there was a great deal of earnest work being done at the Centre to make it monumental, the apotheosis of a dunghill. Their gardens flourished. They made bran cookies and sprout salad and chunky vegetable soup, and their children had rosy cheeks. Wales was said to be full of communes like this, but the Centre charged admission and offered bed and breakfast. It was a happy-looking place, and if it seemed a trifle preoccupied with waste matter and a little passionate on the subject of bowel movements, it could be explained in terms of Welsh culture, in which both evangelism and toilet training figured fairly strongly. In any case, I was treated with hospitality by the Alternative Technologists. They regarded my knapsack as an indicator that I was one of them, deep down—and having seen what the old technology had done to South Wales, I think I was. Any alternative was better than the nuclear reactors on the coast, even the odd designs they were advocating, the harmless energy of solar panels and the superior, multipurpose shithouse.

I walked back to Machynlleth. A grouchy guard at the station, Willy Bevan, said he didn't bloody know which was the next bloody train to Barmouth. He consulted his timetable.

"Two-thirteen. But there's an 'E' on it. What does
that
bloody mean?"

He checked the footnote.

"Not on Sundays," he said. "Today's bloody Friday."

He consulted the timetable again.

"And one at two-forty-eight. But there's an 'A' on it. What does
that
bloody mean?"

He checked that footnote.

"Saturdays only," he said. "So the next bloody train—"

I went down the line in a small train to Dovey Junction and I continued on a second train to Barmouth. The junction was in the middle of the river valley, just a halt in a marsh, but the other train was waiting for this one as we drew in. The remote branch lines of Wales were run with efficiency and pride. The services were frequent, even here, and I could easily have crossed the line and taken a train to Shrewsbury and been in London in time for dinner.

The train traveled seaward along the north bank of the river, and then westerly into the glare of the afternoon sun skipping through the marsh. Tracking around a hillside on a ledge, the train swung away from the wide estuary of the Dovey, and its shore of sand and broken slate, and then north to Aberdovey—houses on the steep hillside, tin caravans on the beach.

Caravans—it soon became obvious—were the curse of the Welsh coast. They were technically mobile homes, but they were not mobile. At best they were tin boxes, the shape of shoe boxes—including the lids—anchored in a field next to the sea, fifty or a hundred at a time, in various faded colors. Sometimes they were plunked down on slabs of concrete, and where there were more than a hundred—I counted over three hundred in some places—there was a fish-and-chip shop and a tin shower and another tin outhouse with a sign saying conveniences. What fresh water there was came from a standpipe surrounded by squashy mud. The whole affair put me in mind of nomads or refugees, certain Afghans or Somalis or Kurds, or the dizziest Gypsies who had perhaps made a little money but refused to abandon their old ways, sending their womenfolk out for buckets of water. You wondered how they could stand it so close to each other in such tiny unsheltered quarters, and you also began to ask the questions that true savages inspired—not the civilized Afghans or Somalis, but those people in remote parts who looked so naked and uncomfortable, you wondered how they washed and ate and kept dry and did their business. And there was something totally savage in the way they did not notice the incongruity of the settlement, how ugly it was, how beautiful the beach. The caravan settlements were always hideous and always in the loveliest coves.

They were English people, of course, encouraged by the Welsh to have a cheap holiday here. Some lived in orange tents at the margins of the caravan fields. It was always a lurid sight on a hot day, the pink people reading the
Sun
in front of the orange tents, making cups of tea on little flaming tin stoves.

It was like the nuclear power stations and the junkyards and the shallys and sewage farms: you could do anything you liked on the British coast, beside the uncomplaining sea. The seaside belonged to everyone.

After Tywyn and more caravan camps, the train climbed to open cliffs and traveled through rocky sheep pastures, and then near Fair-bourne passed the foot of Cader Idris ("the chair of the giant Idris"), a high ridge with a three-thousand-foot peak, which was one of the most beautifully shaped mountains in England. Then across the bar of the Mawddach estuary, with the watering place of Barmouth lying under a hill. The river was wide and purple-blue in the lowering sun, with flat sandy banks rising to steep hillsides and more mountains. Barmouth looked to be a place of great refreshment, but closer it was excruciating, much too small to contain the mobs, not enough parking lots or sidewalks. The sunburned people were milling around, and—unusual on the coast—the train cut right through the middle of town; everything was halted and tangled while the train made its stop, and Barmouth was suddenly full of pedestrians impatient to cross the line.

I had thought of getting off at Barmouth, but I changed my mind when I saw the numbers of people—in fact, I did get off, but I hurried back on, not wanting to be duffilled. And I had another reason: there was a note in the Cambrian Coast Railway Timetable that said, under certain asterisked stations,
Calls on request. Passengers wishing to alight must inform the guard, and those wishing to join must give a hand signal to the driver.

I decided on Llandanwg. I told the guard I wished to alight there. We continued along the coast, passing four or five tiny platforms, and then the train stopped at Llandanwg, for me alone. Llandanwg was lovely, which was why it was full of ugly caravans. I walked to Harlech.

Welsh mountains looked like mountains, and its cottages like cottages, and its castles like castles. Harlech Castle was the very image of the gray mass of round towers high on a sea cliff that children dream about after a bedtime story of kings and princesses and dragons. But I kept my vow against entering castles or cathedrals, and instead walked through the Royal St. Davids golf course to the dunes and examined the caravans and tents. I did not really hate them. I was fascinated by them, as I had been by the shallys on the English coast. I made notes about the furnishings (camp cots, folding tables, transistor radios playing loud music) and about the food (tea, cookies, soup, bread, beans). The people in these encampments were great readers of the gutter press—lots of cheap newspapers were in evidence.