Once (23 page)

‘Will you come out with me?'

What did I think, after that dancing...? She was just delivering the bad news to Max or Brad or whoever (the class of their names spoke volumes), back from the university for Christmas, and ever hopeful.
Yes... yes... yes...
she would. She would. I wanted to kiss her at once but could give no indication, I was so overcome. I still can't believe my lucky stars. I certainly couldn't believe them then. Disbelief threw me back into orbit, to go and look a little closer at those stars, to believe my eyes, into the wildest orbit I can remember, bar one (euphoria at the Black Lake, in the estuary, or on Inis Mór being of a different, steadier order).

It was a cold December night. The stars were up above the wooded hill. And the hill held dark chasms where the trees stood, dark as any allegorical dark wood ever portrayed in life's way. The sea ran on the coast, just audibly. And the town went about its business, oblivious that a miracle had taken place while I walked and then ran through the streets up to Tan-y-Bryn Road and, instead of plunging up our rocky road, ran on round to Nant-y-Gammar hill. Yuri Gagarin never made a bigger or faster orbit of the known world than my lap of honour that night.

Nant-y-Gammar is a narrow hill road of steep gradient. But I ran, the loneliness of the long-distance runner my forte at that time. No gravity could hold me back. On I ran, talking to myself, urging myself on, calling her name, my name, in wild exclamation.
Yes! Yes!
I shouted to the night. Talk about possession. Whoever said it is only nine-tenths of the law never set eyes on the Welsh girl. I got onto the heath, way back beyond our property. The surge of energy released in me by her
yes, yes...
was surely as manic then as it is comic to consider now. I ran on, climbed the high estate wall and jumped down into the conifer planting. The trees there being not yet established, the planting was entangled and overgrown underfoot. But I leapt and bolted through it on to the ancient deciduous woods of Gloddaeth.

Pheasants spurted up about me from the planting like fireworks as I went. I took no care whether Mr Groom the gamekeeper might be about or not. Pegasus couldn't have caught me as I raced on down the hill now, through the great shadowy wood, deciduous and bare, except for loomings of yew and cedar that suddenly obscured the stars. Believe them? They filled my head. Then I broke on down through a little run of hazel and saplings until I met the low wall, at the back of the big house.

A peacock trailing stars behind it flew in wild terror from its roost on the high wall, at my sudden descent, and laboured with a peacock cry, to settle in a tree above me. Such a din! I ran a little faster now, for the path was a dark and shadowy trap, until I got beyond it, beyond the lodge house in the corner of the field, where a dog had begun to bark. I ran out to the foot of the bryn, and on, accelerating as if for the finishing line at Marathon, till I reached home, my heart still hardly quiet, in the wake of her acceptance.

So it was my life entered a fourth dimension.

Now instead of stealing glances into the front-room as I delivered the
Guardian
, I could sit in it, while my beloved played the piano, or did her homework, so that we could go out. I could talk with her there, in the chaos of that room which accommodated in pillars the dispersed library of the late Charles Jones, B. Litt. (whose memorial prize I'd won). Here I found undreamt of treasures. It became my own private library. All the poets in library editions were there and many another thing that shaped my reading as not even the combination of my father and Meirion Roberts could have done. There were books and there was a gramophone too. Now we'd sit entwined on the sofa together listening to works by Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Grieg, Sibelius, Dvorák, Smettana, Tchaikovsky.

For me it was the first time I heard such works. I applied myself to them. I applied myself to her. I realise now that the preference in that household for such a high proportion of nationalist music was an expression of Welsh passion by other means. Not that the great Welsh choral performances were silent there. Not that the family was as Welsh as it might have been. There was Liverpool-Welsh in them, and a strain from Manchester. The Welsh girl's mother was a fay one though, and her mother seemed to me as Welsh as they come, a one-eyed, glass-eyed granny, sea-widow, living on Menai Strait at Waterloo. There sometimes the Welsh girl went into purdah to study and I'd be allowed down for an afternoon, perhaps to see her.

High culture and Welsh culture notwithstanding, ‘Top of the Pops', in the era of ‘The Supremes' and ‘Ike and Tina Turner' (river deep, mountain high), didn't go neglected by the Welsh girl either, all that stuff about love-me-do and not being able to get enough satisfaction. Here was sexuality manifest, just as our own was compelling us towards each other in our all-embracing dream of each other.

By comparison up under the wooded hill we were hardly a musical household. We had only recently acquired a record-player. My sister, away to train as a speech-therapist, encountered jazz in England, at concerts promoted by Norman Granz. It was the era of Acker Bilk too, whose ‘Stranger on the Shore' I taught myself to play on an old clarinet, with n'er a lesson. But I soon departed from that and moved on from my sister's taste too, for the like of John Lewis and the MJQ. Less prim African-American music became my obsession, a music of the body and the soul, speaking to the wrongs not just of history but of America there and then, with proud and brilliant virtuosity.

Jazz was hard to come by in North Wales. Everything was hard to come by. I once set out to hitch-hike from Llandudno to Bangor to go to a specialist French-language bookshop there, in pursuit of work by nineteenth-century poets. It was a little shop near the university. No one would stop for me, so I ended up walking all the foot-weary way there, eighteen miles, only to find the shop had just closed. But I did come by jazz records: Thelonius Monk my first, most intense, personal discovery; Lester Young, Lucky Thompson, Johnny Griffin, Dexter Gordon, Roland Kirk, John Coltrane – all the horn men....

But here by the guiding light of the Welsh girl my horizons shifted and looked up even more, and my life changed. She even arranged for us to go to hear the Welsh National Opera perform ‘Madam Butterfly' at the Odeon. I didn't take to it. Little could I have guessed then that decades later I'd go with a friend to a brilliant performance of that most tragic and painful work, in Los Angeles. High up in the gods there, and blasted almost senseless by jetlag as I was, it still swept me up, and roused me too, vividly to recall my first night at the opera, in the kissing seats at the back of the Odeon, with my first love.

But all that excitement of discovery was as nothing against the intoxication of her presence walking with me, down Clarence Road to go to the pictures, for the first time, hand in hand, like Adam and Eve entering the unknown world together, as if forever. I can still hear those bottle-green suede shoes with the high heels clack and click as she stepped along chattering and laughing. I can still see the skirt of her light fawn tweedy coat swing from her waist as she strode and its suede collar and pocket flaps. I can still see her paleness highlighted by her raven-black hair. I can still feel her hand in mine, fingers interlocked, as in a dream. So it was.

I would know such intoxication again. But twice is impossible. And once is always enough.

A man's life no more than to say not just one, as Hamlet said, but once.... Then nevermore.

What world lay beyond Wales? What tempting but uneasy world beyond the moors and mountains, over the hills and far away, down-river of the Dee, beyond the marches, on Severn side, the promiscuous border counties, where dwell the Welnglish and Engelsh, and Wenlock Edge, and Housman's poems that by now I'd learnt to love?

At eighteen I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of occasions on which I'd spent spells of time in England. (I don't count here the night-drives that brought us at dawn to Gretna Green and Dumfries and led to idyllic holidays in Galloway, tearful to leave: night drives as if to protect our delicate souls from England in the light of day.)

It wasn't that I didn't want to escape. I was restive to be gone, to leave my father's house and be my own man, or whatever I might become. But for all its certainties, the soul of life in youth is all ambivalence, wavering unquiet, and Prince of Denmark indecision. The world beyond Wales I would enter, in my first clear step from home to independence, would be the dark Satanic North of England. I went with hope to study the philosophers and poets, but above all to join the Welsh girl there. But I dwelt unhappily in the great throng of the world, the unknown world, too well-known by my more knowing peers for a backwoods backward Black Lake boy like me to survive in.

It is no sin to lose your way, though you might be excused for thinking it so. I soon lost my way anyway and abandoned all pretence at study. I read only what I wanted to read and attended lectures sporadically if I did. Not that I knew what I was doing. It seems like immodesty perhaps but I think it was far more modest than that. It was misery and depression. I was grieving, that's what I was doing. I followed two courses loyally and closely: Geoffrey Hill on ‘Poetry from Yeats to Hughes and Gunn', and Quentin Bell on aesthetics, ‘bad art', and Victorian painting. Otherwise I played truant. I found bits of urban wilderness to mooch in and wrote poems. I found old city pubs to drink in and be melancholy. I wasn't homesick. I was out of my element, like the albatross on the pavement. Once in a way I was summoned to appear before a Dean, a man called Smith. I'm sure he was a decent person and only doing his job, but to me he was an officious policeman and I detested him. The truth is I was depressed and miserable in my circumstances. It is a common story. I was resisting the call to grow up. And that wasn't entirely unvirtuous, the way ‘up' was defined. Or I had to meet my Moral Tutor, a philosopher called Cameron, a quiet thoughtful and feeling man he seemed who interpreted ‘Moral' and ‘Tutor' in a very liberal way, making it clear, if not saying as much explicitly, that I must take responsibility for my own actions, or indeed as in this context was meant, inactions.

Christmas summoned me home early, to see my father in hospital, after he'd narrowly escaped death in a road accident. It proved a fateful time of regression, haunting again the cliffs and woods, shooting Lord Mostyn's pheasants where I could, or putting up a woodcock from the frosty leaf-bed, mooching at the borders of the day, or down on the estuary as the tides ran, checking nightlines, digging bait to set them again, in the cold salt air, in hope of plaice or flounder or stray codling. And the weather ran in spate about the Wooded Hill, roaring in the harried pines, as if the world was all at sea, and not just young Andrew McNeillie, Mac an Filidh (son of the poet or poets).

It was then that the whole starry-eyed beauty of that coast, the long sea-race roar, the rush of river, the jackdaws blown over the bryn, the wheeling seabirds above the rubbish tip, spilling over the bay, haloing the Norseman's Orme's head, wavering in the wake of Conwy trawlers; and the magic triangle of the Red Wood, the Black Lake, the Wooded Hill, the mountains beyond, and the straits, the islands, headlands, harbours, jetties and piers, reinforced itself in me, and I read my poets, and I read my prose, my Synge and Thoreau, my
Six Existentialist Thinkers
and wrote my poems of no promise that shortly began to appear in the
Anglo-Welsh Review
and I speculated on Inis Mór, where just that previous summer my summer wages had taken me to reconnoitre. I wrote. I scribbled long poems and short poems, to little avail, but my own interest in the struggle.

Meanwhile the other kind of writing was in the making: the writing on the wall of my fate. And down I fell as it foretold. And back I came again to Wales, but very soon away from home, where I was unwelcome, my parents having little or no sympathy for me, in my failure. Call me Ishmael. (And he shall be a wild man…) So I went South, an outcast, to Rhydamman, an anthracite mining village then, where for a fiver-a-week and penny-a-line, I began the reporting and journalistic career that would take me next briefly to Liverpool, then to Broadcasting House, to sit opposite the young John Simpson, to write stories from reports filed by the likes of John Humphreys. They were the days when Alvar Liddell still read the news, in his extraordinarily sonorous voice. (I once half fell in love with his daughter at a party.) Almost my last triumph – and I had one or two in that line – was a nailbiting last-minute minute-and-a-half's-worth for Saturday's foreshortened ‘World at One' bulletin. It was a story from the TUC's last day at Blackpool, General Secretary George ‘Eyebrows' Woodcock the man of the hour, and John Humphreys the correspondent whose copy I condensed, even as it still came spilling from the machine, thinking on the spot, standing to dictate my story to my allocated typist, sitting beside me. And next... hell-for-leather and adrenalin rush down to the studio, almost as in steam-radio days, in the nick of time.

Then very shortly afterwards, at the tender age of twenty-two, I resigned before a Board about to promote me to be a Senior ...what I don't remember, to leave for Inis Mór, rather in the spirit of Auden's line, ‘Leave for Cape Wrath to-night'.

I left by night train from Euston with all my worldly goods to catch the Liverpool ferry for Dublin. I had wrath in me too at the way of the world and the poetry of departure coursed in my youthful veins as the salt-sea coursed round the world. And the rest of this story I have told already.