Jul 20

Jul 20 Orchid Chronicles - Part 7

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The hyssop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Well, it isn’t about finding a rare orchid (although I can think of some orchid fanatics I’ve met who might feel an awe verging on holiness) but, if it isn’t too sacrilegious to compare the Passion of Christ with something very personal, these lines from W.B. Yeats’ The Travail of Passion evoke in me something, yes, of course, holy, deeply sensual – and the smell of burning straw.

The last because I was declaiming this poem on one particular occasion at a place called Nettlecombe, buried in the secret heart of the Brendon Hills in West Somerset, where I had found myself living at the end of an extraordinary walk, one of a few over the years, that changed my life.

I was standing on a straw bale, in the proper declamatory manner, as illustrated above, when, on reaching the trembling climax of the final line, I became aware of shouting from the audience. ‘Get off! Get off!’ Just the usual philistine hecklers, I thought, hardened to the hurt. But wait – the smell of smoke, a crackle of flame, the growing sensation of heat. Get off!! Get off!!!

It will not surprise those local to the area to know that the culprit was our resident Samson, inveterate head-banger and practical joker, known universally as Bins, for reasons only Martin Hesp will know.

Built like one of the great English oaks to be found in The Grove and elsewhere in the mediaeval Great Deer Park at Nettlecombe, from which he annually still collects the acorns for posterity, Bins had taken upon himself to set fire to my bale.

We were holding our home-grown Poetry Festival that sunny, sunny day in the never-to-be-forgotten Summer of ’76, in that uniquely sylvan, dramatic backdrop to the aptly-named Pleasure Grounds. And a straw bale with a twerp in a blazer on it spouting high-flown gibberish proved irresistible to our home-grown joker.

He reminded me of this feat on a sadder occasion some 44 years later, when I stood on a chair to render tribute to the universally beloved sculptor and painter, Alex Hollweg, a soft, lime-wood pillar of the Nettlecombe world for our generation and beyond, who died, aged 84, at the beginning of this year. As I began my poem, Bins approached, lighter in hand, an evil glint in his eye…

Fortunately, the chairs at Monksilver Village Hall where Alex’s wake was held are less flammable than a summer-baked bale. But the chair I sat on towards the end of another walk, the one I mentioned on my return from Africa, aged 22, was different altogether.

After the months in East Africa with Pad and Charles and the Laughing Botanist from Kew back in 1975, I’d had the atavistic urge to suffuse myself in the green sap of an English Spring.

In total contrast to where the vast, thorn tree plains of the Rift Valley swam shimmering in the heat-haze towards the far distant mountains of Tanzania, with only the graceful liquefaction of giraffe or slow, grey drift of elephant to populate its terrifying endlessness to the very edge of the world, Dorset was small. Small, wet, cold, hilly and wonderfully green.

It was in a late March snow-storm on the edge of Dorchester that I struck off through the driving flakes towards Piddletrenthide, Plush and Folly. On my back, too many books, a folly that told on my knees as I pushed up through tracks and lanes, steep and first-primrosed paths, towards my distant goal. North Wales.

Folly or not, I couldn’t leave on this pilgrimage without Hardy, Hopkins, Eliot’s Four Quartets, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Byron’s Childe Roland, George Borrow’s Wild Wales, Heaney’s just published North, Hughes’ Hawk in the Rain and, no doubt, Yeats. Sadly, most of them were stolen along with the car they were in a few years later, for which I still scour secondhand bookshops in the vain hope of finding my much scribbled-in copies.

My load was heavy. The going was heavy. The clods clung to my still unbroken-in boots. My feet hurt. My knees twinged. But my heart was high. And one of the poet Edward Thomas’s favourite songs sang in my head.

To-om he-e wa-as a piper’s son,
He fe-ell i-in lo-ove whe-en he was young,
But a-all the-e tu-unes tha-at he could play
Was over the hills a-and far away.
Over the hills a-and far away,
Was all the-e tunes tha-at he could play.

By the time I reached Gloucestershire, the Spring had moved on ahead of me and now the lanes were a riot of Stitchwort, Speedwell, White and Blue Violet, Sweet Woodruff in the woods, Yellow Archangel, Primroses everywhere and here and there a spotty, ink-stained leaf that told of Early Purple Orchids coming with their cat’s piss smell subsumed within the rich, reek of wild garlic. The first Bluebells, weren’t far away either and soon there would be a sea of blue.

If only my knees would hold up. I’d had to beg a sofa off a friend in Bristol to rest them for a couple of days, jettisoning some of the books to lighten my load. But now I had high hopes of reaching my Ithaca, just this side of Colwyn Bay, nudging 300 miles or so from my starting point, in 15 or so days time.

So why? Why, when there was every incentive to begin the long dreaded haul towards adulthood in the form of a job, a career even, in whatever form that might take? Why, when I was broke and surviving on the last dregs of money from my travels in Africa, reliant on my parents for bed and board at the cost of independence and self-esteem? Why this further procrastination from reality?

Because I needed to see it, the place where I left my innocence behind. The place that had haunted my dreams ever since I’d left it at the age of 13 in 1965.

Call it a quest. Like the hunt for the mythical Ghost Orchid, a flower so rare that it was thought extinct many times over the last 100 years or so. Yet it still flickers every now and then in one’s or two’s, sometimes in places where it has been seen before, sometimes totally unexpectedly. Hence the name – Ghost. Partly because of appearance, partly because it is so ethereally, maddeningly elusive.

Aged just eight years old, I was packed off on a steam train in my grey flannel shorts, pale blue blazer and pale blue cap from Manchester’s Piccadilly Station, along with several other small boys. We left, in my case at least, tearful parents waving good-bye on the platform thronged with men in hats and women in head-scarves who receded out of view in a cloud of smoke and steam as we pulled away.

It was as exciting as it was devastating, this severing of the umbilical chord that had held me tethered in the protective, warm embrace of home all these years.

Readers of the Harry Potter books will be familiar with the Gothick surroundings of Hogwarts where young Harry found himself at the mercy of its strange rituals and magical phenomena. Not least the variably scary, sometimes terrifying staff, and the kind of gang warfare that occurs in all schools everywhere, I know. But when there’s no escape and you’re in the middle of nowhere, it does take on a different dimension.

Heronwater, set in the green sward of the Coed Coch estate, was not Gothic exactly. More with pretensions to the Palladian, with its imposing portico, grand curving double-armed central staircase, which boys were not allowed to use, and a wide, curving window in the Big Room. This last sticks in the mind from the time when, during a Latin lesson, poor ‘Loony’ Laurie, the Classics teacher, was driven to throw his shoe at an insubordinate boy, missed him and broke a very expensive, large curving pane set in that very window. I believe he, ‘Loony’, left in tears, his reputation always somewhat shaky, now well and truly shattered.

But he was kind to me, unlike ‘Crow’ and ‘Squawks’ who handed out sadistic punishments to all and sundry, Crow in his Maths lessons, never my strong point, and Squawks in the Sick Room, which unfortunately I visited on a fairly frequent basis, for at best, cod liver oil or iodine, neither pleasant, and at worst, incarceration for the flu or chicken pox, etc. I’m glad to say that at least Crow and Squawks found some form of happiness together, when they sealed the knot as destiny must have intended, even if they made life a misery for the rest of us.

However, I was beaten rarely, could read and write with fluency, run and jump fast and far and found friendship with some pals I could laugh with and make tolerable this incarceration in the grey slate, wet Welsh world, where bowels were moved to order at the prescribed time in outside toilets with no doors.

Best of all though, we had a wilderness on our doorstep which drew me in.

It was this wilderness, high on a hill called Moelfre Uchaf, known just as ‘Moelfre’ to us boys, I wanted to see again as much as anything. To be able to look down from the safety of the hill and see the place that had haunted me all these years. Where I survived but left something precious behind, lost during my time there, when life and hormones became more complex, more threatening, more confusing.

So this ‘Ghost Orchid’ quest was to, literally, track my life back in time, through the Spring, from where I lived now, in the West Country, up through the Welsh Marches and on until I could achieve what I hoped would be some kind of catharsis. To free myself, be able to let go of what had effectively been a trauma that had disturbed my life over a period of some years from the beginning of my adolescence.

This was a time, starting aged 12 or so, when I had to learn to close down a heightened state of what psychologists call a form of juvenile hysteria, similar to panic attacks, when everything threatens to go out of control.

It can be very frightening to feel you are going mad when there is no-one there to help or comfort you. When your imagination runs riot, your heart is racing, your head is hurting and a part of you just wants to give in and abandon yourself to whatever fate might be inflicted on you. And you can’t tell anyone, not even your parents, who aren’t there to help you.

So you fight yourself. You battle through the night, the worst time, with the sleeping bodies packed in around you in the dormitory, all blissfully unaware of your struggle. And it darkens your days with the weariness of it. But you learn to close it down. And with it, you lose a certain joy, call it innocence. The joy of just being. The unconditional love of life.

So I needed to go back to exorcise the ghost and reclaim, not innocence, perhaps, but the trust in myself and humanity that I had begun to find in Africa I felt and maybe before, on those first journeys through France and Italy and hitch-hiking alone in Spain, aged a very green 17.

Yet very quickly, I became adept at projecting a happy-go-lucky persona. You learn it as an actor learns a role until it becomes a second skin. It was my way of surviving in a hostile world.

And it worked. Often with the help of alcohol. And an attraction to risk. A way of sometimes living too close to the edge, or just over it. To experience the illicit thrill of danger, which is not sustainable, or responsible to self or others, but is when you feel most intensely alive and, paradoxically, close to death. For which I have paid the cost more than once over the years, if not the ultimate penalty, yet.

It still does work, this adept performance that does not tolerate unhappiness in myself or others, while I try and all too easily fail to unlearn it – to be able accept unhappiness as something of equal value to happiness.

And I am still working to unlearn it, this addiction to a perceived state of an essentially egotistical happiness, helped by 41 years of marriage to someone who is always herself, however difficult that can be – for both of us.

Helped also through walking – a way of rediscovering the rhythm of nature, an awareness of the world around you, beyond you, yet a part of you, feeling the ground beneath your feet as it lifts and falls, gives and pushes back, your blood pulsing in synchrony with the earth as you breathe green air from the grass.

Just listening to the sound of water in the brook, the wind in the trees, the different tunes of different trees, birdsong from just before light breaks, the first cuckoos as dawn floods through the open window of the barn you’ve slept in. And then, after draining the last delicious drops of milk from the cold, glass bottle you bought from the milkman’s float, or were given, still warm, just milked from the cow herself, watching the path unroll before you as you pass from farm to hill to wood to field, always seeing ahead the next aiming point, a hill, a tree, and yet not knowing what will be beyond, how far you will go and where you will find yourself as night begins to fall.

There were three things that marked me, that I have carried ever since, amongst the host of sounds and sights, encounters and discoveries on my Ghost Orchid quest, on my way up through the eight 65p 1974 Ordnance Survey 1:50 000 maps that comprised my walk through my past, present and now future life. Three things both separate from and profoundly connected to this journey back in time and forward into a kind of rebirth. A break-out from the loop of recurrent dream into a new reality. The reality of a man stepping out from his childhood into the colder and yet clearer world of adulthood, with all that that implies.

Amongst the sights and sounds, I remember watching the men in the Ship at Upper Framilode suck elvers dipped in their ale while they mused on the mysteries of the modern day, losing most of my money at poker in a Welsh pub where they all spoke Welsh – except me, finding Lily of the Valley just coming into flower with its wonderful fragrance in a Gloucestershire wood that I had never seen before in the wild (of which more to come), the endless Roman Road between Newent and Stretton Grandison that stretched my powers of endurance to its limits, and, through the towns and villages, the strange sense of floating through a busy world where people worked, behind whose windows families fought, made love, gave birth and died.

The first of the three things that happened was in the late afternoon as I approached the village of Hawkesbury, near Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire.

A young woman in a tie-dyed dress with blue hair and dark, shining eyes asked me where I was going. To North Wales, I said. That’s a long way, she said. I know, I replied. Where are you staying tonight? she asked. I don’t know, I said. Well, why don’t you stay with us? We live over there in a big house. There’s plenty of room, she said with a smile.

So we walked the half-mile or so to Hawkesbury Upton where she and a group of 15 or so others lived, or rather, squatted in a happy jumble of cushions, broken-down furniture swathed in colourful Indian throws with smells of patchouli and home-grown ‘grass’ drifting through the spangled particles of dust in the early evening light.

I joined them in the nearby pub and then we went back and my friend suggested she should read my Tarot. I agreed, intrigued, having never experienced this before.

She produced the cards and we began the reading. Gradually, the mood changed and, from a warm and growing intimacy which promised a less lonely night ahead, I hoped, she became progressively more wary of me and eventually she put the cards down and stopped, no longer meeting me with her warm, dark, inviting eyes.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What do you see?’

There was a pause. And then she said.

‘The Devil. I see the Devil, right behind you.’

With that, she put the cards away and got to her feet.

‘I’m going to bed’ she said. ‘You can sleep over there’, indicating a pile of cushions behind her.

I left before anyone had got up the next morning and set off up through Hillesley, Alderley, past Ozleworth Park, on my way up to Uley and Hetty Pegler’s Tump on the high ridge from which you look down on the River Severn. The 3,000 year old burial chamber that takes its name from the wife of the local landowner in the 17th century, contained 15 skeletons when it was excavated in 1821.

I spent that night in the luxury of a bed at The Royal Gloucester Hussars, now renamed The George, in Frocester having dropped down to the Severn Basin by nightfall. And I wondered what it meant. ‘The Devil. Right behind you’.

Was that who, or what, I was? Some kind of fallen angel up to no good, sowing mayhem and destruction in the world around me? Was I, fundamentally, a bad person, evil, even? It was a disturbing thought that led me into troubled dreams of women with blue hair and skeletons inhabiting a house of many broken-down mansions from which I need to escape but was baulked at every turn, with no Royal Gloucester Hussar to come to my aid, being boisterously drunk at the bar.

The second thing that happened to me was several days on, in the higher reaches of Llantisilio Mountain, after having met up with my eldest brother, Andrew, walking the other way, in the remote youth hostel of 16th century Wilderhope Manor on Wenlock Edge, run by the National Trust.

Wilderhope is reputedly haunted by the ghost of Major Thomas Smallman, a Royalist on the run from Cromwell’s Roundheads in the English Civil War. Escaping in the nick of time, he decided, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that the only thing to do was to make a do-or-die leap over the precipitous edge of the Edge – hence The Major’s Leap. Although his horse perished in the attempt, the Major miraculously survived, thanks to an apple tree breaking his fall. Whether he then lived to a grand old age, I don’t know, but I like the idea of the apple tree coming to his aid in a moment of crisis. Perhaps that’s why the Major apple, a fine bitter-sweet cider variety, long established and valued in South Devon and Somerset, is so called. May it break the fall of angels before they come to grief like me in Hawkesbury Upton.

But up on Moel y Gamelin, close by the Horseshoe Pass, North-east of Llangollen, refreshed by good food, better wine and brotherly love, something happened which brings to mind Yeats’s poem The Travail of Passion again.

Moel-y-Gamelin - photo by Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA

As you approach the summit, there is a small cairn of jumbled rocks from which, I sensed, hoped, I might share what John Keats experienced in his On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

I stood there seeing all the world laid out before me, stretching to the distant horizon, the before and after of my travels, of my life as child and man, and something opened – a ‘flaming, lute-thronged angelic door’. I became conductor of an energy, a light, a transcendent, holy joy. And I wept and laughed. I howled.

It felt like a shriving, a form of absolution in return for opening out and releasing all the corruption that lay within. I was one with the universe. Infinitesimally small, huge and yet humble, myself and yet a particle in a stream of stars that ran through me, connecting me with the cosmic vastness of everything and nothing.

At that moment I knew God.

On coming down, I made my way to Llanelidan where I stayed the night although I don’t remember where – a barn, a hedge, a pub. It may have been here that I stayed and slept on a bench in the pub, having in my foolishness, still somewhat concussed by my experience up on the mountain, joined the local poker school and lost nearly all my money. When you are the only person not understanding a word of what’s being said, you are a dead set for being taken for a ride. But I didn’t care. The joy glowed within me and the landlord took a shine to me and gave me a ‘room at the inn’.

The third thing that happened to me was, perhaps, the following day, a mere day away from reaching my goal.

It was hot, I remember, as I came down into a valley beyond the great Clogaenog Forest which I skirted, preferring to keep to the open air and take my chances along little lanes and tracks towards Llansannen, and the Rivers Aled and Elwy beyond.

Feeling strongly in need of a glass of water, I saw a cottage set back from the track I was on, walked through a small gate and up the path to the front door, festooned in floppy pink roses.

I knocked on the door and, after a short moment I heard footsteps and the door opened to reveal a woman with long dark hair, in her mid- to late-thirties, perhaps, in simple, working overalls. She had a pallor to her, as if she had suffered some recent illness or loss of some kind.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been painting’ she added in an unnecessary apology, indicating her overalls.

‘I wondered if I could have a glass of water’, I said. ‘I’ve been walking and it’s very hot’.

‘Indeed it is’, she said, with a shy smile. And after a short hesitation, ‘Please, come in.’

I went in and found myself in what was evidently her front room, which the front door opened directly onto in the small cottage where she lived, seemingly on her own. She invited me to sit while she went to get me a glass of water.

I put down my backpack, sat down on a small sofa and looked around me at the room. It was very neat, immaculate even, muted in fabric and plain painted walls, with a small bookcase containing some paperback novels, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of R. S. Thomas’s poems. On the mantelpiece over a small electric fire were a few ornaments, a framed black and white photograph of a man – a brother, father, husband, lover? And a small crucifix on the wall.

The room smelled clean with a lingering trace of Lily of the Valley, perhaps from her.

When she came back, she had a strange look on her face as she gave me the glass of water. We sat in silence for a while.

‘Have you walked far?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Yes. A long way. For many days now,’ I replied.

‘Your feet must be suffering in this heat’, she said. And then, as if deciding something, ‘Please wait. I won’t be a minute’.

When she came back, she was carrying a bowl of water and a towel. She knelt down in front of me and started untying my boots.

For a moment, I was too astonished to think what to do. Then, out of my embarrassment, I leant down to help her, or stop her, I was unsure which.

‘Please’, she said. ‘Let me do it’. And, one after the other, she took off my boots and socks, to my shame somewhat the worse for wear.

And then she washed my feet, her long hair trailing over each one in turn, light as feathers, as she bathed me gently with a flannel, warm from the water.

We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,

That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,

Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

When she’d finished, she dried them carefully with the towel, taking each toe between the soft towelling until she’d completed the task.

Then she rose without looking at me and took the bowl and towel away.

While she was gone, I pulled on my socks and tied up my boots and stood up, feeling that I should go.

She came back and for the first time, looked me full in the face. Then she gave me a radiant smile.

‘Thank you’, she said.

‘No’, I said. ‘It’s me who – ’

‘Go well’, she said, opening the door. ‘My name’s Lily. Don’t forget me’.

I won’t, Lily of the Valley. I won’t.

When I reached the hill known as Moelfre Uchaf, as I climbed past the sheep and clambered up through the bracken and heather, I knew what I would see from the top when I looked down the other side. Nevertheless, my heart was beating, not just from the exertion of the climb.

And there it was. My goal. The place where I left my innocence behind. Down there, looking small and grey, with the lake where we swam, fearing that the legendary giant pike would eat our toes or worse.

Did I find it, my innocence, the Ghost Orchid of my dreams? No. Nor, having knocked on the door and been greeted almost obsequiously by a much older, diminished version of the Crow I’d known, did I find the love letters I’d written to a very early girlfriend that I’d hidden under a loose floorboard in one of the dormitories and forgotten about when I left.

But the journey, the walk back to childhood and forward into adulthood – that was a different matter. It was the walk itself that had been the quest, I realised.

The odyssey from having the Devil on my shoulder, to knowing God on the mountain, to being taken as some form of Second Coming by Lily of the Valley – that was the treasure, not just at the end of the rainbow but all through its arc.

The school was a little place, high up in the lovely hills of North Wales, where I was a child who spake as a child, who understood as a child, who thought as a child. And I shall continue to see through a glass, darkly, aged 67, but shot through with brilliant light more times than I deserve.

But faith, hope, charity, from that wonderful passage in 1 Corinthians 13? These abideth, if sometimes less strongly than one might wish – and my religious faith has not attained the intensity of that moment on the mountain since then, I fear.

But faith in humanity, hope for a better world, belief in charity, or love, aye, there’s the rub. Despite the worst the autocrats, exploiters, dark money dealers, current slave traders and insidious manipulators of what’s true or false until we no longer know which is which, can throw at us – yes. I have them. Even if it takes some work to hang on in there sometimes.

Best keep walking then. There’s orchids in the next wood, I’m sure. A Ghost even, perhaps?