Apart from the minority who came to do some serious climbing, what brought the rest of us outsiders to the Welsh mountains? Certainly not the search for comfort. In our Welsh cottages we voluntarily lived under the sort of conditions we condemned capitalism for imposing on its exploited toilers. None of us, even given the spartan middle-class styles of the 1950s, would have dreamed of accepting such standards in our everyday lives in London or Cambridge, not even my brother-in-law Walter Schwarz, with his boundless enthusiasm for primitive discomfort as indicating environmentally sound living close to nature. Even so, the only people we could rely on regularly to share the discomforts and the marvels of life in Parc Farm were close and weather-proof friends such as Dorothy Wedderburn. To guarantee even approximate dryness on our first night, we had to pack all blankets and bedclothes into vast airtight plastic bags every time we left Parc. It took two or three days after arrival to dry the house out enough to make it roughly habitable, and even then it was almost impossible to keep warm except in odd corners, in spite of paraffinheaters – basic equipment, though not much good for outdoor toilets – and the fuel for our fireplaces which metropolitan intellectuals, dressed in the local style like tramps, could be seen chopping in the drizzle outside their back doors. Perhaps the sheer physical discomfort of life in Wales was part of its attraction: it made us feel closer to nature, or at least to that constant struggle against the forces of climate and geology which gives such satisfaction. My most vivid memories of North Wales are of these confrontations: taking our two small children along stony, snow-covered tracks to shelter and giving them chocolate in a mountainside cave, returning from a long hike with Robin in persistent, drenching rain, scrambling along sheep-tracks on steep hillsides – if a sheep could do it, why not a middle-aged historian? – above all, walking, balancing and clambering round the steep rocky sanctuary of the Arddy, west of the ridge of Cnicht, rewarded by the familiar but always unexpected sight of the cold lakes hidden in its folds.
But these were visitors’ pleasures. Our part of North Wales also attracted a curious population of permanent or semi-permanent settlers, or rather refugees, from outside: freelance writers, displaced bohemians from Soho, searchers for spiritual salvation on low or irregular incomes, and the odd anarchist intellectual. The presence of Bertrand Russell, the aged guru of anti-nuclear militancy, in Clough’s kingdom brought a number of them into the area; not counting members of his own dysfunctional family. Ralph Schoenman, the young American militant who acquired such remarkable influence over the ancient philosopher at this time, never became part of the local scene. He was too busy whizzing round claiming to save the world, ostensibly in the name of Russell. However, after retiring from this battle Pat Pottle, secretary of the activist Committee of a Hundred (and co-liberator of the Soviet spy George Blake from Brixton jail), settled down in Croesor, attracted by his fellow anti-nuclear activist and revolutionary, the painter Tom Kinsey (later the only known anarchist master of foxhounds, but, Snowdonia being what it is, on foot rather than horseback). After the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 he had organized a demonstration in Portmeirion of thanks to Russell for saving the peace of the world – for it was in a telegram to Russell (in answer to one which Kinsey claimed he had drafted) that Khrushchev had actually made the official public announcement that the crisis was over.
This community of incomers lived side by side with the indigenous Welsh, but divided from them, not only by language but, perhaps even more, by class, lifestyle and the growing separatism of the locals. Sex apart, there were really very few close friendships across the ‘interracial’ divide, and little of that easy neighbourliness and village spirit that made coming to our present, equally remote and even more agricultural community in (Anglophone) Mid-Wales such a relief, especially to that spontaneous socializer, Marlene, after the growing tensions of Croesor.
Unlike the passionately Welsh but 100 per cent Anglophone native gentry, e.g. the Williams-Ellises, by the 1970s permanent settlers from outside began to learn the language themselves, not to communicate, but in deference to the increasingly obvious nationalistic feeling in the region. By the 1960s all except the very oldest and isolated locals were bilingual, bilinguality being essential to any Welsh person, even in the most Cymric village, who expected to watch television and have dealings with people from outside the neighbourhood, including the 80 per cent of his or her country’s non-Welsh-speaking inhabitants. That, indeed, was the fundamental problem for Welsh-speaking areas like ours, and the basis of their increasingly strident nationalism. Even the full linguistic assimilation of a few score foreigners was as nothing compared to the irresistible Anglophone flood of modern civilization.
For most of the mountain people the Welsh language was chiefly a Noah’s Ark in which they could survive the flood as a community. They did not so much want to convert and converse: people looked down on visiting South Walians with their ‘school Welsh’. Unlike Noah, they did not expect the flood to end. They turned inwards because they felt themselves to be in that most desperate of situations, that of a beleaguered, hopeless and permanent minority. But for some there was a solution: compulsory Cymricization, imposed by nationalist political rule. In the meantime the incoming invaders could be discouraged by burning down their second homes. Those who claimed to know said that some of the activists came from Clough’s kingdom, though it was not a centre of cottage-burning. People distinguished between the neighbouring summer visitors they knew and ‘the English’ in general. And although nothing can be kept secret in the countryside, unlike in the big city, no case of terrorist cottage-burning was ever solved by the police.