In some respects the indigenous inhabitants of Clough’s kingdom, and of the mountains of North Wales in general, were therefore as uprooted as the seasonal or even most of the permanent English immigrants, who moved into the farms and cottages abandoned by the natives. Like a house built on subsiding land, the foundations of their society were breaking; unlike such a house, they could not be shored up. Isolation had kept the society together in the past, along with poetry, puritanism and the general poverty of an essentially rural society. All this was now going. The chapels stood empty. (I cannot recall meeting any ministers of religion in our years in the Croesor valley, except the highly anomalous, because Anglican, R. S. Thomas, who came to bury our neighbour and his fellow-poet, in English, Thomas Blackburn, in a steeply sloped graveyard with an unforgettable view of Snowdon.) Total abstinence from alcohol, which had to be the defining criterion of puritan Protestantism in a population so energetically interested in (officially non-existent) non-marital sex, was in retreat. The locus for the new culture of militant Welsh nationalism was not the chapel but the pub. (Clough had built one, the Brondanw Arms, with a beautifully wrought metal wreath as the inn sign, but this motif meant nothing to the inhabitants of Garreg and Llanfrothen, who called it, and the pub, simply The Ring.) Only a tolerant silence about illegitimate babies remained, even the ones that could not be quietly disguised as unexpected younger siblings of their mothers. The hillsides were abandoned for lowland council housing with central heating. Even money now divided communities more, for within the Welsh language community, wealth had not been decisive in the past, since the really rich and powerful were or became anglicized, that is to say they were outside it.
If anything, the hierarchy of status had been spiritual or intellectual – that of minister of religion (that is to say orator), poet and scholar – who might be anyone, a postman with a gift for improvising the complex metres of Welsh verse or, like the great antiquarian and scholar Bob Owen, the pride of Croesor, whose library now forms part of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwith, a clerk at the quarry. (His son and his family – Tuddwr, Gaynor and their children Bob, Eleri and the baby Deian – were and remained our friends in the village.) A less cultural, but still locally recognized male status also came with distinction as a poacher, a widely practised and universally approved sport. Even in our times, when a Welsh friend from an old quarry village wanted to give us salmon for dinner and asked the weekly itinerant fish-seller for the price, the response naturally was: ‘Are you buying or selling?’ R. S. Thomas’s great poems should not mislead us into thinking of most North Wales hill farmers as unintellectual hulks. A lot of Welsh reading and thinking went on under those low roofs, ancestrally designed to combine a maximum view of approaching strangers with maximum shelter from rain and storm. In many ways our neighbour Edgar from Croesor Ychaf, explaining the regular collective pre-shearing round-up by the local farmers and their dogs of all the sheep running free on the mountain, was as knowledgeable about the ecology of the terrain as the college-trained and sullenly nationalist nature warden who had moved into the former village post office, and at least as articulate.
Whether Clough’s kingdom was typical of mountain Wales, I cannot tell, but it was an unstable and unhappy place full of underlying tension. It found expression in a growing, resentful and sometimes rancorous, anti-English feeling, a withdrawal from personal relations which came more naturally to adults than to children.2 There were also other signs of social malaise. When what were locally called ‘the orange people’ (the ‘sanyasins’ or followers of the Indian guru Shri Bhagwan) came into the valley in the early 1980s, they won converts among the native Welsh as well as, less surprisingly, in the English bohemian diaspora. And clearly not only because their way to salvation encouraged a lot of free sex. Croesor was a marvellous place for family holidays, but it was not a happy valley.
By the time I retired from Birkbeck in 1982 we had spent time in Clough’s kingdom every year for almost two decades. Bryn Hyfryd, and even more Parc Farm, flanked by the old Manor House (Big Parc), with its visitors and the tiny Gatws bursting with Schwarz cousins, was part of our, and even more of our children’s, lives, and friendships. Just because it was not blanketed by the permanent routines of everyday and professional life, the memories associated with North Wales – even the domestic and family rows – stand out with special vividness: the terrible news of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968, news of the death of my aunt Mimi brought by telegram – there were still such things – to a phone-less cottage, the car-door torn from its hinges by the storm as we got out to make our way to Edward Thompson’s New Year’s Eve party down the torch-lit path, our drive with Dorothy Wedderburn to picnic past Aberdaron on the far point of the Lleyn peninsula on a sunny Christmas Day, the ancient well in Parc that went on supplying us with water even in the great drought of 1976. Except for the landscape, it was not perfect: living in Boy Scout discomfort became less attractive (it had never appealed to Marlene), and the growth of nationalism soured relations with the Welsh. But, though I was now about to spend four months a year in New York, we would probably have stayed in the Croesor valley to the end of our lives.
But after Clough died in 1978 and Amabel in 1984 things changed. Clough’s grandson, who took over the estate – his parents were busy running the factory and the marketing of Portmeirion pottery – was a passionate Welsh nationalist, who showed no interest in his grandparents’ collection of Cambridge antiques, occupying houses which ought to be re-echoing to the Welsh language of their restored Cymric families. In short, the leases of the outsiders were not renewed. The official reason was that leases would henceforth be given only for permanent residence. We were allowed to stay on year by year until a suitable Welsh tenant could be found, or the estate could raise the money to make the premises of Parc Farm habitable for anyone except a romantic second-homer. We stayed on those terms for a year or two while we looked for another home in Wales, but no longer in North Wales. In any case our friends were also losing their cottages and, by the time I got into my seventies, clambering up Cnicht was no longer so attractive. We found it in the milder landscape and political climate of Powys, from whose hills I can see Cader Idris on a clear day.
My daughter still goes to the valley from time to time. Neither Marlene nor I have been there since we moved away in 1991. I have not the heart to see the place again. But I cannot forget it.
15
The Sixties
I
Sometime in early May 1968 I found myself in Paris, where one of the offshoots of UNESCO had organized a giant conference on ‘Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought’ to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth. Like most such gatherings, its obvious function was to give a number of academics a free trip to an agreeable tourist centre; and, like most conferences on Marx, especially those to which a platoon of ideological bureaucrats from the USSR contributed extremely boring papers of no interest, it encouraged participants to get out of the conference hall and into the streets. But on 8, 9 and 10 May the streets of Paris – at least those of the 5th and 6th arrondisse ments – were full of demonstrating students. By sheer chance, the commemoration of Marx’s anniversary coincided with the the climax of the great Paris student rebellion. Within a day or two it was to become more than a student rebellion, namely a nationwide workers’ strike and a major political crisis of the regime of General de Gaulle.1 Within a few months ‘the events of May’ were recognized as the epicentre of a bicontinental outburst of student rebellion, crossing political and ideological frontiers from Berkeley and Mexico City in the west to Warsaw, Prague and Belgrade in the east.