I said, "It's a hell of a breakfast—a beer."
"She's an alcoholic," Reeny said. "She's thirty-seven. Doesn't look it, does she? Take me, I'm thirty-three and no one believes it. My boyfriend says I've got the figure of a girl of twenty. You're not going, are you?"
11. The 10:32 to Criccieth
THERE WAS no good coastal path north of Cardigan—all the farms and fields were jammed against the cliff edge—but by scaring cows and climbing stone walls, I managed a few miles. Then I came to Aberporth and could go no farther. For the next five miles or more it was an army rocket range—and the rockets were booming. The British were fighting a war, after all—"this Falklands business." Over two hundred and fifty men had died just the day before in the battle for a small sheep station at Goose Green. Most of the dead were Argentines, killed by British paratroopers in fury after word got out that a mock surrender with a white flag by an Argentine patrol had in fact been an ambush, never trust an argie! the headline in the Sun said. Was this why the rockets were exploding at Aberporth?
It was true that much of the British coast was empty and practically anybody's; yet the rest was impossible. Things that were dangerous (like nuclear power stations) or that stank (like sewage farms) were shoved onto the coast. They were safer that way and out of sight. The coast was regarded as a natural home for oil refineries and gas storage tanks, and there was more rubbish on the coast than in any inland dump. The coast was where you got rid of things: they were borne away and lost in the deep sinkhole of the sea. The coast had more than its fair share of parking lots and junkyards; and out of an ancient islanders' fear of invasion—of alien peoples plaguing her shores—the British had overfortified their coast with military installations, gun emplacements, and radar dishes of the sort I had seen in Dungeness and Kimmeridge. And as if that weren't enough, they also had American missile bases and squads of American Marines in various coves. These places looked as though they were expecting another onslaught of rapacious Danes or shield-biting berserkers. Of course, the coast was perfect for practicing with machine guns or even bombs and cannons. Traditionally, the sea was safe to shoot at. Here at Aberporth it was rockets, and the incautious walker risked being blown up or arrested as a spy.
I turned back and stumbled up the grassy hill to the coast road. The road was narrow and the speeding cars made it dangerous—just room enough for two lines of traffic. I had to lean against the nettles on the bank to let the cars pass. I walked to Synod Inn, and when I became bored with waiting for a bus, I hitched. With my knapsack and leather jacket and the Ordnance Survey Map in my hand, and needing a haircut, I looked like a hitchhiker—with a unhurried, money-saving, ready-for-anything expression. I got rides easily, with farmers who were going only a quarter of a mile, and with men making deliveries or heading for work. They usually said, "And how are you liking Wales?"
Emrys Morgan, a carpenter with a ripsaw in his back seat, said, "Aw, the Englishman is a very secretive man. His attitude is 'I look after myself, and God looks after all.'"
I remarked that the Welsh I had met were very polite.
"Very polite are the Welsh," Mr. Morgan said. "And much more polite than the English. We're different stock, with a different tradition. We're European Celts, and they're Saxons and Normans."
Huw Jones took me to Aberaeron in his old gray Singer Gazelle.
"This is where the Welsh left for Patagonia," he said.
"I've been there."
"Aberaeron?"
"Patagonia," I said.
Aberaeron was an unusually neat and orderly town of Nash terraces and plain brown houses, and on some streets there were lovely Georgian houses on the left and pebbledash Council houses on the right.
"Most people in Wales are Labour Party supporters, not Welsh Nationalists," another Jones told me. This Jones was a lawyer—a barrister. He said the Labour Party had a stranglehold on South Wales especially. "They could put a bloody donkey up for Parliament in South Wales, and if they said he was Labour he'd get in."
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.