In My Mind's Eye Page 14

  I am mentally, spiritually, artistically, intellectually and possibly historically disqualified from useful participation in these debates and confrontations, and so I have half reached the conclusion that I should opt out. Am I on my own, or do I hear muted applause, like the tears of that baby behind the screen in the 1920 cartoon, crying for the future?

  DAY 138

  I blush to admit it, as a republican of long, long standing, but it seems to me that the one possible instrument of world peace is the quaint, ridiculous but essentially harmless British monarchy. The United Nations seems to have bowed out of the reconciliation business, all the Powers are absurdly quarrelsome, and the only diplomatic approach that every head of State seems eager to accept is an invitation from the Queen of England.

  The difficulty is this: who is to offer such hospitality without being, or seeming to be, politically animated? I suggest somebody altogether detached from power, politics or economic dispute, somebody essentially innocent and even a bit simple, somebody of a certain age who has grown out of ambition or religious bias and only wishes to be nice – an unfashionable quality, but one I respect.

  In short, somebody like me, and when invited I shall go at once to North Korea, for a start, to be nice to President Kim, to jolly him along and to take with me a sweetly worded invitation to spend a weekend at Balmoral with Her Majesty the Queen of England.

  Who can doubt that he would accept, and it would be the gentle start of a universal diplomatic rapprochement, gratefully to be remembered by future generations as Pax Janica.

  DAY 139

  Yesterday was the opening day of Festival No. 6. It is a celebration of arts, music and such – you know what festivals are – which happens every year in the fanciful village of Portmeirion, a few miles from us down the north-west coast of Wales. The event takes its name, footlingly, I always think, from a sequence in a television programme called The Prisoner, which was filmed there years ago. I never watched it, and I am not big on festivals, but annually since this one began I have contributed to it a talk about Portmeirion itself.

  This is because for seventy years and more I have frequented and enjoyed the highly idiosyncratic village itself, and for half a century at least I delighted in the company of its equally idiosyncratic inventor, Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis, who died in 1978. Clough, as he was known to one and all, created the place from scratch, a light-hearted assembly of buildings old, reconstructed and brand new, assembled in a marvellous coastal site below the mountains of Snowdonia. It had a serious purpose – to demonstrate that it was perfectly possible to create a new tourist destination in a heavenly setting without wrecking the local numen – and it has worked perfectly ever since (except perhaps for visitors without a sense of humour …).

  It has worked especially well for me – I take visitors there, I eat meals there, I love strolling about the place and enjoying its infinite subtleties of architecture and allusion. So when I learnt years ago that Festival No. 6 was going to be launched there, my heart sank. You know what festivals are! Portmeirion was sure to be spoiled, I thought, its delicate purposes ignored in the name of Profit, in an unsuitable site that was, for all its beauties, almost ignobly subject to our legendary Welsh weather, especially in early autumn. Poor Clough! thought I. Poor muddy Portmeirion!

  And if you came to Portmeirion yesterday, you might have thought I was right. As usual, rain intermittently poured and mud was everywhere. A maelstrom of traffic infested the place amidst the puddles, with stern car-park warnings and myriad attendants and shuttle buses perpetually changing gear, and the whole village itself apparently taken over by some tented army of irregulars. When I picked my way towards the gloomy-looking marquee where I was to perform my piece, it was as though I was navigating Dante. Everywhere along my path, it seemed to me, were twisted backpack denizens of inferno, lying around in every corner of shelter, drinking from paper cups, weirdly dressed, and sometimes accompanied by violent, subhuman music.

  But –

  But! One and all, without exception, all those figures from hell, there amidst the mud and rain, turned out to be delightfully friendly and helpful. Holding their horrible coffee in one hand while they jumped to their feet to help me through some particularly ugly quagmire, they were laughing and smiling always, and truly kind; and so was my audience, when I arrived at last, dripping, confused and breathless, at my makeshift podium.

  I could not have asked for a more understanding or forgiving reception to my address, when I floundered through it in that Dantean tent; and when I left Portmeirion in the evening, leaving the place to its own multifarious performances, I felt sure that far into the night dear old Clough himself would once again be enjoying the infernal goings-on. I always feel that in the end.

  DAY 140

  I have been, in my time, an old-school British imperial patriot, a groping liberal internationalist and a whole-hog Welsh nationalist, and I feel myself to be a bit of all of them to this day. Since I came of age at the end of the Second World War and Churchill was, so to speak, pensioned off, no politician has ever inspired me to say, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s a track to follow through the wilderness of our times.’

  Until this morning, when I read that Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, the president of the European Commission, stood for a Federal Europe – an association far more ethereal than the loveless European Union. I have articulated the same ideal when people have asked me just what my own vague ideology envisaged. I have long said I stood for an independent Wales within a Federal Britain within a Federal Europe within (I have added, just to show I’m merely dreaming) a Federal World. But, yes, surely a Federal Europe is a perfect possibility, and perhaps the best we can aim at.

  It is obvious to everyone, I assume, that the balance of world power is shifting, that traditional democracy is in decline, and that perhaps more than any other nation Britain is feeling the rot. No other country was so wedded, economically as well as intellectually or emotionally, to the idea of imperial greatness, and no other people, so far as I can see, has been so thoroughly thrown off balance by its own decline.

  Surely, then, to be once more members of a great supranational power, a federation of equals, friends and colleagues, each still with its own national quirks, methods and characteristics, but each subscribing to a common ideology, with at least overlapping histories in common, and by now, as never before, a familiarity with each other’s ways and habits – surely this is a noble aspiration.

  So lead on, Herr Juncker (if ‘Herr’ you be, as a Luxembourger). If nobody else signs on, there is always me, a simplistic romantic, here in Llanystumdwy, Cymru/Wales, British Federation, Europe, the World.

  DAY 141

  I am at once pleased and regretful to record that our mouse infestation has been defeated. It was centred upon the corner of our kitchen where breads and cereals are stored, and so amounted, as it were, to an assault upon our very survival, together with a sort of chemical offensive upon our health mounted by very small black droppings of shit. Well, the attack has been repelled. First Elizabeth caught a mouse in a mousetrap, and threw it dead upon a rubbish tip; then I surprised one that was very much alive, head down in a packet of cornflakes, and banished it to the farthest corner of the garden.

  Pleased, then, I certainly am, but sort of sorry too, because it turns out that those two little animals constituted the whole mass of our invasion. Since we disposed of them a month ago the mueslis and breads have been inviolate – not a single nibble or excrement among the loaves. It turns out that it was just the two of them, just two small, sorry creatures with as much right to life and self-sustenance as we have ourselves.

  Thank God we’ve got rid of them, and if the live one finds its way back, I’ll murder it.

  DAY 142

  Walking home yesterday on a lovely autumn evening I heard a deep rumble somewhere, and lumbering into my line of sight across an empty blue sky came an old-school helicopter – not one of your fancy hoppity sort that
carry rich folk to their pleasures or their offshore profits, but the real thing, the original, the rumbling, labouring kind of helicopter that seems to me one of the great institutions of our time.

  For good or for bad, that old thing up there (for it always strikes me as elderly) has been an inescapable contemporary ikon. It has outlived Concorde and the hovercraft, it has fought in wars and made innumerable rescues, it has provided employment for princes and escapes for dictators – hope and despair and pleasure and even comedy, all have been provided by that essentially ungainly mechanism.

  Ungainly but to my mind heroic, in a homely kind. I know nothing about helicopters really, but they seem to me bee-like – bumblebee-like – and when that mechanism rumbled across my sky yesterday, going who-knows-where on who-knows-what category of mission, I would have tipped my hat to it in neighbourly friendship, had I been quite sure it was not going to machine-gun me.

  DAY 143

  Oxford, declared an American long ago, is a place where too many bells are ringing in the rain. It might almost be said, too, that it is a place where too many organs are always playing somewhere, in so many college chapels and churches and concert halls, from one end of the place to the other. It is a city infested with organs, and in this context I have a confession to make.

  If it so happened, dear aged reader, that you were walking in Oxford one day in 1937, you may have been surprised to hear the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ emerging fortissimo from St Aldate’s Church, opposite Christ Church. The grand old anthem was being played on the organ over and over again, by no means impeccably, but con spirito and decidedly with all stops out. Why? you may have wondered – may perhaps be wondering still? Was it a national day in France, or some anniversary of the Entente Cordiale? Was some homesick expatriate furiously comforting himself?

  No, it was me, eleven years old and a pupil at Christ Church’s college choir school close by. Somehow or other I had been let loose on that organ, and since the ‘Marsellaise’ was the only thing I could play on it, and I was everyone’s patriot then as now, I made the most of the opportunity and sent that terrific anthem, blurred and approximate, time and again reverberating through the city.

  Were you there in the street outside, that day in 1937? If so, marchons, marchons, and forgive me now!

  DAY 144

  A carnal little poem for my birthday (mostly fiction, by the way, but not entirely …):

  You must eat up your salad

  My mother used to say,

  Like all such mothers everywhere,

  From here to Mandalay,

  From the beginning of the world,

  Unceasing till today.

  But now I am an adult, I care not what they say.

  I am the lord of my cuisine, the captain of my tray!

  In my house there’s no salad. I’ve sent it all away.

  No boring tasteless lettuce, no cucumber may stay.

  Never a vegetarian now cares to come our way!

  And if resistant mums still vainly hiss,

  ‘There is no goodness in your carnal diet,’

  I say, ‘Dear Ladies, hold your prejudice!

  Why not try it?’

  DAY 145

  Two happy things happened to me today. First, my eldest son Mark, away in Alberta, told me that he is sending me for my forthcoming birthday a first edition, dated 1871, of E. W. Payne’s Glastonbury, or the Early British Christians. I have never heard of the work. Ms Payne was my great-great-great-aunt, or something like that, and while I have to say that our maternal literary forebears were seldom sparkling performers, and wrote chiefly pious works for children, still I shall be pleased and grateful to add her book to the family shelf in our library, which contains, I may add, a couple of books by Mark himself.

  (He is keener than I am, by the way, on family trees, forebears and such, but I must admit to being ridiculously chuffed when he discovered some time ago that we are directly descended on my mother’s side from Hywel Dda, the great Welsh law-maker (c.920–950). He was my grandfather × 32! By now millions of Welsh people can probably claim the same, but still …)

  Anyway, the second nice thing that happened to me today was the receipt, from dear friends in Charlottesville, Virginia, of a photograph. They had taken it themselves, they told me, during their walk home that afternoon, and it showed a simple chalked graffito on a pavement. There was the usual smiley face, and a heart, and a few childish hieroglyphs; but largely near the edge of the pavement, where nobody could miss it, were these magical words, boldly chalked:

  BE KIND.

  So all is not lost!

  DAY 146

  I have lived since kingdom come within sight of Snowdon, at 3,560 feet the highest mountain in Wales, and I think of it as a good old friend. It has never, however, actually excited me. It has size and presence, of course, but though it seems unkind to say it of such an acquaintance, to my mind Snowdon is short of charisma.

  Down the years artists of great skill and fame have had their go at portraying its massif, but they don’t seem to have been profoundly moved by it either. Of course, in the early days of mountain travel they loved to emphasize the thrilling awfulness of it all, those mighty ravines of legend, those dreadful chasms and inaccessible peaks, but I cannot help thinking they exaggerated their responses even then. And when truth crept in and more enlightened painters thought the area worth commemorating, somehow, in my view anyway, their innumerable canvases lacked magic.

  How different seems to me a lesser mountain thirty miles or so to the south! Arenig Fawr is a far smaller peak, 2,800 feet high, but it has apparently had a much more mystic effect upon artists – and upon me. I have always found it movingly haunting, and in the 1930s a highly gifted group of post-impressionists felt its pull so powerfully that they went to live in its shadow and interpreted its presence in vivid canvases that briefly came to constitute a true school of art.

  Many another artist has been drawn to Arenig since, and the reputation of the mountain was tragically climaxed, as it were, when in 1943 an American B-17 bomber, a ‘Flying Fortress’, crashed on its summit, killing all the crew. On a clear day I can just identify the silent peak of Arenig, away on our southern horizon, and my heart disloyally leaps; but there, honest old Snowdon understands.

  DAY 147

  I’ve been confused lately by the concept of ‘wilding’, the deliberate making of places wilder than they are by introducing species extinct or hitherto unknown in those parts. A much-publicized example of this human manipulation of nature was the reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park in America. Eradicated by human intervention in the 1920s, they were brought back again in 1995 to deal with an overpopulation of elk by eating them. As an unexpected result, beavers proliferated, I can’t quite remember why, and the whole food chain seems to have been affected by their newly ubiquitous dams, while the elks have proved themselves canny evaders of wolves after all.

  So is everyone, animal or human, happy at Yellowstone now? I don’t know, but the whole affair, and the whole conception of ‘rewilding’, makes me wonder what right the human race has to manipulate nature at all. Are we the bosses of the universe? Who says so? No doubt we are cleverer than any other creature, but does that give us the right to interfere with their very existence?

  Our various human religions offer different answers, of course, but agnostic that I am, I have turned to the Bible, the Judaeo-Christian manual of morals, to find one for myself. There it boils down, essentially, to food (as it clearly did at Yellowstone). In the book of Genesis I learnt that God himself certainly decreed that we humans should be lords over all living creatures, down to every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, but close readings of the scripture suggest to me that we humans have no divine licence to eat any of it, but are divinely intended to be vegetarians.

  One advantage of agnosticism, though, is that one can choose one’s own rules, and this is my conclusion:

  Treat all creation as equal, as
you would wish all creation to treat you. Some creatures would like to make food of some of us, and some of us would like to make food of some of them. but as far as you can, temper it all with kindness, which is the supreme human conception, and which I suspect Nature knows little of.

  DAY 148

  I have a feeling that the British, deprived of their old confidence and self-satisfaction, may soon be nostalgic for their lost empire, for so long an epitome of political incorrectness. I hope they are. I have spent much of my life investigating and commemorating the old Raj, and long ago became convinced that although, of course, we now realize there was much that was deplorable in the very idea of imperialism – everyone knows that! – in its British interpretation there was much to be proud of too, and lots to be harmlessly pleased about.

  The Empire certainly offered many perfectly decent British citizens enjoyable and worthwhile lives. At the top end of the scale were those whose careers quite plainly benefited everyone, rulers and ruled alike: doctors and nurses, engineers, scientists of many kinds, enlightened civil servants, teachers and geographers, and soldiers devoted to their men whatever their race, Geordies or Sikhs or Africans or Maoris. There were hundreds of thousands of such useful British imperialists, across a quarter of the world (and without question lots of them sometimes had doubts, as we do now, about the ultimate justice of their presence, however beneficial, among the palms and pines of Empire).