Everything I Have Always Forgotten by Hughes Owain

Author:Hughes, Owain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seren

XV

MOUNTAINS AND GUNS

Outside the school in London, we would go and visit a small toy shop where the owner would sing us dirty songs (“Auld Ma Kelly, with a Bamboo Belly and Her Tits Tied Up With String…”) and seemingly overlooked the shop-lifting exploits of my classmates. I never tried theft because I knew it was wrong and above all, I did not want to be caught. I had enough chastisement in school for things I did not comprehend, why look for more? Perhaps the ‘Head Man’ was whipping me to stop me even thinking of shoplifting. If that was the case, then it certainly worked.

As a teenager, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer – my neighbour at dinner at Pratt’s, a very select gentleman’s dining club to which Father once took me told me that the purpose of the ‘public school system’ (private, exclusive schools) was to instil a certain deviousness and a capacity for bending the rules “without ever getting caught.” Yet government ministers seem to be getting caught in droves these days. Perhaps the English private school system is no longer doing such a good job… For my own part, by his judgment, I did pretty well. By the time I had finished high school, I had an illicit car kept at school, smoked cigarettes (which I hated, but they were forbidden) and kept a cocktail cabinet inside a large old wireless, whose clumsy valve intestines I had replaced with a transistor set – which left plenty of space for bottles. I also had a girlfriend in a neighbouring boarding school and frequently broke the 30-mile limit for excursions on days off – I was clearly learning ‘to get the ropes’. Incidentally, to avoid the problem that gentlemen might encounter when unable to remember the names of the staff at Pratt’s, they were all called ‘George’ – it was considered more friendly than just calling out: “My good man!”

One landmark remains in the blur of those early years: a slideshow given by a member of the Edmund Hillary-Tenzing team that made the first successful ascent of Everest. I am fairly sure that the lecture was not given by Sir Edmund himself, though I did meet him elsewhere. No, I believe it was given by one of the support team who climbed as far as the last base camp… I vividly remember the unreal blue of the Nepalese skies and brilliant white fangs of the Himalayan peaks, of those early Kodachrome slides. My fantasies about becoming a rock climber were never fully realised, though I did climb some tricky crags in Wales, rocks that had claimed more than one life before and after me. I was about to meet my first climbing buddy and I was just nine years old by then.

I remember James Morris, the journalist who cabled news of the success of that ascent, when he came to visit my Parents, as a very manly man – a war hero and invincible journalist who wore heavy tweeds and stout hiking boots.

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