Once by McNeillie Andrew

Author:McNeillie, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wales, biography, memoir
ISBN: 9781854116376
Publisher: Seren

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Now it is serious. Now you know you have scarcely begun and the world seems huge, and there is some kind of fear in it, as you step manfully on behind the men, hurrying next to pass them, because you want to open the gate. But can you lift it up on its hinges and draw the ice-cold bolt at dawn? At the iron five-bar on the mountain road they’ll take an early breather, to consume the long view home, the foreshortened view up ahead. It’s still no nearer now, or easier, than when in those days they’d pause, to speculate about the weather and the rise, while I’d sail by to scoot the gate shut, swinging it to, with a clang that still jars through me, and as I grew older and with my youthful strength, kicked my heels to be off.

Now here I am like them, at the gate again with you, pausing with my pen, remembering how the year my feet grew big enough to wear my father’s cast-off boots, I took giant manful steps ahead, hobnailed, to hell with waiting, perfecting the gait that still marks me out on life’s road?

How I love a mountain road, its disappearing line, as if headed for eternity. The image of this one has haunted me ever since I used to walk it all but every week from chilly March to cool September. Though headstrong I am no more, if ever I really was. My head’s weakened by the world’s tragedy these days and I write from a consciousness of my own weakness, and loss. The already-fallen world lost, like paradise before it. What is there to lose next? Sense perception... the beloved. So make good your losses while you can.

I made that gate sing out on the mountain road, and went scooting in an arc round its tether, at first light, hinged to life. Now as I say I’m unhinged by remembrance and wrecked by grief at the horror, the horror of man’s inhumanity towards the world, the devastated globe. But was it the first day I did that first? It’s a long road and it has no turning right or left, until you’re at its very end, where the spine of broken green floods out into boggy ruts grazed by sheep, or in those days it did, to more-or-less a sheep-path way, down to Llyn Eigiau, a shallow, silty, shrinking water under Craig Eigiau, not up at the head of its cwm. You can just make out from here the long retaining wall with the gap punched through it, the gravity dam that so gravely gave way and sent the billowing lake hurling all before it, down into Dolgarrog village, one tragic night of disaster in 1925. (The Deluge my father had called it in a tale he published in 1951.)

But the road was a rough track, and potholed, and broken, and if you ventured down it in the brake, you’d ground your sump, crack your – what was it? – your differential, wreck your exhaust.

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