llechfaen
He is always standing in a shoddy wooden shack by a dimly lit workbench, beside an open engine. The light bleeds in between the planks and he is a very short man. His hands are knots of arthritic joints. His arms are compact and strong beneath a sheath of wrinkled skin. There is no fat on him. Sometimes he is wearing a collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Sometimes, a pair of worn-out overalls. Whatever it is, it’s always covered in grime. His wiry white hair sprays out around an island of bald. Something about his expression bears all the wry curiosity of a very kind, very mad scientist. Maybe it’s the thick-lensed goggles that balloon his brown (or green or maybe bright blue) eyes into shining, gentle moons. And always, without fail, he is smiling. But not at me. Perhaps at someone behind me. Perhaps through the open door, to the rolling slate hills, that I won’t see until three years after he’s dead.
…
We are walking past the little cobble cottages. Mum and Dad, Chia, Granny, and me. It is a cool white morning, the sunlight revealing itself in the silver tips of the long grass, shimmering in the wind. Chia is wearing yellow, mud-splotched wellies that go all the way up to her knees. Dad is wearing a frown. We pass the old outhouses, derelict and still. They stand like slate gravestones with no epitaphs, only cracks. The trail is fringed with moss — a verdant green frosted with droplets of morning dew. I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going to see you.
Dad, what do you remember about the slate hills?
That’s where I was brought up, in a little village called Rosebush. It was the first village in Wales that my Mum and Dad settled in, ‘cause they were originally from England.
Both of them?
Yeah, Mum and Dad were both from around Basingstoke.
Oh, what? I thought Grandpa was Welsh.
No. I'm adopted, you remember that?
No, I know. I thought Grandpa was born and raised Welsh and Granny was English.
No, they are both English — well, Mum is English. Dad was English. They were both brought up around the Basingstoke area. They bought places and gradually settled around Rosebush, which is an old slate mining village in the Preseli Hills. They used to quarry slate out of the hills.
In the 19th century, slate was adopted as the main roofing material of the Industrial Age. It is a smooth, grey rock that breaks from itself in sheets and, for a while, most of it came from Wales. Quarries sprung up like chickweed across the country. Countless men poured into the mines. Dangling from wires. Working at the rock with crowbars or wedges. Packing gunpowder into drilled holes to blast chunks away. Countless died in accidents. Caverns were carved — black gashes in the green land. The piles of discarded rock formed new mountains. When the war arrived, the quarrymen left, but the scars of the quarries remain.
Welsh slate roofed the Roman forts at Segontium. Sheltered the people of England and Ireland. Grew to cover Germany, North America, and Jamaica. They say the slate quarries of Wales roofed the world. This is almost true. I grew up under a roof of clay.
Cantre'r Gwaelod
Did Grandpa tell you any stories growing up?
Yes.
The old myth goes like this — there was once a kingdom called Cantre'r Gwaelod. It was a prosperous community of sixteen cities, each more beautiful than the last. The kingdom was ruled over by the wise King Gwyddno Garanhir. Nestled in the lowlands, surrounded by sea, the cities were protected by Sarn Badrig, the great sea wall. Every morning, the young man Seithennin would open the sluice gates, and the water would gush into the pastures. And every night he would close them and silence the roaring pour, reducing it to the sound of water gently lapping at the sea wall.
…
We have made it past the little cobble cottages to the beginnings of a hill. The soil is soft enough to sink into but we keep moving forward. Granny is marching on beside me, her bright red jumper bleeding against the washed-out horizon. She has a pale face, pale eyes, and lots of wrinkles. I count each one and try to memorise them. I think she misses you.
What do you remember most about your Dad?
1.
Dad’s sitting opposite me. Hunched over. Gazing straight ahead. He looks a bit like a policeman in his toll collector uniform. Since Maggie Thatcher broke down the aircraft industry he’s been working the night shifts here. It’s a cold, black night, but I don’t mind. There’s a heater in the corner and I have a crate to sit on. So it feels, for the moment, like we’re the flame of a tea-light candle — just Dad and me — flickering in a giant, shadowy room. That is until a woman approaches the booth.
I can’t see her, but from her voice, I imagine a plump lady with little pursed lips. She says, “Tell me what would happen if I didn’t pay the toll.”
Dad pauses, looks left and right, then leans in, his brow furrowed and serious.
“Well, it wouldn’t be a very good experience for you,” he says, almost whispering.
“Why?” I picture the woman’s tiny mouth agape.
“I’ve got this pedal down here, underneath my foot. And I’ve only got to tap it once and giant spikes will shoot up through your car.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t do that would you?” she stammers.
“I wouldn’t want to, I’d have to.” He turns to me and grins.
2.
Dad’s wading through the water, pants rolled up to his knees. He’s bought a catamaran from Alfie Noals. It’s not like he needs another boat — he just fixed up the last one two weeks ago — I think he needs something to fix. It’s only 30 feet long but with a monster engine in the middle. Dad loves the boat. I love the boat. He’s tinkering with something in the engine. Before that, he was stripping paint off the hull. And before that, he was fitting a new rudder. I’ve been helping. I pass him the tools.
3.
Dad went to the dentist with a dead tooth and came back with none. Having taken the bus home, he’s plonked himself down at the dinner table, mouth stuffed full of wadding, and started reading the paper.
“Well?” Mum says, staring blankly at Dad.
“What?” He replies, muffled by the wadding. “Dentist wanted three of them.” He points to his mouth. “Would’ve left me with twelve.”
“And?”
“I said just take the lot out.”
He’s got a pair of dentures now. They’re plastic and perfect and wiggle around unnaturally when he laughs. The wiggling freaks me out. Unfortunately, I see it often.
4.
Dad and I took the dog bus up north. We call it the dog bus ‘cause it used to be a hot dog van before Dad turned it into a caravan. It’s always up north, these trips. We went to England once or twice but that was all. I don’t think England has anything Dad’s looking for.
It’s just me now. Dad went off to explore the abandoned slate mines. I watched him wander, bewildered like a kid, into the wide erasure of the cave, till only his white hair remained. He looked back for a second, then was gone.
…
How old was he again?
My Dad?
Yeah.
He would’ve been — I think he was 95 when he died?
I went back in 2012 to see Dad and he was on his deathbed in the hospital. I couldn’t stay as long as I wanted to. He’d had a terrible series of strokes and was on a feeding tube and stuff. He couldn’t even talk.
And I didn’t — I wasn’t there for the funeral. They played ‘In The Mood’ for him to be taken out. It was his favourite song. I’ve got a DVD of it if you want to see it sometime.
Dŵr
Grandpa is standing by his boat. The light scatters across the water and he is still a very short man. As he likes to say, dynamite comes in small packages. His hands are strong and his arms are strong too. He is wearing army surplus pants and a white cotton shirt, undone at the front. And his hair is white, but not wiry, it's soft and feathered. His eyebrows are bushy, his skin weathered, and he looks less like a mad scientist and more like Mr Sheen. And it’s glasses, not goggles, that balloon his pale blue eyes. Still, always, he is smiling.
…
We are nearly at the top of the hill. Tall enough to see the full span of the countryside, speckled with black cows and flowers. I think if I stood here an hour or two, I could be convinced that the whole world is quiet. Chia got tired, so she and Mum fell back. Dad has a solemn look that he’s mostly directing at his shoes. Granny says we’ll be there soon.
Do you ever miss home?
Yeah of course I do. Well, I don’t know if it’s home as much as it’s a moment in time.
But you had two choices, really. You either left Wales and went to uni, which is what I did, or you stayed there and made the most of your life, and probably ended up getting married young and having kids by the time you were thirty.
If I’d gone back this year, I’d have gone back to The Galleon and everyone I grew up with would have still been there, sitting at the same bar I left them at in 1989. Still having the same relationship hassles with somebody in the village. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I always dreamed of being a musician. Going to university was the only way to do that.
Once, in the kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod, the young man Seithennin stood on the sea wall and thought of stealing a rowboat. He looked towards the castle, standing steady as ever on the hilltop. Stark against the night. Ablaze with the light of a thousand fireplaces. Searing itself into his eyes, staining his skin red.
“A Sun!” he cried, laughing into the night. “A Sun!” And Seithennin sailed away, but in his fervour, he left the sluice gates open.
…
Do you feel sad that we didn’t meet him?
Yes.
He would have loved you kids. I think he would have seen a lot of similarities between you and me, and Kate and Chia. He would have loved to have quizzed you and gotten into a political debate. I don’t think he ever got to make the connection between me leaving and… for him to have really seen things come full circle… he would have loved it.
When Seithennin sailed away, the water rushed in: rabid and foaming and cold. Great mountains of tide, taller than the castle, black in the moonless night, flooded the streets, crushed the cottages, swallowed the people whole, and settled. And the kingdom was lost beneath the water.
…
Did you guys talk much before he died?
No, because he wouldn’t — he was deaf.
He was deaf?
Yeah, he had really bad hearing.
I always kept in touch with Mum on the phone. When I first went to uni, Dad would come to the phone a bit, but he would always be in the background. And it’d sort of be, ‘I’ll get your mother.’ ‘Oh, I actually want to talk to you’ — you know? I was living at uni. I probably went back twice a year from the moment I left. So everything changed overnight.
I still came home though. I still came home. But Dad — you know, it’s only actually talking about this now — we were really close, Dad and I. He took me on camping trips, we put up tents together, we did all this stuff and he was a good Dad when it came to doing all that.
But the minute I became me, I think something switched off in him. It’s weird. I don’t know if it was because I was adopted — I didn’t know I was adopted then. I don’t blame me coming to Australia. I think the separation actually happened the minute I left and went to university. I just couldn’t speak to him. I didn’t write letters, ‘cause he wouldn’t have written back anyway. I miss that. I regret that. I do regret that.
So let me try.
Grandpa,
I am standing on the slate hill. I think it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Everything here is black rock — glassy and perfect and mottled with grass. In the middle of everything, there’s a lake: calm and blue and clearer than the air around it. I look into the water and see every sheet of slate, every grain of sand, swirling. It’s so desperately quiet. A blade of grass lands on the water, sending ripples across it, and I think I can hear them gliding along the surface.
I had wondered how a lake got on this hill. Granny told me it’s a reservoir, left over from the mining days. She says this whole hill is left over from the mining days, this pile of shatter.
There are several things I would like you to tell me: One: Dad says you invented the ballpoint pen — tell me if this is true; Two: Dad says you taught him how to strip engines – it’s unfair that I don’t know how to strip engines — tell me how I can too; Three: Dad says you came to Wales to leave Basingstoke behind — tell me where a place goes when you leave it.
Dad says Granny scattered your ashes here. I look back to the lake and imagine I can see them, swirling with the sand, and I think that I would have liked to have known you.
So I look into the water. I look for you in the water but I only see myself. So I look through myself to the sand. And through the sand, to slate. But if I squint my eyes, and stare a while, I see it through the slate — a light, flickering — the faintest outline of a kingdom peeking through.