2. A Gathering Silence
The farmer had been out in the front field all day long, grubbing up thistles. He was fighting a constant battle with the thistles that invaded his fields; a battle he was losing, at least in this field, which was rapidly becoming overgrown not just with thistles but with bracken, nettles and sedges too. Personally I liked the thistles, they brought in the tinkling flocks of goldfinches that would winkle out the seeds with their sharp beaks; but then I wasn’t trying to scratch a living out of this land. I invited the farmer in for a cup of tea and he came to join me. He was a heavily built man, amiable and slow-moving, a man of few words, which suited me just fine, but on this occasion he opened up a little. He worked in partnership with his brother, who lived in the neighbouring farmhouse with his family. That farm had been bought, while this one was still tenanted. He told me he regretted never having had a family of his own, but he had stayed at home until he was in his forties to tend to his ailing parents, and by then it was too late to find a wife. The sheep on both the brothers’ farms were dyed in the wool, not with their initials, but their father’s.
He said he could remember from his childhood when Penlan Cottage was still occupied full-time. He told me that the lady who lived here had died in the cottage, and had to be taken to chapel for burial. Not to the village church, but to a chapel miles further away. She was a big lady, he said, a very big lady, and the most direct route to chapel was over the tops. The coffin was carried down to the bridge near where my postbox was now, and up the hillside beyond. The incline here is extremely steep, it would have been an arduous climb even unburdened. He said he watched for hours as the pall-bearers inched their way up the mountain under their heavy load. It took them twelve hours in total to get to chapel.
Although it was over forty years since anyone had lived here year-round, the cottage had been used in summer, so there was a modicum of furnishings: beds, a table, a couple of wardrobes, some old tools in the woodshed. When I moved in I took nothing with me but a bag of clothes. This was a conscious choice; I had decided I would start with nothing, and work my way up to a bare minimum. I wanted to know how lightly I could tread on the earth.
My friends who had first let the cottage, and then decided it was not for them, offered to sell me their two-ring cooker. But I thought: why commit myself to hauling gas bottles up the mountainside when there was a perfectly serviceable fire? The fireplace was actually equipped for cooking, with a solid metal bar across the centre and a selection of S-hooks of varying lengths to hang your pots from. There was already a big old hanging kettle here, black with soot, which would be in constant use. I picked up a beautiful cast-iron skillet from an abandoned farmhouse, a friend gave me a witch’s cauldron that she found for me in a car-boot sale, and later another gave me a Dutch oven, with a lid so heavy it was virtually a pressure cooker. It is easy to become complacent about eating when you live alone, but I made sure I cooked proper meals each day. If I had to soak beans overnight, then spend two hours cooking up a cauldron of stew, then so be it; I had the time. I became proficient at cooking over the fire, and it seemed more natural than cooking on a hob. When my biggest-ever group of guests arrived unexpectedly, it was no problem to rustle up a meal for ten. Visitors would sometimes try to replicate my meals when they got home, but said they never tasted as good. I don’t know if it was the slight smokiness that infused everything, the thickness of the pans, or just the setting, but it was true: food tasted better here.
At a turn in the river there is a wide bank of pale grey shingle filled with flood pools, where the mallards dabble, and overgrown with a wood of mature alders. The wood regularly floods, but the alders don’t mind the occasional dunking. Every time there was a spate the trees would end up festooned with flotsam: branches, leaves, fertilizer bags, even car tyres. It is an other-worldly place. I was exploring this stretch of the river a few months after first moving to the cottage when I had a curious find. As I walked through the trees I saw a face coming towards me. It was my own face, in the intact wing mirror of a car that had lodged in the crook of an alder at head height, and I speculated on the history that had led it to this place. I had not seen myself in weeks, there were no mirrors in the house, but now I had a shaving mirror.
At first I had no way of telling the time either, I just lived by the rhythms of the sun, but then I was given a little transistor radio. It was nice to be able to listen to music occasionally if I wanted to, though mostly I chose silence. And it was useful to be able to find out the time, if for example I wanted to cross the river to the main road and catch the postbus to town, which came only once a day. Though usually I preferred to hitch, because then I could simply stroll down to the road at whatever time suited me.
The decision not to have a vehicle was critical. It changed the scale of things entirely. To me, the pocket of wild country I lived in felt remote, but the nearest town, a very small town admittedly, was only seven miles away. That’s a long walk, but only a short hop in a car. These are small islands. I knew that if I walked to the main road in the morning and started hitching, I could be in a nightclub in London that night. And because I knew that I could, I didn’t have to. Hitching coast to coast in America took me nearly two weeks, and in Australia my longest lift was over a thousand miles, because that’s how far it was to the next city. That’s a distance equivalent to travelling from Britain to Africa. And I had to wait thirty-six hours by the roadside to get that lift. Yet though I was living in a crowded country, the isolation at Penlan was real. Over five years I kept count of the number of passers-by who came walking up my track. Not one. The track simply didn’t go anywhere; it followed a circuitous route from the middle of nowhere to the back of beyond. People who wanted to hillwalk generally went to the Brecon Beacons further south, or Snowdonia to the north. These hills and moors midway between them, with slightly lower peaks, were for the most part left to me and the birds.
In summer it was usually possible to get a car up to the cottage, though you had to open and close seven gates on your way up the track, and the final steep slope defeated some people. In the wet, or when the leaves were falling, it was more touch-and-go, and in the winter it was pretty much four-wheel drive only. Summer was a sociable time for me, by my standards. I am by no means an antisocial person, in fact I had hitherto lived a life in which I chose to surround myself with people, and I now wanted to know who I was when I could no longer define myself in terms of my relation to others. When I first moved to the cottage, I had no idea whether I would be able to cope with living alone, whether I could live with myself. Friends would come for weekend visits, or sometimes longer. It was like a camping holiday for them, with my cottage a stone tent. They would come bearing gifts, boots filled with canned goods and crates of beer. Sometimes they would bring musical instruments, and we would have a jam session around the fire. I would enjoy showing them my haunts and introdu-cing them to the local wildlife, and I would keep them busy hauling wood up the hillside. It was nearly always up; there was very little dead wood above me, I was so close to the treeline. No wood, no fire, I would say. No fire, no dinner. The real hard work was not sawing the logs or splitting them, it was getting the wood to the cottage in the first place. And when after a few days my guests departed, I would wave them off and think: Well, that was nice, but now back to real life. And I would feel a palpable, if slightly guilty, twinge of relief. And perhaps they would feel a sense of relief too, at heading back to the comforts of home.