Footnotes Read online

  By the death of Christ, I am not the slightest bit surprised. It is we who hold the power, and so we are free to commit acts of violence and injustice against these people, and yet we know full well that it is they who are the rightful heirs to the land.

  Gerald, who was only one-quarter Welsh at birth (whatever that might mean), nonetheless felt Welsh, or he did when writing his book, or riding through the country’s green valleys. Later, when he wrote his The Description of Wales, a companion piece to his Journey, he devoted the second half of the book to describing how to conquer the miserable place, and denouncing its hopelessly divided princes and its greedy, incestuous, drunken inhabitants. And that was after spending the first half praising its people (no longer homosexual, he is happy to report, as they had been ‘in their more prosperous days’, but sober, brave, nimble, hospitable and kinder and more quick-witted than any other Westerners). Like any of us, Gerald was able to incorporate or balance more than one identity at a time. Or perhaps he was just acutely conscious of not offending his powerful, Latin-reading audience.

  I am tracking Gerald and his captive listeners down the Coed Grwyne Pass, now home to the Grwyne Fawr reservoir. A couple of miles to the east is Llanthony monastery, which Gerald loved (he takes most of one chapter to tell us how it had grown into the very emblem of noble monastic life, until it was corrupted by the ‘boundless extravagance of the English’), but he seems not to have visited the place on this trip. Time was pressing and as fussy little Archbishop Baldwin no doubt said: ‘Hurry along, now, Saladin’s army isn’t going to defeat itself.’

  It was in this wild and wooded pass, so Gerald tells us, that fifty years earlier the Welsh had ambushed and murdered the Norman Lord Richard de Clare, ruler of Cardiganshire. Apparently he had ignored the advice of the local lord, dismissed his heavily armed soldiers, and come prancing down the path accompanied only by a few servants and preceded by a minstrel singing his praises. It sounds very Monty Python (‘I would fayn walk this way alone,’ trilled Lord Richard, before being hacked to death along with all his followers). Gerald is quick to point out how ‘rash and inconsiderate it is to take no heed at all of the advice given by those who are trying to help us’. Perhaps he was smarting from some recent slight. He was a man who bore a grudge for decades, and rewrote passages in his books several times over the years to amend his verdicts on those he felt had betrayed him. The Plantagenet kings, for example, he described in the end as an ‘accursed race’ and said he’d wasted his time dedicating his books to Henry II (‘no interest in literature’, God rot him) and ‘his son and successor in vice, Richard’.

  The woods in the pass are still dark and gloomy, especially with the familiar mist drifting through the trees. From where I’m standing, all alone, halfway up the eastern slope, I can hear the Grwyne Fawr river splashing along the valley – and there’s laughter, too, coming from the direction of the reservoir. A cuckoo calls and calls again. Perhaps this was the route Gerald followed, down to the River Usk and on to Abergavenny and the sea. There were no maps, of course – only local guides. There are beech trees here on the edge of the pine woods, and hawthorn, rowan, hazel and ash. Plenty of sycamore, too, although there wouldn’t have been any here in Gerald’s day: the species only arrived from mainland Europe in Tudor times.

  It is hard to stand even in this remote place and try to piece together how close any of it might be to what Gerald and Baldwin once knew. For starters, most of the trees are close-packed conifers, arranged into straight rows for harvesting. Britain only has one native pine tree (the Scots pine, or Pinus sylvestris), and I can’t see any of them here. More to the point, in Gerald’s day there were no plantations, just the remnants of the wildwood. On the other side of the valley a huge, surgically neat square of woodland has been carved out, the timber driven away, leaving behind a churn of wheel ruts and splintered bark. Well, they’ll be back again another day to plant more trees (we hope), and this time they may even include a fringe of native species (sustainability and diversity have found their way into the modern foresters’ handbook); but when he came this way Gerald would have ridden through a wild tangle of oak, hazel, thorn and ash, or stopped to rest under an ancient and solitary pine among an outpouring of wildflowers, and the sound of the birds and the insects would have been all-enveloping at this time of year, and so much more than just the bickering of crows in the mutilated woods, and a sudden shriek of alarm from a single blackbird, and the low rumble of distant machinery.

  Can a landscape be old and tired and used up? Put it another way: if we wanted to recreate Gerald’s world, right here, in this isolated valley, what would we have to remove? The pylons, poles and wires, of course. Wheel tracks. Tarmac. The RAF Tornado that has just now come screaming overhead. Fencing. That tumbledown, red-brick building. The reservoir. The four parked cars. The cling of diesel. Any last trace of chemical pollutants and pesticides. Crisp packets and plastic bottles. Footprints with tread. Vapour trails in the sky (if we could see them through the fog). All recent arrivals from the animal and plant kingdoms. (Every bit of this is something the makers of historical dramas must be horribly familiar with – as well as the inevitable scrawling letter pointing out that the larch tree was only introduced to the south Wales valleys in 1837.) Perhaps we should just squint, block our ears and noses, and stare at an oak leaf.

  But we can’t stop there. We have to think about what we’d put back in. Wolves, for example – they were still here in 1188, deep in the broadleaf forests, although there was a bounty on every pelt. And beavers. They’d been hunted to extinction all over England, but they were hanging on not far from the Grwyne Fawr valley, as well as in a last few refuges in Scotland. The pine marten. Red squirrels. And don’t forget the songbirds, in lost abundance, with their spellbinding songs of rapture. Eagles overhead. Beetles underfoot. The fish that leaped and splashed in the river. Honey bees and storms of butterflies feeding on a glittering mosaic of flowers. The spreading bellflower and the bastard balm. And people. This valley would have had its people, who moved south, not so long ago, into the new mining towns and villages and booming cities.

  Would you go back? If you could? I am alone here, on a narrow path, with the pine forest pressing dark and close, and surely it is reassuring to know (the odds at least are against it) that I am not about to be dragged into the woods and murdered by a local cutthroat. And when Gerald rode this way he had much to say about the miraculous gold and silver staff, kept in a local church, that was ‘particularly efficacious in smoothing away and pressing the pus from glandular swellings and gross tumours which grow so often on the human body’. Well, yes indeed. And thank God for antibiotics. ‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ works both ways: and most of the time we are oblivious to the advances that sustain us. If I had been lucky enough to be born Gerald’s twin in 1146, and not some powerless peasant, I would have been dead of an exploding appendix long before I was able to make this trip. But I do wonder if there is anything we’ve left behind, do you think, in our centuries-old quest for the perfect picnic spot – the one that is always just around the next corner? Surely we could have called a halt many times and said, ‘This is great, with its gorgeous view. Let’s stop here.’ Couldn’t we? And when was that, do you think? And where? And who exactly would it have all been for?

  And here comes Enid again, spreading out her tartan rug for tired limbs in the flower-filled meadow. There is ginger pop, and strawberries. Skylarks are calling and hovering in the cloudless sky. There’s honeysuckle and dog roses in the hedgerows. Harvesters at rest in a field of mown hay. A ruined castle on a green hill. Hot dusty lanes. A distant sparkle on the blue sea. The village shop and the beaming bobby. ‘You young scamps run along.’ Sunlight …

  No. We have to press on. But I have allowed myself to drift deep into the pine forest and I am now lost on a faint track, with the mist clinging to the cheerless trees. A dark silence is paring the courage from me. I walk on slowly. The battered remnants of an ancient lime avenu
e are either side of the path. The trees must be hundreds of years old. There are roots everywhere, huge, exposed, sinuous, weathered, slippery and humped with earth and moss. The path is tenuous and the walking is hard. One of the lime trees has fallen, taking two or three pines with it, but it is still alive, its branches reaching for the light, even as the canopy closes over its fallen body. This is a miserable place. Bereft of humanity and life and yet at the same time suffocated by our ceaseless needs. Or so says Gerald – and he quotes Isaiah: ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.’

  We have drained the wild from this world, even in the empty places.

  I am alone in a dark wood. And I cannot begin to describe the rush of joy when I stumble and slip to the edge of the forest and there are the fields with their cows and the hawthorn in blossom, and the mist has lifted (I would never have known), and the sky is a heart-hugging blue, and down below is the glitter of the river I thought I was following but had lost.

  It is an easy walk from here to St Issui’s Church, where local legend holds that Baldwin preached on his journey, although Gerald makes no mention of this. It is a tiny church, rebuilt since Gerald’s time, but still very old, perhaps fifteenth century, and no one is quite sure why Baldwin bothered to make the journey, if indeed he did. But the little place still feels important, carved into the steep hillside, with a tumbling drop to the hazel-fringed river, a long way from the nearest town or village. I stand in the small green churchyard, among the mouldering tombstones, and a woman stifles a cough from inside the church. There are violets, forget-me-nots and countless daisies springing from the grass and a smell of ripe daffodils. There is happiness (and more) in the air. If Gerald were here he would not have wasted the opportunity to set us straight:

  Those mountain-heights abound in horses and wild game, those woods are richly stocked with pigs, the shady groves with goats, the pasture-lands with sheep, the meadows with cattle, the farms with ploughs. All the things and creatures which I have mentioned are there in great abundance, and yet we are so insatiable in our wicked desires that each in its turn seems insufficient for our needs.

  Nothing has changed.

  I speed past Abergavenny, where Baldwin preached and Gerald expends a few more evasive, mealy-mouthed words about the murderous William de Braose, who – he doesn’t tell us – once slaughtered several unarmed Welsh guests in its castle. At Caerleon Gerald stopped among the ruins of the old Roman city and marvelled at what was left (much more than now) of the ‘immense palaces’ and the extraordinary sophistication of the pipework. Gerald believed King Arthur had once held court here; and he has a few salacious tales to tell about a soothsayer called Meilyr, an incubus, some beautiful women and their demons. There is no sign that any of this stuff is any less real to Gerald than his descriptions of the sheep in the fields, because as he says when quoting St Augustine: ‘I will neither put a limit on divine power by denying it, nor strain the bounds of credibility by accepting it.’

  Cardiff was not a big town in Gerald’s day – it was a castle and not much else – and indeed even by the year 1800 the population was still no higher than about 2,000. Today, the population is almost 350,000, their forebears brought here by the power of coal and the immense wealth it generated. Gerald saw it coming, as he gazed out on the nearby hills:

  Many of nature’s riches still lie hidden from us, undiscovered as yet because we have given no attention to them, but the diligence and careful enquiry of later generations will no doubt reveal them.

  Although in truth Gerald was predicting an outpouring of soothing oils and ‘sweet honey’ from the local rock, not black coal.

  After their adventures in the woods, Baldwin stopped at Cardiff Castle, ‘where it stands so nobly on the River Taff’, for yet another of his recruiting sermons (and just think how often the English have turned up in the centuries since, with the same grim purpose in mind). The original castle keep is still here, on its green hill, raised by William, the first Norman king, surrounded by the later medieval walls and towers and Victorian halls, and I go and sit at the very centre, with my back propped against a rough stone wall, and I look up to where the floors would have been, through to a roofless blue sky. The place is busy, with queues forming on the narrow stone steps to reach the very top of the tower. People have arrived here from across the globe – China, Malaysia, India, the US – and I am sitting in the sunshine wondering if any of us actually know anything at all about what we are looking at (I’m not sure I do), when I hear a young black man from Brazil or Portugal absolutely boiling over with enthusiasm for the intricacies of the motte-and-bailey and the crumbling keep. And that makes me happy, because I hate to think that this knowledge might one day evaporate (and ‘ramble, and thin out/like milk spilt on a stone’), and it feels safe in his hands. And then his older friend, or perhaps it’s his father, starts to tell him about the time the Welshman Ifor Bach kidnapped William, the Earl of Gloucester, from inside Cardiff Castle – and this, I realize, because I’m sitting here reading the very same thing, even as he talks, is a story that Gerald tells in The Journey Through Wales. Gerald longed for posthumous fame, especially once he realized that his worldly ambitions were out of reach, and if he’s not now squirming with delight in his grave, or jumping up and down in the celestial heights, then there is no afterlife.

  Down below a bass guitar rumbles with bone-squeezing power. There’s a concert just getting started on the great green sweep of the castle grounds and the people of Cardiff have arrived in large numbers, as well as the travellers from distant lands, to listen to Sister Sledge, the Fratellis and the Hackney Colliery Band. Gerald was well travelled for his day, across England, Wales and Ireland, and also France, northern Italy and Rome, but most people never went anywhere, unless they found themselves swept up into a war or – as was the case here – a crusade. When Gerald and Baldwin (the Normans) preached to the Welsh and English, they would speak in French or Latin, and their audience wouldn’t understand a word, although it didn’t stop them from volunteering with hysterical enthusiasm. Later, in Llandaff, as Baldwin spoke, the English stood on one side and the Welsh on the other, ‘and from each nation many took up the Cross’, united by religion and war.

  In 1188 the differences between the Welsh, Normans and English were pronounced: ethnic, linguistic, cultural. The English were beaten, their leaders killed or exiled and replaced by Normans. In their turn they were helping the Normans colonize the Welsh. Gerald considers the English ‘bumpkins’, but you only have to read his chapters on how to conquer the Welsh in The Description of Wales to know that Gerald the Norman knew all about divide and rule and every other little trick that the English and Welsh, now operating as the British, would eventually bring to their own colonial expansion.

  Also living in south Wales, near Haverfordwest, were a very large number of Flemings, who, Gerald tells us, were ‘hostile to the Welsh’. They had been brought in by Henry I to help keep the locals compliant, behaving ‘vindictively’ and ‘submitting the Welsh to shameful ill-treatment’. Apparently these Flemings, as well as being quick to fight and good with the wool trade, were able to see into the future by reading the right shoulder blade of a ram, once it had been boiled and stripped of its meat. It is a shame this useful knowledge has been lost, but there is now not a trace of any Flemings left in south Wales, although it’s entirely likely that their descendants live on in the town of Haverfordwest and its surrounds.

  The simple question that Kazuo Ishiguro is asking in The Buried Giant, it seems to me, is whether it is better for people to forget the past, or face up to it. There could well be different perspectives to this question, but the answer may still be the same. Also, to be more specific, should different peoples (tribes, ethnicities, nations), who have at one time slaughtered and enslaved each other (and the traffic may have been one way or both ways), and who have been participants, willing or unwilling,
in atrocities, even genocide – is it better or even possible that they live in a cloud of forgetfulness, or should events be disinterred and scrutinized? This question will not go away, but the answer, or at least the first step, is surely obvious: we need to clear away the fog, and listen, hard, to the survivors.

  I wonder what the psychic Flemings would have said about all this. I remember sitting with Anna in the bar of a hotel in Beijing, on New Year’s Eve 1988, with the protests of Tiananmen Square already brewing, having travelled by train and boat from London across Sweden, the Soviet Union and Mongolia, and we were talking to a Québécois and a Welshman who were only just back from visiting Tibet (what a world, Gerald, what a world!). We were the only four people in the bar and we wanted to hear about Tibet, still so strange in those days, but the man from Quebec had nothing good to say: it was ‘boring’; Tibetan culture was doomed, the Chinese would see to that; there’s no point in complaining or resisting … every nuance and difference in the world will one day be ironed out, and that is a good thing; an end to conflict and wars. The boredom will save us. ‘Yes’, agreed the man from Wales, himself, I would have thought, like the man from Quebec, just another member of yet another minority trying to keep its shape in a homogenizing world – ‘yes, it will all go one day, soon, and I won’t miss any of it.’ I could have noticed that there was desperation in his eyes, not acquiescence; but it wasn’t until many years later that I came across R. S. Thomas’s brutal, anguished dismissal of the Welsh and their culture: