Footnotes Read online

  Edith and Martin (and I) stop in Dolgellau to refuel and pick up supplies. I wander into an outdoor sports shop (I am bound for Snowdon), and get talking to a lean and bearded ‘mountainy man’, as he would have found himself called in The Irish R.M., about following Edith and Martin’s route to the summit. He consults his weather chart and stares at my leaky trainers, threadbare anorak and wasted, clerkish limbs with unfeigned concern. ‘I’d head up tomorrow. The cloud is low, but a fresh south-westerly breeze should carry you to the top. If you’re setting off from Rhyd-ddu.’ I thank him and buy my mountain essentials: two beautiful maps and a sugary slab of brown (not white) Kendal Mint Cake. ‘The healthy option,’ I josh, limbering up for the most important part of any hill-walking expedition: excruciatingly bad banter. The mountainy man gives a short, dutiful, dying bark, like a seal choking on a badly thrown fish, and tells me it gets dark at 8.30p.m.

  In Edith and Martin’s day every house in the town of Dolgellau was surrounded on all four sides by a street. The buildings were big and grey and the shopkeepers stood in the middle of their homes, ready to reach out to any passing customer from whichever direction they chose to approach. There must have been a deal of in-filling since those days, because now Dolgellau is arranged into neat streets, with many fewer shops. The major tone is still grey – sky and houses – but that doesn’t do justice to the place’s trim, uplifting appeal. There’s a beautiful cricket pitch on the edge of town, with standing stones on one boundary and a racing river on the other (it was a sluggish, drought-hit trickle in 1893). There is no sign of the Angel Inn where Martin and Edith ‘staggered into shelter’, drawn by the fact that the landlord’s wife looked like one of Edith’s aunts, and while Edith painted an ancient Welsh woman in a Welsh hat, Martin ‘no less enjoyably to myself, sat on a wheelbarrow in the stable and laid down the law’ to the landlord, ostler and saddler about ill-fitting saddles and ‘warbles’. I, meanwhile, am munching my way through ‘the best bacon sandwich in North Wales’, or so it says, and pondering Edith and Martin’s advice that there are three things to avoid in Wales, although you never can: butter, coffee and bacon. All of them are ‘odious’.

  The Grapes Hotel in Maentwrog still stands, where Edith and Martin stayed on the night before they climbed Snowdon, and the village is as it was, ‘hemmed in between a wooded hill and a river, lying silent in the velvet gloom’. They were met at the entrance by a fellow guest from Manchester, his face scarlet with sunburn, who had just been up Snowdon and ‘had felt “that sick and giddy” at one place that on the downward path two guides had enveloped his head in a sack and carried him’. His ‘rather shy’ friend was playing ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ on the piano in the next room and ever since that night, wrote Martin, the tune has ‘held a horror for us that is not entirely its own’.

  Oo’re ye goin’ to meet, Bill?

  ’Ave ye bought the street, Bill?

  Lorf? – why, I thought I should ’a died

  These days it is Sky Sports on every wall and a cheery hubbub at the bar. I haven’t been here long before I realize that every person in the packed front room – grandfathers, mothers, toddlers – is speaking Welsh. Everyone, that is, apart from me (‘a pint of Purple Moose please’) and Gary Neville on the commentary (‘they need to get tight on their man, Jamie, tight’). And of course, again, I remind myself that this should not be strange to us tourists. When Edith and Martin were here they often had trouble making themselves understood, whereas now the Welsh-speaking population is comfortably bilingual. But many English people continue to find this aggravating. When I was working at Time Out in the 1990s (yes, even there, at the great liberal London magazine), I remember one of our editors returning from a Welsh holiday and complaining that people refused to understand him in the shops and he was ‘sure that they had been speaking English before I came in’. The pressure to conform – the insistence on conformity – is relentless; so I’m very happy to sit here, drinking my beer, listening to people talk regular pub bollocks through the night. Or at least I guess that’s what they’re doing, because obviously I don’t have a clue what everyone is shouting about; and I suppose whatever ‘Pam na wnei di ffwcio i ffwrdd, y cont Sais ddiawl?’ happens to mean, it’s all part of the merry chit-chat of a big night out.

  Anyway, the staff and patrons of the Grapes Hotel could not be friendlier. And the morning’s butter and coffee could not be any finer. Edith and Martin left early on the longest day of the year, riding through pine forests and oak woods and absolute loneliness, wrapped in their new Dolgellau puggarees and remarking on the rarity of the June tourist. The weather was on the turn and the air was growing chilly. They rode through the famously beautiful Aberglaslyn Pass almost without comment (‘Mother of God! It’s like a circus’ is all they’ll give us). On the road between the grave of Gelert, which was once a place of pilgrimage for newlyweds, and the nearby village of Beddgelert, they are delighted to observe that ‘the distance that separated each bride from her groom was noticeable, and seemed to indicate a desire to economise conversation’. Edith even supplies a drawing of four mournful figures, two brides and two grooms, shambling in single file along the road, heads down, each of them alone with their thoughts.

  By this stage of their lives, neither Edith (thirty-four) nor Martin (thirty-one) seemed keen on marriage. Later in the trip, in the Saracen’s Head at Cerrig-y-Drudion, they came under the scrutiny of a middle-aged tradesman and his wife sitting in the pub’s parlour, ‘too entirely respectable to be aware that they were bored almost to madness’. Edith was pursued for much of her life by her cousin, Herbert Greene, a genial, pompous and reactionary Oxford academic, who would propose marriage to her every few months. It is possible she even accepted him once, in 1898, but was saved by the death of her father; and the engagement seems to have been allowed to drift away in the turmoil of her becoming mistress of the family home. According to her biographer, Gifford Lewis, she had also wanted to marry a young man called Hewitt Poole when she was nineteen, and was devastated when her father decided he wasn’t rich enough. I don’t know about Martin and marriage – but what mattered most to her and Edith was their independence.

  Were Edith and Martin lovers? Many people seem to think so. A quick Google search finds them cropping up on numerous ‘Famous Lesbians’ websites; and their first major biographer, Maurice Collis, was convinced Edith was attracted only to women. But his book (published 1968) needs to be read through the filter of his times, not to mention the prism of his own prurience:

  Any sexual union with a man had something revolting about it for Edith. Deep in her was a profound distaste for the opposite sex. Ethel [Edith’s first great friend] did not suffer from this disability [sic] … Edith’s deepest feelings, however, were entirely concentrated on her own sex. The emotion, however, was sublimated. It did not include what she would have termed its grosser manifestations [sic and, in fact, good grief!].

  God knows where he got this stuff, but there he leaves us, more or less, with some misquoted notes from her diaries, until later in the book he re-emerges with Edith’s ‘disgust’ at her sister Hildegarde’s wedding, which ‘could only be fully explained by a psychiatrist, though perhaps enough has been said earlier in the book to hint at what his [sic] explanation would be’.

  They loved one another, that much is certain. They spent all the time together they could. They often shared each other’s beds. But after Martin’s death Edith was horrified when someone suggested people might think they had been lovers and she immediately set about scribbling over what she felt were incriminating phrases and passages in Martin’s letters. Gifford Lewis has managed to decipher a few of these censored words and apparently there is no hint of any physical love; instead they are weirdly innocent. In 1919, three years after Martin’s death, Edith became close friends with the composer Ethel Smyth and she appears to have reacted with stunned surprise when Ethel suggested a physical relationship. Ethel (who angrily described Edith as ‘virgi
nal’ and herself as having ‘more experience of life stored in my little finger than you have in your whole body’) was even more bemused when she managed to persuade Edith to come to Sicily on holiday with her, hoping for some love among the lemon groves, only to find that Edith had asked along her sister Hildegarde and her husband. In the event none of them went.

  Well, what do we know? Really? It seems unlikely they were lovers. Not because of the times they lived in – or not especially – but because neither of them seems to have had the inclination. Perhaps they sought diversion in writing and hunting. I guess in the end we have to say that we just don’t know. And more than that, I now find myself wondering – and obviously I don’t want to come across like a gaslighting Victorian patriarch, or indeed the worst biographer in history, a kind of anti-biographer, the black hole of biographers – but I do have to ask: what the hell business is it of ours anyway? Here’s Gifford Lewis: ‘That Edith was a lesbian has gained general acceptance through an unlovely combination of affected liberalism, ignorant salaciousness and the sad assumption that huge vitality and strength in a woman implies masculinity.’

  So – to Snowdon we must go. ‘The ascent’, wrote Somerville and Ross, ‘began as seductively, as gently, as the first step towards a great crime.’ The daughter of the landlady at the inn in Beddgelert, with ‘compassion in her eye’, had suggested they start from the tiny hamlet of Rhyd-ddu instead of from Beddgelert itself, cutting a long preliminary walk out of the journey. They had hired a guide for the trip, a stocky, almost silent man called Griffith Roberts, who had already been up and down Snowdon once that day. We don’t have guides any more in this country, or at least not ones who are hanging about at the foot of Snowdon or on the coastal path of Cornwall, waiting for business, like the men who sprang out of the mist to take Wilkie in hand. It wouldn’t make any financial sense. But after a few minutes of following Griffith Roberts’s unforgivingly broad back, Edith and Martin started to wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off with a slightly less vigorous guide: an asthmatic, perhaps, or someone with a club foot.

  These days the route to the top from Rhyd-ddu is clearly marked: you just have to park next to the one-track railway station (where the steam train puffs and wheezes) and head up the hill. It couldn’t be easier. I am alone, but carrying my lovely new map and what’s left of the brown Kendal Mint Cake. Unlike Edith and Martin, I am not encumbered by a full-length skirt, bodice, cinch-waisted jacket, hat and thin-soled leather shoes. There is no one else on the path (how strange that is for a weekend), but then, as the mountainy man had warned, the grey cloud is settling on the heights and there’s a chill edge to the stiffening wind. I feel very close to Edith and Martin. Indeed, I seem to be tracking them precisely: an early over-confidence in the easy, grassy gradient is turning quickly into a breathless, heart-pounding, ignominious craving that Griffith Roberts might call a halt. We have been walking for about half an hour, so we are probably not nearly there yet.

  When they finally pause, Edith tries to find out if there are still any eagles on Snowdon, as Gerald once wrote, but Griffith Roberts’s English is not up to the question. She leaps to her feet and flaps across the mountainside, squawking and shouting about ‘big birds who steal lambs’ and at last Griffith Roberts assures her that there are indeed plenty of ‘fahxes, oh yess, many fahxes’ on Snowdon. Edith sat down, exhausted, and Martin ‘laughed a great deal’, something she did often: she was famous for her wild laughter, impossible to suppress, which could come at the worst moments, and always at any sign of over-inflated dignity. The eagles were in fact long gone by 1893, although there is now a slender chance they might be making the most tenuous of returns, if only the conservationists and farmers can agree what to do about all these sheep and their helpless, succulent lambs.

  The way grows steeper and rockier. Griffith Roberts is taking ‘a short cut’, and I am certain that I am on his trail, following the occasional signs and my perky little map. We are tracking the path of a stream, shallow in the summer months, slipping over boulders and a deluge of splintered rocks. I find I am standing at the foot of a sharp passage, peering over the beginnings of a cliff, watching distant pillars of mist glide from left to right, while silver filaments of cloud flow above them. It is more or less the last time I see anything, because now the Snowdon mist is upon us. I press on, finding hope in the cairns that lurk in the gloom. They must have been a rarity in 1893. A soft rain has joined itself to the thickening mist, although I could waste a lot of time wondering where one ends and the other begins. Let’s just say it’s grey and wet, up here on the cold mountain. Despite the fact that the land down below is writhing under the worst drought for many years, there is water all around: in the reeds and squelching underfoot, spraying from the falls, pouring from my hood and blearing my glasses – how on earth could Martin have seen any of this? A blanket of chill damp fog is laid across my shoulders. It is quiet. Heavy breaths and scrabbling footfall. Stones slipping back. No other sound. Water. Sheep. Crows.

  A brief tear in the mist allowed Edith and Martin to see that ‘the cliff on which we were kneeling ran with a tremendous horse-shoe curve right up to the highest peak of Snowdon’. And that’s about where I am, I reckon, when Edith ‘made the contemptible suggestion that we should return to Rhyddu and get particulars of the sunrise and the view from the landlady’s daughter’. Edith and Martin, you see, were staying (or meant to be staying) overnight at the hotel at the top of Snowdon, and I am starting to think, as I read these words, alone in this fog, that Edith may have a point (and there isn’t even a hotel on Snowdon these days), but Martin ‘repelled the suggestion with appropriate spirit’.

  I have paused (again), this time on the pretence of looking at the twelve tender saplings planted in plastic sheaths just to the side of the path. Once, long before Somerville and Ross came this way – and probably not even in Gerald’s day – the slopes of the hills and mountains of Wales were covered in trees. The early settlers and English conquerors made a good job of cutting them down (why give your enemy somewhere to hide?) and the relentless sheep ensured they never returned. Perhaps a pair of eagles, or a pack of wolves, would solve this problem. It is surprising how high the treeline might climb if these saplings manage to take hold, but we are conditioned not to think of our peaks as naturally wooded. We think first of moorland and peat and grouse, and the occasional square of forestry, but this barren landscape is not natural: it requires constant work to keep the uplands free from trees. It is also madness, of course (we need trees for flood mitigation, soil retention, species diversity, oxygen …), but with the climate in meltdown, and the sheep corralled, there might soon come a day when we see juniper, alder and birch near the very top of Snowdon.

  There is an ancient wind blowing me up the mountain, ruffling the mist among the rocks. It is cold. I hadn’t thought I would be so alone here, just me and the long-dead Edith, Martin and Griffith Roberts. And I had not thought to give Snowdon the absolute respect it is due. But even Edith and Martin, before they started, were saddened by the way their planned route ‘degraded the ascent of the highest mountain in England and Wales into a mere episode of the late afternoon’. And I was following them – at least that’s my excuse – two Victorian ladies in all their finery, giggling their way to the top, although it’s only when they are finally there, shivering in a little wooden hut (because that’s all the ‘hotel’ turns out to be) that Edith admits that on the last narrow stretch, with cliffs on either side wreathed in tormented vapours, she had ‘an almost uncontrollable desire to traverse it after the manner of a serpent’.

  How does anyone manage to lose his new, beautiful map on the slopes of Snowdon? It can be done, apparently. Round about the point where the mist is thickest and the path least certain. Perhaps I should not have come here alone, but I wanted to enjoy Edith and Martin’s company. Their friendship was the bond that defined their lives. In one of the later Irish R.M. stories, ‘Harrington’s’, they introduce us to ‘the c
hicken farmers’, two women who have retreated to a small farm on a remote stretch of the Irish coast, one of them a doctor, the other ‘very pretty’, and recovering from a broken engagement to a gunner (‘drink, I fancy, or mad’, says Philippa, the R.M.’s wife). I’ve always thought the portrait of the women chicken farmers must have been Edith and Martin’s wistful fantasy of escape, written not long before Martin’s death. It showed what might have been possible, if only family and duty had not pressed so hard. A little pink box of a house, on the shore of a small, round lake, far from the suffocating intrusions of others. Tending chickens. But it’s really not something they would have thought about for long. Or even much enjoyed.

  In the story, Major Yeates, his wife Philippa and their cousin Andrew end up following the chicken farmers to an auction in the ruins of an old mine on the edge of nowhere. They have Anthony, their eldest son, with them, as a treat for not crying when his cake was spoiled on his ninth birthday. Mr Harrington, the last owner of the mine, had committed suicide (although the jury was too sympathetic to call it that), and everything he owned was going under the hammer. Unlike every other R.M. story, there is a twitchy unease running through it like adrenaline in a rat. There is a ghost, and second sight, and a groping, nauseating dash through the pitch-black mine, looking for Anthony, who is lying limp and stricken by a falling rock, and the major (who narrates all the stories) ‘felt that sickening drop of the heart that comes when the thing that seems too bad to think of becomes in an instant the thing that is’. I know that feeling too well. I guess we all do.