Chapter 10
I had said I would pick Miaow up at 9.00 for our trip to the escalators of Shrewsbury, but like a kid on his first date I was early. I parked outside the shop at the caravan site and waited. Then I grew impatient and walked across to the office. A fat man sat wedged behind the reception desk, eating a bacon sandwich. The grease that dribbled over his knuckles glistened in the sharp morning light. The expression on his face said that, whatever it was I needed, he probably had it but couldn’t be bothered to go and get it. It was the face of someone whose synapses sparked at a slower speed than other people’s. The face a tortoise wears the first morning after hibernation as he walks downstairs to collect the post from the mat. It was the face of a man who doesn’t care less and has made it his specialist subject; everyone needs something they can be proud of. I told him I was looking for the caravan of Miaow and his face betrayed no sign that the question meant anything at all. Maelor Gawr was the caravan park at the world’s end.
I took a deep breath and said, ‘You know, my friend, to look at your face you probably wouldn’t believe this, but you are a lucky man. Yes, you are. This may come as a surprise. All your life you have gone to bed at night convinced that nothing good ever happens to you and yet here am I claiming you are lucky. Why? How can a man like you be lucky? I’ll tell you. Because on any normal day I would now grab your tie and stick it into the roller of that typewriter you are busy dripping bacon fat onto. Then I would give the barrel a violent twist and keep turning until your nose was touching the keys. Then I would type out a letter to the
‘You want a caravan?’
Before I could answer, she appeared in the doorway.
‘Sorry I’m late; I couldn’t decide which hat to wear.’
‘You’re not late and you are not wearing a hat, but you can tell me about it in the car.’
She was wearing a cream cardigan over a simple cotton frock patterned with tiny lemon flowers. It was belted at the waist and reached demurely to just below that most underrated bone, the patella. She was wearing cream sandals and carried a cream handbag. Her hair was kept away from her face with a cream hairband. She was also holding a plastic Co-op bag which I knew contained our picnic. We drove in my Wolseley Hornet over Trefechan Bridge and turned right towards the station.
As traffic slowed on the approach to the roundabout I turned to her and said, ‘You look lovely.’
Instead of denying it or accusing me of saying it to all the girls, she smiled and said, ‘No one’s ever said that to me before.’
In the slightly awkward pause that followed, I patted my coat pocket and said, ‘I’ve got the tickets.’
‘You must tell me how much I owe you.’
‘Don’t be silly, it’s my treat.’
‘How many rides do you get?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘On the escalator.’
‘As many as you like.’
‘Really?’
‘The tickets are for the train.’
‘Oh!’
‘You get a special day return to Shrewsbury and it includes unlimited rides on the escalators.’
It is no coincidence that train windows are shaped like the celluloid frames of a movie. All rail journeys are adventure stories, which is why fate reserves her grandest statements for them. Without this tendril of steel linking us to Vladivostok and all stations between, Aberystwyth would be bereft: no Pier, no camera obscura, few hotels, and the tourist information office would almost certainly have been deprived of its proudest boast, namely that on 7 May 1904 Buffalo Bill came to town.
Miaow kept her nose pressed to the window for most of the journey and stared with a sense of wonder that made me regret I could never again take this journey for the first time. As we glided into Shrewsbury the track curved gently round the main signal box; once, no doubt, the red bricks and white-painted window frames would have gleamed like a mansion on a chocolate box, and an entire extended hierarchy of workers would have beavered away at the clockwork intricacies of directing trains. Today it stood in chest-high weeds like an abandoned house in an abandoned field; as with most businesses that have seen their best days, the first to go is always the guy who cuts the lawn. There is still a man up there, moving behind the filmy grey glass, drinking tea and reading the paper resting against rows of levers that don’t work. He doesn’t know the war is over.
The tracks converged onto a bridge across the river before the entrance to the station, and two buildings, one of pink Shropshire sandstone, the other of red Victorian brick, stood sentinel. Miaow pointed, but didn’t speak.
‘Guess what those buildings are,’ I said. ‘Home to two branches of the same family.’
Miaow gave me a look of inquiry.
‘Both been in business a long time, the same business in fact, although it goes by different names. The people from the one on the left quite often go and stay with the ones on the right, but it seldom happens the other way round.’
‘OK, I give up.’
‘That one is the castle, that one is the prison.’
‘That’s silly, the people in prison are thieves and murderers.’
‘So are the ones in the castle. How else do you get to own a castle?’
‘No!’
‘If you steal small things, you get a room on the right with a view of the river and the railway station. If you steal big things – like counties – you get a room on the left also with a view of the river and the railway station. The room is bigger, and the food is better. You have about as equal a chance of having your throat slit while you sleep.’
‘The people in the castle are lords and ladies with coats of arms and pointy Rapunzel hats. All through my childhood I dreamed of wearing one of those pointy hats.’
‘Trust me, the pointy hats are all stolen.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Along with ermine stoles, gold-painted furniture, pheasants and oil paintings. Do you think they worked for it?’
‘Didn’t they?’
‘No, they were just smarter than the rest of us, or meaner. The way I see it, they are just descended from the better armed robbers. It’s like a great Welshman once said: “Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?” ’
She pulled a face. ‘So why didn’t anyone complain?’
‘The pointy-hats were smart. They invented the priesthood to preach to the multitude the great spiritual benefits of being penniless; they taught them not only to accept their misery but to love it, and to regard it as evidence of their spiritual superiority. In addition, for those who found themselves unconvinced by these fine sentiments, they had a rather persuasive complaints office in the basement of the castle.’
‘That’s what they teach us in the Denunciationists as well – to regard poverty as evidence of our spiritual superiority. Are we wrong?’
I smiled and pulled her closer. ‘No, of course not.’
Where do you take a girl for her first ride on an escalator? Marks and Spencers, Boots, Woolies? We did all three. We went up and down ten times in Boots, Miaow clutching the moving handrail with a grip slightly too tight, pausing too long each time before she stepped on. When the security guard asked us if everything was all right, we moved on to the other shops, and so threaded our way down town towards the river and the park along its banks. We chose a tree to sit under and began to unpack the picnic, but then Miaow changed her mind and we tried two more trees until we found one that satisfied.
‘I hope it’s OK, I’ve never made a picnic before. Back in Cwmnewidion Isaf such things are considered
