depopulating hillsides. Our first cottage was one of a windswept row of four, built somewhere in the scooped-out bare mountain valley outside the quarry village of Croesor for the local quarry. Its only permanent inhabitant by then was our cherished Nellie Jones, who brought up three children by various fathers, and a dog, in an approximate kitchen, and acted as caretaker for some almost equally rackety English visitors. (The village, or rather hamlet, of Croesor itself was just about to lose its shop-cum-sub-post office, and only a constant battle against the authorities – assisted by Clough’s policy of letting empty cottages to unmarried or abandoned mothers – kept its tiny schoolhouse from closing.) Our second was a sixteenth-century ruin, once part of the complex of buildings that formed the seat of the Anwyl family, fallen on bad times after the eighteenth century, which Clough had transformed into a habitable house for Londoners who did not mind living in extreme discomfort, but in romantic surroundings. Typically, he had left part of a projecting wall of three-feet stone blocks out of which, in the centuries of ruin, a tree had grown so vast and tall that we insisted on a clause in our lease to protect us in case it was toppled by some storm, destroying most of the house. I doubt whether a single inhabited building on his estate was not either first built, restored or made fit for human occupation by him. But the inhabitants belonged to at least two entirely different and barely overlapping species: the second-homers or incomers and the native Welsh.
The incomers were a network of middle-class British intellectuals and a scattering of attached bohemians. In some ways most of them were linked directly or indirectly with the Williams-Ellises. Most of their connections came through Cambridge, which had also been Clough’s own university, and that of his dead son Kitto, whose friends from King’s became part of the Brondanw scene as regular visitors and (in one case) son-in-law. That is how Robin Gandy had first come to the valley. Each of the initial settlers in turn tended to attract their friends, contemporaries, teachers and students, who also came, saw and were conquered: the Hobsbawms, one by one, plus two children, followed by Marlene’s brother, Walter Schwarz, plus wife and five offspring, the historians E. P. and Dorothy Thompson, from the lower slopes of the Moelwyns, and various sons and daughters of the Bennett family whose parents, both English dons, were pillars of Cambridge academic society. In one way or another a substantial set of Cambridge names was already linked with Clough’s kingdom: the philosopher Bertrand Russell on the Portmeirion peninsula; the Nobel Prize physicist Patrick Blackett, settled in retirement in what had been a holiday cottage just above Brondanw, not far from his daughter’s house in Croesor; Joseph Needham, the great historian of Chinese science, spent regular holidays at Portmeirion with one of his two ladies – his wife presumably remaining at home in Cambridge. John Maddox, for many years the editor of
Though science and Cambridge went together, I suspect that it was Clough’s wife, the writer Amabel Williams-Ellis, who got much the greatest satisfaction out of the accumulation of great brains in the local hinterland. A Strachey from a landed and intellectual family with long Indian links, her family connection (both Oxford and Cambridge) was, if anything, with politics. Her journalist father, St Loe Strachey, had carried considerable political weight, and her brother, John Strachey, broke away, first to follow the (then) hope of radical Labour, the dashing womanizer Sir Oswald (‘Tom’) Mosley, until he became the leader of British fascism, then to become the most widely known Communist Party intellectual of the 1930s. He turned away from communism in 1940 and became a prominent, though not notably successful, minister in the Labour governments after 1945. Amabel herself had joined the Communist Party unofficially, and remained a little homesick for the days when the Party was a semi- conspiratorial embattled band of brothers and sisters. She welcomed me as a reminder of those times, someone with whom she could gossip about the comrades, but perhaps chiefly as a reliable conversationalist on intellectual themes. For this purpose she would drive up to our cottage, full of memories, with the excessive care and dangerous slowness of the very aged motorist. Since few except the locals used the Croesor Road, traffic made the necessary allowances for her. Amabel, far more than Clough, had a passion for the intellect. As a girl she had dreamed of becoming a scientist, but that is not what ‘gels’ in her type of family did. Indeed, she was not sent to school at all. She became a writer, in the end best known as a children’s writer, while as was usual in her generation her considerable contribution to Clough’s own writing and thinking was subsumed under his. Amabel was not the tragic kind – indeed, she enjoyed the sweetnesses of life and the new emancipation of women, including (it would seem) a fairly free-wheeling approach to marital fidelity, but, had she not been brought to keep the stiff upper lip of her class, she might have shown some bitterness. She would have made a very professional scientist and she saw to it that at least one of her daughters became a marine biologist. I grew very fond of the old lady, even though sometimes taking avoiding action against her expeditions in search of intellectual enlightenment. We talked a great deal, especially in her last years, after Clough’s death, when she waited for visitors, wanting to die. She did not complain, but made no secret of wanting an end to lying alone bedridden and in pain behind thick stone walls in a damp old house. She had lived enough. However, even political solidarity could never move her to tell me how to find the entrance of the underground workings, somewhere under Clough’s kingdom, where the treasures of the National Gallery had been stored during the Second World War. A communist past was one thing, state secrets quite another.
Apart from the minority who came to do some serious climbing, what brought the rest of us outsiders to the Welsh mountains? Certainly not the search for comfort. In our Welsh cottages we voluntarily lived under the sort of conditions we condemned capitalism for imposing on its exploited toilers. None of us, even given the spartan middle-class styles of the 1950s, would have dreamed of accepting such standards in our everyday lives in London or Cambridge, not even my brother-in-law Walter Schwarz, with his boundless enthusiasm for primitive discomfort as indicating environmentally sound living close to nature. Even so, the only people we could rely on regularly to share the discomforts and the marvels of life in Parc Farm were close and weather-proof friends such as Dorothy Wedderburn. To guarantee even approximate dryness on our first night, we had to pack all blankets and bedclothes into vast airtight plastic bags every time we left Parc. It took two or three days after arrival to dry the house out enough to make it roughly habitable, and even then it was almost impossible to keep warm except in odd corners, in spite of paraffinheaters – basic equipment, though not much good for outdoor toilets – and the fuel for our fireplaces which metropolitan intellectuals, dressed in the local style like tramps, could be seen chopping in the drizzle outside their back doors. Perhaps the sheer physical discomfort of life in Wales was part of its attraction: it made us feel closer to nature, or at least to that constant struggle against the forces of climate and geology which gives such satisfaction. My most vivid memories of North Wales are of these confrontations: taking our two small children along stony, snow-covered tracks to shelter and giving them chocolate in a mountainside cave, returning from a long hike with Robin in persistent, drenching rain, scrambling along sheep-tracks on steep hillsides – if a sheep could do it, why not a middle-aged historian? – above all, walking, balancing and clambering round the steep rocky sanctuary of the Arddy, west of the ridge of Cnicht, rewarded by the familiar but always unexpected sight of the cold lakes hidden in its folds.
But these were visitors’ pleasures. Our part of North Wales also attracted a curious population of permanent or semi-permanent settlers, or rather refugees, from outside: freelance writers, displaced bohemians from Soho, searchers for spiritual salvation on low or irregular incomes, and the odd anarchist intellectual. The presence of Bertrand Russell, the aged guru of anti-nuclear militancy, in Clough’s kingdom brought a number of them into the area; not counting members of his own dysfunctional family. Ralph Schoenman, the young American militant who acquired such remarkable influence over the ancient philosopher at this time, never became part of the local scene. He was too busy whizzing round claiming to save the world, ostensibly in the name of Russell. However, after retiring from this battle Pat Pottle, secretary of the activist Committee of a Hundred (and co-liberator of the Soviet spy George Blake from Brixton jail), settled down in Croesor, attracted by his fellow anti-nuclear activist and revolutionary, the painter Tom Kinsey (later the only known anarchist master of foxhounds, but, Snowdonia being
