Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

The settlers left Wales in the middle of the nineteenth century to start a new life. They sent letters home complaining how hard and unforgiving the land was; wresting potatoes from the soil was like wrenching coins from a miser’s hand. And yet, paradoxically, when the war of independence erupted they spent three years irrigating the land with their blood, rather than surrender the colony. Some people saw it all as a monument to an essential truth about the human condition: to contrariness, or man’s deep-seated need to moan. But not me. For all the names of obscure battles we memorised in school, the campaigns and mountain ranges, the lamas and lamentation, the one image that has remained with me across the years is the strange story of their arrival on those far off shores. The story of the first day. The good ship Mimosa was anchored out in the bay, men were wading ashore; and one man – the perennial early bird – ran ahead and climbed a nearby hill to view the promised land. What happened next must surely have crushed their spirits and made them want to turn back. But emigrating in those days was a life sentence against which there was no appeal. Everything you had was sold to buy the dream, the one-way ticket; there was no surplus and no returning. You had to admire their guts; or their desperation . . .

What did the man see, that first Welshman on the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? He saw the cruel wisdom which had been available to him at his grandmother’s knee, but which he had scorned because of her simple ways; and because knowledge only becomes wisdom once you have paid a high price, and traversed oceans for it. He saw a simple truth: that a man who arrives in the marketplace to sell dreams from atop a hastily upturned crate, and who casts anxious looks around every now and again as if in fear of arrest, is not to be trusted. He saw that a man who claims to have the cure for all known ills in his small bottle of cordial and wears clothes covered in patches is not to be believed. He saw that a man who has found what all men since the beginning of time have sought, a promised land, might reasonably be expected to go and live there himself; not sell tickets with an air of furtive desperation in the marketplace.

But hope, like love, is a powerful drug that subverts all calls to reason. Patagonia! Where the soil was so rich you could cook and baste with it; rivers so full of gold it took two people to carry a bucket of water; lambs which made the ground tremble as they walked, and arrived ready-seasoned from grazing in the vales of mint. A blessed grove where troubles were unknown; but which, strangely, only Magellan had heard of. A far-off land named after a race of Indians who had vanished from this world and whose only imprint in the sands of time seemed to have been – and oh, the cruel irony of it – the fact that they had big feet. What did he see from the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? No one knows. He disappeared into thin air. The very first settler: climbed to the top of the hill and was never seen again. Don’t tell me that isn’t an omen.

Meirion had said he’d bring the paper’s film critic along, but when he arrived there was only him. Then I saw he was wearing a different hat and I understood. He greeted me with a warm smile and took a stick of rock out of his pocket and went through the slow ritual of removing the cellophane. He pointed at Clip. ‘They say it’s the second most enigmatic smile in the history of art.’

‘After the Mona Lisa?’

‘That’s right, but without the guile.’

‘I didn’t know they used dogs in war.’

‘They used loads, they just don’t like to talk about it too much. They’re ashamed, you see.’

‘What of?’

‘Of what you have to do to get a dog to disobey his natural instinct and run headlong into machine-gun fire.’

‘What do you have to do? Throw a stick?’

Meirion smiled. ‘No. You have to use the dog’s deep love and devotion, his loyalty to and trust in his master. There’s nothing else on earth quite like a dog’s love for his master. And it’s freely given. A bit of food, a bit of kindness, a few soothing words and a pat on the head, some slippers to fetch, that’s all it takes. Then, once you’ve got it, once the dog loves you so much he will trust you absolutely and do anything you say, you can send him into the minefield.’

I grimaced at the picture Meirion had painted. ‘So what’s the story about the new movie, Bark of the Covenant?’

‘Technically it’s not new. It’s just been re-cut. The director’s cut, I suppose you’d call it – he’s dead now, but he left detailed instructions on how he wanted it. Clip was a kind of Lassie, you see. He used to star in the newsreels shot in the What the Butler Saw format. At first it was all factual stuff, but because the news was rarely good they started to embellish it a bit. Before long Clip became so popular back home no one wanted to hear about the war unless Clip was in the story. So they blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. In fact, they didn’t so much blur them as blow them away. They started producing full-length features masquerading as newsreels. Bark of the Covenant and Through a Dog Darkly are the most famous. Last spring some workmen rebuilding the Pier found a walled-up room with a runic inscription above the door. Inside they found an archive of lost Clip footage. Some enthusiasts restored the movie and transferred the print to 70mm.’

‘What did the inscription say?’

‘I don’t know but I can guess: “A curse upon all who enter” or something like that.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, when you get a druid inscription above a sealed chamber it doesn’t usually say, “Come in and make yourself at home”.’

Before he left, Meirion gave me a newspaper clipping which he thought I might find interesting. It was from a few weeks ago and told the strange story of a man who had hung himself after seeing the premiere of Bark of the Covenant. He had been a taxidermist. Meirion gave me the address and said the man’s daughter was living there now. The house was nearby, on Bryn Road, and I decided to pay her a visit. The girl, her eyes still red with crying, peeped round the door at me and invited me in. I was shown to a chair in a small sitting room in front of a gas fire that hissed softly in the gloom. The mantelpiece was arrayed with the usual knick-knacks, stuff which I could tell had belonged to her dead father and mother: cheap silver-plated candlesticks, a Coronation mug, miniature brass elephants set beside a brass shell case from the Great War; framed photos of various dead people, and a south-coast seaside resort where a young couple grinned awkwardly into a camera forty years ago. A brass letter holder stuffed with letters and cards, none of them from abroad. The accumulated detritus of a life, all that was left of the good times two people had shared. Put them all together in a box and sell them through Exchange and Mart, you might get the cost of a second-class stamp.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said the girl, dabbing her eyes. ‘I . . . I . . .’

‘Take your time,’ I said gently. She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, wrapped up in a bilberry-coloured mackintosh which looked like it might be quite an expensive model, belted tightly at a narrow waist. Her hair was cropped in a pageboy bob, ivory colour, the way they did it in Flemish paintings back in the time when the Flems went in for painting. She was very pretty, with clear blue eyes and tear-stained cheeks which some would describe as pellucid. It was the sort of complexion they use to advertise cosmetics even though you never get a complexion that good using powder. Two weeks ago her father had gone to see the new Clip movie and after that he had walked down to Trefechan Bridge by the harbour, attached a length of cord to the central light fitting, and hanged himself from it. He swayed like a pendulum in the breeze all night and was found in the early light by a fisherman going to work. If he’d been my dad, I would have cried, too.

She picked up a tissue and with a determined effort to move things along blew her nose with a sharp and unseemly ‘parp’ sound.

‘You say he hanged himself after seeing the movie, but does that imply simply a temporal relation like saying it was after the six o’clock news, or are you implying there is a causative connection?’

‘I’m sorry, I . . .’

‘I mean, when you say “after” do you just mean after the movie, or do you mean he killed himself because of something he saw in it?’

‘Because of what he saw, yes, there is no doubt about it. No doubt whatsoever.’

‘There’s usually doubt about these things . . .’

‘You didn’t know my father. His life was ruined by that dog.’ She gave me a look which challenged me to make light of such a claim. I left the gauntlet where it lay. ‘You’ve seen the stuffed Clip at the museum?’ she said.

‘Plenty of times.’

‘What do you think of it?’