The remembered responses of adults to ourselves as children by which we were crushed or made the more resistant at the time gather force throughout our lives: What would you do if you were lost? the schoolmistress asked. Work out the way home, and start walking No, fool youd ask a policeman. The class looked blank. I got the strap.
We threw stones at policemen where I lived as a child. There were no drugs (other than alcohol and tobacco), guns, sink estates or case conferences in post-war, inner-city Manchester; but the deprivation and dispossession were palpable gapped streets of poor housing shaken to its foundations in the Blitz, its sodden brick steeped in a marinade of soot and industrial discharge. And the violence was ubiquitous kids and women beaten, men with faces carved, eyes lost to bottle and knife, noses smashed by fist or boot, old blind men whose Great War wounds still wept sitting out on doorsteps when the hazy sun appeared.
On those days, at street-ends or from bomb-site, croft or park, the hills and moors of the Pennines rose like the ramparts of Paradise. The phrase is that of Robert Roberts from his wonderful autobiography, A Ragged Schooling. (He was another corner-shop Roberts, but this one of beneficent rather than malignant genius. Can you imagine Margaret Thatcher, with that peculiar mode of locomotion of hers, ever actually enjoying a walk?) In the same book he tells of the northern urban tradition of escape that had certainly been extant a century before, at the time Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Mary Barton. To Robert Roberts, concisely, it was on Sundays, the Derbyshire hills, seeking at times the desolate places that imaged my growing loneliness.
My feet took me down those paths too. I walked out of the city. Literally. Time and again from before I was in my teens. Back to the places my people had left maybe fifty years before. Was it safe? No more so then than now. Did I have money? No, but I scratched together enough in the way of things a rucksack, a blanket, a stove to allow a high degree of self-reliance. Was I allowed? It was barely noticed that Id gone. Escapades, adventures, threat ? Yes, thank heavens how else do we learn?
There are a dozen other crucial questions that could be asked, should be acknowledged, but the essence is this: exercise of the freedom invested in my own two feet brought me gifts, and my grandparents love apart they were the greatest Id known in my life to that point. They took me out of the city, and they took me back to a way of being, a necessary attention, a connection and a real reverence that generations before mine had known; and that for our human happiness and balance we all need to know. They placed me, as only your own feet and your own eyes and your own senses can, back in a vital relationship with nature, time and process.
A displaced inheritance
Much later in that educational progress, I came consciously to realise this truth, and to express it in a radio essay that teased at the cultural interface between Wales and England to make the point more personally. Heres its conclusion:
My people come from those colliery terraces with the clean hills of Wales at their back which look down on Wrexham from the shoulder of Ruabon Mountain to the south-west. They come from Rhos, with its fine Welsh and its score of chapels and its great choir, and they left there in the years before the Great War, in the way that working people did throughout the ages, to find jobs in Salford, and to live among the chemicals and the effluent and the smog with which the Industrial Revolution, throughout its progress, poisoned its people and its planet.
I think of my paternal grandfather and the change in his life, the decision formed of necessity to make his way from Rhos to Salford and what it entailed for him and for the millions like him over the century-and-a-half up to his time who had had to follow the same path.
For my grandfather as a youth, there would have been the heather changing colour season to season on Ruabon and Esclusham Mountains; the rare mornings when their hillside stood out above the cloud sea; the times after chapel when he and his companions might have ranged over the moor past Mountain Lodge, down into the lovely green limestone valley with the cranesbill trailing from the walls and the tang of wild garlic on the air at Worlds End before they clattered back, hobnails sparking, along Gwter Siani and past Llanerchrugog Hall as the stars came out to reach Rhos again.
How much of this did he miss, down there in Salford by the ooze and stench of the Irwell? He took his language and his culture with him. Each Sunday after his death my grandmother still went to the Capel y Bedyddwyr on Plymouth Grove in Manchester to sing the old hymns in the Tongue of Heaven. How can my grandfather not have taken also the memory of the sky and the wide moor and the clouds billowing out of Wales all those glimpses of freedom that the tyranny of economics and maybe also the closeness and scrutiny of a small community forced him to barter?
I think of my grandmother in her chapel pew singing out Ar lan Iorddonen ddofn on the banks of Jordan deep and wonder if ever a glimmer of her sly Welsh irony passed between these banks of imaginary promise and those of the Irwell on which she lived. And the names of her childhood Fron Deg, Bryn Goleu, Llwyneinion how did Factory Lane, Barrow Street and the East Ordsall Road compensate for the loss of those? Or for the liberty of walking on a spring morning maybe over Esclusham Mountain, the loping hare kicking rainbows from the dew, England still unknown and beneath the damp oblivion of the cloud behind her. And as, unknown to them, on a thousand hillsides frost and storm and rain tore at the integrity of their former roof and hearth, how often would the thoughts of all the displaced have hovered around the sentiment of this plea:
A ninnau boed byw / Yn ymyl gwisg Duw / Yn y grug, yn y grug.
"Let us live too/ At the hem of Gods garments/ In the heather, in the heather".
For the most part, we can no longer live in the heather, but our feet for a time can take us there, and perhaps must if were to retain a sane perspective on this world. My grandmothers Manchester chapel is now the Islamic Academy, Welsh graves in the chapelyard still.
In the White House and the Pentagon and Downing Street, men who rage within take decisions the implications of which are blinded old, maimed children, raw wounds on the streets of Jerusalem or Kabul. They should slip their security blankets and take a walk from time to time
