Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [137]
The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys The nettles growing through the cracked doors The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight The fields are reverting to the bare moor
Even in the 1960s tourism was only slowly beginning to fill the gap – for, though Snowdon dominated the view, the major beauty spots (and mountain climbing centres) of Snowdonia were a few miles away. The ruined Ffestiniog Railway, the narrow-gauge line on which 200 men from Llanfrothen and Penrhyndeudraeth had once travelled daily to the great quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog, was just beginning to be restored by passionate amateurs for the benefit of grateful tourist parents wondering what to do with their children. For most of our years in North Wales it still stopped dead on an overgrown mountainside before returning to Portmadoc.
Much of Clough’s work as ruler of his kingdom was literally making ruins habitable and filling empty walls on still 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,