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By Root 1746 0

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