Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [141]
If anything, the hierarchy of status had been spiritual or intellectual – that of minister of religion (that is to say orator), poet and scholar – who might be anyone, a postman with a gift for improvising the complex metres of Welsh verse or, like the great antiquarian and scholar Bob Owen, the pride of Croesor, whose library now forms part of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwith, a clerk at the quarry. (His son and his family – Tuddwr, Gaynor and their children Bob, Eleri and the baby Deian – were and remained our friends in the village.) A less cultural, but still locally recognized male status also came with distinction as a poacher, a widely practised and universally approved sport. Even in our times, when a Welsh friend from an old quarry village wanted to give us salmon for dinner and asked the weekly itinerant fish-seller for the price, the response naturally was: ‘Are you buying or selling?’ R. S. Thomas’s great poems should not mislead us into thinking of most North Wales hill farmers as unintellectual hulks. A lot of Welsh reading and thinking went on under those low roofs, ancestrally designed to combine a maximum view of approaching strangers with maximum shelter from rain and storm. In many ways our neighbour Edgar from Croesor Ychaf, explaining the regular collective pre-shearing round-up by the local farmers and their dogs of all the sheep running free on the mountain, was as knowledgeable about the ecology of the terrain as the college-trained and sullenly nationalist nature warden who had moved into the former village post office, and at least as articulate.
Whether Clough’s kingdom was typical of mountain Wales, I cannot tell, but it was an unstable and unhappy place full of underlying tension. It found expression in a growing, resentful and sometimes rancorous, anti-English feeling, a withdrawal from personal relations which came more naturally to adults than to children.2 There were also other signs of social malaise. When what were locally called ‘the orange people’ (the ‘sanyasins’ or followers of the Indian guru Shri Bhagwan) came into the valley in the early 1980s, they won converts among the native Welsh as well as, less surprisingly, in the English bohemian diaspora. And clearly not only because their way to salvation encouraged a lot of free sex. Croesor was a marvellous place for family holidays, but it was not a happy valley.
By the time I retired from Birkbeck in 1982 we had spent time in Clough’s kingdom every year for almost two decades. Bryn Hyfryd, and even more Parc Farm, flanked by the old Manor House (Big Parc), with its visitors and the tiny Gatws bursting with Schwarz cousins, was part of our, and even more of our children’s, lives, and friendships. Just because it was not blanketed by the permanent routines of everyday and professional life, the memories associated with North Wales – even the domestic and family rows – stand out with special vividness: the terrible news of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968, news of the death of my aunt Mimi brought by telegram – there were still such things – to a phone-less cottage, the car-door torn from its hinges by the storm as we got out to make our way to Edward Thompson’s New Year’s Eve party down the torch-lit path, our drive with Dorothy Wedderburn to picnic past Aberdaron on the far point of the Lleyn peninsula on a sunny Christmas Day, the ancient well in Parc that went on supplying