Although I keep talking about staying in the present and just living one day at a time and being all those good things to be, there is a singular part of me that is secretly and greedily writing about the Welsh Marches because that is my way of not having to come home.
It is possible to love place the way you can love a person. My first lost love was the forest reserve of Stapleford, an isolated and undeveloped forest and mountain savannah plain somewhere high on the mountainous eastern borders of what is now Zimbabwe, falling away into Mozambique. There, in the Eastern Highlands of Nyanga, I knew and named and passionately loved every knotty pine and red blade of grass and tall wind-shaken reed and mountain silhouette as if I was a child charting her mother’s body. I could eagerly watch the swarming of flying ants just before rain, knew how to catch grasshoppers, imitate the shrieking whistle of eagles on the escarpment, and the noise of the river at night lulled me to sleep. The brown Pungwe in flood was the first riverine love of my life, sluggish and threatening on the plains and then becoming transparent, crystal clear over the rapids. I could search out flame lilies and wild epiphytic violets, the various ferns tumbling down the sides of gorges and ravines, the gourd creepers of the undergrowth, the brown velvet pods that caused such terrible itching. I spied on otters and iguanas and a small wily mongoose near the mealie field, knew how to sidestep the lazy coiled puff adder at the top of the verandah steps. I loved the quick black and red dawns and the long summer nights when the skies would be white with starlight. Galaxies opening up like the endless pages of a favourite book, the constellations of the Southern Cross.
If there is any kind of natural heaven for us to play in after death, that would be mine. Leaving that forest sanctuary was among the deepest griefs of my young life.
And the desire to explore the Welsh Borders was like finding a whole new paradise. I do wish I had taken the initiative and travelled around more, taken more bus rides into north Wales and the Gower, spent more days walking the sidestreets of Brecon or Talgaarth or another of those quiet and surprising little grey villages in the hills. I loved rambling along footpaths, fording streams and clambering up slopes of thistle and gorse, followed quite cluelessly by a crowd of blackfaced sheep. Lying amidst bluebells in a spring woodland. The views from the Black Mountain were always misty and beguiling, I was never sure if my directions and landmarks were what I took them to be. There were the endangered red kites soaring overhead on thermals, their wing spans like a code for freedom; and in early spring all of Wales seemed crowned with white hawthorn.
The memories I have are all gossamer and blossom and ravishing. Fairy land, a thin liminal place of crossing over, the history alive in the present, magical in an unsentimental way. The swans under grey willows on a small island in the Wye losing their cygnets in the spring floods; the gipsy woman with her roughly rolled cigarettes of newsprint and shredding tobacco, narrow black eyes like those of a wild bird, her stories of roasting hedgehog and plucked swallows over a fire in the woodland sixty years ago. Finding the traces of a vanished railway track down by the river and following a long-overgrown hedge of dogroses and crab-apple trees to a ruined castle keep…
The young woman with hair gone grey too soon, talking about prostitution and the strange lost men who would knock on the door of her almshouse rooms just before dawn, wanting to come in out of the cold and be comforted, sleepless men like animals hunting in the woods all night, washing blood from their hands in her basin, reeking of drink but obedient as children.
By writing about that timeless borderland and its people, I am making it real to myself and inhabiting it all over again. Able to postpone my departure just a little longer.
Recent Comments