6 minute read
A leaf from the Memory Book
Forest of thoughts
Stephen Gregory’s thoughts branch off while enjoying a summer ice cream…
A perfect Sunday afternoon in August... and I’m sitting on the Slate Quay at Caernarfon eating a screwball.
A screwball? I’m reliving a rather sickly experience of my long ago childhood, a vanilla ice cream on a bed of bubble gum. When I’ve worked my way through a large cup of over-sweet vanilla ice cream, I start chewing the gum at the bottom and trying to blow a bubble big enough to burst all over my face.
Across the river Seiont a hot summer’s breeze is blowing through the foliage of Coed Elen, one of the loveliest woodlands in the world. And in August the trees are in their darkest, heaviest leaf. Oak and ash and great billowing boughs of sycamore... and towering specimens of lime, some of them as tall as the towers of Caernarfon Castle. Coed Elen is a magical place of history and mystery older than the castle, redolent with the legends which King Edward of England tried to entwine into his conquest of Gwynedd.
I’ve been lucky to have lived in and near woodlands in many times of my life. My wife had an ancient house called Coed Cae Bach, with six mature beech trees in its grounds. We had a farmhouse in France called Le Bois, surrounded by forests running with deer and wild boar. In Borneo we lived in a leafy suburb called Forest Hill, alive with monkeys and hornbills and giant monitor lizards.
As a child at boarding school in North Wales, I built dens in the dripping rhododendrons of Pwllycrochan woods. As an aspiring writer in my thirties I worked as a gardener in Beddgelert, in the oak forests high above the village. A teacher in Sudan, I marvelled at the strange otherworldliness of the baobab. And in the Amazon I climbed to the giddying heights of mahogany, to sit in the nest of the harpy eagle.
Right now, in August, you don’t have to be anywhere exotic to be totally spoiled by the richness of our native trees. They’re everywhere and they’re glorious... in all the suburbs and side streets of Bangor, whether you’re shopping in a supermarket or trying to park in a crowded car park, or having your tyres checked on a busy industrial estate… the trees are at their very best, in full, blousy summertime foliage.
And from here, on the quayside of the Seiont, I can just make out the shape of one of my favourite trees...
It’s an ash. Not especially unusual or rare, and it’s not at all magnificent, hidden behind a bramble hedgerow. But every
time I pass nearby, either on foot or in the car, I pause and look and pay my respects. My ash, the one I always especially notice and spare a thought... In the winter time, when its branches are bare, it’s a poorly specimen. It’s black and twiggy. Its trunk is split wide open, probably blasted by lightning many years ago, riven and blackened by fire. It looks dead.
But when the spring comes, there’s the first inkling of a
miracle. The tree shows a twinkle of green shoots, and within a few weeks in March and April, it’s wearing a coat of fresh shimmering green. Now, in August, its branches are heavy with deep green leaves, and bedecked with the marvellous little helicopter seeds which will detach in an autumn breeze and spiral into the fields and hedgerows nearby. My tree – I don’t
think you’ll be able to find it. Everyone should have a favourite
tree, in their garden or in a park or hedgerow near their home, their secret tree which they hug warmly to themselves without telling anyone else.
Pop! My bubble gum has burst. As I pick at the shreds on my chin and nose and ponder my secret, I’m reminded of a legendary oak tree, and how it was split by a bolt of lightning. It’s the legend of Rhys and Meinir, at Nant Gwrtheyrn. You’ll know the story if you’ve been to the National Welsh Language and Heritage Centre, known as ‘the Nant’, near the village of Llithfaen on the north coast of the Llyn Peninsula. The centre was established from the remains of a quarrying village called Porth Nant, and these days it’s a Welsh language-learning centre taking in as many as 30,000 students every year. It’s a hauntingly atmospheric setting – and it’s know for the legend of a tragic young couple called Rhys and Meinir, who were married there once upon a time, long long ago.
A beautiful young couple, deeply in love... they had a beautiful wedding, attended by many guests and their loving families. And after the ceremony, as part of a tradition sometimes called ‘the bride quest’, they played a game of hide and seek. We’ve all played hide and seek, as children. We all remember the thrill of running away and finding such a marvellously secret and
unusual place to hide that we think we’ll never be found. And do you remember the niggling, gnawing feeling in your tummy when you wait and wait and wait and eventually worry that you’ll never be found?
We played it at school, among all the corridors and dorms of a big old house. I remember that another boy ran away to hide and he simply disappeared. We couldn’t find him anywhere.
After the long dark hours of a dismal Sunday evening, we told our teachers that he was missing... and everyone searched for the rest of a dreadful night until he was found half-suffocated inside the case of his own cello. He’d taken the cello out and tucked himself inside, and zipped himself up and couldn’t get out again... lucky to be alive, he’d found the perfect hiding place.
As did the lovely bride Meinir. She disappeared into the night, last seen flitting through the dark streets of the village in her
splendid white wedding dress.
Rhys searched everywhere. Consumed by his love for her and thrilled by the excitement of the game, he called her name until his voice cracked with weariness and a growing sense of despair. At last he enlisted the help of his family and friends and they searched every house and shed and barn. So the night passed. She was nowhere to be found. A week passed, a month, of desperate searching for the missing bride. The groom, Rhys, horribly distraught, suspected that Meinir had had a change of heart and run away, after the ceremony. In any case she was gone. Years and decades went by. Rhys grew old, tormented by grief. He became a shadow of the beautiful young man he had been. Until he was eighty, grey and gaunt, and he would surely die an embittered and loveless man.
One night there was a terrible storm. The sky crackled and sizzled with lightning, the village shook with the rumbling of thunder.
Rhys was outside in the storm. He wanted to die. He wanted the storm to end his misery. The mightiest of all bolts of lightning hit the oak tree where he was standing. And the tree was split wide open. There was Meinir... a grotesquely wizened skeleton, in her wedding dress, inside the perfect hiding place she had found for herself.
Oh dear, my gentle musings about my favourite, secret ash tree, riven by lightning, have taken me obliquely to another place, another time, another tree. Blame the bubble gum. n
Stephen Gregory’s first novel, The Cormorant, which he wrote in Snowdonia 35 years ago, has been published several times in both the UK and the USA, and translated into German, Polish and Italian. The new edition, which is available from Parthian Books, is its tenth publication.
