6 minute read
Remembering the past
Tempus fugit,
and all that …
Mellow fruitfulness? It’s autumn in North Wales and I pull off the expressway and down to the big roundabout at Abergele. I run into the convenience store, donning my mask and sanitizing my hands, and a minute later I’m sitting in the car again and enjoying a particularly delicious meat and potato pie.
Yes, autumn is in the air. It always makes me feel a bit wistful, the passing of another summer and the advent of September and October. And as I rest in the car and bite into my pie, I suddenly realise I’m sitting in a spot I haven’t visited since I was eight years old, and which has a special bitter-sweet place in my autumnal memories…
Not so sure about the mellow fruitfulness – the pie is excellent, laced with a rich brown gravy, but there’s an aftertaste of hand-sanitizer too, which we’ve all had to get used to over the past year or so, whenever we’ve nipped in and out of a store and enjoyed a snack in the car.
Abergele roundabout… I was eight years old in September 1960, long before the expressway was built. Our journey from Nottingham all the way to Colwyn Bay took us winding through the many small towns of Cheshire and North Wales, through the very middle of all those pleasant and perfectly nice places such as Holywell and St Asaph and yes, Abergele. My Mum and Dad, for various reasons I still don’t completely understand even now that I’m nearly 70, were taking me several hundred miles away from home, to deposit me in a boarding school and leave me in the hands of complete strangers and then drive away again.
Dad had just bought a beautiful new car. It was a Rover threelitre, two-tone grey and blue, with cream leather upholstery. I’d been sitting in the back with my brother, not so much sitting as sliding this way and that (long before seat belts were invented), and feeling sick with the nervous fear of being taken away to school as well as with the intoxicating smell of the upholstery.
We stopped in Abergele. I mean, we stopped. The big, powerful, purposeful car spluttered to a standstill, as a cloud of blue smoke came puthering out of the bonnet.
Dad, understandably, was fuming too. He strode across the road to the garage which was there on the roundabout… a proper garage and workshop, where today there’s a car showroom and a convenience store, and in a little while he’d
passed the Rover into the oily hands of a mechanic who came out to take a look, and we were all transferred into a comparatively tinny and humble Ford Zephyr. Humble and tinny, yes, but it worked… and Dad, seething with frustration, drove us the rest of the way to Colwyn Bay.
We were late. It was my first introduction to boarding school
life, just eight years old, and I was saying a mumbled goodbye to Mum and Dad and being marched into the building by a big, gruff man who smelled of tobacco and sherry, and into the school dining room – a hundred other boys eating beans on toast in a cacophony of voices I’d never heard before.
Autumn… yes, a time for wistful nostalgia and reflections on
the passing of time. For me, especially in North Wales, where I spent my schooldays from the age of eight to eighteen, September and October were especially poignant. I was a long way from home, after the bliss of summer, mucking in with all the other boys, some of whom became my friends, others who did not. And the teachers, some of whom I liked, some I did not.
We played in the woods behind the school, at the top of Pwllycrochan Avenue. Boisterous in our blue dungarees, we climbed trees and made dens in the dense thickets of rhododendron. We played football every day, long ago when footballs were brown. At night we were herded into our dormitories by a matron, who sat us in the bath and washed our hair with jugs of hot water. And the master on duty – smelling of tobacco and sherry – warned us of the perils and dangers of this night by intoning the bedtime prayer, and then switched off the lights.
I would lie awake for a while, in my narrow, chilly bed, and listen to the hooting of the owls in the woodland, and the coughing of a leopard. A leopard? Yes, all those years ago, in the early 1960s, there was a leopard in the Welsh Mountain Zoo, and it would grumble and cough in the night, until I fell asleep and dreamed of being at home again. Mustn’t get too wistful… they say nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Right now, in the present moments of 2021, autumn is delicious in our lovely and very special North Wales. I can stand on the footbridge across the river Seiont, under the Eagle Tower of Caernarfon castle, and watch the water slipping out to sea… all the way down from the mountains of Snowdonia, slowing and pausing in Llyn Padarn at Llanberis and then tumbling and twisting through Pontrug and past the sweet little park on the outskirts of town. On its way the river has gathered a foam of fallen leaves. I stand on the bridge and watch the swirling foliage of the oak and ash and sweet chestnut which flourished this summer, as it joins the
salt water of the Menai Strait and drifts out to sea. Sic transit gloria mundi…
For me, as a schoolboy in Colwyn Bay and then as a schoolteacher in Bangor and Llandudno, September is unmistakably poignant. The very taste and smell of autumn, and starting a new year in school… by the way, it isn’t just the boys and girls who feel anxious, I’ve known teachers in their fifties and sixties who’ve been sick with nerves at
the beginning of the new school year, suffering a kind of hangover of anxiety they’ve experienced since they were children.
Ah, tempus fugit. For me, turning the calendar from August to September brings back the memories of a journey through Holywell and St Asaph and into Abergele, in the back of a big car smelling of leather and then seeing a pall of smoke rising from its not-so purposeful bonnet. And the sounds of a chill autumnal night… the quick cry of an owl and its quavering hoot, and the coughing of a leopard in the gathering darkness.
Funny how a meat and potato pie with a tang of handsanitizer can conjure the bitter-sweetness of autumn! 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.
