Back to School

A lesson learnt

Stephen Gregory’s journey from student to acclaimed writer went from one school term to another – until he escaped to the North Wales countryside…

September… and back to school? Not necessarily. One September, back in the 1980s, I was waking up in a little old

caravan in a field in the village of Nantlle, in the foothills of

the Snowdonia national park, and realising it was the first

September since I was five years old that I wasn’t going ‘back

to school’.

I was 33, I’d been through primary school and secondary school and university and then gone straight into school teaching… 28

consecutive years of following the rhythms of the school year as though they were as inevitable as the seasons themselves. I remember the mixed feelings of joy and panic. Joy, because I’d escaped the system in which I’d been cocooned since I was a small boy, that I’d tugged myself away from its comfortably magnetic attraction… and panic, because I felt suddenly rather alone and lonely in my Snowdonian retreat.

It was the beginning of years of living in caravans in North Wales, of tackling the risky, exhilarating prospect of being a freelance writer rather than a teacher in full-time employment. And what a marvellously refreshing place to embrace my new freedom! I emerged from the caravan and strolled across the fields, startling the sheep which were grazing there, and I

knelt to splash my face in the dark, cold waters of Nantlle lake. I gazed around me, up to the flanks of Snowdon and its peak in

a swirl of cloud, to the looming grey spoil of the slate quarries, across the still, smooth face of the lake itself. made coffee on the gas stove… and a few minutes later I was scrawling pages of very good and very bad ideas onto a yellow pad, the very stuff of the novel I would write in the coming autumn and winter.

Caravans in Snowdonia… I lived in a few of them, over the first few summers of my writing adventure, when I was feral

in North Wales. In the winter I’d be able to rent a cottage and be snug against the gathering darkness, because the rents were so low and landlords were happy to have anyone, even a feckless young novelist, in their property. But by the beginning of April and the first holidays of spring, the rents shot up and

I’d find a local farmer with an empty caravan in a field of sheep,

which I could occupy through an idyllic summer.

In Betws Garmon, on the winding road beyond Waunfawr and climbing up and up through Rhyd-ddu and onwards to Beddgelert… it’s the quintessence of Snowdonia, a tiny village on the river Gwyrfai, in the valley between Moel Eilio and

CARAVANS IN SNOWDONIA… I LIVED IN A FEW OF THEM, OVER THE FIRST FEW SUMMERS OF MY WRITING ADVENTURE, WHEN I WAS FERAL IN NORTH WALES

YES, THE APPLES WERE FALLING, IT WAS SEPTEMBER AND NOT THE BEST TIME OF YEAR TO BE PITCHING A TENT IN AN ORCHARD.

Mynedd Mawr, with Yr Wyddfa itself towering into a blue

summer’s sky. My caravan was hidden in a derelict, roofless

stone barn, accessible only by foot, a few hundred yards up a steep, rubble track. I would struggle up there with my shopping, with a few bottles of water and the kind of food I could eat without cooking anything at all, and ensconce myself in my perfect writer’s hideaway.

Another hundred yards further, above the caravan in its ruinous hut, there was an abandoned quarry, no more than a cleft in the hillside, almost completely overgrown with rowan and alder and a formidable bristling of bramble… and I would scramble up in the evenings to my own special eyrie, with a view down the valley to a sunset on the Menai Strait at Caernarfon, and I’d look out for the nightjar which went hawking for moths in the twilight.

And another caravan, in a field below the forests of Mynedd

Mawr, near a farmhouse called Tros y Gol. There were big galumphing heifers sharing my summer domain, and they would lean against my caravan and rub their bony haunches so hard that sometimes I thought they would topple me over. Especially disconcerting at night, when I was dreaming the oddly nightmarish stories I was writing, when the beasts would blunder through the darkness and bump into the caravan, in their own bovine befuddlement…

A different summer and a different place, yet still within the same village of Betws Garmon, and my home was a musty old caravan, all green with moss and surrounded by towering fir trees… It was a strangely unsettled summer. My head

was whirling with the muddled ideas of a book which was resisting my very best efforts to write it, with the farmer’s geese pestering at my door all day and even knocking with their tough yellow beaks in the middle of the night, with the gnawing discomfort of a wisdom tooth enflamed in my jaw, and

forever the groaning and creaking of those fir trees, leaning

over my roof and threatening to topple and crush me in my feverish sleep.

Ah, a marvellous place to be a horror writer, Snowdonia in the summer or the winter – at any time of the year really. And so I’ve enjoyed many idyllic summers in caravans, in the lovely mountain scenery of North Wales, and the occasional foray into real camping, under the stars. It was a golden September, and my wife and I pulled into a camp-site to spend a night in of the apple trees – and indeed there was an orchard in full heavy fruit. There were already ten or a dozen other campers established on the site, with their caravans and tents set up at the other side of the field, some distance from the trees.

We thought it would be private and more appropriately rustic to pitch our tent in the orchard, wondering why no one else had done so. In the night, in our balmy and fragrant dreams, we were awakened by a heavy thud… and another thud, and another… as though a clumsy drunk or even a thief were trying to break into our tent.

Me, bravely protective of my wife, I scrambled outside to confront the intruder. Thud, this time on the crown of my head. Yes, the apples were falling, it was September and not the best

time of year to be pitching a tent in an orchard. Abashed, and bashed, we moved the tent out into the field, where a few of the

other campers watched and smiled. So it’s September again, but no more school for me. Seventy now, I’ve added up the years of my life I’ve spent as a schoolboy or a student or a schoolteacher – exactly a half-century of ‘back to school’. And I remember the joy and panic, waking up in a caravan in Nantlle, long ago in lovely Snowdonia, and the daunting prospect of filling two or

three hundred blank pages with my good ideas and bad ideas, to justify my escape from the classroom.

Schooldays are the best days of your life, right? But sometimes you need to tug yourself away from their gentle magnetism. 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.