Once by Andrew McNeillie Read Free Book Online Page B

culturally murderous without being socially so, and why would anyone want to be?
    In those days, just up the road and beyond in the heartlands of the north – away, too, among the London Welsh – the language was like Glyn D w ^ r himself, always on the move, always there, unheard, unseen to the non-Welsh, like a well-kept secret. No matter periodically there were those who betrayed their compatriots in the name of an English tendency. Innumerable groups and organizations flourished to foster Welsh, ancient and modern: societies to nurture Welsh hymnody, singing festivals great and small, youth movements, eisteddfodau, local and national, for young and old. It was like religion and bound into religion still, as it had always been, since Elizabeth I commissioned a translation of the Bible into Welsh, perhaps the single act that did most in all history to keep the tongue alive.
    Coed Coch Road in Welsh would be Ffordd Coed Coch (Road… Wood… Red), but it was a bilingual road in its denizens and knew it so. That’s what it said on the sign. Even more than the all-clear it was a mystery. Who knew where the Red Wood stood? Was it the Fairy Glen? But the Fairy Glen was only at all red in autumn. Where was the Red Wood? In what way was it red? In a bloody way, as a site of battle in the long, long ago, some people have said, an encounter between Welsh and Saxon princes, Anarwd avenging the death of Rhodri Mawr against Athelstan of Mercia, or something of that sort, as could never be established, but might be true to the spirit and history of naming in that country. For sure, anyway, the estate of Coed Coch is on record back to 1246, exactly seven-hundred years to the year of my birth.
    Of course, these weren’t matters I dreamt of for a moment as a child. The beauty of childhood is that you don’t know much and you don’t know what’s going on most of the time, because you’re in a world of your own. Yet how vivid it was and enduring its experiences. How when you pause to examine incident and moment, sight and sound, they open up into detail to be reinvented.
    I did come consciously to wonder once in a way about the wood being red and how it might be, and when I was a bit older I remember wanting to find it. I had only to cross the road to get into the Fairy Glen, which was at least a step in the right direction. A municipal garden in a dingle, the Glen was an arm of woodland tapering up into the country, carefully but not over-carefully tended and planted, with terraced paths, and Colwyn stream in summer burbling or in winter gushing brown at its foot. They’d created a diversion from the stream itself, higher up at the top of the Glen, to make a second shallow water-course, six or seven inches deep at most through most of its length, a foot and more at the sluice-gate where it began, crossed in three places by flat wooden footbridges. The little stream, as we called it, ran a few hundred yards beside the top terrace. It spilled down at last in a waterfall, back to rejoin its source, and flow round by Edwards’ mill to the shore. Here were sycamores and elms, oaks and beeches, and lesser trees, conifers, shrubs of all sorts, yew trees, a run of cane along the upper stream, the occasional prickly berberis, a bank of trimmed laurel.
    The Glen contained a whole world of hideouts and lurking places, for boys and nesting songbirds. Though it was tended by the little fat man we knew as Willie Winkie, it admitted wildness too. As long as we were back, or in sight, when we said we would be we could disappear there all day, if we wanted, playing at war and westerns, furtively curious about, but suspicious of girls, following and spying on courting couples, peeping through foliage, tracking and stalking Red Indian style.
    Here I’d mooch alone down along the lower stream, setting lines for trout at evening, and sometimes catching them by the morning, sometimes catching eels. It’s all