Whispering Back by Adam Goodfellow Read Free Book Online Page A

limited. However, living as we were with Nicole’s parents, the idea of some time to ourselves held a lot of appeal, especially as most of our friends had gone off to Thailand, Australia or Japan. We hardly had enough money to fill a car with petrol, let alone buy one, and an overseas adventure was completely out of the question. We decided to visit a friend who lived at the foot of Cader Idris. His cottage, built with stones from a nearby castle, the last stronghold of Welsh nationalists, which had been comprehensively demolished by the English in 1283, made up exactly half of the houses in Llanfihangel-y-Pennant (excluding the church). The hamlet nestles into a perfect valley near the coast, and is overhung with crags echoing to the calls of buzzards and red kites. Its claim to fame is as the only village in the country with twice as many letters in its name than it has inhabitants. Clearly it was not going to be accessible by public transport.
    A friend from Cambridge, my old schoolmate Dom, had got himself into the unenviable position of owning a clapped-out Ford Escort estate, which needed constant repairs to keep it on the road, and for which he did not possess a licence to drive. It was almost old enough to be a collector’s item, except that nobody in their right mind would collect such a desperately unstylish car. Nearly a year before, it had somehow passed an MOT test, but this did not necessarily mean it was roadworthy. In any case, it had been sitting outside Dom’s flat for months, quietly detracting from Cambridge’s tourist attractions, and utterly redundant. Therefore it was not terribly difficult to persuade him to let me borrow it, and I took the bus over to Cambridge and drove it back to MK to pick up Nicole for our ten-day trip. It was a rusting death trap, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure that Dom was doing me a favour when it failed at first to start. He sounded unusually sober as he wished me good luck and added, ‘Take care.’
    Unable to reach 60 mph, the car only just made it to Milton Keynes and the brakes were decidedly dodgy, so we held off a couple of days until they had been fixed. Although our extremely limited holiday budget had not included the costs of repairing Dom’s car, this was, in retrospect, probably the best money I have ever spent. We set off across the English Midlands, following the Roman road, Watling Street, which runs from almost outside where we were living, right to the middle of Wales. From here, we found ourselves struggling to get up the steep inclines of the Welsh mountains, even though we remained on A roads. The traffic built up behind us as the Escort toiled up to the crest of each ridge, at one point needing to be put into first gear as we urged it on like cheerleaders, looking desperately for a roadside parking space to let the long line of cars past.
    We managed to reach our destination, and from there, a few days later, decided to make an excursion to see one of Wales’s magnificent strongholds. Or, as it turned out, Lucy Rees’s house, ‘on the way’. After an hour’s drive, we left the main road and headed for a village that appeared to be in the right area. Of course we got lost, although to say we got lost implies that we actually knew where we were trying to go, which we did not. After many embarrassing conversations with local shepherds and shopkeepers, we came across a couple of farmers who were standing by the side of the road. They seemed to know who we were talking about, although we found their accents almost impossible to interpret. ‘Up that road,’ one of them pointed. ‘Go past the village Lleffiddillich bllah bllah and then when you come past a house, go left, Ddyllian lleyn bllah bllah and she’s the second house llan Gw liar the valley.’ Having asked him to repeat himself once, we pretended to understand, thanked him and set off.
    For those who may not have visited the charming vicinity of Cnicht, there are not many roads, houses,