No. 29 - The Call of Home

On Monday October 15 1984, I realised one of my ambitions by leaving Pwllheli, the town I grew up in, for London and a career in the Civil Service. I worked in Wood Green, King’s Cross, Hornsey, Holloway, at Southwark Bridge and finally Westminster, for three government departments. I consider London a friend. It celebrates with me when I'm happy and comforts me when I'm sad, and it would take something extraordinary for me to ever leave.

But, even though I no longer have family in the town, Pwllheli retains an emotional hold, whether I like it or not, and it inspires an unsettling ambivalence in me. My parents were from the Rhondda, I was born in Bangor, and I’ve now spent over half my life in London, but Pwllheli will forever be my home town and I cannot bear the idea of never going there again. It is a part of who I am.

Looking towards Morfa Garreg, over the rooftops of the old town. 2016

Whenever I visited my mother in her later years, I hated arriving in Pwllheli, as though I was being forced to revert to a previous version of myself - one I’d gone to a lot of trouble to banish. My teenage home looked the same but different - smaller, the décor brighter, busier and very 1970s - my mother’s ideal house. By then its narrow staircase had been corrupted by a lift, practical but ugly.

Two or three days later, with my holdall slung across my shoulders, I would walk down Salem Terrace while she would stand, a tiny figure at the window beside the front door watching me go. As instructed, halfway down I would turn and wave, every time fearing it would be the last time I’d ever see her. This went on for years. With a lump in my throat I would wave my last goodbye and walk to the No 12 Clynnog & Trefor bus bound for Caernarfon. I hated leaving her, and I found I hated leaving Pwllheli even more than I had hated arriving in it.

A Seaside town

Pwllheli, for Llŷn, was a metropolis. Although it had fewer than 4000 inhabitants, it was the largest settlement for 20 miles. It had a Woolworth’s, a W H Smith, a Boots the Chemist, why, it even boasted a proper Department Store called Bon Marche. So it felt important, and bigger than it actually was. It was riddled with eccentricity - the characters, the gossip - everyone knowing and talking about everyone else’s business, it seemed loved and hated in equal measure by its own inhabitants. The townspeople would moan about its lack of this or that, but if an outsider was to do so, they might find the locals fierce in its defence.

The houses of Salem Crescent viewed from Embankment Road. 2016

From a sheltered hollow the old port looked out on Cardigan Bay, but its centre was separated from the sea by a harbour and some reclaimed land. The fabric of a Victorian seaside resort was built by Cardiff-based entrepreneur Solomon Andrews, a man responsible for operating buses in Belfast, Leicester, Manchester and Nottingham and tramways in Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth - and Pwllheli. His horse drawn tram that used to carry passengers and stone along the beach between the town and Llanbedrog, was destroyed by a violent storm in 1927 - what a tourist attraction it might have become. The wooden ticket office endured, repurposed as a fruit shop, and one of the tram cars dispensed tourist information leaflets on local attractions - the Ffestiniog Railway, Butlin’s Holiday Camp and the Italianate village of Portmerion.

Andrews’ grand seaside parade on the promenade remained - Pwllheli’s West End. It was in the west, and it was pretty much the end, unless you counted the golf links. From my childhood I remember it as uniformly white, but when I last visited it was painted in pastel shades of pink, blue, yellow and green, like a bag of sugared almonds. At the other end of the promenade lay South Beach with its Beach Café - and beyond that, the jagged remnant of Gimlet Rock, its original profile corrupted by the quarrying of stone to make granite setts, a monument either to economic pragmatism, or to greed.

Town on the edge

Pwllheli lived close to the weather and the weather had its moods. In summer it could sometimes have a Mediterranean feel to it. Before white-sailed boats sharp against the deep blue sea of the bay, you could lie on the warm sand breathing in the scent of marram grass and the salt air and, eyes closed against the brilliant sun, listen to the insistent drone of an outboard motor and the excited cries of children scampering in and out of the shallows, with buckets and shrimping nets that would only ever catch slimy seaweed.

Overlooking the town, Pen-y-Garn may have lacked vineyards, but it was fragrant with lush ferns and prickly, yellow flowered gorse, and there was a throbbing music in the hum of bees, the stridulation of grasshoppers and even the low growl of a tractor at work in the distance. So yes, quite Mediterranean, as long as you didn’t go into Sparta Café and ask for a selection of tapas and a cold cervesa that is. They did once do frogs legs – in batter.

The quieter end of Pwllheli High Street. 2018

But the sleepy town of a balmy summer evening in late July, its population overwhelmed by tourists, had little to do with the cold, wet, inhospitable place it became during a winter storm. From my mother’s dormer window in Penlleinau school house, on a clear night you could see a gold chain of twinkling lights from the towns across Tremadog Bay – Harlech with its Norman castle, Abermaw and all the places strung out along the coast between them. But if the weather was particularly bad, you couldn’t see anything. During a storm, I could imagine myself one of a handful of survivors of some cataclysm, cowering in a hollow, hiding from the darkness, the cold hills, and a vast, hostile sea. It felt menacing, sinister, exciting – a reminder of how fragile and impermanent we are compared to the elements and the landscape around us. Above the town, many of the weathered slate graves in the older part of Denio cemetery have an anchor engraved upon them, along with etched tales of how their occupants worked on, and were sometimes claimed by the sea.

Safe indoors, listening to the howling wind and torrential rain beating against the windows, occasionally we would hear the sound of a distant flare. This meant that a boat was floundering in the bay, and that down in the rain-lashed, wind-buffeted town, a handful of townsmen would hurry to answer the distress call. They would drop whatever they were doing, rush to the edge of the tempest and launch the little lifeboat into the tumult. Thinking of their peril made the storm seem bleaker. Men I’d pass in the street every day without giving them a second thought, would rip themselves away from mundane, cosy domesticity and deliberately plunge into a dangerous rescue mission, risking their lives for the sake of someone they often didn’t know.

Gaol Street looking towards Salem Chapel, as featured in C4's 'Our Welsh Chapel Dream'. 2018

Umbra

But there wasn’t a storm every night, even in the winter. All through my childhood there were two cinemas - the staid Town Hall and the jazzier Palladium, which had double seats in the rear circle, to accommodate courting couples, or picture-goers with particularly large bottoms. Assuming chapel or church wasn’t your idea of a good time, aside from ‘the pictures’ and the fairground amusement arcade, there was little to do but drink. A few minutes after eleven, people would tumble out of the Whitehall, the Tower, the Castle, the Mitre, the Penlan Fawr - there would be mickey-taking, laughter and loud farewells - and then nothing. A quarter of an hour later, the streets were quiet and empty. My brother once observed that it was like watching a film crew deserting a set at the end of a day’s shooting.

In fair weather, at night the sky became the magical star-scape that light-pollution prevents city dwellers from ever seeing. When the people had gone home and the gulls had retired for the night, the only sound was the melancholy call of curlews from the marshland, the dunes and from across the harbour mudflats. But often there would be absolute silence and absolute darkness. When visiting from London, I never slept well on my first night home, because it was too dark and too quiet. There was a tangible nothingness - the complete absence of light.

I was often disturbed early in the morning by the sound of munching, because the wall of our back yard held back the Garn, the hill that looks over the town, and on it the sheep could be heard enjoying their breakfast - grass with a side order of clover.

The jagged remnant of Gimlet Rock, ruthlessly quarried for its granite. 2016

The call of home is loud

Wherever I see hills covered in fern or bracken, or with gorse, or hear the melancholy cry of gulls, the rattling of wind-bothered rigging on sailing boats, or smell the mud of a harbour or the salt of the sea - for an instant - I am taken back to my hometown. Make no mistake, I belong in East London. I've been here so long, I find it hard to believe that I could have lived my first nineteen years in a remote, eccentric little town, smaller than many English villages, and somehow thought of it as ‘normal’. I took it for granted. It was a community where, despite the odd sharp tongue, people tended to be kind and to look out for each other, without expecting any credit for doing so, and along with the weather, I think it is probably one of the few things unchanged today. With the benefit of hindsight, I consider myself privileged to have been raised in the midst of such quiet beauty, in a safe and fertile place in which to conjure stories and wallow in dreams.