Wild Wales I
The drive up, the Black Country and an unlikely family history (not mine).
We’re late setting off because I want a run, then a shower, then I have to explain to my mum which bits of the garden she can fuck with and which bits she can’t (most of them).
Then I give her Helen’s number in case of emergencies. If there’s anyone in the village I trust to handle most emergencies, up to and including armed intruders, an outbreak of plague or a zombie apocalypse, it’s Helen.
Finally we’re off but Joel needs coffee. He functions on several a day and a shortage of milk this morning means he needs one now, urgently.
An hour’s delay later, an aborted attempt to get to Services mired in M40 Easter traffic, then a detour to a strip mall in Banbury — a town in which the only thing of note is a rhyme about riding a cock-horse — and Joel has coffee.
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross…
We are off, swinging up the motorway towards Wales via the Black Country.
The Black Country is a strange place. The old industrial heartland of coal seams and iron foundries, these days it’s part of the sprawling Midlands conurbation around Birmingham (and no less bleak for it, sorry).
I first came upon mention of it in the Quincunx by Charles Palliser. Our hero, escaping from indentured servitude on a farm in the York moors, sets out by foot for London.
He describes it thus:
There’s also this, from Samuel Sydney’s Rides on Railway:
“.. a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow. The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome; the natural dead flat is often broken by high hills of cinders and spoil from the mines; the few trees are stunted and blasted; no birds are to be seen, except a few smoky sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces continually smoke, steam engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while blind gin horses walk their doleful round.. ”
It sounds like Mordor.
And the natives?
“… savages, without the grace of savages, coarsely clad in filthy garments, with no change on weekends or Sundays, they converse in a language belarded with fearful and disgusting oaths, which can scarcely be recognised as the same as that of civilised England.”
Victorian travelogues are brilliant, aren’t they? New verbs (“belard”, anyone?) and maudlin, spread thickly on a bed of self-righteousness.
I’m reading George Borrow’s Wild Wales this week — another Victorian travelogue — and it’s jam-packed with moral superiority. I confess I lost my taste for old Borrow a bit after his conversation with “a black” on the Chester city walls, which ends with him chastising the man for his laziness because he doesn’t want to be a slave. Incredible stuff.
Speaking of moral superiority, as we skirt Solihull, a banner on an overpass proclaims “Jesus is King”. I thought it was Charles, but there we are. Joel suggests “Jesus is Dead” would be more appropriate. I remind him precision in language is a virtue and suggest: “Jesus was (probably) a man, now dead, who lived two thousand years ago.”
Yesterday in the coffee shop we were talking to our friend who works there. He was telling me he’s started on the classics, feels it’s time. He’s been through Animal Farm and 1984 and Sherlock Holmes, now on Lord of the Flies.
“It’s amazing,” he said, “how good they are.”
I agreed.
“Like, it’s amazing how even though they were written like 100 years ago, it feels like something that could have been written today by somebody.”
I love seeing this moment in someone else’s eyes. That sudden realisation that communion is possible, with remote existences across space and time, in a book.
That great power the Bible has always hijacked.
Speaking of remote existences.
“I think we’re quite close to your ancestral home, babe.” That’s me, to Joel.
This is a funny story. Last year, on our journey to Wales, we stopped at Attingham Park. It’s a grand old pile, a vast ornate stately home that belongs to the National Trust but used to be the seat of the grand old Lords Berwick.
Now, something I should mention: Joel’s grandfather is said to be the illegitimate son of the last Lord Berwick of Attingham.
I know. Wild right?
He was a pretty interesting character and maybe someday I’ll get round to a serial novel of his life. He fought in WWI, served the Viceroy in India and, it would seem, shagged Joel’s great-grandmother in Whitstable at some point, approximately nine months before Joel’s grandad was born.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, right. That’s what I thought too.
Then I saw a picture of the guy and, let me tell you, the family resemblance is fucking uncanny.
Anyway, the 8th Lord Berwick didn’t trust this wild cousin of his who was going to inherit, when he himself (the 8th) died without sons. A penchant for shagging commoners in Whitstable didn’t bode well, he felt.
So, before he died, he gifted the whole estate off to the National Trust. In doing so, he dispossessed the 9th Lord Berwick, Joel’s great-grandad, who died estate-less, debt-ridden and without legitimate heirs. The title Lord Berwick went extinct and Attingham belongs to the National Trust these days.
Now, I can’t get too deep into the irony of all the Lords Berwick dying without legitimate issue and, in the year 2024, Joel being one of eleven siblings. It’s like the remote family trauma of not having enough children was so deeply engrained that this generation felt the need to finally put it to rights.
But anyway, even if Joel’s great-grandad had put a ring on it, Joel is not the eldest son — so only in the most notional of alternative universes might this vast pile ever have been his.
But still.
Last year, we stopped to check out Attingham on the way to Wales (at my urging, for the story that’s in it).
We paid for admission to the house. I suggested he might want to stand at a lofty window and murmur to himself: “and, to think, of all this, I might have been mistress.”
In the vast entrance hall, I told the woman giving out brochures. Of course I did, you know me.
“His great-grandad, you know. Lol.” Or words to that effect.
Well, you have never seen anyone quite so star-struck in your life. She proclaimed the family likeness and could not stop shaking Joel’s hand. All but scraped the floor. It was like the scene in the Sound of Music with the bowing and the curtseying.
Back on the modern day motorway, my lordly boyfriend is grumpy. He’s driving and having a blood sugar crisis. This happens to him roughly every 45 minutes if he’s had neither sugar nor caffeine. He is wire-thin and fit as a fiddle — but this is wholly undeserved. The way he eats he should be the size of a house.
Anyway, we pull over at a Starbucks and he has a grump on. He’s never a prima donna so much as when hungry and faced with an inadequate food selection.
We diverted across the road to a petrol station. I joked it’s because he wants to spend as much time as possible in the vicinity of his ancestral home.
“It’s just because you feel really at home here, right? Here in the Black Country. Getting back to your roots.”
“Shut up.”
“I see you. You’re secretly hoping someone is going to drop you a quiet bow and whisper m’lord to you.”
He is not amused.
Luckily, the petrol station has salted caramel sugar-coated pretzel things and a Philly cheese steak, so his mood increases exponentially after that.
He drives for awhile, sugared and caffeinated and full of beans.
A left turn sign to Attingham flashes past and is gone.
Then:
“And, to think, of all this I might have been mistress… ”
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This is the first part of a five day trip to Wales. The rest of this journey will be paid subscribers only.
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Also, here’s last April’s trip to Wales, if you’re interested:
"Well, you have never seen anyone quite so star-struck in your life. She proclaimed the family likeness and could not stop shaking Joel’s hand. All but scraped the floor. It was like the scene in the Sound of Music with the bowing and the curtseying." This was funny. But it also makes me sad to see how that kind of feudal reflex lives on in our blessed realm.
So that's what the Black Country is! All this while I thought it must be so named centuries back for its prodigious produce of witches and such. Also later of Black Sabbath. And of Tolkien's Angmar, Witch King of and all that. Now I realise the Tolkien connection is probably (if at all) with the area's bleak industrialisation that he so detested. Mordor indeed!
You kind of sort of know another Lord; me, the Lord of the Bantering. Self-proclaimed, of course, but widely acknowledged as such.