An Audience with an Elephant Read online

  You come on their names in footnotes for they are of little interest to historians. They did nothing, they went nowhere; once those doors closed on them in childhood they were the dead. ‘Three marks to be yearly laid aside to make good the wall and ditch to shut off the nuns, that no person may go in or have the least sight of them. No presents or messages to be delivered to or from the nuns. The windows through which anything is delivered to have wheels that turn so the sisters may not see anyone, or anyone see the sisters.’ The rules at Sempringham of England’s one monastic order, founded by the little hunchback Gilbert, were strict.

  The children had committed one crime, that of being born. Even Stalin didn’t hold that against the children of his victims, for eventually these were allowed to emerge from their orphanages. But not Gwenllian or her little girl cousins who turned up the following year before being dispersed to other nunneries; had they stayed together they might have shared some memory of the past, and to the English this was Year Zero. The little boys of Gwynedd did not come, they had disappeared into perpetual imprisonment. The children of disgraced English barons came, one or two to be retrieved when a deal was struck in later years. But the Welsh children were already history and for them Sempringham was the dustbin of a broken dynasty. But where is Sempringham?

  Find Grantham on the map. Forget the alderman and his grocer’s shop: follow the A52 eastwards until after about 9 miles you see a B road turning south to Billingborough and Bourne. Two miles after Billingborough you will find Sempringham, a place where Mrs Thatcher has probably never been.

  Sempringham is a locked church at the end of an earth track, out in the fields with no houses near it. You will have no problem finding the church, for you will already have seen it from miles around; there is no landscape here, only sky. But once there was something which would have pushed up that sky. What survives is a church which was there when Gilbert came, but 350 yards to the south of this he built his Priory, the nave of which was 55 feet longer than Ripon Cathedral and 25 feet wider than Lichfield. When archaeologists excavated here before the last war it was this width which stunned them and the enormous buttresses which flanked it; together they suggested a towering loftiness which would have been one of the wonders of the Middle Ages. The local newspaper was suitably impressed: ‘Excavations at Sempringham. Remains of a big church discovered.’

  Of this there is now no trace for at the Dissolution it became a quarry, the bumps still visible in the field being those of the mansion built from of its stones. Daniel Defoe saw that mansion when he came through, and the tactful old hack recorded its plasterwork was the equivalent of that in the Royal Palace of Nonesuch. There is no trace of any of the graves, so hers is as lost as those of the rest of her dynasty (though her great grandfather’s stone coffin lies empty in Llanrwst church); the English saw to it that there were to be no shrines, and two generations on were hiring an assassin in France to kill the last male member of the family. They had forgotten about him.

  She would have seen the church, though not in its present form. It looks a bit odd now, having been restored from near ruin by a Victorian parson; its huge original arches and the fussy little chancel he added make it seem as though a giant’s clothing had been cut down to fit ordinary men.

  There were 200 nuns in her time. A high wall ran the length of the Priory and separated them from the 80 monks, so that there were two altars, one on each side. Think of her there in those 54 years of institutional life. The coarse woollen clothing. The bells ringing for worship and work, matins and masses, masses and matins; the enforced silences which may have got easier as childhood ebbed; the windows squeaking as they turned on their wheels for a few inches when a stranger called. She had come from the mountains and she was to pass her life without seeing a single hill. The wind howling over the flat land, and time passing.

  Perhaps she grew cynical, watching the arrival of other bits of jetsam, the children of her father’s enemies. Roger Mortimer’s daughter came after he escaped from the Tower, a member of the family suspected of the treachery which had led to her father’s death. The dustbin offered excellent views of English political fortunes. The two daughters of the executed Hugh de Despencer came, on a pension of £20 a year between them as they were not such big potatoes. She, Gwenllian, was a very big potato. They would not have allowed her to forget that. When Edward II tried to raise cash from the Pope for Sempringham it was Gwenllian’s presence there that he mentioned. When Edward III came through in 1327, the Priory records show that he confirmed her £20 a year, but then the English could afford to be generous.

  They had always had this small, nagging guilt when it came to the Welsh, the Archbishop of Canterbury observing in 1199 that ‘the Welsh, being sprung by unbroken succession from the original stock of Britons, boast of all Britain as theirs by right’. Which was why, when her father’s head was paraded down Cheapside, the Londoners crowned it mockingly with ivy.

  And now all that was over. Llywelyn’s halls had been destroyed, their timbers taken away, his archives burned, all this so completely men now argue as to where his power had its seat, even as to the form this took. There is one extraordinary little footnote: some years ago a family moved into a smallholding at Aber, near Conway, and found under a Victorian grate a massive medieval fireplace. Under the render of the walls they found mullioned windows and the outline of a great arch; and Mrs Kathryn Gibson who had bought a chicken farm found herself in the lost hall of the princes, where Gwenllian had been born.

  Perhaps she was happy in her long exile in Sempringham. I like to think so, for everything else would be so sad; perhaps in time there was a stout, bossy woman as masterful as her father had been. The nuns would have been in awe of her anyway, let us hope she exploited this to the hilt.

  We can imagine this because, with one exception, none of the lost children speak to us. The exception is her cousin Owain, who, with his brother Llywelyn, had been sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Bristol castle. Llywelyn died after a few years but Owain lived on, and 20 years later old King Edward was still worrying about him. This, you may remember, was the king who in public said that sin was not passed on. ‘As the King wills that Owain son of Dafydd ap Gruffydd who is in the Constable’s custody in the castle, should be kept in future more securely, he orders the Constable to cause a strong house within the castle to be repaired as soon as possible, and to make a wooden cage bound with iron in that house, in which Owain may be enclosed at night.’ Just like a mouse. That was in 1305.

  But then something odd happened. Around 1312 Owain managed to get a letter out to the new king, Edward II, and his Council. The one voice for the lost children in speaking. ‘Owain, son of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, shows that whereas he is by order of the King detained in the Castle of Bristol in strong and close prison, and has been since he was seven years old, for his father’s trespass. He prays the King that he may go and play within the wall of the castle if he cannot have better grace of the King. . .’. It sounds like the plea of a small boy, but it isn’t. The man begging to be allowed to play within the wall of the castle is 36 years old; he has been locked up, probably without exercise, for 29 of them.

  The Council ignored his appeal but was so startled to receive this, a hand has written across it in Latin, ‘Let it be enquired who sues this petition.’ They had forgotten who he was. What was this thing that had dared crawl into their daylight, this ghost out of history? It is like that scene in Koestler’s Darkness At Noon when the purged Communist learns that the man in the next cell is a Tsarist, still alive. Owain was still alive in 1320, when a bureaucratic hand records a change of constable. Thereafter. . . nothing.

  ‘1337. Wencilian, daughter of the Prince of Wales, died, after 54 years of life in the Order. The King excuses the Prior and the convent from a payment of £39.15s.4d. . .’. That payment was tax they were owing, but the King was grateful; a child had disappeared.

  I walked up the track through the fields and, seeing something in the gra
ss, bent down. It was a dead barn owl, the first I had seen, and, ruffling in the beautiful orange plumage to find a cause of death, I came on a tiny metal ring crowded with writing around one leg. It gave instructions so I wrote to the British Museum of Natural History, saying where and when I had found it. A month later a reply came. The bird had been hand-reared and had lived just 96 days, travelling only a mile and a quarter from its place of release. Its natural habitats had gone, there were so few barns now. But I kept the ring. At Sempringham I had found another small thing lost in a huge world.

  The Last Tramp

  Y THE TIME YOU read this the subject of the article will have disappeared into Wales as effectively as any goblin or guerilla of the Middle Ages, as completely, in fact, as David Livingstone disappeared into Africa. George Gibbs is one of that shrinking body of men steadily eroded by the processes of government who can still do this, as for nine months of every year, in 20th-century Britain, he is beyond the reach of postmen and phone calls. Gibbs comes at the end of a very long tradition: at 53 he is the last of the wanderers.

  For as long as there have been hearth fires and home acres some men have been forsaking them, to wander. Outraged legislation indexed their progress, spitting against ‘vagabondes, roges, masterless men and idle persons’ and ‘myghty vagabonds and beggars’; up until the nineteenth century, with its glimmerings of official enlightenment, society hounded and reviled its tramps because in their way they represented, like Soviet emigrants, an adverse comment upon it. Yet then tramps acquired a haze of romance, particularly with growing urbanisation. They were the men outside, the bronzed wanderers, men with no axes to grind (though ironically this is how many earned their livings), with no families, no past, no future. The romance was, of course, in contradiction of the facts. Tramps, the manager of a reception centre told me, were usually ‘physically or mentally disabled, or socially inadequate’. Besides, very few of them now did wander: what remained were derelicts or alcoholics shuffling through city centres. Philip O’Connor, author of Vagrancy, advised me to invent such a man: he doubted whether he existed in life.

  Finally, I found George Gibbs. Since 1968 he has been something of a minor celebrity in Wales. Then, trying to light a fire in a deserted house near Llanelly, he had the good fortune first to push his hand up the chimney, and enough blasting powder came tumbling down to have sent him, the house, and most of the street, into kingdom come. It was the year before the Investiture.

  Gibbs spent his winters at the Stormydown Reception Centre near Bridgend, leaving each year with the spring, and by summer could be anywhere between Glamorgan and Anglesey; the difficulties in contacting a tramp are legion. I rang some of his regular stops — a Carmarthenshire farmhouse, a Newtown presbytery — without luck. But there was one thing which characterised Gibbs: his fondness for the police force. Like an unofficial Inspector of Constabulary, he dropped in on their stations, chatted to them, discussed their families, promotions, moves, smoked their cigarettes and drank their tea. The Dyfed-Powys force offered to pass the message ‘up the line’ as they put it, to say I was interested in meeting George. A week later I was rung up from Machynlleth: ‘Mr Gibbs,’ said a voice, ‘is just entering town.’ Which made him sound like a gunfighter.

  It is 9.30 a.m. in Machynlleth. A smell of fresh bread drifts through the town. In the sky the first of the day’s Royal Air Force jets are beginning their passes along the valley, as in the municipal rubbish tip George Gibbs is waking up. He has spent the night in an open shed which contains agricultural machinery, where across the entrance he has placed a series of planks and oil cans to deter intruders, so it is difficult at first to make him out in the gloom. Then there is a slight movement among a heap of old coats and sacking in the corner of the shed, and two large white eyes, like a lemur’s, peer out. Somewhere in the huddle a radio is switched on and pop music flares in the darkness. Mr Gibbs is awake.

  All night he has slept on some planking, covered by his coats, his feet in an old dog-food sack. He has slept well, as he always does. ‘I can’t sleep in a bedroom any more. I roll around all night. But when I sleep on a hard surface I sleep all night.’ Gibbs has slept well in abandoned boats, in telephone boxes with his knees pulled up like a Mexican, even, he confesses shamefacedly, in public lavatories. But mostly he sleeps in far more comfortable surroundings, in empty houses, on dried bracken in snug barns. He walks some 8 miles a day. All over Wales he has places to sleep in at 8-mile intervals. After a week with him one begins to suspect that he has hides at such intervals to heaven.

  It takes Gibbs a long time to get up. Finally, at 10.00 a.m., a small crumpled figure comes blinking into the morning. He is wearing an old black beret found on a rubbish tip, to which he has fixed a Women’s Institute of Wales badge found on the roadside, a cavalry twill sports coat given to him by a Caernarvon lady, and a sweater issued at the reception centre. On his feet he has a pair of ladies’ slippers found on Barmouth rubbish tip, which will be replaced that week by a pair of Wellingtons found on Machynlleth rubbish tip. Rubbish tips to Gibbs are the equivalents of all those marvellous wrecks bursting with consumer goods in Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson. He scours them, poking about in the packing cases and ashes, the seagulls’ one rival. They clatter irritably up as he passes.

  Gibbs is a curious, shuffling, knock-kneed little figure. He weighs very little, like most tramps — just 8 stone. Of a tramp found dead by the police, he told me: ‘The sergeant who found him said he was just like a sheet of cardboard to lift, a sheet of cardboard. He’d been dead a fortnight, I think. Poor old Paddy.’ He is bespectacled and bearded, and quite spectacularly grimy, a small boy’s dream figure of personal hygiene. He talks occasionally of romantic little morning dips in the River Conway but cannot quite remember when he last had one. ‘I prefer showers meself. It’s clean water. In a bath you’re lying in dirty water,’ says George with the cold objectivity of a man who has not been in either for a very long time.

  He was born in Glasgow in 1917, the son of a sailor missing at sea during World War I; he himself went straight to sea after leaving school, ending up as a cook, and took to the roads after his own wartime experiences as a merchant seaman. He left the sea, having had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, ‘always thinking of the other ships that went up, the bombings and suchlike’. He told his mother he was off to look for work, and did work for a while as an itinerant agricultural labourer, but in 1948 he came to Wales and really went on the roads. He never told his mother he was a tramp: to the end of her life she believed he was a farmworker. The Gibbs family are not given to writing letters, and George does not know where his three sisters and brother are. Since 1948 he has been out of Wales twice, once when he went on a long tramp to Kent in the early 1950s, and contracted pneumonia, and once two years ago when he was given a rail warrant by the Stormydown Reception Centre to go home. On that occasion he found that his mother had died a few months earlier.

  George is not very forthcoming as to the point when his itinerant labouring tipped over into tramping, but it seems to have been a quite gradual process. At first he worked regularly: now the last time he remembers working was over six years ago, for five weeks in a Flintshire brickworks. ‘Quite interesting work,’ he says airily. On tramping itself he says, ‘Once you get on to the road it gets into the system. It’s like smoking: you get a craving. I just can’t get off.’

  At Machynlleth he has just lit his fire and is perched in front of it like a small Fisher King, dangling his billy can in the flames at the end of a stick. George puts his tea in the bottom of the can and allows the water to boil up through it so one can almost eat the resulting mixture with a knife and fork. As he sits he talks in a soft, unflurried monotone no incident can disturb. George says ‘Oh dear’ a lot of the time; as an exclamation it covers the gamut of his feelings, which seem to run from mild surprise to mild upset. When we found a huge black catamaran beached miles from anywhere on a remote beach near Aberdovey: ‘What have we h
ere? Dear, o dear,’ he repeated in surprise. Again, when he saw some modernised buildings, ‘Ruined that, they ’ave. . . dear, o dear.’ George is like a whitewashed wall: one longs to scribble all over it, to make some kind of impression.

  He is proud of being on the roads. On page after page of the occasional notebooks he keeps are reflections on the life and the lore. He lists the old tramping signs that were once scored on trees: does he ever make them himself? ‘No, I never do. Who’s to read them?’ The signs fall into two categories, invitations and warnings; the latter seem to be more numerous. Thus a circle bisected means that the householder could call the police Ø; Z indicates extreme warning, the tramp should move on at once. Others are amusing: two axe-like symbols mean that the householder will help the tramp, but will also expect work first; a triangle means the house is a police house. A circle is the symbol of a generous person, two small concentric circles of a rich person. Poring over this lore, George communicates it to nobody.

  He did, however, earlier this year meet an Irishman travelling south. ‘He only had a little bag, no frying-up equipment. . .’. A long pause. ‘I think he was a hitch-hiker.’ This is George’s most telling recrimination against a fellow wanderer.

  He himself is anxious to establish his credentials. ‘I think I must be the only fellow on the road with a radio.’ ‘I think I’ve got the only pram with two reflectors on it.’ ‘I think I must be the only man on the road who’s had six prams.’ On the sides of his pram he has written the names of the Welsh towns through which he passes. He was given it by a café owner in Caernarvonshire: the pram is battered and old, but to George it is wardrobe, medicine cupboard, desk, larder and trunk.