MORNING SERIAL

ALL very Victorian pastoral and, I think, quite, quite wonderful.

Here in these lines is the closest rendering I am ever likely to see of what I heard and felt on that day for I did, certainly, get the chance to ‘feel celestially’ and I saw the possibility of purity in human experience, as well as the reality of our connectedness. The native Americans say that all things are connected. I had felt the connection of sky to earth, and of myself to both; the ‘silver chain of sound’ binding us together and making all this perceptible.

Last year I took my own two sons, James and Sam, along that same route which my father and I had walked that day. I think I wanted to show them a place which might still bear an imprint of an old happiness.

We walked along the old Glamorganshire canal bank, now known as the Taff Trail. It has a tarmac surface now, and the A470 dual carriageway runs alongside it. Traffic roars over the spot where the old Lock House once stood.

We climbed the mountain by the same route my father and I had taken more than forty years before. We made our way uphill through the beech wood. It was too late in the year for bluebells, but there was still a rope swing hanging from one of the great beech trees. James tried it out. He didn’t fall.

When we got as far as the little disused quarry, we stopped for our lunch. I’d filled a rucksack at the Co-op with sandwiches and pork pies and bottles of water. I’d slipped in a bag of wine gums, too, just in case.

I told my sons about the school holiday, some time after my father had shown me this place, when I had come here with a group of friends, and we had built a den. It took us several days, but it was worth it. It had dry-stone walls and a turf roof. We built a hearth inside and lit a fire. The roof kept out most of the rain, and the fire drew a treat through a hole in it, but our attempts at cooking were a mess.

When our baked potatoes came out incinerated and black, we melted fruit pastilles on the hot stones instead.