It was a Monday evening in March 2004 when the phone rang and my Mum passed on the sad news that Auntie Gwen, my Dad’s eldest sister, had died. I was surprised at how upset I was by the news. Dad is one of eight children and with the exception of Eileen, who emigrated to Canberra during the fifties or sixties, Gwen was the farthest flung. It had been a while since I’d seen her - no doubt at Mum and Dad’s - and I couldn’t precisely remember when it would have been. I know we’d all been at her son Brian’s wedding, but that had been over ten years earlier, and her Ruby wedding party had been a year or two before that. That Ruby wedding had been the last time I’d been to the house in the village of Valley on the north-west of Anglesey - the place that had been home to her and Uncle Pat since the mid-seventies when he was coming to his final RAF posting and looking to lay down some roots. Their four children had been there for the shindig - Jan, Meg, Martin and Brian - and we’d reminisced about the weeks that our family (Mum, Dad, me and younger brother Steve) had enjoyed staying with them during the summer holidays. Jan hadn’t been at home then - she’d married and settled in the Portsmouth area where the Whelans (for that was their family name) had lived previously and where I could vaguely remember having visited in the past - but Meg had been in her late teens, I guess, Martin in his early teens and Brian a year younger than my ten or eleven years. As such, the four boys had played together and formed a pretty close bond that I think is still there when we meet at family parties, weddings and funerals in spite of the years that have passed.
As soon as I heard the news, I felt that I ought to attend the funeral - I wanted to be there for Dad, for Uncle Pat and for the cousins but most of all, I think, I wanted to be there for Gwen. Those holidays had mainly been about seeing Martin and Brian and being at the seaside but Gwen had undoubtedly been one of those grown-ups that you looked forward to seeing - and I know that Pat, Meg, Martin and Brian were always keen to see the four of us. I arranged with my boss to take the Friday off and spoke to Meg to ensure a room was booked for me at the Valley Hotel for the Thursday and Friday nights. In keeping with her strong Catholic faith - inherited from Grandma Lee and shared by Pat - Gwen was to spend the Thursday night in the church and there was a brief service that evening when she was to be laid to rest. I wasn’t able to get away in time to attend that but was too early onto the island to go directly to the hotel so once over the Britannia Bridge turned off the main A55 (a “new” road that had not been there during the seventies) and took a winding route up the eastern coast of the island - “off the beaten track” Mum would say - towards the villages of Benllech, where we had holidayed in (probably) 1973 before the Whelans came to Wales, and Moelfre where we had always enjoyed spending time exploring the rocks and the Roman village that lay inland from the village. As I did, I saw a sign to “Red Wharf Bay” and on a whim took the right hand turn down the narrow “no through road” that led to the coast. The light was fading as I reached the shoreline - it was March and the clocks had yet to spring forward - but the views from the car park that I found there were wide-ranging and bathed in a lovely reddish sunset. I left the confines of the car and took a little stroll to stretch my legs after the two hours plus of driving. As I did my eyes were drawn to a signpost pointing along the bay, a signpost that displayed the image of an Arctic tern and the words “Isle of Anglesey Coastal Path”. I was immediately captivated by the concept - I’d walked Alfred Wainwright’s Coast to Coast route over ten years earlier and had climbed Kilimanjaro in the late nineties but my recent walking had largely consisted of day-walks in the Peak District and Staffordshire Moorlands. I loved those day walks, don’t get the wrong impression, but this was something else. An adventure that I had been seeking even though I hadn’t actually realised it. And when I accompanied Brian, his wife Sarah and their two children on a brief visit to Trearddur Bay the following morning, trying to take their mind off the funeral to come, there were more fingerposts, more terns, and I was well and truly hooked.
Driving away from the hotel on the Saturday morning I felt a genuine sadness - not just because of Gwen’s death but also because we’d enjoyed each others’ company still, after all of these years, and also because the island had begun to weave a spell and I was sorry to be leaving. I pottered along the west coast, through Rhosneigr, Aberffraw and Newborough before rejoining the main road and setting off home. But I’d be back I told myself; back to the island and back to the coastal path.
As is the way of these things, life took over and prevented me acting upon that initial impulse for a few years but I never forgot the excitement I had felt when realising there was a path that encircled the whole island and it was always in the back of my mind that some day I would complete the circuit. Not in one go - at one stage I had the romantic notion that the twelve stages of the route could be divided into one day a month so that the passing of the seasons could be enjoyed and the route completed in a calendar year. The practicalities - in particular the travelling time and the shorter days of winter - meant that idea was shelved but I retained the thought of doing it one day at a time and savouring the expeditions as twelve individual adventures that could be enjoyed as much in anticipation and in retrospect as on the day itself.
On both the Coast to Coast and on Kilimanjaro I had enjoyed keeping a diary and had written up each of these on completion and in doing so had re-lived the journeys I had made, something I carried on with a series of walks I had organised for friends and colleagues at work over the previous three or four years. Those colleagues had been kind enough to tell me how much they enjoyed these ramblings (in both senses) and I had come to enjoy the writing nearly as much as the walks themselves. In re-living and remembering the walk, in researching and writing about the route and the day that is done, you can extend a four or five hour stroll into a whole month of pleasurable recollection. Alfred Wainwright understood this with his pictorial guides to the Lake District fells, his “love letters to the hills” written each night after a day as Kendal’s Borough Treasurer and bringing him the enormous pleasure of revisiting those glorious weekend days when he would tramp the mountains of Cumbria. Wonderful, wonderful books. Works of art. But you rarely learn the details of his own expeditions, hear of the happiness he felt at the buzzard’s flight or the feel of the wind in his hair, the conversation about the previous night’s TV (unlikely in his case - he always walked alone) or indeed the simple pleasure of a flask of coffee and a Mars Bar at the summit. My jottings made much of these distractions and the more personal approach meant that I could re-live a particular stage in my life as much as the route itself. I resolved that if I were to take on the route around the island, it would be in part to re-live those happy days of the mid-seventies and the idyll that is a seaside holiday when you are still of junior school age.
Those idylls always began with Dad’s arrival home from work on a Friday evening - quite possibly bearing fish and chips from Chippie Milanec’s (Mr Milanec’s daughter, Anna, would be Head Girl of the school when I was in the Lower Sixth form but he achieved a more lasting fame as purveyor of the best chips in town). After the meal Dad would take the car around the block to Cubley’s Garage where he would fill up with petrol, ensure the tyres were fully inflated, check the oil and water and (occasionally) run it through the car wash before returning home for the ceremonial loading of the boot. Suitcases would already have been laid out in the hall ready to be lugged the few yards and placed with precision in such a way that everything could be fitted in around them - like Sudoku, there was only one perfect solution that did not entail taking everything out and starting again. It was best to leave him to it but such was our excitement that Steve and I were always keen to get involved and make sure that the cricket bat and stumps had made it in (me) or the bucket and spade (Steve). If we were lucky Superstars or It’s A Knockout would be on the telly and we would settle down in front of it with a Crunchie Bar or Curly Wurly (Friday Night was Chocolate Night in the Lee household - Dad would have a Nutty Bar or Bounty; Mum her beloved Polos. Not strictly chocolate but an exception could be made for her).
We would rise early on the Saturday morning, have a Weetabix and some toast and jam and be away by about eight o’clock while traffic remained light. We would not have made the first bend on Old Eaton Road before Dad started the first chorus of “We’re all going on a summer holiday”. In those days before the A55 dual carriageway made things quicker (but less enjoyable) we would head off through Stafford and Newport to the town of Shrewsbury. Under the railway bridge, a left turn alongside the river, right over the Welsh Bridge and up through Frankwell, past Darwin’s birthplace and onto the A5 that would be our road until practically the Whelan’s front door. Whittington Castle was the next landmark (a brief “Turn Again Dick Whittington” from the driver) and then the Croeso Y Cymru sign just below the village of Chirk. We’d probably stop in Llangollen to stretch our legs and have café break. Steve and I would unfailingly plump for a glass of milk and (although it wasn’t a Friday) we’d be allowed a Bar Six chocolate bar (if available), a Bandit or a Club. Club may have had the catchier advert (“If you like a lotta chocolate on your biscuit, join our club”) but it also had too many varieties that I didn’t like - orange, mint, dried fruit - so I preferred the first couple of options. I’m not sure I ever ate - or saw - a Bar Six outside of our holidays but they are as much a part of those weeks away as sand in the underwear and picnics in the car as the rain fell. We’d also use the stop as the opportunity to buy our Summer Special comics - not always the same comic as we were being bought weekly but instead the best available from the newsagent we visited. Shoot, Warlord, Krazy, Cheeky, Action, Beezer, Whizzer and Chips and various others over the years - I would devour them all, play the games, do the puzzles and then read them all over again. Steve too. We were voracious readers even at that age.
Refreshed and revitalised we would pass through Corwen; cross the River Dee; see Swallow Falls, Betws Y Coed and Conway Falls; watch the mountains to either side grow taller, rockier and more threatening; drive alongside the beautiful Llyn Ogwen; through Bethesda; by-pass Bangor and then the moment we had been waiting for - who could be the first to sing out “I can see the sea-ea” as the beautiful Menai Suspension Bridge carried us high above the Menai Straits and onto The Island. We could now tick off the sights in the knowledge that we were only half an hour away - the Marquess of Anglesey’s column to the right, the Llanfair PG toll house and railway station to the left; a featureless windswept moorland; Valley crossroads; and then the last right hand turn before the causeway across to Holy Island and Holyhead. Gorad. A left and a right and there we were, pulling up outside “home” for the next week. We would have to endure a kiss from Gwen and Meg (uurggh - a kiss!), shake hands in grown-up fashion with Pat, and then were free to get out in the garden, surrounded by a six foot high breeze-blocked wall, where we could play to our heart’s content. The football would be out and ready, the oilcan set up to act as cricket stumps; and most importantly, Martin and Brian were ready and waiting to rejoin sporting battle.
Thirty-five years later I find myself thinking of the words of Carole King and Gerry Goffin:
Now there are no games to help me pass the time
No more electric trains; no more trees to climb
Thinking young and growing older is no sin
And I find myself doing precisely that - thinking young and growing older. And again:
Now there’s more to do than watch my sailboat glide
And every day can be my magic carpet ride
A little bit of freedom is all we lack
So catch me if you can, I’m going back
Dusty Springfield’s version of the song was in the Top Ten on the day I was born back in 1966, which is as good a reason I can think of for taking their advice, snatching back that bit of freedom, taking that magic carpet ride.
So catch me if you can. I’m going back.
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