The Daily Novel

Tany Bryn. Ah, what it is to look at Wales as a truly foreign country. No longer the Land of my Fathers. And, as if to re-inforce my unblemished Englishness, Holly is reading one of the Christopher Robin stories to Joe. What could be more English than that?

I am sitting in the doorway smoking my first fag of the day and gazing out at a rain soaked woodland glade topped by looming black clouds. To my left a tree heavily laden with clusters of unpicked apples. Overhead two crows cross the stage from my right, swoop around and exit from my view at the far left. They make no sound. There is no sound apart from the thumping of Dulcie’s feet on the wooden floor.

The scene reminds me of many Welsh holidays. Holly is still reading out loud, and I quote the sentence I hear, ‘It is a dull autumn day.’ Days of un-relieved gloom. Or days of glorious laziness when there is no necessity to do anything. No point in rushing to the beach. Or driving further up into the hills to see the view.

It reminds me of another such day near Dolgelly. My father’s younger sister was staying with us in a house we had taken at Ochr Y Foel and we had had a succession of rainy days. To relieve the boredom Dulcie (my aunt not my granddaughter) and I were doing a bit of research to find the house where my grandparents spent their honeymoon, called Rhyderwinion. We knew it was in the valley with a view of Caeder Idris, not too far away from Dolgelly.

The house was the summer home of a Mr Lockhart. Nellie, my grandmother, was their nanny. She had moved with them from Edinburgh, where she had been born, to Wolverhampton. There she had met my grandfather, Frank, who eked out a living doing odd jobs for the well-to-do. Lockhart’s wedding present to them was a week’s bed and board in his holiday house in Wales in the summer of 1900.

The house was not marked on any of the maps I had. We had not been able to trace any Lockhart in any of the local records but we had a rough idea where the house might be. That we found it was a triumph for serendipity rather than systematic research. I suddenly saw the name on a gate as we drove slowly down a winding lane.

We walked through the gate and immediately had a view down the valley towards Cader Idris. My heart was actually beating faster as we walked down the drive. The house was now a home for a few juvenile offenders, and the social worker in charge showed us around. I stared down the valley and tried to imagine what it might have been like in my grandparents’ time. Queen Victoria was still on the throne. They must have arrived by train at Dolgelly. But how did they get to the house? I could not see my grandfather lugging a suitcase around the country lanes. But maybe the Lockharts had someone they employed to look after the house, who would have met them at the station with a pony and trap.

Now I can see my grandfather. He never earned much money but he enjoyed being squired around. He also had a commanding manner. The locals probably thought he was one of the toffs as the pony and trap turned in through the gates. My grandfather would have waited for the driver to hand Nellie down from the trap. And then stepped down himself, and fished in his waistcoat for a coin to put in the man’s hand.

Mention of Nellie makes me realise that there is still a blemish on my English pedigree. Nellie was Nellie Skinner, a Scotttish lowland clan. So there must be some Celtic blood in me somewhere. But not the stuff that flowed through the veins of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his ilk. The Skinners were Puritans through and through and no doubt marched against the King to rid the realm of singing and dancing and boozing.

This is not just a galloping assumption. I have some evidence.

First, Nellie’s face, a picture stoical suffering. She had much to complain of because my grandfather held court at the Ring o’ Bells, where he spent most of his wage packet. He went on drinking when his wage packet was empty, because he was much in demand. For the stories he told, the monologues he recited and the songs he sang. While my grandmother toiled over the kitchen sink and heated the water in the copper, ready for his bath on the kitchen floor.

I met several of the Skinners from Edinburgh. One anecdote will suffice to show what they were like. A visit in my boyhood from the only prosperous Skinner, who had emigrated to South Africa and had become the secretary of the cemetery and a burgher of the local church. He came to our house for lunch one Sunday. As we were starting lunch he looked at my father and said: ‘Shall I say grace.’ It was not a question. And he intoned a long verse with a pompous gravity which left my sister spluttering in her soup.

Later that week, Nellie’s widowed sister, who was then living with them, because she had no money of her own, took them, and me, on a visit to another relative in Walsall. On the way there the South African Skinner paid the bus fares for all of us with a flourish. On the way back, the conductor stopped at his seat to collect the fares. He turned around to my great-aunt sitting behind and said: ‘Mary, your turn to pay now.’

So I don’t think I am going to spend much time researching the Skinner side of my lineage. I have to get used to the fact that I come from a long line of white anglo-saxon protestants. But I don’t have to bore myself to death finding out any more about them than I already know.