Memories of Elsewhere: New Quay, by Charlotte Wührer

Painting by David Hughes Jones

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Charlotte Wührer: 

Elsewhere is a beach. Elsewhere is the beach on which I was buried alive up to the neck, given a tail of sand, a mermaid for a minute until the dog came.

Antonia’s fingers went deathly white after a swim, and back then we couldn’t imagine how miserable it might feel to be so cold while everyone else sweated. Ten years later, we’re sorry we didn’t take her seriously until the rest of her body turned blue.

One year, we squirmed into wetsuits, the old neoprene of some a little cracked, and went out in the kayaks to watch the late afternoon sun. A family of dolphins circled us as my kayak slowly but surely began to sink. The sea teemed with jellyfish.

Another year we drank gin from the bottle sitting on the pier, and it got messy. Perhaps it was that summer we also downed endless pints of ale brewed in whisky casks at a pub quiz before rolling all the way down the hill. From Dylan Thomas’s favourite watering hole into the sea. The bats and stars were more visible there than in any other place. We felt very small, and sobered by the dizziness of not knowing where was under water and where was the night sky.

By day we ate crab meat with lemon juice and black pepper from the shell on the porch bench overlooking the sea. Sometimes we wore straw hats. Sometimes we read books. Sometimes we played games. Sometimes we walked along the clifftops. A lot of the time, we were pretty sunburnt and pretty hungover. Late morning, someone would make the first cup of tea and we’d all get into each other’s beds.

Another year: recovered from the mess, we - the same constellation but with a few additions and a couple of gaping absences - let the seagulls circle the mackerel we’d gutted on the hot September tarmac before the house. Rivers of blood ran downhill past the porches of the other terraced houses, down the patchwork slope of the visitors’ car park, past the tourist knick-knack shop and Annie’s fruit and veg store, down the sand and past our barbecued fish and sandy burger baps, until it was reclaimed by the sea. (Do fish drink the water they swim in?)

The sea that comes after this beach can be seen and heard from the house, which belongs to Sophie’s parents. They were teenagers when they met here in the town, probably on the beach. Now they live both in Swansea and in this little house in New Quay, and I’ve been once a year almost every year since I turned eighteen.

If you know the town, the house stands in the middle of the second row of houses on the north side. It’s not hard to find on googlemaps. Find in street view the purple house with the stained glass porch door. The sash windows are old enough for the glass to have suddenly shattered one windy morning as we slept. The key is in a special place not many people would think to ever look. The house feels a little damp even at the height of the hottest summers.

No one wears shoes in the house or on the short walk down to the beach. City codes of acceptable dress are suspended. The dog wears a superman cape that is also a towel over her eyes. Sophie and I drove down once from Bristol, maybe last year, and it took three hours longer than it should have because there was a swan on one lane of the motorway. Police men wearing fluorescent warning vests stood around it scratching their heads. At the Swansea service station, Sophie’s parents pulled up in their car, handed over a large bag of still-warm welsh cakes, Sophie briefly held the family dog like a baby, and then we drove on belting Savage Garden, more excited to arrive than kids going on a family holiday.

***

Charlotte Wührer is a Berlin-based writer and translator from Newcastle-under-Lyme, England. Her writing appears in numerous online and print publications, including SAND Journal, Ellipsis Zine, and Daddy Magazine. She was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Cambridge Short Story Prize, and is currently working on a flash fiction novella about place and desire.

David Hughes Jones paints mainly seascapes and landscapes around New Quay in Ceridigion in West Wales and the occasional shipwreck from the past. His subjects are inspired by many years of sailing and messing about in boats, and walking the coastal path. David Hughes Jones Art on Facebook.

Memories of Elsewhere: The White Arch by Paul Scraton

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… first up, our editor in chief Paul Scraton:

Above my desk, taped to the wall, are a series of photographs and postcards. There is an illustration of the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, not far from my mother’s house. There are photographs from the Baltic coast, taken during the writing of Ghosts on the Shore. There is a picture of myself and my daughter Lotte, on the night train that was taking us from Paris to Berlin. And there is a small painting of a rugged coastline in Wales, waves breaking beneath a white arch and the faint outline of a rocky outcrop, swathed in clouds, in the distance. 

Like the books on my shelves, these postcards and pictures are triggers of memory. Of journeys taken and the places along the way. Some of them are places visited but once while others are more familiar, locations that have acted as stage sets for many moments at different times of our lives. They are places we return to physically and we return to in our imagination. We remember and, now more than ever, we look forward to when we will see them again.

The small painting of the Welsh coastline has at its heart Bwa Gwyn – the white arch of the Rhoscolyn headland. Since I was a child, the white arch has been a destination. It is not far, perhaps a forty-five minute walk from the house where my Uncle and Aunt live, depending on which route you take and how much time you spend exploring the coves and the beach along the way, or admiring the view from the coastguard lookout point from where, when the weather is right, it feels as if you can make out the walkers on the ridges of Snowdonia right across Anglesey on the Welsh mainland.

It’s a walk I’ve made so many times I cannot remember. But I can picture moments, still hear snippets of conversation; I can remember the first time I ever dared to walk the narrow path above the arch, the sea on either side of me as kayakers rocked and rolled in the swell, waiting their turn to pass beneath. This stretch of coastline, like all stretches of coastline, has its share of stories and legends, the mythology of Saints and the tragedies of the open water. They mingle with the personal stories, those we experienced and those we heard second hand, from family members and friends. The stories pile up on top of each other, adding texture to the place like the heather and gorse on either side of the worn footpath, soundtracked by the waves, the distinctive call of choughs by the cliff-edge and the whirring blades of a sea rescue helicopter. 

I look at the painting of the white arch above my desk, along with the postcards from Prague and Gdansk, the photographs of Rannoch Moor and the Baltic coast, and I think about what it is about certain places that means they remain with you even after you’ve left. It is, I think, about how they make you feel, from the people you meet or those who travel with you, the atmosphere of the cliff-top path, the wide city street or the narrow alleyway, and the stories you hear and the ones that you write for yourself. 

I look at the painting and I am walking again, out from the house and across the fields, around the headland and skirting the beach. Through the houses on the far side, the path rises up to the lookout point and from there I can see the mountains and the islands, the ferry leaving Holyhead and the route of our walk. Bwa Gwyn is not far away now. The path drops down and swings round. Past the place where we once saw the wild goats, clinging to the grassy slope. A little bit further and the white arch will appear before us. The sea is rough. The sea is calm. The white arch stands above it. The white arch is waiting. We’ll be there again. Soon.

***

Paul Scraton is the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His first book to be published in German (translation by Ulrike Kretschmer) is Am Rand, about a long walk around the edge of Berlin. It is out this month from Matthes & Seitz. 

On visiting the Dylan Thomas Boathouse, Laugharne

By Anna Evans:

Approaching along the peninsula, the town seems to lie at the end of the road, like reaching a final destination. A castle stands guard over the quiet estuary, dramatic and imposing, its battlements slowly reclaimed by the landscape. It is a trip I embark on as much to look for traces of the past, a memory of a prior visit fifteen years ago. Arriving at the hour of dusk in early spring, the town quiet and deserted, the Boathouse already closed for the day. We walked along the street to the pub where Dylan and Caitlin Thomas used to drink together in the evenings. Then we continued our journey into Pembrokeshire, driven on by the time.

I am thinking of a photograph on a beach somewhere on that trip to Wales. Dark clouds and grey sea. There is synchronicity in the image; our faces are together, touching in the half light. When photographs were still like slips of chance on the paper. Thinking about being outside as night fell in the mountains, sharing a bottle of wine; jubilant in the almost total darkness, with no lights to guide us home.

Today I am on time to make the pilgrimage and see inside the house, but I had imagined my return differently, that I would have more time to look around and to absorb the atmosphere of the place. I am distracted, harassed; my mind caught in the argument we had this morning, still unresolved. Family life spinning around us, its currents of confusion. I am looking for clues of something. Thinking back to a simpler time and recalling pictures of my past self, shrouded in the rain-soaked hills and twilight of the Welsh skies. Dylan Thomas is important to me. His poetry resonated with me, the colour of language. He gave me a way to think about death and the passing of time, and about change.

Thomas lived in the town with his family, and for the last few years of his life acquired the Boathouse and the writing hut. It is a place in which he wrote some of his most important poems, and a place that witnessed arguments, the disintegration of his marriage, of his body. A life lived outside convention. The house is understated, leaving scope for imagining life here. I look around, my camera stuck on sepia mode, nostalgia in the recreated drawing room space. A notice explains that this is not the actual furniture, much of which Caitlin sold in response to the ever-advancing demands for money, the unpaid bills.

Family photos on the wall. Dylan and Caitlin in a rowing boat, his deep brown eyes stare into the camera. The exhibition tells me that Dylan would retreat to his writing shed, away from the noise of the children, from the travails of family life. The closed door. I look out from the window at the far-reaching view out into the bay, across the estuary, outwards to sea. Thinking about the precarious balance of art and life, between real life and life on the page, and about trying to carve out a space for one from the other. Thomas is seen in a pure sense as an artist, one who created his art and placed it above all things, the artist as genius, demon angel, doomed to destruction.

I continue back along the path to the writing shed. It is beautifully restored and has inspired many aspiring artists, as the photographs and paintings of it attest. It is overlooking the water, the sweep of the bay and the harbour where boats lie, picturesque, as if cast adrift from the sea. A place to think about moorings and being unmoored.

I am always compelled by images of writing spaces and desks, by descriptions of how and when writing takes place. I think of my own chaotic balance of writing and life, the hasty tidying away of books and paper to make a space for living, my writing is always on the move, from one place to another. A dedicated writing space where things could remain untouched is every writer’s dream. Where, as Caitlin explains, from two until seven each day – often she would lock the door - Dylan would disappear, returning hours later with a perfectly crafted line or two of poetry. In his writing space, the many lists of words he compiled. The possibilities of language, and the meticulous hours spent in constructing a single sentence. Looking out to sea, a retreat away from the domestic confines of home, exposed to the waves and sealed off.

Leaving the writing shed, I begin to walk, thinking to head back into the town. There is a path leading to the churchyard where Thomas is buried, and a sign says that ‘the path to Dylan’s grave can be muddy.’ It occurs to me that I am the same age now, as Dylan when he died. I would like to keep following the path but I am uncertain where it goes and how long it will take. Instead I read your messages, you are wondering where I am, how long I am planning to be away.

Looking back as we drive onwards, the remains of the castle unexplored, the map open displaying the route along the coastline, the town falling away behind us.

Now I see that the road continues.

About the author:
Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction and has recently launched a blog playing literary detective around Paris and London in seach or Jean Rhys and other wanderings, titled And The Street Walks In. 

Late of Kings Turning

By David Lewis:

One grey day in early summer I found myself unexpectedly alone, so I stole a long day to go walking and exploring.  The town was quiet and warm, and the air was scented with the rich musk of lilac and a soft suggestion of wisteria.  Great pale purple bunches hung over the road and curved gently across the faces of old houses.  The country lanes were bordered by long grasses and frothy, gentle wild flowers - cow parsley, herb Robert, buttercups.  The hedge thickened around an overgrown brick step and a sturdy white iron gate, as the ground rose into the cemetery.

We all have cemetery stories, ancestor tales.  My maternal grandparents and great grandparents are buried in a sloping graveyard overlooking the Welsh town of Llangollen, but my Lewis ancestors were either cremated or lie in an unmarked grave in Toxteth Cemetery, Liverpool.  There is a poetry in these places, the poetry of time and loss and hope, stories told in grass or written on stone pages.  Far from being depressing places, cemeteries are full of wildflowers and a rich meditative silence broken only by the birds.

This was a very Protestant cemetery and I saw only one Catholic crucifix on my slow walk.  Carved from the local grey-brown stone, the heavy Victorian headstones were sombrely decorated with calligraphy and curlicues rather than angels, although many headstones wore small panels of spring flowers, symbolic of Easter and the Resurrection, an eternal stone garden mirroring the lush greenery in the hedgerows outside.  The headstones’ crisp edges had been softened by a hundred Welsh winters, and names and dates were fading beneath lichens and mosses.  As a landscape it was defined by giant yew trees, dark and gloomy, beneath which the grave plots were widely spaced, a lawn sprinkled with tombs.  Gothic ironwork disappeared into thick ivy; older tombs were smothered by wild undergrowth.  There were more Celtic crosses than in an English cemetery, but very few Welsh inscriptions.

Yet the stories reached back through time to the landscape around the town.  Older graves were often carved with the names of large houses, hill farms and town houses, places I passed daily.  Bridge House, Stapleton Court, Tan House.  Late of Kings Turning, read one.  In this border cemetery the names were Welsh and English – Hatfield, Davies, Jones and Roberts – and I found many Thomas Lewises, my paternal great grandfather in that unmarked Liverpool grave.  Many families were haunted by infant mortality, the children’s lives cut short which sadden all visitors to a nineteenth-century graveyard.

But in rural Wales, the dead are part of the stories of the living and old stories fade slowly.  King’s Turning is a bend in the road, a field, a footpath on the outskirts of town, named for a fleeting visit by Charles 1st, so the story goes.  Welsh family storytelling creates a weave of story unconnected to chronological time, in which the dead are present through story and anecdote.  In Wales, as in William Faulkner’s Deep South, the past isn’t dead, it’s not even the past.

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter