Happiness

Drumming feet of early morning blackbirds on the roof and gas whistle of kettle wake me. The familiar and comforting smell of locked up musty caravan comforts me as I stretch awake in the nylon sleeping bag.

I am ten years old. I sit on the caravan steps; face upturned to the speckled blue sky and I feel the beginning of the day’s warmth on my eyelids. On my lap I nurse a half eaten cereal bowl of sodden cornflakes. Behind me the open door in the darkened interior where my mother folds up blankets and my father asks where my mother has hidden ... Well, take your pick. I place the bowl on the concrete slab and listen to the sounds of the awakening families on field 5. I hear the dull, muffled sound of footsteps walking on tin. Radios sing to excited children who draw back curtains in anticipation of the beach.  

Hens scratch around and strut on the grass in front of me and a far off cock calls them reminding them not to stray too far from home. The metal bars of the steps cut into me now and reluctantly I leave the sun’s rays and go inside.

Later, on Talybont beach, stick thin and berry brown, my brother and I career over the waves of stones left behind by the tides. For once no one looks at my thinness and, instead in passing, I hear an old woman exclaim ‘Ooh isn’t she brown!’ At the ice-cream stall – an old caravan marooned on the beach - we buy a rare treat. 99s for ourselves and other brother and sister. We scuttle our way back over the pebbles, melting ice-cream dripping stickily down wrists onto bare legs.

We have no money and I am envious of those families who eat crisps and drink coke with their packed lunch;  have ‘treats’,  whilst we ravenous from swimming in waves, wolf down the plain cheese and tomato sandwiches and digestive biscuits [ in between moaning] and drink diluted orange squash. My mother explains once that we don’t have the treats other families have, because we don’t just have one week’s holiday and, as this makes sense, I accept this.

The screech and roar of an overhead low-flying pilotless plane from Llanbedr airfield is incongruous with the beach setting, but it’s a familiar sound and an indicator of good weather. It’s a sound that anchors me to Talybont beach. Behind me the patchwork quilt of hills fold downwards to the pebbled dunes and either way stretches to infinity. Snowdonia and the Llyn Peninsula one way and the distant shores of Aberdovy the other.

I am eternally grateful to you Gwynedd for your coastline, your seagulls and your harbours and your wild hills and mountains. Here you have taught me what it is to really love and to feel that I am home. There is no other place where all my pasts and presents are as one. I can track my existence on your timeless trajectory. Days, weeks, years spent here have left me living in a geological, metaphorical, mental no man’s land, hovering somewhere between wherever I am and where I want to be. I am in love with a place that makes me wish I could be with it as I would a ‘beloved’. I am not Welsh yet I understand it when they talk of ‘hiraeth’ the yearning; the sickening longing for home.


Jenny