FINDING MY COUNTRY by Martin Davies (www.reddragonhood.com)

[Ceri Shaw]

We motor up the interminable hill out of Merthyr Tydfil, the fifty seven horses of my father's Hillman Minx straining against the mass of our nuclear family and the seaside holiday luggage packing its boot. Its tank is full to the brim having been fuelled sufficiently to take us all the way north to Llandudno. Our car is the deluxe version of the Minx, clearly differentiated from lesser models by its grey over green two-tone paintwork. The manufacturer calls it the 'gay' model and the automotive advertising slogan of the moment is "Go gay, go Hillman". Despite this affirmation of my father as a sophisticated aesthete with an elevated socio-economic status, his mood is far from gay. To be honest with you, he's a miserable get.

My parents, as usual, sit in enraged silence; my father gripping the steering wheel with whitened knuckles, wrestling as much with the anger my mother permanently arouses in him as with the inconsistencies in the road surface, while my mother stares into the far distance through her side window, seemingly transfixed by the black slag heaps of the upper Taff valley.

My brother and I, innocent on this occasion yet cowed, nevertheless, by the air of belligerence separating our parents, slouch into the pale green leatherette of the rear bench seat and pass the time by pulling individual hairs out of each other's heads. Well, I say individual hairs; the point of the game is not to wince because making any kind of disturbance while my father is driving will provoke him to grope around violently behind his back, ultimately bringing the flat of his left hand down hard on whatever bare flesh he finds there. This is a time when they dress ten year-old boys in short trousers and I have the misfortune to be occupying the seat behind my mother, directly in the firing line of my father's retribution. My thigh sometimes stings for the entire duration of these journeys, glowing a lurid red as a result of his smacking, its particular hue indicating the exact degree of his frustration at any point in time. He has a lot of anger. Sometimes I think I act as a beacon, warning others to give him a wide berth.

I don't cry though. I'm long past crying. I know if I cry my mother might step in to protect me and then there'll be real trouble. She'll probably get a beating that I'll find far more distressing than a mere smacking, so I accept the pain in silence. It could be worse, though, since he's actually right-handed.

This is a long time before the bypass would be built around Merthyr. Thus our journey has just taken us through what was, until only a few months ago, the typical Valleys village of Aberfan. It's not typical any more. I may be only 10 years old but even I understand why the air tastes of grief and the ground still seems to be in a state of shock. In assembly we have said prayers for the 116 children of a similar age to ourselves who had been engulfed in their school by the excrement of old 'King Coal'.

My father parked the car and we were briefly allowed to survey the site. The rubble of the school is still there, its desks and chairs partially entombed in the black slime that has set solid over what was once the playground. Over the road, a Victorian terrace with its doors and windows pushed out and its lace curtains flapping mournfully in the breeze, stands wide open to ghoulish souvenir-hunters who are, even now, picking over the possessions of the dead. My father, brazen as you like, strolled into one of the houses without knocking. He emerged with a grunt, I think more in disappointment at the lack of spectacle than in disapproval at the petty looting going on around him, and he ushered us back to the Hillman without saying a word.

Rather than observe the golden rule, which stipulates that on no account must you tug out more than one hair at a time, my brother and I normally can't resist a perverse temptation to provoke a smacking for the other by exceeding the hair quota sufficiently to induce an involuntary yelp. On this occasion, however, we play the game fairly, maybe because it's the first day of our family summer holiday and we're hoping against hope that for once it will turn out all right. Maybe our parents won't shout at each other if we're not naughty.

Despite the ever-present threat of violence and the far greater worry of being entombed for hours with the wreckage of my parent's marriage, I have been looking forward to this journey. Our family is more mobile than many at this time and there have been day trips to Barry Island and Caerphilly Castle. I am the only boy in my class to have been up to London but I have never been taken into the Welsh hinterland, let alone to the far distant North. We plan to journey the entire length of the A470 trunk road to Llandudno where we will be confined for five days in a caravan. On the return journey, my parents will leave my brother and I with my father's elder sister, my Aunt Mary, whose husband works a small farm on the edge of the Dyfi Forest near Machynlleth. There we will be expected to play politely for ten long summer days with our cousins, two boys slightly younger than ourselves, even though they speak only Welsh and we speak only English, before our father returns to reclaim us.

We are taught almost nothing about Welsh history or geography or language at Hawthorn Junior School in Llandaff North. Wales is more mysterious to me than the European Economic Community or Biafra or Vietnam and I am hungry to know everything and anything. More than that, I am excited at the prospect of receiving what I imagine will be like a full-immersion baptism into Welshness.

My brother and I were born two and half years apart, I in the winter and my brother in the summer. Our dominant genes seem drawn from the extreme poles of the opposing factions. My father is of the stocky, swarthy type of Welsh build, like Tom Jones, while my mother looks a bit like the actress Nerys Hughes from the Liver Birds. I suspect my father hates me because I remind him of my mother, while my mother prefers my brother because he is a more biddable clone of my father. I'm on a hiding to nothing with our parents but it's a different story when we're at school. His teachers invariably ask him why he can't be more like his elder brother. He is dyslexic while I am already reading Shakespeare's sonnets. I have a creative bent while he excels at sports. I am tall while he is of average height. I am tough while he is soft, although he is so good at rugby that he will eventually play in the same team as me, despite giving away two years in age. Above all else, I have the psychological advantage that comes with being the firstborn, and I will maintain it until the day one of us dies.

As the car climbs higher, the valley opens out on the left of the road to make room for an expanse of broadleaf trees, while on the right the hills tower more steeply above us, as if trying to lean on my father, demanding his kindness and compassion on our behalf.

By the time we reach the minuscule Llwyn-on village, the scrapings and scratchings that scar the river banks for almost the entire length of the Taff are at last drowned out by the smooth, glassy expanse of the Llwyn-on reservoir, a huge volume of water held in place by an imposing brown stone dam.

My father has the perfect alibi for his behaviour, I suppose. Several years ago now, Her Majesty's secret police recognised his emotional inadequacy and saw they could mould it into a malevolence that might be usefully deployed against the enemies of the State. He has now risen to the rank of Inspector in the Special Branch.

The road levels out, the car picks up speed and my father changes up a gear with the precision endowed by the police Advanced Driving Course. He dips the revs just so, engages the clutch and pushes the lever forward with his palm facing towards his thigh. There's not a hint of complaint from the gearbox. The valley's sides, now heavily wooded, press in on either side until we enter a series of cuttings that were once blasted out of the obstinate Welsh bedrock.

On the seat between my brother and I are the latest issues of the Valiant, a boy's war comic, and the more highly prized American Marvel comic serialisation of The Amazing Spider-Man. These are souvenirs of a whole day spent with my father a week earlier. He allowed me to take a day off school, a prospect I would have jumped at had he thought it necessary to consult me on the matter beforehand. I was to help him with 'special police business', which, as it turned out, required me to do nothing more than sit in the front passenger seat of the Hillman - an honour and a remarkable experience in itself – while he took photographs of a good looking young man through a large telephoto lens. As I slowly read the comics, savouring every separate illustration before moving on to the next, I worked my way through a bag of boiled sweets he had bought to keep me quiet. Meanwhile, my father recorded every move the man made and every person he met against times jotted down in his notebook. At one point I saw the man turn suddenly and walk directly towards us. I couldn't help staring at him for a moment. He was powerfully built with an intelligent face and the confident gait of a soldier or horseman.

My father dropped the camera out of sight beneath his legs and took a sudden interest in my comic. He gripped me tightly, in a manner that an observer would take to be no more than fatherly affection, while he appeared to be intently studying the page of cartoon drawings over my shoulder. I can still smell the warm wool of his jumper and feel the press of his body across my neck. That may have been the only time he ever cuddled me.

At lunchtime, he left me on a bench outside a pub with a bottle of Coca Cola and a straw in one hand and a ploughman's sandwich in the other, while he drank inside with a rowdy group of fellow policemen. It felt important to be helping my father but I was lonely and bored without the company of my brother who, being too young for police work, was not allowed on this mission.

That evening, after I'd had my bath, my father sat me down in his study and paced the room while giving me a stern briefing on what I should say at school the next day. I had suffered from an earache and he had written a note to confirm it to my teacher. Of course he and I would know that I had actually been helping him with his police work but this must remain a secret between us. Our story was a lie, obviously, but it was necessary to lie sometimes, especially when police business was involved.

He will make spectacular proof of this philosophy later in his career, lying outrageously to engineer the wrongful imprisonment of six innocent Irish people who are unjustly accused of planting an IRA bomb in a Guildford pub.

Who would suspect a man with a small boy in tow of being a secret policeman? Many years later I would think about apologising to the unsuspecting Julian Cayo Evans, the leader of the Free Wales Army, for my insignificant role in the establishment conspiracy that ultimately led to his downfall, but he had already died. I would have said that I just wanted to spend some time with my daddy. It was special police business. I didn't realise it was bad. Cayo was a hero, a man of action and a father himself. I'm sure he would have understood.

The back cover of the American comic carries an advertisement for 'An Entire War Chest of Ships', priced at a paltry $3.95. An illustration implies that the offer includes miniature representations of practically the entire United States navy, hundreds of tiny model ships. I stare at the advertisement for a long time, oblivious to anything else, calculating how many weeks worth of pocket money I will need to save. I even picture myself going down to the post office to purchase the international money order. The exchange rate is somewhere in the region of three dollars to the pound, but it will still take two months of abstinence from sweets to own this American dream, so it will never happen. Harold Wilson's Labour government will shortly spoil my calculations anyway, by presiding over an economic collapse that will cause both the pound and Wilson's political legacy to be devalued.

A beam of sunlight intrudes on my daydream at the point where I imagine myself at the front door, accepting from the postman a large airmail package carrying American stamps that, as a bonus, I'll be able to add to my collection. In my reverie, I have been only half aware of passing the smaller Cantref and Beacons Reservoirs but I am instantly dragged back to consciousness by the landscape. We are cresting the head of the valley and here, where the watercourse separates into the south-flowing Taff and the temporarily north-flowing Usk, the blighted, blasted and bleeding Wales suddenly meets the idealised, mythological, achingly beautiful Wales of my imagining. It is love at first sight.

I am a child who is emotionally receptive beyond his years and the real Wales - the natural, majestic, unrepentant Wales, the land of my fathers - is revealed to me in a thrilling moment of super-lucidity. I had thought it existed only in my dreams; in an entirely different universe to the tawdry provinciality of central Cardiff where we sometimes go to shop in the department stores, far from the gentility of Llandaff North where we live, and light years from the filthy, stupidly cowering, unabashed poverty of the valley through which we've just travelled. The Wales of my heart is raw and ragged and wild and free. It exists in the huge skies and barren landscapes of the high Brecon Beacons and it stretches far away across the windswept black hilltops on every side.

We're coasting downhill now with Corn Du and Pen y Fan at our backs. The Minx, having overcome the uphill slog it has had to endure since we left Cardiff, glides down the valley, for once deserving of its 'gay' slogan as it flies along like a pit pony relieved of its coal truck. My father has turned the engine off and taken the car out of gear, something he often does on descents to save petrol.

My mind records every detail of this sacred landscape; deeply shadowed corries; purple saxifrage clinging to the rocks of long abandoned quarries; rust coloured heather bordered by the brightest green grass; sunlight sparkling on the Glyn Tarell brook as it races downhill alongside the road, which at this point clings to the craggy left-hand side of the valley.

The atmosphere in the car seems to have been lightened somewhat by the warmth of the sunshine and the uplifting view, although none of us actually says anything. Yet far too soon the sun retreats behind solid grey clouds and the landscape closes in again as we reach the outskirts of the prosperous market town of Brecon. We pass the ancient Christ College, cross an old stone bridge and sweep up a steep hill past Georgian and Jacobean shop fronts.

My father stops in the High Street, opposite the post office and outside a baker's shop. My mother practically leaps out of the car, relieved no doubt to place some fresh air between her and my father. Slamming the door rather too hard, she charges into the shop in search of filled rolls for our lunch. Viewed from behind, my father appears to wince at her clumsiness with the door but, inexplicably, he says nothing. My brother must have a tapeworm because he is permanently hungry and forever foraging. He treads hard on my toes in his haste to get out of the car so he can follow my mother. He'll no doubt plead for an iced bun or a doughnut. You'd think he was never fed. I retaliate by jabbing the tips of straightened fingers hard into his ribs. He whines loudly, "Dad, Martin hit me", but to our amazement, my father just stares straight ahead and does not react at all.

Expecting a whack at any moment, I slide carefully out of the car and close the door with perfectly judged mechanical sympathy. A tea towel printed with illustrations of Welsh castles in the window of the souvenir shop next door catches my eye. I love a good castle so I'm clearly in the right country. A quick survey of the shop, piled high with enough tourist tat to last the summer season, impresses me deeply. This brave new world seems to be adorned with cultural jewels of great magnificence. My head is now in turmoil because my heart, which was set on a miniature US navy a few minutes ago, is now not so certain.

My attention is drawn to the unmistakable sound of the Minx's engine starting and I turn around. My father has stayed in the car. He clumsily grinds the gearbox as he forces the car into first gear, uncharacteristically forgetting to double-declutch as he does so. The unnerving look of desolation now occupying his face tells me he is not merely planning to move the car to a more convenient parking space, but I am more shocked by the tears running down his cheeks than I am by the realisation that he intends to abandon us here.

Our eyes lock for a moment and I am somehow able to comprehend his struggle with self-loathing, even though I can't put a name to it. To me, it's a glowing force field that surrounds him like an aura.

A barely imperceptible change enters his expression; an infinitesimally small movement in the muscles of his face readable only by someone whose senses are, like mine, acutely tuned for the slightest hint of danger. In this new expression I can see that his anguish has hardened into an emotion with which I'm much more familiar: good, old-fashioned, common-or-garden anger. Powered now by strength rather than weakness, his indecision has become resolution. I feel a sense of achievement because he has clearly felt and appreciated the full force of my absolute indifference towards him. This is one of the two feelings he engenders in me; the other, of course, is fear. Throughout my childhood he has systematically tried to beat every trace of emotion out of me and I will never properly recover.

He grasps the steering wheel and muscles it around with considerable force while pressing the accelerator too hard, so that the car lurches to the opposite side of the road, narrowly missing a speeding post office van he has failed to spot in his haste. The postman keeps his hand on the horn too long, an act of confrontation my father would normally take as an excuse to go nuclear. He is confident with his fists although, were they to fail or prove inappropriate for resolving an incident where resorting to violence might get him into trouble, he has his warrant card to reduce an opponent to grovelling apologies. Today though, he just lets the opportunity pass.

The Minx has a lousy turning circle and the road is too narrow for it to turn around in one 180 degree arc, so there is more frantic grinding of gears as he reverses and then completes an awkward three point turn to avoid the van, which has been forced to stop, before lurching away in the direction from which we came. The postman leans out of the van window and shrugs at me, the only witness to the incident, as if to say, "Some people, eh?" before driving off.

I'm rooted to the pavement of Brecon High Street, not sure what to think or feel. Mostly I feel exhilaration, I think. Then my mother comes out of the baker's and asks me where my father has gone. I tell her I'm sure he won't be coming back for us but it takes some time before she believes me. So we walk down to the canal and sit on a bench to eat our rolls. My brother begins to cry when I explain to him that our holiday will now be cancelled. The little sod is always snivelling, perhaps because my father never hits him for it.

We wait for ages outside a phone box while our mother talks to our grandfather. She cries a lot but nothing is resolved. Eventually we catch a bus back to Cardiff, then another bus home to Llandaff North.

When we arrive home late in the evening, the Minx is not parked outside our house. My mother nervously ushers us straight into bed but when we awake in the morning, we find that our father has returned, our mother's mood seems bright and breezy and the turbulent events of the previous day appear to have been entirely forgiven and forgotten. We're not about to do anything to disturb the peace so we don't talk about it.

Some months later, however, I am removed from my class in the middle of a morning lesson to find my mother waiting outside the school, perched on the wing of a hired Mini. My brother and the few possessions that will fit into the tiny car have been packed haphazardly. I know the headmistress is wishing me goodbye forever without her having to say so. My brother cries relentlessly but I feel nothing more than relief that the war is finally over. This is worth a lot more to me than the friends I am about to lose. I do not cry. I have taken the expression, "Shut up or I'll give you something to cry about" well and truly to heart.

We drive east into England, not north into Wales, to find sanctuary in exile with my maternal grandparents. I am to get my rural idyll, protected by a fierce, broom-wielding yet loving Welsh nain and emotionally restored, in part at least, by a strong, generous Welsh taid. Fortunately he is a perfect father figure who will teach me about love and respect as well as rude words to Men of Harlech, although not in the language of his fathers.

It is a place where I can run free in the fields and woodland but it isn't the Welsh countryside I've dreamt about ever since the aborted trip to Llandudno.

Safety comes at a price. All external traces of my Welshness will be erased by the time I leave the English countryside for an art college in London when I'm 17 years old. It could have been steeper, though; my brother ends up talking like an East Anglian with a foul accent he affects so as not to be bullied by his peers.

Forty years on, I breeze around Merthyr Tydfil on the bypass before rejoining the old road up to the head of the valley, the Mercedes Benz making light work of the incline. My particular car is a Brabus, an aggressive-looking souped-up version of an upmarket motor that you wouldn't describe as 'gay' in either the traditional or contemporary sense of the word. Maybe my mode of transport serves to illustrate that I really have more in common with my father than I would like to admit.

The sun is shining and the big sky is radiating a deep spring blue. Everything looks strikingly clear and the air tastes fresh now that the tongue-tingling acidity of mining and heavy industry is long gone. Rather appropriately, Kelly Jones is belting out Maybe Tomorrow from the in-car entertainment system. Everything seems smaller than I remember yet everything is still in its place, just not so dirty.

I love to travel. As a benefit of my work I have been able to visit every continent and I have been lucky enough to see some of the world's most breathtaking landscapes at first hand. Yet as I crest the head of the valley once again and gaze across at the Brecon Beacons, I'm back to my first love, a love that still endures.

Did I tell you I never cry? It was a lie. Right now, driving north into Wales, the same tears of sadness and joy I cry when singing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, are dripping onto my light blue T-shirt. The shirt has the wonderful Welsh word 'Hiraeth' - 'longing' seems to be the simplest definition in English - printed across the front. I'm crying because I am happy. I am home.

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