On a damp
late-November morning we went on pilgrimage to the Dark Tower, the three of us,
Valentine, Howard and Gale, keen book-collectors all. We went from our digs in Abbey Dore, hard by the Abbey itself, through the Golden Valley until we came to Peterchurch, whose church has a slim, needle-point, pale spire, an
aerial of elegance.
From here,
a narrow, steeply climbing road is the way to Urishay. As we neared the summit,
making way for an approaching vehicle, our wheels slithered in the roadside
slime, as if to impose upon us a slow, respectful approach. Through the autumnal
trees, the last vestiges of gold glowing on their gaunt branches, we could see
the high ruinous towers. Here, a Norman baronial stronghold had become over the
centuries a ramshackle farmhouse, until finally its owners had been obliged to give
up the struggle to keep it intact: its once roaring fireplaces now stood exposed
in their walls, dank hollows.
Before its
desolation, a traveller, seeking gratefully its lights through a storm, arrived one
night, and asked for shelter, and was welcomed by its eccentric castellan: they
talked long together by one of those fireplaces, in the marvellously evocative opening scene of
Francis Brett Young’s The Dark Tower (1915). In a preface to a later edition, the author
says: ‘this early, imperfect book has a deeper claim on my own affections than
any other I have written.’
It was
bound up with his discovery of ‘that mass of Old Red Sandstone called the Black
Mountain, whose sombrely suggestive name and bold outline, filmed by distance’
had haunted him for years. When Brett Young had visited ‘the lonely outpost’ it was ‘still
inhabited, through the declining storms of centuries, by the family whose
forebears had first held it: a race named Delahay. Now, at last, the Delahays
are gone and Urishay a stark ruin . . .’
It had been ‘his romantic privilege in
those
days to know the last of them: a young man, half-squire, half small
farmer, who
clung to its stones like the last leaf of a dying oak’, and the story of
his lineage and the story of the place, had enthralled him. Moreover,
he had written
the book as a relief from his work as a local doctor, himself
convalescent, during
the fiercely busy days of an influenza epidemic in 1914: ‘The
composition of
The Dark Tower, an urgent spiritual necessity, was the only escape a harassed
mind and ailing body found at that time’.
All that remains with
a roof here is part of the medieval chapel, with whitewashed walls, bare beams,
clear, gridded glass, in solemn silence, carefully preserved by The Friends of Friendless
Churches. We paid our respects here and then, from the bank on which the chapel stood, I gathered from among the leaf-mulch a
pocket-full of fallen, half-formed sweet chestnuts, seized by the wind before
they could grow to full fruit.
We
descended to the valley and continued on our way to Hay, passing a sign by a scarlet
post-box at the house of Crossway which pointed to Arthur’s Stone. As we journeyed, our talk
turned to another early Francis Brett Young book, written with his younger brother
Eric: Undergrowth, notable because the older author freely confessed it
was a homage to Arthur Machen: ‘the Machen-ery was obvious’, he quipped.
Notable too for being hard to find, unlike the volumes of the Severn Edition of
the author’s books, with their royal blue bindings and gilt decorations, which
are still to be seen at the far end of shelves. So rare was it that I wrote a story,
also called 'Undergrowth’, about a young collector’s quest for it.
A few
copies have come my way over the years, one of them in the damp shed at the
back of an antique shop in Presteigne which mostly sold china dogs. And on a
recent sojourn, Mr Howard had found one too, in a cupboard in a bookshop in
Brecon. So, said I to John Gale in jest, it is your turn now: you too must find
a copy, to join the select sect of Undergrowthers, thinking this was no easy quest.
At the Old Cinema
Bookshop in Hay we had already plundered the day before the trays outside where
every book is a pound, and we had conducted a first reconnaissance of the
shelves of vintage hardback fiction. Here there was a copy of Sax Rohmer’s The
Yellow Claw with a pleasing inscription: in the top corner of the front
free endpaper, in narrow, childish letters, was an ownership signature: D M Watson,
or some similar plain name. But then in bold capitals across the page another,
or her own later, hand had proclaimed: THE FIENDISH MISS WATSON’S BOOK. One
would rather have liked to know this reader.
And then,
as we browsed on, Mr Gale came to us with a look of triumph, mingled with
bewilderment. A sign had guided him to a bookcase in a remote corner of the
room, for Pocket Editions. Here might be found the red bindings of Nelson’s
Classics, a few Cape Travellers’ Library volumes in their deep blue, fewer
still of the New Adelphi Library in bottle-green: a Compton Mackenzie, a Norman
Douglas. And here too Mr Gale’s gaze had alighted with wonderment on the word ‘Undergrowth’,
and underneath the word ‘Young’: a compact edition in berry-red covers. He could
scarcely believe it as he drew out the book, like Arthur withdrawing Excalibur
from its stone. But there it was, sure enough, overlooked by others, waiting for him.
Afterwards,
we wondered about those sweet chestnuts from Urishay: magical talismans? Ought
we to wish for another book? Better not, we decided: just accept gratefully the
gift of the spirits that haunt the Dark Tower.
(Mark Valentine)
Pictures:
The Ruins of Urishay © John Gale; The Doorway of the Chapel ©
John Howard; The Sign to Arthur’s Stone © John Gale; The Sweet Chestnuts of
Urishay © John Gale.
