I’ve been looking for the traces great writers leave on a
place and there aren’t many in Roath. In
my hand I’ve a copy of Dannie Abse’s A Strong Dose Of Myself. It’s a collection of the late poet’s
essays. It came out in 1983. In the first, “Return Ticket to Cardiff”,
Dannie recalls his youth in the district and then lists a range of houses in
which he and his family lived. He was born in a smoky house (which he can’t
remember) in Whitchurch Road. The others,
later residences, were all strung out along the fault line that divides Penylan
from Roath. “We were wandering Welsh
Jews,” he writes. Why move so often, he
asks himself. And then replies: because
the bathroom needed decorating, because my father’s fortunes had changed, because the
mice had taken to chewing aphrodisiacs, or because it’s sometimes easier to
move than to get rid of guests.
The Rhys Davies Trust who put up plaques to the Welsh
literary great and the Welsh literary good had asked me to check out Abse’s east
Cardiff. Would anywhere be suitable? Dannie
had listed three houses in Albany Road.
I visited each in turn. The first
was now an Estate Agents and hopeless.
At the second, a run-down property with evidence of heavy use by
children, I could get no reply. At the
third a nice Asian lady asked me in broken English to come back evening. See the men.
At Dannie’s one time Sandringham Road house in view of the
site of Roath Mill the owners were in and were interested. The Trust will be in touch, I told them. Nearby was Waterloo Gardens. It once held a wooden shelter inside which
both Dannie and I, as schoolchildren of different eras, had gone to carve our
names with a penknife. When, in later
life, he and I returned together to check this piece of synchronicity out we
found that the hut had been pulled down.
Right now I’m at the planning stages for two cycle tours which
might take this no longer there hut in.
They’ll run deeper and deeper into Cardiff’s east. Roath,
Capital of Wales, land of hills and waterways, lost mansions and holy
wells. Something like that. The tour will be managed by Pol’s Cardiff
Cycle Tours – check http://www.cardiffcycletours.com/
for more information. It’ll take place
on Saturday 13th June, 2015
and then repeat on Saturday the 20th. If you don’t have a bike then you can hire
one from Pol.
This new tour, I’ve decided, will take in lost holy wells,
lost mansions, the site of the now partially destroyed Roman Quarry, the place
where Cardiff’s Corporation star observatory once stood, Cardiff’s equivalent
to the Magdalena Laundries, the remains of a thousand year old mill and the
place where the geese once roamed. We’ll
visit the island on which Jimi Hendrix once woke unable to tell the world just
how he got there. There’ll be sight of
the graves of some of Cardiff’s most famous.
We’ll also take in the ghosts of the Butes and the hill fort that no one
knows about. I’ll enliven things with a
few poems. To the point and not. But then you’d expect me to do that.
What I’ve not yet worked out is how able cycle tour
attendees will be when it comes to actually getting up Penylan Hill. That’s a long slope. Welshman’s Hill as it was once known. We could walk up but that might be regarded
by the fit as cheating. We could cycle the
whole way but then I’d be too breathless to speak when we got to the top. Maybe some sort of half and half operation, a
long and loping side street zig zag with
a bit of bike pushing at the end would do it.
I’m doing a few trials shortly. Watch
this space to find out how they went.
For information on plaques for writers check here - http://www.literaturewales.org/writers-plaques/
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