Edging the Estuary - What is all about?

Hemmingway knew how it went with new work.  You needed to keep your head down and do it.  In an interview with George Plimpton he told him “though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”  If the book isn’t complete then talking it up isn’t going to get you there.  Explaining how it all fits together will ruin it.  So what’s the new book going to be about?  They ask me that at the pub.  I try not to explain too much.  It’s about the estuary, the river, you know.  What, another Real book?  Maybe

Actually what I’ve ended up writing  isn’t a Real book at all and although it most certainly is about the Severn Estuary it’s also about an incredible amount more than that.  Is it a psychogeography?  Maybe, it could be that.

I’d long been interested in the idea of the linear city.  This was something first proposed by Arturo Soria y Mata in the nineteenth century.  He proposed turning Madrid into an elongated rope of buildings which would follow the Rio Manzanares.  The Soviet planner Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin took the idea further but nothing actually got built.  In the late twentieth century the notion regained currency with proposals to run the resorts along England’s south coast together to form one continuous conurbation.  They were almost that anyway.   The fiction of JG Ballard’s dystopian future suddenly became real. 

Cities did not need to be lozenge shaped, walking suburbs had been outmoded by city metros, communities had become acclimatised to scattering.  Conurbations could be ninety miles long and half a mile wide.  Then I read about the Cardiff Custom House back in Tudor times.  The Custom House was the base for the king’s officers.  These were bold Englishmen sent out from London to collect taxes levied on all goods landed on the king’s shores.  And these Welsh shores belonged the English king.  All of them.  For ease of admin everything landed from Chepstow right down to Worm’s Head on Gower was controlled from Cardiff. 

Cardiff, that wide.  The linear city in place hundreds of years before its time.  It was a concept I could not leave alone.  I vowed to walk it and to write about what I found.  Edging the Estuary is the result.

The walk was completed in sections, done largely in the right order, east to west, always chasing the sun.  There were diversions.  Trips inland up rivers, the tracking of canals, the crossing of cities.  There were three of those – Newport, Cardiff, Swansea – and each deserved and got more than a single traversing.  Using a technique I’d exploited in the Real series I often got someone who knew the area well to travel with me, to tell me about themselves and their locale, about the place we were walking through.  Tony Curtis at Barry.  Robert Minhinnick at Porthcawl.  Nigel Jenkins in Swansea.  John Briggs at Newport.  Des Barry and John Williams in Cardiff.  Lynne Rees at Port Talbot.

It soon became apparent that this Welsh walk alone would not be sufficient to describe the great muddy estuary I was tracking.  I had to get to the islands, to the far tidal reaches up beyond Gloucester, to the bridges, the barrage sites, the boats that sailed on the waters and, most importantly, the much richer English side.

I needed to explore the literary connections – John Williams at Cardiff, R D Blackmore in the Doone Valley, Shelly at Lynmouth -  and the industrial ones - lime, asbestos cement, electricity, steel, coal, copper.

There were difficulties and deviations.  The electricity generators  alternated come on in welcomes with you are not entering these premises under any circumstances go aways.  I was given tea and tours in about equal number to chases off and no mate not without a permit, this area is forbidden, you’ll have to walk round.  Sometimes I obeyed, sometimes I did not.  This land is not entirely a free land, despite what you may read.

I met characters, chancers, owners, renters.  I talked to locals, to visitors, to workers just passing through.  Gareth Woodham told me about his Severn Lake barrage proposals.  Glyn Jones, the ebullient chairman of BARS, the Barry Amateur Radio Society, gave me Marconi’s history.  Paul Parker at the Severn Estuary Partnership explained just how the estuary worked, where its past was,  and where its future may lie. 

What came out of this was a community that lived and worked the greatest waterway Wales has residing cheek by jowl with a larger population many of whom barely understood that they lived on the coast and that the water out there beyond them was the world’s most powerful thing – the sea.

History underpinned everything.  I read of the Conquest and of the Normans riding down the Welsh coast from their base at Tewkesbury to invade the and subsequently subdue the Welsh princedoms.  I followed their route along the northern shore of the Severn – through Lydney towards Newport.  I tried to feel as they must have done galloping the flat Severn shorelands.  And when I got back home to Cardiff where Robert Fitzhamon had taken up residence in around 1093 I read of what actually occurred.  They came across the water from the direction of Bristol, by boat.

I wound what I discovered and what I experienced into a homogeneous whole, brightening it with memory and personal experience.  I digressed from the true course as many times as I needed.  This thing is be read.  So what is it about?

It’s about the difference between Wales and England, here in the place where the border is, where the one place runs out and the other begins.  Fishermen at Black Rock by the bridge speaking in clear Gloucester accents but declaring themselves eternally welsh.  Tourists at Lynmouth who barely knew that that was Wales over there through the sea mist.  Students in Cardiff who had little idea that they were studying in what was once the world’s greatest coal exporting port and still a city on the coast.

 

It’s about the history of the waterway – from its time in the age of the saints as a sort of sea motorway, its time as one of the greatest merchant sea routes in the world, to today when there are barely enough commercial sailings to warrant the existence of all our ports and docks and the most anyone sees are leisure craft and fishing boats.

It’s about the communities that cluster along these coasts: the farmers, the fishermen, the walkers, the industrialists with their docks and their container parks and their power stations, the leisure provider with their fair grounds and their family beaches, the caravaners, the historical remains, the castles and iron-age headland forts, the scrap-metal merchants, the tyre hoarders, the horse traders, the turf growers, the flatlanders, the heritage industrialists, the wedding planners, the lighthouse keepers , the harbours, the creeks, the sea walls, the muds, the conservationists, the nature reserves, the sites of scientific interest, the sewage outlets, the barrage builders, the atomic scientists, the b&b owners, the hoteliers, the surfers, the beachcombers, the time wasters, the manic, the retired, the wonderful, the hopeless, and the lost.

It’s got a map – I twisted the publisher’s arm and they provided that.  It has no photos.  The links to several gross of them are here: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/Estuary/estuary.htm 

It comes out on the 19^th of this month – September, 2013 – published by Seren books at £9.99.  the launch is at the Norwegian Church the same day.  7.00 pm.  I’ll be in conversation there with the former director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs, author and journalist John Osmond. 

Start edging now.  

It's Such a Dangerous Medium This Photography

I’m off along the Estuary, camera with me. The big one rather than the compact. With the big one they all expect something of you, even though you are just a snapper. Something to do with cost and size and expectation. Big cameras make you look professional even when you are not. Trouble is my Nikon D90 does take good pics. The long lens brings in distant subjects. The wide angle takes brilliant landscapes. When you point it you have an idea of what you are going to get.

With the Lave fishermen – these are the guys who sail out into the muddy Estuary below the Severn Bridge and fish with nets that look like something from the Sea of Galilee – it’s all laughter about how I might go flat on my back in the mud fields – glutinous stuff everywhere but on the camera. “He’ll protect that, you see.” Says Martin to his fishing companions, “just like that TV documentary man last week.” I don’t fall, in case you wondered. But I did get out there in the boat on the tidal waters and I took some great pics of men up to their chests in waders, hunting salmon. Didn’t catch any. Not a thing. “I’m off next week on holiday, “ Martin says. “Anywhere nice?” “Going to Ireland. Fishing trip, you know”. What else.

Going round Aberthaw Power Station is another matter. When there’s someone talking to you then you just can’t concentrate on taking pictures. It’s as much as I can do to point and shoot, hoping something I wanted will get in through the lens. This is where the compact comes into its own. Unpretentious. Easy to hold. Weighs nothing. Works every time. Don’t line anything up, to hell with the light and the focus, just hope. I use this as a sort of aide memoire, a notebook, I tell them. Saves me from having to write things down. “You go ahead”, they say, “take what you want.”

At Port Talbot it’s different. Here I have the big Nikon because I need it to see into the distance, because I want to try to make something of this industrial intrusion among the perfect sand dunes, because what’s there in front of me is so amazing. Full of fire and smoke and flying dust. I’ve walked up along the beach, top of the bund the Tata steelworks have built to keep the marauding sea back. The beach is a long yellow gleam of a thing and it’s totally empty. Not even a man in the distance digging for worms. I’ve got here on a public path and, far as I know, I’m still on it. Although I have to say it’s beginning not to feel quite like that. What with the thunder of heavy lorries and the grind of the conveyor belt and proximity of emissions and smog.

The guard who stops me, puts me into his gleaming, light flashing vehicle and drives me off site. He could demand my memory card at any second. He’s on the radio. “Pair of members of the public here illegally. Yep. One of them has a camera. Yes a camera. That’s right.” Hell, like being caught with dope or porn by your parents. I try to hide it, slide it round my back, hope it gets lost next to the daysack. You are not allowed to take photos here, I’m told, firmly. Sorry, I mutter. But to be fair he's pretty reasonable after that.

It was the same thing when we stopped the car half way across the site of the Dong power station outside Newport. John Briggs and I quietly shooting a road sign that reads DIVERSION WHEN FOGGY. Urban surrealism. Signs of the future. States of mind. A van arrives with lights flashing. “You can’t do that, you’re not authorised”. Hell no. It’s such a dangerous medium this photography. Shows the world the world and lots of people are not happy with that. It upsets people in a way that writing usually doesn’t. Why is that?

Peter Finch is currently researching his forthcoming Seren title Edging the Estuary – Where Wales Runs Out. Cameras, security guards, sea walls, wave cut platforms, gouts and fire, mud, menace, power and people will all feature. Watch this space for further details. It’ll be a while yet.

The Lave Fishing photos are here http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterfinch/sets/72157627430789629/

Taking Criticism Seriously

A nation’s culture has come of age when that culture begins to talk about itself. In Wales we have a poor history of doing this but there are signs that things are changing. Back in the days when the poet laureate of the left, the late Adrian Mitchell, was resident writer at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, a bright examination paper compiler put one of the great man’s works on the syllabus for the GCSE. Mitchell was flattered and asked if he could try the exam himself. Permission was granted and, along with hundreds of schools kids half his age, Mitchell duly sat the paper. His entry was marked. He failed.

There was a gap between what the examiner thought Mitchell had meant and what the poet actually had. “The syntax of the last two lines…create tension and ambiguity by allowing both narrative closure and apostrophic openness,” writes the critic James A Davies in a discussion of Dylan Thomas’s keynote poem in Deaths and Entrances. Did Dylan have this in mind as he wrote? Or was he, instead, simply caught up in the magic tumble of words flowing from his fingers.

The new critics of Welsh writing in English are emerging in force from the departments at Cardiff, Bangor, Glamorgan, Aberystwyth, Swansea and Carmarthen. Kirsti Bohata, Matthew Jarvis, John Goodby, Daniel G. Williams, Damian Walford Davies, Francesca Rhydderch, Jasmine Donahaye and others. It’s the first time in a lifetime that Wales has been able to muster this many quality literary analysts, essayists, in-depth commentators, refiners and redescribers of our burgeoning culture.

Their work takes the literary surface and fixes it hard into the heart of the cultural engine. The Welsh Wordscape rolls on but now we know why, to where and with whom. We know every detail of our cultural nationalism, tradition, displacement, marginal colonial discourse and the way in which we have found ourselves flooded with post-modernists at a time when elsewhere the world seems to be giving up.

Seren’s Slanderous Tongues, a volume of essays edited by Daniel Williams, covers the past thirty-five years of our literary longings. Matthew Jarvis writes on poetry after the second flowering. Jo Furber covers gender and nationhood. Daniel Williams writes on Welsh poetry in the USA. Tudur Hallam looks at Menna Elfyn’s bilingualism. Nicholas Jones discusses Harri Webb and the place of literary nationalism. Hywel Dix ponders on the place of class.

In the middle of all this Nerys Williams looks at how the avant-garde has been managed in Wales. She concentrates largely on my own work. And, I have to say, largely gets it right. Critics rarely talk to their subjects. They don’t phone and check. They extrapolate from what you’ve written. She tells us what I mean and how I write. Would I pass the exam? I’m not saying.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #176