Everything I Have Always Forgotten Read Online Free Page B

reading, until our Parents went out. Then, in holiday times, when some of my siblings were around, we could burst out with our raucous indoor games.
    Behind this little oasis of lush gardens and colour on the opposite shore, rise the sharp peaks of the Snowdonia range, craggy summits soaring from treeless slopes, snow-clad during the winter months, an ever-changing view of spectacular depth. Squalls of grey rain clouds would veil the brilliance of blue sky. The mountains themselves turned from pale blue in the misty light to deep blue in clearer light or were veiled completely, those sharp crags far away, inaccessible as a Romantic painting of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, frameless as the open sky. They were intangible in their distance. The very concept of access, the idea of walking their slopes, climbing the crags seemed quite inconceivable – yet in fact is so very real. At times, there was a brooding calm but again later, it could be fierce and tempestuous, ferocious, magical. It was a constantly shifting scene. This is no theatre backdrop, but natural scenery. This is the view from our family home. Sixty years later, it is a view that still takes my breath away when I get out to open the farm gate at the top of the hill behind the house and look down over the vast panorama when I visit it again, (after an overnight flight from New York to Manchester). This is the view that I have left behind. It belongs to another life, a could-have-been life that I do not, for a moment, regret not having pursued.
    This white house was built in 1911 to serve as a base for a headmaster (John Chambers) and his family, while his pupils camped in a field next door. An additional wing was added after the First World War. It was never intended as a year-round residence, so our eight-bedroom home was very simple, even utilitarian – but the situation spectacular. Behind it rose a small hill, the ‘Ynys’ or Island – for it was a tidal island until the end of the nineteenth century and going back seven hundred years (when Harlech Castle was built) it was a full-time island with access only by boat or perhaps at low tide over the sands.
    In those early days, Arthur Koestler (the intensely engagé Hungarian writer) and his wife Cynthia had come to dinner with us in Wales, despite the difficult access to our house. Afterwards, Father escorted them the half mile, in the pitch-black night, along the sea grass that was carved by deep gullies where the tide ran out and edged the estuary, to where the old driveway was washed out and came to an end, where their car was parked. The tide had risen, leading Koestler to remark that he was almost drowned on the way back. “Nonsense,” said Father afterwards, “he never stopped talking for a second, I would have known at once if he was drowning, there would have been a moment’s peace!”
    The estuary used to be forked, the northern part having been dammed in 1811 to create arable land on that reclaimed branch. The southern fork, where our house stands, is still tidal: twice a day, the seven by one mile estuary is transformed from sand with a few streams in it, to being completely full of water. At spring tides there can be a vertical rise and fall of up to 11.5 metres. Tides governed whole sectors of our lives and respect for the lethal currents was in our veins. To this day, tourists drown where we children played. For one thing, the warning signs are usually illegible and, even when they are decipherable, often only in Welsh. At home, the tide table always hung on a string in the ‘telephone room’, to be consulted before planning a dinner, accepting an invitation or making any other daily plans, whether building sand castles, setting and cleaning the nets, baiting the night-lines, collecting the fish, going sailing, riding or shooting.
    Our family was broadly divided into two camps: sailors and horse people. Father headed the first, though he also