OVER THE GOSPEL PASS (2/5)

Nigel and I met at the dawn of the 90s on a kibbutz overlooking the Sea of Galilee in Israel’s Golan Heights. He confessed that it was the first time he’d left the valley and he hasn’t been out of it much since.

He’s talking to Aunty Mary about a sculptor called Eric Gill. The kitchen is bounded by shoe-polish brown, slatted wooden cupboards with brushed brass fittings. On one of those cupboards, there’s a peeling black and white photo of man in a wide-lapelled shirt smoking a cigar. He looks like Pablo Escobar or a womanising racing-car driver. It turns out he’s Aunty Mary’s long-deceased husband, Dai.

Eric Gill, I gather from their conversation, was Aunty Mary’s grandfather. Over his lifetime, he produced sculptures for the stations of the cross in Westminster Cathedral, for Rockefeller House in Jerusalem as well as inventing the eponymous Gill Sans font. Aunty Mary jokes that being married to Eric Gill was tough on her grandmother. He had a fondness for young women, she confesses and several daughters who came to lodge at the monastery had to be relocated to the barn over the way for their own safety. His fondness, if Wikipedia is to be believed, also extended to his own daughters and, staggeringly, his own dog.

Did you know that about him? I texted Nigel the following day.

Strange people have always been attracted to the valley, he replies.

I think I might be one of them.

For the last three years I’ve been coming back to this part of the world, though never up to the Grange. I’ve been drawn inexplicably to a tiny fifteenth century chapel called St Mary’s about half a mile from where I’m sitting in Aunty Mary’s kitchen; been called over and over again over the Gospel Pass and the surrounding Brecon Beacons.

Does a place have a soul?

The house is sunk in layers and reams of history and buttressed by familial ties and conflicts. Sitting in the kitchen, something is sinking into me.

At 1am nears, Aunty Mary pours herself another beer. I’m fading a bit. Aunty Mary is 82 years old and when I eventually turn in, she goes off to feed her 3 hedgehogs. She once had a squirrel called Skippy, she tells me who they raised at the back of the Aga. He used to eat cream crackers, hide on the element on the back of the fridge and got a write up in a local paper when he died.

It might be fatigue but I wonder intermittently whether, like Atlantis or a Shangri La, the Grange, the towering pine and larch trees that surround it, actually exists. As Aunty Mary and Nigel chat on, I feel like I’ve slipped a dimension, here. There are flintlock muskets hanging from the parlour wall, plastic flowers and cloudy fish tanks. They’re chatting about people I know by with nicknames like Tom the Piper, Lady Trout, Sticky and Ting that I don’t.

Another tongue entirely.

I went to the Drs with a leaky eye, Aunty Mary explains. And he found I had lichen growing in my tear ducts.

Lichen jumps the flora-homo sapien boundary, I joke.

Aunty Mary’s sentences remind me of popping corn. Another pops into life before the previous one has returned to the pan. She interrupts herself frequently. But I don’t mind.

I’m drinking it all in.