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From The Railway
Game An Early Autobiography
by
Clifford Dyment
(Readers Union edition 1963)
- Chapter
2 -
'Caerleon
was all romance and Rome to me'
The
place I was taken to, at one month old, was the place in which
I should like to have been born: my private and adopted native
town, Caerleon-upon-Usk. It is a fitting origin for a literary
man, especially a poet, to see against his name in Who's Who--just
as Cardiff is right for a sailor, Stepney for an orphan, Tunbridge
Wells for a Bishop, East Ham for a pop singer. It's as rich
in romance as a novel by Jeffrey Farnol.
Caerleon,
city and village, Isca Silurum. Isca Silurum, a name honouring
the Silures, the intolerant mountain men of Monmouthshire
and Glamorgan, whose land the Romans seized but had to hold
in a grip of iron; Isca Silurum, garrison of the Second Legion
of Augustus, six thousand soldiers, where generals composed
victory marches on maps stretched over desks of marble, where
the proud legionaries looked down on the mere auxiliaries
and where glamorous legionary and glamorous auxiliary took
the local girls from the local boys with a beam of bronze,
silver, and gold; Isca Silurum, eyrie of the Roman eagle,
crowded and loud with men, horses, and engines of war, where
arrived baskets of quail, pheasant, peacock, thrush, dormice,
and snails, trays of figs and cakes sweetened with honey,
jars of wine and oil, nets of mullet, bags of shellfish, wagons
of corn and pork sent in by the grumbling farmers, unpaid
feeders of the army of occupation; Isca Silurum, along whose
famous Roman roads walked goldsmiths, tinsmiths, armourers,
wheelwrights, masons, glaziers, bakers, confectioners, cooks;
walked soldiers to Mithraic caves; walked sporting men to
the amphitheatre to watch chariot races, wild boar hunted
in real woods and naval engagements fought on real water,
gladiator killing gladiator, beast killing beast, gladiators
and beasts killing each other. Isca Silurum, Britannia Secundus,
outpost of Empire: Caesar, Consul, tribune, centurion, lictor;
Julius, Claudius, Nero, Trajan, Hadrian; Suetonius, Frontinus,
Agricola; aqueducts, highways, arches, villas; pottery, mosaic,
enamel, fresco, bracelets, brooches.
Caerleon-on-Usk,
where King Arthur held his court and received tribute from
vassal kings, earls, and barons where mass for his household
was celebrated in thirteen churches, where the courtiers slept
on satin and fur, dined at silver tables inlaid with gold
and pearl and ate off dishes of gold, silver, and buffalo
horn, where there was roast buck and flagons of mead and minstrelsy
and games; Caerleon-upon-Usk, where on festal days the flowers
of the field were outmatched in colour by the striped tents
and flying pennants and by the ladies' gowns and the lords'
surcoats and the knights' glinting armour and jewel-hilted
swords; Caerleon-upon-Usk, where you walk on grass over which
the knights galloped to crash with each other in the jousts;
Caerleon-upon-Usk, here the daily round was polishing of shields,
sharpening of swords, shoeing of horses, where the ambitions
were tournaments and quests, where the talk was of sieges,
brachets, harts, and palfreys, of griffins, dragons, and the
Sangreal, where the gossip was of chivalrous knights and false
knights and virtuous women.
Caerleon-on
Usk, home, chapel, and workshops of Cistercians, who ploughed,
planted, and reaped in white habits that were streaked with
loam and the grease of sheep's wool and were thin at the knees
from canonical hours of kneeling; Caerleon-upon-Usk, where
the years passed and the monastery bell marked time across
the fields until the monks departed and the iron rusted and
the tower toppled and there was no marking of time in Caerleon's
fields.
Ashwell Terrace today
From The
Railway Game An Early Autobiography
by
Clifford Dyment
(Readers Union edition 1963)
-
Chapter 3 -
- extract -
1,
Ashwell Terrace
The
house
in
which we lived at Caerleon was No. 1, Ashwell Terrace,
one of a row of cottages that have since been condemned.
My father took it because it was cheap - and because he
was married, young, and a carpenter only just starting
in business as a cabinet-maker. I remember that when I
played on the bit of pavement outside I could look right
through the cottage as though it was a telescope, through
the front door seeing the back garden so close I was afraid
of being stung by bees. The reason was that the cottage
was only one room wide - there was one room downstairs
for cooking, eating, and living in, and one room upstairs
for all of us to sleep in.
There was no gas in the house: cooking was done on an
open fire or in an oven at its side heated by hot embers,
the embers being scraped with a steel rake from the fire
to a space under the oven. For lighting we had an oil
lamp which stood in the middle of a beautiful pear-wood
table made by my father. That oil lamp was a beauty, too:
made simply to be practical it was as graceful in profile
as a piece of Samian ware. Its brass curved sides were
as full of little squares and circles of reflected daylight
as a polished bed-knob, and through its globe of translucent
porcelain you could see shadowy images of the furniture
on the other side of the room. It was my father's job
to light the lamp in the evening. To me this was a ritual
and a spectacle that invested him with priestly power
and glory. He held a match to the wick and the wild wick
snatched the flame from his hand and threw it up in the
air and bounced it on the floor and hurled it up to the
ceiling and flung it from wall to wall: it was a rough
and playful exhibition of the eternal conflict between
the forces of light and darkness. Majestically my father
turned the lamp's brass wheel and the romping flame was
hauled instantly back into the lamp like a tiger into
its cage: the ceremony, short, brilliant, and daunting,
was over. Now a cone of sunshiny radiance hung placidly
from the lamp to the floor, and until it was time for
me to be put to bed I scrambled about in a bell-tent made
of light.
In the daytime I played in the back garden, where my father
grew leaves. There were millions, billions, trillions
of them. Leaves were my ceilings, walls, partitions: they
pressed me down and shut me in, and when I resisted they
tugged at my hair, slapped my face, pushed themselves
up the legs of my short trousers, sealed my nostrils,
gagged my mouth, tolled at my ears, jazzed before my eyes;
and sometimes my forehead smarted and ached from the brutal
rebuff of wood as a branch denied my thrusting head. All
the same, I liked the leaves, and spent hours in the thousands
of acres where they grew, breathing foreign green air
and getting tipsy on sappy, fruity smells.
After these exotic holidays in the leaves I made my way
back to everyday life by staggering across our living-room
to the street. It wasn't a street really - it was more
of a lane. In it there was our row of cottages, whitewashed
and blue-roofed, the white walls stained, broken, and
mildewed, but seen by me now through a haze of years that
gives them a dairy sweetness; and alongside them were
the few flagstones of pavement, then a dirt roadway, then
a hedge with a wicket gate, and then beyond the hedge,
as far as I could see, nothing - though a grown-up could
have looked over the hedge and viewed fields and beyond
them Tyn Barlym mountain hunched low to let the clouds
pass over.
Caerleon Net Home Page
Both Sides Of The River
- Memories another ex-resident of
Ashwell, Cosette Allsopp (nee Lloyd)
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