Angharad Price
Between Môn and Arfon
To those of us who live on the banks of the river Menai the Atlantic’s ebb
and flow are part of our daily lives, as the sea twice a day fills and empties
the gap that forms the border between Môn and Arfon. To us in Arfon, this
river defines us, especially at high tide. At low tide, with its blue ink paling
away, the Menai threatens to deny our very existence.
I say ‘river’, but the Menai is no real river, for its water is salty. It is rather
a channel: a sleeve of sea about a mile wide and twenty miles long
linking Caernarfon Bay in the west and Conway Bay in the east. Its bed is
unstable, always changing as the sands move with the powerful currents
and cross-currents. It is a perilous place for both ships and men.
I suppose I’m typical of Caernarfon people in feeling ambiguous about
this river that reminds us every day how far we can go. We thank it for
coming between us and Môn’s flatland farmers. We thank it for bringing
the world to our ancient town; for making us more familiar with Hamburg,
Bordeaux, Sydney and Valparaiso than with the mountainous villages
of Snowdonia; and for bringing oils and wines and shag tobacco to our
eager palates.
But only a few Covies, as we call ourselves, have ever travelled along the
Menai. And only a few would want to, considering the terrible shipwrecks
of the past.
The pilots of River Menai were a breed apart from your average Covies,
and only one of them survived until my day. His name was Abram Janeiro
Jones.
His father had been Mate on the New World II, and the son - strong and
rosy-cheeked - was born in the docks at Rio. The mother took ill on the
voyage home to Wales from Brazil and died on the Atlantic Ocean. His
father had learnt his lesson. He gave up sailing and became a pilot on the
Menai, like his father and grandfather before him. His son was brought up
a pilot from the cradle.
That same son, Abram Janeiro Jones, was the last of the honourable line
of Menai pilots. Though a ship may have sailed the world’s roughest seas,
and Liverpool dock may have been finally within its sights, the Menai pilot
was always needed to guide it through that final perilous strait between
Môn and Arfon.
These days, cargo ships only rarely come this way. Now, the Menai’s
traffic consists of pleasure boats. Janeiro had been idle for years, not
wishing to stoop to guiding yachts. He had fathered no children, as far
as we know, and he half taught his craft to a neighbour’s son, so that
someone was there, at least, to deal with the small, shiny white boats.
He spent a year or two fishing for plaice in Caernarfon Bay, but got tired
of the monotonous shoals and threw his nets to the bottom of the sea at
the narrow gap of Abermenai.
He found work, in the end, as Keeper of Caernarfon’s Estuary Bridge,
where the river Saint carries the mountains into the sea. When a ship
signals, the walkers are stopped and the bridge divides in two and swings
open, to let a boat out of the town’s harbour, or into it.
Janeiro lived in the Bridgekeeper’s cottage in the twilight of Alun Woods.
He sat every day at the door of his house, the boats’ masts like a forest in
the quay, and the castle’s Eagle Tower coming between him and the town
square. Whenever a boat signalled, he would get up from his chair and go
into his house to press the red button that worked the bridge. When the
boat had gone through he would press the green button and the bridge
would return to its place to let the walkers cross the estuary.
Very seldom did Janeiro himself cross the Eastuary Bridge to the tavern
or into town. Indeed, no one knew how he kept body and soul together.
Some said they’d seen him wandering Foryd beach in early morning to
the laments of the oystercatchers, and that he fed himself on cockles and
periwinkles and crabs’ claws. They said he smoked seaweed in his pipe
and drank seawater. Of course no one dared approach him. He was a
man who liked his own company.
Yet, as when a boy whose roots lie deep in dry land sometimes feels an
unfamilial wish to go to sea, I had - from the first time I had seen him -
desired to sail on the surge of this oceanic man. There I was, a boy of ten,
crossing the Estuary Bridge to the playground on the far side, when I saw
the silver buttons of his coat shining in the twilight of Alun Woods. I was
drawn to them as to a lighthouse.
He did not see me coming. His eyes were on the sea and had a distant
look. Were they blue? Or was it the Menai I saw in them?
Only at the last minute did he turn and see me coming, slight and
purposeful, between him and the castle. He became very agitated. I shall
never forget his roar, nor the sting of the rope’s knot as it whipped my
naked legs while I was scarpering back over the bridge.
I did not venture over the estuary for many years after: neither Mr
Whippy’s ice-cream van, nor the Foryd’s summer fair, nor the promise
of girls’ kisses in Alun Woods, could tempt me over the bridge and into
Janeiro’s view. But I knew all along that he was there, in the doorway of
his house opposite the castle, waiting for me with a distant look in his
eyes.
Only when my voice had broken, and my chin was sprouting a beard,
and when we had begun drinking in the Anglesey tavern, did I dare get
close to him again. This was my final year in Caernarfon. I shone in the
geography lessons at Sir Hugh School and my mind was set on going to
Liverpool University to graduate in the subject.
My research project during the Easter holiday was the river Menai. I
discovered many facts in the town library and in the archives at Victoria
Dock. I came to understand the Menai’s borders: the structure of its
unsteady banks; the water’s movements at high tide and low; the location
of its rockiest areas, the eddies, where the deep channels and shallow
waters lay, as well as the special pattern of red and green buoys in a
river that has two mouths. I learnt of those who had lived from the Menai:
fishermen, seamen, smugglers, quarry owners, and the flat-bottomedferry
men of Abermenai, Tal y Foel and Moel y Don. I saw the life it had in
it: its mackerel and herring and plaice and crab and lobster and cockles
and mussels, and a myriad of creatures and plants of whom we had not
yet learned to take advantage...
My work made steady progress. But I somehow felt that something was
lacking, a personal touch... Though I had not then thought of asking
Janeiro.
It was Good Friday when I left the town square and rounded the castle
in order to reach the quay. There, between the Estuary Bridge and
the Anglesey gathered the old seamen to pay tribute to the Menai. I
interviewed them thoroughly, and they were more than willing to talk of
the ‘River Caernarfon’, especially for the price of a pint.
In fact, they became quite animated in their talk of the Menai, half
memory, half rumour: of Irish pirates from Carrickfergus; of a smugglers’
ship trying to escape the taxman and getting stuck on Caernarfon Bar; of
the old drunken ballad-singer who used to hang around the Slate Quay;
of importing ‘soap-waste’ from Dublin’s shops to use as manure in the
gardens of Arfon; of children pulling the ropes to drag the schooners
along the quay; of the annual August regatta, and of the days of the ‘little
steamer’ that linked the town with the island of Môn. They talked of the
wreck of the Speranza, the Mon Amour and HMS Conway, and the time
the Queen of the Sea ran aground near Melynog beach, drowning twenty
passengers, eighty pigs, two cows and a ton of butter.
And as they talked the Menai’s placenames sounded like the names
of faraway places to a boy from the town: Mussel Bank, Belan, the
Limehouse, Melynog Beach and Wild Beach, Frydan Rock and the
Cribiniau, the island of Gored Goch, Pwll Fanogl, the rock of Craig y Pwll,
and Pwll Ceris itself...
‘Pwll Ceris!’ I interrupted.
But then they all became silent. Little Îf and Sven drank from their beer,
and Deio started lighting matches on his trousers. Eyes and voices were
lowered.
‘You won’t get to the bottom of that, son...’
‘Our very own Bermuda Triangle.’
‘They say there’s a fort at the bottom of it.’
‘Ker Is,’ said Little Îf who was born in Brittany.
‘We use the English name - The Swellies - in any case.’
‘They say,’ said Paddy, ‘that only one man has been to the bottom of the
Swellies.’
Amidst their murmuring I heard them mention the name of Abram
Janeiro Jones. And it was then that they all looked up and glanced at the
Bridgekeeper’s cottage.
‘No one dares go anywhere near him.’
‘What if I do?’ I said, and saw Sven choke on his pint.
‘You go to him, mate, and you’ll be a gonner!’
‘It’s safer in The Swellies than with him.’
They all giggled nervously and downed a whisky each.
It was after the boys had gone home for their dinner that I ventured over
the bridge.
I watched Janeiro looking at me approaching from the door of his house.
I closed my eyes and walked on. When the rope whipped my legs I
stayed my course. When I felt the loop slipping onto my leg and the
knot tightening around my ankle I stayed my course. And when I felt the
sudden jerk, I was ready to fall to the ground and strike my head on the
pilot’s path.
I awoke to the sound of a scolding.
‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you, you little arse?’
The pilot dragged me by the scruff of the neck, not back onto the Estuary
Bridge, as I had expected, but onto the jetty on the right, where the
Danger sign hung and where the town’s boys would dare each other to
dive.
‘Come back when you’re sober...’ said Janeiro, and before I knew it I was
being thrown over. I felt my body fall like an anchor’s chain through the air,
and the Menai’s polluted waters coming ever closer.
When I came to the surface again, and after swimming to the steps
near the Floating Restaurant, and pulling away the seaweed that hung
around my ankle, and walking through the Square like a drowned rat;
and after Mother had taken me for an injection to Gwynedd Hospital, and
after drying my notebook where the seamen’s words had run into one, I
considered Janeiro’s words again.
‘Come back when you’re sober...’
On Easter Saturday, therefore, I crossed the bridge again and stepped
onto the pilot’s path.
‘Three tries for a Welshman!’ he cried drily from the door of his house.
‘Three..?’
‘You came here years ago, didn’t you?’
I blushed.
‘I want to know about The Swellies.’
‘Why?’
‘School work.’
‘I see.’
Pause.
‘I call it by its Welsh name, myself,’ said the pilot. ‘Pwll Ceris.’
I blushed again.
‘I’ve heard that you...’
‘Come back tomorrow,’ Janeiro interrupted me. ‘If you’re man enough.’
I was all happy as I crossed the Estuary Bridge. But half way over, the
bridge’s gates closed suddenly, stopping me in my tracks.
The earth moved under my feet, and the next thing I saw was that the
bridge was dividing in two, and that I was moving with it. Or rather, I was
moving with half of it, and my view become a panorama, moving from
the castle’s Eagle Tower, past the Anglesey, before coming to rest on the
Menai, and beyond it those two trees in Môn between which the sun sets
if you’re looking from Golden Gate on midsummer’s evening.
But neither boat nor mast seemed to be coming! I turned to the
Bridgekeeper’s cottage and there, in the doorframe, stood Janeiro
laughing until the tears were rolling.
‘Lovely view!’ he cried, and disappeared into his house.
Fifteen minutes I was there, hovering between two banks with the queen’s
swans moving around beneath me. And perhaps I’d be there still, had it
not been for the arrival of a bus-load of tourists intent on going for a walk,
which forced Janeiro to press the green button and make a free man of
me again.
Whilst Mother was in the chapel on Easter Sunday I crossed the Estuary
bridge for the third time that week. I could see Janeiro lighting his pipe
as I approached, and by the time I’d reached him the smell of seaweedsmoke
filled the whole place and the pilot had started to speak.
‘Pwll Ceris,’ he said, ‘has a bad reputation amongst all who claim to know
it...’
He grabbed the biro from my hand and threw it into the woods.
‘Pwll Ceris has a bad reputation,’ he started again. ‘And that how it’s
always been. It’s been the demise of Celts, Romans and Vikings alike! If
we’d been able to pass without it, we’d have done so centuries ago. But
the Menai’s main channel goes right through the bloody place.
‘Pwll Ceris is full of islands and rocks. Many visible to the naked eye,
many others hidden away. There are patches of rocky shallows, and right
next to them deep, deep pools, and this gives rise to the eddies.
‘And the other thing about Pwll Ceris is its narrowness. On the one side
you have the rocky banks of Arfon. On the other the Cribiniau and Craig
y Pwll rocks that stick up like razors. There is only a narrow gap between
them, and the water accelerates like hell over there. And on top of
everything else you may get a sudden gust of wind through the trees on
the Arfon side causing your boat to sheer badly.
‘Do you understand about the Menai’s tides, son? That the tide comes in
from Abermenai gap on one side? And past Puffin Island on the other and
that they collide in the Menai not far from Bangor?
‘Good boy! These tides also complicate matters. For you can only pass
through Pwll Ceris during the slack after high tide, when there is enough
water in the channel to clear the rocks, but before the flow has turned
against you. And even then, there’s little time to spare. You only have a
few minutes before the tide turns. Do you hear me?
‘That’s why we are so important,’ he went on. ‘The pilots. We have known
Pwll Ceris for generations! We have been brought up to know where to
go and where not to, when to go and when not to, and how much a ship
should draw in relation to different tides...’
I watched him use the thumb of his right hand to compress the tobacco
in the bowl of his pipe. And I saw the black stain on his thumb when he
reached into his pocket to fetch his lighter. He sucked fiercely as he lit his
pipe, and his cheeks pulled in and pushed out as he drew the smoke into
his mouth.
‘Yes, the whole world depended on us at one time! The world’s biggest
ships used to come through the Menai, you know! The bastards wouldn’t
have made a cent on the precious cargoes if it hadn’t been for us...’
‘You were very respected.’
‘Were?’ crossly.
I lowered my eyes and concentrated on the hole in Janeiro’s shoe,
through which I could see his naked flesh. It agitated me strangely. When
I raised my eyes again the pilot had turned to look at the sea.
‘Respected? I should say! But any better off? No! No word of thanks, just
a backhander from the captains and the blame when things went wrong...
‘But what you need to know is that my forefathers went to their graves
with nothing to their name but their good reputation. And nobody to
commemorate them, except me. Here.’
‘I’m here too!’
‘Yes,’ said the pilot slowly.
His face became wrinkled suddenly, as if the wind had agitated the sea.
His mouth was part open and the pipe hung limply from his lip.
I believed Janeiro was about to make a revelation. But in the end the
tortured look on his face became too much for me to bear.
‘Is that why you gave up?’
‘I was not brougt up to pilot pleasure boats. That isn’t why I earned a
certificate from the Board of Trade.’
‘But to break the tradition..?’ I insisted.
‘It was broken for me!’ he lost his temper. ‘And anway, I had no one...’
‘Teach me!’
I saw Janeiro swallow hard.
‘I’d like to be a pilot!’ and I leaned forward.
But Janeiro stood up suddenly, forcing me to pull back.
‘The pilot’s work is useless today. The Bar’s silted too much to let big
ships through.’
‘But what I can’t understand,’ I raised my voice so as to prevent him
leaving, ‘is why you don’t use your knowledge for other things: surveying
the Menai, or laying cables across it, or even write about it.... Anybody
could do this!’
And as I stretched my arm to point to the Estuary Bridge I knew that I had
gone too far. Janeiro looked at me, and his words broke over us like a
cold wave.
‘You little bastard!’ and he went into his house.
I waited over half an hour before he returned.
‘Somebody said you’d been to Pwll Ceris.’
‘Who said that?’ the pilot was still angry.
‘The seamen,’ I nodded towards the tavern on the other side of the
Estuary. ‘Paddy, Sven and the others.’
‘You’ve been gossiping with them, have you? Did you see that their bums
had worn the quay wall smooth?’
I looked at him without saying anything.
‘And what else did the lazy drunken dogs have to say?’
‘Nothing... Only that you’d been to The Swellies.’
‘Well, I haven’t,’ said Janeiro in the end. ‘But I know what lies at the
bottom.’
He didn’t come to sit this time.
‘And I’m not telling you, mate, so that you can go and laugh at me with
those other devils.’
‘I would never...’
‘And anyway, why don’t you find out for yourself? Surely there’s a book or
something in that school of yours?’
‘I didn’t come here to be mocked,’ I said.
I struggled to get up and walk away. But by the time I was half way down
the path I was regretting it. And when I did not feel the whip of the rope
on my leg, nor the loop tightening around my shin, and when there was
no jerk on the knot to make me fall again, I swore quietly.
I reached the Estuary Bridge a free man, my heart sinking.
But as I was about the step onto the bridge, the gates suddenly closed
and prevented me from going any further.
I turned back and saw Janeiro smiling.
‘It is another world!’ he cried, as I approached. ‘An unbelievable world
lies at the bottom of Pwll Ceris! A multicoloured world, of which we know
nothing!’
I sat a long time listening. He was in his element, talking of the Menai’s
splendid creatures. He talked not only of welks, and limpets, and mussels,
and cockles, and types of seaweed, but also of sea scorpions and
lobsters, crabs, red-eyed crabs, prawns, prickly sea urchins and jellyfish.
He talked of multicoloured sponges and sea anemonies that were pink,
red and purple, of feathered anemonies and blood-red starfish...
‘You never know how it’ll be from one day to the next,’ said Janeiro. ‘For
the world at the bottom of Pwll Ceris is never the same.’
He turned to me, and was about to say more but was interrupted by the
rude sound of a pleasure boat calling to the Bridgekeeper. I saw Janeiro
shudder. He got up and stumbled into his house.
The bridge opened and the yacht sailed effortlessly from Caernarfon
harbour and out into the Menai. The bridge closed and I began to move.
‘Mother will be expecting me..’
‘Your mother... yes...’
‘Thank you for your information.’
‘Yes,’ said Janeiro again.
I gave him my hand but he did not accept it.
My journey back across the Estuary went without hindrance. The gates
did not close when I reached the bridge. They did not close when I
reached half way over. They did not close when I reached the other side,
and stepped off the Estuary Bridge to face the broad entrance of Eagle
Tower.
I did not return home through the town square. Instead, I went on along
the quayside, past the Anglesey and towards Golden Gate, in order
to keep the Menai, and Janeiro, within my sight. Before going through
Golden Gate I looked over my shoulder and saw the pilot at the door of
his house. Standing with his eyes on the sea, and the silver buttons of his
coat shining like a lighthouse in the twilight of Alun Woods.
I waved my hand but he did not wave back to me.
I did not go back to see Abram Janeiro Jones. I’m not sure why. Certainly
not because he did not wave to me before I disappeared through Golden
Gate, nor because he had called me names when he was angry.
The truth is that other things needed my attention over the following
weeks. Exams, mostly. I got a good mark - the best in Wales - for my
research project. On my eighteenth birthday in mid August I received
a sum of money that had been kept for me since my birth. Mother
contributed some more, so that I could go and ‘see the world’.
When I came back it was time to go to university, as I had gained a place
at the Department of Geography at Liverpool.
It was in the final year of my degree that I next heard of Janeiro. It was
Mother, in a way, who told me.
A letter came from her soon after Easter. This was nothing remarkable.
She wrote to me regularly enquiring after my health and including pieces
of news about our neighbours in town. This letter was similar. But
included with it was an extract from the Caernarfon and Denbigh Herald.
This contained a rather detailed report on a shipwreck that had occurred
in the Menai during Easter. I had not been paying attention to the news
at that time, as I was busy revising. The article, therefore, took my breath
away.
The Indefatigable was an old 60-gun Jackass Frigate. I knew of it well.
It was a school ship, where young seamen were to learn their trade in
navigation and plane geometry. She was brought to the Menai during the
Second World War, to protect her from the air raids in Liverpool. There, in
a small haven near Plas Newydd, to the west of Britannia Bridge, she had
remained, a home and a school to generations of cadets.
The accident happened when it was time to move the ship back to the dry
dock in Liverpool for repairs. She had no engine and the natural motion
of the tide, along with two tugs, would have to be used to move her. This
meant that the journey eastwards was far more perilous than the journey
westwards had been fifty years before. And moving the Indefatigable
through Pwll Ceris, that terrible mile between Britannia Bridge and Menai
Bridge, would be no small thing.
Careful planning was needed, and most of all experience and specialist
knowledge of the channels and tides. It was both a surprise and joy for
the organizers when the Menai’s most experienced pilot, said the Herald,
Abram Janeiro Jones, agreed to guide to ship through the Menai, together
with her Captain Superintendent, Captain J.E.A. Quinn.
After conferring with Dr Knight of the Bidston Observatory, it was decided
to move the Indefatigable at the vernal equinox high tide.
The pilot asked for a third tug, in case anything went wrong. Captain
Quinn refused, saying that two tugs would be sufficient to ‘waltz her
through’.
Saturday, April 14 was the big day, the second of the three days of the
highest spring tides. It would be necessary to wait for the slack after high
tide before moving into Pwll Ceris. Moreover, the slack would only last for
five minutes before the tide turned westwards again.
At 0820 the Indefatigable started its journey and at 0845 it came to stand
to the west of Britannia Bridge. Here it was kept in place by the two tugs,
to await the slack, when it could enter Pwll Ceris at 0920.
The wind was a light to moderate northwesterly, and the pilot knew that
this would cause the slack to occur sooner. He insisted that the ship enter
Pwll Ceris before 0920. Again Captain Quinn disagreed and insisted on
keeping to the original timetable.
The operation resumed at 0915. But it was not easy to accelerate a ship
of the Indefatigable’s size and it was already 0923 by the time it passed
under Britannia Bridge. The Cribiniau rocks were passed without many
problems, but when the island of Gored Goch was abeam the tide had
already turned westwards and was flowing rapidly against them. The pilot
wanted to turn back. Again Captain Quinn refused. The operation had to
be completed on this tide. Thousands of pounds were at stake.
By the time they had reached the Craig y Pwll rock, the tide against them
had reached a speed of two knots, and the ship was not making any
headway. It became clear that she would never make it to Menai Bridge.
Again, the pilot wanted to turn back, but Quinn did not accept his advice.
By now the Indefatigable was sheering badly in the fierce waters. At
1015 the stern tug was ordered to come and help the for’d tug pull the
ship along. This succeeded for a while. But when the Platters rocks were
abeam an eddy caused the Indefatigable’s starboard to sheer badly.
The tugs failed to respond and counteract the sheer. The line from one
of them was broken, disconnecting it from the other tug. That is when
Indefatigable ran aground.
Attempts to refloat the ship on the afternoon tide were vain. Water flowed
through the upper orlop deck ports, causing the ship to be dragged
down. By night time the Indefatigable had been wrecked on the rocks and
tides of Pwll Ceris.
A Sub-Committee was established to look into the ‘accident’, said the
Herald, and it was to report to the Inquiry. At the moment, however,
said the Herald, the main concern was the pilot, Abram Janeiro Jones,
who had not been seen since the day of the shipwreck. His cottage in
Caernarfon was empty.
There was one reported sighting of him under the chains of Menai Bridge.
But the police were asking anyone with further information to contact
them as soon as possible.
At the university in Liverpool the article’s words ran into one another as
the Menai’s saltwater filled my eyes. I put my head down and let the tears
flow for the pilot who had been like a father to me. Had I not spent my
childhood in his faraway presence?
During the examination period I dreamed every night about the Menai.
Of leaving the town square and rounding the castle in order to reach the
quay. Of going to greet the old seamen near the Anglesey tavern, and
of seeing them nod towards the half-open Estuary Bridge. The Keeper’s
cottage was empty, and when I turned back I saw the seamen laughing
into their beer glasses.
I ran every night along the Menai’s unsteady banks looking for you,
Janeiro, and calling your name to the sound of the oystercatcher’s cry.
Past Waterloo Port and Llanfair-is-gaer, and the watersports centre at
Plas Menai; past the port at Felinheli and Britannia Bridge, and past the
rough rocks. Before leaping into the water at Pwll Ceris into the midst of
your fantastical creatures, Janeiro. I felt an eddy pull me down. And each
time I would let it take me, but I never reached the bottom.
When summer ends I will have to leave Caernarfon again and go
eastwards to find work. I intend to leave during the slack after high tide,
and will only have a few minutes before the tide turns westwards again.
I do not want it to drag me back towards the gap of Abermenai, that
narrow gap whose bed has been scoured deep by the Atlantic’s ebb and
flow.
Meanwhile it is good to be on the banks of River Menai once again,
watching the sea filling and emptying the gap that forms the border
between Môn and Arfon. I recall all that the Menai has brought to this
ancient town, and all that it has taken from it. But I think mainly of the
Menai’s complex tidal movements and of the special patterns of the red
and green buoys in a river with two mouths. And I curse the pilot for not
teaching me his craft.
*Môn, known in English as Anglesey, is an island off the coast of North West Wales.
Arfon (lit. ‘on Môn’) is the name of the area opposite it on the mainland.