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Powys Society Publication List Powys titles currently in print A Visit to The National Library of Wales Supplement to Powys Checklist & Readers’ Guide 2010 TFP The Voice of God by Michael Kowalewski JCP OWEN GLENDOWER The Seen and the Unseen by P.J. Kavanagh First Powys Lecture in Ireland
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A PATTERN OF MEMORIES
Gerard Casey
[...] John had written from North Wales: "Come to meet brother Will. I'd like you to meet him ... it may be you will -- as they say -- 'cotton' to each other." That was early in 1938. The letter found me in Dorset at Punknoll where I was pruning trees. A week or two later I was climbing the hill to 7 Cae Coed in Corwen to be welcomed into their home by John and Phyllis. Will came across the room to meet me. An unmistakable Powys head. Eyes detached and searching suddenly lighting to friendly acceptance, touched by a hint of amusement. I was to remember that look -- and meet it again from the eyes of Lucy and Katie years later at our first meetings. The swift acceptance was to remain unchanging — no shadow of turning — ever.
Soon 1 was walking over the high slopes of the Berwyn and being invited to join Will on his African farm. No flicker of hesitation from me.
Evening came down and a game of chess was suggested by John. He looked on as the game was played, his face quick with excitement, head etched against the uncurtained windowpane. Gusts of rainy wind blowing across the darkened hills of Myrddin Wyllt were dashing against the black glass. Repeating and repeating mantra-like words echoed across my mind:
I do not remember how that game of chess ended -- there is a sense in which it has gone on through the years and still remains to be ended.
I was next to see Will stretched out on his bed in a reed-thatched wattle and daub hut on the northern slopes of Mt Kenya. White and frail after a haemorrhage from a duodenal ulcer. The issue was life or death. Always indomitable he won slowly through. As he convalesced more games of chess followed as they did in still pauses over the years to come.
More memories came crowding -- Will riding interminably (as it seemed at times) across vast African plains tawny in the sunlight against tangled ranges of mountains dark blue in the distance; calling leopards along wooded valleys at nightfall; calling wild dogs to death in sunlit forest glades; marking lambs in dawnlight: unconcerned as a rhino slowly lumbered by; tracking lions, buffalo, cattle thieves; bantering shepherds, cowherds, near-naked honey-hunters over gravely shared pinches of snuff; riding with Katie under Walt Whitman's Head on the high moorlands of Mt Kenya, then after a picnic in Katie's enchanted wood, coming down to see a herd of elephants just above Kisima sending jets of sparkling water from a deep rainpool over their calves in full-moon light; initiating a somewhat nervous and bewildered Katie into the mysteries of correctly marking bales of wool for shipping to England; or guiding her in the shared sorting and classing of superb Merino fleeces; watching the great wains laden with wool drawn by teams of up to sixteen oxen as they set off on their week long return journey to railhead; safaris with Will, Elizabeth, and Mary across the wild desolation of lands down to the coast; wandering among the ruins of ancient Arab harbour-towns -- entrepots of the slave trade; wading out into the surges of the Indian Ocean to swim under the rising sun.
Memories too of Will as the years gathered -- sketching, painting: giraffe, zebra, antelope, gazelle, camels; birds, butterflies, moths; monstrous baobabs -- any tree contorted into desperate crippled form; frogs, toads, tree-frogs; bizarre insects, lizards, chameleons; elephants, crocodiles, hippo, ant-bears; endlessly trying to capture in colour the glaciated north-facing form of Mt Kenya in all its weather-haunted moods; or the sheer tawny cliffs along the south-facing form of Lolokwi, innumerable rivers, lakes, crags, swiftly captured likenesses of friends, black and white ... all Africa and its prodigies was grist to Will's mill.
Always absorbed, intent on the moment; always kind, courteous, sensitive at every level to the needs of all around him. As sceptical as his brother John in the face of the claims of possessive 'love' either human or divine. One day a huge tortoise came lumbering through the scrub. Someone had painted in large white letters on its domed shell, "God is Love". At his word the tortoise was caught and brought to him. It was his whimsy to wash out the word "Love" and paint in its place the word "Good". That done the creature was released to wander again through the bush to carry its modified message for all with eyes to see.
Will shared close affinities with John. (It is of some interest that Lucy, Katie, Will rarely called him 'Jack' -- almost always 'John'.) In the affinities however were differences of emphasis. Once he remarked to me -- having just finished a re-reading of John's Autobiography -- "we are very alike except that he is excited by girls' legs and I by lion's tracks". He was not impressed by J.C.P.'s claims to 'sadism' (or indeed by any of John's pretensions to any greater wickedness than the common peccadilloes flesh is heir to) -- "the only 'sadist' in our family was Llewelyn ... " When I wrote to him after John's death, speaking of the scattering of the old white magician's ashes on Chesil Beach and quoting a line on Homer by Antipater of Sidon "The uttering head that groweth not old", Will replied, "Yes! those words fit old John like a cap -- especially when he was angry with Jehovah". He would speak of John as "my old brother who keeps no secrets" and would speculate with wry homour on "what would happen if I kept no secrets".
His quiet, ever-present, sense of humour was very Theodorean. He would on occasion read a story by Theodore with much chuckling. Once after reading Mark Only: "Yes, I'm like him in some ways but I'm not so frightened ... but Mark Only ... !!!" The amused look conveyed all where words failed.
Describing Marian, by that time crippled by arthritis, holding court as she was wont from the bed in which all of them had been born -- this had come out to Will in Africa after his father's death -- in the course of her visit to him at Kisima, he remarked: "I'm still the little brother—she raps out orders just like a cross between Moses and Nietzsche".
Spirited and courageous to the end -- a brittle frame of loosening bones -- he would be lifted into his Land Rover by Kagwema his African friend and driver for one more and still one more drive over the wide earth he so loved and blessed through a long life of wrestling with Africa's unpredictable utterly testing vagaries. In a late letter to Lucy he wrote out for her words taken from Isaiah: a comment on his accumulating and distressing physical afflictions and his approaching end: But the word of the Lord was with him -- precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little there a little, that he might go and fall backward and be broken and snared and saved and taken. On a great slab of unhewn granite over his grave are the words:
WILL POWYS Born at Montacute Somerset Died at Ngare Ndare Timau 3 • 3 • 1888 4 • 10 • 1978 The pastures are clothed with flocks the valleys also are covered with corn they shout for joy: they also sing. Psalm 65
A peal was rung for him at Montacute— it had been his pride that in his youth he was one of the team. I went up into the Tower with two of his grandsons, Michael and Francis, to watch the work—and feel the swaying of the Tower to the surging tumult of joyous sounds ringing far out over the fields and woods he knew and loved so well as a boy.
Gerard Casey From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 71, Nov 2010 [Originally appearing in The Powys Review No 24]
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