Hello, it’s me (as Todd Rundgren once said). Last post I referred to a travelogue-cum-memoir (with photographs) I recently completed tantalisingly entitled Cow Charmers and Wonder Dogs: A Pembrokeshire Diary in which I've interwoven a diary of the six months Carol and I spent in Pembrokeshire last winter with autobiographical fragments and anecdotes mostly from my New York upbringing and misspent youth. These include my various encounters with the likes of Greta Garbo (I used to deliver her groceries), Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Allen Ginsberg, Johnny Thunders, Russell Brand, and Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds. Also included in Cow Charmers… is a segment involving our attempt to reconstruct the life of the former owner of an abandoned house we came across through a cache of letters and documents we found there. It is a rather poignant section, as this man was institutionalised after suffering a breakdown, and then seems to have disappeared. I've been told it’s quite a unique as well as compelling book, and while there’s been some interest from a Welsh publisher, it’s not progressed beyond that so I'm open to offers from any publishers who might be reading this. (And while on the subject, the film rights to my book Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth are available as well if anyone’s interested!)
Here then, are some excerpts from Cow Charmers… though unfortunately anyone curious as to precisely what the title refers to I'm afraid will have to wait for the book to appear (sorry).
Cow Charmers and Wonder Dogs: A Pembrokeshire Diary
by
Bruce Paley
The proposed cover to Cow Charmers... (photo by bruce Paley) An asterisk * in the text indicates where an accompanying photograph will go
Monday 11 Oct.
Leave London at 1.00pm, our V-reg Daewoo packed with six months’ worth of clothing and supplies, three distressed cats, and one collared dove, Ruby, who we found on Hampstead Heath on Carol’s birthday six or seven years earlier. Ruby had been dumped by her owner, who presumably thought he was liberating her, but as doves have poor natural defences, spend much of their time on the ground and aren’t a native species, it’s likely she would have ended up on a fox’s dinner plate.
Carol and I had been to Pembrokeshire twice before on holiday, fell in love with the place, and determined to move there. Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, Carol was raised in Llanfyllin, mid-Wales (pop. c 1100), before moving to Hampstead, in north London. I was born in Manhattan and grew up in Queens, where I was based until a two week vacation in London in 1986 stretched out into 25 years and counting. We met in 1999 at a jumble sale, and bonded over a plastic skull on a stick in a boxful of junk, as one does.* I was looking for objects for the sculptures I was making at the time and like Hamlet pondering Yorick I was studying the skull-on-a-stick when I became aware of someone peering into the box over my shoulder, a 30-something woman wearing a bright red leather jacket. We started talking, and it was like two pieces of a puzzle fitting together: Carol wrote and drew comics, while I owned a comics shop; we had similar taste in music, art, and literature; we even knew some of the same people and had been to some of the same exhibitions and concerts – Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Serpentine, a Charles Bukowski tribute in Russell Square, The Who at Wembley Arena in 1989 (though not exactly their best gig, mind you; I’d seen the group in their 60s/70s heyday, and this was merely a weak facsimile of the real thing, more like a mediocre tribute band than the best live act ever.)
Eleven years later, meanwhile, I still have both the skull on a stick, and Carol.*
We booked a cottage for six months off the internet, a converted hundred-year-old barn set amidst sheep and cow-filled fields, situated some 500 metres down a bumpy, pot-holed dirt lane about a mile south of Hayscastle. There are three rooms, a fair sized kitchen and living room, plus a bedroom that looks out over the Preseli Mountains. Our landlord, Svante, a Swede, lives diagonally across the lane from us with his Kenyan wife Linah. They have two kids, a dozen chickens, around forty cows, and two kittens. A third cottage sits opposite ours. The couple who live there moved in a few weeks earlier and drop by to say hello. They tell us how much they like the area, and how they’ll soon be bringing their ponies down from Reading. In our experience everyone has always been pleasant and easy-going here. In New York we’re always in a hurry and are notoriously rude or indifferent - at least to one another - and Londoners aren’t much better. In the 25 years I’ve lived in the city I've watched it slowly deteriorate into New York-on-the-Thames, a dirty, fast-moving, urban sprawl obsessed with Mammon. And increasingly violent. Hampstead is one of the nicer places to live in London, yet one night from our window we witnessed a bunch of hoodies beat a man almost to death over a dodgy car purchase, after which police armed with machine guns stormed the perpetrators’ house. In all my years living in New York I’d only ever seen a few fistfights and a handful of muggings (a couple of which found me on the receiving end). I did almost see a shooting once, but the gun jammed and didn’t fire.
We unpack our bags and let our cats - Froggy, Poppet, and Curry - out of their baskets. It’s well known that unlike dogs, cats hate to travel. The whole compact between cats and people and dogs and people is entirely different. Dogs say feed us and look after us and we’ll devote ourselves to you, we’ll be your best friend and will happily die for you if need be. Cats say feed us and we’ll entertain you with amusing antics and sit on your lap and purr, but none of that best mates stuff, all right? And don’t expect us to eat any old crap either, we’re choosy about what we ingest. And where dogs latch on to their owners, cats become attached to places. Ours seem a bit subdued, but that may be because of the drugs - we sprayed a lot of Feliway on their travel baskets, which acts like a sort of cat morphine, dulling and sedating them; I half expect them to start nodding out and rubbing their noses as they ask us for spare change. Tentatively, they emerge from their baskets, stretch, and begin to explore their new surroundings, though we’ve been advised to keep them indoors for at least two weeks.
Almost the first thing we notice once we've begun to settle in is how peaceful and still it is here, the sky speckled with stars with nary a sound to be heard. To paraphrase Dorothy, I have a feeling we’re not in London anymore!
Tuesday 12 Oct.
Off to Haverfordwest (Hwlffordd in Welsh, meaning “ford used by fat cows” apparently), around six miles south of our cottage. It’s the county seat, and the would-be commercial centre of Pembrokeshire, sitting in the shadow of the ruins of an imposing 12th century castle, one of several built by the Normans that divide north and south Pembrokeshire along the so-called Landsker line. Back then, the Normans and Anglo-Saxons grabbed the superior agricultural land to the south, which became known as Little England Beyond Wales, and left the native Welsh the lesser northern lands. Such is the Anglo-Saxon gene. I have to confess that although I've lived in London for a quarter of a century and have made some good friends and met any number of fine people, on the whole I don’t really care too much for the English. I find them for the most part belligerent, petty, sheep-like, constantly whining, and not at all interested in anything beyond themselves. That England of the popular imagination, a highly civilised nation of fair play and cultured, intelligent people with proper manners and stiff upper lips went out with the bowler hat, the shilling and the pink bits on the map, if it even ever existed at all.
In any case, here it is a pleasant weekday afternoon in Haverfordwest, and the streets are virtually empty. Where are the people? On Bridge Street, in the town centre, there are but a handful of souls in sight, wandering aimlessly about like extras from a George Romero film. The high street is even worse, three or four people panting their way up the hill; truly we dodged a bullet!
To wit: Carol and I have a business in Hampstead selling second-hand books, and we had the brainstorm of moving our operation out here, to Haverfordwest. On our last trip we met with an estate agent whose company had an arrangement to refurbish about a dozen shops on the high street and adjoining Market Street if the council would widen the pavements and provide a few parking spaces in return. Fair enough, but what they should have done was get the council to level the hill, as climbing that gradient is a real limb killer. Market Street is even worse, confirming our suspicion that steep inclines are not conducive to the passing trade needed to sustain a business, though we didn’t appreciate that at the time. Instead, we selected a shop about two thirds of the way up the high street and were but a John Hancock away from committing to a five year tenancy when common sense prevailed over wishful thinking: the recession was beginning to bite, there was no passing trade, the hill was too steep, the rent too high, and the lease was heavily balanced in favour of the landlord.
That was a year ago. Today that shop and most of the others remain desolate and empty, and as we walk by we catch a glimpse of our would-be selves sitting glum and anxious in the empty premises praying for customers while attempting to stave off bankruptcy, bailiffs, and ruin.
NB: If Pembrokeshire Council is serious about revitalising Haverfordwest and attracting new businesses to the area, then what they should do is offer the vacant properties at a peppercorn rent, at least temporarily, which would give businesses a chance to establish themselves and build up their clientele. Otherwise I suspect it'll be some time if ever before the majority of shops are filled.
As for the mystery of the missing people, it turns out that some are at the Riverside Shopping Centre and others at the Withybush Retail Park, but most seem to be in the mammoth Tesco superstore, where we join the herd and do a food shop. We also join the local library.
Wednesday 13 Oct
Drive to Fishguard (Abergwaun), a cosy little burgh about a dozen miles to the north, and the embarkation point for the Irish ferry. We eye an empty shop, though given its central location the rent is probably too high. There are two charity shops, and some sort of swap shop which we look for but can't find. In London we buy most of the books for our business from charity shops, albeit selectively. We specialise in quality fiction and literature, with some crime and popular novels, though of a certain standard. Katie Price might sells billions of books, but you won’t find any of them in our shop, nor any of those so-called misery memoirs, though thankfully no one has ever actually asked us for one. Gerri Halliwell is an occasional customer, but she won't find any of her books there either; Alison Pearson and Jodi Picoult are about as low as we’re willing to stoop.
Even if we didn’t need to buy books for our business, however, we’d still frequent the charity shops. They’re fun and they’re cheap - why spend £100 on a new pair of Levi’s when you can get a decent pair for under a fiver, or a nice shirt for even less than that? Plus there’s always the chance of unearthing a real treasure. Over the years we’ve had a few such finds, including a gold coloured belt which Carol realised was actually real gold, which we bought for £4.50 and immediately sold to a jeweller for £650, the exact sum we then paid for a second hand Renault. Forget about alchemists turning lead into gold, we turned a belt into a car! But since the advent of eBay, everyone is now an expert, so it’s been a while since we’ve found any real gems.
From Fishguard it’s a short drive to Strumble Head, with its iconic century old white lighthouse, which stands on a tiny islet just off the mainland. The area is known to be a good place for sighting seals, sunfish, porpoises and dolphins, and sure enough, we quickly spot some porpoises, and a small white seal pup stretched out on a rocky inlet that can't be more than a week old, its mother swimming about nearby. It looks very vulnerable, lying on its back like a giant, juicy slug, but other than another seal, nothing can actually get near it.
Thursday 14 Oct
Svante comes to tell us that the fox hunt will be riding past our cottage this morning, and a dozen or so horsemen soon appear on the lane, flanking a pack of around 35 excited, yelping hounds, with the hunt master blowing his horn to spur them on.* Luckily our cats are still inside; the sight of several dozen frenzied, ravenous canines out looking for small furry animals to tear apart must be their worst nightmare! Personally I find the “sport” barbaric, on a par with bear baiting, but it’s a drag hunt of course, and admittedly it’s a thrilling spectacle. Now I know we’re not in London!
Friday 15 Oct
Carol is applying for a grant to the Welsh Academi for her next graphic novel, called Gast, about a young English city girl who becomes intrigued with the suicide of a reclusive, cross-dressing Welsh farmer, and seeks to find out what happened by talking to those who knew him best, which turns out to be his animals; not surprisingly, Carol’s been called “the love child of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Raymond Carver”. It will be her fourth graphic novel, if you count one we did together (Giraffes in my Hair: A Rock’n’Roll Life, a selection of stories from my misspent youth), and her first major work since the 2009 release of her anthology, Crossing the Empty Quarter.
As for myself, I’m working on a London-set crime thriller called The Rain Man, about an atheist Jewish cop on the trail of a serial killer, who is prompted to examine his Jewish identity after a family crisis. He finally gets his man – or does he? It’s my fifth book, though only two have thus far been published. The first one, about the Jack the Ripper murders, is what brought me to the UK. Our story begins back in 1975 in New York, when I was looking for something to read and happened to pick up a book on the subject, and before I even finished it I felt I had solved the crime. To my eyes the solution seemed obvious, and I couldn’t understand why no one had singled out my suspect before. I did a bit of research, and wrote an article outlining my theory for a British crime magazine, and a few years later came to London for a couple of weeks to do more research. At that time I knew only one person in the country, but as it happened he was looking for someone to manage his comic book shop, and I had some experience in the field. The job came with a flat, and I never looked back. I ended up buying the shop, which allowed me to hire staff, which in turn enabled me to continue my research so that over the next several years I spent much of my free time poring over thousands of documents – hospital and employment records, census returns, old newspapers, sewage and street plans, and so forth. The result was my book, Jack the Ripper: the Simple Truth, which was recently named the best book ever written on the subject by the esteemed Journal of the Whitechapel Society, who know about such things.
On the downside, however, my visa had long since run out, and I had become that scourge of the tabloid press, the double I word, the Illegal Immigrant, come to take jobs away from the British and jump the queue for choice council houses! But by that time I was firmly settled with a job, a flat, and a partner, so hoping to avoid detection I created a false British identity, replete with documentation and a phoney back story, a process learnt from that well-known terrorist handbook, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. Only once did that cause a problem, many years later. It was shortly after the 9/11 attacks, so the London police were on high alert, and as it happened, the rear window of our Peugeot had recently been smashed when someone broke into our car, and we hadn’t yet repaired it. We were just a couple of hundred yards from home when the police pulled us over and asked to see some identification. With practiced casualness, I handed the officer my driver’s licence, in the name of Howard Friedman. “What’s your date of birth, Mr Friedman?” he asked. My date of birth? Blimey! For the life of me, I couldn’t remember my supposed birthday, which of course was different from my own. “Uh, I don’t remember,” I said feebly. “You don’t remember?” “I'm nervous,” I suggested, but of course he wasn’t buying it. “No one forgets their date of birth,” he declared as he fastened the handcuffs to my wrists as Carol looked on in shock.
But there was to be a happy ending. Evidently it’s not illegal to have some documentation in another name, and after spending the afternoon in a cell while they determined that I wasn’t a terrorist, I was released. (Bizarrely, like something out of a David Lynch film, as I was being processed, a dwarf casually strolled out of the adjacent cell asking if anyone knew the football scores!) Luckily for me the issue of legality never came up. I told the police I was a writer and that writers often did that sort of thing, and they accepted that. Whether they believed me or not I couldn’t say, I think they were just relieved that I hadn’t been planning to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Nor did it hurt that I was an American, I suspect. The British hate everyone of course, but they seem to dislike Americans the least. Other than that then, I spent a total of 14 years flying under the radar before being granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, the logic being that if you’re a clever enough chappie to have survived and avoided the authorities for all that time then you might as well stay.
Saturday 16 October
I'd been warned that it rains a lot in Wales, and as promised, a heavy downpour that began at sundown lasted through the entire night with no let up. In the morning all the potholes in the lane are filled with water, like tiny lakes.
Stayed in all day, did a lot of book/comic work.
Sunday 17 October
Carol and I both like to devour the Sunday papers, which can be bought either in Haverfordwest, or Roch, a tiny village (pop. c. 750) around 6½ miles away, notable for its 13th century castle that sits high upon a rocky outcrop of volcanic origin. Legend has it that the owner, one Adam de Rupe, chose this particular locale because he lived in dread of a prophecy that he would one day be killed by a viper. He took suitable precautions, but wouldn’t you know it, like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, one of the slithery, slimy, buggers snuck into the castle one day concealed in a bundle of firewood, and proceeded to sink its fangs deep into the no doubt horrified Mr Rupe.
The castle is also said to be haunted by the ghost of a later inhabitant, Lucy Walter, who had a son, James, with the future king Charles II when he was in exile during the time of the Commonwealth. Ms Walter died a decade later, while James went on to make an ill-conceived attempt to seize the English throne; it failed, and he was beheaded at the Tower. But the story doesn’t end there. Apparently someone realised that illegitimate or not, it was only proper that there be a picture of the king’s son, so James’ severed head was sewn back onto his lifeless corpse in order for his portrait to be painted by Sir Peter Lely, the official court painter. No wonder Ms Walter’s spirit remains unsettled!
Back home we take a stroll through a field filled with Svante’s grazing Welsh Black Cattle. They’re a docile breed, he’s told us, so we needn’t worry about the bull, which eyes us suspiciously but allows us to pass. We carry on to Plumstone Rock, which sits atop Plumstone Mountain, which in point of fact isn’t really a mountain, more of a gently sloping hill, really, that peaks at 551 feet. The rock itself is a fairly easy climb, and well worth the effort as its summit provides a stunning panoramic view of the surrounding area, encompassing the sea, the Preselis, Haverfordwest, and the nearby conifer woods, which each night play host to a couple of million roosting starlings. They begin to gather as sunset approaches, arriving in enormous flocks, and set about weaving the most extraordinary, kaleidoscopic 3D patterns in the air above the woods. It is truly one of nature’s most dazzling spectacles. We’re not the only ones watching either, as circling high overhead we see a couple of buzzards and a peregrine falcon hoping to pick off an easy meal, their version of fast food.
Equally remarkable is the sound the starlings create as they zip back and forth above the woods, a relentless, high-pitched, cacophonous white noise (best heard from within the woods itself) that continues for a couple of hours until they gradually settle down for the night.
Walking home we continue through the through the woods where we come upon a clearing by a disused quarry, where there’s evidence of a settlement of some kind - a couple of caravans, several abandoned vehicles, piles of tires, hunks of rusting of metal, rubbish, and a porta-cabin. There are signs of habitation, though no actual signs of life, and in the fading light the scene conjures up every slasher/horror flick we've ever seen, images of the inbred, mutated family of deformed freaks living deep in the woods who prey on innocent passers-by and subject them to unspeakable acts of depravity and cannibalism, a Welsh equivalent of the infamous Sawney Bean family, who lived in a cave in 16th century Scotland from which they waylaid and ate passers-by. No doubt it’s nothing of the sort, we’ve just seen too many movies.
Even so, we hurry home.
Tuesday 19 October
Visit St Davids, named after Wales’ patron saint, who was born nearby. It’s the UK’s smallest city, the size of a small village really, but given city status by the current queen due to the presence of its 12th century cathedral, one of Britain's finest, and a prime tourist attraction. Built on the site of a sixth century monastery, it sits partly hidden in a deep depression. Supposedly this was to keep it from being sacked by the Vikings and other raiders, though in truth it’s not really that hard to spot, invaders would have had to have been rather short-sighted to miss it. Unlike any other cathedral I've seen, this one is purple, quarried from the local sandstone, and has long been a magnet for pilgrims. In the medieval version of air miles, two journeys to the cathedral was the equivalent of one to Rome, and three equalled a trip to Jerusalem. The town itself is pleasant enough and refreshingly low key, with a tiny, cramped charity shop open for only a few hours per day, a couple of excellent grocery shops, plus the expected art galleries, gift shops, and cafes found in any tourist town, one of which, the Pebbles Yard gallery-cum-café, has perhaps the best chocolate and coffee cakes I’ve ever tasted, baked by a little old lady from Solva. There’s also a tiny bookshop virtually on the doorstep of the cathedral gate, and we’re immediately envious.
From St Davids it’s a short drive to Whitesands Bay, part of the unbroken 186-mile stretch of stunning coastal walks that make up the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, which is unique in the UK. In some spots the path veers alarmingly close to the sheer cliffs – one stumble or a strong gust of wind…. There are warning signs tacked onto some of the gateposts, which depict what looks like a stubby midget tumbling headlong over the edge of a cliff – little people beware!* The surrounding countryside is marvellous, hilly green fields that quickly give way to a primitive looking landscape dominated by a striking 600-foot outcrop called Carn Llidi and populated by herds of wild horses roaming amongst the lichen-covered rocks and old stone walls, impenetrable gorse shrubs, bracken, bramble, and heather. Further on, by St Davids Head, are the remains of an Iron Age settlement, and a 5000-year-old cromlech known as Coetan Arthur. And no other people in sight!
***
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Tuesday 16 November
On the way to Strumble Head we pass a house in Goodwick with several vintage American cars parked outside, including a ‘57 Chevy and a 1959 Cadillac, the one with the enormous fins, the archetypal symbol of American excess when that was seen as a good thing. But it’s strange seeing those cars here in Pembrokeshire, so far from America. A friend of mine in Queens, Howie, had a white ’58 Chevy convertible that we used to cruise around in. One afternoon we were horsing about and I was standing on the boot when Howie suddenly drove off and I landed on my head. Luckily I’ve been blessed with a rock solid head, else you wouldn’t be reading this now. Being hard-headed served me well on another occasion some 10 years later when I fell off a bar stool in an after-hours club in New York. I was having a drink with ex-New York Doll Johnny Thunders, who I knew from the local music scene. Johnny would often drop by my place on East 13th Street in Manhattan at 3.00 or 4.00 in the morning, knowing I would probably be awake, or not caring if I wasn’t. The first time he did this he headed straight for my wardrobe, and helped himself to a one of my jackets, which I was pleased to see him wearing at his next gig. On another occasion he asked me if I had any Nazi memorabilia, before catching himself: “Oh, you’re Jewish Bruce, aren’t you? Sorry.”
A local scenester who called himself Rockets Redglare was also there when I leaned too far back on my barstool and toppled over. I didn’t come to until the next afternoon when I woke up in Bellevue Hospital drenched in blood, missing my wallet, and still clutching my blood-stained glasses, which Rockets later told me he pressed into my hand as I was concerned about losing them. A doctor gave me a cursory examination and told me to come back if I felt nauseous or had a headache, which meant that I probably had a concussion. In fact I was experiencing both, though he didn’t seem very concerned. “Well, come back if they persist,” he told me.
It was around that time that I had an interesting encounter with Sid Vicious. A musician friend of mine called Neon Leon, a sort of precursor to Prince, lived in the Chelsea Hotel and knew Sid, who was about to go on trial for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. In those days I worked as a music journalist for a now defunct paper called the Soho Weekly News and Leon introduced us at another after hours club. Sid was leaning over a pool table measuring a shot when I asked him what he thought would happen. He looked up, curled his lips into a practiced sneer, and snarled “I’ll win and I’ll laugh,” in a strong Sarf London accent, before potting his ball.
Two weeks later he was dead.
Interestingly, Rockets later told me that he had been with Sid earlier on the night of the murder, and that Sid didn’t do it. Rather, a melee had erupted after a drug deal went wrong and Spungeon paid the price. A couple of weeks later at my apartment one night, Johnny played me a poignant song he had just written about Sid, entitled Sad Vacation. “We were going to form a group together, you know,” he told me in that whiney voice of his, though I can imagine how that would’ve gone; one hapless junkie in a group is unfortunate, and Arrowsmith not withstanding, two has got to be fatal.
In Strumble Head we see seals and porpoises, a rather elegant looking cormorant standing with wings spread, and a couple of herons, large, prehistoric looking, grey and white, hunched birds with long yellow beaks that (may my forebears forgive me) always remind me of stooped old Jewish men in grey suits when they stand up; I half expect them to be saying “Nu? Nu? Do you want we should have Chinese or Italian?” (A well-worn aphorism about Jews is that they’re good at two things in particular, where to find good Chinese food, and how to suffer. I can't testify for the suffering bit, but I can vouch for the first part).
We return home to the announcement of the Royal Wedding. I'm always surprised that people still care about these things, it must be in their genes. I've nothing against the Royals personally, but surely they could support themselves? Also they perpetuate the class system, which seems to be deeply engrained in the British psyche; maybe like wolves, or our chimp cousins, people need a pecking order, a superior to look up to, be they monarch, politician, or vacuous celebrity; someone to place on pedestal and genuflect to (and then knock off should they become too full of themselves). And while on the subject, isn’t it traditional that the father of the bride pays for his daughter’s wedding? Shouldn’t Mr Middleton be coughing up the spondulies the big do, rather than us already overly burdened taxpayers?
***
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Monday 20 December
Snow brings travel chaos to the UK – what else is new? In New York we cope with heavy snowfalls and much worse weather every winter without the whole city needing therapy; here everything seems to collapse under the weight of a few snowflakes.
Tuesday 21 December
Up early to view the lunar eclipse, though the moon doesn’t look any different to my eyes. But there is a lovely, fuzzy morning light over the snow covered hills and fields we see every morning from our garden. We spy a redwing in the trees, the first we've seen. They’re known to avoid gardens unless it’s very cold or snowy, so this one is acting entirely in character. A small bird crashes into the kitchen window, though it quickly recovers and flies off again. An omen? Crows and ravens seem to be the birds most associated with superstition, usually portends of misfortune or death. It’s well known that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, England will fall, and it’s said that during World War II only one raven, called Grip, remained. Happily for us all, ol’ Grip stuck it out and saved the day. Here in Wales they say it’s good luck if a raven perches on your house, and it’s meant to be equally fortuitous should swallows decide to set up house in your house. On our last trip we came across a pair of swallows who’d built their nest of all places amongst the beams in a men’s toilet in Marloes, so it would follow that this must be a lucky toilet (lucky or not though, imagine coming all the way from Africa to set up home in a toilet reeking of stale urine and disinfectant!) It’s also meant to be good luck if two crows cross your path, but bad luck if it’s only one, though a dead crow on the road brings good luck for everyone except for the crow itself. And should a “building” of rooks leave a building or house en masse, then someone there will die. Magpies meanwhile, are said to be cursed by God for not wearing all black to the crucifixion, while it’s all good for doves on the other hand, as legend has it that they’re the only bird that the devil can't transform himself into, so we’re safe with Ruby.
Nothing about birds crashing into windows, though we’re lucky it didn’t just tap on it, which would mean that one of us would die!
At night the misty moonlight illuminates the snow like a Christmas card come to life.
Wednesday 22 December
The camera we ordered arrives earlier than expected, though not the lens. Loads of birds at the feeder this morning, we spot blue tits, great tits, blackbirds, dunnocks, a robin, song thrushes, mistle thrushes, chaffinches, and the odd jackdaw, it’s like a gathering of the tribes, though they seem particularly agitated; maybe the eclipse has thrown them off their normal rhythm. Or more likely it’s simply the cold. Carol receives an email from an old colleague who wants to reprint one of her stories for a London anthology, while I get one from an old friend called Pete Chiaramonte, someone I hadn’t heard from in 30 years. He came across a copy of Giraffes and got in touch through our publisher. In the late 70s Pete and I worked together in New York’s Colony Records on 49th Street and Broadway, on the ground floor of the famous Brill Building, where the legendary songwriting teams of Goffin and King, Lieber and Stoller, Mann and Weill, Barry and Greenwich, and Phil Spector forged the sound of early rock’n’roll. Besides being workmates, Pete played drums in a band I managed called The Richard Craven Group. Craven had an intense, brooding persona, wrote brilliant songs, played a fair guitar, looked a bit like Boris Karloff and sounded like a cross between the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith with a sprinkling of Bowie and Rolling Stones. But like a lot of artistes he was pig-headed and temperamental, and our first gig at Max’s Kansas City was also our last as the band broke up immediately afterwards and we lost touch. Since then I’ve often wondered what became of Craven – temperament aside, he had a singular talent and I always thought I would come across an album of his or read about him in the music press. But I never did; nor did the occasional google search ever turn up anything, and I wondered if he may even have died. Maybe Pete knows.
Thursday 23 December
Mystery solved. Pete emails to say that Craven lives. He gave up music in 1986 after all his equipment was stolen, became an actor, and is now semi-retired.
Lens arrives.
Friday 24 December
Christmas Eve. Neither of us is religious, but Carol and I have a (vegetarian) Christmas dinner each year with a bottle of red wine. Christmas is still a novelty for me. In suburban middle class Whitestone, Queens, where I grew up, the immediate neighbourhood was 95% Jewish. There were a handful of Italian and Irish Catholic families on the perimeters, one Puerto Rican family, no blacks, and neither Christmas nor Easter existed; we had Chanukah and Passover instead, as well as several lesser Jewish holidays which meant lots of days off from school. The area was flat, leafy, sedate, tidy, and crime free, with long streets arranged in an irregular grid pattern and lined with detached or semi-detached houses. It was like growing up in one of those idealised 1950s American sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best, where every family was wholesome and loving with perfect parents blessed with the Wisdom of Solomon. Drugs, divorce and adultery were non-existent, and happy endings prevailed. My friends and I rode our bicycles around the neighbourhood, walked to school, played sandlot baseball and American football, and grew into slightly bored teenagers who smoked dope, popped pills, chased girls and hung out on the pavement outside the local candy store on the rather presumptuously named Utopia Parkway, where the renowned box sculptor Joseph Cornell then lived. In its day Whitestone was quite des-res, and previous residents included two personal heroes, Harry Houdini and Charlie Chaplin, as well as the silent film stars Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino. Another local was mob boss Carmine Tramunti, aka Mr Gribbs, head of the Lucchese Mafia crime family and later indicted in the famous French Connection heroin case, though I knew none of this at the time.
In the summer of 1965, when I was sixteen, my friends Bob, Gordon, Lenny, and I all got our first jobs working as vendors at the recently built Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets baseball team, just a short bus ride and subway stop away. We wore blue uniforms, and sold peanuts, cola drinks, ice cream, and hot dogs, calling out our product as we walked around the stands: “Hey, soda here; soda here.” or “Hot dogs here, hot dogs, hot dogs.” With peanuts it was traditional to toss the bag to the customer as accurately as you could, and they would pass the money back through the crowd. None ever went missing.
As employees, we got to work the big Beatles concert that summer, but we cashed in early to watch the show; with all the screaming no one could hear us anyway, and in any case they weren’t interested in hot dogs or peanuts. And what a concert it was! The unrelenting, ear-splitting din of 55,000 teenaged girls shrieking at the top of their lungs non-stop for three or four hours straight is a sound that even puts the starlings to shame. It was textbook mass hysteria, and as we discovered to our delight, these girls had become so worked up that they were completely oblivious to our presence. Thus it was that I spent much of my time during one of the most famous rock concerts ever groping as many girls as I could get my hands on. What can I say? Guilty, your honour! But I was 16, horny, and in a rather unique situation.
As for the music, you couldn’t hear it at all, not a single note. John Lennon even admitted afterwards that at such concerts they often sang nonsense lyrics, knowing no one would be able to tell the difference.
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Saturday 19 February
Off to Aberporth for an indoor boot sale, we enjoy these long country drives. Ceredigion seems more hippie-ish than Pembrokeshire, we see more middle age men with paunches and pony tails walking about with their colourfully clad grey haired partners. The topography is different too, more open and not as wild or prehistoric as Pembs, you don’t see so many of those wonderful wind-bent trees.* The boot sale is crowded, I buy a sheepskin coat for a fiver, after which we head for Cardigan, where I send a postcard to my cousin Barbara in San Francisco; she’s a keen knitter of sweaters so she’ll appreciate the gesture. Barbara is a few months older than I am, and we were named after the same grandparent, and so have the same initials: BHP. But where she became Barbara Helane Paley, for some reason I was deprived of a middle name - I assume my parents couldn’t agree on one - so all I got was an H. My birth certificate reads Bruce H. Paley, though I rarely use the initial. Our fathers were brothers,* first generation Americans raised in Brooklyn by Russian Jewish parents fleeing the pogroms of the old country, and after serving in the Second World War the two of them moved into Manhattan where they started their respective families and opened a candy store together. I should point out that a New York candy store is essentially a British newsagent, usually with the addition of a long Formica counter with swirly stools, as in a diner, where they serve drinks like chocolate malts and egg creams, the latter a Brooklyn creation which, oddly, contains neither eggs nor cream, but there you go. Our candy store was too narrow for a fountain, more like a corridor squeezed between two larger shops, but it survived thanks to a reasonable rent and a wealthy clientele who bought lots of chocolate bars, cigarettes, magazines, stationery, toys, and newspapers. I used to work there as a boy, though most of my time was spent eating thick, juicy hamburgers and reading comic books – Adam Strange, Challengers of the Unknown, Herbie, Superman, and Batman; in time I would graduate to the early Marvels like The Amazing Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, titles worth millions these days. Before my father moved us to Queens we lived in an apartment building around the corner from the shop, which was situated in the heart of Manhattan on First Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets, an area known as Sutton Place, one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in all of New York whose residents included Henry Kissinger, Aristotle Onassis, Joan Crawford, Truman Capote, and Arthur Miller and his then wife Marilyn Monroe. I don’t know that any of them ever came into our shop, but I do recall one middle-aged woman who would stop by regularly for cigarettes. She would often have her groceries with her, which I would dutifully carry to her large apartment around the corner, close to the East River. In return she would give me a quarter tip (25¢). One day my father mentioned that she was a famous actress, and while her name might not mean anything to me then, when I grew up I would know who she was. Her name? Greta Garbo.
On the way back from Cardigan we stop at Poppit Sands, which marks the beginning of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, recently rated by National Geographic magazine as the joint second best coastal destination the world, an honour it shares with New Zealand’s Tutukaka coast (top-rated was Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula). The receding tide leaves plenty of room for dogs to run amok on the soft sand, as they love to do. Took a nice picture of a crow silhouetted against the golden sunset.* Meanwhile further signs of spring are all around us - wobbly, newly born lambs and calves in the fields, snowdrops, daffodils, the days getting progressively longer…. On the drive back we’re treated to a magnificent view of Newport with the great Mynnyd Carningli looming in the background. According to local legend, in the 5th century Saint Brynach used to climb to its summit to commune with the angels, as one does, and as a result the mountain was known for a time as Mons Angelorum, or Mount of Angels. Brynach was also said to be able to magically tame wild beasts, so that his cart was drawn by stags while a wolf looked after his milk cow. We stop by a bridge over the River Nevern where we see several herons waiting alongside the river for their evening meal, also some widgeons, winter visitors from icier climes which we haven’t seen before.
In the evening we watch the latest episodes of The Killing, the 20-part Danish crime thriller. It’s slow moving, tense, dark, and blatantly manipulative, scattering the red herrings about to keep you guessing whodunnit. But the newspapers seem more interested in the jumper worn by the lead actress, Sofie Gråbøl, who plays the detective Sarah Lund; apparently sales of that particular jumper skyrocketed in Denmark when the series was originally aired. Like the book I'm currently writing, The Killing is largely character driven, and like Sarah Lund, my character, DCI Richard Greene, becomes obsessed with solving the case, though the results are different. If nothing else, these programmes are good sources of information, and not only for crime writers. In the States there have been instances of criminals able to stymie the authorities by utilising methods gleaned from the CSI programmes to clean their crime scenes.
On the downside, the final episodes of The Killing coincide with our return to London, a dreaded date creeping ever closer, our stay now measured in weeks rather than months.
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Saturday 12 March
The news this morning is full of pictures of the tsunami, they’re shocking, like something out of a Roland Emmerich film, the massive thrust of water surging down residential streets carrying everything moveable in its path from cars to houses as onlookers watch in horror.
Go to Milford Haven, it’s still a ghost town, though we hear talk of a plan to expand the docks, which in theory at least, should stimulate a revival; let’s hope. At the moment its only redeeming feature is the Green Acres charity shop at the end of Charles Street, it’s cheap and filled with junk, thus brimming with promise. Back home Charlie has butchered a mouse; as much as we've softened them, he and Tips should survive well enough after we’re gone.
Tough noir film on the telly, Force of Evil, directed by Abraham Polonsky and starring John Garfield, an actor largely forgotten now but big in his time. He was the first of the modern anti-heroes, and my relative, born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants; he and my mother were first cousins, making him my first cousin once removed, if I've got that right. I don’t know that I ever met him, both he and my mother died in 1952 when I was three, my mother suddenly when she was 32 of a brain tumour, Garfield at 39 of a heart attack, which he allegedly suffered while shtupping a nurse while he was hospitalised for heart problems (or so the story goes). Onscreen Garfield exuded oodles of naughty charm, and had perhaps the cheekiest smile ever seen in the movies. He appeared in several classic films, including the original (and superior) The Postman Always Rings Twice with Lana Turner, Humoresque, with Joan Crawford, and Gentleman’s Agreement, a controversial 1947 exposé of anti-Semitism that won the Best Picture Oscar that year. He also starred in perhaps the two best boxing movies ever made, Body and Soul, and my personal favourite, They Made me a Criminal, directed by Busby Berkeley and co-starring Claude Rains and the wonderful Dead End Kids. The scene on the train where murder suspect Garfield calls Rains a sucker after Rains decides to let him go free is priceless! Like many American Jews who had lived through the depression, a time when, then as now, the failings of capitalism were laid bare, Garfield was a staunch left-winger who flirted with Communist ideology. As a result, he was summoned to testify at the notorious House Un-American Committee congressional hearings, the congressional investigation into communist infiltration in America, when the fear of “a red under every bed” was widespread. Garfield initially claimed he knew of no communists in Hollywood (in fact he had married one!) though at the end of his life he reneged, having been blacklisted by the film industry.
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