The Hawthorn King

Lives of the Wild Saints #9

St Govan
Wales. Sixth century

This is a tale from before the War, a story from when I was a young man. I liked wandering, then. You could wander easily, the lanes were not clogged with cars. The air over Britain tasted of hawthorn, not petrol, and the inns still served beer and sandwiches. Real beer, and proper sandwiches: cheese and onion, white bread thick with fresh butter. A man could roll his own tobacco under the roof beams without some spiv from the government complaining about it. A day exploring the lanes, the spinneys, the ruins, an evening in the inn: show me a better life, and I’ll go to it!

I mention the inn because this story I’ll tell you now was heard in one. In a small public house in Wales, in the year before the War, I met a traveller from an antique land. An old man: a whiskered old man of the type who, back then, was always sitting around in dark little pubs waiting to be bought drinks in exchange for stories. Sometimes you would meet a master storyteller in the snug, and sometimes you would waste your pennies on a low-rent drunkard. Either way it passed the time. Back then, there was more of time to pass. No radios, no televisions, none of these giant screens. Only human beings and their talk. Only the air, which was stiller, and didn’t hum. Only the lowing of the cattle on the fenced hills. The old country, familiar in its rhythms. I doubt you understand.

I’d been wandering about that morning, down by the sea, in south west Wales. The stones there are huge; the beaches are scattered with them. I’d been exploring the coves when I came across something remarkable: an ancient stone chapel, built in to the cliffside. I hadn’t known it was there. To reach it, you need to wend your way down a spiral of steps hacked into the rock. You enter through a small cleft. A tiny place it is, built around this thin crack in the rock. Further inspection of the beach below it revealed a well - dry now, it seems - with a little stone wellhouse built over it. What a place! It was no living church, and perhaps never had been; it was too small, too remote. So what was it?

I’d asked around, and here I was, with this old character who claimed, for the price of a drink of course, to be able to tell me. So I lit his pipe for him and bought him a whisky. It was summer, but a coal fire was low in the grate. The swallows were chattering around the eaves outside, arcing under the thatch. A green haze through the window glass. I settled in to see what he’d cough up.

It’s of Arthur I’ll tell you, he began. He took a sip of whisky.

Perhaps, he went on.