The Battle of Nantlle Ridge

Late September 1985 and parts of Britain are burning in the remaining heat of a long and very hot summer but you find my dad and me on a birding expedition to remote valleys in North Wales. These are uninhabited places, haunted only by the ghosts of people who claim Lloyd George as acquaintances and the strange sound of tumbling streams. The picture above shows Nantlle Ridge at the end of one of these valleys, a name which always suggests a WWI battle in my mind but is instead, in the absence of wilder weather at least, a place of almost absolute silence with little chance of seeing more than a few other people in any one day.

And this is where my dad fell and broke his leg and the place where I first cursed my inability to drive. As he fell I heard a loud crack which luckily was just his leg breaking rather than contact between his very expensive camera and his extortionately expensive Zeiss binoculars. As it was my suggestion of walking to the nearest farmhouse - an unknown distance away - was overruled and my dad drove back ten miles - in barely concealed agony - to Porthmadog hospital only to find it almost empty and without any X-ray facilities at all. We were transferred by Taxi to Bangor Hospital A&E where the leg was X-rayed and plastered while we sorted out the cancellation of various visits and arranged insurance to allow my sister to drive the car back. The wait was notable for my dad's conversation with a farmer in the waiting room, whose daughter was unable to speak any English, something I found romantic and almost unreal. Late that night, an ambulance on some tour of various locations gave us a lift back to the cottage where we staying. None of this stopped my dad enjoying the next day's birding with his plaster wrapped in a plastic bag, though he had to restrict himself to the estuary around Ynys where we were staying.

It still took me several years for me to pass my driving test and I have always been ashamed of that drive which probably made my dad's injury worse. However, I don't remember any panic on my part, which would surely accompany any accident of that severity that should befall my family these days. The sudden switch from the absolute serenity of the lower slopes of Nantlle Ridge to the racing choosing of options was quite memorable and looking back on it seems to have been the point which defines where I started beginning to recall things with greater clarity. Before then I only remember strange and dream-like whooshes of things, maybe enough to get me by in any conversation about the past but nothing close to the clarity of my memories of things since then. Sometimes at my most irrational, I wonder about planted memories and whether my recollections of things before this time are actually real. I would expect a gradual focusing of the clarity of memory as I look back on it rather than a sudden big bang. I could start the old rabbiting about Catastrophe Theory and then I remember than I like to think of myself as scientific and all of this is just rubbish. My dad really did break his leg and most of the stuff from my first memories up to that point happened as well. And in an alternative universe, Nantlle Ridge is a WWI battle at which my grandfather fought and won the Military Medal.