Barmouth






I was thirty five years old. Successful, scared and driven, anger never far from my shoulder. Guilt and my mortality, like the train of a wedding dress, dragging in the dirt that followed my footsteps. My mother died at thirty five. I was fourteen and getting ready for school when I found her. With cardboard in my shoes, and the stench of poverty in my nostrils, I tried in vain to wake her, but the tablets had too much of a grip. Do I call a doctor, an ambulance, go to the surgery? All or any would never have been enough.

Of all the men she had known, I was the only one who was still there. The errant father, the disingenuous lover, both tucked up somewhere else in some other woman’s head. The pump that emptied her stomach unable to prevent the seeping rigor that reached places of no return. The monotone beat of the failing pulse drowned out by wailing disbelief. It took three days for her to die in the January of ’67, twenty one years for me to purge the guilt that drip fed my pain.

The months after her death saw relief and pain in equal measure. School arranged a holiday in Barmouth, West Wales, at a Christian holiday camp.
My contact with marmalade, toast, sun, friends of my own age, encouraged to run on the sand, feel freedom in the wind, an alien experience for this boy from West London. Apart from my brothers and sister, only responsibility had ever shared my bed. I did not know where freedom lay until that week in Wales.

So my return to Barmouth in the bleak windswept November of 1988 saw my emotions struggling to bridge the gap, the gap between the joy of success and a family of my own, and the pain of the guttural guilt that continued to haunt me. “Christian holiday camp?” I asked the local man “Keep following this track” came the Freudian reply. So I continued, until at the top of a hill, in the drive of a rambling hillside idyll, clearing the detritus of a certain autumn, stood the same man who had been guardian to us needy unfortunate souls some twenty one years before.















Nothing had changed. He still strummed his righteous songs, gave children the light of his humanity, and at the end of the week, made sure you left with a message recanted faithfully through the love and succour offered for free, but also writ large in the same pamphlet every child received prior to their departure. The tea and sympathy were a welcome diversion, his generosity comforting, but I left the hostel none the wiser as to the source of my unerring guilt, It was never my fault, until back in the car I opened the pamphlet, more in curiosity than expectation. There it was the answer to a child’s confusion, within the opening line.

“We are all sinners in the eyes of the Lord……………….”