A Proper Holiday - Part Two
I have been informed by readers of the blog, that a really proper holiday is a two-centre affair. Given that the camper van’s toilet capacity won’t stretch to driving between Yorkshire and Monte Carlo, we have decided on the Celtic Riviera, the Welsh island of Anglesey. The primary sensation which we aim to satisfy here is neither cultural nor aesthetic, it is gluttony.
On our tiny campsite in the south west of the island is a rough-and-ready glorified café called the Marram Grass. Initially a simple campsite eatery established by Liverpudlian ex-pats, the owner’s chef-trained sons pitched in during the early days, to offer a helping hand. One thing led to another, and now they’ve raised campsite cuisine to a level where world-famous chef and owner of Le Gavroche, Michel Roux, recently sung their praises on TV. And this is what we’ve come to try. Studiously unpretentious, most tables don’t even have matching chairs. The décor may be far from Michelin-starred, but the food isn’t far off, although to be fair, nor are the prices.
Arriving in the early evening of Tuesday, we hope that the Marram will be worth the trip, because the surrounding countryside doesn’t have the aesthetic appeal of the beautiful Yorkshire Dales we recently left. Flat tufted grass fields are bordered with lengths of rusty wire. The houses are not the romantic granite and limestone constructions of Yorkshire, they are square, functional, and mostly grey or white pebble-dash; a necessity here to protect against the wind and rain lashing off the Irish sea. Even the sheep are different. In Yorkshire, sheep are dreamy white clouds on legs, their lambs gambol about without a care in the world. Here the sheep are scruffy and dirty, and the lambs huddle together for warmth in mud-bath fields.
After setting up the van, we walk the mile or so to investigate the local village, Newborough. A review of Newborough might as well end right there. The best thing about Newborough is leaving Newborough. The only incident of note was the fact that the pub was closed. Squinting through the dirty windows into the dark interior, I am torn as to whether the pub being closed is worse or better than the pub being open. Given that a flashing neon sign, a veritable Welsh aurora borealis, declares definitively that the pub opens at 6pm every evening, I cross to the local shop to enquire.
Does the pub open at 6? Because the sign says it does, but it’s quarter past.
Oh yes, it opens at 6 every day!
I guess the landlord’s just a bit late then?
No, I think it’s closed tonight.
Hmm. I go for the back-up option and review the advertised ‘wide selection of craft ales’. These consist of plastic bottles of White Lightening, several rows of Moretti and Cobra, and a yard or two of empty shelf-space.
Mooching back to the van with a few bottles, I muse on the coincidence that my beer’s countries of origin, India and Italy, are my current subjects of research. For the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India and Italy were important travel destinations, although for different reasons.
India was a destination for traders and for soldiers and civil servants, the ambitious young men of the East India Company, involved in the apparatus of British rule in India as a formal colony. Italy was primarily a leisure destination, a convenient and accessible place to indulge the growing British middle-class passion for travel as a signifier of taste and social sophistication, copying the ‘Grand Tours’ of eighteenth-century aristocrats.
Although apparently very different, Italy and India shared several characteristics as travel destinations. For example, India provided an opportunity for metropolitan outcasts, and Italy was a refuge for those whose sexual, social, or financial lifestyles were unacceptable or unconventional back home. For Lord Byron, Venice was an escape from the embarrassing rumours about what he had being doing with his half-sister. ’Doing’ apparently being the operative phrase. Venice was also attractive to many gentleman, and even couples, aware that gondoliers often provided a greater range of ‘services’ than simple transportation; all good fun for those preferring an ‘improper holiday’.
The natural resources and treasures of both India and Italy were economically exploited by the British. In addition to millions of pounds in revenue for the British state, the tiger-headed rug, the elephant-foot umbrella stand, and the liveried Indian servant show-cased the personal achievements of those returning from India. Such trophies also illustrated the dominance of one nation over another, physically, economically, and culturally. So too, the paintings of Botticelli, Titian, Tinteretto and other Italian Masters, often bought illegally and smuggled back home, provided proof of taste, wealth and prestige for their owners.
Travel writing and travel go hand-in-hand, and Italy and India were no exception in this respect. As the number of British travellers grew, travel writing became one of the most popular and published genres of literature. Perhaps the characteristic most shared by India and Italy was the disparagement of their people in British travel writing. Indian Hindus and Italians Catholics were invariably described as superstitious, rooted in the past, dishonest, lazy and irrational. They were incapable of self-improvement or effective government. Of course, British writers implied themselves as the opposite. In comparison, they were full of Christian morality, rational thought, and industrious activity. Where the ‘foreigner’ was inferior and backward, Britain was superior and modern. Travel and travel writing were leveraged by the British, to demonstrate their civilizational ascendancy. Perhaps the worst part was that the ‘knowledge’ generated about Indians and Italians appeared to have the ring of objective truth; the traveller had seen it with their own eyes!
The following day, we visit an exhibition of one of the greatest of recent Welsh artists, Sir Kyffin Williams. An artist unfamiliar to me, I was expecting a relatively mundane set of
landscapes ‘celebrating the natural beauty of Anglesey, blah, blah’. Instead, Williams impresses on the viewer a deeper and different sense of Anglesey, rather than a twee chocolate-box presentation of the landscape. Simple dark pen and ink washed drawings present moody skies, brooding villages and farm workers who might have been painted by an early Van Gough. These are not the romanticised landscapes of a Constable, not a ‘Haywain’ in sight, but neither are they patronising or intended to cast the people of Anglesey as victims. Locals with nobility, pride and humour, who care
not what staring travellers think. This is a tough working landscape with tough working people; no Yorkshire gentleman farmers with their banking facilities in Ripon and Richmond here.
You tourists may come to gawp and sneer and compare, Williams’s subjects say, but we have been forging an existence in the eye of nature’s fury since the neolithic and we have not the time to accommodate your tourist pretensions.
A 4-6,000 year-old tomb sits silently in the landscape here. It has seen travellers as diverse as Bronze and Iron Age pilgrims, Celtic Druids, Roman centurions, medieval English royalty, and modern bourgeois tourists. What does it care what any of them think? It has played the long-game and continues to do so.
Later, in the Mallam Grass, I ought to marvel at the sweet-corn puree with my perfectly cooked lamb rump and deep ruby glass of Malbec, but I am in a chastened mood. Sir Kyffin’s depiction of this part of Anglesey made me reflective and I realise that for all my laughing at the locals and adverse comparisons with landscape I find traditionally more aesthetically pleasing, I am no different to those travel writers who concocted a version of India and Italy that favoured the ‘superior’ British.
Extensive English money pours into other parts of Anglesey, snapping up sea view properties around the Menai Bridge and re-developing local pubs into gastro-extravaganzas. Up go the property prices and out go the locals, banished to the margins and edges of the villages and to minimum wage jobs, serving food and beer to wealthy mainland weekenders. In a sense, Anglesey is a ghost of Empire, where the needs of the English are served by the colonised islanders.
If the pubs around our campsite are less developed, and the landscape less sculpted to my liking, it is perhaps because the investment goes to other places. But at least the people here are fully invested in what they do, the vista may not suit the tourist, but it is a working landscape and it is theirs; they serve themselves rather than outsiders who pitch up in luxury vehicles complete with carbon-fibre bikes and miles of racing lycra.
Over lunch in Ann’s Pantry, a beautiful bistro-café in Moelfre, I talk to one of the waitresses, a Cardiff Film Studies student born and bred in Anglesey, about how ‘English’ this area is, with every harbour-side cottage owned by an outsider.
I must admit, she says, at the end of a season, after serving all of those tourists, I wonder if we are giving away something of ourselves.
I imagine the owner of the aforementioned scruffy sheep in the field bordered with rusty wire doesn’t have such concerns. I am guilty of the same acts of ‘constructing’ identity for others that I deconstruct with such glee in the British writers of the nineteenth century who travelled to Italy and India. Like the subjects of those writers, the locals here have no recourse to challenge what I say about them and no ability to speak for themselves. I am speaking for them, as British travel writers spoke for India and Italy. Is travel writing ever really ‘true’?