'The Past is Myself'
The history, geography, geology and natural beauty of Penmaenmawr make it a special place. The modern quarry-town spread up from the railway-station, under the mountain they got their name from, in the nineteenth century, but the mountain had been hewn long before that, and the distinctive igneous rock, since used in making concrete, had once been used to make axeheads. In the Iron Age the mountain was topped by fortifications, whose remains were described by antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The darkest period in British history was in Wales an age of saints, one of whom, the nearby islet’s eponymous hermit, was Penmaenmawr’s St Seiriol. To Dr Johnson the beetling cliff with the coast-road cut into it was a fearsome object; it was also a romantic object to David Cox, who painted it as such in the picture a tinted engraving of which hangs in the room where I am writing this review. The Victorian age, which saw the discovery of the source of the Nile, the greatest prize in exploration, also saw the discovery of Penmaenmawr as the most salubrious of watering-places. And in the last century a number of Londoners evacuated after the German bombs had begun falling found a refuge there.
A review of Anne Forrest's
(Illustrated version of the Amazon review)
My Whole World—Penmaenmawr
Anyone attracted by this place will want to read an author who can call it ‘my whole world’, but this book has a value apart from the interest of the place. ‘The future is nothing, the past is myself, my own history…’ Evidently if we live only in the present we can neither know ourselves nor value truly our own lives. Every life being transient and unique—and so in itself precious even if mislived—, Lampedusa thought we should each leave some personal record, some account of things otherwise lost entirely. In quoting those words of Stevenson’s the writer of this book indicates at the outset what she is about. It is subtitled ‘an illustrated common-folk biography’ (it incorporates a photographic archive), and its comprehensiveness and also its particularity are points of difference from Alice Thomas Ellis’s memoir with the same setting, A Welsh Childhood. The (auto)biographer is a Roman Catholic, we learn (as the novelist was), still a recognition of impermanence as a mark of existence is not confined to Buddhists, and the Buddhist truth could hardly be illustrated more strikingly than it was by the ‘Head of the Great Rock’ itself—reduced, after weathering the ages, to setts, ballast and aggregate. The town too has lost what had seemed an essential feature, in losing the promenade that Elgar trod. And the other changes the author has seen there are not few. 'La forme d’une ville /Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d’un mortel'. You must feel deeply in this way to undertake the labour of putting your memories down in writing. But reading this narrative of life in those post-war years which are now history themselves, we can surely feel that even today the best medium for the preservation and transmission of the past is still a book—or at any rate a book such as this.