Memories (fictitious)
I often let my fancy roam,
And carry me once more
To those clear scenes so far from home
Sweet Cambria’s mountain lore
Often by the firelight gleam
When the day is done
I’ll sit for hours at once and dream
Of hours that have gone
In memory now I’m climbing
The Glyders rugged peak
Or, wandering on Eryri,
Some wonder-view I seek:
I hear the breezes singing
A welcome o’er Cwm Glas
Then as the day is fading west
I trace some homeward pass.
How happy was the morning –
How happy were we three
When with our rope and rucksacks
We clambered o’er the scree
That tussle on old Trifan
I never can forget –
The fight by crevice, ledge and bluff
The sternest rock I’ve met!
And now, friend Tom you’ve left us
To climb some further height
We did not know that sublime day
The horror of that night
When three go out a-climbing
Yet only two return
How deep the dregs of sorrow then
Are drunk from friendship’s urn!
And Fred, the mountains claimed you
Old Lliwedd wond at last:
We three who oft together
Unloaded dice had cast
We three were dauntless cragsmen
How many a fight we’ve won!
But now….. I sit at whiles and think…
‘Now I’m the only one’!
Oh then how I desponded
I neither feared nor cared;
I climbed the stoutest rock alone
That no one else had dared
But still uncalled for fortune
Kept watch and ward of me
And now I fear that life must hold
Some other destiny. 1925
The above poem seems to have been written, with sadness, with Charlie somehow trying to imagine what life would be like if his bosom friends Tom and Fred expired on the mountains as in the note below, obviously some real life drama that put Charlie into thinking mode. Charlie always fancied himself as a climber from a young age. The following note, which seems to have had a real life background, must have left its mark!
Charlie’s Note: They were three of the best known cragsmen on British mountains, and could always be found together at Easter and New Year time at such famed climbing houses as Wastdale Head in Lakeland, Pen-y-Gwryd or Ogwen Cottage in Snowdonia, whilst for summer climbing they invariably chose the difficult crags on Skye or the Grampians in Scotland.
Their peculiarity was their (one might say personal) attachment to Wales, and it was in Wales where ‘Tom’ met his untimely end in that ‘death trap’, Twll Ddu, which they were climbing, not for the first time. The other two continued their activitities until ‘Fred’, on a lonesome climb (a rare thing) slipped on the 1000ft face of Lliwedd above Llyn Llydaw, and was immediately killed. ‘Frank’, the remaining member of the ill-fated trio, overburdened with grief, seemed to be tempting fate by climbing almost impossible rocks alone, and to the amazement of his friends came out of impossible positions unscathed, until at last, three years after ‘Fred’, the expected happened on the ‘Parson’s Nose’ on Snowden.
