My own earliest memories come from the place to which the children of Bryn Mill school and their teachers were evacuated. Pumsaint is a village, now in Powys, named for ‘Five Saints’.  “Gold has been dug up here since Roman times,” they will tell you in the village shop, with its tourist attraction posters. The place we had been sent to was a mansion, Dolacauthi Hall, no longer standing. I found out later that it was remembered locally for being the place of a notorious murder, where a servant savagely hacked his master to death in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

When I went back there with Ken, my husband, in the early 1980s, I looked across the garden at an apple tree and said confidently: “There’s a swing on that tree”. When I examined the tree, I found deep grooves from long ago where the ropes had cut into the bark. It had not been easy to find the place. We had driven up from Swansea after a meeting and spent some time searching the area. Eventually, we went down a drive into parkland and the land began to feel familiar, albeit like a place seen in a dream.

I found a modern house. The owner was friendly, perhaps used to the occasional historian or tourist. She told me that her house had indeed been built on the site of Dolaucothi Hall, pulled down sometime after the war and I was welcome to wander around the garden.

As I walked around, trying to see where the Hall had been and which way it had faced, I felt myself as a very small child with two or three others, giggling and whispering, daring each other to approach the glass porch of the house. “Snakessss, there are snakessss in there,” whispered the older children. I remember being a terrified half-believer, yet somehow aware that I was enjoying a pretence.

I remembered sitting in the corner of a huge bay window, my brother at the far end, both howling dismally for what seemed like hours. There were shrubs outside and the light made squares on the wooden floor. It seemed a very big place, smelling strange and old. My brother told me, after we were grown up, that he remembers it too; it was the day our parents left us there.

I remember being very small and looking out through the bars of a cot, probably the cot sides of a child’s bed, playing with the stripy shadows of the bars. Another time, I am in the same cot lying with my cheek on a wet pillow. I am aware that I have just been having a most almighty outburst of rage. High over my head in a vast dark room, I can hear shocked whispers about me from the grown-ups, but I am drowsy, spent, it seems to have no relation to me anymore, it’s gone.

The Gold in the Shadow 

When I went on that visit in the 1980s, walking in the garden of the modern house that had replaced the great Hall, I looked out across the parkland beyond. I could see in the middle distance a huge, beautiful tree, an oak I think, just coming into leaf. Suddenly, now in my forties, I was overwhelmed with my first memory of God, my first experience of the mystical. I was no longer on the ground but looking out of a great window on the first floor at that very tree. I knew it was very early morning, barely light. I could see the milky mist coiling around the trunk and the crown, in full leaf. I am as sure as one can be that it was a true memory, but there is no proof.

The wooden floor under my feet feels cold and slippery. The glass seems to radiate cold at me. I know it is naughty to be out of my dormitory before getting up time with no-one around, but my misery is too much for me. I cannot put my sorrow into words but my whole world has been taken away and I am sick with the loss of my mummy and daddy.

I look at the tree and it speaks to me, not with words to the ear but something directly in the heart:

“I am TREE. I was here long before your father and mother and I will be here long after you are all gone.” 

I am far too young to understand what it is saying, but somehow I know in a way beyond any four year old’s understanding that it is saying “I am GOD”; the words tree and God are the same because GOD has chosen to show me the real essence of being through a tree.

I remain standing there open-mouthed, my feet squirming in the cold and eventually make my way back to bed, the experience folded small and tucked away in my memory only to be woken by this visit.

Was it real? Was it a true memory? How can I say? Time does not exist in a mystical experience and this was a re-experiencing. 

I do know that it must have been the source of something of which I have been consciously aware all through my childhood and adult life – a knowledge of the existence of God. I have never been without a sense that, although we live in a marvellous scientifically-ordered universe, at the heart of it is a great mystery of personal love beating down on us, evoking a response. Both within us and around us. 

As I grew up, that sense seemed to match up, near enough, with what other people called God, so I used the term. It never seemed to fit, though, with the caricature judgemental man with a long white beard.

One thing seems to me to give it a hallmark of authentic ‘otherness’. If I was going to hallucinate or project something, even in memory, to a child that would comfort her in the desolation I experienced at the loss of my parents, even now I would be unable to resist making it obviously comforting. It would have to be a warm glow, a sense of being hugged, a visit by an angelic being.

I was a very physical child, well used to cuddles. This experience was almost harsh in its sparseness but somehow it gave me something more valuable than comfort; a lifelong sense that there was order and love in the universe beyond anything we can imagine. 

Today I still only know those three things about Pumsaint, all of them very valuable. And I found not just five saints, but the massed ranks of heaven and something more precious than gold.