The Dream Cave Read online

  THE DREAM CAVE

  Susan Holliday

  PIP

  POLLINGER IN PRINT

  Pollinger Limited

  9 Staple Inn

  Holborn

  LONDON

  WC1V 7QH

  www.pollingerltd.com

  First published by Pont Books 1996

  This edition published by Pollinger in Print 2007

  Copyright © Susan Holliday 1996

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-905665-23-5

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without prior written permission from Pollinger Limited

  To Michael and Alex,

  who are on their own journey.

  Contents

  NOW

  THE STORY OF A JOURNEY – WALES 16,500 BC by DAVID MORGAN

  BOOK ONE – GREENWATER 16,500 BC

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  BOOK TWO – THE JOURNEY

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  BOOK THREE – HOMECOMING

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  AFTERWARDS

  NOW

  ‘We’re going to explore caves,’ said Owen, dumping his haversack in the middle of his grandfather’s threadbare carpet. ‘Goat’s Hole, Devil’s Hole, Crow Hole, Spritsail Tor, all the Gower caves, Grandad. We think there’s more there than meets the eye.’

  ‘Do you now?’ There was a sudden liveliness in the old man’s blue eyes. ‘Well, I can tell you quite a bit about the caves, and not just in the Gower. You should travel all over, like I did. Further west you come to Hoyle’s Mouth and Coygan cave, and up north, there’s Cefn. And others, that no one knows about.’ His expression became dreamy and lost as if he was no longer sitting in a small, dingy living room in a terrace house in down town Cardiff, surrounded by students and cheap eating houses and cats. As if he was somewhere so compelling and vast it drove him to silence for a few minutes.

  Owen looked at his grandfather with compassion. Dad was right. He shouldn’t be living here on his own. ‘Obstinate,’ Mum had said. ‘It’ll take more than the Welfare to move him.’

  The old man opened his blue eyes and looked straight at his grandson. ‘I don’t just live here,’ he said, as if he had read Owen’s thoughts. He tapped his head. ‘I live here. Such things I’ve seen, such sights.’

  He shifted towards the small, dingy kitchen. ‘It’s like that when you live on your own,’ he said, half to himself.

  ‘But I like it, do you see? Not like some, always on the move.’ He put on the kettle. ‘Well, it’s natural when you’re young, isn’t it? Especially when you consider our ancestors.’

  Owen moved into the small kitchen and watched his grandfather make the tea. ‘I thought the Morgans had lived here for ages!’

  ‘And so they did,’ said Grandad, pouring the hot water into a white cracked teapot, ‘until your father took it into his head to go away. No, no, boy, I’m talking about our long-ago ancestors. The ones who lived in the caves. Who live in my head.’

  ‘Tell me about them, Grandad.’

  ‘No one believes me nowadays,’ the old man grumbled. He picked up a mug and rubbed it with a dirty tea towel. Owen could see the going might be difficult.

  ‘I live in Croydon,’ he said gently, ‘and I have an English accent, but I see things in my head too.’

  ‘Do you now? It’s more than your father did. Else he wouldn’t have gone to live in England, would he now?’

  ‘I see all sorts of things in my head,’ said Owen persistently. ‘That’s why I’m off to Swansea in the autumn to study art. You have to see things in your head if you’re going to paint.’

  ‘You seem like a painter with all that hair,’ said his grandfather, surprisingly cheerful again. Owen took off the cap that he had been wearing back to front over his long black hair. He had an earring in one ear and looked as if he needed a shave.

  ‘Dad doesn’t like the look of me either,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Grandad. ‘Come to think of it, you look just as they did.’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘Your ancestors from a long time ago. They mostly looked like you.’ Grandad poured the tea carefully and handed Owen a mug. They went back into the living room and sat opposite each in the dowdy armchairs. The prehistoric look, thought Owen, Mum would like that one! But a smile might offend his grandfather.

  ‘How do you know, Grandad, about our ancestors, I mean?’

  The old man had the same dreamy expression in his eyes. ‘I’ve seen them, haven’t I?’

  He’s a bit of a crackpot, Dad had said, before Owen left, but he means well. Give him my love.

  ‘Dad sends his love,’ said Owen, out of the blue, but he didn’t succeed in breaking the old man’s dream. They sat in silence for a while until Grandad pulled himself up, drank his tea and began to tap his left foot. His eyes were lively blue again.

  ‘So you’re going to explore caves, is that it?’

  ‘That’s it, Grandad.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘I’m going with David. He lives in Swansea.’

  ‘What colour is his hair?’

  So he isn’t quite right, thought Owen.

  ‘Reddish,’ he said kindly. ‘He tells me he’s growing a moustache. It’s a bit straggly, he says.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Grandad triumphantly, trembling a little as if he had made a great discovery.

  Perhaps it was all too much.

  ‘Do you mind me staying overnight?’ said Owen. ‘I don’t want to get in your way.’ He stood up and took the empty mugs into the kitchen and ran them under the tap. ‘If it is too much for you I could go to the Youth Hostel,’ he shouted back.

  ‘Come and sit down, will you,’ said Grandad eagerly, ‘and stop talking such nonsense.

  That’s better. I don’t want you towering over

  me like they do.’

  ‘Who, Grandad?’

  ‘Juniper and Oak. The ones who looked after me. They were quite tall men in those days, do you see?’

  Mum was right, thought Owen. Grandad should be in sheltered accomodation. Someone to look after him would make all the difference.

  The late evening sunshine pushed its way through the dusty windows and the drab net curtains. Outside a crowd of youths were shouting at each other, on their way back from a football match. It’s normal out there, thought Owen. Good job it’s a short visit. But Grandad’s eyes were shining again and the sunlight cheered the dusty room as if someone had put a treasure into it. Grandad sat forward in his chair.

  ‘We have a lot in common, you and I. Though you can’t see it, I can tell that.’

  Owen shifted his feet uncomfortably. Did Grandad know what he had been thinking?

  ‘Now listen to me, sonny. I’m an old man now and when I go they’ll clear this all out as if I had never been here. Burn it all, I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s why I want to give you something. I ca
n tell you will look after it. You’re a chip off the old block as my Da used to say.I’ve kept it in a drawer for many years but now the right moment has come along. I can tell that,’ he said again, looking intently at Owen. ‘It’s a book I once wrote. It came out of something that happened to me a long, long time ago. In the sixties.’

  ‘The Beatles,’ said Owen inconsequentially, but Grandad ignored his comment.

  ‘1967. The year when everything changed for me. I’m not boring you, am I?’ he said, his confidence suddenly faltering.

  ‘No, no. I love hearing about the past,’ said Owen quickly. ‘Dad never speaks about it. He’s always full steam ahead, if you see what I mean. I expect he was always like that. But I like to think about things. Slowly. It gets on Dad’s nerves.’ It occurred to him then that maybe he really was like his grandfather. He began to listen more intently.

  Grandad locked into his thoughts. ‘In 1967 I was fifty-five years old. That was the year I lost everything. My wife went off with another man. A little while afterwards my son—that’s your father, of course—took himself to England to find work. Then the final straw: I was made redundant. I was in the print in those days, do you see, and I didn’t have another trade. Everyone seemed to think I was too old to start again, so I went on the dole. No choice. I liked to write and explore but there was no money in those things.’

  So he decided to walk, he told Owen. All over Wales, to get to know the country better. Wales had to become his family. He always did his homework—read books and went to museums before he set out.

  At this moment Grandad stood up and disappeared into his bedroom. He came back with a scruffy, much-thumbed note book. He looked at Owen over his glasses. ‘This is what began it all. My real project, that is.’ With some difficulty he read out a little passage he had scribbled down.

  ‘Professor Sollas: “The Red Lady of Paviland is a Cro-Magnon man. He represents the most westerly outpost of a race which is known to have extended to the east as far as Lautsch and Predmost in Moravia and from Belgium on the north through the Dordogne in France to the margin of the Mediterranean at Mentone.”

  ‘Do you see what it means, Owen?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Owen, who didn’t know where those places were anyway and found it rather boring.

  ‘It means our ancestors were of the same race as the great cave painters of the Dordogne. Just think of that! Just think what that implies.’

  From then on Grandad had became obsessed with prehistoric Wales. Now he had a purpose and a project. When he was a young man he had read in the newspaper about some school boys who discovered the great cave paintings at Lascaux. He became convinced there must be a lost cave in Wales where the Ice age animals would have been painted with as much mastery as in the Dordogne. There must be one somewhere, he told himself. If his ancestors were of the same race the chances were that they expressed themselves in the same way as the Lascaux painters. He read everything he could find about the last Ice age in the library, the fluctuations in the climate, the flora and fauna. There was no English Channel then, he told Owen, and much of the Bristol Channel was a wooded fertile plain. Think of that.

  He made up his mind to follow the rivers. Conwy and Clwyd, Dee and Severn, Lugg and Arrow, Teme and Clun, Wye and Usk, Teifi and Tywi. He half sung the names of the rivers like a litany. Men always settled near water, he said. The north would tell him about the Ice Age and the south would tell him about the people. He looked at Owen. ‘Grief can make you strong as well as weak.’

  And then it happened. One day in winter he explored the Coygan cave and afterwards found himself somewhere along the Tywi river. It was like that for him that year, he told Owen; it was as if there had been gaps in his time.

  ‘Today the new-fangled doctors would call it a breakdown,’ he said wryly.

  When he set out it was a cold day and the sky was low and grey. He didn’t mind—he even wanted to experience the cold. For his head was full of ancient times and the difficulties his people must have endured. He should be all right, he thought, for there were plenty of main roads about and he had food in his haversack. He was wearing his weatherproof jacket and his walking boots. He was well-armed against the weather. He would aim to get to that branch in the river. The Afon Duad, wasn’t it?

  Then the snow came down, not gently or softly but on a huge wind that swept over the hills. He was soon completely lost. He began to climb a hill because he thought the main road was on the other side. By now he was tired but at the same time he had the feeling he was no longer alone. Two young men seemed to be walking beside him, brought on the wings of the wind and the driven snow. Two companions, come from another age, an ancient Wales. One was Juniper, who looked like Owen, and the other was Oak. He was certain they would protect him.

  Grandad stared straight at Owen. ‘It’s happened to other climbers, you know. The feeling of having a companion. You see, by that time I no longer knew where I was or even who I was, such was the effect of that snow on my poor mind. I believe that day I would have died if we hadn’t reached their cave. For that was where they were leading me. The entrance was a small hole sheltered by an overhanging ridge. They told me to go through, that I would be warmer inside. I put on my torch and squeezed my way down a long tunnel.’

  Suddenly he was in a vast cave and Juniper told him to shine his torch on the walls. There, out of the shadows leapt the most beautiful paintings he had ever seen. Deer, horses, auroch painted in black and earth red. Overlapping each other, mysterious, magic, absolutely silent. It was like the paintings at Lascaux but this was his own country, his own hill. He wept for joy.

  He didn’t remember much else. Perhaps he had gone to sleep, he didn’t know. At some point he found himself outside, stumbling in the snow again. It was dark by now but it had stopped snowing. The stars were like snow flakes and the moon walked lightly on the top of the hill. ‘Walk towards the moon,’ said Juniper. ‘Don’t stop,’ said Oak. His hands were bitterly cold inside his gloves and he longed to lie down but his friends helped him on. It was at dawn the helicopter came over the top of the hill and caught sight of him. Then Juniper and Oak vanished and he was winched up to the helicopter. ‘No fool like an old fool,’ they told him, as they wrapped him up in a big blanket.

  ‘I was ill after that,’ said Grandad. ‘They put me in hospital and took off my little fingers. My legs never fully recovered so I never went walking again. I tried to tell people about the cave but no one believed me. So in the end I spent my time writing a story. All about my friends, Juniper and Oak, and the long journey they had to take. I wrote about our ancient rivers and forests that flowered in the brief summers of Ice Age Wales and froze in its long winters. For that was how it was then.’

  Grandad paused as if he was looking back at that far-off time. Then he looked straight at Owen as he did when he wanted him to listen hard. ‘When you walk and explore I want you to remember how it was all those years ago. And to remember your ancestors—especially Juniper, who was so like you.’

  Grandad stood up slowly and went over to the window. He pulled aside the dusty net curtains. The sun was sinking and in the half light cars and houses and smoke and roads and trains were all he could see or hear.

  ‘That’s the landscape we’ve made,’ said Grandad as he shuffled back to his chair. He sighed as if he was getting tired. ‘Now listen to me, boy. I’m going to bed now. I always go early, you know. You can slip out for fish and chips. Dai Griff’s Bar is just up the road next to the Chinese. I never eat in the evening.’ He paused. ‘You can read the book tonight in bed if you like. It will give you something to do.’

  Owen smiled. ‘It’s been a really cool evening, Grandad. And I will read the story.’ He hoped secretly he would be able to read the writing; it would be embarrassing if he couldn’t. He watched his grandfather go to the bedroom and bring back three thick hardback exercise books tied up with a ribbon.

  ‘Here we are. I’ve kept it for a long while. It’s time to giv
e it away.’

  Owen took the books carefully. ‘I’ll look after the story, Grandad, I promise. I could put it on the computer for you, if you liked.’ It was the best thing he could suggest.

  ‘Now that would be a good idea,’ said Grandad. ‘But read it first. That’s the important thing, to read it before you start exploring.’

  He said goodnight and shuffled off to his bedroom.

  ‘Don’t forget to put out the lights,’ he shouted back.

  Owen couldn’t resist opening the first book. To his surprise the pages were unlined and white and the writing was small and controlled as if Grandad was trying to make his story look as beautiful as he could.

  That night he put on the yellow rickety lamp in his attic room and very carefully turned the pages.

  THE STORY OF A JOURNEY

  WALES, 16,500 BC

  by

  DAVID MORGAN

  The Last Glaciation is the background of prehistoric Wales. At its height Wales must have been uninhabitable by man or beast-— the whole country covered with a vast sheet of white ice. Nothing lived. The gradual retreat of the ice-sheet was accompanied by a slow and perhaps interrupted approach to more temperate weather. For a long while the climate was like northern Siberia: its tundras or flooded bands froze deeply during the long sub-arctic winters and flowered briefly during the short hot summers. Following the retreating ice, people came to Wales and settled here to hunt and worship mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave-bear, cave-lion, wolf, bison, reindeer and horse. Some of them were the same race as the great cave painters of the Dordogne. Juniper was such a one who, with others in the Salvi tribe, practised the art of painting in the marvellous tradition of their forebears.

  This story is dedicated to Juniper and Oak who saved my life.

  BOOK ONE