Memories of Elsewhere: River Ogmore, by Tim Cooke

Photo: Dan Wood

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Tim Cooke:

If I try to think of my hometown objectively, images spring to mind one after another like a series of postcards. I see the old stone bridge, from which the town takes its name; I see the derelict bingo hall, a husk that was once a cinema, now a car park; I see the estate, much maligned but not so long ago an architectural vision of hope; I see the playing fields, the site of my worst childhood nightmares; and the dunes, where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. I see the castle, the woods, the supermarket, the dual-carriageway, the standing stones, and the recreation centre. 

Of course, I cannot think of these places without making connections, fitting them together and applying my own stories and others I’ve encountered; experience flows through each scene, as does the River Ogmore. 

The water rises at Craig Ogwr, in the Ogmore Valley, and runs down through Blackmill, Brynmenyn, Aberkenfig, Wildmill, Bridgend Town, Merthyr Mawr, Ogmore by Sea, and out into the Bristol Channel – I love the sounds these places make. There are parts I know intimately – from childhood and my teenage years – and those I’ve visited once or twice, like on school trips. There are huge sections I’ve not been anywhere near, which I find somehow exhilarating. The more I think about the river, the more I contemplate journeys I might make in the future, or should have made in the past, when I was there. 

My first experience of the river – in terms of place, not time (it runs from north to south and I track it geographically) – takes me all the way back to its starting point, up in the valley. At primary school, we spent a whole term on local waterways. We studied maps and diagrams, drew pictures and trekked out into the field. I recall a coach journey to the source, near Nant-y-moel, eating sweets and crisps and feeling sick. We stopped at a bend in the road, flanked by scarp and crag. Water poured from the mountaintop and slid away to our left, worksheets killing the mood. I did something wrong and was made to stand metres apart, listening alone to the babble and the noise of rolling pebbles.

*

I’m looking at a gallery online and the first image in the sequence is of that exact same spot. The grass is greener than I remember it, and the water is whiter. My first impression is that the photograph speaks more clearly of Wales than my recollections do. Maybe it’s in the detail, like the damp weather, or the colour of the soil – I’m not so sure. I move on. Next is a woman dressed in a dark-green coat, speckled with rain. Her expression is one of awe and wonder, or perhaps she’s been caught mid-sentence by the camera. Regardless, she’s part of the story now. 

I continue through pictures of two men on a bridge, a Welsh-flag towel pinned to a washing line, rows of almost identical flats, a war grave, a post-it note scribbled with ‘Donald Trump’, a swastika carved into a tree, and a schoolboy leaning on a wall with his arm in a pink cast, names signed in black pen. There’s a car, too, parked between lockups, a convertible BMW I think, that appears to have been pulled from the flow, the white paint covered in what looks like algae – a modern sort of river monster. It makes me think of the team of volunteers who dragged two-hundred tyres, five trollies, umpteen traffic cones and wheelbarrows, a large gas canister and a road barrier from the river one Saturday, plus fifty bags of smaller items – detritus dumped in the drift.

I keep going and, minutes later, stop to linger in a car park overlooking the bus station on the opposite side. The sun is about to disappear behind the hills in the distance. I walked not far from here, once, with the photographer, making a film about creativity in Bridgend; it was my response to the international press coverage of the spate of suicides that dubbed it ‘The Suicide Town’. As a child, I spent successive afternoons smoking cigarettes underneath a bridge just down from here, then hopped along a series of concrete platforms jutting out from the artificial banks. I have countless similar memories – I don’t know why I’ve chosen this one. 

*

Back in 1999, this stretch of river was central to a high-profile police investigation, into the murder of a young woman, who enjoyed writing songs and poetry. It was said there was no forensic evidence available, as the fast-flowing water had washed it away, but a hammer was discovered in a clump of trees a hundred yards from the cash and carry. Mud found in the boot of a car was thought to match that of the riverbank. 

*

I follow the river’s course through town, below the subway where, at fifteen, I spent a freezing cold night in a sleeping bag, and along the dirt track I’d take home after too many pints in the pub. I pass the recreation centre, where I played five-aside football and hung out with my first proper girlfriend. I can still smell the chlorine leaking from the vents that warmed our backs on winter evenings. There are no photos of these locations; in their place are images of redbrick housing, a man I vaguely know and a pile of chopped wood below broken glass – all effective in their way. I stop to linger on the sand at the bend in the river, referred to locally as just that, where I caught countless eels and my brother a sewin that tasted like shit. I lost a salmon once, I swear; that flash of iridescent silver.  

Across the rugby pitch, beyond the standing stones, I can see the steps. I was sixteen or so when three hooded figures asked for a fight. One of them was screaming at the top of his voice, as he paced back and forth. We ran and they chased us along the path by the playground, shrieking: Let’s drown them in the river. I was terrified, but they gave up pretty soon. That was the year I started bunking off school, spending hours in the strip of woodland that slopes down to the water’s edge. To get there you had to cross the huge metal pipe like a bridge, a post-apocalyptic leviathan, coated in graffiti and rust. I read a while back that a medieval pilgrimage route cut through this landscape. 

When I was twelve, my older brother and some friends made a raft out of tyres, which they strapped together with rolls of duct tape. I was the only one light enough not to sink and so sailed alone. I was basking in the glory of it, enjoying the scenery, until one of the boys began to hurl rocks from a thin bay of shingle. He had a crazed look in his eye. Dodging the missiles, I pleaded with him to stop. It was only when one struck my knee that I was given the time to disembark and sprint home.

*

One of the last pictures in the sequence is of a repeated curve not far from the estuary. The clouds are low above the ridge, and the river is a murky grey. There are thousands of shades of green and plenty of textures to explore. I see myself in a blue raincoat skimming stones, or trudging along the sand with friends after a beach party in the middle of the night. I’m jogging at the foot of the dunes. I twist my ankle and have to walk miles back to the car.

I’ve written about this place before, in a work of weird fiction based on real events. A child is fishing with his father. He’s being taught to hook ragworm, but is disturbed by their form, the writhe and slither. Shivering, he picks the least obscene specimen he can find from the parcel of paper, wrapped like a bag of chips, and holds it out in front of him, watching it curl around his thumb, turning itself inside out. Following his father’s instructions, he pinches it taut and presses the steel tip down until the skin punctures, or pops. At this point, the creature screams. The boy looks up to see a woman thrashing in the mist on the banking opposite. She’s a version of Jenny Greenteeth, or Wicked Jenny, a river hag from folktales who drags children to their deaths.

There’s a girl crouching on the shore, replaced in the following image by a large splash. There’s a coach parked by a bench on the cliff, and a person stares out to sea.

***

Tim Cooke is a teacher, freelance writer and creative writing PhD student. His work has been published by the Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, New Welsh Review and Ernest Journal. His creative work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Shadow Booth, Black Static, New Welsh Review, Foxhole Magazine, Prole, Porridge Magazine, The Nightwatchman, The Lampeter Review, Storgy, Litro Magazine and MIR Online. He recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published in a Dunlin Press anthology on the theme of ports and is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2

Dan Wood is a documentary and portrait photographer based in Bridgend. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he has featured in a wide range of publications. His books Suicide Machine and Gap in the Hedge are available with Another Place Press. He is currently working on a new book about the River Ogmore and was kind enough to share his current edit for this piece.

A week in Orkney

By Tim Cooke:

One summer, my father took us, Rob and I, to the Orkney Islands, to see the Viking burial sites, Pictish and Neolithic ruins, and to do some fishing. I was still in primary school – year five, I think. The first evening we arrived, we watched three locals unload their catch from a small motorboat onto the boggy shore of the lake we were staying on. We ate dinner in a barn, or outbuilding, with stuffed fish mounted on the walls, gawping over our shoulders at our food. Dad drank Guinness, as he would each night for the coming week, while me and my brother sipped ice-cold cans of Irn-Bru. I don’t remember what we spoke about, just that Rob kept repeating Will Smith’s line from Independence Day – Let’s kick the tires and light the fires, Big Daddy.

We fished most mornings, Dad steering us out to the silky deep, but didn’t catch a thing. He’d choose a spot, kill the engine and cast our lines, then wait quietly for a bite. Every so often, one of our wires got snagged in the weeds. My lack of experience meant the first few times this happened, I flicked up my rod and shouted, I’ve got something, only to reel in handfuls of mulch. After every twenty minutes or so – not nearly long enough – Dad broke the silence by announcing we were to move on, because the fish were surely basking in that pool of sun over there, or whatever. Reflecting on our failure one night, he blamed the seal apparently stalking the boat and stealing our trout. He’s stuck to this story ever since.

We’d travelled to Scotland a number of times before our week in Orkney. I’m not sure how many trips we’d made, but they’ve all sort of amalgamated into one in my mind. I recall, for instance, a murder of crows alighting on the roof of Edinburgh Castle, and that very same day, as far as I can tell, driving beside Loch Ness. I was obsessed with the monster mythology and told everyone I was going to see it. And then I did. I had this pamphlet with a condensed history of the beast – a few grainy black and white shots dispersed between paragraphs – that I must have read a thousand times or more. I loved the ‘Surgeon’s Photograph’ – categorical proof, if any was needed, that some time-evading horror lurked below us and would, on occasion, rise to the surface. 

I held on tight to this leaflet as we drove along a narrow country road. There was a screen of lush green foliage to my left, beyond which the water bobbed and chopped. I longed for a breach, and sure enough it came. I’d only been looking at the loch for a matter of minutes – ten perhaps, without averting my eyes – when two humps broke the crest of a wave, followed by a third and fourth, and finally the pointed tail, the last bit to disappear back into the sloshing abyss. It was over in three seconds flat, only ripples remaining – working away from the site of incision like lights on a radar dial.

There – I saw it! Look, over there! Look at the water!

My parents were enjoying my burgeoning interest in cryptozoology and had told me they, too, believed in the creature.

Well there you go, Mum said, you’ve seen it now. You can tell Nan when we get back to the hotel.

Did you see it, though? I was bouncing in my seat.

They smiled at one another and Dad confirmed he had, indeed, seen something.

Nearing the end of our time in Orkney, we visited Maeshowe, a Neolithic cairn and passage grave constructed around 3000 BC. From the outside, it looked like a small hill, a place a hobbit might inhabit. The entrance tunnel, which runs to the central chamber, is only three feet tall, so we had to shuffle through on our hands and knees. As I crawled along, I was struck by the smell of the damp earth, far stronger than that I was familiar with. It left an almost bitter aftertaste. We’d been told there were bodies here and, despite the likelihood of this information being false, I could feel them. I paused in the passageway, unsure as to whether or not I should go any further, but Rob was gaining on me, so I had to keep moving. It was as if I was being sucked into the ground.

Stepping into the chamber was like stepping out of our world and into a different dimension, a time capsule. While the guide talked about dates and architecture, man-hours and angled buttresses, I zoned out and heard sounds and voices swirling in a maelstrom around me. I’d been thinking a lot, at night, about death and heaven. Dad tried to comfort me with words of God and eternal life, but to be honest the idea of forever scared me more than anything else. I couldn’t get my head around it.

I stood facing the wall, looking at an image of a dragon scratched into stone by a Norse graffiti artist in the twelfth century. As recounted in the Orkneyinga Saga, a group of Viking travellers broke into the tomb and left more than thirty runic inscriptions, the world’s largest collection of such engravings. It occurred to me that this dragon I was staring at might, in fact, be skulking in the depths of Loch Ness. Had they seen him too?

I flinched at something wet and warm moving along the back of my skull. I turned around to see Rob grinning. He’d taken, lately, to surreptitiously chewing a tuft of hair protruding from my crown – he loved that I hated it so much. What’s the matter with you? 

Back outside, in the fresh air, we walked along the coast. It could have been a different day, I don’t know. We paused by a farmer’s field and watched a woman delivering a foal, her arm inserted deep inside the back end of the horse. Rob touched the fence and jolted backwards. 

It’s electric. He touched it again. Whoa. That’s so weird. He turned to me. You have a go.

I placed my finger on the wire. Shit! It felt as though my bones were being pulled from their sockets. 

Dad caught up and joined us. 

It’s an electric fence, I explained.

Don’t be silly.

The woman in the field looked up. It is actually. I wouldn’t touch it if I were you.

His hands were already stretched out – it was too late to retract them. Strewth! Bloody hell. The woman shook her head.

We continued walking along the cliffs. The wind was blowing hard now and the sea writhed like a snake pit. Always full of energy, Rob ran on, sidestepping knots of couch grass, skipping over divots and molehills. He was straying dangerously close to the edge.

Robert, get away from there. Dad was holding my wrist ten or fifteen metres inland. Come back here with us. The wind is very strong. Rob strolled over, his mouth twisted into a smile.

What would you do if I fell?

I’d grab your brother and jump off too. The words startled me – I looked up to see if he was joking, but his face was stern, almost angry. I could never go back to your mother with just one. Where was she, anyway? Why hadn’t she come with us? I looked out at the ocean, at the thrashing waves, and felt unsafe.

***

Tim Cooke is a teacher, freelance writer and creative writing PhD student. His work has been published by the Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, New Welsh Review and Ernest Journal. His creative work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Shadow Booth, Black Static, New Welsh Review, Foxhole Magazine, Prole, Porridge Magazine, The Nightwatchman, The Lampeter Review, Storgy, Litro Magazine and MIR Online. He recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published in a Dunlin Press anthology on the theme of ports and is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2

To Island Farm

By Tim Cooke:

On my fourteenth birthday, I was presented with a new bike, complete with front-fork suspension, and the freedom it brought saw a change in my attitude to rules and regulations, borders and boundaries: they became less concrete. As such, the local edgelands, many of which were totally off-limits – both geographically and by parental decree – became my choice stomping grounds. In tow with the more feral and exciting of my friends, I tore through sun-baked industrial estates, ploughed headfirst into monastic woods and derelict graveyards, took up with rogue youths hanging out in car parks beneath brutalist recreation centres and explored the grounds of water treatment plants hidden on the salty flanks of wild coastal scrublands.

One of the first of these potent and dynamic – but often, at a glance, unremarkable – landscapes that demanded our attention was the old POW camp at Island Farm. A close friend of mine, who lived around the corner and introduced me to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, second-wave punk music and Camel cigarettes, had visited with an older schoolmate and returned with beguiling tales of BMX tracks, booze and beautiful girls. It was a daunting prospect, particularly because this strange zone had attached to it many dark and mysterious mythologies that served to keep us clear – not least those concerning satanic rituals and predatory criminals. I’d lived less than half a mile from the site for fourteen years but had never before set foot on its hallowed ground. It was daunting, yes, but compelling, too.

It was midsummer and the sun was hot and high in the sky when the boys called at my door. We’d crossed the large, somewhat monstrous, graffitied sewage pipe in the field behind my house – over the River Ogmore and into Bluebells Woods – every day for the previous week and we needed somewhere new to explore and claim as our own. I fetched my bike from the padlocked shed in the back garden and we set off in single file. The road emanated that warm stench of scorched tarmac, released by a light morning shower that had failed to clear the thick humidity, and the beech trees sizzled with birdsong; we waved to our smiling neighbours, who had known two of us since birth, as we passed.

We rounded a blind bend at reckless speed, forcing the still air into a gentle flurry, and arrived at a treacherous junction that bled onto the A48, a fairly busy dual carriageway separating the town’s southern-most suburb from its surrounding countryside. This is still the point at which the suburban realm leaks into rural territory. The cars whooshed by one after another – red, yellow, black and blue – and we pedalled across to an inlet from where we could join a narrow track into a profusion of slim tress and overgrown shrubbery. A sign warned that trespassers would be prosecuted; we all turned our heads, hocked back our best phlegm and spat at it with embarrassing vigour.

I recall the journey up until this point with surprising clarity, but the next portion has slipped entirely from my mind, the topography obscured by a dark mist that simply won’t shift. I’ve created the right conditions: I’m sat in front of a window at the top of a hill, looking out onto the Black Mountains, the only noise is that of the tits, chaffinches and siskins pecking at the birdfeeder in the garden. I have a copy of an article I recently wrote, detailing some of the camp’s many fragmented histories via a walk I undertook earlier this year – in search of the one remaining hut that contained the prisoners – but still the memory refuses to take any discernible form. I do, however, remember that incomparable feeling of anticipation, a kind of excitement only teenagers on the cusp of something brand new can feel.

We must have weaved our way around the labyrinthine system of footpaths, tearing clouds of dust from the dry earth with our wheels, perhaps stopping momentarily to fill our mouths with sour blackberries, before emerging onto a wide expanse of grey land with no apparent purpose. When I revisited this spot a few months ago, it gave off an eerie sense of transition, as if something was happening. There were wooden stumps hammered into the soil, with rubber boots placed on top to serve as weird markers of some kind. Drinks cans hung from painted trees. Felled wood peppered the terrain and two sets of tattered blue overalls were cast nonchalantly over a stump, an empty bottle of homemade wine or cider resting in the crook of a nearby branch. It was ugly and beautiful, the same but different.

I imagine as youngsters we would have dragged our bikes in rapid, imperfect circles around this nondescript plot of pallid ground, unaware that we were riding on rubble formed during the destruction of nineteen of the twenty units that once constituted the POW camp; the debris was supposed to extend a runway at Cardiff Airport, but it was scattered instead to level the uneven surface. Grass has since grown over it in wild tufts that suit the landscape like an untamed hairstyle.

This is where it comes back to me: we dismounted under a cover of oak-tree foliage and wheeled our bikes along yet another passage surrounded by tight knots of bracken and bramble. First from below and then suddenly above the chirruping birdsong came the aggressive conversation and trigger-happy laughter of adolescents eager to prove something and impress, some relishing the challenge. We swept clear the final twigs and leaves and arrived at a sort of amphitheatre – a dome cut into the topsoil and layered with improvised obstacles to make a gnarly cycle track. Around its circumference were strewn three or four groups of boys and girls, smoking, drinking and flirting.

The air surrounding this congregation was hot and hormonal and laced with pollen. I scanned the faces for any I knew and spotted that of a lad I’d met in the schoolyard after hours, described to me by a friend as one of the best skaters in town. Today he was on a BMX, throwing himself at the final ramp, which was composed of a dented white washing machine turned on its side and a heavy layer of turf thrown over the top. He skidded to a halt at the foot of the banking we were descending and raised his chin: “Alright, boys?” We nodded in return and the chatter that had suddenly dissipated resumed.

For the next half-hour or so we sat alone about five metres from three girls I recognised from the year above. I knew one of them as mouthy and popular, prone to hurling abuse at unsuspecting victims she passed on the path between lessons, while the other two were, as far as I was concerned, beautiful and unobtainable. It was about this age that something chemical had rendered me incapable of talking to anyone I found attractive. The idea of spending any length of time in the company of good-looking older girls was totally outrageous, but before I knew it we were in a circle, sharing Super King cigarettes and swallowing gulps of cheap cider from a plastic flagon. I hardly said a word, which didn’t matter, because they carried me along with their jokes and small talk; it was bliss.

The rest of that first visit remains mainly as a kind of montage, or mosaic. I recall my longing for the brown-haired girl with faint freckles and braces on her teeth. The disproportionate ache I felt then makes me think now of the artwork produced by the prisoners once held at the camp: images of scantily-clad women – wives and girlfriends left behind, perhaps never to be seen again other than as memory-traces scratched into prefabricated concrete. I recollect, too, tumbling from the top of the repurposed washing machine, the pain that dug into my groin on impact and crawled into my stomach. Then there were the feelings of belonging and community that would stick with me right through my years on the darker edges of town.

Finally, we arrived at the far end of the zone and smoked in the shade of Hut 9, from which seventy prisoners escaped in November 1945 by tunnelling into an adjacent field. All of them were recaptured and later dispersed around the world, but I’ve no doubt their ghosts returned from wherever they perished – this landscape needs them somehow. The structure itself, its weathered brickwork and boarded-up windows, meant little to me then – I would even scrawl my name on the wall, adding inadvertently to the tangible palimpsest this site also requires. It feels now, divorced from any official history, like a monument to a significant moment in my life. Strangely, I can’t recall a single journey back from Island Farm, only getting there, staying awhile and, eventually, moving on.

About the author:

Tim Cooke is a teacher and freelance journalist. He writes about film, literature and place for various publications, including the Guardian, Little White Lies, the Quietus, Ernest Journal, the Nightwatchman and the Hackney Citizen. His creative work has appeared in the Lampeter Review, Drain Magazine, Foxhole Magazine, Stepz, Particulations and Litro Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2