Rhyl meet again
David Lovibond
My mother and father honeymooned in Rhyl. It wasn’t only that my father had a sense of humour: the borders were closed during the second world war and at least Wales was sort of abroad. Anyway, 65 years on I thought a faux pilgrimage to the disappointing beginnings of my parents’ disappointed lives had to be a more original alternative to a week on the piste than a week in the Caribbean sun. Especially if I could motor through the mountains and swan along the prom in the sort of caddish two-seater my cravatted father aspired to.
To be sure, the 4/4 sports car bravely lent me by the Morgan Motor Company looked the part. Unchanged in appearance since 1936, it had the jaunty air of Leslie Phillips in lecherous pursuit of pulchritudinous nurses, or doomed air aces on a last night out before the big op. Sadly, my Morgan had pre-war notions of creature comfort too: the rudimentary springs had me bouncing my coccyx on the rear axle for a thousand miles, the primitive heater gave up the ghost before Shrewsbury and the fist-size gaps in the hood offered no kind of challenge to the horizontal Welsh rain. But with the top down in honour of the brief winter sunshine and the wind in my flying helmet, I was suddenly Mr Toad bowling along the Queen’s highway scattering weasels before me at 90 miles an hour. Naturally I kept to the red roads, and rattling through the old marcher towns I caught a glimpse of that vanished world when cars were curiosities and there could be a fleeting connection between places and passing strangers.
In common with so many seaside towns, Rhyl reached its apogee in the lean uncomplicated years leading up to Hitler’s war. It is there in picture postcards: the high Victorian terraces fronting the esplanade, the decorous pleasure gardens, the glass pavilions, the well-mannered crowds promenading — the men always in ties. In decline, the Blackpools and Southends have found salvation in cheerful vulgarity and retain a municipal pride in appearance. Rhyl is a different story. But every sow’s ear has a silver lining: on a Mediterranean plage, surrounded by the beautiful people, one pale Englishman might as well be invisible. Drive a classic sports car through Rhyl town centre and you’re a god.
‘If you want to be drunk and not be out of place, be scruffy and not be out of place, be poor and not be out of place, then Rhyl is the town for you,’ says local businessman Simon Harris. ‘Out of all the places I’ve visited in Britain and Europe, this is the most comfortable place for down-and-outs.’ But there had to be more to Denbighshire than this. I took Sage Harris’s advice, put Rhyl behind me and headed for the hills.
Climbing beyond the reek of chips and onions, and the twinkling lights of the fruit machines, I stumbled upon an unsuspected world of whitewashed cottages and stone manors a mere long song from the town. The green foothills of the Cambrian mountains are a kind of Welsh ‘flyover’ country — a hundred-square-mile chunk of corrugated emptiness the tourists never see in their hurry to reach the familiar splendours of Snowdonia. Above the old Roman road west of St Asaph, and stretching south as far as Betws-y-Coed and the A5, Morgan and I met fewer than 50 cars in half a day’s meandering. Pushing up the sinewy unclassifieds through a landscape of sudden perspectives and intimate glimpses, I came to the remote tarn-strewn heart of this unvisited country near Gwytherin, a scattering of freestone cottages at the head of a tiny valley. Turning for the sea, I lunched on fish at the Kinmel Arms, a Cotswold look-a-like gastropub in St George (what kind of a people calls a village after the patron saint of their conquerors?). The pub sits discreetly at the gates of an antique seat of the Welsh squirearchy and is obviously a cut above; it won the palm for ‘Best Dining Pub in Wales’ last year. I could have had 11 different kinds of locally caught fish if the fancy took me, but the prices have more in common with Rio than Rhyl: a three-course meal comes to about £35 per head.
Later, avoiding Edward’s castles, I bought postcards in Llandudno and, contrary to my resolve not to like the place it is more or less obligatory to admire, I found I rather did. There’s something about monumental Victorian gentility that hushes people up and makes them behave, which gladdens my Tory heart. Driving west, I followed the spangled trail taken by numberless legions of scousers in the pre-Costas days of long ago and crossed Stephenson’s bridge on to Anglesey. I found the love of my life here (24 January 1972 — but I don’t think about it) and spent a Crosby, Stills and Nash summer among the sandhills of Newborough Warren. Most of the coastal villages, especially in the accessible east, have become Liverpudlian retirement colonies or subsumed in caravans. But the interior north of Llangefni, the island’s grim little capital, is as Celtic as the day Suetonius Paulinus massacred the Druids here. Dozens of isolated settlements, older than Rome, wayside chapels, and stone hedges high as a man and stickle-backed with slate, and fine houses among tall trees, blurred by rain. A soft country of little cornfields and easy grazing, unregarded, unknown and unspoilt.
Unlike Rhyl. And yet, looking hard, there was at least one chink of light in the town. Mr Harris and I were fellow guests at ‘Ty’n Rhyl’, described as a restaurant with rooms, in the heart of Rhyl’s badlands. The Welsh tourist board insisted this was the only feasible place to stay in town, and I saw what it meant. Dating from the early 17th century, Ty’n Rhyl is the oldest house in Rhyl by a couple of hundred years, and not only gave its name to the town but owned the marshland on which it was developed. The hotel is a decent distance from the road so that, once the oak door is wedged shut, the wood panelling taken in, the snug drunk in, the Barbie-pink bedrooms forgiven and owner/chef David Barratt’s food eaten, you can forget about the town for the night. But the Barratts are running a beleaguered outpost, a Rorke’s Drift among the Zulu, and I fear for their survival in such a wilderness.
Morgan Cars at www.morgan-motor.co.uk; Ty’n Rhyl hotel, email: e.barratt@aol.com; Kinmel Arms: 01745 832207.
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