The red dragon

As I look now, out of my second floor window, I can see the first mountains of the ancient kingdom of Wales, climbing into the horizon.
They are out there, across the railway tracks, down the road of terraced houses, across the dunes and over the estuary.
Today I can see white crests breaking out where the river meets the sea and, still further out, crepuscular rays beam between cracks in the cloudscape, illuminating foreign beaches or sand banks.
Wales is a whole other country, and I can see it from my lounge. I’ve never been there and yet it appears quite a walkable distance away; drowning in mud, quicksand and saltwater not withstanding.
It seems a place of mystical and magical possibilities. What secrets might it hold? What ancient power may still be locked within those mountains? Their national flag has a picture of a dragon on it! How much more mystical can it get?
When last I thought like this, I resolved to journey there.
In order to aid my flight to this land, I spent all evening watching the dance of the insect-chasing swallows as they glided over red-tiled roof-tops and swooped at speed across the road below.
Then I watched the glossy winged gulls as they flipped and flapped their huge spans and took off from chimney pots and railway sidings. And I spied the arcing flight of the pigeons, glancing branches and telephone lines but still flying straight and true. If these rodents of the skies can do it, I reasoned, then why not I?
So, once the sun had descended into its nightly cradle and the moon was safely ensconced behind the sinewy clouds, I slid open wide the huge window in my lounge and clambered out onto its narrow ledge. Someone had painted the ledge cream, and I found that comforting.
I took in deep lungfulls of air and bent my body backwards, stretching my arms out as I went. I then began to move them in a routine flapping action and my joints cricked and cracked under this unusual motion.
I then held one of my deep breaths, counted to three and prepared to step forward, off the ledge. I strained and I struggled but each time I tried, something, some primal fear deep within, wouldn’t let me go. Wouldn’t let me leave the ledge. I felt like some fledgling who couldn’t depart the feather-lined nest.
Perhaps it was for the best, I thought. I’d probably just collapse, sprawling, in the garden below.
But then a remarkable thing happened. Through a crack in the ever-shifting night clouds, I saw a strange shape flit across the face of the moon.
“A dragon!” I exclaimed and, without second thought, leapt into the summer night.
What happened next is still difficult for me to understand or make clear in my head. I remember though, quite distinctly, my body rising up, and it just kept on climbing.
The railway and road went by in a flash, and I was soon swinging out towards the river. My shadow fair whizzed across the beach and I felt the air temperature cool as I reached the water.
All I could do was flap my arms and head on towards the far side of the estuary and the north-east coast of Wales.
I must have been mere minutes from the Welsh border when suddenly the temperature around me rose quickly. Flame crackled close to my head and I was forced to dive down, close to the spraying sea.
I twirled and wheeled my body like it was some top secret fighter plane and was amazed to see the scaled body of a great red dragon flapping above and snorting its fiery breath in my direction.
For a large beast it flew superbly and soon headed me off in my quest for the coast. A crackling wall of death halted my progress and I banked sharply as my progress to the sandy shores of Talacre was blocked by this boiling curtain of flame.
As I scrambled to avoid a scorching end, my course brought me into the path of the ancient beast itself. The dragon reared and roared at me, swinging a blistering claw in my direction. Its breath, all sulphur and inferno, wilted my resolve. It landed a bloody smack and my body sailed backwards at an astonishing rate, across the ten or so miles of water that separates Merseyside and Wales.
And that is the last thing I remember about my encounter with the red dragon of Wales, the great guardian of its borders, repeller of English invasion.
I awoke the next morning, scratched and sore in the branches of the apple tree that grows in my front garden.
I was lucky to survive my encounter with the dragon, that’s for sure. But every now and then, when I gaze from my lounge window, I still get the urge to make that short trip across the water to visit those Welsh shores.
Not by air, though. Next time, I’m going to swim for it…

Clouds

The feeling of floating above the clouds is a queer one.
If you let it, it can take you over. You could get lost in a kingdom of cloud, see castles with soldiers and dragons attacking. Something about these fat mountains, wisping into new dimensions before your eyes, turns one’s head back to childhood dreaming.
I once took my grandfather with me on a transatlantic flight to New York, to visit my sister. It promised to be an uncomfortable journey; a long flight interlaced with stilted conversation and awkward silences. Still, there were always the clouds.
I remember the first time I flew in a plane. I was an adult yet I was stuck to the window in delight as a million synapses fired at once, relaying memories of candy floss and ginger beer, chasing pig-tails and climbing trees, mud seas and bloodied knees. And now I was above all that.
I travel by air routinely now, but it still stirs up some of those feelings, and it did that day flying with grandpa. I looked away from the clouds when I heard the clinking trolley of the air-stewardess but my grandfather, in the window seat today, stared on at the rolling white ocean below us. The stewardess had to touch his shoulder to see if he wanted a drink. She may have been checking to see if he was dead, too.
Then, as we enjoyed an in-flight brandy or two, my grandfather began to speak.
He told me how he had longed to fly above those clouds in his youth; and how he had loved flying above them in his adulthood.
“I would take every opportunity available to me to taste the higher air,” he said, “And get closer to those white angels dancing in the fluffy sky.”
He didn’t look at me many times while he recalled his time amongst the clouds, and at times I couldn’t tell if his memories were real or fantasy. His words were laden with romance and it seemed as though he had at one time managed to grow wings and flown like a migrating swan to reach the heavens.
The war was raging and there he was, a flying delivery boy transporting whatever was needed to wherever he was told.
He said how lucky he was to be able to fly so often back then and recounted a tale from those days:
“Often the sky would run black with smoke and man-made clouds would burst my white castles and set them aflame.
I would stay calm by searching out any little speck of white in the distance and focusing on it and striving towards it with all my might. Anything to leave behind the grey reek of the flak.
I was doing a similar journey to the one we’re on right now, in the June of 1940, when one of my engines caught fire during an attack on our convoy. It spread to the wing so my co-pilot and I bailed out.
In a way, I’d always longed for the chance to jump, the opportunity to step onto the clouds. It almost made me cry when my body flashed through them like they weren’t even there.
They might look substantial, like a dream taken form, but they’re really just clouds of water vapour.
I thought about this as I plummeted, and I didn’t want to open the parachute, not for a long time. But something in me, maybe when I saw those blue Atlantic waters rushing at me, something made me relent and I pulled the ripcord and slowed sufficiently to hit the water safely.
I bobbed around there for a few hours before a passing trade ship happened to spot me. I looked up, helpless once more, and saw the clouds turn to white again.
And as I looked up at that colossal sky I was thinking, ‘Maybe I just picked the wrong cloud? Just the wrong cloud to walk on?’ ”
He finished his drink and then didn’t say anything for a while. I looked and saw that he’d fallen to sleep.
He was back in the land of dreams now, where anything can happen. So when the stewardess brought our dinner I asked her not to wake him.
We let him sleep awhile longer. We let him sleep there in the sky for as long as we could.