Once by Andrew McNeillie Page B

boat available for anglers.
    In the seventeenth century a belief prevailed that whoever, on one of the three “spirit nights” – All Hallows Eve, May Day Eve, and Midsummer Eve – watched beside this lake, would see who were to die in the coming year. *   There were unfounded stories of deformed fish and of birds avoiding the lake, also there was a causeway running into it, of which the farthest stone was called the Red Altar. It was believed that in hot weather, to stand on the causeway and throw water on to the Red Altar would cause rain before nightfall.
    This is what Ifor knew, along with whatever else he kept to himself.
    (There was no charge levied to fish there in our time. 5s each a day would have been preventative.) Marie Trevelyan reveals that the lake was also said to be a point of entry into the Celtic underworld, Annwn or Annwfn, and tells that a dove appearing by those ‘black and fateful waters’
    foretokened the descent of a beautiful but wicked woman’s soul to torment.... Fiends would arise from the lake and drag those who had led evil lives into the black waters. Those who had led good lives would be guided past the causeway leading to the lake, and vanish in spirit forms robed in white.
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    It was for all of us an entry into the underworld of the heart and mind, the soul itself, both when we were there, and when we were not, the place we haunted to stave off the world’s demands and stresses on our time, the place that haunted and possessed us. It was my first love affair. The real thing, at first sight, and, in this case, at first hearing. For I heard tell of it of course before ever I saw it, and I saw it first in the mind’s eye.
    I knew only one Black Lake myth in those days and believed it for fact, as did the others who told it me, and who died before I could tell them the truth. We believed that the aircraft flattened into the high crag, like a moth buckled and splattered on a car windscreen, was a German bomber that had lost its way returning from a raid on Liverpool. Here was the war haunting my world again, like the Laundry Hill siren, but no warning for those men and no all clear above the mountain, just the ghosting mist and the rock behind it. I used to wonder about the rear-gunner, looking back into the night, as the plane concertina’d exploding into the crag. Who was he? What were the last seconds of his life? By what fraction did he outlive the others in the cockpit?
    You might still see wreckage up there now, for all I know. It is some years since I was there (as in the poem above) and I could see none then, the mist being down, tumbling back into the cauldron. But it held great fascination for me in those years and when we fished at the far corner below the cliffs I would sometimes tire of catching nothing and clamber up through the rocks and search among them, among the bilberries, the myrtle and heathers, for bits of aluminium, misshapen nuggets from the furnace of the impact, or meccano-like strips of aluminium from fuselage, wing or tail.
    Once I found a twisted piece, the size of my thumb, a slug of light alloy forged in the flames, from which protruded, miraculously, an intact light-bulb, something from the instrument panel, I suppose. I hoarded these little treasures in a cardboard fishing-reel box, for some years. But now when I’d like to cast my eye over them again, I find they have gone the way of all things, into the dark, into the underworld, where those airmen, or whatever burnt offering remained of them, fell to their doom.
    They were Germans. They were the enemy and as a callous boy and youth I shed no tears for them or their nightmare fate. Hadn’t ‘The Dambusters’ been one of the first few films I ever saw, in ‘The Supreme’, Old Colwyn, through a fug of cigarette smoke, the projection room like a gun-turret under fire, spluttering and flickering, and stuttering suddenly to a halt, as if hit, and