To the Ends of the Earth

She was wearing a straw calypso hat tipped back on her bushy hair, and a knit jersey, and white slacks. It was a very hot day and she was dressed for it. There is a certain educated English voice that is both correct and malicious. Jan Morris has such a voice. It was not deep but it was languid, and the maleness that still trembled in it made it sultry and attractive. There was nothing ponderous about her. She shrugged easily and was a good listener, and she laughed as a cat might—full-throated and with a little hiss of pleasure, stiffening her body. She was kind, reckless, and intelligent.

Her house was very neat and full of books and pictures. “I have filled it with Cymreictod—Welshness.” Yes, solid country artifacts and beamed ceilings and a NO SMOKING sign in Welsh—she did not allow smoking in her house. Her library was forty-two feet long and the corresponding room upstairs was her study, with a desk and a stereo.

Music mattered to her in an unusual way. She once wrote, “Animists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing, but I go one further; I am an inanimist, holding that even lifeless objects can contain immortal yearnings.… I maintain, for instance, that music can permanently influence a building, so I often leave the record player on when I am out of the house, allowing its themes and melodies to soak themselves into the fabric.”

Perhaps she was serious. Inanimate objects can seem to possess something resembling vitality, or a mood that answers your own. But melodies soaking into wood and stone? “My kitchen adores Mozart,” the wise guy might say, or, “The parlor’s into Gladys Knight and the Pips.” But I did not say anything; I just listened approvingly.

“I suppose it’s very selfish, only one bedroom,” she said.

But it was the sort of house everyone wanted, on its own, at the edge of a meadow, solid as could be, well-lighted, pretty, painted, cozy, with an enormous library and study and a four-poster: perfect for a solitary person and one cat. Hers was called Solomon.

Then she said, “Want to see my grave?”

I said of course and we went down to a cool shaded wood by a riverside. Jan Morris was a nimble walker: she had climbed to twenty thousand feet with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953. Welsh woods were full of small twisted oaks and tangled boughs and moist soil and dark ferny corners. We entered a boggier area of straight green trees and speckled shade.

“I always think this is very Japanese,” she said.

It did look that way, the idealized bushy landscape of the woodblock print, the little riverside grotto.

She pointed across the river and said, “That’s my grave—right there, that little island.”

It was like a beaver’s dam of tree trunks padded all around with moss, and more ferns, and the river slurping and gurgling among boulders.

“There’s where I’m going to be buried—or rather scattered. It’s nice, don’t you think? Elizabeth’s ashes are going to be scattered there, too.” Jan Morris was married to Elizabeth before the sex change.

It seemed odd that someone so young should be thinking of death. She was fifty-six, and the hormones she took made her look a great deal younger—early forties, perhaps. But it was a very Welsh thought, this plan for ashes and a grave site. It was a nation habituated to ghostliness and sighing and mourning. I was traveling on the Celtic fringe, where they still believed in giants.

What did I think of her grave? she asked.

I said the island looked as though it would wash away in a torrent and that her ashes would end up in Cardigan Bay. She laughed and said it did not matter.

At our first meeting about a year before, in London, she had said suddenly, “I am thinking of taking up a life of crime,” and she had mentioned wanting to steal something from Woolworth’s. It had not seemed so criminal to me, but over lunch I asked her whether she had done anything about it.

“If I had taken up a life of crime I would be hardly likely to tell you, Paul!”

“I was just curious,” I said.

She said, “These knives and forks. I stole them from Pan American Airways. I told the stewardess I was stealing them. She said she didn’t care.”

They were the sort of knives and forks you get on an airplane with your little plastic tray of soggy meat and gravy.

Talk of crime led us to talk of arson by Welsh nationalists. I asked why only cottages were burned, when there were many tin caravans—as the English called mobile homes—on the coast that would make a useful blaze. She said her son was very pro-Welsh and patriotic and would probably consider that.

I said that the Welsh seemed like one family.

“Oh, yes, that’s what my son says. He thinks as long as he is in Wales he’s safe. He’ll always be taken care of. He can go to any house and he will be taken in and fed and given a place to sleep.”

“Like the travelers in Arabia who walk up to a Bedouin’s tent and say, ‘I am a guest of God,’ in order to get hospitality. Ana dheef Allah.”