Interview: Christine Evans

Jon Gower leaves mainland Wales to visit Ynys Enlli and meet poet Christine Evans.

One of the Christine Evans’ most enduring poems is one called ‘Enlli.’ In its opening she explains how:

We get to it through troughs and rainbows

flying and falling, falling and flying

rocked in an eggshell
over drowned mountain ranges.

 The island swings towards us, slowly.

We slide in on an oiled keel,
step ashore with birth-wet, wind-red faces

wiping the salt from our eyes
and notice sudden, welling
quiet, and how here the breeze
lets smells of growing things
settle and grow warm, a host of presences

drowsing, their wings too fine to see.

Christine Evans has been living on Ynys Enlli, Bardsey island for most of her adult life. She summers here, leaving before winter’s gales and then returning again come spring, like a migrating bird.

Born in west Yorkshire, Evans came as a teacher of English to Pwllheli, her father’s birthplace, over forty years ago and has lived on the Llŷn Peninsula ever since.

Learning Welsh

She had an interest in learning Welsh from an early age, having picked up a few words from her grandmother. In 1969 she married into a family which had farmed Enlli for many generations. She began writing poetry suddenly during maternity leave in 1976.

Through the window of her sturdy home we can see her husband Ernest’s boat, working the lobster pots around the coasts of the island. He is a man who knows how to harvest the sea in the same way that a farmer knows how to tend the land. He understands the sea, its moods, currents and dangers in a very intimate way. ‘It goes very deep with him,’ suggests Christine.

Ernest is very deeply connected with the island. He grew up on Enlli and his was the last name entered in the register of the island’s school. He was seven or eight when the school closed. He then had to board with relatives on the mainland for a bit.

But he and Christine have spent every summer on the island and it’s hard for the two of them to be away. They normally leave in October. ‘After COVID he was in hospital for some six weeks. Once he did manage to get back to the island it was like some kind of elixir, he just recovered straight away. It’s quite a healing place.’

Medicinal

The monks who once inhabited the island planted herbs which have medicinal properties, as Christine explains: ‘That’s all they had. There are a few plants here that aren’t common on the mainland. There’s henbane which helped stop seasickness and you can also find it in Porth Meudwy, the little cove where the boat departs and arrives on the mainland. And elecampane, too, which used to grow big and high.

That used to be found in the field near the chapel, because the field there was known as Gerddi Lleuddad, Lleuddad’s garden, after one of the monks. It’s now been ploughed up. We saved some cuttings and I sent some all over the country. And there was the bitter tasting wormwood which was used for treating pretty much anything, particularly if you were in the early stages of sickening, suffering from a cold or a sore throat.’

Christine can hardly remember a time when she didn’t write. ‘I’ve always scribbled, even as a child. I didn’t publish anything until the year I had maternity leave, had a baby and thought this is great, I have all this time. I wrote most of my poems with my son Colin in the carry-cot beside me.’

Every visitor to the island will know Colin as he grew up to become the boatman who takes residents and visitors safely across the fast running Swnt, which races between the island’s brontosaurus hump and the mainland.

Atmosphere

Christine, who has produced six collections to date, recalls how ‘The early poems were about subjects such Aberdaron and its farmers and the social atmosphere which was unlike anything I was used to, the way they brought the smell of their beasts in with them. I hope nobody was insulted.’

She is a detailed and sensitive chronicler of island life, its rhythms, its history and its natural history. ‘I’m amazed at how many birds I’ve written about. This is the Kingdom on the Wren, with somewhere between 150 and 200 pairs nesting on the island. Gannets fly through the work and Manx shearwaters, of course.’ Enlli is one of the most important breeding sites for the shearwaters in the world, seabirds that range widely as they feed, then return to their underground nests at night.

Shearwater

The shearwater’s nocturnal call is an extraordinary, caterwauling sound. Christine says ‘It’s very breathy, very asthmatic. The first night I spent on the island nobody had told me about shearwaters. I was up in Nant, in the north end of the island, in the front bedroom which is near a lot of nesting burrrows.

‘I was woken by this strange noise. I didn’t want to raise the household so I opened the window and I could see black shapes hurtling about. If I’d been told about it it wouldn’t have had the same drama and impact.’

Enlli is a very special place by day or by night and ‘People of all kinds are very responsive to the island. Mind you, there was one disappointed visitor who arrived, looked around and then asked where is everything? He though he was going to Barry island not Bardsey island!’

Compulsion

Christine Evans finds all she needs here, not least the stuff of her poems. ‘Writing is a compulsion and I’ve got to do it.’ Away from the blandishments of the mainland she enjoys reading a great range of poets. ‘R.S.Thomas, of course, because he’s always got something interesting to say even if you don’t always agree with him and he has wonderful phraseology. I’ve been reading and listening to Thomas for years.’

It’s an island that has its own poetry, one feels. As Evans suggests, ‘Every time when the boat engine stops there is always this sense, that something opens to welcome you. And it’s maybe just the sound of the birds, unless the foghorn’s sounding.’

The square bulk of lighthouse is one of the small island’s most prominent features, although the old white light, which used to lure thousands of migrating birds to their deaths, has now been replaced by red LED beams. But the bright beams of light still flash and illuminate Christine Evans’ poems, such as the mesmerising end of the poem called simply ‘Enlli.’

And then…

 After supper, lamplight
soft as the sheen of buttercups

and candle-shadow blossoms

bold on the bedroom wall.

 Outside’s a swirl of black and silver.
The lighthouse swings its white bird round

as if one day it will let go
the string, and let
the loosed light fly
back to its roost with the calling stars.