Grief
A few days after my time-travel to Aberystwyth, I returned to Episode One of Hinterland only to find Matthias dashing off to Devil’s Bridge. Well, duh, that was the title of the episode. I just hadn’t noticed.
Devil’s Bridge is a little village up in the mountains about ten miles inland from Aberystwyth and it was a very, very, special place to my parents. My mother wrote in her photo album in 1930 that it was the most beautiful place she had ever been. You can’t tell from the faded old sepia photograph but it is a pretty spot, though I suspect Mum’s enthusiasm for it was more because it was where she and Dad spent their honeymoon. Several years later, we went there quite frequently on our day trips to Aberystwyth, always stopping there for tea and a walk down to the waterfall no matter how hard it was raining. It is the only place where the three of us ever stayed overnight, in the same hotel where they had honeymooned; inevitable as there was, at that time, only one hotel. (Now, I am astonished to find, Expedia lists eight right there, and a hundred and forty-six nearby!)
Now, I sit here in Colorado watching Matthias hurrying down to the falls, where of course he finds a dead body. I am amazed to see solid stone steps with handrails zig-zagging down the little gorge. No such thing in my day! We simply scrambled over wet muddy slippery rocks until, one way or another, we landed at the bottom. I am disappointed in this development, but have no time to dwell on it as Matthias is now entering the hotel. THE hotel. The one I stayed in with my parents, and where we used to go for tea. In the series they call it the Devil’s Bridge Hotel but I recognize it instantly as the old Hafod Hotel, as it is actually still called, they just changed the name for the TV series. It has been there since the 1700’s when it opened as a hunting lodge, and there was probably some kind of hostelry long before that, as there have been bridges across the gorge at Devil’s Bridge since the 1100’s.
Probably I was already sensitized by my Aberystwyth experience, but seeing the waterfalls, and the bridge, and following the path of the TV camera into that very hotel, overwhelmed me. I had an intensity of grief for my parents such as I have rarely felt, and certainly not for many years. As I have said before, I seem unable to come to grips with being an orphan, but this pain astonished me How can I possibly feel such sorrow after … what is it now? Thirty years. I guess real grief never leaves us, despite the healing qualities of time. We feel it less often, perhaps, but it is never gone. It sneaks up on us when we least expect it, and stops us in our tracks.
I turn off the TV.
Again.
I have decided that Hinterland Episode One is not for me.
Warily, a few days later, I did watch the other three episodes. All was well. Matthias trots his grim path around many places I recognize, but none that tear at my heart. I’m not sure if I will ever return to Episode One.
Who needs what the critics are calling ‘Welsh noir,’ anyway? At this moment I am grieving for a longtime friend who died last week. There’s enough ‘aging noir’ in real life these days, I don’t need to borrow grief from the television.
© 10 August 2015
About the Author
I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.