26 April 1985

8:13 p.m. at the Plas Bowman in Caernarfon. Caernarfon, I have been told today, means "castle on the river" in Cymric. The Plas Bowman is a small, clean hotel on High Street, about a block away from the river. High Street is quite narrow, about two car widths from side to side. The gray stone house opposite the hotel is therefore very close to my bedroom window. Looking through the window, I can see the wallflowers clumped atop the roof slates. One of them is 8 or 10 inches across and at least 6 inches high. The largest plants, apparently rooted in the warped and tilted slates, are thick with bright, butter‑yellow bloom. At the Castle, from which I have just returned, I saw dozens of similar wallflowers sprouting from the towers and battlements. One of them, I discovered when I climbed to the top of one of the highest towers, grows in the crenelations more than a hundred feet above the ground. How they survive—drawing sustenance from stone—seems a mystery, to me, at least.
     Some of the images I will recall as reminders of Caernar­fon's character (beyond those that drew me and others as visi­tors) are the large polished stone this hotel uses as a doorstop in the lounge and a sizable bale of hay sticking out of the trunk of a guest's car parked in front of the Royal Hotel, where I had dinner.
     The hotel, by the way, is on the corner of Stryd y Fawr (High St.) and Stryd y Eglwys (Church St.). My room in it is small, about 7 feet wide by 10 feet long. The short walls are dominated, respectively, by a large, glossily enameled white entry door and an equally large, deeply recessed window well finished in rather crude but freshly painted panels. A thin white curtain scrims its lower half and a traverse drapery of dark beige hangs from a home‑made valance above it. Beneath a chipped and dented chair rail, again white enameled, is a cream plaster wainscot. The walls are covered with cream‑colored paper with pink wisteria flowers, roughly the size of thumbnails, that hang from dark tan vines bearing occasional green leaves a fifth the size of the clusters of flowers. The blossoms, vines, and leaves form an irregularly triangular pattern. The furnishings—a small mirrored dresser with groaningly balky drawers, a wooden twin bed stained a dark mahogany, a white wooden bedside table 2 feet high, a red gooseneck lamp, and a chair—have the look of arti­cles on display in a second‑hand store. The closet is merely two wooden panels about 4 feet long that form a side and top built into the corner to the right side of the door. Although the side panel is painstakingly cut to fit over the chair rail snugly, it bellies away from the wall sharply toward the top piece, leaving a noticeable gap. A sliding curtain covers the front.
     The room is next to a toilet and bath. The toilet is regally positioned on a platform a foot higher than the floor level. At the end of the tub is a closet about six feet high. Behind its right door is an insulation‑wrapped boiler, into which and out of which a vast number of sharply elbowed pipes project. The other half is given over to the storage of bath mats. Next to the closet four bath towels hang on a heated rack. They are the only bath towels I have seen here. (I used middle one, left side, after my bath, having convinced myself that it was the one nobody else had used. The toilet in the adjoining room has no closet seat lid. Or, rather, the closet seat lid for it lies on the floor next to the water closet. Under the p.v.c. pipe running from the reser­voir to the bowl, a plastic box catches the drippings from what seems to be a permanent leak. The hinges on my bedroom door squeak twitteringly whenever I enter or leave the room, a fact I was disturbingly aware of when, at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., I tried to make a trip to the john without announcing my purposes to sudden­ly awakened guests in rooms near mine.
     When I bathed, I lathered up with a thin, well‑used bar of soap with an incontestable verification of its claim to earlier serv­ice: a dark, crisp pubic hair, shaped convincingly like a capi­tal‑letter U, embedded in the cake's slightly gummy surface. Homey touches of this sort, I concluded as I sat down at break­fast with the owner full of friendliness and hospitable good cheer, are the other side of the coin that purchases so much good will for Britain’s b and b’s. He happily recounted tales of the sexual exploits of Lloyd George as proof of Welsh vigor and demonstrated further provincial pride in reminding me, eyes contentedly closed and head nodding in neighborly approbation, that when Princess Margaret visited her husband's Caernarfon‑area family after her wedding, she was greeted by the locals simply as "Mrs. Armstrong‑Jones."