Bred of Heaven, page 1
BRED OF HEAVEN
JASPER REES writes about the arts for the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and theartsdesk.com, and has also reported on football for the Independent on Sunday. He is the author of Wenger: The Making of a Legend, Blizzard: Race to the Pole and I Found My Horn, which he co-adapted for the stage.
ALSO BY JASPER REES
I Found My Horn: One Man’s Struggle with the Orchestra’s Most
Difficult Instrument
Blizzard: Race to the Pole
Wenger: The Making of a Legend
BRED OF HEAVEN
One man’s quest
to reclaim his Welsh roots
Jasper Rees
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London EC1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © Jasper Rees, 2011
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Transitional 551 by MacGuru Ltd
info@macguru.org.uk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84668 299 5
eISBN 978 1 84765 422 9
The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061
To the memory of Bert and Dorothy
Contents
Author’s Note
Cyflwyno = Introduce
1 Dechrau = Begin
2 Credu = Believe
3 Gweithio = Work
4 Canu = Sing
5 Siarad = Speak
6 Chwarae = Play
7 Cystadlu = Compete
8 Tyfu = Grow
9 Eistedd = Sit
10 Cerdded = Walk
11 Parhau = Endure
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
‘O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau’ = O let the old language endure
Evan James (1856)
Author’s Note
The business of writing about Wales brings up an inevitable question. Place names: to anglicise or Welshify? There is no real method in the choices I’ve made other than pure instinct. It would be perverse to refer to Caerdydd, Abertawe and Casnewydd when almost all of Wales knows them as Cardiff, Swansea and Newport. For most towns I have kept to that rule of thumb. So it’s Carmarthen not Caerfyrddin, Llandovery not Llanymddyfri. But where there is simply an English transliteration, I’ve reverted to Welsh spelling. Thus Caernarfon rather than (the abomination) Carnarvon. Hence also the Lln peninsula not Lleyn. As for rivers, the Severn and the Wye are overwhelmingly known by their English names so I’ve stuck with them but it seems preferable to refer to the Tywi, the Taf and the Dyfi rather than the Towey, the Taff and the Dovey. Finally, most Welsh mountains do not have English names. But two famous ones do. In the case of Snowdon (and Snowdonia) I’ve – mostly – used the English rather than wilfully obfuscate with Yr Wyddfa (and Eryri). However, where the Welsh say and write Pumlumon, I simply cannot bring myself to go with Plynlimon, which may be just as pervasive but is plainly the orthographical product of an Englishman’s failure to listen.
(And it goes without saying that it’s Owain Glyndr, not Owen Glendower.)
Cyflwyno = Introduce
‘Wales, see England.’
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition (1875–89)
YOU HAVE TO PAY to get in. The current cost, if you’re in a car, is £5.30, though it’s less for motorcycles and more for heavy goods vehicles. Pressing a note and two coins into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker: ‘Diolch.’ Thanks. Then push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers.
Initially there’s not much topographical discrepancy from the foreign field back at the other end of the bridge. Arable land trimmed into rectangles. Grey cloud flattens the light, as it often seems to this side. And now the tidal waters in my passenger window recede from view. I’m not really sure where I’m going. ‘Croeso i Gymru’, says the sign. Am I really welcome to Wales? I’ve been coming here since before I can remember, the atavistic summons dutifully answered at Christmas and in summer. Twice a year we ploughed over the old bridge, into the west, along roads which down the years became broader and smoother and faster until eventually it was possible to drive the ninety miles from the toll gate to my grandparents in not much more than an hour; South Wales was reduced to a race against time, the chain of conurbations whipping by in a blur of turn-offs. Newport. Cardiff. Swansea. Quite early on in my childhood the road signs began speaking in two tongues: Casnewydd, Caerdydd, Abertawe. Services: gwasanaethau. Parking: parcio. How we laughed at that one: the foreign language indebted to the master. The car – in the 1970s we had a succession of Range Rovers which glugged petrol at the dipsomaniac rate of thirteen miles to the gallon – munched on the long column of tarmac and spat it out behind us.
All I knew of Wales was the road, and a house on a hill above the market town of Carmarthen. Caerfyrddin.
‘Haven’t you grown?’ my grandmother would exclaim in her warm Welsh soprano as we squirmed out of her embrace, scrummed through the mock-Gothic porch and past her down the long welcoming corridor. We stayed for a night, sometimes two. My grandmother would leak tears as we snuck over the cattle grid and began the return journey back east. And when ninety miles later we crossed the Severn and accelerated into England, my entirely Welsh father would urge us to cheer.
This is the closest my childhood came to indoctrination. I could never quite work out what we were celebrating. I’m still looking for the answer. It’s what has been bringing me back to Wales time and again: a sort of cultural bafflement, an unfulfilled sense of ancestral belonging. And here I am again. I’ve got a spare week and I’ve answered the westerly summons.
Suddenly I veer left. I’ve always sailed past this little corner of Wales. I decide to follow my nose and attempt to drive south towards the water. Flat, even sunken, and riven with ditches, the countryside looks neither English nor Welsh but Dutch. I follow a track down towards a sea wall and, turning off the ignition, set foot on Welsh soil. I clamber up the steps and there, arrayed in front of me, is the Severn estuary, the Bristol Channel. England fans out along the horizon. I breathe in briny air. Overhead, gulls squawk territorially. Before the wall was raised, high tides would have scurried inland and drowned the fields in salt water.
I turn my back to the water and gaze across the protected plain. Down below, a forthright child pushes its own rickety pram on the rutted road, while a young mother and a spaniel amble patiently alongside. Two grey-haired men arrive stoop-shouldered on expensive bikes and, in neon Lycra which faithfully highlights every contour of slackening bodies, bounce up the steps and onto the sea wall. One day I too will no doubt lever myself onto a crotch-partingly narrow saddle, grasp a pair of drop handlebars and try to pedal away from the inevitable flood tide of old age. I too will look ridiculous. As things stand, there’s no need of death-defiance. At forty-three, for another couple of years my twenty-fifth birthday is still nearer than my sixty-fifth.
It’s hard to say from here where the river ends and the sea begins. Somewhere below the surface of the wide waters, epic undercurrents have been arguing that one since the last Ice Age. It’s hard also, it occurs to me, to say where my Englishness ends and my Welshness begins. My father was born and brought up in Wales. Six decades later my two daughters pushed their own prams in England. I’ve wanted to know this for ever. Do you come from where your parents come from? Or do you, like it or lump it, just come from where you come from? Which I may as well admit is why I am here.
Am I Welsh? How Welsh, in the end, is half Welsh? My yearning, my claim, has always been for my Welsh half to swamp the rest. But it’s hardly had a chance. I’ve never lived in Wales. In fact I scarcely know it outside the little corner I’ve always visited: I’ve never been to the top of Snowdon or along the Rhondda Valley, barely even stopped in Cardiff or ever set foot in the mountainous middle. But on some inchoate level I sense that I love Wales. It feels like having a crush on a long dead star whose face you know only in the black and white shimmer of the silver screen.
These feelings of belonging have had to sprout from barren anglicised soil. If scientists in a laboratory were creating an upbringing designed to inculcate Englishness in a boy, they couldn’t find a much better template than mine. My birth in London took place at a Welsh-sounding address: Gower Street. But everything else about the street is English. The Pre-Raphaelite movement was also born here. Illustrious residents include Charles Darwin, Mr Pickwick and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I then grew up in the smartest crescent in the heart of the royal borough. Every morning we ran to our bedroom window in the garret and watched the Household Cavalry clop and clink glamorously along the Old Brompton Road. On Friday afternoons we clambered into the car and drove down south to the South Downs
How Welsh can all that grounding make you? How Welsh can you be on the back of two visits a year? Eventually there came a time when if I wanted to go to Wales I had to travel under my own steam. It didn’t take long for the wool to be pulled from my eyes. By train, and then – when my grandmother gave me her old Simca saloon with its handy orange disabled sticker – by car, I would push along the old corridor to Carmarthenshire with a budding awareness that we had been hoodwinked. Wales, it turned out, was not somewhere you had to get out of as quickly as your four wheels would carry you. In subtle and creeping ways it grew on me. But hold on, I remember realising one evening as loafy hills burned in the slanting western sunlight, Carmarthenshire’s gorgeous. I was much taken with the diesel trains chugging picturesquely to and fro along the shore of the Tywi estuary. I started to feel possessive about the lowing castle at Llansteffan, a broken-toothed ruin put out to grass centuries ago but still pluckily commanding the heights. This would have happened when I was about twenty, and getting past my teenage indifference to landscape. I stopped looking at Wales through paternal eyes.
Many years and many visits to Wales later, and for all my shouting at the telly on match days, I’m still pretty much English. I certainly sound English. I’m like everyone else. I have a deep hankering to come from somewhere. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, but I feel rootless. My kind of middle-class Englishness lacks meaning, at least to me. Which is why I’ve drifted over the Severn this overcast Friday morning. A magnet has drawn me. The Welsh call it hiraeth: longing. But I’m nowhere near Welsh enough to start giving my feelings Welsh names.
It’s on the sea wall where Welsh land and Welsh water meet that it occurs to me: to take the scenic route round Wales, do the whole circumnavigation. It suddenly seems the thing to do: to put a girdle round the old country. I have seven spare days, and no real idea how to kill them. I bet it doesn’t get done much, if at all – coming in on the new Severn Bridge and several hundred Welsh miles later leaving on the old one. I can practically feel obsession, that omnivore of the male brain, sinking its talons in. This is a man-made project that will need rules and order. It will impose discipline and purpose. It will make sense.
Before I skip down the steps and into the car, I invent some instant guidelines. No islands, of which there are several (so Anglesey is out). Always stick to the road nearest the sea, however tiddly. And when I get close to the northern border, cut inland and drive down along the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke, the man-made ridge which once upon a time advised interested parties where England begins and Wales ends.
I unlock my car, lower myself behind the steering wheel, open the map to the relevant corner of Wales, reconfigure my milometer back to zero and turn the key.
What follows is a slow and winding crash course in Welshness, although the Welsh have a more resonant word for it: Cymreictod. On the surface at least, the induction is topographical. Knobbly headlands and beetling cliffs make way for windy strands of white powdery beach. Chimneys belch and cough. There are Georgian jewels and kiss-me-quick resorts. Estuaries bite deep chunks out of the coast. Turrets of innumerable castles prop up the clouds. Mountains tumble into the sea. Along the edge of Offa’s Dyke delineating the old border with England, empty moorlands sound like the winds which howl about them: Eglwyseg, Berwyn, Y Mynyddoedd Duon.
At strategic points I get out and walk. And walk – over heathered moors, up looping paths, along deserted beaches, past trilling woodland streams, onto tufty headlands and into secretive coves. I walk among the stony remains of past incursions: castles raised by kings and barons, abbeys planted by monks, now roofless and naked to the heavens. Welsh weather permitting, it’s usually possible to see along the tumultuous coast towards the site of the next ramble. And the weather, contrary to expectation, does permit. Friendly breezes shoo away the cloud cover. The sun is free to pick out blues and greens, the seas and meadows partitioned by seams of sand and rock. Once or twice it rains old women and sticks, as they colourfully say in Welsh, and I can’t see beyond the fence. Otherwise it wouldn’t be Wales.
The more I stop to clamber up hummocks and take in the view, the more I am baffled by something. When you can see so much of it in one go, the country seems no larger than a postage stamp. One miraculous dusk I sit on a drystone wall, picking at an Indian takeaway, and with the naked eye take in the entire sixty-mile semicircular sweep of Cardigan Bay while Snowdon and her siblings bustle and bristle beyond the shore. I’ve only ever gawped at that from a plane before. Another golden twilight I look down on the long arcadian corridor of Clwyd, beyond it the whole commotion of North Wales as far as the eye can see, and in the distance the magnificent lonely peak of Cadair Idris. Wales, in short, doesn’t go far. On the other hand, criss-crossed by a labyrinth of ridges and ravines, it goes on for ever. Its distances are in its ups and downs, in the intestinal coils of roads pushed this way and that by Welsh geology.
The binary nature of the place is of course underlined, even enforced, by the names of things. Such has been the success of the Welsh Language Society’s rearguard action that this is a country where you can be driving to two places at once: one with a Welsh name, another known by a later English alternative. With only myself to entertain I try to exhume a grandson’s sepia memories of Welsh pronunciation. The signposts are never slow to tease the tongue: I pass through Dinbych-y-Pysgod and Abereiddy, Mwnt and Tywyn and Gyr, Llanystumdwy and Rhydycroesau, Dwygyfylchi and Penbontrhydyfothau. The consonants I’m sort of on top of, but the vowels can seem as alien as Greek. It’s as if they’re encrypted to bamboozle some nameless enemy. Forebears of mine knew their way round every nook of the language. For all my efforts, Welsh keeps its back turned to me. I look at a sentence without the first idea which word’s the verb. And yet the Romans left their Latin DNA in the names for things: pont and porth and castell. Wales is a broth, I tell myself, thousands of years in the brewing.
And then there is the quilt of voices. As I make my clockwise circuit, the accents of the place sing and dance, narrow and fatten. The voice of the capital has a tight, parsimonious tang. The Dyfed accent swoops and dips in a hilly lilt. In Gwynedd delicate wispy vowels flutter as if wind-borne. Across the porous border of Clwyd come abrupt stabs of nasal Scouse, while further south in Powys and Gwent impenetrable inflections form a kind of natural barrier against the enemy over the hill.
By the end the milometer, measuring serrations in the coastline and the jagged eastern edge of the country, has ticked over towards 850 or so long and very winding miles. That tally incorporates wrong turnings, backtrackings, map-reading indecision and evening sorties from my bed and breakfast to the pub for stout and chips. There are also a pair of disastrous mishaps in which I accidentally drive a good hundred yards into England. Manfully I control an obsessive-compulsive urge to turn round and snake back along another route and maintain the Welshness of my footprint. There are only so many country lanes, lurching and burrowing along the fertile length of the border, stuck behind ancient hatch-backs and swaying tractors or even bobbing dinghies on their stately way to water, that even the keenest born-again Welshman can take.
