Bred of Heaven, page 18
‘Faint?’ calls out the co-coach. How many tackles? ‘Rhywun yn well na deg?’ Anyone better than ten? Wyth for me. Eight.
When the rota begins again we are tasked with improving on our previous score. I ratchet up the intensity and hurl myself at a queue of bodies. Hit. The lungs are starting to feel it. Down. And the right shoulder. Up. But I keep going. Sprint. The rhino consents to keel over first time. Hit. Just as I’m wondering if the whistle will ever go, it does and I’ve scored ten. I am starting to feel like quite the meathead. If it moves I’ll fly at it so I will. Bring it on! Testosterone now at danger levels. Bring it all on!
We jog up towards the tryline and form into more queues of six. This time, taking it in turns, we have to run from the touchline to the five-metre line, crouch, then sprint and crunch hard into a tall yellow rectangular crash pad held up by a volunteer. After the first crash you retreat three metres and, at the call, crash into the pad again. I await my turn. It seems perfectly doable. After all, a crash pad can’t hurt you, can it? I reach the front. And sprint to the line. Crouch. Sprint. SMASH! The crash pad, and the volunteer, take the impact of a monstrous hit. Or as monstrous as I can manage. I shuffle back and await the call. Go! SMASH!
‘Da iawn,’ says the crash-pad holder. This goes on for ten minutes. In all I manage a dozen or so crashes. If only I’d been this aggressive at rugby as a schoolboy, I think, as the head coach asks for two teams of six to line up against each other. One has the ball and, passing it up and down the line, has to try and break through the other team’s defences. Suddenly the pretence is over. A dozen young Welsh men are clattering into one another for real. Llawer o contact. One of them is the giant Hywel. Physical iawn. I suddenly decide that my body might object if after twenty-eight years of no impact it is suddenly asked to take on this extra burden. I’ve done enough for now. I can congratulate myself. Project Wales has taken a vast step forward. I shower, wash, dry, dress and get into the car feeling thoroughly pleased. This is it, I think. I am one of the boys. Finally.
The next morning there is not a single muscle about my person that hasn’t succumbed to paralysis. It is virtually impossible to get out of bed. Or sit. Or stand. Or walk. I move like a lobotomised Frankenstein’s monster. My joints have locked. It’s as if I’ve been caught in rockfall. The worst of it is not the arms and shoulders, back, coccyx, rump (which really aches), thighs, knees or ankles. The real problem is in a more vital part of the body. My neck. Something feels badly wrenched in there. I suddenly realise why rugby players have necks the width of barrels, to go with all their other pumped-up musculature. It’s chainmail.
My phone beeps. A text from Rhys the Voice.
He names a date for the codgers’ match two days before my forty-sixth birthday. Only a couple of weekends hence. The vets play very infrequently. All things being equal, this is likely to be my main chance.
The next morning I can’t move either. I wonder whether my body, which is after all my temple, is trying to tell me something. And even if it isn’t, I know someone who is: an email arrives from my parents.
‘We think your intention to play rugger is not only foolhardy but downright stupid. Please reconsider.’ Without waiting to be asked, Dr Rees has ventured an opinion. Trust him to say ‘rugger’. I can’t move on the third day either. By the fifth I am in negotiation with myself. If I play only half the match, I halve the risk. If I trot on with twenty minutes to go, so much the better. Even with ten minutes I can at least say I’ve played rugby in Wales. But in the small dark hours fears start to assail me of getting ransacked in a seething maul and having my unarmoured leg snapped like a dead twig or being spear-tackled by a psychopathic wing who doesn’t like the sound of my English accent. My visualisations are all about survival, not glory. But I must do it. Against medical advice. And against that of Elgan Rees. Who played for Wales. ‘Don’t take the risk,’ he said.
With five days to go, snowstorms are massing on the east coast of England and Scotland. The unseasonal weather races west and smothers all Wales. I text Rhys the Voice, ostensibly to ask for directions to tomorrow’s game, in reality to seek confirmation that, while I was always willing, I won’t actually have to put my body on the line after all. A reply comes back by return.
‘Dim gem! Eira!’ (Eira = snow.) Another cancellation. Is it just my body which doesn’t think it’s a good idea to play? Is a guardian angel trying to prevent my participation? If I really pushed it, if I really hustled, I could presumably get myself onto another team sheet. But I feel as if I’ve dodged a bullet with my name on it. There is no point in pretending. I cannot duck the unWelsh truth about myself: Dr Rees, I got a terrible problem with my backbone.
7
Cystadlu = Compete
‘Restoring the Welsh language in Wales is nothing less than a revolution. It is only through revolutionary means that we can succeed.’
Saunders Lewis (1962)
WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER could eventually no longer drive, she gave me her car. It was beige. And somewhat of the old school, being a Simca saloon with plush red upholstery, a handbrake in the dash and a petrol cap behind the rear number plate. It felt like an Eastern European taxi.
No car in the history of motoring can have had two more contrasting owners. She was a slightly flappy driver, if memory serves, but ever so careful. I remember racing away from Carmarthen on a golden Sunday evening behind the wheel of my new motor at the age of twenty, feeling enriched by new possibilities.
While staying with friends in the Black Mountains, I had to collect a latecomer from Newport station. Two of us set out on an icy night. My passenger and I decided to kill time in conventional OCD style by compiling sports lists. We fixed on first-class Welsh rugby clubs. A mile into our journey we had already listed Llanelli, Cardiff, Swansea, Neath, Bridgend, Aberavon, Pontypool, Pontypridd, Maesteg and South Wales Police when one of us – I forget which – proudly introduced the untoppable, championship-clinching decider.
‘Ebbw Vale.’
At which point, because I had not really been concentrating on the road, I veered round a left bend a little too vigorously, skidded on sheet ice, slammed through a thickish hedge and came to rest, Italian Job style, in precarious mid-air. I was forced to ring up my grandmother and explain what I had done to her car. She was all too forgiving.
So I associate Ebbw Vale with my inner halfwit. It’s not a good association to take into Welsh Learner of the Year, being held this year in Ebbw Vale. Or Glyn Ebwy, as we say in Welsh. This is my moment. I’m competing as a Welshman against other Welshmen and Welshwomen.
It’s not quite pissing down. Rain dribbles dismissively onto the windscreen, as if holding back the monsoon for later. I’ve come down from the northern end of the valley, along the ridge fringing the top of the old coalfield. I drive past formerly prosperous towns which once powered the British Empire, each at the head of its own valley: Aberdare, Merthyr Tydfil, Tredegar – they turn a hardened face to spitting skies. Coniferous forestation smothers the slopes hereabouts. Where it doesn’t, the hills are scorched bald, purple heather scattered like alopecia.
I hear about Learner of the Year when nosing about the BBC Cymru website. Four people had got through to the previous final. There were pictures of them, all wearing smiles. You could click and find a paragraph in quotation marks, with a helpful translation underneath. They were all resident in Wales, I noted. And had learned Welsh for the usual reasons: needed it for work, or lived with a Welsh speaker. Somewhere inside me, envy fluttered its mean little wings. I bet they didn’t write those blurbs themselves. A fiver says they had help, that the syntax police swooped and sprayed it with Cymrifying anti-toxins. I wish one of those pictures were of me, grinning false-modestly in contemporary casuals, semaphoring to the world how marvellous I am at Welsh. Well, it could be, couldn’t it? I could enter, couldn’t I? I could do that. It’s just a question of application.
The application form can be found on the National Eisteddfod website. Needless to say, this corner of cyberspace is in Welsh. Rather official Welsh, cluttered with pedantic grammatical formalities and long abstract nouns ending in -aeth. Cystadleuaeth = competition. Gwybodaeth = information. To be honest it’s all kind of a bit Gree … Ooh look, you can click on that tab there and get the whole site in English. The devil on my shoulder urges me to click. No, says my Project Wales voice, that would be very wrong. Cliiiiick, whispers the first voice sulphurously. Reader, I click. Instantly, the entire site of the National Eisteddfod, the site which celebrates Wales and Welshness and the Welsh language, transmogrifies into the language of world domination. It’s a jolly easy read. There’s bags of digestible info about categories of competition, rules and regs of entry, deadlines, addresses. I am hoovering it up, like moreish polyunsaturates that corrode your stomach wall. After three web pages I start to feel uneasy, then queasy, then actually soiled. This is the language which once set out to smother Welsh into actual extinction. I must return to Welsh at once. If I don’t, how can I claim to be learning? Click. We are back among pedantries and abstractions.
‘Wyt ti wedi dysgu Cymraeg?’ it asks in large jaunty italicised white letters on a hot-flush pink background. The tense is ambiguous. It could mean ‘Have you learned Welsh?’ or ‘Have you been learning Welsh?’ They don’t draw a distinction, so I’m not sure of the answer. Yes, I have been learning Welsh. No, I have not learned Welsh. Not yet.
‘Beth am gystadlu?’ Soft mutation: how about gompeting? This competition, it explains, is open to anyone over eighteen who has been learning Welsh. The preliminary round happens in the spring, and something something chance to chat and something with a team of judges. I don’t understand it all. Five will be chosen to compete in the final during the National Eisteddfod week. There’s £300 in it for the winner, and £100 for the finalists, not to mention a year’s subscription to Golwg magazine.
I fill out the form, and set down to compose a supporting document of 300 words. I quite like writing in Welsh. You get as long as you want, a dictionary, the Internet, a chance to scope your work for errors. And you don’t have to answer someone firing mutations at you with a self-loading rifle. So I tell the story – of the two trips a year to Carmarthen, of my grandparents’ abandonment of Welsh as the marital language, how the language has reseeded itself in my uncle and now, maybe, in me. The supporting document is probably chockful of cock-ups – erratic conjugations and rogue consonants, omitted mutations and misattributed plurals. But it is sincere and enthusiastic; and it’s undeniably in Welsh. I post it, and email the Eisteddfod office in Wrexham asking for acknowledgement of receipt. ‘Disgwyr o’r Blwyddyn’, I type carefully into the subject field. A few days later a reply lands in my inbox, confirming receipt. The subject field has been subtly edited to ‘Dysgwr y Flwyddyn’. Clear subtext. ‘Get it right, plonker. It’s not “Lerners from the Year”. Don’t expect to get far if you can’t spell. Or master the basic tenets of the genitive case in Welsh. Muppet.’
I’ve been practising Welsh all week. A session with James, a lot of BBC Radio Cymru on the website. I’ve been mainlining vocab too, like I used to at school before an exam. It doesn’t feel enough. I am visited by an urgent need to warm up my Welsh before I go in. I text Rhys the Voice: competing in Dysgwr y Flwyddyn, beth am ymarfer? How about some practice? While I wait for a reply I get out the little red book and go through more vocab. Thanks partly to Harri Potter, partly to Nant Gwrtheyrn, I have ingested some random and frequently arcane vocabulary. I know the Welsh for ‘to ramble on’, ‘to dart’ or ‘flit’, for ‘a bit of a lad’ and ‘climate change’. I know the word for ‘noble’ and ‘science fiction’. Will I ever use any of it? My phone buzzes. It’s Rhys the Voice: ‘Can’t,’ he texts in Welsh. ‘Working at the stadiwm. Pob lwc! [good luck!]’
I scroll down my list of contacts. Leighton? Might be humiliating if I can’t understand him over the phone. I try Catrin, the only Welsh speaker I know in London. She texts back in Welsh that she’s busy at the mo but some time next week?
‘Too late! I’m competing in forty-five minutes.’
‘Fyc!’ she replies, then adds that her Welsh at the moment is yn grap (= crap – mutated). I ring, and we have a nice chat. Its function, we both tacitly understand, is to stiffen my collapsible vertebrae. Cat compliments my accent, and tells me how well I’ve done to get so far so fast. I lap it up. At this juncture I need to believe.
‘Pob lwc!’ she says. It’s showtime.
The competition is taking place in a school. There’s a quiz in progress, questions in Welsh with piecemeal English translations. The front two rows are occupied by happy-looking types. Other Welsh learners and their families, presumably. I seem to be the only person who hasn’t dragged along an entire carful of children. It would have been nice to bring a daughter or two. I’ve tried to get them interested in Project Wales. Right from the off I drummed their quarter-Welshness into them with missionary persistence. ‘You’re supporting the team in red,’ I’d advise two small girls fresh out of nappies whenever the Six Nations was on. One of them was even given a Welsh middle name to put in her passport: Mair, Welsh for Mary. They’ve been driven over the border often – once upon a time to visit their great-grandmother, latterly their monastic uncle Teilo, but also to take the air in Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire. They’ve been up Cadair Idris. Unfortunately, they’ve enjoyed a bit too much sun in other parts. They associate Wales with walking, walking with effort, effort with reluctance, and reluctance with saying no to stuff. Principally, inducements to visit Wales.
Plus they’ve got their own oral exams to sit, more important ones like A levels and the International Baccalaureate. So I’m on my own.
I feel as if I’ve trespassed into some sort of pre-established environment. These people all look naturalised, as if they’ve lived here for ever, even though they can only have got here this morning. It’s like when you turn up on holiday somewhere, but for some enforced reason a day later than everyone else, who by the time you arrive have already scoped the parameters of this new world, colonised it with routine. This, they say, is how we do things here. We know. We have long experience. Longer than you anyway.
A woman with a clipboard approaches busily. She ticks off my half-Welsh name on a long list. I’m at the bottom, the last one unaccounted for. ‘Da iawn.’ Ten minutes before my interview, she explains, I’ll be taken upstairs. I should settle in, get a paned (cuppa), enjoy the cwis (quiz). Obediently, I edge towards the edge of the raked seating and park myself in a red-plastic bucket seat.
A woman in the row behind asks me in Welsh if I’m here to compete – cystadlu.
‘Ydw,’ I say. Yes I am. This is another quirk of Welsh: they don’t say yes in Welsh if they can help it, or no. Yes I am, they say, or no you don’t. Yes we would. No they will not have. The tense is immaterial: if the question contains a verb, so should the answer. Are you competing? Yes I am. Are you nervous? Yes I am. (One is cacking oneself, to be specific.) Don’t worry, she advises. They’re very nice.
They are the two judges. In Welsh they call them beirniaid – barn being the word for judgement or opinion. But I can’t help thinking of them as examiners. Sorry, but a situation in which you go into a room for ten minutes to answer questions in a language you have by no means fully conquered and then discover at the end whether you’ve passed or not is, for my money, an exam. The last time I sat an oral exam was twenty-eight years ago. If memory serves, they’ve never not been problematic.
No, insists the woman, it’s just a gentle chat. I ask her where she’s from. O ble dych chi’n dod? was one of the first sentences I ever learned in Welsh. She’s from Bridgend, she says, and points to her name on the list of competitors we’ve all been given. To kill time I peruse it studiously. There are twenty-nine of us this year, apparently the largest entry ever. Among adult learners, Welsh is on the up. I peruse the long column of names. They are all very Welsh-looking: lots of Ieuans and Angharads and Hywels, sundry Joneses and Llewellyns and ap-Morgans.
At the bottom it says, ‘Jasper Rees, Llundain’. The familiar relief: at least my surname doesn’t look out of place.
I assume I’m the loner here, the one who has travelled furthest. After their names it says where they’re from – in Welsh naturally: Aberteifi, Caergybi, Llantrisant, Y Gelli, Pen-y-Bont, Yr Ariannin. Oh. That’ll be Argentina. He must be one of the Patagonian diaspora. Welsh speakers are tuppence a dozen down there, I tell myself, thanks to the nineteenth-century migration to a remote pocket of South America. Rhys the Voice once went on a rugby tour there and, while failing to find anyone who spoke English, couldn’t move for Welsh speakers. I look around the room for a vaguely Hispanic-looking learner. More intriguingly, there’s even one from Gwlad Belg – Belgium.
