Bred of Heaven, page 22
‘That’s about £400,’ says Hedd, pointing as unaccusingly as he can manage at the ewes responsible for the lost revenue.
No wonder, back in the barn, the orphaned lambs are carefully nurtured through their loss. They fight over a pair of rubber teats sticking through a fence and attached to an upturned flagon of high-protein milk substitute. The thug gets it all unless you drag it out the way. Which I do, assertively, for the whole week. The tiny one needs a bit of guidance. I grab it by the neck and force its mouth onto the teat. After a few seconds it loses concentration and after further force-feeding you have to conclude that actually maybe it’s just full. Other lambs, either rejected or orphaned, are thrust upon new mothers. It’s the sheep-farming version of an adoption agency. The only way to get the mother to accept her new charge is to pin her in the corner of her pen with an iron crook so she can’t turn and shove the interloper away. I do quite a lot of iron crook work across the week. Eventually, says Sian, the ewe will accept the lamb once it smells of her own milk.
Regularly at midmorning, I follow Hedd across the yard and into the old two-storey farmhouse. Boots are left outside, hands washed in a cluttered anteroom. The kitchen is snug, with a square table. A tin of biscuits is proffered with a pot of tea. There’s the local paper to read – in Welsh – and S4C is on in the corner. On the wall is the clock Hedd won as Welsh Rural Community Champion (there was also a cheque for £500). At lunchtime Sian serves up hearty pies and stews followed by filling puddings. I look at Owain’s whippet frame and wonder how long it can last. Maybe he eats less as an agriculture student in Aberystwyth.
The Pughs acquired the farm from an uncle and aunt of Sian’s in 1985; her father was born here. A photo album shows the work that went into renovating the place. Hedd previously had worked on his father’s farm, three miles away at the bottom of the valley. The farm cost £100,000 for a thousand acres. ‘It sounds a big farm,’ he says as we get into the 4x4 and head off down Cwm Cywarch, ‘but it’s mostly mountain.’ A sheep per acre is the accepted norm on a hill farm, he explains. Five years later they expanded the flock and the farm by renting 600 further acres. By then the boys had started coming. At three or four they were already helping and in due course it became clear the older two wanted to go into sheep farming too. ‘Once you have boys you’re thinking if they want to farm you’ve got to find land for them.’
The 4 × 4 noses along the lane. We pass Beti on her corner and wave. The sun seems insistent on hanging around. I’ve barely seen a cloud since arriving. Round a pair of bends we come to a small chapel, long since closed, where they used to take the boys to Sunday school. Google’s Street Search cameras filmed this far and no further up the valley. ‘We’re in no-man’s-land,’ says Hedd. He doesn’t have to add that that’s how he likes it. We reach the main road and drive south-east for twenty miles. The landscape grows notably tamer, the hills more reasonable. Eventually Hedd pulls in at a caravan park, heads up the hill into a network of four or five fields and proceeds to drive very slowly around the perimeter. Sheep look up at us inquisitively, trotting out of the way where necessary. This, Hedd explains, is one of his farms, acquired four years previously.
‘There was no land going for sale by us so you’ve got to expand and buy wherever you can find it.’ He barely gets out of the car. This is purely a tour of inspection. With the rising cost of petrol, coming here every day must be ruinously expensive. ‘That’s why we brought the sheep from this farm home to the shed for lambing.’ Every time he shifts a sheep from one farm to another he has to fill in a form. We spend no more than half an hour at this farm before, the inspection completed, we head back the way we came. I ask Hedd if in his time farming has changed.
‘I think we’ve had the best times for farming, especially the hills,’ he says. ‘I used to produce, produce, produce, and then the emphasis changed to conservation. Going back about twenty years ago. It works well with us. We’ve done double fencing, looking after hedges, planting trees. You’ve got to make sure that you don’t put too many sheep on the mountain so that the heather comes back. There’s a new scheme coming out now. The new scheme is going to be on water quality and carbon footprint. At the moment I can’t see getting into the new scheme. It’s voluntary. If I can’t get into it I’ll be losing 40 per cent of my income. And without that I haven’t got a chance of surviving. What we get from selling the lambs is not enough to survive on.’ He and Sian restrict their holidays to a couple of days at the Royal Welsh each year. But then you’d have to travel a very long way to find anywhere more peaceful than Blaencywarch. Does the beauty ever pall? I ask him. ‘You get used to it,’ he says with a smile.
A few miles from Dinas Mawddwy Hedd pulls off onto a narrow road and follows a tight valley for a few miles until at a tiny village called Abercegir he parks at a pretty whitewashed farmhouse. This is yet more land owned by the Pughs, acquired twelve years back. We load a couple of sacks of sheep feed on a quad bike and head up the one-in-three slope. After a climb of 300 metres or so a column of sheep is chasing along behind the quad bike. To a chorus of bleating I get off and distribute the feed along a line of about five metres. The trick is to make sure the lambs get some too. Back on the quad bike we climb higher and higher until the slope starts to level out and we are near a ridge. Hedd directs me to go up and have a look. I do as I’m told and all of a sudden am overwhelmed by a panoramic view of bristling peaks. I unfurl a map in my head and start ticking off the mountains. To the south is the bare mound of Pumlumon, to the north-west the triangular crag of Cadair Idris, to the north the bristling ridge of the Arans, which sit just above the Pughs’ farm. In the distance a NATO fighter takes its regular route over Cwm Cywarch, sound trailing behind it like a dog after sheep. It’s up here that I have my answer to the question I’ve been meaning to ask Hedd. Why is it that sheep are so embedded in the national consciousness of Wales? The pretentious urbanite in me is hoping for a riveting answer which I can scope for embedded meaning. But while the ancestral heart of a bard beats somewhere inside every Welshman, hill farmers are above all practical people. Hedd sits on the quad bike and surveys the magnificent array of mountains rising in every direction.
‘You’ve got so many hills and on the hills you can’t do nothing else,’ he says. ‘Only put sheep on it.’
One summer’s day I am summoned to a lunch party in Ascot, hosted by one of the grandsons of Corn Gafr. There are seventy of us spanning three generations, descendants of five of the nine siblings from Meidrim. (Two of the brothers did not have children, one line has died out, and the Australian diaspora couldn’t make it.) Bert’s line, I’m proud to say, is the only one that produces a full house: two sons, three grandsons (plus other halves), six great-grandchildren.
We are given name tags, and a noticeboard with a family tree explains who everyone else is. The photographs of the nine and their wives from 1952 sit alongside the portrait taken in Carmarthen of Thomas and Eliza Rees in their Sunday best towards the end of the nineteenth century. I look around and see the faces of Corn Gafr iterated across the generations, strong resemblances among the sons and daughters of the nine, genetically diluted until the great-grandchildren reveal little or no visible trace of their Welsh ancestry. Nor in the next generation down will many still bear the name. Of Thomas and Eliza’s fifty-two great-great-grandchildren, four male Reeses seems a poor return. Thus does nature, which gave them eight sons, correct itself.
This is a revival of a tradition. When the Rees siblings were still alive they used to meet every couple of years for large family gatherings at hotels in southern England. I remember large crowds of people to whom I knew I was related but in whom, as a child, I had no interest. We kept ourselves to ourselves, or talked to our grandmother and those Reeses we knew. The same rules of disengagement now apply to the large brood of begrudging children hauled here along motorways from all over England. Various boys play cricket in the baking heat. Three smartly dressed young girls sit in a corner looking horribly bored, as do their parents. But most of us make an effort to work our way round the room. My part of the conversation is always the same.
‘Yes, we’re descended from Bert and Dorothy. I’ve got two brothers and here are my two daughters. Girls, come and meet your second/third cousins once/twice removed.’ In all this, Teilo is a phenomenon. The only person who has this family tree photocopied in his head, he could not be more in his element, making connections, tying up loops, telling people things they didn’t know about their own grandparents.
The gathering is an abiding testament to the nineteenth-century Welsh belief in education, and the social mobility it catalysed in the twentieth century. There is much quiet wealth. The Reeses have carried on being farmers and doctors. And then among the quirkier callings we also have not only a monk but also a pilot, a bus driver, a violinist. And a writer. The majority of the assembled will have benefited from private schooling, or still do, or will. One little girl is freshly sprung from the womb. We eat and drink as we sit and mingle, and eventually my father takes it upon himself to stand and thank our hosts for their great generosity in reviving this tradition. I telepathically urge him to mention the remarkable fact that we are all the descendants of a small farm in the middle of Carmarthenshire. Or at the very least to give Wales a name check. The telepathy doesn’t work. And maybe that is appropriate. Wales for most of these people is a ghostly memory, its DNA thinned out till it’s all but imperceptible.
After lunch it’s time for a group photograph. On such an occasion I cannot let the opportunity pass to slip off to my car and change into the appropriate dress. As the party ambles across the lawn towards the large tree under which a long row of chairs have been laid out for the elders, I come back in the other direction newly attired. Several people catch sight of me.
‘What the bloody hell are you wearing that for?’ barks someone.
‘What in God’s name do you call that garment?’ parrots another.
Forgive them, I think, for they know not what they say. England has marinated their brains in old assumptions. Amid the chorus of snipes and catcalls is an approving smile or two.
‘Excellent choice, Jasper.’
‘Daad! Typical.’ As seventy descendants of Corn Gafr in Meidrim smile for the camera on this boiling English summer afternoon, I quietly hope my daughters standing just in front of me are proud that I for one am wearing the red shirt of Wales.
On my last day in the Pughs’ kitchen at Blaencywarch, Owain produces his passport. Out of curiosity I ask if I can glance through it and on the first page I notice that it has Welsh writing in it. I’ve not seen Welsh in a British passport before. It so happens that my passport is about to expire. Where better to renew it than in Wales? Perhaps I can get my mitts on one of those Welsh-language ones. How Welsh would that be?
The post office in Machynlleth is at the back of Spar, only yards from the seat of parliament where Owain Glyndwˆr was crowned Prince of Wales. It’s after him that all Owains are implicitly named. Not to mention all Owens and Owenses – the surnames of my grandmother’s parents. There’s a queue. When they get to the counter everyone seems to speak Welsh. And the post-office mistress speaks Welsh back. I’ve taken the precaution of looking up a word or two and step forward confidently.
‘Oes ffurflen am gael pasport yn Gymraeg?’ (Ffurflen = form.)
‘You can apply for a passport in Welsh.’ Irritatingly she’s decided I need to be addressed in English. She rummages on a shelf behind her and returns brandishing two envelopes. ‘Here is the Welsh-language form. But the language is quite technical so it might be an idea to have the English one as well.’ She slips them both through the narrow slot on the counter.
‘Diolch,’ I harrumph. But at least I have in my hand a Welsh-language passport form. No one can take that away from me.
A mile or so beyond Dinas Mawddwy Hedd pulls in at a house. We enter a low-ceilinged room full of large sofas and chairs and a kitchen table on which afternoon tea has been laid out by a small friendly woman in her eighties Hedd introduces me to as his mother Margaret. On the piano is a snap of Hedd and Sian on their wedding day in the 1980s. Hedd, looking uncomfortable in a suit with a fatly knotted tie, is rather thinner, but the same glint shines in his pebbly eyes. After tea we go out and help Margaret shift some of her flock into a trailer and thence up into a field at the near end of Cwm Cywarch. We do four trips in all, a dozen or so ewes plus their lambs quad-biked in from the field to an enclosed yard, gates positioned so that the sheep can be corralled into a tight space and pushed into the trailer, then taken up to the field to have their fleeces spray-painted with a green dot by me, shoulder or rump according to gender, then released. My movements become mechanical. I am aware of a pleasant sensation of feeling naturalised. The city is a fading memory. I am living and working in Welsh. In one week I have returned to the land without a backward glance. It helps of course that the weather has been unremittingly benign.
It’s past my regular time for knocking off when we get back to Blaencywarch. Normally I’d slope off, but I slip into the barn to see how the lambs I’ve been helping to feed all week are doing while Hedd potters about. The smallest one has learned to take milk from the bottle. The ewe has accepted the lamb foisted upon it. My work here is done, I think. Radio Cymru still blares tinnily from the wireless. Suddenly I hear my name.
‘Jasper, ti eisiau tynnu?’ Do I want to pull? Hedd is over among the pregnant ewes. One of them is prone on her side. He’s kneeling next to her.
‘Pam lai?’ Why not? I clamber over the metal fencing and into the enclosure. I’ve not seen another birth since the morning I arrived. Hundreds of lambs have appeared in ones and twos in the fields, but always when I’ve been looking the other way. I crouch down. Hedd tugs aside the vaginal membrane and two cloven feet materialise. This time I know to grip firmly and pull properly. I pull one, then the other slithery leg until they come clear, and soon enough a tiny snout has nudged out into the air. I take both legs. At first nothing happens. You really do have to haul hard on these things. I pull again and feel movement. A small head pops out and with one more determined heave the entire body of the lamb slips clear, followed by the dark shiny glob of the afterbirth.
Hedd pushes a finger into its mouth to check for amniotic blockage. The lamb lifts its head and emits the merest wobble of sound, a tiny bleat. The ewe looks round. We stand and retreat so that the mother can bond with her newborn. Hedd looks at me and smiles.
‘Da iawn,’ says the Welsh Rural Community Champion. ‘Ti wedi tynnu cig oen o’r diwedd.’ I’ve finally pulled a lamb out. I smile back.
9
Eistedd = Sit
‘When I see the enthusiasm which these Eisteddfodds [sic] awaken in your whole people … I am filled with admiration.’
Matthew Arnold (1866)
AT FIRST SIGHT it looks like any other countryside festival. Armies of attendants in Day-Glo livery wave you through muddy fields to park precisely where they tell you. Happy humanity in cagoules and fleeces brandishing costly tickets flows on foot towards clicking turnstiles. People of like mind congregate under open skies to cheer and drink and commune.
But here, in a small town in the British Isles in the twenty-first century, you pass through a portal and something is definitely different. As I wander along tented avenues among families, couples, teenagers and busy-looking officials, the scene could not be more English. Beers and beverages are sold along with sandwiches and salads from outlets in a manner recognisable the length and breadth of these isles. Plastic awnings flap in the wind. Gun-metal skies glower overhead. There’s a classic August chill on. They’ve managed to get every detail right. It’s uncanny. This could be anywhere in England. But there’s one thing that’s different. Everyone – everyone – seems to be speaking Welsh.
This is the annual celebration of Welshness, of Cymreictod, known as the National Eisteddfod. There are local eisteddfodau galore across Wales, held in village halls, theatres, churches, chapels and sundry other makeshift performance spaces. There’s an eisteddfod for the young known, somewhat sinisterly, as the Urdd, or Order. But this is the big one. Every summer, in the first week of August, Cymru Cymraeg attracts thousands of visitors to its festival of nationhood. The venue alternates each year between north and south. This year it’s in Ebbw Vale. I hand over my ticket to a smiling attendant and wander into what in effect, with only one or two small discrepancies, is indistinguishable from the Quidditch World Cup.
Every conceivable representative of Welsh life has an outlet. The political parties are all here, from Plaid Cymru to the Tories. So are the farming and teaching unions, the universities from Lampeter up to Bangor, museums and tourist trusts. You can have your fill of Welsh publishers and printers, manufacturers and designers, harpists, jewellers, cottage rental companies, single-issue agitators of various hues. I buy a hoody blazoned with the legend ‘Cymdeithas yr Iaith cymraeg’: the Welsh Language Society.
And then there is the parked pantechnicon of S4C, who are broadcasting round the clock from a gated paddock. Presenters with bright faces and cheerful hair sit on garden furnishings under television arc-lamps. The focus of their attention is a huge pink pavilion, a jaunty big top which dominates the Maesfield. Inside here, Welsh musicians, actors, singers and choirs compete across a range of categories defined not only by art form but also age, gender, number. The Welsh Learner of the Year is presented with his or her prize on the stage of the pavilion (in this case her: my mate Dai got to the final but did not win). The competitions are numerous enough to fill the week from Monday morning through to Saturday afternoon.
