Bred of Heaven, page 7
‘Just tell me what to do, Teilo.’
I stack. He packs. Our through-put is impressive. In forty minutes we’ve bagged and cellophaned thirty boxes, each containing a dozen biscuits. A new monastic record, I fancy. And meanwhile we talk – copiously.
A silent order strikes me as an odd choice for a man of many words. Teilo is very Welsh in that sense. When as a young man he first thought of walling himself up in here, he recalls that his mother took to her bed for a fortnight and he thought better of it. In fact the Cistercians gave up on the life of unadulterated contemplation a while back. When Teilo first came here in 1954, no one uttered a word. The second Vatican Council in 1965 concentrated on updating the general life of the Catholic Church. ‘Religious orders were encouraged to consider their way of life and rules and practices,’ he tells me as he grapples with a gizmo which fastens the shortbread into its cellophane wrapping, ‘and go back to the spirit of the founders and remove accretions. Silence,’ he explains, ‘was a very positive value, but strict silence using sign language was deemed to be unnecessary.’ The order considered a revision of its constitution across its 170 monasteries. ‘We had about twenty-five years to think about it,’ Teilo adds. Eventually, in the early 1990s, the brothers of Caldey began to talk.
Still, there is no talking in the refectory. Unless it’s by Father Daniel, who takes his lunch late so that he can read to the brothers as they eat. The choice of literature is not necessarily devotional. Today’s is from a book about the Open University or the World Service or some such. Spoken into a microphone, Father Daniel’s kindly Dutch voice booms across the long tall room via an over-amplified sound system. The other top monks are parked at a top table: Brother Luca, a short bald Italian from Port Talbot, and Brother Gildas, a tall and stupendously white-bearded figure. The rest of us sit along tables lining either wall of the refectory. I am sitting very much below the salt – below the psalt, if you will – beyond the last table leg of the last table.
A trolley enters from a door to the kitchen in the far corner, pushed by slow-strolling monks in sandals. The monks look well fed on this simple food: soup, cheese, bread, a rather splendid tortilla with salad. (In one or two cases, they look very well fed.) I go up to the trolley and take a hefty plateful. Father Daniel’s lowland vowels clang off the high walls. We masticate quietly. It’s none next. More psalms. Terce, sext, none: the daylight hours codified in cod Latin. The contemplative life is entirely knackering, I think, as I get up and take my things through to the swing door. On the other side a bunch of beaming monks from this formerly silent order, their hands dipped in suds or wielding tea towels, are all yakking their heads off.
After lunch, none comes and goes. As does vespers, after which we embark on fifteen minutes of contemplation, of which I have been forewarned by my uncle. I sit and do not pray, though I attempt a sort of agnostic equivalent. The day-trippers flocking across the sound from Tenby have flocked off again to the mainland in a flotilla of vessels. As my Cistercian immersion draws to a close, the heavens have opened. Through tall narrow chapel windows rain splashes on full green leaves, drips insistently from a leaking gutter. It feels as if I have rifled through the entire Book of Psalms. Supper passes too. The Lord has been my shepherd and I have not wanted for quite a nice paella, a leftover from a feast day. And now compline, the final service of the livelong day. ‘Before the light of evening fades we pray, O Lord of all,’ intones Brother Titus from The Hague, ‘that by your love we may be saved from ev’ry grievous fall.’ I am a convert to monastic ritual, nodding to the altar without a second thought now. And it’s become second nature to bow with every ‘Glory be to the Father’ in – for the record – Psalms 4, 90 and 133. I feel quite embedded. The visiting priests have taken their slightly suffocating piety and nocturnal noise pollution back to the mainland. I am alone with the monks of the abbey on this holy island where Welshmen of yore once did much to establish Christianity in Britain.
We sing the Nunc Dimittis very, very slowly. The atmospherics are spot on: tonally calming, hypnotic, suffusing one’s frantic restless grasshopper mind with a sensation of great peace. The bell in the tower is clanged. Most of Wales, land of monasteries and chapels, no longer worships. It has journeyed from faith through doubt to disbelief. St Mary’s in Conwy was empty but for me and three short elderly ladies. The Capel Yr Annibynwyr where my grandparents married has room for a thousand believers. Where are they now? ‘I wish one Sunday everyone would come at once,’ Towyn says of his scattered flock. God is not in my life either, however much I may wander about Wales looking for Him. The last Rees who believes is Teilo, born and raised in Carmarthen, sent into England and now, after sixty years away, home again. It’s an extreme form of repatriation. Tomorrow morning he will stand and wave on the quay. And I, the only passenger on the chugging boat, will wave back at a receding figure with cropped white hair, head hunched into bony shoulders, elderly and stooping but somehow miraculously rejuvenated at nearly eighty on this rock first occupied by saintly Welshmen fifteen centuries ago.
3
Gweithio = Work
‘The miner’s employment is laborious, and dangerous; and his profits uncertain. Frequent injuries happen to him in blasting the rock, and digging the ore; and cold, damp, and vapour, united in destroying his health, and shortening his life …’
Revd Richard Warner, A Walk Through Wales in August 1797 (1798)
SWITCH ON LAMP. Tighten helmet. Check belt with battery and self-rescuer. Enter hole in side of hill.
If you’re looking for Welshness, sooner or later you will be heading underground. In this case, the way leads into an arched tunnel maybe fifteen feet wide. The left half of the space is taken up by a raised conveyor belt which thrums along at a fair lick, carrying grainy black lumps up towards the light. The earth underneath is rutted and uneven, here hard, there powdery.
‘Best keep your lamp on the floor,’ says Brian as the gradient steepens and we start to plummet.
For one shift only, I am becoming a miner. OK, perhaps too self-aggrandising a claim. I am being shown into the clandestine underworld where that Welshest of activities has always taken place with nobody to watch: the mining of the coal which, once upon a time, powered the British Empire’s trains and ships and industrial furnaces. There were always other pits in the United Kingdom, other coalfields. But in the world’s imagination, nowhere is as indissolubly associated with coal as the South Wales Valleys have been for two centuries.
Not that there are many mines left anywhere in Britain, of course. The national tally of big pits is currently down to seven. Wales has two of them and they sit on opposite sides of the A465 – the Heads of the Valleys Road – as it hastens through the Vale of Neath. Over the way is Aberpergwm. I’ve come to the Unity mine in Cwmgwrach.
The valley is one of the least populated in the South Wales coalfield, which stretches from Llanelli to Pontypool. Cwm Rhondda, just over the mountain, is known as the Long Street. But here are no terraced villages running for miles along a deep narrow gulley carved by a river. When George Borrow walked through the Vale of Neath on his way to Merthyr Tydfil, he noted the valley ‘soon became exceedingly beautiful; hills covered with woods on the tops were on either side of the dale’. Pleasing emblems of the local status quo included a passing pack of hunting hounds and, across the valley, ‘a very fit mansion for a Glamorganshire squire’. There was only one breach of the peace: ‘one of those detestable contrivances a railroad was on the farther side – along which trains were passing, rumbling and screaming.’
The railroad has gone. From the road, flanked on either side by mournful coniferous hills, you’d barely suspect that the embers of the old industry still burn.
I feel entirely fraudulent. I have never knowingly got my hands dirty in the course of work, let alone my face. I don’t suppose they see many Jaspers at the coalface. Some Reeses, doubtless. There are no miners in my lineage that I’m aware of, though statistically it’s likely that someone on my grandmother’s side must once have quarried slate in the north, or on my grandfather’s dug for coal in the south.
My guide underground is Brian Lewis, under-manager at Unity. In his smart blue shirt and formal trousers he has the look of someone whom office life hasn’t quite succeeded in taming. He can talk the talk of business, figures, productivity, but that frame looks built for a more physical life. He’s a sizeable unit is Brian; as a young man he played at centre three-quarter for Aberavon and was offered a signing-on fee to go and play league up country. Employment opportunities in Welsh mining have shrunk to almost nothing, but he has never been out of work since joining the industry in 1976 as an eighteen-year-old. ‘I signed on behind my father’s back,’ he says. ‘He wasn’t happy, but I could make £22 a week instead of £11.’ He started as a face worker at Blaenant, but was offered the chance to train as a mine deputy in Swansea, then, having some O levels, as a mining engineer in Pontypridd. While on strike in 1984–5, he was allowed by the union to attend college. He has since worked mostly at the western end of the coalfield – at Abernant near Pontardawe, Betws near Ammanford, Penallta near Ystrad Mynach. But much of his working life was spent at Tower colliery in Hirwaun. Until 1993, when coal prices dropped through the floor and the pit was deemed uneconomical, it was just another struggling mine. It acquired notoriety when it reopened as a workers’ buyout. Brian stayed there till it finally closed in early 2008 and after a brief spell in small mines he came to Cwmgwrach.
The first portal to the underworld is the pithead baths. It’s full of row upon row of three-tier numbered metal lockers – far more than is needed for a mine that employs around one hundred men. I change into bright-orange trousers, bright-orange shirt, bright-orange jacket with white luminous strips, bright-orange shin-guards and black lace-up boots. The trousers would be a snug fit for a plumper midriff. As I transmogrify myself from civilian to collier, I think of Big Pit, the museum at Blaenavon which memorialises a decimated industry. The locker doors there are decorated with images of famous mining men. Idris Davies, b. 1905, the collier’s boy who became the people’s poet for inter-war industrial Wales. A. J. Cook, b. 1884, the miners’ leader who during the General Strike coined the phrase ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day’. Bert Coombes, b. 1897, author of the collier’s autobiography These Poor Hands. ‘Slogger Bill’, b. 1921, who cut 234 tons of coal in six shifts from a six-foot seam, and turned down an MBE.
I stumble out into the bright morning light, barrel down one of those metal-grill stairwells that sing with each tread, then cross the yard. There is a pile of coal as tall as a house and as long as four. It must weigh thousands of tons. Beyond it we enter the hole in the flank of the hill. This is a drift mine. Unlike a deep-shaft pit, fed by lifts sunk hundreds of metres into the netherworld, in a drift mine you descend to the coal seam on foot (though at the start of the shift the men travel down on the belt).
Brian walks about four miles a day. In previous jobs it was up to twelve. He moves with a burly stride, booted feet wide apart. I stumble along like an eager child, trying hard to feel manly. I am intensely conscious of the signals I must give out: privileged, metropolitan, puny. These are the badges of my white-collar life. They are only partly shrouded by the luminous gear I’ve been issued with. At least in the darkness everyone else sticks out like a sore thumb too. After reaching a point where we have to clamber over the conveyor belt and dip through a gap, we come to a junction. Down to the right is one of the two roads Unity has been driving into the earth to reach the seam. But we take the left fork and keep walking. Overhead on the left is a huge cylindrical fan pumping air down towards the coalface. We follow it for nearly half a mile, the slope keeping to a constant gradient of one in seven. Every so often there are man-sized holes dug into the corrugated walling – for colliers to squeeze into when machinery passes. I’m wondering what on earth could be big enough to force a man into the fabric of the wall.
A few minutes later I have my answer. A hundred metres off I can see lights and white strips looming; cap lamps are milling around a huge solid presence squatting on the arched roadway. It glowers ominously as we approach, a brontosaurian vehicular hulk. It’s as long as a pantechnicon, as low as a Land Cruiser, an unspeakable mechanised apparition. As we pass its flank I can see tank tracks under its skirts.
And here suddenly the corrugated tunnel runs out. After just over a mile of walking downhill we have come to the end of the road. Above us are 550 metres of solid earth. In front is only wall – wall which, by some miracle, broils with fretful life. It convulses in angry reaction to the advance of man and machine. A cluster of miners, faces entirely blackened with coal dust, stand and watch as clumps of rock and rubble detach themselves from the ceiling to thump and scatter cussedly onto the floor, puffing up clouds of particles. A man leaps onto the back of the machine, guns the engine and grapples with the gearstick. The beast jerks and nudges slowly forwards, tank tracks a-growl. And there, mounted on its front and edging towards the coalface, is the most fearsome drill I have ever seen.
One year, to test a much floated family boast that our grandfather was so well-known a figure in South Wales that even the Post Office knew where he lived, my younger brother wrote a letter. On the envelope were the following words:
Bertram
Carmarthen
It took its time but the letter, stamped and franked, found its way to Mount Hill. The postman knocked on the black-and-white front door and asked my grandfather to ensure that next time his correspondent provide them with a little more information to go on. But the barest amount, excluding even his surname, had on this occasion proved sufficient. Bertram Rees was not just any old dentist.
Bert was born in 1901 and grew up on a small farm in Meidrim, a village ten or so miles west of Carmarthen. There were six siblings above him, two below. As in many a home in Wales, education and self-improvement were valued. The four oldest sons went into farming. The only daughter, who was the middle child, married a farmer. The next four sons all qualified as doctors and dentists.
As a young man Bert went up to London to train at Guy’s Hospital. On his return to Wales he established himself in Lammas Street in Carmarthen and by 1936 he had managed to buy Mount Hill. Built in the late 1700s in the style of a pavilion in India, it was a prestigious local property which had been in the possession of the family of the Soviet spy Donald Maclean. It cost £2,000. Among his patients was Dylan Thomas, who would come into town from Laugharne and leave without ever, apparently, settling his bill.
My grandfather did not have that difficulty with most of his clients. When the National Health Service was created after the war, the farmers came down from the rolling Carmarthenshire hills and the miners came up from the valleys of the western coalfield and they queued in Lammas Street to have, for the first time in their lives, free dental care – probably, in most cases, their first dental care of any kind at all. The state reimbursed my grandfather handsomely. His compatriot Aneurin Bevan, the member for Ebbw Vale and architect of the NHS, perhaps did not anticipate that free dentistry for the disenfranchised would entail enriching a few practitioners. So prolific was my grandfather’s practice, so assiduous his throughput, that in the House of Commons he was held up as an example of dentists milking the system. That’s what we were always told, anyway. By the time Bert retired in his seventies, his practice had the records of 70,000 patients, their names and addresses all entered on individual cards. His sons and grandsons went to Harrow. He himself became a name in Lloyds. He was a pillar of the community, so much so that in 1959 he was appointed High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire and ten years later was president of the Three Counties Argricultural Show, in which capacity he took the salute of the Household Cavalry when that summer – I remember this distinctly – they came down to perform a disappointingly squelchy tattoo at the county show under laden summer skies. For the seventh child of a farmer from Meidrim, it was quite a journey.
Teach yourself Welsh. The time has come. My City Lit course is all very well, but we are learning an average of two and a half useful phrases a week, plus approximately twelve new words. At this rate I will be able to hold a conversation shortly before I retire. So I go to a language bookshop in London and invest in a Teach Yourself Welsh book with a pair of CDs.
I’ve never taught myself a language before. The emphasis is on listening first, and using the book only as a second line of defence. I click the play button. There’s a demo of how to pronounce the various letters. The hard ch. I know all this, I think contentedly. The salivating ll. I am very much ahead of the curve. The windy rh. Maybe I should just skip the first chapter. But hold on. ‘Jayne, Tom and Matthew,’ says the CD, ‘have enrolled on a residential Welsh course in Lampeter.’ That’s actually not a bad idea. ‘Matthew has been learning Welsh on his own for a few months. On the first morning he is wandering around the college when he meets someone.’
I listen to the dialogue – y deialog – between Matthew and his tutor, Elen. After the initial greeting (‘Bore da.’ ‘Bore da, pwy dych chi?’) I fail to understand a single word. I listen again. No. And again. Nope. This is quite upsetting. On about the fifth go I start to make out indistinct sonic patterns, although none that I recognise. After the sixth I check the transcript in the book and it becomes clear that they are indeed, although you could have entirely fooled me, speaking Welsh.
There seems little choice but to clamber onto the snake and slither back down to square one. And so I start all over again, listening, not comprehending, listening, half comprehending, listening, slightly comprehending. I establish that Matthew is by his own admission nervous (nerfus). Elen advises him to chillax (paid a becso = don’t worry).
