Bred of Heaven (11 page)

As the pages of my red booklet fill, I come across a number of problems. The first is that, Welsh being a largely insular language, give or take the odd cross-fertilisation with Latin and, more recently, the invasion of English, words have a habit of melding. It takes a more agile and adhesive brain than mine to sift and label
llaw
,
llawn
,
llawr
,
llawer
,
llawen
,
llew
,
lle
,
llo
,
lleol
,
llem
,
lled
,
lles
and many more. And then there's something curious going on with a lot of the adjectives. The friendlier ones are short and manageable:
hen
= old,
braf
= nice,
gryf
= strong, etc. I'm mildly concerned about some of the longer ones:
difrifol
, for example, which means serious, or
hanfodol
(essential); or
priodol
(appropriate),
ddelfrydol
(ideal),
annhebygol
(unlikely). They all more or less merge. And they all sound like pharmaceutical applications. Rub this
difrifol
on your bunions. If you take three
priodol
a day that rash'll clear up in a trice. A spoonful of
annhebygol
…

There's no cure for galloping mutation psychosis. The BBC Cymru website actually supplies a mutation checker, but I discover in due course that it's virtually useless because it acknowledges only one trigger for mutations. I am now making the acquaintance of some truly obnoxious rules about when and where and indeed why to deploy the mutation. I read somewhere that you use the nasal mutation for days and years if there are a certain number of them – specifically five, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-nine and one hundred.

Sometimes you get a whole conga line of mutated words, as if out on the town after a rummage in the dressing-up box. Every time I think I've got the system locked down, another rule will pop up like a fresh carbuncle. Fired by enthusiasm to approach the problem from several angles rather than learn Welsh entirely through the medium of Matthew's dysfunctional experiences in Lampeter, I invest in a book of Welsh grammar. The first chapter doesn't mince its words. No one would ever guess how many different triggers there are for the soft mutation in the Welsh language. It comes to an inconceivable tally. Thirty-one! A soft mutation can be caused in THIRTY-ONE different and separate ways. If they told you that before you started, you wouldn't start. The book even talks of how certain words ‘suffer a mutation'. I know
exactly
how they feel.

‘The real traveller in Wales must explore the coal valleys which stretch northward like the fingers of a hand, of which Cardiff is the palm.' Long before Bill Bryson, there was H. V. Morton. The first of the mass-appeal travel writers, the puppyish Morton leapt aboard his open-top, two-seat Bullnose Morris in 1926 to go
In Search of England
and came back with a picture of a pleasing
arcadia that, even then, didn't quite exist. Books on Scotland and Ireland promptly followed, both based like their predecessor on articles for Lord Beaverbrook's
Daily Express
.

Morton had defected to the
Daily Herald
by the time
In Search of Wales
was published in 1932. It managed more than any other travel book on Wales to capture the binary nature of the country. Remote and rustic North Wales mesmerised Morton with its antiquity and foreignness. Excluded from all conversation only a few miles from the border, he began to have paranoid hallucinations in the classic English manner: ‘It seemed to me that they were hatching another Glendower rebellion,' he said, as he looked at Welshmen chattering incomprehensibly all around him. ‘A Roman might have felt like this in a British village.'

But Wales worked away at him. By the time he had driven to the end of the Ll
n peninsula and back he had seen and heard enough to be lecturing a Welshman in an inn in Llanberis about the shameful way the English misunderstood the Welsh. ‘Too many people come to Wales, look at it and go home without the slightest idea that they have encountered an alien culture.'

The first two-thirds of
In Search of Wales
concerns itself with the north. Morton kept his gaze fixed on the Wales of old, of Merlin and Arthur, the Romans, of Llewelyn the Last's doomed resistance to Edward I, Owain Glynd
r's heroic campaign against Henry IV (‘I will stick to Shakespeare's spelling,' he said). It was only halfway through the tenth of twelve chapters that he entered what he called ‘Black Wales'. Suddenly the observational journalist in Morton had a more urgent sort of spectacle dancing in front of his eyes. He visited a steel works in Llanelli, a copper works in Swansea, an oil refinery at Llandarcy, a zinc works in Llansamlet, an iron forge in Pontypridd. He also spent a blustery day on the Gower with female cockle-pickers on donkeys who hid their faces from the camera for
fear of incurring bad luck. (Never mind that rather worse luck was invited by Morton himself when he and a photographer from the
Herald
, using ‘a new safe-light apparatus', took the first ever flashlight picture in the potentially explosive methane-rich environment of a coal mine.)

Morton's Welsh journey concluded in the Rhondda. His compassionate portrait of dignity wrestling with poverty reads like the complex, layered climax to an epic symphony. In Heartbreak Valley, as it was known in the Great Depression, Morton found the river running black, chimneys no longer belching smoke, jobless men loitering on street corners and stoical women feeding and clothing ‘insanely large families'. But when he spoke to the men of the Rhondda, whether they had work or not, he was astonished not only by their mild manners and gentleness, but by the high level of education, culture and intellectual curiosity.

And then he plunged underground. Issued with dungarees and a lamp, he stepped into a cage with a group of men for the afternoon shift and reached fifty miles an hour as they dropped half a mile into the earth. ‘It roared. It rattled. It banged. I felt that my feet had left the bottom of the cage and that my ears were being pulled upwards.' It slowed to a halt, out he stepped and began walking for more than a mile towards the coalface. Overhead, steel girders had been wrenched out of shape by the weight of half a mile of terra firma. Underfoot, as he walked between rails, his boots kicked through fluffy powder. A voice hallooed from a great distance. Then another noise was heard, which grew and grew until ‘it was as if the miners in the front line had released some dragon that was tearing towards us in the dark': a train of twenty-five cars laden with coal growled past, as Morton and his guide stepped into a lay-by.

Eventually he came to the coalface, where he found not only
miners but boys and a horse. He seemed to show more interest in the fate of the colliery horses than the boys, and indeed reported on the care they received at greater length than the business of working the seam. Nonetheless, Morton did marvel at the extraordinary skill with which the men attacked the face:

He seemed to find no means of expressing his admiration for these men other than through punctuation: he littered these paragraphs with exclamation marks as he met and talked with them of music (‘He was fond of Handel!') and of greyhounds (‘We talked of dogs!'). The readers of the
Daily Herald
needed to be told that these miners were no worse than themselves, and possibly rather better. ‘It was like finding hell inhabited by angels,' said Morton.

His imagination made a link with still-fresh memories of the trenches, a coal mine's atmospheric equivalent for camaraderie in the face of danger.

‘Well, and what do you think of it?' a miner asked him as he entered the cage to be sent back up towards green grass and soft rain.

‘You are always in the firing-line.'

‘We get used to it. It's got to be done! I wish a few more people would come and see us work. Cheerio!'

The DOSCO Mark IIB Roadheader bears down on the coalface, its ferocious cutting head a-jigger. A new upgraded DOSCO would cost in the neighbourhood of one and a half million quid, Brian tells me. This one's forty years old. If it were a whale it would be smothered in barnacles. Under advice, I've got my breathing mask on.

Visible across the vertical surface is a join between the six-foot coal seam and, above it, a mixture of sandstone and mudstone. The miners call it muck, because it's worthless. The cutting head engages the wall of rock and begins the work of ripping it to shreds. As the arm swings left and right, up and down, the whole lot spits off in an indiscriminate mix onto the floor, where it is swept into the bowels of the machine by two huge, flat, rotating star-shaped wheels. The roar is all-engulfing. There's no point in attempting to talk unless you want to howl directly into someone's inner ear. I am transfixed by the unequal battle between machine and mineral. This, it suddenly strikes me, is modern coal-mining. Unlike their hundreds of thousands of Welsh forerunners, fellow moles under these mountains, the men scurrying around in luminous orange barely touch the coal itself.

In due course the cutting head stops and a kind of peace is restored. The road has been swept clear of dusty clumps and mangled heaps, the coalface pushed back by perhaps a metre. Between fifteen and eighteen tons have been sent back on the conveyor belt. In the silence a miner greets me with a handshake and a plug of tobacco. Miners chew tobacco as an alternative to smoking, which along with all forms of battery-powered equipment is banned. Slung on a wire across the roof of the tunnel is a winking
gizmo designed to measure the level of flammable gas which has claimed so many local lives over the last two centuries. I've never taken so much as a single drag on a cigarette but it seems unadventurous to refuse.

‘Don't swallow, mind,' he says. ‘Whatever you do …'

‘Why, what happens?'

‘You won't feel very well is what.' Brian, who is listening in, advises that I'll be vomiting without cease if I let so much as a drop of saliva near my epiglottis. He can't stand the stuff, he adds. How they'd all chuckle if I sprayed the road with neophyte's chunder. Warily I put the plug in my mouth and bite. It feels like munching on a wet twig dipped in bitumen. Within a minute I spit it into the dust and for the next quarter-hour I'm neurotically gobbing spumes of saliva. I've failed my first underground trial.

There were 35,000 miners working in the South Wales coalfield in 1984. There are now around 1 per cent of that figure. These men down here in the bowels of the earth are survivors of an industrial holocaust. There are eight of them: a fitter, an electrician and a deputy, an apprentice engineer and three heading men. Not that you'd ever guess who does what. Everyone has a job title but, whereas miners used to have very specific roles in the days when there were thousands of them, these days everyone seems to muck in. If a job needs doing, someone does it. That's not the only reason it's hard to tell them apart. They're all in a version of the same outfit, with every head covered, every face coated in dust. It appears there is also a regular collier's size and shape too – a generous midriff, thick shoulders and a general air of stumpiness. There are no beanpoles at the coalface. In this environment, teeth become much stronger marks of identity (although in the old days of course none of them would have had many). Caught in the light of my cap lamp, feline eyes – briny blue or iridescent green-brown – blaze in the darkness.