Bred of Heaven (13 page)

‘Am I trespassing?' I call. I'm still fifteen yards off, but can see two faces set hard. I definitely am trespassing, and in a posh English accent.

‘Where are you going?' It's the hunched figure of the farmer who calls back. He's come out of the barn.

‘Over the hill to Caio.'

‘This is private land here.'

‘I'm very sorry. I didn't realise.' If I'm honest I did realise.

‘But if you keep on up you get to the path by there.' He points begrudgingly up the hill, not quite having the heart to send me all the way down into the valley and round. I don't know how it happens, but the permission kicks a tripwire in my brain.

‘Diolch yn fawr iawn,' I say. Thank you very much indeed. The farmer's wife pipes up.

‘Dych chi'n siarad Cymraeg?' She wants to know if I speak Welsh.

‘Dw i'n dysgu ar hyn o bryd.' I'm learning at the moment. Then something marvellous happens. Two stony weathered faces crease into the warmest, broadest smiles. It's as if these few words have raised a portcullis and I've passed through to a sunlit inner sanctum. She wants to know where I'm learning.

‘Yn Llundain. Ond mae fy tad yn dod o Gaerfyrddin.' I cock up the nasal mutation of
tad
, but the important thing is to tell them that I belong to this part of the world, at least ancestrally: my father comes from Carmarthen. She then says something else which I don't remotely understand and we revert to English to establish the precise route up the hill. But it doesn't matter. I suddenly feel I've cracked it. I am on the right path.

‘I worked 'eadings five years, then I moved to …' ‘I started off as an apprentice then went to 'eadings.' I have no idea what they're talking about and am too embarrassed to ask. Headings? What are headings? Then it dawns on me. With every fresh metre hewn away, every length added to the tunnel, the walls and ceiling have to be secured. Otherwise, the whole place could collapse. This is what the men mean by working on headings. They are building the tunnel that will prevent the world falling on their heads.

For mile upon mile the tunnel is held in place by steel arches placed a metre apart. Between the arches is corrugated sheeting. It takes a shift to move forwards two to three metres. It seems slow work, but the surprise down here is the speed at which the men move. The energy is frenetic. Two men lift a curved steel girder and place it upright at the flank of the tunnel. A longer piece is lifted by
the DOSCO and suspended just under the roof. The two pieces are then bolted swiftly together using a clamp, the same for the girder on the other flank. To reach the roof a gantry platform is fixed to the extendable arm of the DOSCO so that two men can whack the corrugated sheets behind the girders. The sound of banging mingles with monosyllabic shouts, coded communications that are meaningless to my virgin ears but seem to indicate stop, start, lift, drop, pass, left, right. It's neither English nor Welsh but almost pre-verbal.

I feel a bit spare. Charlie is carrying sacks from further down the tunnel and bringing them to the face. It's a feeble token of goodwill, but rather than watch him I might as well join in. Then there are some thick, square, four-by-four lengths of wood to lug too. I do a bit of that as well. No sooner delivered than they are hauled onto the gantry and shoved as packing into the gap between the heading roof and the tunnel ceiling. Another metre, another bit of the Welsh underground has been claimed by these men, dug out and sent up to be sold as it has been for centuries.

It's hardly participation Welshness. Manual labour and me are not, historically, a comfortable fit. I feel frustrated that, owing to health and safety, industrial rules and lack of insurance, I can't get my hands dirty. I speak metaphorically of course. My hands are filthy. But it is a privilege, when fewer and fewer Welshmen can claim first-hand knowledge of the dust and the heat, at least to visit a secret sphere so linked with Wales's national identity. The DOSCO Mark IIB chokes into life. Men clear out of its path. The gantry has been removed; the arm of the cutting head is ready to scour more coal from the seam. How many more metres will these men cut? How many more miles of tunnel excavated under these hills? There are many millions of tons of coal still there – an inexhaustible resource. But the men to do the job will not be here for
ever. I shake all their hands, and those teeth and eyes glint once more in the beam of my cap lamp. ‘So long, Jas,' they say; ‘Thanks for coming down, Jasper,' my unWelsh name shouted above the bellow of the engine.

Turning away from the coalface I accompany Brian back up the slope. It's hard work walking uphill for half a mile, and when eventually we reach the junction I'm relieved that Brian says we can travel on the conveyor belt. I lie face down on a bed of coal and am spirited back towards the light, towards the Wales the world knows. Only when we emerge into the sunshine there is something new I hadn't noticed before. Just over the brow of the hill on the other side of the Vale of Neath is a monstrous white wind turbine looking imperiously down at the Unity mine and its black tip of coal. The future confronts the past.

I head back to the pithead baths. In a mirror my face has been impressively rebranded. It looks a bit like theatre make-up, wispy and too tasteful, but I'm thrilled with my new look. With reluctance I peel off my orange pelt and head for the shower. As they have for decades, Brian and two other miners are washing the black dust from their pores, reminiscing about the days when you had to catch the bus home and leap into a tin bath. I scrub too, but with less commitment. Like a fan who doesn't wash the bit of their cheek kissed by a pin-up, I want to keep some of the grime about my person. I want these Welsh particles to seep into my skin until there is no scrubbing them away.

MY FIRST FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE
of Welsh choralism is in the Millennium Stadium. The occasion is another battering from the All Blacks. I stand to attention more or less in the back row. It's as if I'm at the top of a small Welsh mountain and looking down a seething slope to the foot of the hill. A flat rectangular field is peopled with matchstick figurines: one line of microscopic beef-cakes in black, another in red. Perched on a box is a minuscule conductor who swishes a baton as a military ensemble of tiny bandsmen strike up the famous opening chords. I spy a long male choir, twenty-five wide and four deep, who lend support to the noise which now swirls and booms around this secular cathedral like no other musical sound on earth. There is not the vocabulary to encompass the sensation of hearing for the first time ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau' sung by 75,000 voices. The most expansive superlatives shrivel into inadequacy.

Regrettably, so do I. I know the tune. I do not know the words. Result: I cannot join in. There is nothing for it, while all Wales fills its Welsh lungs and sings, but to stand – uselessly, space-wastingly – in limp-dicked, shaming silence. I feel ever so grimly in sync with that most abominably unWelsh of figures: John Redwood. As a Secretary of State for Wales foisted on the Principality in the 1990s, Mr Redwood did not spend a single night in Wales. He was once caught off-guard by the camera, miming a version of the words to the anthem. It looked like he'd been dubbed from Bulgarian. He bobbled his head from side to side as if trying to cover his blushes with boyish enthusiasm while a pair of darting eyes betrayed his fear of discovery. How Wales howled.

I need to work on this core Welsh skill as a matter of urgency.

‘I now propose to describe the Welsh people, who are so very different from other nations.' In
The Description of Wales
, Gerald took the long historical view that the Welsh, who were the original Britons, derived their name from Brutus, whose people fled Troy and tarried in Greece. They might still be in Troy, he argued, were it not for their moral weaknesses. ‘It was because of their sins, and more particularly the wicked and detestable vice of homosexuality, that the Welsh were punished by God and so lost first Troy and then Britain.' Without Welsh vices, according to this reading of mythology, Aeneas would have never left to found Rome and the word ‘odyssey' would not exist.

This comes in a section ominously called ‘The Less Good Points'. The list is carefully demarcated into chapters with such unpromising titles as ‘They live on plunder and have no regard for the ties of peace and friendship' and ‘Their weakness in battle: how shamefully and ignobly they run away'. The Welsh, we learn, are greedy, inconstant and far too keen on incest. Gerald incorporated
advice to the English on how the Welsh can be conquered and governed, before even-handedly offering some tips to the Welsh on resistance. ‘I myself am descended from both peoples,' he reasoned, ‘and it seems only fair.'

Perhaps Edward I had read it with interest by the summer of 1277 when he marched into Wales with a 15,500-strong army (more than half of whom were Welsh) and, having subordinated it, turned it into a principality. But even the king who encircled unruly Wales with castles stopped short of following Gerald's recommendation to the letter. ‘It may well be thought preferable,' mused the man who yearned to become Archbishop of St David's, ‘to eject the entire population which lives there now, so that Wales can be colonised anew. The present inhabitants are virtually ungovernable, and there are some who think that it would be far safer and more sensible to turn this rough and impenetrable country into an unpopulated forest area and game preserve.' Even the most rabid Englishman might struggle to acquiesce to ethnic cleansing.

But Gerald also praised the agility and courage of the Welsh, their frugality, hospitality and intelligence: ‘they are quicker-witted and more shrewd than any other Western people' (by which he meant the Celts). Their respect for genealogy earned his approval, and of course their piety. He also had the highest praise for their cultural attainments, and one of them in particular:

I've never been to the Rhondda Valley. It's about time. I send an email out into the ether. A few days later I get a phone call. A chirpy voice invites me to come along any time. Visitors are always welcome. I'm told to make my way to Tylorstown between Porth and Maerdy. For anyone who has dipped a toe in the narrative of Wales after the Industrial Revolution, these place names are rich with history.

As I drive up the Taf Valley one evening and enter the mouth of the Rhondda Fach, I have an almost tangible sense that I am heading into the Wales that everyone has heard of but no outsider ever visits. Pendyrus Male Choir meets twice a week in a sports centre near the floor of the valley. Several senior gents carrying briefcases flow towards an entrance. I am greeted by a smile from a short man in his sixties. And another with a big grey beard. They urge me to follow with a knowing jaunty air. Through a big window the odd swimmer is splashing in a pool. Other young and spry types loiter in reception, either on their way to the gym, or freshly returned. The same cannot be said for the seventy or so men gathered in a room down a long corridor whose average age is certainly sixty, possibly older. Unless I'm much mistaken everyone seems to be chuckling. I seek out the Pendyrus secretary Graham, who turns out to be a benign bruiser with shiny blue eyes and a pinkish face behind wire-rimmed specs.

‘Glad you could make it, Jasper,' he booms. Graham, I sense, is an extrovert. ‘The question is where do we put you?' I give him a blank look. ‘Your voice. You fancy singing with the tops or down with me in the basses?'

‘Ah. Not too high and not too low,' I say. ‘If that's OK. Sort of in the middle.'

‘Sounds to me like you're a second tenor. You'd best sit by here.' ‘By here' is pronounced to sound like a famous Norman tapestry.
‘Got room in there for one more, boys?' Two men, also in their sixties, stand and usher me to a seat in the third row with extravagant friendliness. They introduce themselves as Alan and Mal. Alan has a full head of curling white hair and a look of wry amusement. Mal, tanned and poker-faced, is dapper with a generous girth. Around me other singers turn to nod and smile or shake my hand.

‘Good evening, gentlemen.' The hubbub suddenly pipes down. A tall man is standing out front behind a music stand: Pendyrus's conductor, Stewart Roberts. Tall, with a fresh open face and neatly parted hair, he has the confident manner of a teacher who knows that his class's attention may wander but can be effortlessly controlled with a well-placed word. In his mid thirties, he is half the age of half the room.

‘Now then, gentlemen, since we're performing at the international swimming gala in Swansea quite soon, why don't we warm up with the European anthem?'

Seventy men rummage in briefcases and produce sheets of music. Mal indicates that I can share with him. Our conductor counts us in and away we go. And so the first song I sing in the first of many practices with Pendyrus Male Choir is Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy', adopted by the European Union as its anthem. It's all highly apposite. The tradition of the Welsh male-voice choir has its roots in this and adjacent valleys when men came out of the pit and the foundry and, deprived of other communal entertainment as the temperance movement kept them increasingly from the tavern, joined choirs. Without much in the way of musical training, they learned to sing in four-part harmony. The repertoire consisted of stirring, lyrical tunes composed by Welshmen and sung in Welsh, but also of music in the German oratorio tradition.