Bred of Heaven (14 page)

The Welsh gift for choral singing came to international attention in 1872 when the South Wales Choral Union, a 350-strong
ensemble gathered from all over the Valleys, travelled up to compete in the Crystal Palace. They performed choruses from Bach's ‘St Matthew Passion', Handel's
Samson
and Mendelssohn's ‘Hymn of Praise' and returned triumphantly to Wales with the Challenge Cup and the praise of
The Times
ringing in their ears. Their conductor was Griffith Rhys Jones, a blacksmith turned breweries' director known by his bardic name of Caradog. It was Caradog who coined the phrase that has resonated across the years: the Land of Song. The South Wales Choral Union went back to London the following year and won the Challenge Cup again.

It's hard, in the midst of the second tenors, to appreciate the richness of the four-part sound. I concentrate on my Beethovenian line, while the familiar high tune is taken by the first tenors on my right – ‘the girls', Mal calls them. Chuntering some way off to my left are rumbles and growls from the baritones and basses. After one sing-through our conductor gets under the bonnet and starts to work on individual parts.

The atmosphere could not be cheerier. Banter pings around the room. For someone who spends his working life alone, it is a strange feeling to move seamlessly into an atmosphere that ought by rights to be swilling in testosterone but has somehow had the edge of male assertion syringed away.

‘Now then, second tenors.' Stewart asks us to sing our line. ‘The cream of the choir,' he adds. From the rest of the choir comes a sforzando of mock disapproval, an uproar of hissing and tutting. Around me the sixteen or so second tenors puff out their chests with an air of casual entitlement. Stewart, his hands raised to beat us in, wears the chirpy grin of someone who knew he would provoke that reaction. It's as if he has at his beck and call the vocal services of seventy sixty-year-olds in short trousers.

We're on to the German national anthem now, the swimming
gala being Great Britain against Germany. Mal says they've sung all sorts: the Canadian and American when they go there on tour, various European anthems, even the Japanese. The harmonic line has a beautiful Teutonic certainty about it, and I am kept afloat by the singers around me. It would be nice, I think, as we are invited after ten minutes' rehearsal to stand and belt out ‘Deutschland Über Alles' in unison, to sing something in Welsh. No sooner is the German anthem done and dusted than I have my wish.

‘Excellent, gentlemen. Now I think it might be an idea to have a look at “Heriwn, Wynebwn y Wawr”.' More rummaging in briefcases, and suddenly I'm trying to sight-read fiendish music in Welsh. On an electric upright an accompanist spatters out aggressive dissonant chords. Our conductor mouths the words back at us as we sing. ‘Gloyw fo'n llygaid a'n gobaith yn fflam!' I have no idea what much of this means, there being no time to peruse the over-poeticised English translation.
Llygaid
= eyes.
Gobaith
= hope.
Fflam
(presumably) = flame. The music is clearly eager to excite passion and incite fervour in a Welsh breast, with stabs of staccato and dotted power surges. On
fflam
the second tenors hold a screechingly high note, then veer up a tone, then clamber up again. For a male choir novice, this is voicebox boot camp. Next to me I can hear Mal soaring effortlessly, but for me the second tenor line slips up into the clouds, past the top of my range, and I feel my enfeebled throat squawk and squeal in protest. Just in time the tune plummets vertically south. ‘Mae'r dyfodol yn dechrau,' we sing, quick and fast, repeating and varying the phrase urgently until it fans out into a closing climactic four-voice chord. ‘Mae'r dyfodol yn dechrau … yn awr!' The future is beginning … now!

‘Very good, gentlemen. Now, baritones …' Stewart is back under the bonnet. As he tinkers, I mop my brow.

‘Popeth yn iawn?' says Mal. Everything OK?

‘Ddim yn siwr, Mal.' I'm not sure. I cough hesitantly.

‘Paid a becso, bychan.' Don't worry. He's called me
bychan
(lit. little one). I suppose in this room, unlike any other, the diminutive is legitimate. There are a couple of teenagers, but apart from them Stewart seems to be the only one younger than me.

Eventually, after two strenuous hours of pushing lungs and larynx, the choir's chairman stands up and makes an announcement or two. The arrangements for travelling by coach down to the gala in Swansea are discussed – times, dress code and so forth. The chairman passes on the news with regret that someone's wife is unwell – the whole room in unison voices deep concern – but that recovery is hoped for. Then something happens that I'm not expecting.

‘We'd like to welcome a visitor from London – Jasper Rees – who has come along to sing with us tonight.' I can feel myself itching to shrink from the attention, only for spontaneous applause to swell. I am being clapped for turning up in this wide room in the Rhondda Fach full of full-bodied men with honeyed voices. Alan pats me on the shoulder. As the applause fades, Mal hollers out a welcome.

‘Give him a jacket!'

It's music to my ears.

‘We had heard much of Welsh hospitality,' wrote the Revd Richard Warner upon arriving at an inn near Abergavenny, after a long day's slog in 1797; ‘it gave us … no little pleasure to find it exemplified towards ourselves.' In 1854 George Borrow found the Welsh welcome in robust health in Llanfair on Anglesey, where he entered the home of a poor miller who shared his enthusiasm for a long-dead bard. ‘My eyes filled with tears,' he recalled, ‘for in the whole course of my life I had never experienced so much genuine hospitality.' Shame on the Saxon, he added, for his ‘uncouth and ungracious' ways. In 1870 the curate Francis Kilvert, wandering
the parish of Clyro in Radnorshire, was similarly overwhelmed in the house of another miller. ‘Oh these kindly hospitable houses about these hospitable hills!' he exclaimed at the memory of tea, bread, butter and preserves brought to him by the fireside. ‘I believe I might wander about these hills all my life and never want a kindly welcome, a meal, or a seat by the fireside.'

My grandparents believed in the Welsh welcome. Before or after Christmas, the house would jostle with guests – old friends and colleagues, neighbours, people they'd known for decades. The entertainment mostly took a musical form. As a girl at school in Dolgellau, Dorothy was a proficient enough pianist to gain a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She won a gold medal there and returned to Wales to teach ‘but
hated
it', Teilo tells me. ‘The pupils were so unenthusiastic about music and reluctant to learn.' Her mother succumbed to diabetes in the early 1920s and Dorothy had her excuse to give up teaching piano. She gave charity recitals in Carmarthen. Bert saw her performing at one and determined there and then to marry her.

At Mount Hill there was a Bechstein baby grand in a room we rarely visited, just inside the front door on the left. The drawing room had a feminine ambience: whereas everywhere else the house had rich red carpets and polished wood, here were white walls and a light-green carpet; dainty porcelain knick-knacks covered low shelving. Only the piano came from another part of the colour chart: the wood was stained stark black. I remember the shock one afternoon of hearing rambunctious, fiery music detonating out of the drawing room. I slipped in and discovered my grandmother, whose extremely benign disposition was a matter of fact, thrashing and lashing the keys. Soon enough she noticed me standing next to her, lifted her fingers away from the piano, turned and smiled, as if she'd been caught.

‘I didn't know you could play the piano that well, Granny.'

‘Oh, I'm not very good, bach,' she said. ‘I can't get my silly fingers to move any more!' Her sing-song voice was full of self-remonstration. I remember asking her what she was playing and she said it was the ‘Moonlight' Sonata by Beethoven. She played a bit more, her hands ripping through angry upward scales. Away from the piano that side of her was invisible.

The singer in the family was my father. As head chorister at St George's in Windsor, he wasn't allowed to leave – so the story goes – until his voice broke belatedly at fourteen. Once he'd dispensed with his Welshness, the umbilical which alone seemed to connect him to his mother was music. She would accompany; he would sing a repertoire that included Gilbert and Sullivan and other flavour-some tunes of the era. The welcome guests would be ranged about the room, perched on the arms of chairs, a sofa, on stools and dining chairs carried in for the occasion. They would listen politely, some beaming, some tapping and all, on cue, clapping. There was also a local soprano my grandmother had befriended who would stand by the Bechstein and shatter the peace with mighty warbling from lively arias I did not then recognise. We didn't like warbling in our family.

There was a moment, always hideous, when the grandsons were prodded to the fore to show what they could do. We'd hammer out tunes learned back at home in England, loamy celebrations of Englishness like ‘Glorious Devon' and ‘The Floral Dance'. Although not yet old enough to board at Harrow-on-the-Hill, we'd obediently parade our familiarity with the school's rumpty-tumpty Victorian songbook. Dorothy would sight-read while her son would lead us in bovine choral unison. It was only out of respect for our grandparents, I'm guessing, that the guests would tolerate this anglophone lowering of the tone.

But the real nadir would involve me on my own. As neither of my brothers could sing much, the solo duties landed in my lap. Before my voice went south, this meant delivering weedy renditions from the treble's classic repertoire – ‘O For the Wings of a Dove', Mozart's ‘Ave Verum'. Many of them must have heard my father singing the same tunes much, much better than me. Thus is talent thinned out across generations.

Once, when I stayed in Wales on my own for several days, I remember refusing to sing for my grandparents. This would have been a counter-intuitive bid for attention. My grandmother reacted with a rare display of coldness. If I would not sing for her, she would not speak to me. And she didn't. I was being punished for my unWelshness.

‘Helo, Jasper, sut wyt ti?' It's a simple question.

‘Er …' Requiring a simple answer. ‘Bit nervous actually.' A simple answer in Welsh. ‘Nerfus,' I add.

‘Paid a becso.' Easy for him to say. I'll worry if I want to.

Halfway along Gray's Inn Road, between Chancery Lane and St Pancras in the very heart of London, a Welsh flag hangs limply from a pole. The red dragon –
y ddraig goch
– on its white and green background welcomes visitors to the London Welsh Centre, or Canolfan Cymry Llundain. Upstairs in the bar James, the teacher of Welsh Level 1, Module 1, sits at a table. It's a long, lived-in room flanked on the street side by mock-Tudor windows. Lest we forget, the Tudors were Welsh. I've always been faintly grateful that Henry VII's great-uncle was Jasper Tudor, though one suspects it was his French mother, the widow of Henry V who married Owen Tudor, who chose his name.

Having learned a lot of words, the time has come to stop being afraid to use them. There is only one option. To pay someone to
hold a weekly conversation with me in Welsh at an hourly rate. I know only one Welsh teacher and that is James. He nominates a time and a place – six o'clock on Tuesday evenings at the London Welsh Centre in the hour before he goes into choir practice.

No sooner have we settled, each with a pint of beer (
cwrw
), than I am required to explain what I have done this week. Into the past tense I have been summoned. I consider my options and plump for the obvious.

‘Dw i wedi gweithio.' I have worked/been working (Welsh seems to make no distinction).

And what do I do for work?

‘Ysgrifennwr dw i.' I have been using this formulation for a while now. I want to say I am a journalist but I've not got round to learning the word, so I stick with ‘writer'. It's definitely one of the reasons they didn't like me in Welsh Level 1, Module 1. ‘I am a writer' oozes self-importance.

And why, he asks, do I want to learn Welsh? The important question. I mention Welsh roots –
wreiddiau
– and Welsh family –
teulu
. I attempt explanations. I learn the word for ‘uncle' (
ewythr
), ‘monk' (
mynach
) and ‘monastery' (
mynachdy
). Every time something comes up, down it goes in the red book. It's one of the slowest hours of my life, punctuated by long silences from me and puzzled looks from James. My problem is not so much in formulating sentences. This I can manage if I apply myself to a meticulous step-by-step process. If I want to construct a sentence, I'm going to need this noun, that verb, an adjective or two and maybe a preposition or conjunction, depending on the level of complexity I'm after. It feels like a visit to the word larder, but one subject to strict rationing: the shelves are post-apocalyptically bare. Therefore the range and subtlety of my conversation is limited. Forget about subsidiary clauses and pleasing parenthetical asides. Abandon complexity and
sophistication, all ye who enter into Welsh conversation here. Abandon nuance and irony. Abandon, in effect, adulthood. If my on-board translator is correct, James teaches children with learning difficulties. And now, for one hour only, a middle-aged man answering to the same description. I find I have the speech skills of a six-year-old introvert.

But my speech skills are at PhD level compared to my listening skills. James will ask a simple boilerplate question. I will reply in the following manner: ‘Dw i ddim yn deall' (I do not understand). He will repeat the question. I will give him a vacant look. He will repeat the question very slowly. I will ask for a translation of at least one of the words. It will turn out to be a word I already know but do not recognise in an oral context. I will slap my forehead in self-reproach. Eventually, after this long rite has been completed, I will go to my word larder and, from the paucity of provisions available, start piecing together an answer.