Bred of Heaven (15 page)

We move in super-slo-mo. Paint has dried in less time than it takes me to decipher a perfectly ordinary sentence. By the end of the first hour I have made no perceptible improvement in the Welsh language. It is plain to me that my depleting brain is not set up for this sort of mental agility any more. It can no longer touch its toes. It cannot learn new tricks.

But I also think I'm hard of hearing. Not clinically – it's not as if I have a physiological defect, more that stuff doesn't go in because I simply won't let it. I hear, but I don't want to listen. In English I've been noticing I interrupt a lot (in fact my daughters tell me). Or someone is about to talk and I'll be overcome by the need to talk over them. There is no alternative conclusion: I like the sound of my own voice. I am constitutionally deficient when I am required to take in the point of view of others. It must explain why with other languages I have always got so far and no further. I have imposed
my own ceiling by refusing to learn to listen more than is strictly necessary. And now when I really need the skill, it is in a state of semi-development. It is extremely tempting to blame England and Englishness, specifically that part which my backgrounds represents: public school, privilege, lack of struggle. It could be argued that the English majority cannot or will not learn languages because, at a pre-conscious level imposed by history and embedded in the culture, they lack empathy. To learn to speak Welsh with any level of competence, I am going to have to do nothing less than take up arms against my inner Englishman. Let battle commence. Or recommence same time, same place next week.

I hand James thirty quid and slip out of the London Welsh Centre. Above me on the doorstep the dragon moves in the breeze.

Côr Meibion Pendyrus is one of the great choirs in Wales. It was founded in 1924 by two of Tylorstown's out-of-work miners. These were grim years in the industry, when the workers were either striking for better wages and conditions (‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day') or the owners were locking them out.

Welsh choralism had already been flourishing for more than fifty years, and choirs had sprung up all over South Wales and beyond, fired by the rise of Nonconformity and the temperance movement. But singing came relatively late to the Rhondda Fach. The smaller of the two Rhondda valleys had its first mineshafts sunk in 1872. Before that, the valley was home only to hill farmers and sheep. Like many other mine owners, Alfred Tylor gave his own name to the community which sprouted around the pits. He may also by extension have given it to the choir but for an accident on the night the inaugural members first convened. A fire destroyed the power station in the valley. As the men gathered outside to watch the flames, they noticed, written on a railway signal box and
presumably illuminated by the fire, the word
Pendyris
, itself named after a local farm. Having much more of a Welsh ring they took it, with a minor spelling change, for the name of the nascent choir. It has since travelled around the world, from the far side of Canada to Australia, most recently the Baltic. A street in Pennsylvania – one of the American states which received the Welsh Diaspora – took the name of Pendyrus in honour of a visit in 1989.

The choir soon accrued 150 members, most of them miners, most of them young from the evidence of a 1928 photograph of row upon row of callow youths with bony cheeks and full dark moustaches. In only its fourth year the choir was invited to perform in Cardiff Castle, the splendour of which will have intimidated some choristers and enraged others: the Bute family's immense wealth derived from the coalfield. In 1930 Pendyrus's founding conductor, Arthur Duggan, briefly stepped aside so they could have the privilege of singing for Sir Henry Wood, founder of the Proms. They won their first National Eisteddfod in 1935 in the presence of Lloyd George, and two years later performed with the great Russian bass Chaliapin. These triumphs all came in a decade which found more than half of the choir jobless. Duggan continued until 1960 when, suffering from ill health, he reluctantly accepted a recommendation to retire. By that time, one or two members of the current choir had already joined.

One night after practice I sit in a club just down the valley in Wattstown, another mining village named after a Victorian owner. There are a dozen men round the table, including Jakey, a short man in his late sixties with a knowing glint in his eye and miraculously dark hair. I'm guessing he used to play scrum half: he has some of that birdlike awareness, and a prodigious bow in his legs. Jakey has been a second tenor with Pendyrus for forty-nine years. For most of that time the choir was under the baton of another
hugely significant figure in Welsh choral music: Glynne Jones. ‘There must have been twenty boys around about twenty years of age who joined at the same time,' Jakey tells me. ‘At the time we had a new conductor who was a breath of fresh air. He was lucky because he had all these young voices.'

Jones was by all accounts a figure of terrific flamboyance – and the choristers around the table nursing their pints leave little room for doubt about what they mean by flamboyance. He'd wear a cape and sip pink gin. Photographs show a man with a long face, small eyes and a goatee beard. In order to tell his choristers apart, Jones allocated nicknames, many of them acquired thanks to their professions: Puffing Billy worked on the railways, Granada was a television engineer, Dai Sausage had once been the accountant to a butcher. Other handles were often a product of convoluted word association – Tokyo was inscrutable; Sickies did not take well to his first curry; Starsky and Hutch were a pair of new young blades. Keith, a voluble and bearded upholsterer, tells me he was known as Buttons. Barry, an extremely vigorous first tenor who briefly dabbled in his youth in a musical instrument, has for decades been called French Horn.

Glynne Jones's individualism extended to repertoire. Alongside the traditional array of Welsh compositions and nineteenth-century oratorios and masses, he introduced choir and audiences to the music of the sixteenth century. Unlike other famous Welsh choirs – Treorchy in the Rhondda Fawr and Morriston in Swansea – performing challenging new Welsh work has been Pendyrus's life-blood and mainstay. ‘I don't think I'd listen to them myself,' says Jakey, pulling a face, ‘but in the saloon bar you really felt you'd done something. Discordant is not the word.'

Their fame rose and rose. When the Aberfan disaster claimed the lives of 118 children and 26 adults in 1966, it was Pendyrus who were invited up to London to appear in ITV's special
commemorative programme. The choir continued to compete in the National Eisteddfod but there came a time when Jones refused to submit to adjudication he regarded as wrong-headed. In 1968 they performed a dissonant piece of modern music and the judges marked them down. ‘Glynne in his mind thought we were the best choir,' says Jakey. ‘He said, “It's not you guys, it's me. They didn't adjudicate Pendyrus; they adjudicated Glynne Jones.”' Choral competition is in the marrow of Welsh culture, but while Pendyrus Male Choir has sung all over the world, been broadcast countless times on Welsh television and radio and performed with sundry great orchestras, it has never competed since.

What does it take to be a Welsh male chorister? ‘You need a very understanding wife,' suggests one of them, to general nodding. Several members of the choir I meet are widowers, including Mal and Alan, the second tenors who nursed me through my first rehearsal. Roy, a wiry second tenor who joined even later than me, was persuaded to sign up after losing his wife. ‘I was spending all my time staring at the big black box in the corner,' he says. Pendyrus has given him a new lease of life. There are two rehearsals a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, and up to twenty-five concerts a year. And then there are marriages and funerals to sing at, usually the latter. Illness and infirmity are a constant shadow. At the end of at least half the rehearsals I attend the chairman asks how many choristers are available on a weekday morning a few days hence to sing a chorister's wife or other relative to their rest. They will all presumably sing at one another's funerals.

Many of the choristers have been with Pendyrus for many years. Mal joined twenty-one years ago. It sounds like a long time. ‘I'm just starting to speak up now,' he says with a straight face. He regrets not having joined much earlier. ‘The choir was something that you wanted to do when you retired. But we're all of the same
mind. When we joined the choir we all wished we'd joined twenty years previous to that.'

Glynne Jones conducted Pendryrus for the last time in December 2000 and died on Christmas Eve. A distinguished new conductor was appointed but the consensus around the table is that it was not a happy union. Stewart Roberts, a young music teacher in the Rhondda and a professional concert pianist, was invited to take over in 2009 and with him have come young singers scoured from local schools, who in turn have even brought their fathers along. The older members acknowledge that without that renewal this magnificent Welsh tradition will follow them all to the grave. The men around the table seem unanimous that after long years of stagnation Pendyrus sounds better than it ever has.

Stewart has decided to test that claim. For the first time in more than forty years, he is entering them in a competition. The target is the prestigious local eisteddfod in Cardigan, where the earliest recorded eisteddfod – literally a sitting – took place in Cardigan in 1176 at the invitation of Lord Rhys. What's more, after discussion of the pros and cons, Graham and the committee have invited me to compete with them. Pendyrus are offering total Welsh immersion: I am to become a member of one of the oldest choirs in Wales.

I've been given dispensation not to attend every rehearsal, but nor will they contemplate carrying a passenger. There seems little for it but to spend a lot of time on the M4. The drive to and from choir practice is 320 miles. I usually leave at half three in the afternoon, stop off at Mal's for a bite in Penrhiwceibr, a pit village in the Cynon Valley where several of the choir live, take the spectacular route over the ridge and down into the Rhondda Fach, attend two hours' intense practice in the sports centre in Tylorstown, get back in the car, drive slowly home and flop into bed back in London at,
if I'm lucky, half past midnight. It's a long way to go for a sing-song.

Practices have a regular shape. We sing something to warm up, then Stewart will go through a musical line with each section. As a result there's not a lot of singing for the second tenors, who are, it seems, the most musically able section in the choir. The top tenors, required to send largely ageing voices into the rooftops, are the ones most regularly subjected to forensic examination of technique. ‘Top tenors, you've had an easy night,' Stewart will say. ‘Now stand up and sing like Caruso.' The basses do a lot of heavy lifting. ‘The further away I am from them,' suggests Stewart, ‘the better they sound.' Once the pieces have been put together we'll sing in unison and, prompted by a motion from Stewart's hands, stand and deliver a rendition.

I shift around the second tenors depending on where a seat is available. Colin is the spryest of them, a barely suppressed sixteen-year-old in a sixty-year-old's body. Dai gives avuncular advice on breathing technique. I often find myself next to a serious man known as the Prof, whom I daren't call anything but Gareth. It turns out he really is a professor of history at the University of West Glamorgan and has written the definitive history of Welsh choralism. The first time I try to engage him in conversation I am promptly given to understand that it's not done to talk on these occasions. The Prof does a lot of shushing.

His more official duty is advice on Welsh pronunciation. Stewart is a Welsh learner and several of the choristers have taken up Welsh after retiring, but being of the generation before the language revival when Welsh was barely present in the Valleys, most of the choristers learn Welsh lyrics by rote. Welsh pronunciation is important. ‘Heriwn, Wynebwn y Wawr' will be judged not only on musicality. It's Buttons who articulates a pervasive anxiety. ‘We've got to
learn the piece fluently. Now I'm not a Welsh speaker and I find it a bit hard – I'll put my cards on the table, you know. If you don't get the pronunciation right, you're not going to win.' And Pendyrus has not re-entered competition after four decades in order to make up the numbers.

One evening at the London Welsh Centre I buy a ticket to a concert given by Dafydd Iwan. Being a provisional Welshman, I can't say I've ever heard of him, but am assured by a Welsh-speaking friend that he's the musical heartbeat of Cymry Cymraeg, the people of Welsh Wales. The long room where James and I have weekly conversations is now heaving, the bar shifting barrels of
cwrw da
(good beer). A stocky man in his sixties with a jocular face and an acoustic guitar takes to the makeshift stage at one end and, in a rough-hewn voice, works his way through a folkish songbook that is entirely familiar to everyone else in the room. They sing along, a wistful, middle-distant look in expat eyes. There are hoots of laughter as he performs ‘Carlo', a song about a young Englishman becoming Prince of Wales. I get that lonely feeling again – the barred door, the inaccessible sanctum.

My Welsh isn't good enough to understand his amplified speech between songs. On one occasion breaking into English, he tells a lovely joke about mutations. They were invented, he suggests, to ‘keep the numbers down. We don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry speaking Welsh, so we make it difficult.' Everyone laughs, although not as hollowly as me. In the interval, in faltering Welsh, I go and introduce myself to the evidently great man. I buy a CD, which he signs. I also ask if we can meet. He hands me his bilingual card. On it are written the words ‘President, Plaid Cymru'. He's an even bigger cheese than I thought.

A month or so later, one evening in late winter, I drive up
winding Gwynedd lanes into the countryside and soon I am installed in the spacious kitchen of Dafydd Iwan. His real surname is Jones of course. He comes from a formidable clan brought up in Brynaman in Carmarthenshire by fiercely nationalist parents who insisted their sons sit the Eleven Plus exam in Welsh. ‘A non-Welsh speaker was something of an oddity,' he tells me. ‘I have vivid memories of coming across this other language – I was probably six or seven – running to school late one morning when the mother of one of my friends who was non-Welsh-speaking said, “You're late, you're late!” And I didn't understand what it meant.' His older brother, the actor Huw Ceredig, was a mainstay for years of the BBC's longest-running soap,
Pobol y Cwm
. His younger brother, the politician Alun Ffred Jones, is Minister for Culture in the Welsh government. Dafydd Iwan has hovered somewhere between music and politics for more than forty years.