Bred of Heaven (16 page)

He first attracted attention across the border on 1 January 1969 in Betws-y-Coed. He was chairman of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg at the time – the Welsh Language Society – which had convened a large crowd to make a symbolic protest against the English-only road signs by painting over them. The movement chose the heart of Snowdonia because it was close to T
Mawr, the home of Bishop William Morgan. It was Bishop Morgan who was granted permission by Elizabeth I to translate the Bible into Welsh. The Welsh Bible, used for centuries as a manual for teaching literacy, is credited with saving Welsh as a written language. Now it needed saving as a spoken language. The campaign to restore Welsh to its place in Welsh national life got eye-catchingly underway when Dafydd Iwan painted out the word
police
on the door of the local constabulary, was arrested, duly fined and eventually imprisoned for non-payment. Others were arrested too, but the campaign's focus was tightly on this pugnacious, guitar-strumming nationalist.

‘We were talking pretty historic stuff,' he tells me. ‘We knew we were part of a big change in the history of Wales and we were quite confident we were right.' If they needed proof of that, it came in the tacit collusion of the police throughout their non-violent campaign. The Archbishop of Wales visited him in Cardiff prison. ‘When you're in there for a cause the other prisoners think you're barmy. “Could you have paid the fine?” “Yes.” “You must be bloody mad.”'

So the campaign to save Welsh must have appeared to many at the time. I remember my grandmother voicing her disapproval of Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, which won Carmarthen as its first ever constituency. But the concessions to the language and by extension to the individualism of Welsh identity were gradually made: bilingual road signs, a Welsh-language radio station, a Welsh-language television channel, devolution, a Welsh Assembly, Plaid Cymru in coalition government and now an independent commissioner for the Welsh language. And throughout this long struggle, Dafydd Iwan's songs have been the soundtrack. In particular ‘Yma o Hyd' – which translates as ‘still here' – is a paean to the sheer bloody-minded durability of Welsh Wales, its people, customs, language. ‘I don't look at myself as a musician,' he says. ‘My musicianship is always a bit of a joke, but what I really am is a songwriter. My songs are my main medium of communication. I can tone down the politics to fit the occasion, but wherever I go in the end I hope I communicate a similar kind of message.'

The new inclusive message is that Wales is for all who sail in her. The president of Plaid Cymru isn't interested in hating the English back. ‘There is always that danger that pro-Welshness becomes anti-Englishness, and you've got to steer clear of that or it becomes blatant racism.' But he is by implication grateful to English hauteur for helping to keep the language alive. ‘The survival of the Welsh language is a miracle,' he argues, ‘in that it has survived so very
close to the centre of the British Empire, who imposed English on so many countries to the detriment of the native language. And yet this language has survived probably to some extent because of this imperious official attitude. The Welsh language was a symbol of our refusal to give in to the landlord and the Church and the law and all these foreign-based authorities.'

I ask him what he makes of my quest to slip the bonds of my inheritance and be re-embraced by the land of my fathers. Being a politician, he doesn't want to say the wrong thing. He's met others who've looked for their Welshness, he says. ‘But many of them have not included the language. “I don't have to learn the language, do I?” “No, you can be Welsh without the language.” But making the language pretty central is the one sure way of opening that door to a different world and seeing the Welsh from the inside. If you want to simplify it, that quest is attainable if you attain the Welsh language.' I'm trying, I tell the moral and musical guardian of Welsh. I'm really trying.

Over the weeks the word larder is becoming better stocked, and the sentences come out more quickly and have a richer texture. Small red book in my lap, I learn words on Tube journeys: Welsh on the left, English on the right obscured by a ticket to the Millennium Stadium, then the ticket switched as I mouth the Welsh. Funny looks occasionally stray in my direction. Or I'll catch a neighbour peering over my shoulder. Who knows what they think? Who cares? At night to get to sleep I set myself the task of naming every Welsh word I can think of beginning with a particular letter. My favourite is
ll
. Or words beginning with
cyf
-, or ending with -
aeth
. Some words which stubbornly refuse to stick in my head are written out in a new vocab list and subjected to intense and punitive study.

Over the weeks and months I become familiar with the ways in which words shift shape from one part of speech to another, how adjectives and nouns can be recognised by their endings. The musicality of the language begins to assert itself, its elegant folds and rhythmic undulations. It takes a while, but eventually I twig that the only way to achieve any hint of authenticity in Welsh is to speak in a Welsh accent. This may sound logical: the Welsh language after all is where the lilts and cadences of the accent come from. But it's only when you think obsessively about it that these things become truly apparent. The element of the accent which is traditionally described as sing-song comes from a heavy commitment to the penultimate syllable. As you get into the rhythm of it, Welsh words take on the springiness of a trampoline. The rhythm bounces you into the following word. I would be interested in asserting that it's connected on some inchoate level with the dips and rises of the landscape. But that may be a little far-fetched.

‘Ti'n gwella yn sicr,' James says at a certain point, one Tuesday evening in the London Welsh Centre. You're certainly getting better. The weekly gain comes at a cost. Three-quarters of an hour into our regular weekly sessions, I can feel a massive blood-sugar low coming on, my brain seizing up, my Welsh articulacy losing its motor function. The bar fills with choristers meeting for a drink before practice. Our table is surrounded, often by Welsh speakers near to whom I sense my tongue turning to stone. The minute hand tumbles ever so slowly south towards half past when James has to go and sing, and I can at last recover from the shattering mental effort required to accelerate towards competence in conversational Welsh.

It takes an awfully long time to walk a male choir of eighty singers into position. I am second on, only a lofty white-bearded second
tenor called Howard ahead of me as we process in strict formation out onto the stage of a concert hall in Cardigan. I reach my place on a raised platform in the corner and adopt the Welsh chorister's traditional pose, arms hanging by the side, eyes impassive, head dignified. There is strictly no talking or even whispering. I've seen Pendyrus perform and noted the Zen-like focus.

I'm in the navy-blue jacket. The badge of Pendyrus Male Choir rests on the breast pocket: a golden harp with a sheet of music, a baton and a sprig of corn. I pull it on for the first time in the changing room, also looping the tie round my neck, and feel as never before like the real Welsh thing.

It's strange to see the choir out of their natural habitat, the deep cleft of the Rhondda Fach. On a beautiful late afternoon in Cardigan, a summer breeze whispers in from the bay. The old town is quiet but for a few revellers down on the quayside of the Teifi. At least some things remain the same. The eisteddfod is being held in the town's sports centre. There's a great deal of milling about to do, the day-long programme now running late in the early evening. Pendyrus convenes on its own patch of sports field for a pep talk from Stewart. It's all about lifting our confidence, patting us on the back for collective hard work, and a final word or two on the songs, not only ‘Heriwn, Wynebwn y Wawr' but also ‘You Make Me Feel So Young', the old 1940s swing hit recorded by, among others, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.

‘Remember, gentlemen,' he says, ‘as you sing “You Make Me Feel So Young” I want to hear that twinkle. I recommend you think back to a special time with a very special lady.' Manly memories stir in eighty romantic hearts, not all of them ticking so steadily nowadays. ‘Some of you,' he adds, ‘may have to think back quite a long way.' A bark of laughter fills the open air. By now I really do have the second tenor part locked down. Stewart has kindly recorded
‘Heriwn, Wynebwn y Wawr' on tape for me and I have listened without cease on the M4. I have suspended my night-time listing of vocabulary to recite the words. I'm rather fond of them, or those I can understand: they portray a dystopian vision of a grim present in which flames cool in the hearth, mighty oaks wither, darkness descends and the weary body grows ever more frail. It sounds exactly like a depiction of old age, a dire forewarning of death. But one thing can make spirits rise, hearts lift, and allow us to face the future: the power of song. The sentiments expressed are Welsh to the very marrow.

Pendyrus last performed here in 1959. The bright evening light begins to dim. I slip inside the tented awning abutting the sports hall and find a seat next to Stewart.

‘Popeth yn iawn, Stewart?' The proceedings from the hall are being piped through a loudspeaker – song after song, between them booming announcements in Welsh from a male master of ceremonies. We talk quietly.

‘I'm nervous for the choir really,' he says. ‘They've worked so hard and I just hope they give a good account of themselves.' Is he not at all anxious? He looks at me. ‘I'll be like that,' he says, holding out a rigid left hand. ‘Trouble is I conduct with that.' His right hand is all a-quiver. I am struck anew by the unforced ease of his charisma. After years of choral atrophy, the many men under his baton have been renewed by Stewart.

The male choir category has attracted six choirs from across South Wales. The category is for twenty-five members or more. Ours vastly outnumbers most of them as we are bossed into entrance formation in a corridor area feeding the stage. The choir goes quiet. I catch Mal's eye.

‘Nervous, bychan?'

‘Tipyn bach,' I say. A little bit. ‘You?'

‘Nooo,' he says with an admonishing look. ‘I'm looking forward to it, I am.' He rubs his hands as the sound of applause ripples in from the sports hall and a long crocodile of choristers in burgundy jackets files past us. The men of Pendyrus put their hands together to clap them off. Fittingly for a sports hall, this is a sporting contest. Eventually Howard gets the nod. I follow his lumbering frame out onto the stage.

Four minutes later Stewart raises his baton, the choir's pianist Gavin swings into the intro, the tenors begin in unison. ‘You make me feel so yooooung,' we croon, all snappy and syncopated. ‘You make me feel like
spring
has
sprung
.' It's incredible how frothy and frolicsome a choir of eighty well-drilled Welshmen can sound. ‘We're just like a couple of tots / Running around the meadow …' The image of the men of Pendyrus skipping brightly through the fields of Ceredigion is not allowed to linger as we bring it right down for the key line: ‘And even when I'm old and greeeey / I'm going to feel the way I dooo tooodaaay / 'Cause yooou make me feeeel sooo yoooung.' Sung entirely without irony. But with considerable twinkle. As Stewart pushes us through the gears, the harmonies get so tricksy that in the surge towards the round-off we're practically clambering on top of one another. ‘So yoooooouung!' The final chord is a tight weld of diminished fourths and augmented minor sevenths (or some such).

The audience claps cheerfully. The eighty of us make a point of not smiling. Or I do anyway. As Stewart takes a bow, down in the audience I notice three people making notes. Judges. They are presumably writing things like
ardderchog
and
gwych
,
rhyfeddol
and
siwper
(‘excellent' and ‘great', ‘wonderful' and ‘super'). Just you wait, ladies and gentlemen, for the forthcoming explosion of choral gigapower.

Gavin crashes in on the piano and Stewart counts us down to our entry and … Whoosh! ‘Miloedd ar filoedd sy'n amau bob dydd
…!!' (Thousands upon thousands who doubt every day …!!) We give it the hairdryer treatment. The sonic force would knock an unsuspecting Englishman off his feet. Then a diminuendo monstroso con legato
mawr iawn
. We can swivel the volume knob at the swish of a stick. I watch Stewart carefully – we all do – as he mouths the words and allows the music to speak through his body. We articulate punctiliously. Such a large choral organism, such a subtle, particular sound. The lyrics paint their dire picture of a palsied present, the heartbeat of the song driven almost to a standstill before the green shoots of a musical revival very quietly suggest themselves: ‘Oerni'r canrifoedd fu'n gwasgu yn drwm
…
' Something about a deep freeze and sleeping heavily for centuries. The pianissimo phrase hints at withheld excitement, at stirrings of passion. Stewart's motions, tightly reined, start to expand. ‘Heriwn, wynebwn y wawr,' boom the basses on their own, studiously observing that comma. (Let us challenge, let us face the dawn.) The melody surges towards a climax: ‘Gloyw fo'n llygaid a'n gobaith yn fflam.' (Shining eyes, blazing hope!) My voice felt as if it had been mugged the first time I tried this. Up another note for a bar. Now it soars to the heights as if yomping up the flank of a Welsh mountain. And another. Feel that sustain! Understanding of Welsh is probably not necessary for this most pictorial of songs. Down comes the volume again for the urgent, hurried conclusion: ‘Mae'r dyfodol yn dechrau.' (The future is beginning.) ‘Yn dechrau.' (Is beginning.) ‘Yn deeechraaauuu'
–
socking breath – ‘yn aaaawwwrrr!' (Nooooooow!) The roll on that climactic
r
is like a carpet unfurled at pace.