Bred of Heaven (2 page)

These feelings of belonging have had to sprout from barren anglicised soil. If scientists in a laboratory were creating an upbringing designed to inculcate Englishness in a boy, they couldn't find a much better template than mine. My birth in London took place at a Welsh-sounding address: Gower Street. But everything else about the street is English. The Pre-Raphaelite movement was also born here. Illustrious residents include Charles Darwin, Mr Pickwick and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I then grew up in the smartest crescent in the heart of the royal borough. Every morning we ran to our bedroom window in the garret and watched the Household Cavalry clop and clink glamorously along the Old Brompton Road. On Friday afternoons we clambered into the car and drove down south to the South Downs to spend ineffably English weekends on ponies and Choppers. We were sent to a school called Sussex House, and when we moved permanently to Sussex itself I stopped my tears like many a good English boy, put a little English bung in my little English rear and boarded: the immemorial English expulsion from the English home to the English public school. Envelopes crested with the family's heraldic device would arrive at school franked with a Dyfed postmark, containing chatty news from Wales in my grandmother's spidery hand. They would have been more or less indistinguishable from letters mailed thirty-five years earlier to my father. He was of that generation who were sent away to school in England at the age of eight and never really came back. Wales had been educated out of him. He liked to tell a story of how, touring Herefordshire one summer with his medical-school cricket team, he snuck out of the hotel under cover of darkness to steal the ‘Croeso i Gymru' sign guarding
the Welsh border as a trophy for the pavilion back in London. Not long after, he was driving his Welsh mother into Wales. ‘Some vandals have removed the sign,' she said. He kept quiet. Later, his emotional detachment from the scenes of his youth manifested itself in the ritual we performed every time we crossed into England. In that succession of Range Rovers thumping back across the bridge, we'd hurrah and huzzah like junior zealots.

How Welsh can all that grounding make you? How Welsh can you be on the back of two visits a year? Eventually there came a time when if I wanted to go to Wales I had to travel under my own steam. It didn't take long for the wool to be pulled from my eyes. By train, and then – when my grandmother gave me her old Simca saloon with its handy orange disabled sticker – by car, I would push along the old corridor to Carmarthenshire with a budding awareness that we had been hoodwinked. Wales, it turned out, was not somewhere you had to get out of as quickly as your four wheels would carry you. In subtle and creeping ways it grew on me. But hold on, I remember realising one evening as loafy hills burned in the slanting western sunlight, Carmarthenshire's gorgeous. I was much taken with the diesel trains chugging picturesquely to and fro along the shore of the Tywi estuary. I started to feel possessive about the lowing castle at Llansteffan, a broken-toothed ruin put out to grass centuries ago but still pluckily commanding the heights. This would have happened when I was about twenty, and getting past my teenage indifference to landscape. I stopped looking at Wales through paternal eyes.

Many years and many visits to Wales later, and for all my shouting at the telly on match days, I'm still pretty much English. I certainly sound English. I'm like everyone else. I have a deep hankering to come from somewhere. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, but I feel rootless. My kind of middle-class Englishness lacks
meaning, at least to me. Which is why I've drifted over the Severn this overcast Friday morning. A magnet has drawn me. The Welsh call it
hiraeth
: longing. But I'm nowhere near Welsh enough to start giving my feelings Welsh names.

It's on the sea wall where Welsh land and Welsh water meet that it occurs to me: to take the scenic route round Wales, do the whole circumnavigation. It suddenly seems the thing to do: to put a girdle round the old country. I have seven spare days, and no real idea how to kill them. I bet it doesn't get done much, if at all – coming in on the new Severn Bridge and several hundred Welsh miles later leaving on the old one. I can practically feel obsession, that omnivore of the male brain, sinking its talons in. This is a man-made project that will need rules and order. It will impose discipline and purpose. It will make sense.

Before I skip down the steps and into the car, I invent some instant guidelines. No islands, of which there are several (so Anglesey is out). Always stick to the road nearest the sea, however tiddly. And when I get close to the northern border, cut inland and drive down along the Welsh side of Offa's Dyke, the man-made ridge which once upon a time advised interested parties where England begins and Wales ends.

I unlock my car, lower myself behind the steering wheel, open the map to the relevant corner of Wales, reconfigure my milometer back to zero and turn the key.

What follows is a slow and winding crash course in Welshness, although the Welsh have a more resonant word for it:
Cymreictod
. On the surface at least, the induction is topographical. Knobbly headlands and beetling cliffs make way for windy strands of white powdery beach. Chimneys belch and cough. There are Georgian jewels and kiss-me-quick resorts. Estuaries bite deep chunks out of the coast. Turrets of innumerable castles prop up the clouds. Mountains tumble
into the sea. Along the edge of Offa's Dyke delineating the old border with England, empty moorlands sound like the winds which howl about them: Eglwyseg, Berwyn, Y Mynyddoedd Duon.

At strategic points I get out and walk. And walk – over heathered moors, up looping paths, along deserted beaches, past trilling woodland streams, onto tufty headlands and into secretive coves. I walk among the stony remains of past incursions: castles raised by kings and barons, abbeys planted by monks, now roofless and naked to the heavens. Welsh weather permitting, it's usually possible to see along the tumultuous coast towards the site of the next ramble. And the weather, contrary to expectation, does permit. Friendly breezes shoo away the cloud cover. The sun is free to pick out blues and greens, the seas and meadows partitioned by seams of sand and rock. Once or twice it rains old women and sticks, as they colourfully say in Welsh, and I can't see beyond the fence. Otherwise it wouldn't be Wales.

The more I stop to clamber up hummocks and take in the view, the more I am baffled by something. When you can see so much of it in one go, the country seems no larger than a postage stamp. One miraculous dusk I sit on a drystone wall, picking at an Indian takeaway, and with the naked eye take in the entire sixty-mile semicircular sweep of Cardigan Bay while Snowdon and her siblings bustle and bristle beyond the shore. I've only ever gawped at that from a plane before. Another golden twilight I look down on the long arcadian corridor of Clwyd, beyond it the whole commotion of North Wales as far as the eye can see, and in the distance the magnificent lonely peak of Cadair Idris. Wales, in short, doesn't go far. On the other hand, criss-crossed by a labyrinth of ridges and ravines, it goes on for ever. Its distances are in its ups and downs, in the intestinal coils of roads pushed this way and that by Welsh geology.

The binary nature of the place is of course underlined, even enforced, by the names of things. Such has been the success of the Welsh Language Society's rearguard action that this is a country where you can be driving to two places at once: one with a Welsh name, another known by a later English alternative. With only myself to entertain I try to exhume a grandson's sepia memories of Welsh pronunciation. The signposts are never slow to tease the tongue: I pass through Dinbych-y-Pysgod and Abereiddy, Mwnt and Tywyn and G
yr, Llanystumdwy and Rhydycroesau, Dwygyfylchi and Penbontrhydyfothau. The consonants I'm sort of on top of, but the vowels can seem as alien as Greek. It's as if they're encrypted to bamboozle some nameless enemy. Forebears of mine knew their way round every nook of the language. For all my efforts, Welsh keeps its back turned to me. I look at a sentence without the first idea which word's the verb. And yet the Romans left their Latin DNA in the names for things:
pont
and
porth
and
castell
. Wales is a broth, I tell myself, thousands of years in the brewing.

And then there is the quilt of voices. As I make my clockwise circuit, the accents of the place sing and dance, narrow and fatten. The voice of the capital has a tight, parsimonious tang. The Dyfed accent swoops and dips in a hilly lilt. In Gwynedd delicate wispy vowels flutter as if wind-borne. Across the porous border of Clwyd come abrupt stabs of nasal Scouse, while further south in Powys and Gwent impenetrable inflections form a kind of natural barrier against the enemy over the hill.

By the end the milometer, measuring serrations in the coastline and the jagged eastern edge of the country, has ticked over towards 850 or so long and very winding miles. That tally incorporates wrong turnings, backtrackings, map-reading indecision and evening sorties from my bed and breakfast to the pub for stout and chips. There are also a pair of disastrous mishaps in which I
accidentally drive a good hundred yards into England. Manfully I control an obsessive-compulsive urge to turn round and snake back along another route and maintain the Welshness of my footprint. There are only so many country lanes, lurching and burrowing along the fertile length of the border, stuck behind ancient hatch-backs and swaying tractors or even bobbing dinghies on their stately way to water, that even the keenest born-again Welshman can take.

So by the time I drive deliberately back into England with a sentimental lump bulging in my throat, I am confused. On the one hand, I am so bloody Welsh you wouldn't believe it. On the other, I don't believe it myself. The symbolism of my chosen route is irrefutable. I have gone around Wales. It's where a lot of Wales is. But I haven't strayed into the heart of Wales, or into my own Welshness. I wonder if despite this immersion I can make any claim to be Welsh at all. Maybe it's all been just a mirage. I try to banish the thought, but a week after my week in Wales I can only look on helplessly as imperious England replants its flag in my head. I am disappointed with myself. The inference is clear. I must be culturally fickle. I'm no more than a flirt. Or, worse, a tourist.

I don't want to be like one of those American Celts who stick out like sore thumbs in pubs. It seems clear that Wales is not going to claim me voluntarily as one of its own. If I want to turn myself into a Welshman, I'm going to have to force the issue. I'm going to have to look for Welsh experiences, try to get Welsh stuff done. Some are born Welsh. Some achieve Welshness. I am going to thrust myself upon Wales.

So I'm going back in.

ONCE UPON A TIME
we all spoke Welsh. Before the Normans came, before the Vikings, before the Angles and the Saxons brought their amalgamated Johnny-come-lately language, before even the Romans rowed across the seas, the inhabitants of the place we call England were, in effect, Welsh. The various invaders, who referred to the natives as Britons, successfully shunted the indigenous language back into the mountain fastnesses in the west, where what was once known as Brythonic evolved into the great survivor that is Welsh.

Did they but know it, compelling evidence confronts anyone who crosses the so-called English Channel and sees rising white cliffs, a geographical feature tightly allied with English identity, gleam across the water. The ferry pulls in at the dock. Vehicles nudge from its innards onto English tarmac. Drivers trickle through customs and excise, brandishing passports, their badges of nationhood. They are greeted by a sign: ‘Port of Dover Ferry Terminal'.

The name ‘Dover' is a modern transliteration of
dwfr
.
Dwfr
is
Old Welsh for water. The most English of ports with its blue birds and its chalky ramparts, which could not be much further east of Wales, takes its name from the island's oldest living language.

Like it or not, in the beginning was Welshness.

‘So tell me, Bryn, what is Welshness?' As I work on my plan of campaign for Project Wales, there's no harm in going to the very top. I look straight into the blue eyes of Bryn Terfel, the international face of Wales. ‘How would you measure Welshness?' I add, for good measure.

The face seems fashioned from rock. The jaw has a kind of jutting mass, a hewn heft. I am reminded of one of those monstrous capstones on the burial chambers that dot the long coastline of Cardigan Bay.

We are in a hotel not far from Caernarfon. Outside the fields are lush from summer rains. Into the mouth from which the famous bass baritone sound has emerged these twenty years, the great man has been shovelling forkfuls of pasta quills with roasted vegetables. But now the loaded fork hangs suspended. There is a ruminant pause. The blue eyes betray cogitation. And then he speaks.