Bred of Heaven (25 page)

‘Wyt ti wedi dysgu Cymraeg?' it asks in large jaunty italicised white letters on a hot-flush pink background. The tense is ambiguous. It could mean ‘Have you learned Welsh?' or ‘Have you been learning Welsh?' They don't draw a distinction, so I'm not sure of
the answer. Yes, I have been learning Welsh. No, I have not learned Welsh. Not yet.

‘Beth am gystadlu?' Soft mutation: how about gompeting? This competition, it explains, is open to anyone over eighteen who has been learning Welsh. The preliminary round happens in the spring, and something something chance to chat and something with a team of judges. I don't understand it all. Five will be chosen to compete in the final during the National Eisteddfod week. There's £300 in it for the winner, and £100 for the finalists, not to mention a year's subscription to
Golwg
magazine.

I fill out the form, and set down to compose a supporting document of 300 words. I quite like writing in Welsh. You get as long as you want, a dictionary, the Internet, a chance to scope your work for errors. And you don't have to answer someone firing mutations at you with a self-loading rifle. So I tell the story – of the two trips a year to Carmarthen, of my grandparents' abandonment of Welsh as the marital language, how the language has reseeded itself in my uncle and now, maybe, in me. The supporting document is probably chockful of cock-ups – erratic conjugations and rogue consonants, omitted mutations and misattributed plurals. But it is sincere and enthusiastic; and it's undeniably in Welsh. I post it, and email the Eisteddfod office in Wrexham asking for acknowledgement of receipt. ‘Disgwyr o'r Blwyddyn', I type carefully into the subject field. A few days later a reply lands in my inbox, confirming receipt. The subject field has been subtly edited to ‘Dysgwr y Flwyddyn'. Clear subtext. ‘Get it right, plonker. It's not “Lerners from the Year”. Don't expect to get far if you can't spell. Or master the basic tenets of the genitive case in Welsh. Muppet.'

I've been practising Welsh all week. A session with James, a lot of BBC Radio Cymru on the website. I've been mainlining vocab too, like I used to at school before an exam. It doesn't feel enough.
I am visited by an urgent need to warm up my Welsh before I go in. I text Rhys the Voice: competing in Dysgwr y Flwyddyn,
beth am ymarfer
? How about some practice? While I wait for a reply I get out the little red book and go through more vocab. Thanks partly to
Harri Potter
, partly to Nant Gwrtheyrn, I have ingested some random and frequently arcane vocabulary. I know the Welsh for ‘to ramble on', ‘to dart' or ‘flit', for ‘a bit of a lad' and ‘climate change'. I know the word for ‘noble' and ‘science fiction'. Will I ever use any of it? My phone buzzes. It's Rhys the Voice: ‘Can't,' he texts in Welsh. ‘Working at the stadiwm. Pob lwc! [good luck!]'

I scroll down my list of contacts. Leighton? Might be humiliating if I can't understand him over the phone. I try Catrin, the only Welsh speaker I know in London. She texts back in Welsh that she's busy at the mo but some time next week?

‘Too late! I'm competing in forty-five minutes.'

‘Fyc!' she replies, then adds that her Welsh at the moment is
yn grap
(= crap – mutated). I ring, and we have a nice chat. Its function, we both tacitly understand, is to stiffen my collapsible vertebrae. Cat compliments my accent, and tells me how well I've done to get so far so fast. I lap it up. At this juncture I need to believe.

‘Pob lwc!' she says. It's showtime.

The competition is taking place in a school. There's a quiz in progress, questions in Welsh with piecemeal English translations. The front two rows are occupied by happy-looking types. Other Welsh learners and their families, presumably. I seem to be the only person who hasn't dragged along an entire carful of children. It would have been nice to bring a daughter or two. I've tried to get them interested in Project Wales. Right from the off I drummed their quarter-Welshness into them with missionary persistence. ‘You're supporting the team in red,' I'd advise two small girls fresh out of nappies whenever the Six Nations was on. One of them was
even given a Welsh middle name to put in her passport: Mair, Welsh for Mary. They've been driven over the border often – once upon a time to visit their great-grandmother, latterly their monastic uncle Teilo, but also to take the air in Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire. They've been up Cadair Idris. Unfortunately, they've enjoyed a bit too much sun in other parts. They associate Wales with walking, walking with effort, effort with reluctance, and reluctance with saying no to stuff. Principally, inducements to visit Wales.

Plus they've got their own oral exams to sit, more important ones like A levels and the International Baccalaureate. So I'm on my own.

I feel as if I've trespassed into some sort of pre-established environment. These people all look naturalised, as if they've lived here for ever, even though they can only have got here this morning. It's like when you turn up on holiday somewhere, but for some enforced reason a day later than everyone else, who by the time you arrive have already scoped the parameters of this new world, colonised it with routine. This, they say, is how we do things here. We
know
. We have long experience. Longer than you anyway.

A woman with a clipboard approaches busily. She ticks off my half-Welsh name on a long list. I'm at the bottom, the last one unaccounted for. ‘Da iawn.' Ten minutes before my interview, she explains, I'll be taken upstairs. I should settle in, get a
paned
(cuppa), enjoy the
cwis
(quiz). Obediently, I edge towards the edge of the raked seating and park myself in a red-plastic bucket seat.

A woman in the row behind asks me in Welsh if I'm here to compete –
cystadlu
.

‘Ydw,' I say. Yes I am. This is another quirk of Welsh: they don't say yes in Welsh if they can help it, or no. Yes I am, they say, or no you don't. Yes we would. No they will not have. The tense is immaterial: if the question contains a verb, so should the answer. Are you competing? Yes I am. Are you nervous? Yes I am. (One is cacking
oneself, to be specific.) Don't worry, she advises. They're very nice.

They
are the two judges. In Welsh they call them
beirniaid
–
barn
being the word for judgement or opinion. But I can't help thinking of them as examiners. Sorry, but a situation in which you go into a room for ten minutes to answer questions in a language you have by no means fully conquered and then discover at the end whether you've passed or not is, for my money, an exam. The last time I sat an oral exam was twenty-eight years ago. If memory serves, they've never not been problematic.

No, insists the woman, it's just a gentle chat. I ask her where she's from.
O ble dych chi'n dod?
was one of the first sentences I ever learned in Welsh. She's from Bridgend, she says, and points to her name on the list of competitors we've all been given. To kill time I peruse it studiously. There are twenty-nine of us this year, apparently the largest entry ever. Among adult learners, Welsh is on the up. I peruse the long column of names. They are all very Welsh-looking: lots of Ieuans and Angharads and Hywels, sundry Joneses and Llewellyns and ap-Morgans.

At the bottom it says, ‘Jasper Rees, Llundain'. The familiar relief: at least my surname doesn't look out of place.

I assume I'm the loner here, the one who has travelled furthest. After their names it says where they're from – in Welsh naturally: Aberteifi, Caergybi, Llantrisant, Y Gelli, Pen-y-Bont, Yr Ariannin. Oh. That'll be Argentina. He must be one of the Patagonian diaspora. Welsh speakers are tuppence a dozen down there, I tell myself, thanks to the nineteenth-century migration to a remote pocket of South America. Rhys the Voice once went on a rugby tour there and, while failing to find anyone who spoke English, couldn't move for Welsh speakers. I look around the room for a vaguely Hispanic-looking learner. More intriguingly, there's even one from Gwlad Belg – Belgium.

To kill more time I look down the order of play:

And then there's some stuff about 4 August, competing at the National Eisteddfod and announcing the winner and giving him or her the prize, interviews with the press, etc. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The question is this: am I Welsh enough to get past lunchtime?

‘Jasper?' The clipboard woman taps me on the shoulder. Would I like to follow her? Not particularly, but I get up anyway and trudge in her wake. It's not just me. There's a tall bloke called Dai. We are herded into a small office and asked to wait. Dai, who's from somewhere off the M4, says he took up Welsh for work: something to do with youth groups if my internal translator is functioning correctly. He seems alarmingly fluent. I ask him how long he's been learning, and it's well north of three years. Great.

Two extremely jolly ladies keep popping in and out, beaming reps of the National Eisteddfod. I ask them how many contestants they
had last year. Half as many, it turns out: only fifteen. Among adult learners, on this circumstantial evidence, Welsh is twice as popular as it was a year ago. A comparable take-up pattern of constant annual multiplication will bring about total bilingualism in sixteen years. I've just done the maths. No wonder the reps are so jolly.

We chat about this and that – why we are learning, where we come from. London raises an eyebrow or two. There aren't many opportunities to speak Welsh there, I make a point of saying, just in case either of them is involved in the judging process. There's no point, it occurs to me, in not letting them know that some of us are operating under a handicap. The evidence is stacking up that Dysgwr y Flwyddyn is not a level playing field. It's not some gentle sub-GCSE paddle in the shallow end for dilettantes and newbies. People who've been at it for literally aeons can enter – who have to use Welsh at work every day and/or who are married to a fluent Welsh speaker. I've been learning for fifteen months. Count them.
Un deg pump
. It is now dawning on me, in this airless anteroom, that I am about to commit an act of hubristic folly. Long tall Dai sits opposite me trotting out lovely looping Welsh sentences without a care. He's like one of those natural sportsmen you sometimes get elegantly thrashed by at, for example, golf. The energy is minimal, the efficiency maximal, the result a flawless mechanism built for economy and ease. Dai's sentences land on the green, near the pin, as planned, as required, and this they do every time. His mind is able to translate thought into word.

I tee off my sentences honourably intending to fetch up somewhere over there, having travelled in a smooth arc that bisects the air. I address the thought in my head, eye on the ball, check the tense, right arm locked, think about the object, keep my head straight, plan for mutations, feet firmly planted, watch out for that
relative clause ahead, ease in and whoops you've used the wrong verb there and that's a declining preposition you've just omitted to deploy correctly and wrong plural, you jerk,
wrong plural
, call yourself a Welshman?!?

My Welsh lives off the fairway. I spend a lot of my time scratching around in the tufted undergrowth.

‘O ble dych chi'n dod?' The question comes from an angular man in his thirties with long swept-back hair and a slight bulge to his green eyes.

‘Llundain,' I say. My answer is toploaded with heavy implication. At the foot of the rainbow in the east, mate. That's where I come from. The dim and distant mouth of the M4. I am the outsider here.

‘A chi?' And you? Might as well ask him. He has a thick accent I can't quite place. He's obviously another contestant with the built-in advantage of living and breathing the language in his daily round. Anglesey maybe? Somewhere impenetrable in Mid Wales?

‘Gwlad Belg,' he says. Ah. So this would be the Belgian contestant. Now he mentions it he does have a Flemish tinge to him. He looks like he's walked woodenly off a canvas by Memling or Van Eyck. It's difficult to suppress a faint annoyance. Why the bloody hell would a Belgian learn Welsh? Back to Ghent with you, Lowlander. I'm all set to ask when one of the ladies pokes her head around the door and summons him to his interview. All eyes and elbows, he grabs a bulky black briefcase and exits with a friendly wave.

Maybe I should pipe down about London.

There's another bloke in the room from Dorset, short, wiry and ginger. My accent bitch-slaps his salty yokel burr. Yes! Ha! This is one contestant I'll wipe the floor with. Easy. Competition brings out one's loveliness ever so. Come on! Let's do this now! I must pump myself up. None of this bile foams out of my actual mouth.
I'm all modest charm and beaming politeness. We're all in this together – that's the public position. But these ugly Darwinian feelings run free in the pastures of my mind. I want every other contestant to seize up in front of the
beirniaid
. If we were confined to a desert island I would want them all to be struck mute, even if it counterproductively depleted the number of Welsh speakers. Just so long as I could go through to the next round.

It's just me and Dai now. Dai says something. I must keep up this confidence. So I nod cleverly. I am your equal, I think. He looks at me expectantly for an answer. Can't he tell I'm nodding in agreement? Oh sod it, I'm going to have to admit I didn't understand. So much for Darwin. I'm way down the evolutionary chain of command. He repeats the question. It's the basic one about my Welsh roots.