Bred of Heaven (3 page)

‘For me personally,' he says, ‘a Welshman that sings, who speaks the language, lives in Wales, brought up, everything Welsh, education, through the medium of Welsh, being taught geography in Welsh, biology in Welsh, maths in Welsh.' The oracle has delivered its verdict, without recourse to main verbs. But there is no mistaking his meaning. Welshness sprouts from the soil. To define yourself as truly Welsh, you need to have learned about the birds and the bees and the isosceles triangle in the native tongue.

I swallow. According to the international face of Wales, my quest is over before it has even begun. I will never turn myself into a Welshman. I can give up now. But hold on, here comes more.

‘Sometimes people might laugh at the fact that you haven't read things like
Madame Bovary
. But you've read your Welsh poets and your Welsh writers. That's something that matters. I read
The Mabinogion
to my kids most nights. I love to think that my children are growing up exactly as I did, through the medium of Welsh in primary schools. It didn't harm me at all.'

So Welshness is also about handing a legacy on to your children. I decide not to mention my own Welsh inheritance, the celebratory whoops as we cleared the Severn Bridge and raced into England. Nor my failure to enthuse my daughters about their quarter Welshness. I try to suppress the despondency in my voice.

‘You're setting the bar quite high there, Bryn.'

He looks at me.

‘This is only from my perspective,' he says. ‘I love to have my roots firmly planted in Wales.'

I look back at him.

‘You could come and live in Wales now?' he offers.

The bar is coming down. Not by much, mind. My life is in London: children, work, responsibilities. There really is no hope.

‘And if you showed any enthusiasm towards the language you would be welcome here with open arms. There are two shops in my vicinity that are run by people who have come over from Liverpool, and not one morning have they said “good morning” in Welsh to me. I just need one word. It doesn't take much, does it?'

There's a mixed message in the blue eyes lodged in the midst of that giant face. They defy and they beseech. It's a very Welsh look.

‘It is two hundred miles long and about one hundred miles wide. It takes some eight days to travel the whole length.' Thus wrote Gerald of Wales, author of the first effort to encapsulate in literature the essence of Wales and Welshness.

It is a structural quirk of travel literature that visitor speaks unto visitor. Gerald de Barri was born in Manorbier on the south coast of Pembrokeshire, and may have called himself Welsh, but the family tree has him down as three-quarters Norman. His
Description of Wales
was composed in Latin in the 1190s. Much travelled – he had crossed the Alps to Rome – he was nonetheless impressed by the forbidding wall which Wales presented to those approaching from England. ‘Because of its high mountains, deep valleys and extensive forests, not to mention its rivers and marshes, it is not easy of access.'

This would remain a stock reaction for several hundred years. The mountains which had thwarted invaders also kept out visitors. It was in the eighteenth century that the trickle began, when roads became more passable and the leisured classes developed a new taste for luxuriating in the sublimity of untamed landscape. Daniel Defoe was one of the first literary travellers to gasp in awe as he confronted Wales's natural fortifications. ‘I am now at the utmost extent of England west,' he noted in his
Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
, ‘and here I must mount the Alps, traverse the mountains of Wales.' The comparison with the Alps was apt, he enthused, ‘but with this exception, that in abundance of places you have the most pleasant and beautiful valleys imaginable, and some of them, of very great extent, far exceeding the valleys so famed among the mountains of Savoy, and Piedmont.'

Wales's peaks and hollows were no longer unassailable to thrillseekers. Indeed the first approving impression of Dr Johnson, arriving in the Vale of Clwyd in 1774, was that the place had been tamed: ‘Wales, so far as I have yet seen of it, is a very beautiful and rich country, all enclosed and planted.' Travellers flocked west, several sending back dispatches which they would publish. The first impression was not always auspicious. The Revd Richard Warner, setting off on a walk through Wales in August 1797, was
fleeced by the ferryman taking him over the Severn but consoled himself with improving thoughts of the river's classical lineage, known to Tacitus as Sabrina, and hymned by Milton. On landing in Wales he and a companion set out keenly to inspect the nation's monuments and ruins, only to meet an instant anticlimax. ‘The ruins of Caldecot castle disappointed us,' he reported. ‘In its appearance there is nothing striking or picturesque.'

Wales was particularly appealing to young men of unplacid temperament. No sooner did he penetrate Wales in 1798 than the excited young Turner was splashing its castles and crags onto canvas in untidy swirls and whorls. Walking into the Elan Valley as a very young man, the proto-revolutionary Shelley reported that ‘this country of Wales is exceedingly grand: rocks piled on each to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, and valleys clothed with woods present an appearance of enchantment.' The sheer jaggedness of the place exercised a form of convulsion on his febrile mind. A few months later he introduced his young first wife Harriet to Wales. They had a treacherous thirty-six-hour crossing from Dublin. ‘We had been informed that at the most we should certainly be no more than 12 hours,' wrote Harriet. ‘We did not arrive at Holyhead till near 2 o'clock on Monday morning. Then we had above a mile to walk over rock and stone in a pouring rain before we could get to the inn. The night was dark and stormy.' It was only when day broke and Anglesey revealed its splendours that her pen seized up: ‘… the beauty of this place is not to be described.'

In dowdy middle age on a warm summer's day in 1824, Wordsworth had a more pleasant introduction to the north coast on a steam-packet from Liverpool with his wife and daughter. They ‘passed the mouth of the Dee, coasted the extremity of the Vale of Clwyd, sailed close under Great Orme's Head, had a noble prospect
of Penmaenmawr, and having almost touched upon Puffin's Island, we reached Bangor Ferry a little after six in the afternoon. We admired the stupendous preparations for the bridge over the Menai.'

Even the prospect of Wales, its beckoning landscape an eruption of the unfamiliar, had the capacity to restore the spirits of its visitors. George Borrow, author of the classic Victorian portrait
Wild Wales
(1862), sped towards the country by train in, he reports, a melancholy frame of mind ‘till looking from a window I caught sight of a long line of hills, which I guessed to be the Welsh hills, as indeed they proved, which sight causing me to remember that I was bound for Wales, the land of the bard, made me cast all gloomy thoughts aside and glow with all the Welsh enthusiasm with which I glowed when I first started in the direction of Wales.' Francis Kilvert, arriving in 1865 to take up a position as a young curate in Clyro on the river Wye, recalled striding for the first time over the moor to Builth Wells. ‘Then every step was through an enchanted land,' he wrote a decade later. ‘I was discovering a new country and all the world was before me.'

And then there was the visitor who didn't know where England ended and Wales began. H. V. Morton, a journalist who popularised travel writing at the dawn of the motor-car age, pulled up on the border near Chirk, where there are no mountains forming a natural frontier, and had to ask. ‘Your front wheels are in Wales,' he was told by a road sweeper, ‘and your back wheels in England.' This was between the wars, when Welsh identity was in the doldrums, the language in steep decline and the mining industry rapidly shrinking after the Great Depression. Morton stood and watched the road sweeper ‘sweep the dust of Wales into England'. Looking about him, he wondered why there was no sign to mark the border.

‘Wales should see to this,' he concluded. ‘Two million people,
many of whom speak their own language, and all of whom are proud of their country and its traditions, should tell the traveller where it begins.' And with that, he motored into Wales.

How do you learn Welsh?

We've all had a go at a language. The Teach Yourself learning kits make it sound like assembling a toy aeroplane. Try our unique language-learning tool. Fluency always guaranteed. The common experience teaches us otherwise. Especially when our mother tongue is English. Built into the English-speaker's psyche is a consensus that speaking in other tongues will not be necessary. English has long since usurped French as the international language of diplomacy; indeed it has deracinated itself and transmuted into something so universal as to be known as globish, an intercontinental mulch of patois and webspeak. If this is your birthright, why on earth speak anyone else's lesser language? Let the mountain come to Muhammad. In the Microsoft Age, English is the thug in the playground, its bovver boot planted on the windpipe of vulnerable dialects and local lingos, starving them of air.

But there's one language which, despite a jolly plucky effort, English hasn't quite managed to murder. As it was right next door, it should have been easy to rub out Welsh, just as it all but managed with Irish. Prevailing attitudes of the empire-bestriding Victorian towards ‘an antiquated and semi-barbarous language' were enshrined in an infamous diktat penned in London. ‘The Welsh language,'
The Times
thundered in 1866, ‘is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence and the ignorance of English have excluded and even now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation … of their English neighbours … The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better.' And so it was that the 1870 Education Act gave with one hand – free schooling for all Welsh
children – but took away with the other: the outlawing of Welsh in the classroom. Naturally the language pupils spoke at home and among themselves would trip inadvertently off many a junior tongue throughout the day. The first to do so would have a wooden tablet hung round their neck bearing the letters
WN
for ‘Welsh Not'. It would be passed from one miscreant to another until, at the end of the school day, the child who had possession of this instrument of linguistic oppression would be thrashed.

‘
Welsh?!
' says someone when I mention that I'm thinking of taking Bryn Terfel's advice. Her face screws up into a twisted moue of distaste. Some things never change. Her eyes scrunch. Her cheeks pucker. Her mouth gathers into a tight, uncharitable little anus. I swear it's involuntary. In that face is printed a millennium's worth of accumulated hauteur. A plume of fiery wrath whooshes up somewhere in the furnace of my guts. I really ought to give her a thorough dressing-down, but I find that I'm too polite – too
English
– to do it myself. She admits, on being pressed, that she has never been to Wales.

Yes, Welsh.

These feelings are good, it occurs to me. If my knee-jerk reaction is to hate those who hate the Welsh, I must therefore be a little bit Welsh already.

The old English joke about Welsh is the same as the one about Polish. It's a language which, for whole sections of randomly juggled letters, seems to get by entirely without vowels. If you haven't been walked through the rules and regs of the Welsh alphabet, it has the look of a sardine can of consonants. Vowels being the breath of a language, Welsh seems bafflingly to subsist without air.

Even if native English speakers are not linguists, some are more inclined that way than others. I couldn't do the sciences – yes, I hold my hands up: I flunked matrices and enzymes and all that
quantum stuff and guff. But I could always find my way around the floor plan of a new language. It was the kind of learning I was good at: the shapes of words, their sinews and musculature, their etymological kinship with root languages, alliances with sister languages, their migrations and false friendships – this was the stuff that fired my curiosity.

But the learning was all literary. We didn't do much speaking in class, or not in the relevant language. We did reading instead. When I left school I could wade through Balzac and Molière in the original. But in France I could barely order myself a bowl of soup. Spanish and German I've basically forgotten. Then at eighteen I went away and for the first time tried learning a language by speaking it. To this day Italian is the comfiest fit. The experience taught me that the classroom is not the best place to pursue oral fluency. Or not the classrooms I was in.

But old habits die hard. Just for starters, I decide to swallow a chunk of Welsh vocab. So one day, when I'm in Wales, I make my way to the back of
The Rough Guide to Wales
and hoover up their short glossary of useful terms. Being a guidebook, it mostly comprises boilerplate words and phrases for ‘good morning' and ‘cheers', ‘town hall' and ‘bed and breakfast' and ‘how much is that breathable windcheater in the window'? Many of them are familiar to all-comers from the bilingual signage you see everywhere in Wales.
Araf
for ‘slow',
gorsaf
for ‘station', in which
f
, it says here, is pronounced like a
v
. In
heddlu
(police) that double
d
is a hard
th
sound, as in ‘this' or ‘thus'. Oh, but here's the first curveball. That
u
,
The Rough Guide
advises, is actually pronounced
ee
. You basically have to treat it as an encryption. Like Cyrillic. Or music.

In the guidebook there is also a list of topographical nouns. In any other language, you probably wouldn't want to know how they say ‘mountain pass', or not for the first couple of years. But more
than other languages I've learned, Welsh geography is written in the names on the signposts.
Llan
, to take the most in-your-face example, literally means an enclosed piece of land, though it has long since been taken to refer to the church found within such an enclosure. There are more than 600 Llans in Wales, from the modestly named Llan all the way through to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (which has two Llans in it).
Aber
, another prefix, means river mouth.
Pwll
means pool;
nant
, stream;
cwm
, valley;
melin
, mill, and
maes
, field. And so on. At Aberystwyth is found the mouth of the river Ystwyth. Porthmadog is Madog's gate. Cwm Rhondda is the famous Rhondda Valley. And so on and on. The
w
in
cwm
, it turns out, is actually a double
o
, so there's another vowel to add to the collection. Mountain pass, by the way, is
bwlch
.