Bred of Heaven (4 page)

That's fifty or so words in the bag without even breaking sweat. I buy a little red book, write them down and start to learn, like the good old days of O-level vocab. Welsh on the left, English on the right. That's the way to do it. I tell myself it all seems quite easy.

This facility didn't take a direct route down the family tree. My father grew up in a bilingual environment. Welsh was the first language of both his parents. A Welsh-speaking grandmother lived with the family. ‘But English was the language of the house,' he tells me. ‘I can remember driving round Carmarthenshire with my father visiting cousins on farms. My father spoke Welsh to them and I didn't understand a word.' How was it? ‘Very dull.'

His older brother by contrast – my uncle – was linguistically attuned. Perhaps because he spoke only Welsh till he was three, he learned languages for fun, much as other boys play with train sets. It was a feature of our childhood, asking our uncle how many languages he spoke. The official tally settled on nine. We used to list them, starting with English as well as, obviously, French, Italian,
Spanish and German. One Boxing Day in Carmarthen, when I was about seven and everyone else was out on horseback killing foxes, he taught me to count to a million in German. He wrote a Latin primer at six. For him this was a living language rather than a remnant of the classroom. When resigning from the priesthood in Rome in the year of my birth, he had had to write to Pope John XXIII in the lingua franca of the Vatican. Modern Greek was another of his, also Russian. He once even had a stab at Turkish, though that wasn't on the list back then. And finally there was Welsh, which he relearned at the age of twelve.

‘I'm thinking of learning Welsh,' I volunteer when I see him.

‘Wonderful,' he says. ‘It's a marvellous language. You'll love it.' My uncle is an enthusiast.

‘I've already learned the words for black mountain and coastal marsh,' I add. ‘Seems pretty easy so far. Any tips?'

‘Well, there is one real snag with Welsh.'

‘What?'

‘The system of mutating. It's absolutely horrid. Really nasty.'

‘Yes, but what is it?'

‘You're used to changing the endings of words in French or Italian. In Welsh they change the fronts of words.' He pulls a face as if suffering a mildly unpleasant back spasm.

‘That seems manageable,' I say.

‘Ah, but there's a bit more to it than that.' He proceeds to explain that, depending on circumstances, a word like
tad
(father) may actually change to
dad
,
thad
or
nhad
. He pulls more of an anguished face this time, as if hearing of a relative's slightly early demise.

I've never heard of such a counter-intuitive linguistic model. Change the
front
of a word? You might as well stick it in a priest's hole. Still, that's only one word that changes, in only three ways. Presumably there'll be a few like that, a small bunch of wildly
misbehaving individuals you have to keep your eye on, like incurable show-offs in class. I am undaunted.

‘That's just one word. Are there other examples of these … what are they called?'

‘Mutations,' he says. It sounds like a botch-up in a laboratory. ‘I'm afraid so. As a system, it's more or less ubiquitous. Mutations are absolutely integral to the Welsh language. You just have to learn them.' This time his voice and face impart outright shock and horror.

And if the mountains denied ease of access, so did the rivers. The Bristol Channel – the Severn estuary – presented the same obstacle to motorists in the mid 1960s as it did to the Romans. Before they built the bridge the journey was interminable. We had a Singer estate in racing green which my father wove along Welsh A roads with, I suspect, a mixture of impatience and dread. Impatience to escape a car with three small fighting boys. Dread at the imminence of home. Not that I knew any of that then. I just felt sick. Sometimes I actually was sick, usually by the side of the road, but once, spontaneously, down the front of my jumper (knitted by my grandmother), into my lap and thence onto the permeable weave of the Singer's back seat. After that I was allowed in the front. I took to this privilege like an insufferable princeling. Whenever a car journey beckoned, I would assert my rights over both brothers without conscience or let-up.

‘Why does he always get to go in the front?'

‘Because he gets car-sick, poppet.' My mother called her sons ‘poppet' a lot. Mothers did back then.

‘We're only going to Chichester.' This from my older brother.

‘Yeah, but it's bendy.' This from me, with a hard, vituperative edge. That was the answer to everything. It's bendy. Nowhere was
bendier than Wales. After they built the suspension bridge it became less so, but my primacy had been established by then. I spent my entire childhood in the front.

The bridge gave rise to a competition. Who would be the first to spot it? Children are not good with distances. We'd set out from West Sussex, usually quite early, and soon after we hit the M4 we'd start scouring the horizon for the telltale turrets. On and on the road mowed west, but our quarry resisted all efforts to will it into sight. I had the advantage of course, being in the front seat and therefore closer, with a full windscreen to see through. It must be round this hill. It must be over that brow. It must be. It never was, not for aeons. We'd start to lose interest, get bored, perhaps be distracted by the prospect of a squabble.

‘You're a dimmy.'

‘No, you are, so there.'

‘Am not.'

‘Boys, look!'

‘Are so.'

‘Not.'

‘Can you see what I can see?'

You rounded a hill and there, surprisingly close, would be the Severn Bridge, suspended as if from the clouds. Strangely foreshortened by a trick of perspective, visible long before the stretch of water it spanned, it was a thing of mystery and fascination.

We had a ritual of driving up for a closer look. There was a service station called Aust built on the banks above the Severn. I know now that Aust Services was the direst shitpit and the thought of it caused my parents to sink into morbid depression, but to us it was a wonderland. We'd eat eggs, beans and chips – chips were forbidden at home because my mother objected to the lingering pong – and look up at the bridge magnificently filling the window.
Below it the Severn swam muddily by. And on the other side of the bridge you could see Wales. Or so we thought. Actually you couldn't. It took me decades to work out that Wales begins beyond the Wye, not the Severn, and that the opposite bank was Gloucestershire.

‘How many miles to go?' We knew exactly how far it was from the bridge to our grandparents. Children with no concept of distance ask such things frequently.

‘Eighty-four … seventy and a half …' My father would turn arithmetical. ‘Sixty-eight and three-quarters …' The revolving milometer kept us from fighting. ‘Fifty-nine point nine …' Progress was slow. In those days, somewhere after Cardiff, the motorway petered out into a single carriageway and the numbers would click along with agonising reluctance. ‘Forty-seven and a third.' Sometimes there was nothing else for it but to peer out at Wales crawling by beside us.

It looked nothing like England. Children don't notice countryside. They aren't interested in the character conferred by the lumps and bumps of landscape. But they know a plug-ugly bungalow when they see one. They also regard deviations from their known environment as somehow deficient, and that was certainly how I saw the towns and villages the Singer hared through in the days before speed cameras. It sure as heck didn't look like home. The road was lined with squat, drab housing, low-slung shops and hatchet-faced pubs. I remember wondering by what right petrol stations, planted in the middle of nowhere, were permitted to exist with such unfamiliar names. And overhead it was forever grey. From those journeys along that snaking, snailing road, whether I was four or five or eight or nine, I have not kept a single memory of the sun.

‘Twenty-seven miles to go.'

The colour, such as existed, was all in the names of places. And
what colours they were. As we drove on we'd ask my father to read them out.

‘How do you say that one?'

‘Cwmrhydyceirw.' My father had a musician's ear for sound and a trace memory of correct pronunciation: the rising terminals, the firmly placed stresses that made Welsh sound like both a statement and a question.

‘And that one?'

‘Pontarddulais.' I might not have liked the look of the western end of Glamorgan as it began to shade into Carmarthenshire, but I liked the sound of it.

‘Thirteen miles!' The countdown now began to take on a breathless urgency. We really wanted to get there. The hours in the car – five, six; once even epically close to
eight
– were gladly behind us, done and dusted, gone and forgotten. In front of us lay the golden prospect. Ten miles. The car swept along. Eight and a half. My father would be driving faster by now. Seven. We were in the west. Six and a quarter. No other cars on the road. Five. We swung off the main road and up a hill. Four. Is it just a fantasy or did the sun shoulder aside the clouds around now? Three. ‘Bags I hug Granny first!' Two. ‘
I'm
going to!' One and a half. We thumped along the lane, hearts almost bouncing out of mouths. ‘No, I am!' One. ‘She's
my
granny, not
yours
.' I was convinced that our grandmother was exclusively my possession, that my brothers had some other grandmother, as yet unmet, for them to visit as and when they chose. ‘She's everyone's granny,' my mother would say, her own mother dead before we were all born. ‘Mine!' And there with half a mile to go, it would spontaneously erupt out of nowhere, a flash fight over grandmaternal ownership. ‘No, mine!' I may have made my older brother cry with my ruthless power-grab. And thus as we bore down on our destination, the atmosphere turned fretful with junior fomentation and puerile wrath.

‘Look, boys!' My father creating a diversion. Carmarthen beckoning. You could see it on the right-hand side, parked proudly in the valley with hills lofting into the distance beyond. Caerfyrddin. Merlin's Castle. No sooner there than it disappeared behind a hedgerow, then a brow, then a village of tiny modern houses that had recently sprouted on the hillside. The car rattled as it passed over a cattle grid guarding the entrance to the house. And there it was: low and wide, mock-Gothic windows, a porch painted a glossy black, the door a beckoning white. We exploded out of the Singer and thundered towards the door. I don't remember if there was a bell or a knocker, but that's because my grandmother would have heard the car clearing the grate and the voices filling the air and we would barely even get to the porch before the door, heavy and thick, would creak heart-stoppingly open to bid us welcome to the promised land.

I am going back to school. ‘Welsh Level 1, Module 1,' it says in the City Lit literature. I've never gone anywhere near adult education before, and am amazed on flicking through the thick catalogue to find that you can learn more or less anything. Yoga is an option, as is opera. So are sewing and self-defence, Afro-Cuban drumming and personal development. You can make jewellery, study anatomy, learn to podcast. There are options for folklore, myth and spiritual studies, for the philosophy of photography. They will even teach you creative writing. Of course all the usual languages are queuing up, but so too are the unusual ones. You name it, they teach it. Including Welsh Level 1, Module 1.

‘Learn to speak Welsh on this lively course for beginners, with the emphasis on the practical use of Welsh and the development of your listening and speaking skills.' I am two weeks late for some reason. The course has already started, but I've been assured over
the phone that there is still one place. I fill out the form, write out the cheque and join the multicultural queue. City Lit is one of those buildings in the capital around which individuals randomly cluster from all generations, all corners of the globe, each brought here by the prospect of self-improvement. We are all trying to qualify for something or other. Me, I seek qualification as a Welshman. Following Bryn Terfel's recommendation, I am making my entry through the portal of language.

The room looks full. Of women mainly, mainly of a certain age. Standing at the front is a thin youngish man of medium height with fair red hair. ‘Sh'mae,' he says in a Welsh accent as I push open the door. From my
Rough Guide
vocab list I know that is some sort of greeting.

‘Er, hello.' Why on these occasions does one feel oneself flush? ‘I … I've come along for Welsh Module 1, er …'

‘Well, the class is full actually.' The voice sounds uncommiserating.

‘Oh, I was told there was one place left.'

‘Oh.'

‘Oh.' This is a face-off. Having shelled out ninety quid, I shan't be backing down.

‘What's your name?'

‘Jasper Rees,' I say, laying heavy stress on the surname. I am clearly Welsh, with a name like that. The less said about the first name …

‘James dw i – croeso.' Thus the first sentence of Welsh ever uttered specifically to me: he is James and I am welcome. And so, after twenty-three years, I resume my education.

‘Iawn,' says James, turning to the class.
Iawn
means OK, another word I already know. ‘Last week your homework was learning the days of the week. So let's run through them again together. Dydd Llun …' The class embarks on a slow recitation. ‘Dydd Mawrth.' I
have of course missed the first two lessons. ‘Dydd Mercher.' A sudden memory taps me on the shoulder: this is what it was like arriving at boarding school, being behind in Latin and French. ‘Dydd Iau.' I detest being behind. ‘Dydd Gwener.' What else have they already conquered? They seem practically fluent. ‘Dydd Sadwrn.' Hm, that sounds like Saturday. I glance across to my neighbour's textbook, open on the days of the week. ‘Dydd Sul.' Some of these words are not so far from French or Italian.
Dydd Llun
must be Monday,
Dydd Mercher
Wednesday. It's all doable actually. Why was I worried?