the world and write to them. Simple enough, but procuring the lists took time. The daffodils were up before I was actually addressing letters to the Mashonaland Cambrian Society in Harare, Zimbabwe and the St David’s Society of Singapore, among thirty-four others.
In March I made a brief foray to New York to try to persuade newspaper and magazine editors to assign me enough travel stories to pay for the trip. One night after a long day of wheedling I met my friends Mary and Tom at Tom’s office. They’d just hooked up to the World Wide Web and he wanted to show us how cool it was. ‘See if it does anything with “Welsh”,’ I asked. He pressed some keys and in moments had overcome the space-time continuum.
‘Here’s something.’
The screen held a message from the Clwb Cymraeg – the Welsh Club – of the Shimizu Girls’ Junior High School in Shimizu City, Japan. They were looking for Welsh-language pen pals.
‘Now that’s just plain weird,’ said Mary. ‘But it looks as if you’re in business.’ I felt like I’d finally made contact with aliens. So they were out there after all. We were high above Central Park late at night and the lights of Manhattan receded from our office tower like a distant galaxy. The three of us were chartreuse with the green glow of the Japanese schoolgirls’ message. ‘Well duw, duw,’ I murmured to myself, astonished, in the idiomatic Welsh equivalent of a good slap on the thigh.
The trouble with finding the Shimizu Clwb Cymraeg was that I had to write back to its members in Welsh. The Welsh part was the problem. After speaking it poorly but daily in the summer of 1992 I’d returned home to Providence, Rhode Island and my Welsh had gone fallow. Since more people in Rhode Island probably speak Pig Latin than know Welsh exists, practice opportunities were at a minimum.
I dug out my old cassettes and repeated the ABC of Welsh in the car. Every night as I made dinner a man correctly guessed ‘Ella Fitzgerald’ on the Welsh version of Name That Tune and Hurricane Andrew slammed into Florida as people were evacuated from their homes (I’d taped the news in Welsh off Radio Wales three years earlier; consequently at dinnertime in my kitchen it was perpetually 24 August 1992). I was never bored listening. Other things happened that day as well – I think mortgage rates rose and there was a sailing accident off Llandudno – but come May all this was still new to me, since I couldn’t quite figure out what the announcer was saying. Surveys have shown that about half of all native Welsh-speakers can’t understand the news either, so I didn’t despair.
But I did need speaking practice. Tom’s computer in New York had also turned up an on-line Welsh course that went out to hundreds of learners around the world. Remarkably, the guy who produced it lived about ten minutes away from me in East Providence. The world was shrinking and I hadn’t even found affordable luggage yet. I looked him up in the phone book and we agreed I’d come over on a Thursday evening to speak Welsh.
Mark Nodine is an American computer jockey who visited Wales once on a two-week vacation and decided to learn the language. That seemed excessive even to me. I imagined he could speak rings around me and downed a big glass of wine to lure my vocabulary out of its usual cocoon before appearing on his doorstep with a bunch of supermarket daffodils. Mark was waiting for me. He projected earnestness and clean living. I sucked in my breath after the prerequisite Noswaith dda – Good evening – so he wouldn’t smell the wine. My stomach ached.
I sat on his sofa and he drew up a chair. He spoke. I tilted my head like a parrot. He spoke again and I tilted again, smiling mightily. I couldn’t understand a word he said. His vocabulary seemed arcane and his rhythm – the syncopated, palpitating heartbeat of the Welsh language – fell into a monotone like the pulse of a long-distance runner. I, meanwhile, had rhythm. Sometimes I even had music. But I could ask my Welsh language memory for nothing more than an occasional unconjugated verb followed by an inblown hiss of winy breath. Forty-five unintelligible minutes later I suddenly remembered an important phone call I had to make. On the way out Mark told me he’d learned Welsh from the Bible.
‘I didn’t understand a word. Do you hear me? Not a single word,’ I cried to Marguerite later, clutching the rest of the Merlot.
‘But you’ve been studying all the time.’ She looked concerned.
‘Get this,’ I whimpered, ‘he learned Welsh by reading the Bible. Can you believe that? Jeez, the Bible! And now he’s creating this mega Welsh vocabulary program on the computer. How does he have time for that? He’s got a job. He’s got a wife and kids. Man, I hate that.’
‘So he probably speaks in Welsh thees and thous and uses verbs like smite. How could you possibly understand him?’
Coulda shoulda woulda, I thought darkly, but time for fear was running out. I painstakingly wrote the Shimizu girls. Marguerite spent Easter weekend summing up her thoughts on Brazilian fiction. Responses from Welsh societies began to trickle in: a Welsh Studies Centre in Germany would be happy to see me, same with the Paris Welsh, and the Dutch. A hearty invitation arrived from the Argentinians. No word from Asia, but for a letter from a very old Japanese Celticist who was in the hospital with pulmonary emphysema. He wrote wishing me luck from his hospital bed. The Mashonaland letter came back from Zimbabwe stamped ‘Return to Sender’. The travel agent demanded an audience.
‘You can’t go below the equator,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Why?’
‘It’s just a hemisphere thing. Most round-the-world packages don’t.’
‘That discriminates against Brazil,’ said Marguerite.
‘You’ll have to buy a separate ticket from New York to Buenos Aires, but now you have more immediate concerns. You have to choose your round-the-world route today.’
With less than half the response letters in, selecting an air path was like taking so many shots in the dark. We closed our eyes, drew our travel bow and shot: New York – London – Paris – Frankfurt – Athens – Frankfurt – Bombay – Singapore – Bangkok – Tokyo – Hong Kong – Tokyo – New York, followed by New York – Buenos Aires-Rio-New York. For better or worse, it was done. We were committed.
Then life speeded up. The director of the language course I’d attended in Lampeter sent me names and addresses of all the overseas learners who’d attended the programme in the past two years: it seemed Poles, Germans, Swedes, South Africans and Argentinians have all been flocking to Lampeter. I’d already heard something about Welsh being taught in a high school in Poland, and fired off a letter to Gdańsk. A last-minute invitation arrived from the Oslo Welsh, and I added another leg to the trip. Marguerite defended her dissertation. Hurricane Andrew beat the hell out of Florida every night in the kitchen. Mark called and told me (in English) about the ‘Welsh-L’, a Welsh-language chat group on the Internet and advised me to get E-mail.
This entailed wrestling a modem into my computer, which brought out a vindictive streak in its software. Over the next week it fought my every attempt to master the art of E-mail, by which I hoped to keep in touch with my editors, my brother, and the over four hundred yakkity Welsh-speakers who monopolized my E-mail box.
In the last, frantic days before we left I began to feel as if I were learning two languages at once: one, the synaptic slang of the twenty-first century, the very cutting edge of computer-speak itself; the other, possibly the oldest language in Europe, a contemporary version of Brythonic, the tongue that had been brought to the island of Great Britain around 600 B C (some argue for an even earlier date, around 2000 B C), and which, along with Basque, is the only language in Western Europe to have been spoken before, during and after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was
