buy you lunch if you’ll speak to me exclusively in Welsh for at least an hour.’ This is a bold move, as we’ve never met outside the post office before.
Tim is a big man, Pavarotti-size at least. And he’s a tenor as well, with two albums out on which he sings almost exclusively in Welsh. I figure food is a strong temptation.
‘An offer I can’t refuse, I see.’ He smiles and his features bed down on a cushion of dimples. We agree on a date for next week.
I’m procrastinating, I know, but hey, I’m sick.
Tim Evans is one of only a handful of townspeople I know in Lampeter, which is odd considering I’ve spent at least twenty-eight months of my life here. By ‘here’ I mean any one of the three Lampeters: the Town, the College – formerly St David’s University College, now the University of Wales, Lampeter – or the Concept. This last, when referred to with equal parts vexation, perplexity and grudging affection by an inhabitant of either of the former, usually means something like the gulf that exists between them.
Lampeter the town is primarily Welsh-speaking, and therefore officially Llanbedr Pont Steffan (six syllables, which together beat out the Church of St Peter at Stephen’s Bridge); the College is essentially English-speaking but for the Welsh Department. The town, with its two new traffic lights and three main streets (two of which describe the upper and lower ends of the same trajectory), is a regional hub of around two thousand people. One of the college porters once confessed to me that his wife, a local farm girl now in her sixties, has never gotten over moving to town three years ago. City folk, she claims, just aren’t as friendly. The College, meanwhile, thrives like anaerobic bacteria on its sense of deprivation. It was founded in 1823 to keep young Welsh lads bound for the Anglican church out of reach of Oxford’s corrupting pleasures. Today, however, most of its staff and students are English expatriates, who gather together as on a deserted island and yearn in maudlin drunkenness for Thai food and foreign films.
These disparities are contained within a simple geography. To the eye Lampeter is plain. The nose is a more reliable guide to its charms: the acrid shiver of coal smoke on damp mornings; an oily stench outside Jones’s Butchers that seeps into the pores; the rush of old beer leaking from the pubs; frying oil; the smell of the sea when the wind is from the west; fertilizer; wet wool; incense from the whole-food and hippie shops; fresh baked Welsh cakes; newsprint; cheap cosmetics. The only eye-marker in town is a bald hill behind the College crowned with a tuft of trees at the very top, like a perpetual, green mushroom cloud. From the crest a sheepscape of pastureland ribbons toward the horizon in all directions.
Till now I’ve spent most of my time here speaking English among the academic crowd, the majority of whom find my smittenness with the Welsh language a little unseemly. Their Welsh, gleaned over decades of opening the campus’s bilingual doors and parking in its bilingual lots, is of the utilitarian or Dim Parcio (No Parking) variety. They’ve all picked up enough to know that Welsh actually has vowels – unlike those who express amazement at my wanting to learn a language composed exclusively of consonants – but that’s about as far as their skills go. I forgive them: they’ve got other things on their minds. No other group of my acquaintance, anywhere in the world, is as prone to divorce, alcoholism, suicide, murder, anorexia, romantic malingering, unwanted pregnancies, nervous breakdowns and hauntings as my pals in this academic, rural idyll.
Today I can’t walk across campus without exploding one emotional landmine after another. Coming toward me from the library is an acquaintance whose path since we last met has been crossed by murder, attempted suicide and divorce. I want to sympathize but don’t know how, so I duck back into the Canterbury building only to bump into an old friend whose wife, also a close friend, just confessed to me that her nervous breakdown is abating, but she still sees disembodied eyes when she’s tired. From him I learn that their marriage is on the rocks. Dinner at the Indian restaurant seems a hazardous idea, but I agree anyway.
In the library the talk is of Mr Ryder, the old librarian, who despite his death last month nevertheless continues to prowl the stacks shelving books.
This may seem callow, but I confess that Lampeter’s dark eccentricities have long been what’s lured me to the place. Everyone likes to be touched by lunacy now and again, and Lampeter is my source of the stuff. Its fecundity in the department of recklessness and whimsy is legendary: a friend of mine, on his first day on campus, was kidnapped by students in pith helmets and genially held hostage down a manhole. I spent my first week here locked in an old library with eight people I’d never met before, preparing an exhibition of incunabula: it was days before I learned that the word meant nothing more sinister than books printed before 1500. Naked man have been spotted chasing pigs down the main street, rugby players have been seen in make-up, and I, before I became sane, have been known to speed along country roads at night through barricades of mist with my headlights switched off, just for the hell of it.
Over time, however, whimsy has grown a sharp edge. I’m now an occasional visitor from across the sea, and find myself on the threshold of voyeurism. Acquaintances die in car crashes and friends have nervous breakdowns. Now it’s language that gives me my fix of loopy thrills. Welsh – a tongue few speak and fewer understand, with vowel sounds so rich I’d swear they have calories – is the grown-up corollary to all that attractive eccentricity and slight touch of peril. (The Welsh word for danger is perygl, testimony to the occupation of Wales by one Latinizing army or another – the Romans or the Normans, I forget which, both were liberal with seed vocabulary – and the nature of the words that followed in their wake.)
For me learning Welsh is a way of growing up, though few people may see it that way. I make appointments to meet with members of the Welsh department to discuss my book, grab Marguerite, who’s been in the library trying to avoid Mr Ryder, and head home.
Ymarfer to Practise
‘Home’ for now means Dolwerdd, my friend Rebecca’s bungalow on a sheep farm a mile or so out of town. It’s a little cube of a house set amid a wayward grid of vivid green sheep pastures, marked off from one another by dark windbreaks and low, shrubby hedgerows. The air smells of sweet earth and sheep. A hay-swaddling machine is busy in the next field over, snatching up Swiss rolls like a diabolical gift-wrapping device and imprisoning them in black plastic.
‘Looks like you got mail.’ Marguerite gingerly scoops up several envelopes lying in the hall near the birthing box of Rebecca’s cat, Usurper, who’s just had kittens.
‘Hey, you hit the jackpot. Someone named Ursula – look, she writes in green marking pen – invites you to stay with her in Tokyo. You’d better tell her you’re travelling with a friend.’
I nod.
‘What’s this?’ She shows me a letter with a red dragon on it.
‘Cymdeithas Dewi Sant Singapura,’ I rasp, ‘the St David’s Society of Singapore.’
‘… will be delighted to meet you. And it seems that a man named Lynn is picking you up at the Oslo airport, but you’ll be staying with a woman named Rosemary, who reputedly speaks Welsh “with music in her voice”.’
This is good news, but I worry that all the letters are in English. Maybe I won’t find Welsh-speakers out there. Then I worry that I will. Then I remember my growing fears about my Welsh comprehension ability. I decide to watch S4C for a while.
S4C is Sianel Pedwar Cymru, Channel Four Wales; it is also work. For a learner the Welsh-language television station is about the farthest thing on earth from entertainment. I start to reminisce about watching the
