to convert the indigenous people who didn’t hide in caves or underwater to their laws, their stories, their language. By the time the Romans arrived in the first century AD, Britons had been speaking Brythonic – the predecessor of Welsh – for time out of mind.
This story has a familiar ring to it. After twenty-four hundred years it was only a century ago, in the decade between 1870 and 1880, that more than half the people in what we now call Wales came to speak something other than a form of Welsh. This didn’t happen because the English replaced the Welsh in Wales – though since the 1960s the number of English immigrants either retiring to or ‘dropping out’ in the Welsh countryside has grown exponentially – but because their language, like that of the Celts before them, powerfully eroded its precursor.
Surely this is a case of déjà-vu, in which I and my English friends at college are cast as the New Celts. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the linguistic sea change we’re heralding is a kind of karma on a national scale, and by learning Welsh I’m throwing the universe out of sync. Maybe I’m just unrepentant about that, even though I can’t begin to say why. Maybe I’ve had too much red wine tonight after too much exercise. And yet … I have a nagging conviction that no matter how much Welsh I master, however well I learn to say ‘Llangollen’, R. S. Thomas’s poem ‘The Small Window’ is a warning written for me.
In Wales there are jewels
To gather, but with the eye
Only. A hill lights up
Suddenly; a field trembles
With colour and goes out
In its turn; in one day
You can witness the extent
Of the spectrum and grow rich
With looking. Have a care;
This wealth is for the few
And chosen. Those who crowd
A small window dirty it
With their breathing, though sublime
And inexhaustible the view.
Peanut’s owner wakes us in the middle of the night. She’s drunk a pint of gin and left her husband. Will we still be her friends, she wants to know, in the morning? I tell her we always will. As the future is a convincing tense in English, she believes me – correctly – and I go back to bed.
Edrych ar y Teledu to Watch Television
The following day Marguerite discovers back-to-back editions of Pobl y Cwm episodes with English subtitles. It turns out that the blonde woman and her husband had been shortchanged on their coal delivery, and were debating whether or not to complain about it. I’m stunned by the dramatic impact of it all. And I sorely regret telling our friend Rebecca, who’s just back from London, about my body-in-the-coal theory.
‘Why did you say you were learning Welsh?’ she snickers. ‘It was the quality of the TV programming, right?’
Gweithio to Work
‘So, when shall we begin?’
‘Now?’
‘Now?’ My voice is regrettably on the mend.
‘Pam lai,’ Tim says. Why not.
He’s just locked up the post office and I’ve delayed the inevitable – our all-Welsh lunch – as far as the King’s Head Tavern. We remain in public long enough to order a pint of bitter and a curry for me, and a ham steak for Tim, then retire to the large dining room at the back of the pub. It’s entirely empty but for an encampment of about fifty tables draped in unaccountably elegant pink cloths. We sit at one, I take a shaky breath – and plunge.
For an hour I feel like I’m holding a live wire between my teeth. Sometimes it slips and jabs my tongue and I spray Tim with chwech, the Welsh word for ‘six’; sometimes, when I haven’t understood what he’s just repeated for the third time, very slowly, I feel the heat wave of an electrocution coming on; and once in a while, for a moment or two, that live wire picks up an actual impulse from my brain and I connect and Tim nods and understands and we’re speaking to each other. Even better, he insists on paying for lunch.
At two o’clock I look down to discover someone has miraculously eaten my chicken curry. The beer disappeared long ago. I can’t remember any of it. I can’t even remember what we’ve said, but whatever it was it was in Welsh. When language evolves into something other than commonplace communication – a badge of identity in foreign lands or, in this case, a gift between friends – the urgency of knowing and making known dissipates and the words slow to a speed at which a learner can catch them. I’ve wagered a book contract on the hope that it’s easier to wield a symbol in Singapore and a gift in an empty back room than a verb in a crowded shop out in the still-unaccustomed sunshine on the High Street. So far, so good. My hour with Tim, I realize, belongs more to the Trip than it does to any of the trinity of Lampeters I’ve known over the past twelve years. It’s time to go.
Gadael to Leave
The National Express coach slows as all coaches must. I’ve never crossed the Severn Bridge when it wasn’t crippled by road construction. What’s that fairytale about some luckless soul’s work being perpetually undone in the night, so that for all eternity he has to start over again in the morning? The possibility should be investigated.
The River Severn marks the southern end of the boundary between Wales and England. Small cars have blown off the bridge in fierce side winds, or so I’m told. I remember reading in 1988 about a woman who was stuck in construction traffic so long that she got out of her car, and jumped. Unlike her, I’m not in a rush today because I missed the Croeso i Gymru sign on the way into Wales, and I want to see it now. I spin around in my seat, jabbing my ribs into the armrest. There it is. A yellow sign with a red dragon, the symbol of Wales. I’m pushed harder into the armrest as the coach suddenly accelerates toward Heathrow. Welcome to Cymru. The ‘C’ has mutated and become a ‘G’. That happens a lot in Welsh.
For a long time I wonder about the woman who jumped back in ’88. I sometimes feel that for me, an American with no Welsh ancestry, with no tangible connection to the place, learning Welsh – especially under the circumstances I’ve chosen – is a lot like jumping off the bridge of common sense. And to make matters worse I’m taking Marguerite with me. Before I fall asleep these thoughts give way, mercifully, to a poem by Harri Webb called ‘Ode to the Severn Bridge’, which I hum in a made-up singsong:
Two lands at last connected
Across the rivers wide
And all the tolls collected
On the English side.
NORWY (NORWAY)
Hedfan to Fly
I’ve been bumped to business class, where there are more distractions than in economy to divert my mind from the unassailable knowledge that we’ll all die if the plane falls out of the sky. I hate flying. A drawback, considering this is the second
