via Zürich – to visit her sister’s family. I’ll join her there in about a week.
So for now I’m on my own, half-heartedly attending to the bones in my salmon steak entrée. Somewhere nearby a young American woman is giddy or drunk, I can’t tell which. From what I’ve heard it sounds like she’s going to Norway to visit relatives and is unsure of her Norwegian, learned from grandparents. ‘I just know I’m gonna forget everything,’ she all but hyperventilates. I can see tinsel strands of blonde hair wrapping over the top of her seat by grace of static electricity.
‘Listen, sweetheart,’ I’d like to say, ‘at least you’re going to Norway to speak Norwegian. I’m going to Norway to speak Welsh. Now there’s a reason to worry.’ And I am. Worried.
The truth is I’m really not alone on this flight. I’m with the mysterious stranger who’s travelling the world with me: the Welsh language. On my lap is Y Trip, ‘The Trip’, Nofel Antur i Ddysgwyr – an adventure novel for learners – that I bought in Aberystwyth. The blurb on the back says it’s about Charles, an alluring and arrogant former secret service type who goes bad, starts a drug empire in Liverpool, and enters a sailing race around the Isle of Britain. Or Ynys Prydain, as it was once known, and in some quarters still is.
Not long ago the only marks I would’ve understood on the page were the periods and quotations. Now Welsh no longer looks like undisciplined gobbledygook. The letters fall into formations that I’ve come to expect, that don’t drive my eyes skittish and shy. The first two sentences of Y Trip read, ‘Roedd y dyn yn sefyll yn llonydd, yn hollol lonydd. Doedd dim swn o gwbl.’ I say it under my breath, which sounds something like ‘Rrroithe uh deen un sevultch un tlchonith, un holtchol lonith. Doithe dim soon o gooble.’ This means, ‘The man was standing still, totally still. There was no noise at all.’
These sounds are aerobics for the American mouth. I barely have to open up to speak the lazy, slightly slurry English that is my birthright. If I look down, I never see my lips protrude beneath my nose when I’m speaking Saesneg, which is the Welsh word for English (Saeson, literally ‘Saxons’, means ‘Englishmen’). But when I’m speaking Welsh I constantly catch glimpses of my lips projecting in and out like feeding sea urchins. It takes smiles, frowns, grimaces and active supporting roles from my jaw and neck muscles to get out just one sentence. It’s so much work that half an hour of Welsh makes my face quiver. But there’s no other way to say a word like gwbl. You’ve got to love a language in which you can make the noise ‘gooble’ and have it actually mean something (cwbl means ‘all’; gwbl is cwbl after it’s mutated, but I refuse to clutter my mind with mutations at the moment).
And then there’s the rhythm. You can’t just speak Welsh, you have to ride its waves. If English is a calm, smooth-as-glass harbour for its nearly four hundred and fifty million native speakers, Welsh is the rough open ocean. It bobs and bounces, I want to say it’s a curly language, a curvy language, with the stress in both words and sentences on the penultimate sound. Listen: Dim o GWB-l. Da-da-daaa-da. It’s incantatory.
Chwarae Golff to Play Golf
I have kept my word, and worn a bright yellow top and white trousers. My flight is an hour late and my expectations of being met are low, but there, miraculously, in the midst of the arrivals crowd, is a sign that says PAMELA in yellow and blue letters. The man holding it is also fiercely waving a tiny Welsh flag.
‘Well met, my lady, well met.’ Lynn Edwards is a trim, handsome man in his early sixties, with a tanned face and paler crevices of laugh lines around his eyes. His wiry, greyish hair reminds me of a Brillo pad.
‘I can’t tell you how glad I am it’s you.’
I look surprised.
‘You see, I was waiting here watching the women come out thinking, ooh, maybe it’s that one. Nooo, maybe it’s that one. Oh dear, I hope it’s not that one. Then you appeared. I thought you’d be … older.’ Lynn Edwards doesn’t speak Welsh but you could get seasick on his accent anyway. There’s very little correlation between the thickness of a Welsh person’s accent in English and whether or not he or she actually speaks Welsh.
‘So. Let me see if I understand the purpose of your trip. One, you’re here to learn to speak Welsh; two, to meet Welsh people and anyone interested in Wales; and three, to see a little of the world. Have I got it right, then?’
He beams me a brilliant smile, rapidly blinking his eyes in what seems to be a slight twitch. This man has just brought clarity to my life.
Lynn Edwards flops backward on to the grassy slope of a sandtrap on a golf course outside Oslo, arms and legs akimbo, demonstrating how he may have lost his wallet here yesterday. I root around on my hands and knees looking for it in the lush grass. Norway is nothing if not green. From the plane I’d spied a scattering of natty, wooded hills that had looked like wild bumps of woolliness amid the paler, cultivated plains. So different from Wales, where the hills have been treeless for most of our millennium. Oslo, too, seemed to have a leafy look about it, clarified by the scrubbed northern air. At least that was my passing impression as we sped by on the freeway and zoomed out the other side.
I have come four thousand miles and straight from Fornebu Airport to watch people I’ve never met play golf. All in the name of learning Welsh. I seem to be ingesting particles of surrealism today like so many dust mites. Lynn has brought me here because his best friend, Iorwerth Roberts, is playing in a tournament – the same one Lynn would have been in if it hadn’t been for me. Iori is from Amlwch on Ynys Môn – Anglesey – and speaks Welsh fluently. We’ve hiked on to the fairway to intercept him and have a look for Lynn’s wallet, which seems to be a goner.
‘I’m sorry you couldn’t play in the tournament.’
‘No matter, my lady, no matter. Here they come now.’ Then over to Iori, ‘Yo, boy, how many balls you lost, then?’
A foursome appears led by a compact man with a broad, tanned face and silver hair. He grins and pointedly ignores his friend. As Lynn greets the others in Norwegian Iori asks me several quasi-intelligible questions in Welsh. In my heart I wish very, very hard I’d stuck with French, and stammer the two words most beloved by Welsh learners when asked if they speak the language: tipyn bach, I say, a little bit. This tends to shut people up.
Because they’re only on the third tee and it’s a fine, warm day, Lynn and I decide to drive to the seaside village of Drøbak and catch them later. On the way Lynn tells me there are four Welsh members of the golf club, and several Scots.
‘Never bothered to count the number of English,’ he says, relishing his little bit of wickedness.
Drøbak is about as quaint as it gets in Norway. It was the site of the country’s big moment in World War II – the navy sank a German battleship in the fjord here before the rest of the flotilla successfully invaded – but today the town is serene. The vertical clapboards of its old houses are painted gleaming white, mustard yellow, red and green. The air is aggressively fresh. On the fjordside footpath a Norwegian groom-to-be tries to buy me from Lynn. ‘My last beautiful girl,’ he shouts in perfect if drunken English, before he’s led away by his friends.
Back at the golf club, my heart sinks when we learn that Iori and company have six more holes to go. After what seems like an eternity – the temperature has been dropping fast and there’s an old lady in the group who can’t hit the ball for beans, which makes their progress painfully slow – they finally finish at nine o’clock, in strong sunshine, at five over par. I’ve gone from
