Bred of Heaven

BRED OF HEAVEN

JASPER REES
writes about the arts for the
Sunday Times
,
Daily Telegraph
and
theartsdesk.com
, and has also reported on football for the
Independent on Sunday
. He is the author of
Wenger: The Making of a Legend, Blizzard: Race to the Pole
and
I Found My Horn
, which he co-adapted for the stage.

 

 

ALSO BY JASPER REES

I Found My Horn: One Man's Struggle with the Orchestra's Most
Difficult Instrument

Blizzard: Race to the Pole

Wenger: The Making of a Legend

One man's quest
to reclaim his Welsh roots

Jasper Rees

 

 

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Exmouth Market
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Copyright © Jasper Rees, 2011

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84668 299 5
eISBN 978 1 84765 422 9

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To the memory of Bert and Dorothy

Author's Note

 

Cyflwyno = Introduce

1 Dechrau = Begin

2 Credu = Believe

3 Gweithio = Work

4 Canu = Sing

5 Siarad = Speak

6 Chwarae = Play

7 Cystadlu = Compete

8 Tyfu = Grow

9 Eistedd = Sit

10 Cerdded = Walk

11 Parhau = Endure

 

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

‘O bydded i'r hen iaith barhau' = O let the old language endure
                Evan James (1856)

The business of writing about Wales brings up an inevitable question. Place names: to anglicise or Welshify? There is no real method in the choices I've made other than pure instinct. It would be perverse to refer to Caerdydd, Abertawe and Casnewydd when almost all of Wales knows them as Cardiff, Swansea and Newport. For most towns I have kept to that rule of thumb. So it's Carmarthen not Caerfyrddin, Llandovery not Llanymddyfri. But where there is simply an English transliteration, I've reverted to Welsh spelling. Thus Caernarfon rather than (the abomination) Carnarvon. Hence also the Ll
n peninsula not Lleyn. As for rivers, the Severn and the Wye are overwhelmingly known by their English names so I've stuck with them but it seems preferable to refer to the Tywi, the Taf and the Dyfi rather than the Towey, the Taff and the Dovey. Finally, most Welsh mountains do not have English names. But two famous ones do. In the case of Snowdon (and Snowdonia) I've – mostly – used the English rather than wilfully obfuscate with Yr Wyddfa (and Eryri). However, where the Welsh say and write Pumlumon, I simply cannot bring myself to go with Plynlimon, which may be just as pervasive but is plainly the orthographical product of an Englishman's failure to listen.

(And it goes without saying that it's Owain Glynd
r, not Owen Glendower.)

YOU HAVE TO PAY
to get in. The current cost, if you're in a car, is £5.30, though it's less for motorcycles and more for heavy goods vehicles. Pressing a note and two coins into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker: ‘Diolch.' Thanks. Then push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers.

Initially there's not much topographical discrepancy from the foreign field back at the other end of the bridge. Arable land trimmed into rectangles. Grey cloud flattens the light, as it often seems to this side. And now the tidal waters in my passenger window recede from view. I'm not really sure where I'm going. ‘Croeso i Gymru', says the sign. Am I really welcome to Wales? I've been coming here since before I can remember, the atavistic summons dutifully answered at Christmas and in summer. Twice a year we ploughed over the old bridge, into the west, along roads which down the years became broader and smoother and faster until eventually it was possible to drive the ninety miles from the toll gate to my grandparents in not much more than an hour; South Wales was reduced to a race against time, the chain of conurbations
whipping by in a blur of turn-offs. Newport. Cardiff. Swansea. Quite early on in my childhood the road signs began speaking in two tongues: Casnewydd, Caerdydd, Abertawe. Services:
gwasanaethau
. Parking:
parcio
. How we laughed at that one: the foreign language indebted to the master. The car – in the 1970s we had a succession of Range Rovers which glugged petrol at the dipsomaniac rate of thirteen miles to the gallon – munched on the long column of tarmac and spat it out behind us.

All I knew of Wales was the road, and a house on a hill above the market town of Carmarthen. Caerfyrddin.

‘Haven't you grown?' my grandmother would exclaim in her warm Welsh soprano as we squirmed out of her embrace, scrummed through the mock-Gothic porch and past her down the long welcoming corridor. We stayed for a night, sometimes two. My grandmother would leak tears as we snuck over the cattle grid and began the return journey back east. And when ninety miles later we crossed the Severn and accelerated into England, my entirely Welsh father would urge us to cheer.

This is the closest my childhood came to indoctrination. I could never quite work out what we were celebrating. I'm still looking for the answer. It's what has been bringing me back to Wales time and again: a sort of cultural bafflement, an unfulfilled sense of ancestral belonging. And here I am again. I've got a spare week and I've answered the westerly summons.

Suddenly I veer left. I've always sailed past this little corner of Wales. I decide to follow my nose and attempt to drive south towards the water. Flat, even sunken, and riven with ditches, the countryside looks neither English nor Welsh but Dutch. I follow a track down towards a sea wall and, turning off the ignition, set foot on Welsh soil. I clamber up the steps and there, arrayed in front of me, is the Severn estuary, the Bristol Channel. England fans out
along the horizon. I breathe in briny air. Overhead, gulls squawk territorially. Before the wall was raised, high tides would have scurried inland and drowned the fields in salt water.

I turn my back to the water and gaze across the protected plain. Down below, a forthright child pushes its own rickety pram on the rutted road, while a young mother and a spaniel amble patiently alongside. Two grey-haired men arrive stoop-shouldered on expensive bikes and, in neon Lycra which faithfully highlights every contour of slackening bodies, bounce up the steps and onto the sea wall. One day I too will no doubt lever myself onto a crotch-partingly narrow saddle, grasp a pair of drop handlebars and try to pedal away from the inevitable flood tide of old age. I too will look ridiculous. As things stand, there's no need of death-defiance. At forty-three, for another couple of years my twenty-fifth birthday is still nearer than my sixty-fifth.

It's hard to say from here where the river ends and the sea begins. Somewhere below the surface of the wide waters, epic undercurrents have been arguing that one since the last Ice Age. It's hard also, it occurs to me, to say where my Englishness ends and my Welshness begins. My father was born and brought up in Wales. Six decades later my two daughters pushed their own prams in England. I've wanted to know this for ever. Do you come from where your parents come from? Or do you, like it or lump it, just come from where
you
come from? Which I may as well admit is why I am here.

Am I Welsh? How Welsh, in the end, is half Welsh? My yearning, my claim, has always been for my Welsh half to swamp the rest. But it's hardly had a chance. I've never lived in Wales. In fact I scarcely know it outside the little corner I've always visited: I've never been to the top of Snowdon or along the Rhondda Valley, barely even stopped in Cardiff or ever set foot in the mountainous
middle. But on some inchoate level I sense that I love Wales. It feels like having a crush on a long dead star whose face you know only in the black and white shimmer of the silver screen.