Bred of Heaven (17 page)

Silence. To much applause, Stewart and Gavin bow. As the choir begins the slow business of removing itself from the stage, I resume my Zen-like focus, in correct choral style. Inside I am exultant, having just participated in an undeniably Welsh ritual.

Back outside, it's a long wait for the result. Two more choirs must sing, including one that others seem worried about called Côr Meibion Taf. They're a small outfit from Cardiff with perhaps thirty members, but they're also singing our song. We wince as we listen through the loudspeaker to what sounds like a crude telegraphing of the ‘Heriwn''s emotionalism. It's the
Pobol y Cwm
version, a soapy oversell. The men of Pendyrus mutter a version of the same thing to one another: we can definitely take this lot. If we don't there'll be an outcry. When Côr Meibion Taf return, being sporting, we politely clap them back in.

Some choristers form an advance party and head to the rugby club over the road. The tension eases as the judges' long deliberation extends deep into the evening. It is dark now, though still warm. The Pendyrus committee, including Graham, are conferring in a corner. I am talking to some other second tenors when a rumour ripples out of the awning.

‘It's Pendyrus.'

‘Pendyrus what?'

‘I think we've won. That's what they're saying.'

‘We've won?' Owing to the announcement being in Welsh, there is some confusion.

‘I don't know but that's what I 'eard.'

I slip into the tent and find Graham with some of the committee.

‘Has Pendyrus won?'

‘First place,' says Graham, swelling with pride, ‘chief male-voice choir competition.'

So it turns out. Côr Meibion Pendyrus has not only won on its first return to competition since 1968, but it will also be taking the overall Choir of Choirs award back to the Rhondda Fach as the best choir in any category. And Stewart Roberts has won the award for best conductor. This is like one of those clean sweeps at the Oscars.
Gratifyingly, we have beaten Côr Meibion Taf and their embarrassing rendition of ‘Heriwn, Wynebwn y Wawr' into third place. Over the road the rugby club bursts with drinking, singing, beaming tenors. The news has spread. Choral uproar is in full swing. Jakey, nearly half a century with Pendyrus despite his freakishly brown hair, is purring with satisfaction. Colin, whose regular default setting is irrepressible, is a human beacon. Roy, who joined Pendyrus even later than me, is beaming. Even the Prof is chirpy. They all greet me as a long-lost friend and are eager to shake my hand.

‘How about that then, Jasper?' ‘How does it feel to win now, eh?' ‘Now you didn't expect that when you joined the choir, did you, bychan?' The implication from all of them is that the big smoke may be rich in many things but it cannot readily supply this sort of sweet experience. Mal informs me that I will remember this moment for the rest of my life. He's right. I will, though not quite for the reason he imagines. It's because, as the night progresses and the beer flows and the songs are dreamily sung, every one of these men from the Valleys thanks me for sharing the taste of triumph and the fruits of hard labour, for becoming one of them. In my case the song turns out to be word perfect.
Mae'r dyfodol yn dechrau
. The future is beginning.

I'VE BEEN TRYING TO IDENTIFY
the most mystical mountain in Wales. Most mystical to me, that is, based on my state of mind at the time of ascent. Of course the English half of me doesn't have much truck with feelings of spiritual uplift. But then we're not listening to him. There's a shortlist of six.

1. Pen y Fan. A Brecon Beacon I first climbed as a schoolboy doing CCF. I didn't like it at all then. I like it a lot now. One afternoon in June I use the mountain to test my Welshness by climbing it rather than sitting in a pub in Brecon to watch a vital England group game in the football World Cup: Wales 1, England 0.

2. Arenig Fawr, at the southern end of Snowdonia. I sprint up one hot cloudless April afternoon. ‘Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,' recalled Borrow, ‘none made a greater impression
upon me.' It's one of the many peaks in Wales into the side of which a military plane has crashed in thick cloud. Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit.

3. Cadair Idris, up which I once memorably led my spry young daughters through spring showers. Its terrors provoked a gripping, ghoulish diary entry from the Revd Francis Kilvert, the story incorporating a lone English climber falling 440 yards to his death and the flesh-stripped corpse being discovered six weeks later.

4. Waun Fach, the highest point in the Black Mountains and smothered in snow when I glide to the top one romantic sunlit day in the very epicentre of February. Curious because from the valley it is no more than a rumour; it reveals its pimpled summit only from atop a neighbouring mountain.

5. Mynydd Mallaen in the Cambrian Mountains makes it onto the list despite – no, actually because of – its utter lack of distinguishing features apart from two very ancient standing stones, useful for leaning against when guzzling a hard-earned picnic. Boggy.

6. Pumlumon, from whose flanks the Severn and the Wye, among other rivers, famously spring. ‘There is nothing either picturesque or fantastic in the form of this mountain,' thought the Revd Warner; ‘but, rising with dignity above the neighbouring elevations, it conveys the idea of massy solidity, and substantial majesty.' Not meeting another soul when I wander up it, I feel as if I have the desert expanse of Mid Wales to myself. I locate the place where the Wye trickles out of the mountain and, slightly self-consciously, hunker down on all fours to drink from the source of, for me, the Welshest river.

But while all these mountains are mystical to me for personal
reasons, I cannot in the end ignore the claims of a mountain which is dwarfed by most of the above. The most mystical place in Wales is in the far north, out on the limb of the Ll
n peninsula, up a mountain called Yr Eifl. I set off alone on a fresh May morning. Clouds scud in off the Irish Sea, one of them gluing fast to the mountain's official peak. But I am heading for the slightly lower peak next door. The going is by no means hard and I summit (to use the mountaineer's verb-noun) after an hour and a half. The view in every direction is breathtaking: Anglesey to the north; Cardigan Bay to the south; Snowdonia rises in the east; while the long arm of the peninsula rolls away to the west, a bumpy carpet of green laid across a wide floor of blue. But the real miracle up here is Tre'r Ceiri – Town of the Forts – a place which hints at habitation reaching back half a millennium before the arrival of the Romans. The drystone circular walls of more than 150 huts dot an oval plateau, some bafflingly intact after 2,500 years. Once upon a time this wind-battered hill fort may have been home to a community of 500. As I do whenever I'm at any of the many miraculous places of Wales, I reflect that if it were in England it would have tourists crawling all over it like head lice. Blessedly, though, as usual it's only me.

One name attaches itself more than others to Tre'r Ceiri. Vortigern, the fifth-century King of Powys in the years after the Romans left, is alleged to have betrayed the Welsh by cutting a deal with the Saxons. ‘The stories of Vortigern,' wrote Defoe in another part of Wales, ‘are on every old woman's lips.' Legend has it that he retreated into the far north-west, where he gave his Welsh name – Gwrtheyrn – to a place called Nant Gwrtheyrn: Vortigern's Brook.

Nant Gwrtheyrn is not an especially well-known name even in Wales. As far as the Welsh language is concerned, however, it is the crucible. In the end, almost anyone who is serious about learning Welsh as an adult follows the stream to the Nant.

It's James who tells me about it. Our weekly sessions have hauled me along the path towards competence. I'm stuffed to the gills with Welsh words, and able to deploy them for up to an hour at a time without needing to drape myself afterwards on a restorative chaise longue. But perhaps both of us sense that for further development I need to talk Welsh to more than one person, and for longer than an hour a week. Hence the Welsh Language and Heritage Centre in Nant Gwrtheyrn. I go to the website and click on courses. Starting at the bottom and working up, I've got to
Cwrs Canolradd
(Intermediate) before I find anything that sounds remotely at my level. And even that offers guidance on grammar I reckon I've already conquered. The next course up is
Cwrs Uwch
(Higher). Can I really pose as a higher-level student? The potential for altitude sickness seems considerable. I ask James for his thoughts. He sits on the fence, though behind his eyes I can see doubt being silenced with a raised truncheon. I decide to email the Nant. In Welsh.

Yes, my Welsh is that good. My written Welsh is. I can write far better than I can speak. A reply returns from someone called Pegi. She advises that my Welsh sounds more than up to
Cwrs Uwch
, on which there is no reason not to enrol. I do as I am told.

‘The graph of the number of people speaking Welsh has been steadily decreasing since the middle of the nineteenth century.' I am in the office of the man in whose care the Welsh language ultimately resides. Alun Ffred Jones was appointed Minister for Culture when his predecessor walked into a pub brandishing a lit cigar and his position became untenable. In a way I can't quite put my finger on, it seems a wonderfully Welsh way of losing a job in government. Alun Ffred, as he is widely known, is of course the younger brother of Dafydd Iwan. I've come to ask him how healthy the Welsh language really is. As he's a politician, I'm expecting to be fobbed off with a robust and implausible portrait of ruddy cheeks and rosy glow. But no, at the very top of the Welsh Ministry of Culture, optimism is at best cautious and watchfully hedged about with ifs and buts.

A close reading of John Davies's epic
A History of Wales
tells me what I need to know about the forces which pushed Welsh to the edge of potential extinction. Henry VIII's Act of Union in 1536 sought ‘utterly to extirpate all and singular the sinister usages and customs' practised outside England. His daughter threw the language a lifeline with the Welsh Bible, whereafter a kind of stasis endured until the Industrial Revolution duly brought an influx of English-speaking workers to Wales, while the Education Act in 1870 made English the universal language of elementary schooling. The working class grew correspondingly more alive to the economic gains available to those who could speak English. Nonconformity, meanwhile, preferred saving souls to saving the language and began
founding English-language chapels. The Labour movement made it a priority to fight for political justice rather than go out to bat for a language identified with the Liberals and the rural vote. And then came the wireless, which piped clipped BBC English into Welsh homes. By the 1960s, with television pinning couch potatoes to sofas up and down Wales, the death of the Welsh language could have been confidently predicted.

Thanks to efforts very much identified with the minister's older brother, a visit to the docks in Cardiff suggests that the forces of history have been defied. The resplendent development is home to the Welsh Millennium Centre and the Senedd, the Welsh Assembly Government. The architectural emblems of contemporary Welsh confidence look like odd spaceships piloted in from distant galaxies. Hollywood imaginations have been at work to give Wales the symbols it needs. The flourishing language is a more earth-bound component of the drive towards self-determination.

Alun Ffred Jones is taller and straighter than his brother, and drier, as he starts outlining the parameters of the minister's task with regard to the language – principally, handing over annual subsidies to the Welsh Language Board, which since 1993 has had responsibility for promoting and developing the language through schemes adopted by public bodies, local authorities and the more bilingually inclined private companies. We talk about laws and policies, facts and figures. It's not quite what I came for. I want to know what the Welsh Assembly Government thinks about the language's survival. Is it still on life support? Has it left intensive care? Can it discharge itself from the sick bay altogether? Alun Ffred is like one of those doctors who don't want to be sued for issuing too cheering a diagnosis.