Bred of Heaven (19 page)

These things require a mental recalibration. It's a struggle enough to translate the Welsh you do know into English, but now there's a Welsh you don't know which you have to translate into a Welsh you do know and only thence into English. On the first morning I come across one trim little phrase which encapsulates the fault line running across the middle of the Welsh language.
Dw i'n flin
in the north means ‘I'm cross'. In Llanelli, down there on the edge of Carmarthen Bay, it means ‘I'm sorry'. It begs a question. What happens when someone from Llanelli accidentally insults someone from Ruthin. ‘Dw i'n flin,' says Angry of Ruthin. ‘Dw i'n flin,' replies Apologetic of Llanelli. Is it just me, or does Pegi pass on this and other examples of South Walian eccentricity like an Edwardian anthropologist fascinated by the antics of tree-dwellers from Bongo Bongo Land who eat their own hair? But at least I discover a new word. Down south they refer to Gogs. Up here they refer to the people of South Wales as Hwntws: the people from beyond – beyond the mountains.

By the end of the first day, it has dawned on me that at least there's a silver lining to only half understanding what anyone says in the Nant. It gives me a sudden and unexpected sense of belonging. Pegi and the Gogs start to class Roisin and me as Hwntws. I am identified by my allegiance to the Welsh of the south. Therefore, by deduction, at least as far as these people are concerned, I am Welsh.

But the silver lining rims a cloud of exceptional gloominess. Among other things clear by the end of day one is that Helen is basically fluent. John, once you've hacked your way past the habitual coughing and spluttering which ornament his utterances, also has the language creeping through his veins. Both of them, it
emerges, grew up in Wales speaking Welsh. Helen, being perhaps three decades younger, has a much fresher memory of these events: she's the only one of us to recognise a Welsh nursery rhyme which Pegi plays. In my head I promote her from pupil to classroom assistant. She wears a look on her face that will become familiar as the week unfurls – patient, serious, non-judgemental – as you demonstrate to her in some disjointed, dysfunctional speech or other the hollowness of your linguistic pretensions. Meanwhile, Richard the Anglesey fireman and David the Conwy complaints officer are both inclined to hurl themselves into sentences without the least anxiety about grammar. They're like boys diving into creeks whose depths they have not taken care to fathom. I'd give a lot for a piece of their confidence. The impression I have is that they understand everything that's being said, perhaps because their exposure to Welsh has been longer and is more regular. They hear it every day in work. I've been on the go, in effect, for just over a year, and I continue to be hampered by my English deafness to foreign sounds. As I tire towards the end of the afternoon, Pegi's radio-crackle Gog increasingly fails to penetrate. I sense one of my almighty Welsh-induced blood-sugar lows coming on, possibly even some kind of diabetic shutdown. That first evening at supper I buy a bottle of Merlot to share. As there are six of us, that's one glass each. No one else seems impressed by my notion of making a start on a second bottle.

The others have their low moments too. Roisin's face wears a long look if the course strays into literature. When poetry hour comes round on day two – we look at a longish poem overflowing with verbal goodies about the founding of Nant Gwrtheyrn – Richard's bright and open face grows hangdog and glum. He prefers to talk.

And talk we do, from the moment we sit down to breakfast till we part after supper. In the morning coffee break, the lunch break,
the tea break, we talk as we refuel. The standard of the Welsh is variable but it seems not to matter. We are in this together. What do we talk about? Standard stuff: Welsh life, the Welsh universe, anything Welsh that pops into our heads. There is a running joke or two. Richard and David claim that from the terrace outside the dining room they have spotted Ireland (
Iwerddon
). It's theoretically possible, but I'm having none of it. We extract excellent mileage out of this piffling gag. (Guess you had to be there.) As Roisin and I are heading down to the pebbly beach after lunch on day two, I make my own sighting on the terrace. There are two women, one tiny, the other tall with a big bird's nest of white hair. It's definitely Jan Morris. When we get back from the beach no one believes that I've spotted an actual Welsh celebrity.

Another source of amusement is in the dogged refusal of us all to slip into English, however great the ensuing indignity. Vocabulary being limited, this involves a certain amount of perfectly innocent pilfering. Welsh is often accused by the more ignorant English of purloining half its word larder. After all, Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief. British English is of course an entirely self-generated language with no roots at all in Indo-European, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Old German and their later descendants, etc. It's true that some words have slipped across into Welsh via the portal of English.
Tacsi
is one that causes widespread hilarity. Never mind that ‘taxi' hails from Germany.
Sgio
is the Welsh word for ‘ski', which English and several other languages half-inched from Old Norse. When S4C was introduced. the Welsh had their own television
sianel
and could also see Welsh-language films in
y sinema
(source of both words: French). And so on and so forth. In fact the Welsh have made inventive use of modern technology to generate their own vocabulary. You use your
cyfrifiadur
(computer) for
ebost
(email) and
trydar
(Twitter). You enter a
gwefan
(website) via
y
hafan
(its homepage, lit. haven). You heat up food in
y popty ping
(microwave). When the general subject of borrowing from English comes up in class, I get the chance to tell my first ever joke in Welsh, passed on to me as a true story. An Englishman behind the bar at the London Welsh rugby club is serving a Welshman up in town from Wales. ‘The thing about Welsh is it's just English, isn't it?' the barman says. ‘They take a load of English words and add an
o
, don't they? Eh? That's all Welsh is.' ‘Fair play,' says the Welshman. ‘I can't argue with that. Now can I have a pint of lager please, Fatso.'

And as I say, we too occasionally succumb to a version of Fatso syndrome. Verbs are usually the first port of call in such circumstances. You can't think of the word for whatever locomotive action it may be. If Pegi's not listening, or anyone else from the Nant's Welsh-language police – the women who work in the kitchen or the office – then you might in a dire necessity and on a strictly extemporising basis use a word which occupies a no-man's-land between English and Welsh and nonsense:
jumpio
, for example, or
rejectio
;
splashio
and of course
snoggio
. (This last comes up because over supper one night it emerges that Helen as a teenager in Clwyd enjoyed an intimate moment with one of the Welsh celebrities depicted on the wall in the classroom.) And other such cod-Latin gobbledegook. We apologise to one another and to higher Welsh powers as we do it. But the key thing is that we do not utter a single sentence of English. That is the one unbreakable rule. To lapse into English would feel like treading on the cracks in the pavement. No good could possibly come of it.

Sometimes, when Richard or Roisin or Dave is reaching for the right Welsh word, it happens that I'll know the one they're after. That in turn becomes my defining identity in the group. My red vocab book is filling at a hell of a lick. Words with no conceivable
use in everyday speech are noted down, just in case. Richard looks at me in mock alarm when I know the word for ‘culture' (
diwylliant
) or ‘international' (
rhwngwladol
), ‘authority' (
awdurdod
), ‘punctual' (
prydlon
) or ‘emergency' (
argyfwng
).

‘Ti wedi llyncu geiriadur,' says Helen in the mid-morning break on the third day. Through the window the sea twinkles pleasantly as we guzzle hot drinks and biscuits.

‘Sori, Helen?' I've done something to a dictionary, but what? She takes a sip of her coffee and theatrically gulps. The others, who hadn't a clue what she meant either, emit a burst of collusive laughter. So they think I've swallowed a dictionary.

It helps that I have been reading stories in Welsh. I started where many a Welsh learner embarks on an appreciation of Welsh literary language. I chanced upon the book ten years previously when poring over Teilo's attic library as he prepared to enter monastic life and divest himself of earthly possessions. His world-class collection of Byroniana, including a near complete set of first editions, was bound for the University of Delaware. Rummaging through the remainder, my eye was caught by a rich variety of books in other languages. Assuming I might one day want to brush up on them, I selected
Madame Bovary
,
La Sacra Bibbia
and for some reason, presumably sentimental as I had no plan at that point to learn it, a slim volume in Welsh. One day I open it and begin.

In Welsh
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
turns out to conceal a terrifying array of booby traps, tripwires, potholes and landmines, principally in and around the verbs, which drive the story forward in a past tense that no one has previously mentioned to me. The story
has been rendered in scrupulously correct pre-war Welsh. Teilo tells me he was always teased by his grandmother for speaking formal rather than oral Welsh. Now I can see why. He was speaking the New Testament Welsh of Beatrix Potter. I dump
Hanes Pwtan y Gwningen
with the fluffy-tailed protagonist still in mortal peril among the cabbages and move on to a book with a more contemporary urban edge. The familiar spine leaps out at me one day in a bookshop.

Shrewd move.
Harri Potter a Maen yr Athronydd
, it turns out, is an absolute goldmine, in which I learn such useful words as
mellten
(thunderbolt) and
craith
(scar),
porffor
and
piwis
(purple, petulant),
neidr
and
Myglars
(snake and Muggles). Not forgetting
Wyddost-Ti-Pwy
(You-Know-Who). I lap it all up as fast and feverishly as ability allows. Which isn't very fast.

‘Where've you got to in the Welsh
Harry Potter
?' a daughter will ask, her interest in my Welsh quest suddenly perking up.

‘I'm halfway down page four.' Irritatingly, the translation has been done in Gog. Very nice for the young Rowlingians of Gwynedd and Merionnydd, etc., where the proportion of Welsh speakers is much higher, but there are actually more Welsh speakers in the south. A
Harri Potter
for us Hwntws would have been appreciated. That said, after two days at the Nant, where I have made it my bedtime reading, it becomes increasingly easy to tolerate if not fully endorse the boy wizard's use of northern dialect. By the time the
Cwrs Uwch
draws to a close, I am more than bearing down on chapter two.

I may have swallowed my
Modern Welsh Dictionary
. John seems
to have ingested the whole of Bishop William Morgan's Bible. His vocabulary – he knows the Welsh words for ‘gooseberry' and ‘roodscreen', ‘limekiln' and ‘hoe' – harks back to an evanescent world in which the Welsh were closer to the soil, to their bardic heritage, to God. He acquires a nickname: The Oracle. John's Welshness is so gnarled and primordial I wonder whether he's not part-fashioned out of coniferous tree root.

The presence of fellow students in possession of a Welsh childhood ticks all the boxes of my inferiority complex. Richard may be the only one of us who has lived in Wales all his life. But of those who haven't, David and Roisin are in-migrants and Helen and John out-migrants. I've never migrated in either direction. There are moments in class when I can feel myself succumbing to the self-pity of the outcast. I am jolted out of one such moment when Pegi presses play on a CD and I recognise the strains of a tune which my grandmother at almost ninety used to coax out of arthritic fingers on the piano.

‘“Gwenith Gwyn”,' I say, humming along to the lilting strains.

‘Da iawn, Jasper,' says Pegi. My chest swells. Not that I've any idea of the words or their meaning. So we translate them together. ‘Bugeilio'r Gwenith Gwyn' – the title means ‘watching the white wheat' – tells of the thwarted love of farm labourer Wil Hopcyn for Ann Thomas, a well-to-do farmer's daughter who is forced by her mother to marry a man of equal status. Wil leaves home, only to dream that Ann's new husband has died. He returns to discover that it is Ann who is dying of a broken heart. It's all quite choking, especially when we are encouraged to sing it together. I allow the Welsh tide to wash over me.

George Borrow is the only notable author of a travel book about Wales who took the trouble to learn the language. Wherever he
went, predominantly in North Wales and always on foot, he performed a sort of informal census, measuring levels of Welsh and English among the people he encountered. The further north and west he went, the more Welsh he found. ‘Dim Saesneg,' passers-by and tradesmen, maids and farmhands would say when he asked them a question. No English. The further south and east, the less Welsh he heard until just beyond Newport the language petered out altogether.

Borrow was a gifted amateur philologist who had learned Welsh as a young man in Norfolk, to which he added a knowledge of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gaelic, Romany and several more mainstream languages. When
Wild Wales
was published in 1862, eight years after the travels it describes, reviewers noted his eagerness to parade his linguistic skills. He faithfully recorded all conversations in which it was discovered with amazement that he could speak the language. ‘I never heard before of an Englishman speaking Welsh,' said a man in Wrexham. ‘Is the gentleman Welsh?' wondered another man near Llangollen; ‘he seems to speak Welsh very well.' ‘It will be a thing to talk of for the rest of my life,' said a carpenter on the road to Bangor. One hostile Welshman, Borrow noted on the road to Llanfair in Anglesey, was ‘confused at hearing an Englishman speak Welsh, a language which the Welsh in general imagine no Englishman can speak, the tongue of an Englishman as they say being not long enough to pronounce Welsh'. On the way to Llanrhaeadr another woman ‘had no idea it was possible for any Englishman to speak Welsh half so well'. None knew quite what to make of him. In the north they mistook him for a South Walian. In the south they assumed he was North Walian. He sometimes pretended that he could barely speak Welsh, before gradually revealing the full extent of his fluency. ‘I have a little broken Cumraeg, at the service of this good company,' he said on sitting down to a beer in
Anglesey. ‘Your Welsh is different from ours,' he was soon being told by an old man, ‘and of course better, being the Welsh of the grammar.' And no wonder. ‘How were you able to master its difficulties?' asked a doctor in Snowdonia. ‘Chiefly by going through Owen Pugh's version of
Paradise Lost
twice,' Borrow replied, ‘with the original by my side.'