Bred of Heaven (21 page)

‘Dw i'n dod o'r de.' I come from the south. ‘Yn wreiddiol.' Originally. I am starting to believe it myself. And why not? Borrow, after all, was often taken for a southerner in the north.

The group have been persuaded to move on to a second bottle. The six of us talk as the dishes come and go of how we'll use our improved Welsh in times to come. Helen is persuaded to divulge more titbits about her
snoggio
with the Welsh celeb. My near encounter with Jan Morris is picked over for hidden significance. The Oracle shares a few more words from Bishop William Morgan's Bible. Richard tells grim tales of fatal conflagrations across North Wales. We speculate about the kind of complaints David will be fending off in Welsh. Roisin wonders whether her Welsh hasn't gone backwards in the Nant. She is firmly advised that this is not the case.

We've now spent four days in total Welsh immersion. There is only one day left. As the others talk I am suddenly blindsided by an out-of-body flash. Tomorrow in class we will be tasked with writing and reading out a story about ourselves. I will craft something riddled with errors about a child's Christmas at Mount Hill, my grandfather with the carving knife, my grandmother busy in the kitchen, a great-uncle shouting ‘Shut the door!' and an uncle talking without cease. And then after a short afternoon session in which Eleri will cover our stories with corrections in red ink, we will get into our cars and drive back to our anglophone lives and perhaps never see one another again (although firm assurances will have been made to the contrary,
ebost
swapped, etc.). And for a few days I will go into mourning the way actors do at the end of a play's run. But that is tomorrow. Today, now, half a dozen of us are in the back room of a pub on the side of a mountain on a remote peninsula in North Wales. Somewhere up there in the dark the round stone huts of Tre'r Ceiri have endured since long, long before the birth of Christ. None of us really needs Welsh. None of us even really needs a past or a heritage or a place we can say we come from. We can all live happily ever after in the eternal present of the cyber-sphere in
which even English will soon be reduced to the utilitarian codings of vowel-free txt spk before eventually Mandarin chokes the planet. So why not let the old ways go? The march of progress, surely, will kill off the Welsh language anyway, as it has all but killed off Welsh coracling and Welsh congregations and Welsh miners.

But reason not the need. Why else are we gathered here this evening round this table? We have stumped up our money and time, volunteered a diminishing stock of middle-aged brain cells to staff the barricades and in our small grammatically challenged way helped stem the predatory forces of English, which has the might of history behind it. We have gone out to bat for this older purer language to which we all feel an ever-deepening allegiance. As do thousands of others. It's an epiphany: a moment when suddenly everything is utterly clear. None of them notices the embarrassing detail of my eyes filling as I formulate my conclusion.

Were we to meet in the future, I say, I couldn't imagine speaking English with any of them. It could be better expressed by a more melodious Welsh speaker, but they know what I mean and we all drink to it. In fact I could no more speak English with these people than Mandarin. Perhaps we'd learn much more about one another in English. Vast hinterlands would presumably open up. We could maybe joke about more than the whereabouts of Ireland. But a contract would be broken and something vital lost. Welsh – at least here and now – is our first language.

THE SUCCESS OR OTHERWISE
of a London Welshman's visit to the Millennium Stadium is subject to various variables. Time of kick-off. Identity of match companion(s). Quality of opposition. Weather. State of the rail network. Team selection. Current level of knowledge of words of the anthem. Side of bed key players got out of. Capacity of bladder. Luck/lack of same. Availability of Shane. Anxiety about getting a seat on the train back.

The journey begins at Paddington. With each stop the train decelerates along platforms lined with red-shirted clusters of the Diaspora. Carriages fill. We slip under the Severn and emerge into the land of our fathers, the hills rising out of the north-facing window. By Newport there is standing room only as the corridors are cramped with gentlemen of all ages, sizes and states of inebriation. Celts have a bipolar relationship with optimism. At this
preliminary hour, hope still abounds. Fatalism is for later. Rivers of red are starting to surge towards the great steel-girdered cathedral that rises like a city within a city on the Taf. Through the gate, tickets ripped, up several staircases onto a long floor where there is Welsh beer to be bought. Stairwells open out towards the sky or, on rainy days, the roof. The amplified sound of a brass band is playing, a choir singing. Someone in a luminous jacket points you upwards and it's now a steep clamber to your row and thence a sideways shuffle past Welsh knees to your seat, where you and whoever you're with, who is also Welsh, turn and sit and take in the sight spread before you of, by general consensus, the finest rugby stadium on earth.

A hundred jacketed seniors with silken voices shuffle from one corner of the pitch to the next, dodging punts from the visiting squad who are now out on the grass doing drills. They lead the crowd in Welsh songs to which you do not know the words. Apart from ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer'. You feel an uncomfortable twinge of self-reproach that you cannot sing along to ‘Sosban Fach' like your grandfather.

As the 75,000 red seats fill, the players trot back into the tunnel, shoulders rolling, pectoral overdevelopment rippling under stretchable neo-fabric. Rugby players used to look like human beings. It's your perpetual worry that the Welsh team will somehow be less pneumatic than the visitors. Meanwhile up in the stands the disciples granny-step towards their seats. Between songs from the choir, a disembodied voice makes deafening announcements in English and Welsh, the two languages merging in an acoustic muffle. The teams are announced, stern glowers from symmetrical screens mounted high above the posts, young faces ever so slightly aged before their time by thunderous hits to the body. For the favourites: cheers; for the visitors' best player: boos.

And during all of this, the anxious thought runs through my head. Do I really belong here? Can I claim with my Harrovian hinterland to be an organic component of this seething whole? I look around me and see Welsher faces than mine, hear Welsher voices. Gaggles of plump, peroxided luvlies, their dimpled faces cased in daffodil wimples. Hordes of hard men with bullet heads and tattooed necks. We Welsh. Can I actually say that? Dare I use the first person plural in this holiest of shrines to which the face of the nation turns as the clock ticks down to kick-off? Strategically placed fire-jets ejaculate spurts of hot flame towards the roof with growing urgency, the tunnel belches pink-orange smoke and the team suddenly spew like red dragon's breath onto the grass as the stadium emits a primordial roar of deathless allegiance. I find that I am bellowing too, without having to will the noise out of myself. It's there in my lungs.

‘Come on, boys!!'

I have no idea why, but this always comes out in a Welsh accent. The stadium stands and sings the anthem, the choir serried behind the teams and conducted by a small man on a box. Imagine harnessing the energy of the sound. You could power the Glamorgan grid. I don't know the words. I sing the important bits – ‘Gwlaad! Gwlaaaad!' – and make a stab at the rest. One time I write them down and self-consciously sing with my eyes lowered, though at that point my Welsh pronunciation is barely up to snuff. And then the teams scatter to either end of the pitch, the choir and band march off towards a corner and the disembodied voice on the stadium Tannoy delivers a final address, which thunders over the gathering noise.

‘Ymlaen, Cymru! Come on, Wales!'

We need no encouragement. ‘WALES! WALES! WALES! WALES!'

Yes. I belong. When the fifteen men of Wales take to the field, I am Welsh.

I have a friend in Wales called Leighton, or Leight, or, when he's texting, L8, who I am convinced was propping for Llanelli when, on the very famous day in Welsh rugby, they beat the All Blacks in 1972. Leighton is edging towards sixty nowadays, so is the right age. And he's certainly the right size, a solid slab of Welsh beef. I'm sure someone told me he was playing, and now no amount of sweet-faced denial from Leighton will convince me otherwise. If he wasn't on the pitch in person, he was there in spirit. Or someone very like him, wise in the old Welsh ways of legalised GBH and licensed assault. That was how they played rugby back then. Over a generous glass of something red, Leighton is fond of sharing his memories of thuggery and skulduggery, of thumpings and stampings, gougings and gashings. His big soft eyes will open wide at the memory. This was in days of yore when referees turned a blind eye. Back in the 1970s I don't suppose Leighton got his hands on the ball very often. That wasn't a prop's job. They were mainly employed in the privatised application of natural justice. Retaliation was preferably administered in a pre-emptive capacity with these words: ‘Welcome to Stradey.' Stradey Park is the home of Llanelli RFC.

These stories chill me to the marrow. Why? Because it has dawned on me that, in order to turn myself into a Welshman, I need to think about getting a game in Wales.

‘No problem, cariad.' Leighton is affection personified (
cariad
= beloved, darling, dear). ‘We can sort you out with a game for Clwb Rygbi Cymry Caerdydd.' Leighton's son Hywel, he explains, is the club captain. I smile brightly in his kitchen and glug some more red. In my head, I'm already booking myself into casualty. I am
forty-five. I have not played rugby for twenty-eight years. And when I did play, it scared the bejesus out of me.

I don't know why I grew up fearful of physical contact. A testosterone deficiency? Infant spindliness? I cut a puny figure on wintry afternoons under H-shaped posts. A deep trauma happened when I was first stuck in a rugby shirt. I still remember the day in the depths of January 1976 when the ball changed shape. My known world ever so slightly tilted and I learned something new about myself: that I had a lily liver. I didn't even fancy tackling the opposition at football, which put only feet and ankles at risk. Suddenly they were telling you to throw your
face
at someone's flying studs. In the trenches they shot my kind in the back.

At the school I went to there was an index of fearlessness. The rugby master, Mr Youle, who also taught maths, was a terrifying ogre with wild grizzled curly hair planted atop a giant frame like tufts of grass on a lofty crag. He lived for rugby – or rugger as they called it in that corner of West Sussex. What he really lived for was tackling. He harboured deep suspicions of anyone who liked football, because football involved kicking. You didn't kick in rugby. You tackled. To encourage a tackle-based culture of kamikaze valour, he would mount a large display board up in the corridor. The names of every rugby player in the school were listed there. If that afternoon someone pulled off a heroic tackle he'd put a capital
T
next to their name. A more perfunctory effort, but still identifiable as a tackle, would merit a small
t
. Most boys accumulated a respectable set of
T
s and
t
s. Even those who preferred to steer clear of a scrap would generate enough
t
s to spare their blushes. But I just couldn't seem to hurl myself into the danger zone. It looked like it would hurt. Even maim. As I was a new boy my name was bottom of the list. I used to look at the board in break, wondering if anyone would notice the blank squares next to Rees 1. The humiliation was such
that one week, having dredged up the courage to wrestle a midget to the floor, I reminded Mr Youle that I'd done a tackle. He had the board in front of him at the time and was busy distributing upper-case commendations. With a disdainful squiggle he deposited a small lonely
t
next to my name.

There was something Mr Youle found particularly baffling. He could make no connection between the long-haired skeleton who refused to tackle and the evidence enshrined in my surname that I must on some level have something to do with Wales. On Sundays he would invite the older boys down to his cottage in the grounds to watch the highlights of the Five Nations. As an honorary Welshman I was asked along and more or less told to support the fifteen men in red. So I did.

It was on those Sunday afternoons in 1977 and 1978 that I was introduced to names that still echo around the hills and valleys of Wales and far beyond: Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett, J. P. R. Williams, J. J. Williams, Gerald Davies, Mervyn Davies, the Pontypool front row. The great men had mostly retired by the time I saw Wales play for the first time. It was an away game at Twickenham in 1980. I went with my older brother and, reaching our seats ten minutes late, we were met by a stadium in eruption as the flanker Ringer was pointed towards the tunnel by a referee. Wales scored two tries, including one by Elgan Rees. To boost my sense of Welsh belonging I would for several years after spread the story among my fellow Harrovians that Elgan Rees was my uncle. In a boarding school full of credulous hoorays, the claim was hard to disprove. He wasn't the greatest wing to play for Wales. He wasn't even the only Rees to play on the wing in that era. There was a Clive Rees too, but as he resembled a short, mad-haired professor who zigzagged about the pitch as if frantically hunting for his mislaid specs, I stuck with Elgan.