Bred of Heaven (37 page)

Precisely what the love consisted of has never been conclusively established. ‘Nobody knowss if they were lessbianss,' says the audio guide at Plas Newydd in a soft, sibilant North Walian accent. Byron, writing when a student at Cambridge in 1807 of his romantic fondness for a fellow undergraduate, knew all about the rumours: ‘We shall put Lady E. Butler and Miss Ponsonby to the blush,' he boasted. Seven years later, presumably in acknowledgement of their status as romantic pioneers, he sent the ladies a copy of
The Corsair
.

The ladies first passed through Llangollen in 1778 after crossing
from Waterford. They had a prodigious day of tourism, having no idea yet that they would have another half a century to take in the sights. They walked to ‘an Abbey called Valede Crucis' then made their way to Chirk Castle. But first they clambered up to Dinas Brân and the overhanging crags of the Trevor Rocks to look upon ‘an extensive Prospect … of the Beautifullest Country in the World'. They will have ached the next day.

We are certainly in North Wales now. My blistered heels tell me as much, as does the Scouse catarrh tingeing the Llangollen accent. Clambering up towards the crenellated silhouette of Dinas Brân on day ten I feel a stab of longing. It's certainly not a longing for England, but it is for not walking, which England represents. Two days and thirty-eight miles to go.

The sun is fierce, the wind sharp at the top. Borrow climbed up to these charismatic ruins more than once, and on each occasion experienced mild irritation. ‘I do not think I saw the Wyddfa then from the top of Dinas Brân. It is true I might see it without knowing it, being utterly unacquainted with it, except by name.' He was right. Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa) is not visible. Not yet. We head north under the grim Eglwysegs. Scenes such as these routinely coaxed the same sort of adjectives out of Georgian visitors. Where they said ‘awful' we say ‘awesome'. Even the sternest English naysayer would concede that these are mountains, not hills.

In due course rock gives way to moor, and as rain revisits we wander out across bare, cold, bleak heather into forest where red toadstools and fat heavy ceps line the path at the edge of the woodland. Mile upon mile. Step upon step. Eventually we rise onto a headland from which, not long after lunch, there is a miraculous sight. I whip out the opera glasses.

‘Look!'

‘What?' E— is not sure what she's meant to be looking at.

‘At that. Over there.' There is longish pause.

‘I can't see anything.'

‘That's the point.'

Twenty-five miles to the north, a misty tabula rasa fills the horizon. Journey's end is visible. The faint outline of turbines embedded in the Irish Sea twizzles in the wind. And in the foreground, fanning out along the corridor of the Vale of Clwyd, we can see most of Denbighshire. Awesome.

‘We came into a most pleasant, fruitful, populous, and delicious vale,' said Defoe when he reached this point in his tour, ‘full of villages and towns, the fields shining with corn, just ready for the reapers, and the meadows green and flowery, and a fine river, with a mild and gentle stream running thro' it.' He fell with relief on the Arcadian valley, so trimly organised and sprouting with well-kept crops, after his exhausting journey across the wilds of North Wales. Had he wandered up onto the top of the range he'd have seen his enemies patrolling there on the western horizon, the razor-sharp peaks of Snowdonia glowering not thirty miles away, and even further off to the south, the mountain he called ‘Kader-Idricks'. And if he'd cared to look to the east, he'd have seen the Dee, an angry torrent back in Llangollen, now wide and becalmed as it convenes with the sea this side of the Wirral and Liverpool. But Defoe sensibly kept to the valley floor. ‘We had a prospect of the country open before us, for above 20 miles in length, and from 5 to 7 miles in breadth, all smiling with the same kind of complexion; which made us think ourselves in England again, all on a sudden.'

We keep to the heights, blanketed in downy purple heather. Green paths loop over tall bosomy hills of the Clwydian Range as the tenth day makes way for the eleventh and last. By the final morning there are twenty-one miles to go till we meet the sea in Prestatyn. We walk hard and fast. At the end of one long hard pull
uphill I am no more out of breath than as if swanning along a city pavement. We swoop northwards. As the hours pass, the market towns of Ruthin and then Denbigh down in the valley gradually recede on our left flank. I have a new awareness: so this is how it feels to be intensely fit and alive, to have a body in which you can entirely trust. The last lunch after many miles is taken on the top of a rounded hill, looking to the west where those crags in Snowdonia – the Glyders, the Carneddau, Tryfan, Yr Wyddfa – serrate the horizon. A cloud clings to the famous peak, the highest place in Britain this side of the Highlands. I could watch this spectacle for ever.

We rise to our feet and carry on, as one must. And instantly spot a problem. Hips, shoulders, thighs, joints, backs choose this particular moment to jostle for attention. E—'s knees moan the loudest. Downhill paths turn instantly infernal. Bit by bit the contents of her rucksack make their way across into mine. The signposts pointing the way are remorseless. Chocolate offers no consolation, nor energy bars nor even tea taken after crossing the A5 via a footbridge.

How shocking to see cars scarring the ineffable peace of Wales, which we have traversed without once meeting a dual carriageway. The end must therefore be nigh, if only Prestatyn did not also seem to be retreating somehow. I miss a turning and off we wander from the ODP. An extra half-mile in such circs – a quarter there and a quarter back – is not easily swept under the carpet. Two fuses shorten. There are seven miles to go. Seven miles! If you told your teenagers you were about to lead them on a seven-mile walk they'd laugh at you and carry on channel-hopping. And we've done two seven-mile walks already today.

Ever so slowly, Wales disappears under our feet. There are no more sheep. We stumble through cow pasture and wheat field until
down to our left the path draws back the curtain on trim suburban outskirts. The pastoral Vale of Clwyd has come to this. In terms of visual stimulants, the journey is as good as done. The sun is weakening now as the path rises onto a ridge before plummeting sharply into Prestatyn proper. The descent is agony. My feet are – no exaggeration (or not much) – killing me. The first commercial building we spot in town is a funeral director's. My boots all but walk me in. We pass down the high street, incongruous in shorts and thick socks. A pub looms on the left. Offa's Tavern. There can be no more suitable place to end this glorious trek up the rib of earth planted in the landscape of our imagination. We push through the door thirsting for liquid relief, to be met by a stale stench of weak lager and tinny speakers pulsing. A dozen drinkers variously prop up the bar, play slot machines and poke one another in the chest. The room simmers with negative energy. One man leans in and asks if we've just walked the Offa's Dyke Path. His eyelids are heavy with drink; beery fumes fog the air between us. I've never felt the need to get out of anywhere faster. We must reach the sea. Prestatyn, someone kindly tells us, is bisected by the railway, so we should take the overpass and keep walking north.

These are the hardest yards: half a mile to the sea along wide roads. Starkness on the edge of town. We are hobbling to the end of Wales. Tomorrow's paralysis has already come. My feet burn with each step. I have wandered the length and breadth and depth of Wales. Now Wales is running out. So this is what it feels like to grow old and suffer betrayal by one's own body. Once upon a time my father crossed Offa's Dyke. Now I have crossed the other way. Kiss me quick, sing shops hawking beach tat. A brute leisure complex protects the shore, as factual as a Norman castle. Somewhere beyond a wall, sea and beach and sky vanish into one another. We halt at the end of Wales.

WHERE DO I DRAW THE LINE?
I set out to turn myself into a Welshman and am curious to know when such a mission can be described as accomplished. I've paddled, worshipped, worked, sung, spoken, played, competed, farmed, composed and walked my way towards Welshness. With more success in some cases than in others. I've got Welsh in my passport. I've described myself as Welsh in the 2011 census. What's left?

I know I am reaching full immersion when I have my first dream in Welsh. Like all good dreams it addresses a deep-rooted anxiety, in this instance about losing my mind. I can no longer think of the words for things. I visit an old people's home to see if I can get myself tested. At the reception desk they are not remotely interested in my condition. After all I'm only forty-six. I get up and make to leave. I'm just walking out of the plushly carpeted sitting room when I notice a male figure sitting in a high-backed armchair to the right of the door. He is wearing a beautifully cut green tweed three-piece suit. I instinctively know that this is my grandfather.
When I sit by the armchair to talk to him Bert addresses me in colloquial Welsh which I understand and answer. The conversation is far more intimate than any exchange we have ever had. Our heads lean in so that they almost touch. A beautiful warm smile plays on his face; his blue eyes glisten. He is even chuckling.

I wake up, not in the middle of the dream, as you usually do, but at the end.

Twenty-five years after my grandfather died, I stand in the rain where the cattle grid once guarded the entrance to Mount Hill. A man happens to be outside the door to which a postman once bore a letter addressed ‘Bertram, Carmarthen'.

‘Can I help you there?' There's an undertone to the voice: a Welshman's home is his castle. For all he knows I might be planning a break-in.

‘My grandparents bought this house in 1936,' I say. ‘My father and uncle grew up here.'

‘Mr Rees?' he says more warmly. ‘Would you like to come in and look around?' The owner introduces himself as Monty Griffiths. Monty of Mount Hill.

‘When I bought the house off Mrs Rees,' he tells me, ‘I said to her, I said, “Mr Rees was a butcher now, wasn't he?” “No,” she said, “my husband was a dentist!” “That's what I meant,” I said. “A butcher.”' Monty mimes my grandmother tutting. ‘He was missing two fingers, wasn't he? I was terrified of him as a boy, I was.'

We walk along the corridor into the house, past the old drawing room where Dorothy's portrait of her mother Nain sitting primly in an armchair used to hang. It's now in my attic. Standing in the hall, which is of course smaller than I remember, I see that the kitchen where my grandmother conjured up those Christmas lunches and trolleyed them into the dining room for Bert to carve is now a bedroom again. Mrs Griffiths has a taste for highly floral linen. The
dark old snooker room where as teenagers we spent our entire time, sunk down the little run of stairs, is the kitchen once more, now glinting with mod cons. Some of the old atmosphere still clings to the sitting room where my grandfather would smoke his pipe in the corner by the fireplace. The surfaces are still laden in the Welsh way with an absolute riot of brass and china knick-knacks. And yet the house sounds different. The hall no longer clinks and tinkles the way it does in my memory. Soon after moving in, Monty tells me, he put his foot through a floorboard in the hall, established that the whole house was riddled with rot and had it gutted.

I ask if I can go upstairs to the old attic bedroom. At the top of the short winding staircase Monty holds open the door. The ceilings slope in as much as ever but the three beds in a row have gone, and so too the poltergeist in the dark alcove which used to haunt us after lights out. Instead, in a house where classical music-making once took place, the middle of the room is occupied by a large shiny drum kit. It is and isn't a change. Forty years after we'd wake up at six on Christmas morning and set off a furious racket, the new owner is still putting our bedroom to traditional use.

I am a Welsh teacher now. The new academic year is beginning, there is a fresh intake of Welsh-language beginners, and James has put out an email to several Welsh speakers. He needs classroom assistants. One Thursday evening at the London Welsh Centre I walk into a large basement room which teems with perhaps thirty-five people who have volunteered to learn the language. It is a sight to lift the heart. I park myself at a table with six new learners as James begins the business of introducing the Welsh alphabet with its rogue extra letters –
ll
and
dd
,
ch
,
ff
and
rh
. Faces are pulled as the class grapples with the new consonants. Puzzled looks sprout at the news of odd Welsh vowel sounds. Soon we are learning to introduce ourselves.

‘Belinda dw i. Matthew dw i. Julia dw i. Alison dw i. Rhys dw i. Pascale dw i,' they say.

‘Jasper dw i.'

They have brought along the usual array of incentives for wanting to try Welsh. They are married to/about to marry Welshmen/Welshwomen. They grew up in Wales and want to communicate with a Welsh-speaking parent. One wants to improve on her forgotten GCSE Welsh to land a job back in Caerphilly.

At the end of the first lesson James teaches them some basic phrases of greeting and farewell. One of them is
tan y tro nesaf
(till next time). After our ninety minutes are up each Thursday evening, I repeat the phrase like a supplication, hoping that uttering the words will make them come true, that everyone I say it to will indeed come back next week. But Welsh as usual sets a cat among the pigeons and there is the expected attrition across the term. Languages are not for everyone, especially not in adulthood, especially not this language with its inimical grammar and tongue-twisting sounds. The first mention of mutations (
Croeso i Gymru
) pastes dread and confusion on several faces, and sends the odd initiate running for the hills. One academic has funding to do a paper relating to Welsh, but after week two we don't see her for dust. I never quite establish exactly why a nervous middle-aged Sri Lankan wants to learn; by week three he doesn't, and is gone. The woman with GCSE Welsh moves back to Caerphilly. But the majority refuse to let Welsh defeat them. One man scratches his head at the speech exercises set by James and long after half-term still appears to have learned absolutely nothing. But he keeps coming back, as bold in the face of the odds as a cockroach in a nuclear holocaust.