Bred of Heaven (38 page)

Along with one or two other volunteers, I patrol the tables, listening and advising, testing and correcting. They look at me as if
I'm a guru whose Welsh wisdom runs to unfathomable depths. Now and then I have to put them right on that, mostly when some bog-standard lacuna in my knowledge base is exposed. For this reason I entirely avoid the table furthest from the front where James has exiled all the Gogs, the ones who want to learn Welsh as spoken in the north. As for everyone else, when they ask I answer as best I can. And I slip them extra bits of contraband vocab, insist they write it down, and suggest that they make sure to learn it before next Thursday. Steady tapping breaks the stone, I tell them. Towards the end of the term I sense that my adopted table starts to dread my approach. They have me down as a hard taskmaster. The problem is that I care. My enthusiasm can barely be contained. We have a language to save. This, I realise, is how evangelists must feel all the time. I am here to spread the word. The words.

The task in hand is summed up in a single, beautiful double meaning.
Ysgol
is the Welsh for ‘school', but also for ‘ladder'. I have a vision of all Welsh speakers, from the Archdruid up on the very highest rung all the way down to the beginners clambering onto the lowest. We are every one of us on the same ladder, each climbing in the same direction. It is the responsibility of those higher up the ladder to extend a hand downwards and help pull up the ones on the rungs below. Thus was I hauled towards competence by James, an adult learner, and now I in turn am reaching out to those below.

I am more determined than ever that, before my journey is completed, my girls will come to Wales and experience some of its wonders just once before they take their own paths into adulthood. I'd rather not witness their quarter Welshness entirely wither as it has with other descendants of Meidrim. Not on my watch. A carefully prepared cocktail of begging and emotional blackmail wears down their defences until eventually one gives in and the other domino soon topples. E—, a convert to Welsh walking, is coming too.

We drive through the dark until in wisps of fog the road heaves up into the heart of the mountains and over the Llanberis Pass and down to a cottage at the foot of Crib Goch. We have a two-day window. On one of them – we're not sure which – we are going to the very top of the land of their fathers.

Yes, to complete Project Wales I am striking Snowdon off my list of Welsh mountains there's no point in climbing. Next morning rain spatters the window.
Mae hi'n bwrw glaw
, as they say; lit. ‘it's striking rain'. The forecast for tomorrow is no better. Today therefore is the day to make a dash for it.

It's flattish walking up to the first of the lakes, then an easy climb towards Llyn Llydaw, which, more than a mile in length, stretches away towards the forbidding wall of Y Lliwedd, rising into invisibility. We bisect the lake, then skirt its northern bank. It is no mystery that Arthur's legend hangs about this place like a persistent mist. The still surface of the water, its bottom strewn with boulders, could easily be pierced any minute by a thin female arm bearing a silver sword. Behind us an epic landscape falling away across the valley is a muted rumour in dull midwinter daylight. The silence would be all-engulfing were the flanks of the mountains not alive with a hundred plump streams bustling down from the clouds as if bringing urgent news from on high.

Many millions have walked here before, hundreds of thousands of them each year. William Wordsworth stayed overnight to watch the sun rise over Wales. George Borrow marched his daughter up and walked all the way back down to Bangor. H. V. Morton took the train to the top with miserable tourists who hated the wind. Among your predecessors, I tell the girls, is your grandfather, who came up here in 1938, a five-year-old crying all the way to the top.

On this day we are more or less alone. Cold and damp have evacuated the mountain. A seagull, which has drifted inland in
search of lunch, patrols overhead. The path works a way upwards alongside a foam-white cascade, which crescendos over an approaching edge. Glaslyn materialises, a more intimate, secret lake hemmed hard into the side of the face. (
Glas
, curiously, means both ‘blue' and ‘green'.) The only way now is semi-vertical, and treacherous with departing snows. As we gain altitude the views grow murkier until Glaslyn sinks below the cloud line while we rise into nothingness. Silence descends. There are no streams up here and the mists muffle noise so that voices sound soft and immediate. We could be indoors were it not for the cold, the intermittent rain and the gradient.

When the change comes it is instant. The path zigzags its way up onto a ridge. A pugnacious wind greets us, fresh from Greenland. The shelter offered by the mountain has gone and walking grows unpleasant. We take a left and follow the path through thicker snow, without a clear sense of how near the summit is – it's far too blowy for map-reading – but dimly aware that this mountain can't go on rising for ever. The telltale track of the railway joins from the right. The train, it goes without saying, is not running today. Soon we make out the faint silhouette of a nearby building. It must be the summit cafe, shut and abandoned. The summit is upon us. My daughters are ahead now and racing towards the man-made cairn that rises as if on a Wagnerian stage set, E— not far behind them. They are already at the top in triumph as I, bringing up the rear, trudge up the steps. Part of me wants the climb to end, another part to go slow and stretch a moment that will not come again.

‘You're at the top of Wales, girls,' I say, for want of anything more oratorical. Millions have stood on this point. On a boiling day the first great Welsh travel writer Thomas Pennant, who came half the way by horse, claimed he could see Yorkshire, Scotland, Ireland and
the Isle of Man from here. We can't see a thing. But you can at least sense how the Welsh word for Snowdonia – Eryri – tacked across into English. This is the original eyrie, haunt of eagles. I coach them to say Eryri. A reservoir of Welsh information is dammed up inside me. I want to direct their attention to the various Welsh peaks I've been up, always to find Snowdon staring across at me: Cadair Idris, Yr Eifl, the Clwydian range, Arenig Fawr, Aran Fawddwy. But today we are unable to stare back. Down there, I want to say, is Porthmadog, where your great-grandmother Dorothy grew up, and Dolgellau, where she went to school. A bit of you is bred of this heaven.

I want to share all this in these freezing celestial mists. But not much gets said at 1,085 metres in early January with an ambient temperature dragged down by 80 mph winds. Instead I thank them all for coming up here to be alone with me at the very pinnacle of Wales. They smile, cheeks pink and eyes alive, and ask if we can go back down now.

(The next day it absolutely pisses down.)

From the emptiest place in Wales to the fullest. Wales are at home. And so am I. I hear the familiar chords cue up the famous tune for the umpteenth time, played as ever by the brass band in regimental red. I've been this way before – the Welsh crowds rising to the rafters, the words of the anthem poised on tens of thousands of lips, the team braced to sing.

I've been this way, but never quite so far. With half an hour to go to kick-off, I am back in the jacket of Pendyrus and walking up through the corner tunnel out onto the pitch of the Millennium Stadium, marching along the edge of the sacred turf to the far side where seats are slowly filling to sing ‘Calon Lân'. I have learned the words to this and other hymns and arias. In all my feverish imaginings I never dared build this particular Welsh castle in the sky.
‘Calon lân yn llawn daioni …' we sing, the melody levitating into the floodlit night. A pure heart full of joy. In front of me my fellow second tenors Mal and Alan, Colin and the Prof. Stewart, relieved of conducting duties this evening, has chosen to join us. Sadly our number has been depleted. Roy, the quiet, wiry widower who joined the choir after me, has died within the past month and been sung to his rest by members of Pendyrus.

‘Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,' we sing. ‘Feed me till I want no more, want no more …' And the thousands join us. Haydn James, whom I first saw as a tiny dot from high up in the back row of the stadium, is now my conductor. We sing Max Boyce's ‘Hymns and Arias', the sound one part Caruso to two parts gelignite, then ‘Sosban Fach'. The red seats of the Millennium are filling. Behind us the visiting squad is grunting and thudding through warm-ups. I turn to watch bones shake and oval balls spin through the air under the tall H-shaped posts.

As the teams jog back inside, we march round to our final position near the players' tunnel. In front of me three tiers crammed with Welshmen and Welshwomen rise towards the roof, thousands and thousands of them looking down at Pendyrus out on the grass of the greatest rugby stadium on the planet. I cannot go any further into the heart of Wales, I tell myself. ‘Heey Juude …' (Not everything about the song sheet is indigenous.) Once again my eyeballs gently toast as fire jets spit from pitch-side barrels with growing urgency. The tunnel starts belching pink smoke, the Tannoy whips the gathered multitudes into a frenzy and the visitors, then, to a climactic detonation of din, the hosts, sprint out to join us.

‘WALES! WALES! WALES! WALES!'

In front of us they go through the business of lining up, shoulder to outsize shoulder. They have never seemed nearer, never seemed more colossal. The crowd now stands to the visitors'
rumpty-tumpty anthem, which we alone in the stadium know how to sing. Silence descends in the great secular cathedral of Wales. The air is pregnant with the approaching noise. High in the gods I had to stand mutely during the national anthem the first time I came to the Millennium. Latterly I've been Redwoodising. I have never sung the anthem all the way through by heart, and yet it has not been necessary to learn the words. They have somehow flowed into my bloodstream. Now I'm down on the pitch. Over this last threshold is the end of my quest. I open my mouth. Breathe. And with my compatriots, sing.

In front of me the wall of Welsh voices heaves into musical life. The old land of my fathers is dear to me, we sing. This is how giants must sound as they wake from their slumber in Eryri.

We invoke celebrated bards and singers, such as those who have consented to guide me in the ways of Welshness. To whom I am eternally in debt.

In unison a whole stadium recalls the spirit of Welsh warriors who once spilled blood for national freedom.

This one resonant syllable comes up six times in seven lines.

I don't think I have ever sung a single word with more heart ( =
calon
).

I am indeed partial to my country. The anthem is going far too quickly. If I could choose a Welsh moment of mine to last more or less for ever it would be this. The final couplet approaches, the great imprecation. As long as the sea walls protect this pure beloved domain …

… O let the old language endure! I sing these words – written in Pontypridd in 1856 as the Victorian Age plotted to legislate Welsh into extinction – with quite extraordinary force. Holding the highest note on
iaith
(= language), I am simply shouting in tune, though drowned of course by the thousands of voices rising into the night. O let the old language endure.
Parhau
= endure, continue. The stadium vibrates with approval and fervour. Our anthem has worked its spell yet again as few anthems can.

Choristers of Pendyrus have no time to turn to one another and smile. The teams are already shaking hands and we must make a rapid exit towards the corner tunnel. Yes, I think as I start walking rapidly, I
am
welcome to Wales. The players are making for their separate ends of the pitch. But I am listening hard to the Tannoy.
I've requested a small favour of Rhys the Voice, my contact with the microphone. The Welsh Rugby Union will frown – they've banned this sort of thing – but I've asked if I can speak to Wales through him. A hush descends as the fifteen Welsh heroes assume battle positions. The whistle will sound the second we have stepped off the grass. Listen now, as I leave the pitch, listen. Suddenly, the amplified words of Rees the Voice reverberate around the entire Millennium Stadium.

‘YMLAEN, CYMRU! COME ON, WALES!'

My instinct is to give thanks to the whole of Wales, but that might be overdoing it. But I would like to acknowledge the many descendants of Corn Gafr who have been helpful in a variety of ways. My father Simon Rees and my uncle Brother Teilo Rees have allowed their memories to be tapped again and again. Thanks also to my mother Jacquy Rees, my brothers Rupert Rees and Ted Rees and my daughters Pascale Rees and Florence Rees. Cousins who have also kindly shared their knowledge are Hugh Rees, Andy Rees, Claire Rees, Philip Rees, Alys Russell, Steve Phillips, Elizabeth Moody, Catherine Moody and Elizabeth May Rees.

I would also like to express my thanks to the many Welsh people who have been generous with their time and knowledge. Chief among these is James Dodd, who helped me learn to speak a great and noble language. Any deficiencies in these pages and elsewhere are entirely mine.

I am also indebted to Leighton and Rhian Jones, not only for their considerable hospitality in Cardiff, but also for introducing me to the Archdruid Jim Parc Nest, also known as Jim Jones, and Manon Rhys; to Rhys Jones, also known as Rhys ap William and Rhys the Voice, who introduced me to Brian Lewis of Unity Mines and Haydn James of the Welsh Rugby Union. To all of them the words barely cover it, but thank you very much indeed/
diolch yn fawr iawn
.