Bred of Heaven (7 page)

As part of our rounds we might barge in on our great-aunt and -uncle, Aunt Joan and Uncle Bob, though as they had no children of their own they tended to greet such invasions testily. Or even our widowed great-aunt Olwen, who lived in Saundersfoot. But for the most part I remember following my grandmother Dorothy around on Christmas Day. She was the soul of Mount Hill, its welcoming bosom. You never for a second had the sense that she was anything but delighted by your company. Which in our case must have taken some doing. I know I adored her.

At breakfast the bread singed nicely on the prongs of a toasting fork by the fire. We sat at an octagonal dining table which stood on a central leg. Amusingly it could rotate. It didn't amuse our grandfather when we tried. Outside through a tall Gothic window we'd watch chaffinches, tits and a lone robin attack the bird table raised on a black metal post, Bert and Dorothy being eager ornithologists. The lawn outside may well have been draped in white, though my memory could have borrowed that image from the hundreds of Christmas cards crowding the polished wooden surface of the mantelpieces, the Bechstein, the dark-oak Welsh dresser.

Christmas in Carmarthen was entirely irreligious. Or it was for most of us. Our uncle – not yet known as Teilo – would rush in at breakfast time, chatting without cease. It would emerge that he had been to something called Midnight Mass with Aunt Joan. Midnight seemed a sensible time to go to church, nicely tucked away in the schedule. Aunt Joan also chatted a lot, while Bob would take a leaf out of his older brother's book and keep more or less shtum. My main memory of Uncle Bob is of a grumbler. ‘Shut the door!' he'd holler from the second most important armchair as we tore in and out of the living room.

And whenever you went back to shut it, whenever you pounded across the hallway, the house clanked, floorboards squeaked, and brass bits and pieces tinkled. A rich aroma of polish entwined in your nostrils with emanations from the kitchen, where my mother laboured in support of my grandmother while Aunt Joan floated about.

Meanwhile we explored: the jungly sanctum of Bert's greenhouse, the dusty old servants' quarters hidden behind a panel door on the stairs, a utility room which had once served as the kitchen. Meat hooks hung from its ceiling. A ruddy-faced old man called Mr John would come through the back door to scrub potatoes. He was
always deferential, even to us. Sometimes my grandfather came down and spoke to him in an incomprehensible language which, I dimly understood, was Welsh.

On a Sunday evening in March in the walled town of Conwy, the sun has long since slipped behind the mountain, casting Edward I's bristling ramparts in darkness. Everything's closed. It's five to six and the bell of St Mary's is calling. I push through the door into a tall and, it has to be said, empty church. A very small lady in her seventies stands at the bottom of the nave.

‘Are you here for the service?'

I tell her I am.

‘Holy Communion is in Welsh,' she says. ‘I hope that's all right.' It certainly is. All my experiences of the Church in Wales, which disestablished itself from Canterbury by Act of Parliament in 1920, have been in English – mostly Anglican weddings and funerals of members of another branch of the Rees family on the Gower. I am handed a service book and ushered towards a choir stall. Numbers being down, there's no question of bothering with pews. She joins me and two other ladies of identical size and vintage, one of whom takes her place just behind us at the organ. Being forty-four, I've brought the average age of the congregation plummeting into the sixties. They are tiny as only old Welsh ladies can be, all muffled into best coats, scarves and hats. I feel scruffy. And tall and English.

A surpliced vicar slides in from the vestry, his trimmed dome gently reflecting a low-watt gleam from overhead lights, his spectacles as thick as prayer cushions.

‘Croeso,' he says, and although he continues in Welsh it is clear that he has one of those C of E larynxes which give every utterance a squashy, benevolent sheen. He announces a hymn. My diminutive neighbour helps me to the right page as the organist toots the
intro. We embark, me uncertain of the tune, the ladies' soprano voices fluting but forthright, the Reverend's baritone loud and slightly metallic.

With the prayer book to guide us, we work our way through Holy Communion's ritual calls and responses. His face all but buried in the order of service, the vicar intones plangently. I am none too certain which bits of Welsh correspond with the English wording dimly recalled, but it's good pronunciation practice. The Welsh does seem blissfully formal and seductive. The Lord's Prayer has a poetic rhythm all its own. I'm especially seduced by a word that crops up often:
gogoniant
. How wonderfully Welsh it sounds. We sing again. This time even the ladies struggle a bit with an unfamiliar hymn and sternly from behind comes the instructive voice of the organist. I grasp at the lifeline. The sermon clocks in mercifully brief at perhaps eight minutes. And all of a sudden the moment comes. The Eucharist is being prepared. It'll look odd if I'm the one person out of four who stays behind. I never go up. I'm not confirmed. But hell, I'm going for total Welsh immersion here. Sod it, I'll go up. Why ever not? I go up and kneel, three little old ladies to my left now even littler on their knees at the altar rail, like chaffinches at a bird table. The vicar proceeds along the row, dispensing the body and blood of the Saviour. I make ready, look up in expectation.

‘Are you confirmed?' He's guessing it's best to ask in English. The voice is kindly. He practically adds the words ‘my child'. But there's no dodging the directness of the question.

‘Er, no.' Not even bloody christened, Father. I can feel my body twist in discomfort. Curses. I am being judged and found wanting. He touches my head and utters a blessing in Welsh. No bread and wine for this sinner. Smarting, I make less of an effort with the last hymn. A final benediction from the vicar and Holy Communion is over.

‘It's nice to see a new face.' As I'm leaving, the vicar proffers a friendly hand. ‘We're a bit light on numbers this evening,' he adds. ‘Some people are away.' I ask him how often he conducts services in Welsh. ‘Well, this is the problem,' he says. You can hear him fight to keep resignation out of his voice. ‘This is the furthest east that you'll find a Welsh-speaking congregation. Even in Llandudno there are very few. And of course the Welsh speakers are from the older generation.' What he means is the Anglicans are from the older generation. The young Welsh speakers don't go to church, or chapel. The language may be sprouting anew, but it cannot reseed belief in the Almighty.

‘Diolch am y croeso,' I say. Thank you for the welcome. It suddenly hits me that
croeso
and
croes
– the Welsh words for welcome and cross – must be etymological cousins. I remember something else.

‘Please could you tell me – what does
gogoniant
mean?'

‘Glory,' he says, and smiles.

Gerald of Wales, also known as Giraldus Cambrensis and Gerallt Gymro, was the Archdeacon of Brecon. He granted to posterity two books on Wales and Welshness:
The Journey Through Wales
and
The Description of Wales
. The first is the more substantial: Gerald sporadically worked on three editions across more than twenty years. It recounts a tour he undertook in 1188 with Baldwin of Exeter, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Their mission was to encourage as many Welshmen as possible to take the Cross – that is, to join Richard the Lionheart on what would become the Third Crusade. Begun in Hereford and completed in Chester, the journey lasted six weeks in spring, five of them spent in South Wales, only one north of the Dyfi river, which, Gerald remarked upon crossing it, marks the dividing line between the two halves
of Wales. The trip was, he reflected, ‘rather exhausting'. And no wonder. They may have stayed in all the best castles with Wales's principal nabobs, but Wales presented its usual array of obstacles: rain, rivers and mountains, all negotiated on horseback. On fording the quicksands of the Nedd, Gerald's packhorse ‘was almost sucked into the abyss', he recorded, and was retrieved by their servants, ‘who risked their lives in doing so, and not without some damage done to my books and baggage'.

And everywhere they stopped they had to put on a show. The journal tots up the sermons preached, the conversions made, by Baldwin and Gerald himself. The author rather vaunted his own homiletic powers. In Radnor we learn that the Archbishop's address ‘was explained to the Welsh by an interpreter'. There was no such requirement for the author in Haverfordwest. ‘Many found it odd and some, indeed, thought it little short of miraculous that when I, the Archdeacon, preached the word of God, speaking first in Latin and then in French, those who could not understand a word of either language were just as much moved to tears as the others, rushing forward in equal numbers to receive the sign of the Cross.'

Whence came Gerald's tendency to self-promote? He had half an eye on a long literary afterlife – correctly, as it turned out, as his portrait of medieval Wales has been a priceless handbook for students of the country down the centuries. ‘I hope to please generations yet unborn,' he explained. ‘Having won the right to eternal fame, one will always be praised and honoured.' But it's possible to read his productions as a form of job application. He was born in, it's thought, the mid 1140s. He was tall with bushy eyebrows and, though he said so himself, was ‘greatly distinguished by my handsome physique' as a young man. By 1188 he had already written
The Topography of Ireland
, ‘my own far from negligible work', which we find him frequently thrusting into the hands of the great and
good. He was appointed to the Archdeaconry of Brecon, where he affected to ‘pass my time in a sort of happy-go-lucky mediocrity'. In fact his burning desire was to claim for himself the see of St David's, and then to restore the archiepiscopal status it had lost, so he believed, in the Age of the Celtic Saints six centuries before. He turned down two sees in Ireland, and two more in Wales, in order to make himself available for the position he coveted.

He was an odd mixture. The Welshman in him was vehemently anti-Canterbury, but he was also an ardent keeper of the flame for Thomas à Becket, martyred when Gerald was in his mid twenties. Gerald seemed to take Becket's awkward-squad king-bothering as a template. He didn't baulk at criticising Henry II or pestering his son John. Welsh royalty also got it in the neck: the marriage of Rhys ap Gruffudd, Prince of South Wales, to his fourth cousin was, Gerald noted, ‘a regrettable circumstance which happens so often in this country'. When the see at St David's fell vacant in 1198, Gerald launched a five-year campaign to secure it for himself. The quest took him back and forth twice between Wales and Rome. His avowed intention to uncouple the Church in Wales made him naturally unattractive to Baldwin's successor in Canterbury, even when Gerald helpfully pointed out that the other candidates were variously illiterate, illegitimate and given to licentiousness. Gerald was summoned to Lambeth to hear the final verdict in 1203. When the bishopric went elsewhere, he promptly gave up his archdeaconry in Brecon and for the remaining twenty years of his life buried himself sulkily among his books.

In Welsh Level 1, Module 1, not everyone keeps the faith. This is a language that likes to administer a sharp slap to the chops, regularly. Sometimes you have to turn the other cheek. The grammar is impacted, the word orders higgledy-piggledy. But when push
comes to shove it's probably the verbs and the mutations, operating a classic pincer movement, which contrive to scare the bejesus out of some of our number. The class size starts to dwindle slightly. For some, anglicisation proves too big a back story. Their Englishness, forced upon them by forebears who once upon a time abandoned hills and valleys to seek employment over the border, runs too deep. It shows mostly in the pronunciation of boilerplate Welsh phrases. They get fed through a voicebox converter which spews out everything with inflections of glottalised estuary or flat-packed vowels from up the M1 or, in my case, privately educated BBC RP.

‘O ble dych chi'n dod?' With his marker pen James scrawls an anagram on the board, then pronounces it. The sound in
ble
and
dod
is notably elongated.

‘Where are you from?' he says. ‘In Welsh they say, “From where are you?”'

‘What's that apostrophe
n
thingie?' someone wants to know.

‘I was getting to that.' And James proceeds to explain the trickiness of the Welsh present tense. ‘“
Yn
” sort of means –“ing”,' he suggests. ‘So, for example, “dw i'n dod o Gaerdydd”. “I come from Cardiff.” Literally it's “do I-ing come from Cardiff.”'

I look around the room. Jaws are slack with dread. The terrified woman has upgraded her status to petrified. Only Alpha Pete has the jutting chin of someone who knows he could take a Welsh verb if it came to a fight. I've spotted something.

‘Erm.' Some turn to look at me, others not. ‘Isn't it Caerdydd?' My voice sounds pleased with itself in that English way.

‘Well, yes it is,' says James. ‘Except that after
o
, which means “from”, a
C
mutates to a
G
.' That explains a lot: a mutation in action, clearly and visibly.

‘So is that why the road sign after the Severn Bridge says “Croeso
i Gymru” and not “Cymru”?' I can feel the cold disapproval of the rest of the class. No one likes a smart alec.

‘Exactly,' says James.

I start to hear conflicting advice on the mutation system. For some it is indivisible from clarity of expression and correct usage. Others say you needn't bother. James tells us about one leading Welsh politician whose speeches are a randomly generated mutation vortex. The system plays merry hell with the universe as one knows it. Let's just take the soft mutations, said to be the easy ones but also much more frequent than the aspirate and nasal variety. Where required,
t
mutates to
d
,
d
to
dd
,
c
to
g
,
p
to
b
,
ll
to
l
. These are more or less manageable. You can keep them in your eyeline. I really struggle with
b
mutating to
f
, so that
byta
(food) or
brawd
(brother), say, or
byd
(world) and
bywyd
(life), will in certain circumstances transfigure into
fyta
and
frawd
,
fyd
and
fywyd
. These are important words. You need to recognise them when they crop up. Unmutated, you know where you are with them. Mutated, they could be anything.