Insufficiently Welsh (9 page)

Andrew's spoken Welsh was not great, he confessed. He understood more than he talked. Pembrokeshire has a line across its middle, guarded by castles. Below it is the Englishry, occupied and colonised by the Normans and Flemish, where the English language is traditionally spoken. In this part of North Pembrokeshire, however, Welsh is the first language. One of my problems with Macsen was that Macsen understood no English at all. The only commands that the very Welsh dog understood were Welsh ones. It was a portent.

–
FISHGUARD UPPERS
–

Hedydd lived on Strumble Head too. She called the Welsh language she spoke “the language of Heaven”. It was her first tongue. “When you want to make a programme about that you should come and see me again,” she said.

We were to meet on a bench in Lower Fishguard harbour. First we had to film the place.

There are two Fishguards: Upper and Lower. It is difficult to sort out which is the lovelier and which the more ruined by traffic. Many of the smaller Welsh towns have missed out on spanking new shopping centres and traffic calming schemes. Of course Welsh councils are councils and they long to catch up. They are only restricted from “modernising” by lack of funds. But instead of building new cul-de-sacs and “modern” bleak housing estates on the outskirts, they could save these wonderful places if they restored them and then completely sealed them off from cars (like modern housing estates). The refurbished centres could become close-quartered living areas.

Some hope. The little village of Lower Fishguard straddles the main road along the coast so closely that people have actually abandoned the houses on either side of it. If you turn away towards the sea though, and venture further from the road, you will find a long, tidal quay sitting quietly under high cliffs, and the best view of this sublime harbour is from Upper Fishguard, on the other side of the bay. Tudor and Chris and Gary had set up on one of the footpaths that snake along the far cliff and I tried to find them. “We're in front of the houses,” they told me on the radio.

“Which houses?'

“You take a right past the cinema and then right again.”

“OK. Let me sort this. We took a right by the deli, and I left the car in the car park down there. I thought you were along here.”

“I think we're probably somewhere above you.”

I thought so too, but an impenetrable wall of gorse and bracken blocked the way. I wasn't going back. And I certainly wasn't asking for directions. I was a late middle-aged man. I don't ask. And I wasn't clambering through the brambles. I could find them. Ten minutes later (a long time in television filming terms) and a flight of concrete steps I finally did.

“This is a great view of Lower Fishguard.”

“The view down there is even better.”

“We're higher.”

They were indeed, and now we were gazing down on the row of pretty fisherman's cottages and the quay and the cliff rising up on the other side. Few towns as underrated as Fishguard can boast such vistas. It was why it became a film star.

–
FILM FUN
–

John Huston's “Moby Dick” was filmed in Fishguard first, or some small part of it. Huston, living in Ireland at the time, was apparently unwilling to fly back to the States, and so chose Wales as a stand-in for Nantucket. (He also employed Ireland and a bit of Guinea as well.) New Bedford and the East Coast of America had become heavily industrialised so Huston sought a “port that hadn't changed materially for the last hundred years”.

Mind you, Nantucket is a flat, featureless, empty sandbank off New York while Fishguard is an ancient, cliff-bound rocky cove. Huston admitted later that, despite writing the screenplay, he had never “been able to read the damn book”. It might not have made much difference. Melville the author had never visited Nantucket, or Wales, for that matter. The film was “the most difficult picture I ever made” Huston said later. It was originally budgeted at $3 million but went over to around $4.5 million because of the expense of moving the production from Portugal to Ireland, then to Wales and then the Canaries. Whether much of the quay and the area featured in the epic film it is difficult to tell, but Gregory Peck definitely hung out in Fishguard. He entranced the local women with his beautiful dancing, so they say.

Fifteen years later, in 1971, Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton rolled into town to make the film of “Under Milk Wood”. The fictional name of the town was “Llareggub”, which spelled backwards reads “bugger all”. The director of “Under Milk Wood”, Andrew Sinclair, donated the rights for the 1972 movie “to the Welsh nation” with the hope of raising funds for cultural projects in Wales.

“Only Fools and Horses” star David Jason played a role in the film, and this time the locals were included too. Hedydd and her sister had the part of little sisters looking into a sweet shop window.

“I remember they gave me a tuppenny bit,” she said when I sat next to her on the bench on the quay.

I was older than Hedydd. “Was there a tuppeny bit?” I asked “I only recall a threepenny bit.” Decimalisation had ruined everything. It had certainly ruined me. Why was I being so pedantic? The whole thing was a fantasy, after all.

Hedydd vividly remembered waking up in the night, looking out of her bedroom window and seeing an actor riding a pig outside the pub. This was a dream sequence in the film. The whole visit ultimately remained a dream for the local community. The film people came in all their fashionable clothes, with their huge amounts of money and transformed the quayside, making shops where there were no shops, and building new extensions to the village where there was no village. Then they went.

There are no shops now, no pigs and only one pub. It seems inconceivable that Lower Fishguard has survived so simply. No gift shop, not even a café. No ice cream placards or tables and chairs on the dockside. It is a little miracle. Except for the rumble and screech of lorries descending to the minute bridge across the Gwaun and grinding up the cliff on the other side, Lower Fishguard is quiet.

Elizabeth Taylor never made it to Lower Fishguard. Rosie Probert (Taylor's character) recorded all her bits in a studio in West London. Richard Burton was entranced. “If this were in the Mediterranean,” he is reported to have said, “it would be the most successful holiday resort in the world.”

He planned to bring his yacht and his lovely bride back. He even boasted that he had the ideal vehicle for exploring the hills: a Mini Moke that lived aboard the boat. But he never came and Lower Fishguard never became famous. I was pleased. And I sensed that Hedydd was too.

–
COASTEERING MOOD
–

The cove at Lower Fishguard looks like an exposed harbour to me, but it doesn't get much swell, or so Hedydd told me. This is because of the great breakwater that stretches out from Goodwick on the other side of the wider bay to provide a deepwater quay for the Irish Ferry. It was originally built to take Atlantic liners. A few came, including the
Lusitania
, but then the war intervened and they stuck with Liverpool. During World War Two, two ships from the port (the
St David
and the
St Andrew
) were used to help rescue soldiers from Dunkirk.

Pembrokeshire is well supplied with shelter. Further down the coast, the deep inlet of Milford Haven is the fourth largest port in Britain in terms of overall tonnage, and the busiest of all for “oil products”, but most of the little harbours look frightening. To land Vikings, or to fend off a French invasion, or to carry off bricks from Porthgain, brave skippers had to point their ships straight at the cliffs of Pembrokeshire, and seek out the tiny coves and sea walls that would keep the crashing sea out of the harbour while they tied up for a tide that would leave them high and dry and praying for good weather to get them back out.

I sometimes run along a section of the coastal path near Strumble Head. My wife is convinced that I will slip and tumble to my death. What a way to go. The path squiggles past buttresses and overlooks sudden drops to the sea. I love the recurring incident, the hard stony beaches clad in grey pebbles and littered with wreckage worn smooth by the breakers, but I have only seen one side of the spectacle. “Coasteering” offered the other.

I wasn't looking forward to it. I am a former fatty. In gymnastics at school I had to cry in order to get off being forced to climb a rope. I have sailed a few boats and now I am constantly expected to leap or dangle or clamber for TV programmes. They want me to fall off, of course. The only thing that drives me on is that I have no intention of doing so.

Imagination is my enemy. I was imagining how cold that sea was going to be. I was imagining how agonising climbing about sharp rocks on my knees would be. On a grey day in September, I went to get kitted out. I was imagining how uncomfortable that kit would be.

“You can leave your clothes on the hook.”

Just the smell of the changing room depressed me.

“There's your wet suit.”

As I slurped and farted into the thing I got more and more self-pitying, tearing the cold rubber up over hairy calves and then trying to calm the folds of intractable tyre-like black gloop around my stomach. There is a long zip up the back with a big drawstring on it which I can never reach. God, I didn't even have the strength to pull that up.

I cheered up a bit when I saw what lift and separation the black stuff achieved. I felt smoothed out and positively svelte. It's a little bit fetishistic.

The instructor Jon came in. “You need to wear one of these,” he said. And he handed me a pair of Hawaii print beach shorts. “They cover your modesty.”

“What modesty?”

“St Davids is a conservative place.”

I looked down. I was a series of smooth planes in significant areas. There was no indication of anything untoward.

“But they are mostly to protect our wet suits.”

I put on the flower-bedecked Bermudans. And then I was naff again.

After the addition of a life jacket and silly helmet, we had to walk along a cliff to get to a path down to the ocean.

The camera doesn't like boats. Boats wobble too much. I knew the filming would be difficult. I started descending internally. Is it a Welsh trait, this moodiness? I might even equate it with the lie of the land. Always up or down, never flat. Perhaps it's not Welsh, it's just me. By the time we were ten minutes away from my autumnal immersion I had become sullen.

Rachel was there to instruct me. She regularly took people out doing this, even in February. I avoided her gaze.

“Are you looking forward to it?” she enquired chirpily.

“It's just a job,” I replied morosely.

Oh dear. Forgive me, Rachel. Yes, intolerable. Still, it made me feel better. And you are so very attractive.

We poised by the sea edge, perched on an outcrop. There weren't many big waves. Jon had predicted that, with the wind in the north, the swell under the cliff would be slight. He was right. The sun came out. The boat with the camera aboard chugged around the corner. It was a big, stable rib. Tudor was secure and happy with his platform. The cliffs were steep. It could motor close to the cliffs. There was no reason for the pictures to wobble unduly.

By the time we jumped in I was on the upward trend again. As soon as we had swum across to the next outcrop, I had forgotten my Hawaiian shorts. As we clambered up on a ledge, I had become friendly towards my helmet and life jacket. This was really extraordinarily jolly. We traversed cliff faces, plunged into the water, paddled a few more feet and found another rock to heave ourselves out on. The wet suit was warm. The climbing was playground stuff. The leaping took me back to Harlow Pool.

There was a disgusting object called a Lion's Mane jellyfish. I had to swim carefully around it, but I was interested to hear that, though excruciatingly painful to bump into inadvertently, it was a rarity. And the cliffs and stones were now revealing themselves in glorious close-up, as they never could from their summits.

We splashed across the bay to a monstrous pyramid of a rock, its granite pressed into level slabs of purple stone, and then lifted sideways, making a massive sculptural fist in the sea. This was like going rock-pooling when you were a kid, without a mother standing there telling you to be careful. This was a wild Welsh experience. This was great.

Perhaps I will become a hard tough guy sitting in the corner after all. In the meantime they hauled me out and landed me at St Non's Bay to wade ashore where St David the evangelist was reputedly born and baptised by St Elvis.

–
DING, DANG, DUNG
–

I had a moment or two to collect myself and then wandered up through the tiny bleak little cathedral city of St Davids and out into the drab bungalow suburbs.

I crossed a field of black cattle to join Sarah Beynon. She was taking me to inspect her latest research project. Arranged in a small corner of a paddock was a series of neatly spaced holes about six inches across. A wire net sat on top of the holes and on top of that sat a round cake of brown matter.

“I made them all myself,” Sarah said proudly. “They are dung cakes.”