A Writer's House in Wales (11 page)

For they are magical woods, and their tangle adds to their spell. The Green Man, son of Pan, half vegetable, half human, peers out at us from behind their trunks just as he peers through the carved foliage of church stalls and temple columns across Europe, and after dark especially, when owls hoot and there is a faint phosphorescent glimmer from the Dwyfor, the Trefan woods are like a stage setting—the woods of Windsor in Verdi's
Falstaff,
perhaps, or a wood near Athens in
A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Not so long ago, when the Welsh resistance to English rule was going through one of its bitterest and most dangerous phases, a young activist crept through Trefan woods on a dark night, and hid in one of Zaccheus Hughes's old pig-houses a stack of explosives, for use in blowing up dams. And one evening I was standing on the riverbank when two middle-age canoeists appeared through the dusk, navigating a way with difficulty among the rocks, small rapids and winding channels of the Dwyfor. I had never seen a canoe on the river before, and in the twilight those boat people seemed to me almost hallucinatory, strenuously and tremulously paddling there in their helmets and goggles. But if they seemed spectral to me, I dare say I seemed equally insubstantial to them: for as it happened the cat Ibsen had followed me through the woods, and so the two of us stood still and bolt upright on the river's edge, staring out across the water like a couple of woodland sprites ourselves.

These woods have bewitched many people. People really do claim to have seen fairies in them. Lloyd George loved them: When he was a boy he clambered through them to go fishing for eels; when he was one of the world's great men he brought his colleague Winston Churchill for a picnic in them; when he died he chose to be buried not in Westminster Abbey, but beneath a boulder half a mile downstream from Trefan. Remember that couple of beguiling gays, like visitors from another world, who created such excitement when they turned up here? When one of them was found to be HIV-positive, in the days before antidotes were discovered, he knew himself to be inevitably dying, and sometimes at dusk I used to come across him in the woods, silently sitting against a fallen tree at the water's edge, or listlessly throwing sticks for his dog to fetch. He reminded me then of a sadder scholar gypsy, there beneath the crippled oak, absorbing the consolation of the woods while the water with the wild fish in it rushed interminably by.

 

I like to think of Trefan woods as a haven for all wild and lonely creatures. In the days when I owned more of the Trefan lands I prevented badger hunters seeking out sets with their ruffianly terriers, and otter hunters from England sweeping their harsh way upstream. So far as I know, foxes have never been hunted with dogs here, and before intensive farming drove them out little hares boxed and jumped over the fields around. Pheasants still find it a convenient refuge from neighboring shooting country. Not long ago a solitary peacock came cockily up the lane, seeking pastures new.

But Pan is horned Pan, no dogmatic conservationist, and sometimes he goes fishing. He is a poacher. After dark I smell his home-rolled cigarettes, and see the faint glow of them on the riverbank, for night fishing is the thing here. The Dwyfor has its salmon, but at night the sea trout run up in the dark, battling their heroic way among the rocks to their spawning grounds in the mountains, and when they lie getting their breath back in one of the deep dark pools down there,
psst!
that's when Pan casts his worm or his spinner. Each pool on the river has its ancient Welsh name, marked on no official map, but passed down through the generations among local people, and marvelously romantic even in translation: the Pool of the Horses, the Boiling Pool, the Pool of the Great Stone, the Pool of the Big Hanging Bank or Noddlyn the Sheltering Pool, which perhaps means a pool where the salmon and sea trout can pause for a time to recuperate. Fishing rights from one bank belong to me, but so long as a poacher is a local man I never interfere, and the Great God certainly qualifies for exemption: That is why, when I sniff that pungent tobacco, and see that twinkle of light among the shrubberies, like one of the glowworms we used to have, I whisper a goodnight and walk on.

Until his death a few years ago our local doctor was a famous fisherman. There was a bit of Pan to him, too, and as he was everyone's friend, so all rivers were open to him. He had a stretch of river himself on a nearby stream, and there he had a telephone attached to a tree, in case patients urgently needed him. He was a salmon man, a dry-fly man, so he generally fished in the daytime: But sometimes I saw him down on our waters, in his waders, snatching half an hour of sport before taking a look at Mrs. Evans's varicose veins. He had left his car with his dog in it up on the lane, and there amid a neat variety of rods, nets, fly boxes and spare waders, his medical bag nestled too. His name was Prytherch, as Welsh a name as you could find, and I like to think he sometimes haunts our woodlands still.

Because of course there are ghosts around Trefan Morys—ghosts of uchelwyr, ghosts of farmhands, ghosts of poets, of poachers, of birds and wild beasts and cattle hauled from the mire. I often see figures walking down my back lane who are not there at all, like mirages, and who gradually resolve themselves into no more than shadows. The saddest tale of this place is the tale of that poor misused heiress whose removal opened the door, after eight centuries, to the presence of English people at Plas Trefan. Her downfall was her very Welshness, at a time when the England of Queen Victoria looked aghast at free-and-easy Welsh sexual customs. Jane's story is still remembered around here, and sometimes people see her pale wan face, weeping, at an upstairs window of the Plas. I wish I could persuade her to come down to the woods, for there she would always be welcome, and it is already inhabited by a blithe and not always very respectable gallimaufry of specters, with the goat-foot god as their majordomo.

One day I shall join them too. Elizabeth and I will end up on a little islet I possess in the river down there, beside Llyn Meirch, the Horses' Pool, close to the steep bank which has immemorially been called Gallt y Widdan, the Witch's Slope. For thirty years our gravestone, awaiting the day, has stood amidst the almost impenetrable muddle of boxes, papers, duplicate copies and long-discarded children's toys that is under the library stairs. It has a text on it that I have written myself, in Welsh and in English:

And if our ashes blow in the wayward wind beside the river, I am sure our spirits will often wander up to Trefan Morys itself, wishing whoever lives here after us, through every generation, happiness if they honor the house and its Welshness, ignominy if they don't.

A year or two ago I wrote another text for the house itself, again in Welsh and in English. This is what it says:

I commissioned a local sculptor to carve it in a slate plaque and place it on the wall of the building, on the lane side where every passerby could see it. So far, however, it has not materialized. He's a busy fellow, he took a bit of a holiday, he had to finish a job of work for Mrs. Owen, the weather's been so bad, Mair hasn't been too well—all in all he hasn't quite got around to it yet. You know how it is.

Of course we do, I tell him. No hurry. We can wait. At Trefan Morys we have all the time in the world—or out of it.

Welsh (Cymraeg to its speakers) is one of the Brythonic group of Celtic languages, the others being Breton and Cornish—related to, but not all that much like, Scottish and Irish Gaelic, and to the extinct Continental Celtic languages. All Celtic languages are descended from the same ancient Indo-European language that spawned most of the languages of Europe and southwestern Asia, including English, but more directly Welsh is descended from the ancient British tongue which was once spoken all over Britain. In written form it first appeared in the eighth century A.D., making it one of the oldest languages in Europe today.

Most foreigners find Welsh the very devil to learn, largely because it uses a phonetic device called mutation, under which the initial letters of words are often changed by gender, or by the last letter of the word that came before: For instance the Welsh word for “head” is “pen,” but “my head” is “fy mhen.” It has several letters, too, that are not in the English alphabet: “dd” which sounds like “th” in the English word “them,” “th” which sounds like “th” in “thin,” “ff” which is the English “f,” “ll” which is rather like the English “thl,” and “ch” as in Johann Sebastian. All this means that until you have mastered the alphabet, and learnt the complex rules of mutation, a dictionary can be maddeningly unhelpful.

On the other hand the pronunciation of Welsh is relatively straightforward. The Welsh “f” sounds like the English “v.” The letter “w,” a vowel in Welsh, is pronounced like the English “oo,” sometimes as in “look,” sometimes as in “loom.” The vowel “y” is sometimes like the “u” in “but,” but sometimes like the “i” in “slim.” The vowel “u” sounds more or less like “i.” They all sound a bit different anyway according to which part of the country you are in, but there is nothing so confusing as the irrational ambiguities of English.

After a precipitous decline in the number of native Welsh speakers during the first half of the twentieth century, the language has enjoyed somewhat of a revival in recent years. Today, about one-fifth of the population of Wales, 500,000 people or so, speak the mother tongue; but anyway the very existence of Welsh, still defiant after so many centuries of alien pressure, is a magic in itself, and those with ears to hear find in its very cadences, speaking to us directly from the remotest Celtic past, a beauty akin to the music of the spheres.

Oliver Sacks
on Oaxaca

Jamaica Kincaid
on Nepal

Robert Hughes
on Barcelona

A. M. Homes
on Los Angeles

W. S. Merwin
on Provence

William Kittredge
on the American Southwest

Susanna Moore
on Kauai

John Edgar Wideman
on Martinique

David Mamet
on Vermont

Francine Prose
on Sicily

Peter Carey
on northern Australia

Kathryn Harrison
on Santiago de Compostela

Anna Quindlen
on London

Howard Norman
on Nova Scotia

Barry Unsworth
on Crete

Geoffrey Wolff
on Maine

William Least Heat-Moon
on western Ireland

Paul Watkins
on Norway

Jon Lee Anderson
on Andalucia