A Writer's House in Wales (4 page)

Wherever Welsh people have gone in the world, the image of the cup of tea has gone with them. Even now, in the days of universal junk food, Welsh women like to live up to their reputation. The Olde Welsh Tea Shoppe may have petered out but the old Welsh cup of tea, sweet and strong, is still universally on offer. When Wittgenstein the philosopher stayed in the house of a Welsh preacher the minister's wife urged her hospitality upon him with some diffidence—“Would you like a cup of tea, now, Dr. Wittgenstein? Would you like bread? Would you care for a nice piece of cake?” Sonorously from the next room came the voice of the clergyman himself: “Don't ask the gentleman!
Give!
” We have managed to honor these precepts at least to the extent that all around the kitchen hang pictures of Trefan painted or drawn by our visitors, and given to us in lieu of thank-you letters (or perhaps to mask hasty withdrawals).

Of course hospitality is only a façade of kindness, and I like to believe that kindness is built into my house. Hopkins thought the very smell of woodsmoke in a Welsh house was itself a sort of kindness, bringing sweetness to the souls of its inhabitants. I doubt if everybody who has lived in this house has had a sweet soul, and my own is frequently sour, but in principle I believe that, just as animal lovers are said to grow to look like their pets, so householders acquire some of the characteristics of their houses. The men who lived in our stable loft were charitable fellows, I am sure, good to each other, good to their animals, and if I ever feel evil tempers arising in me, I try to remember their example, passed down to me through the medium of the house we have shared.

Kindness can be a religion—what Christians call “charity,” greater than faith or hope—and this was holy country once. The name of the village, Llanystumdwy, means “a holy place on a bend of the water,” but there are suggestions that it refers to a river goddess of prehistory, or at least of Roman times. There are several holy wells around here too, beside which hermits of antiquity built their cells, offering cures to the sick, absolution to the repentant and, long after their deaths, bottled water to one of our neighbors who preferred the spring of St. Cybi to the taps of the Welsh Water Board. For centuries pilgrims passed this way on their journey to the sacred island of Enlli, Bardsey in English, where Merlin is supposed to be buried, and which we can almost see from our upstairs window. Enlli was so sanctified a place that in Roman Catholic times three pilgrimages there were declared the equal of a pilgrimage to Rome itself, and throughout the Middle Ages a stream of devotees passed this way to take boats to the island from along the coast. Perhaps now and then, until the Reformation put an end to it all, absentminded pilgrims with their staves and knapsacks strayed along our lane and were welcomed to beer and sgotyn by the fire.

It is certainly not long since the last of the carol singers came up from the village at Christmastime, to assemble sheepishly outside the kitchen door, sing their songs and file inside for refreshments around the table; and not much longer since children showed up at the New Year asking for pennies according to an immemorial privilege of theirs. The old customs are dying now, even here, but if we want a reminder of them we have a gramophone record in the house of old Welsh men from hereabouts singing unaccompanied
plygain
carols, ancient songs for Christmas morning. If I play it, close my eyes and hear their cracked old voices chanting polyphonically out of the past, I can imagine it is the stablemen singing upstairs, while their horses stir, chomp and paw the ground in their stalls below.

 

Anyway, Hopkins's cordial smell of the woodsmoke certainly permeates our kitchen, if only because the timbers of its roof have been breathing it since before the American Revolution. The substances of this house are profoundly organic. Most of the timbers that sustain it come from the Trefan woodlands, down to the river, and they are numbered still for the benefit of the haulers who dragged them up here with their teams of horses. A few, straighter and stouter than the rest, came from ships' timbers—ships wrecked, I dare say, on the seacoast a mile or two away. Wherever they came from, our beams have been matured in benign essences: sea salt, river vapor, the fragrance of damp leaves and summer suns, all marinated, so to speak, in age and hauled up here to my house to bless us all, like incense in a church. I love the woodiness of the house, which makes it feel alive, and I love the odd nails and wooden posts hammered into its beams down the generations, together with boardwood planks to strengthen sagging timbers, and odd chunks of wood to hold cracks together.

For that matter the big stone boulders of the house's walls always seem to me sentient, put together as they were with such care and skill in the days of old conviction. The men of Eifionydd are still at home with stone. They lift huge stone blocks with almost supernatural ease. They can match a stone with a gap, a gap with a stone, with an easy measuring glance. If there is one ancient craft that has survived here into modern times unimpaired, even enhanced, it is the art of dry-stone walling; old examples snake their ways over bare mountain moorlands, new ones are exhibited in mile after mile of elegant construction wherever a new highway needs a boundary wall.

Most of the Trefan Morys stones obviously came from the countryside around, which is rocky and littered with boulders, sometimes standing on end so that they look like holy megaliths. Some of them
are
holy megaliths, sacred down the aeons to the people who lived in these parts, and a bit sacred to me still. They can be eerie things—not far from here, in a churchyard wall, an ancient stone looks out across the gravestones with the chill inscription
Y garreg a lef o'r mur,
“the stone cries from the wall.” More often they seem to me to possess an inner warmness, as though there is a small sacred fire glowing somewhere in them, below the lichen that often clambers up their flanks: and when, in moments of particularly ridiculous emotion, I have thrown my arms around them and placed my cheek against their rough surfaces, I fancy a gentle scent issuing from them, rather like the smell of donkeys.

I don't often, of course, embrace the stones of my house, but still the jumbled mass of them, jammed together with infinite care so long ago, this way and that, big beside small, wedging each other, balancing each other, supporting each other—the whole assembly of them, piled one above the other up to the slates of the roof, often seems to me like a company of old friends. If ever one falls off, no matter, find another one and stick it in the gap. If that bulge in the corner does seem to have grown a little more noticeable during our years in the house, getting no help from our ill-advised buttress, well, we'll outlive it, and anyway it is the destiny of Welsh buildings simply to collapse at the last into exhausted piles of stone, attended by rotting beams—a thousand such derelict Trefan Moryses litter the mountain slopes and deserted valleys of this country.

Other stones undoubtedly came from the immemorial quarries in the mountains nearby. I like to suppose they brought some of the mountain strength and mystery with them, and especially some of the wistful beauty of Cwm Pennant, the Pennant valley, whose stone workings were the nearest. This valley, down which the Dwyfor river flows, emerges from the Eryri massif four or five miles from the house. It has inspired many poets in its time. I was once talking to our local roadman, in the days when there were such folk, and happened to mention that some of our stones must have come from the Cwm Pennant quarries. At once he launched dreamily into the classic lyric of the valley, by the local poet Eifion Wyn:

So instinct are the materials of Trefan Morys with what the Arabs call
baraka
—the quality of both blessing and being blessed—that in my opinion a Rockefeller himself could not build a replica of it. Money could not buy the gifts of age, virtue and experience that imbue it, the allure of the Trefan woods, the cruel beauty of Cwm Pennant. Nor could any tycoon move the house stone by stone to some other place on earth, as Tudor mansions have been moved, and London Bridge: My house is so absolutely of its setting, is rooted so profoundly not just in the soil, but in the very idea of Wales, that anywhere else it would lose all charisma.

 

Mind you—here, another cup of tea—
Don't ask, give!!!
—mind you, I fear you are sitting in a rearguard outpost of Welshness. There are, of course, countless old houses in Wales, many far more magnificent than this, many far older, but they do not represent the future of Wales, or even its present. In theory most Welsh people would instinctively covet a jumbled old house deep in the country; in practice the vast majority of our citizenry, whether indigenous or incomer, would prefer a home more contemporary. Beams that breathe the flavors of the woods and sea, stones that glow with an inner warmth and smell like donkeys, cold slate floors, echoes of lost songs—romantic fancies perhaps, but obsolete. Even in this far corner of the country, where Welsh ways are still entrenched, and romantic fancies are not scoffed at, the Executive Home is arriving, central heating is a prerequisite of civilized living, and a modern bungalow is more in demand than a venerable cottage. The remote old farmsteads, up high mountain valleys, are abandoned one by one, and all too many young people run away to the towns.

I live, though, in a Wales of my own, a Wales in the mind, grand with high memories, poignant with melancholy. It is in that Wales, that imperishable Wales, that my house prospers. When, in the 1990s, I was elected to membership of the Welsh National Gorsedd of Bards, the highest literary award within the gift of Wales, and my proudest honor, inevitably I gave myself the bardic name of Jan Trefan. Fortunately close around us many another household shares my dream citizenship. Across the lane is Twm, who lives, thinks and breathes in the Welsh language, and writes his verse in the strict alliterative meters of classical Welsh poesy, and sprinkled through the neighboring countryside are neighbors, friends and colleagues whose roots and preferences run just as deep in Welsh tradition.

Poets have always abounded here—in 1568 an earlier Morris of Eifionydd, Morus Dwyfach, was acclaimed the best in Wales—and literature is still much respected. Down the road in Llanystumdwy the house where Lloyd George died is now a residential writing school, where eminent litterateurs come to teach, and brave enthusiasts to study the art of writing in both Welsh and English. In every issue of our Welsh-language country newspaper residents of farm and village contribute their poetry, often in the epigrammatical form called the
englyn,
or in other fiendishly complicated metrical and alliterative forms of traditional bardic verse. Eisteddfods, the traditional literary and musical festivals of Wales, flourish still in many country villages; when the peripatetic National Eisteddfod, the biggest of them all, is held in our part of Wales there is hardly a Welsh soul I know who doesn't take a day or two off to attend it.

So the culture fights on. I would guess that many of our guests at Trefan Morys, who often drop in just for a cup of tea, a beer and a chat, are virtually indistinguishable from callers at Plas Trefan many generations ago. Their language is the same, their tastes are the same, their humor is the same, and I think many of them probably look the same: shortish, broad, sturdy people, the women sometimes with wide-apart eyes and sweet expressions, the men sometimes prickly with beard, wearing old knockabout hats and rugged boots. They love to talk, and they love to sing too, especially when the beer is in them. Sometimes when Twm and his merry wife, Sioned, have musician friends in across the lane, we hear them singing and laughing to the harp, drum and piano almost until the dawn breaks.

If Rhys Goch Eryri was a respected guest at the old Plas Trefan, at Trefan Morys an honored visitor was R. S. Thomas, perhaps the greatest Welsh poet writing in English since George Herbert. He died a year or two ago in his own house a few miles away. I so loved his work that one of his poems, written out for me in his own hand, hangs over there, framed upon the kitchen wall and beginning to fade. Thomas wrote in English because it was his first language, but he was a passionate champion of Cymraeg, and believed more English settlement in our part of Wales would in the end eliminate its Welshness. So much that was good about Wales, he thought, had been corroded by Anglicization, and much that was harsh and vulgar substituted. He was another Old Man of Pencader!

English people often thought Thomas arrogant and curmudgeonly, but he was anything but racist, and I suspect at heart he regretted the circumstances that made him seem intolerant and boorish. He was really a very kind man. Like Zaccheus Hughes he was a priest of the Anglican church, but I think his true god was Nature itself, particularly as manifested in the life of the birds. Perhaps it was in disillusionment that he turned back to the elementals: the woods, the hills, the skylarks, the drifting sound of an old language, what he once called, in a moment of despondency, the bones of a dead culture. He was active in the patriotic cause almost until the day he died, and in my opinion his work is the greater for the sad tension that informs it—the sense of yearning for some nobler condition that is endemic among the Cymry Cymraeg.

I last set eyes on R. S. Thomas standing all alone beside our coastal road gazing silently into an adjacent wood, as though communing with the crows and blackbirds in its branches; tourists driving by, I noticed, stared at him without much interest, or perhaps with a giggle, for he was a strange figure there. When I got home I wrote a little poem about the encounter, and it turned out to be my own irreverent epitaph to a good man and a great poet: