A Writer's House in Wales (5 page)

Whenever I recall him at the roadside that day, looking silently into the trees as though the answer to all things was to be found among them, the memory gives me a sense of calm and liberation, as Wales itself does, when it is happy.

 

All these familiars of ours are very good people. They are also proud people, like my own paternal forebears. I don't think my father's pedigree can be traced very far back, but many of my neighbors' lines can. The family that now farms the Trefan lands has a recorded ancestry at least as old as Llywelyn the Last, and many others keep beneath the bed one of the majestic old Welsh genealogies, by which through long rosters of ab-Ifors, ap-Gwyns, ap-Gruffudds or ab-Owains they can watch their own seed developing down the centuries. They have been here for ever, they know just who they are, and this has given them a stately advantage in dealing with their various kinds of invader—it must be hard to patronize a Welshman so secure in his own land and history.

They are not always scrupulously stately in petty matters—they don't always turn up on time, they don't invariably finish a job (or even start it)—but they are good and proud at the heart of them. I know at least half a dozen families in Eifionydd to whom I would entrust my life: I know for absolute certain that if my family and I were ever in trouble, they would instantly be there to help us, and I hope that by setting us their high example, they have ensured that we would always be there to help them, too. Whatever I have done at Trefan Morys, however outrageously I have behaved, however notoriety has nagged at me, I have never lost a friend. Gerallt Gymro, Geraldus the Welshman, a famous Welsh-Norman chronicler of the twelfth century, wrote that there were no better men than the best of the Welsh, and no worse men than the worst. It is still true, I think, but fortunately I have little to do with the bad ones.

With such people to frequent it, and such neighbors all around, Trefan Morys remains ineluctably Welsh. It may be in rearguard, but it is by no means alone. You might not think it in the towns and tourist areas of Wales, where Anglicization is rampant and you hardly hear a word of the Welsh language from one month to another, but up many a lane like ours, in countless muddy pasturelands, houses like mine are still bucking the odds. How could it be otherwise here? Come to the door for a moment—for God's sake, Ibsen, get out of the way—here, look. Those mountains behind the trees, across the river, are called Yr Eifl, transmuted by the English long ago into The Rivals: up there some stone age people built themselves a village—come here a bit, you can see where it was—that bump on the ridge there, that's Tre'r Ceiri, the Town of Giants. And over the trees the other way is the mass of Eryri, the very heartland of Welshness. In one of those ridges Owain Glyndŵr lies sleeping with his hand on his sword; if the clouds were clear you could see the summit of Yr Wyddfa itself, the legendary Snowdon, for centuries as mystic and inaccessible to the people of these parts as Everest was to the Sherpas around its feet. And out at sea, which is only a mile or two away, are the five strange rock ridges known to legend as the Sarnau, the Causeways, relics of a lost Atlantean province which once connected Wales with Ireland—fabulous highways of the ocean where once the warrior-princes rode, with horses caparisoned in gold and women of great beauty.

The very matter of Wales is all around us, for us to see and feel and dream about. And we haven't even left the kitchen!

 

Actually most visitors, when they enter the kitchen of my house, think that's the whole of it. It looks much like the living room of any Welsh cottage of Victorian times, except perhaps for a few incongruous objects (an electric toaster, an outboard motor clamped to the arm of a wooden settle) and a few anomalous absences (no framed texts from the Book of Ecclesiastes or portraits of Mr. Gladstone). There is a grandfather clock, a row of gum boots on wooden pegs, a fishing rod on hooks, a clump of walking sticks, colorful plates on the dresser and a kettle steaming on the stove.

In a way it
is
the whole of the house, too, because it is the core or nucleus of its living accommodation. The door that looks like a cupboard door, over there beside the stick-stand, actually leads into Elizabeth's bedroom and shower room. The iron spiral staircase across the room, with a pebble from the nearest beach jammed below to keep it standing, leads to a landing upstairs, and thence to my bedroom and bathroom. Do you recall those apartment schemes of the 1960s, which were built of separate, self-contained and removable modules? This part of Trefan Morys is such a module. It is not separate and it is certainly not removable, but it is self-contained. I like to think of it as a sort of little hotel, into which I can fall whenever I return exhausted from some journey: hot water is ready for a bath, food is in the freezer, the cooker only needs turning on, there's a telephone on the wall for me to tell everybody I'm home, the mail is on the table, a comfortable bed awaits me upstairs and all life's intrusions can wait until tomorrow, out of sight and out of mind somewhere in the rest of the house.

Mutatis mutandis, the Welsh cottage offered the same welcoming comforts to the shepherd coming off the mountain. He may have been offered only a bowl of sgotyn, and he had to boil a caldron for his bath, but I'm sure he felt more or less as I always do, when I open that blue stable door, feel the warmth and the fragrances, look forward to the ham-and-eggs of our kitchen—oh, and find upon the table the mail left there by the postman, as he has left it for years and years. For half the pleasure of a house like mine, in a place like ours, is its sense of intimacy with the community around. Life may be getting more impersonal in most parts of the world, but still Bob the postman walks freely into our kitchen to leave my letters on the table, stopping for a chat if there is anyone around, and not turning a hair when, a year or two ago, I happened to be walking down the stairs stark naked just as he opened the stable door. In this Welsh society all are friends, or alternatively enemies—there is still little of that frigid restraint which so often marks the social relationships of the English.

I try not to believe in race, only in the effects of history and environment, but sometimes I cannot help feeling that the age-old strain of the Celts, the original Welsh, is still apparent here. Certainly Welsh people are still proud to be thought of as Celts—it differentiates them from the English—and the pageantry of the National Eisteddfod is deliberately, if imaginatively, modeled upon the supposed rituals of the Druids. Celts are always said to have been convoluted people, volatile, enthusiastic but easily discouraged, expressing themselves in art forms that were full of circles, knots and peculiar circles, and today our people are undeniably fluid and flexible too. They are careless about names, sometimes spelling them one way, sometimes another—two of my own children spell themselves Morys, the other two Morris, and I forget which way my grandchildren have gone. Time is scarcely an exact science among my neighbors. Their reportage can be unreliable. As a shrewd American once wrote, if truth elsewhere is more or less like a straight line, among the Welsh it is “more in the nature of a circle”: to my way of thinking, for I have sufficient Celt in me too, only another way of saying that imagination is as real as reality.

For one of my temperament all this makes life agreeably sinuous and slippery. Occasionally indeed it can be so laid back as to be maddening. The mail may be a bit late because the postman has stopped off for a cup of tea up the lane. Iwan and his family, whom we are expecting for drinks this evening, may not bother to turn up because Megan has homework to do, or alternatively may cheerfully arrive half an hour early. Sweet Blodwen, having assured us she would be here on Thursday morning for coffee, rings on Thursday afternoon to say she was so sorry to have had to go to Pwllheli for a hairdressing appointment. How many times have we telephoned dear Mr. Edwards to come and cure the leak in Elizabeth's ceiling? What a relief it would have been if Mr. Roberts the plumber had put the taps on consistently, so that we could be quite sure that hot water was going to emerge from the left-hand tap, cold water from the right. Do you see that wooden corner cupboard? Wil the carpenter made that for us ten years ago. Although I often meet him in the street he still hasn't bothered to send the bill, but a Christmas or two ago he did send us a framed poem imagining how much happier the world would be if it were inhabited entirely by friends.

O, the charms are well worth the annoyances! Who would not rather deal with a friend than a tradesman? Wil knows for sure that when he does get around to giving me a bill, he will be paid in cash so as not to trouble the Inland Revenue, and however delayed the postman is with the morning mail, his merry eruption through the door in his bright red-and-yellow raincoat, with his inevitable caustic quip about weather forecasts or the state of the world economy, is a true shot in the arm. Cymru stands for comradeship, and in such a Welsh rural company as ours a sense of the comradely is certainly inescapable. When, thirty years ago, I did the unimaginable and went through what is vulgarly known as a change of sex, the Wils, the Mr. Owens, the Blodwens, the mailman and the family up the lane took it all easily in their stride, and from that day to this have kindly pretended that nothing ever happened.

 

We live in intimacy with animals, too. As a matter of fact the ultimate Welsh animal, albeit a chimerical one, began his career not far from Trefan Morys. Today the red dragon is the national symbol of Wales, ubiquitous, unmistakable, emblazoned on our flag and exploited in a thousand guises—on bumper stickers, on advertising posters, on beer mats, on mugs, blown up as children's balloons or molded into souvenir door knockers. Rapscallions dress up as the red dragon at rugby matches. The red dragon is as essential to comic strips as he is to political cartoons.

He first emerged from the earth, though, up the road from here. The prince Gwrtheyrn decided to build himself a new capital in the mountains, but no sooner had his men started work than they found all their building materials miraculously disappearing. Time and again they tried, and time again the stones vanished. Merlin the magician was called in, and on his advice they dug a hole in the ground beneath. Lo, there beside a pool they found two dragons fighting—one white, one red. The white dragon was Saxon, the magician told them, the red dragon was Welsh, and they would always be fighting there until the red dragon was triumphant. In the meantime Gwrtheyrn must build his city somewhere else. So it is that to this day there is no house upon that spot, and so it is that in one window of Trefan Morys, facing the lane, a wooden red dragon raises a claw and sticks out a forked tongue (although according to one of the recondite Triads, medieval Welsh mantras, he should be one of the Three Things One Does Well To Hide).

Welsh lore and poetical vision is full of creature images—the symbolical crow, the celestial nightingale, the sinewy salmon, birds as love-messengers, dogs that emerge from hell, glorious horses, canny foxes, goats as military mascots, omniscient owls and inscrutable toads. They were the symptoms of a people's profound affinity with the land—a people remote from the affairs of the greater world, but close to their neighbors the birds and beasts. Most nations have their nature poets, of course, who see heaven in a wildflower, but in Wales this preoccupation with the animal kingdom has had to it a kind of poignancy, because so often it has been the reflection of national impotence. Only the wild creatures, it seems to say, are on our side in our endless struggle to be ourselves, only the swallow can be trusted to carry our messages, or the owl to advise us justly. The birds and the animals became, in their allusive way, images of patriotism, and here at Trefan Morys I am always proud to have them about.

Actually we could hardly
not
have them about. In the countrysides of Wales there is scarcely a prospect, wild or tame, that does not contain its quota of beasts, from the millions of sheep in the hillsides to the cattle in the lowland fields and the black-and-white dogs which come out barking, in greeting or in threat, at almost every farm you pass. Generally speaking animals have been favored in this country, too, at least since the last wolf was eliminated in the 1600s. Among the valleys of the south you still occasionally see aged pit-ponies, long since retired from their drear underground careers, cherished as family friends. In the old days mining families habitually kept a pig in the backyard, and genuine was the mourning when, slaughtered at the last, they were turned into chops and bacon. The dreadful foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 drastically reduced the number of sheep in Wales, at least temporarily, but here in Eifionydd it passed us by. Sheep and cattle still surround Trefan Morys, and the dogs from the farm (Mot and Nel) often make a brief diversion into our yard, panting and broadly smiling, as they drive cattle up the lane.

And there is always Ibsen. We have had many cats at Trefan Morys down the years, their demises always causing me temporary heartbreak. We had a string of beautiful Abyssinians, until their increasing inbreeding seemed to make them insufficiently resilient for the rural life: Theo, Menelik, Solomon, Prester John, all named after historical or legendary emperors of Ethiopian tradition. We had a couple of fine Maine coon cats, Jenks I and Jenks II, named after the original Maine coon pedigree animal, Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines. But we have never had a cat so suited to the place as Ibsen the
skögcatt
from Norway, the present incumbent. Do you know these animals? They strike me as hybrids between wild and tame, between truth and fable. They are big, tough and rather raggety, and in Norway they are traditionally supposed to be descended from the giant cats of the forest which used to pull Freya, goddess of love, in her chariot. For ages they were the prime farm cats of Norway, much prized for their hunting abilities, but in the twentieth century they became almost extinct, and were rescued from oblivion only by a few devoted enthusiasts.