A Writer's House in Wales (6 page)

By now Ibsen—ah, here he is now, boisterously shoving his way through the cat-flap in the stable door—by now Ibsen, the Nordic cat of sagas and snows, seems utterly organic to this Celtic environment. Ibsen, Ibsen, what have you brought us now? Not yet another half-eviscerated field mouse to deposit under the kitchen table! Ah well, better than a beheaded rabbit, I suppose, or a mangled mole, or half a slowworm, or the poor murdered chaffinch you brought us yesterday. The cat is only doing his immemorial duty, and the corpses he leaves for our inspection in various parts of the house are only testimony to his origins as an implacable hunter of the north.

Like almost everywhere else in the western world, the wildlife here has been decimated by modern farming. Pesticides and artificial fertilizers have done for the glowworms, the grass snakes, the hares and even the foxes, that only a few years ago abounded around Trefan Morys. Drainage more drastic than anything Zaccheus Hughes undertook has deprived the frogs and the newts of their homes. But our wild fauna is still rich, and some of it is reviving. Otters are back in the river, badgers are still in the woods, buzzards glide lordly in the sky, slowworms are in the compost heap, herons are poised above pools, doves gloomily coo, starlings and blackbirds infuriatingly imitate our telephone ringing.

The big stuffed bird that stands proudly over there in a glass case is itself a Te Deum for the recovery of a species. Twenty years ago the red kite, though common enough elsewhere in the world, was extinct in Britain but for a couple of nesting pairs in Wales. When Elizabeth came across a fairly decrepit stuffed specimen in a junk shop, she first checked to see if it had died of natural causes, and then brought it home to Trefan. We had it reverently restored, thinking it would be a sad memorial to a vanished species, but instead the red kite made an astonishing recovery, and today its great wheeling flight over the mountains is one of the grand sights of Wales. So the proud bird stands there preening its dead feathers, not as a memorial at all, but in celebration.

I respect all these creatures, dead or alive, real or fabulous, not just for their beauty, but for their immemorial allusions. I would never laugh at a toad under a paving stone because, as everyone knows, Welsh toads count your teeth while your mouth is open and you will lose them one by one. I revere the rooks roosting in the beech trees, because Brân the archetypal crow is fundamental to Welsh myth: it was the hero Brân the Blessed, bird transmuted into man, whose head was buried at the Tower of London near the beginning of time, and is today apotheosized into the Ravens of the Tower, and fed by Beefeaters. There is a local family who have claimed for some generations to have an insight into the language of the rooks, and have put some of it into writing. It seems to have some affinity with Welsh, but to the only example I possess (I have no idea what it means) there is a distinct suggestion of sorcery or even necromancy.

Only a fool would antagonize the Toad and the Rook!

 

Many an uninvited creature shares the house with us. There used to be barn owls in the stables, and very welcome lodgers they were. They preyed upon the pestilential mice which nibbled at the grain-store upstairs, and when Zaccheus built the house he cut a special round unglazed window, to facilitate their comings and goings. They were still here when we came to live in the building, and as I was sorry to have to evict them I had a little inscription cut on a window pane in their memory—
er cof am y tylluanod,
“in memory of the owls.” A ceramic owl over a door honors them too, and guests have sometimes left little clay owls, rather like votive offerings, and a couple of stuffed specimens are, so to speak, funerary memorials. Nowadays the owls live in the trees outside, and one of the fundamental sounds of Trefan Morys is the hooting, often in the daytime, which I sadly interpret to be the song of their homesickness.

The house itself is full of creature noises. Mice scrabble above the ceilings at dead of night. Squirrels slide down the roof. Bees have often swarmed in the walls, and their mighty communal buzz has penetrated our very thoughts. In the summer the odd bumblebee, poor old fellow, finds himself trapped in a cobweb in the corner of a window, and bellows his protest until I arrive to liberate him (murmuring, as Sterne's Uncle Toby once murmured to a bluebottle, “Why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.”). May bugs deafeningly appear out of nowhere late on June evenings, burbling incompetently around the lights. Robins and swallows sometimes fly noisily in, to Ibsen's criminal excitement.

Any old stone and wooden house like ours, slightly damp, full of crannies, is bound to shelter many little creatures. Somebody estimated, in the 1950s, that a larger half-timbered house in England might shelter a couple of mice, 200 spiders, twenty wood-boring beetles, eighty fleas, twenty clothes moths, ten cockroaches and a hundred flies. We can probably match that, with rather more mice, rather fewer fleas, lots of wood lice and infinitely more bats. Bats are protected, and the little species we have, mostly pipistrelles, are generally supposed to be sweet and harmless. So they are, perhaps, if you just see them flitting delightfully about in the dusk, on your holiday visit to the countryside, or skimming so agilely over the surface of the river. If you actually share a house with them, they are less endearing.

Our bat population varies. I have known ninety pipistrelles to swoop out of their holes above the kitchen door when evening comes. I have counted forty-six whizzing and flitting around the upstairs rooms. They can be exciting to watch, but they are no fun as co-inhabitants. I have to cover my bedroom windows with wire mesh, to prevent them coming in, and after their winter hibernation they can leave an all too pungent smell of excrement behind. Often I have been tempted to exterminate them, law or no law, but as yet I have only gone so far as to make Trefan Morys temporarily a bat-free zone by banging on ceilings, slamming on floors, and playing loud hi-fi music close to bat haunts. “This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me,” quoth Uncle Toby to his fly, but even he, the kindest soul in literature, might sometimes have thought differently about bats.

 

Of course the language of all these creatures is Welsh, and if ghosts talk here they certainly speak in
yr hen iaith,
rather than in the “thin language,” which is how Welsh-speakers characterize the English tongue. For those who love languages Welsh is a thing of majesty, so nobly defying the worst that history can do to silence it. Is it a practical survival? Perhaps not. Is it strictly necessary, when every Welsh citizen speaks English anyway? No. But it is something beautiful in itself, like the rarest of animals, or a priceless and irreplaceable work of art. It has sometimes been used as a code, being incomprehensible to almost everyone outside Wales, and sometimes as a secret language—English people habitually suppose that when they enter a Welsh pub and hear it spoken, it has been at that moment switched on to annoy them (“the minute we walked in they started their jabbering…”). Its great virtues, though, are not obscurant. It is a difficult language to learn, because so many of its words are not related to more familiar roots, and because it goes in for mutations, the altering of letters according to gender, or what comes before: But its grammar is mostly straightforward, and its pro nunciation is entirely logical. And far from being a jabber, it is a poetical language par excellence, as lovely to listen to as it is to read—and as irresistible too, at least to romantics like me, in its intimations of defiance, rootedness and immemorial age.

Welsh still drifts and reverberates around this kitchen, the natural heart of the house. To most of our neighbors Welsh is the first language of life, and there is more to a language than mere words. Conceptions, nuances, allusions and communal memories charge different vocabularies in different ways, so that a horse, say, when summoned into the imagination in the English language, gallops away in one motion, one light, and a
ceffyl
in Welsh prances off in quite another. I can remember people here who could not speak English at all: Now everybody is bilingual, but a marvelous transformation overcomes the Parrys, the Williamses, the Owens and the Robertses when they switch from
yr iaith fain
to
yr hen iaith.

Instantly they are vitalized, and conversations which have been lumpish or prosaic are charged with humor and quick intelligence. It is as though the ancient genius of the country, cherished by the poets and scholars of other ages, but half-stifled during the centuries of English domination, is suddenly rejuvenated and brought into the light again. Merry evenings were undoubtedly enjoyed around the tables of Trefan Morys, when the farm lads lived here long ago, and merry evenings still come easily now. My own Welsh is too simple to tap the depths of this half-hidden folk-brilliance, but when Twm comes over with his Sioned, and a handful of friends sit where you are sitting, with liquor to keep them in form, Rhys Goch Eryri himself would still feel at home.

One of the hottest of all Welsh patriots, the nineteenth century Lady Llanover of Gwent, allowed not a word of English to be spoken in her kitchen. Although her husband Benjamin was an absolute Englishman—as Commissioner of Works in London he gave his name to Big Ben the clock—she dressed her servants in Old Welsh Costumes of her own design, employed domestic harpers and stuck over her doorway some lines which she had allegedly translated from the Old Welsh, but which I suspect she had composed herself:

Whoever wrote them, I like to think my kitchen subscribes to their sentiments (except perhaps the bit about the enemy—it does not invariably respond courteously to busybody officials, intrusive evangelists or abrasive ramblers, and I dare say Lady Llanover's kitchen didn't really, either). Certainly the room always offers me a welcome of the heart which I like to think reaches me out of its own generations of hospitable inhabitants, and for that matter out of Wales itself.

I agree with another earlier Morris of these parts, the seventeenth-century Iorwerth Morus, who was a cattle drover by trade, and spent much of his time away from home. This is what he wrote about returning to the kitchen at his own house, Hafod Lom:

I have always led a peripatetic life, too, half the time away from home, and no moments of it have been happier than those which bring me flying up that rubble-littered lane, ignoring a sudden rattle somewhere behind the steering wheel, to scrape perilously between the gates of Trefan Morys (it didn't matter with the dear old ones, which bore the scars of a thousand misjudgments), and stand once more before that dark blue stable door. If I can hear the vacuum cleaner going I ring the big bell, to give warning. If Ibsen comes to greet me I pause to flatter him. And then—well, you know the rest!

Another cup? Or do you feel like a malt whiskey? No? Then come and see the rest of the house.

If the kitchen complex represents the unchanging Welshness of Trefan Morys, bequeathed by history and sealed by its stones and vapors, the other part of the house represents my own contribution to its character—my patina, as it were. There is very little here that I have inherited, only a few books (Balzac, Walter Scott, W. W. Jacobs) and some pictures (mostly of Wales, by great-aunts). All the rest I have acquired myself, so that it represents my own tastes and interests, and adds a purely individual, mostly late twentieth-century layer to the palimpsest of the house.

This part of Trefan Morys, its work-module, consists of two rooms, each forty feet long, one above the other and connected by a wooden staircase. The downstairs room is entirely a library, lined with bookshelves wherever there is space. The upstairs is partly library too, but chiefly a living and writing room. Sofas, chairs and a divan are strewn about it, and a black Norwegian wood-burning stove stands in the middle, its chimney running up through the roof. A heavy wooden door, with a portentous if slightly rusted iron key, leads down that flight of stone steps to the yard outside.

Both rooms are crisscrossed with beams, and both have doors leading into the more domestic quarters of the house. The kitchen and the bedrooms of Trefan Morys, the living-module, speak of hospitality and tradition, but now we are in the workshop. Only I can really assess the true beauty of these rooms. Like red wines, they need warming. They need the caress of long affection to bring out their bouquet, and a cat to sit curled on the sofa there, woodsmoke and crackle from the stove and the self-indulgent, sensual satisfaction of knowing that here down the years, watched by that Chinese wicker goat on the table by the stairs, I have given my best to the writing of books.

Those books themselves, in all their editions and derivatives, fill a long bookcase along one wall, for me to gloat over. Nearby is a wooden armchair awarded as a prize at an Eisteddfod at Cefn-y-Waun. Visitors often ask me if I won it myself, and I am properly flattered, but it is really a backhanded sort of compliment, for as the carved letters on the chair clearly tell us, the prize was awarded in 1912.

 

English people often grumble that Wales is too narrow a place, too obsessed with its past and its problems. There is something to this petulant complaint. Perhaps some of my neighbors are a little inward-looking. It entertains me to observe how, entering my library, they so often ignore its several thousand books about other countries, other cultures, and make straight for the stacks about Wales! But then you probably think that my emotions about my house are just as obsessive. I do go on and on, you may well think, about the traditions of Welsh hospitality, the mystic power of the Welsh language, the fragrance o-

f Welsh woodsmoke, Ibsen the cat, sgotyn, owls and all that. “Why, you curse those poor bats, but you're secretly rather proud of having them!”

But the identity of Wales has been so threatened down the centuries, and it still has to fight so hard for its own survival, that it often comes to assume an almost paranoic importance among its patriots. Lady Llanover perhaps rather overdid it, in her day, when she devised her own traditional folk costumes for her domestic servants, and chose a dragon and a horned goat as supporters of her coat of arms, but she succeeded in maintaining Welsh traditions, Welsh culture, in a part of Wales particularly threatened by English ways. If the Welsh activists relaxed their enthusiasm for a moment, all might still be lost, and only the idea of Wales would remain to haunt imaginations for ever after.

Besides, this part of the country was for so long isolated from the wider world that knowledge of other peoples, other histories, was generally limited. A tremendous stir was created when a black slave-boy turned up here in the eighteenth century: Half the girls fell in love with him, his fiddle music was in great demand, he became an enthusiastic chapel-goer, married a Welsh wife and left behind him seven Afro-Welsh children, their own seed now disseminated, I do not doubt, among half of us. When in 1846 the London government decided to make a survey of public education in the country, they sent teams of piously monoglot English-speaking Educational Commissioners who reported (for example) that children not so far from Trefan thought that Eve was the mother of Jesus Christ and that Moses was married to the Virgin Mary. More disgracefully still, “only one out of the three best scholars,” reported the inspectors indignantly, “was able to find England on the map.” Some imps and urchins may have been pulling their legs, but it was certainly true that in those days most people here were very ignorant about the world beyond their own horizons, and had probably never set eyes on a foreigner in their lives.

I would guess that to those children the earnest commissioners themselves were almost like visitors from another planet, so utterly different must they have been from anybody they had met before, and correspondingly fascinating. Some years ago a cheerful pair of young homosexual men from London, one a hairdresser, one a teacher, came to live in a rented cottage in Eifionydd. Nobody had met people like them. They were probably the first openly gay couple ever to live in these parts, and they were a wow. Everybody was enthralled by them, everybody asked them in, everybody wanted their hair done by the one partner, or their opinions about the local schools confirmed by the other. It was a sadness for all, and a horrible shock, when AIDS caught up with them even here, and frightened mothers began closing their windows when they walked by, in case the germs came in…

Relatively few foreigners come to our district even now, the most common tourists being those indefatigable travelers, the Dutch, who find their way in ones and unobtrusive twos into every last valley. The most familiar aliens in recent years have been Bretons, who until a few years ago bicycled from village to village, farm to farm, selling their onions; we so welcomed visits from these well-weathered strangers, and so enjoyed drinking wine with them, that we never could resist buying strings of their onions, some of which used to hang for so long from the kitchen stairs that they became part of the room's décor, and decoratively sprouted.

There have also been, ever since the Second World War, a handsome company of Poles, now aging—soldiers and their families who declined to live in a Communist Poland when the war was over, but have lingered ever since, with pride and dignity, in a hutted camp of exile down the coast.

 

I am Anglo-Welsh myself—Welsh father, English mother. My first loyalty is always to Cymru, but like Giraldus before me I am proud of the best in both peoples, and I like to think that Trefan Morys, besides honoring those old Welsh criteria of the kitchen, represents too a wider empathy. That is why my weather vane lettering is in two languages, the one to represent the rootedness of the house and its symbolisms, the other to express my own dual horizons.

My two families, paternal and maternal, have in the past been very different. My father's family has been, so far as I know, living in Wales since the beginning of time, bred from peasant stock not so long ago, proud of itself and its simple style, and devoted down the generations to that seminal Welsh art, music. My mother's family on the other hand has prided itself upon its Norman origins, which brought its forebears, not so long after the Conquest, to their manor house in the Somerset Mendips—where their brass-plated tombs, with armor and swords and little dogs at their feet, look as remote from the idea of Welshness as the Conqueror himself.

Could any lines of descent be more disparate? The two families first came into contact at the time of the First World War, after several hundred years of occupying the same island of Britain, and their attitudes to that conflict perfectly reflect their two cultures. Both families suffered a terrible loss in that war, one by shellfire, one by gassing, but as their letters from the front reveal, they had made their sacrifices in very different spirits. My English uncle had gone to battle like a Rupert Brooke, and wrote proudly of it to his father—exalted by the honor of the challenge, head high, with a copy of
Tristram Shandy
in his jacket pocket when the fatal blow struck him. I found a letter from one of my paternal uncles to another, though, conscientiously advising his younger brother how best to find a cushy billet when he crossed over to France to be asphyxiated. Both were good men, I do not doubt, both were surely brave, but while one was proud to die for King, Flag and Empire, the other was chiefly concerned to see that all Morrises got safely home to Wales.

Some people would say these are racial characteristics—on the one side the Norman sense of splendor, on the other the Celtic sense of place. Wales is a great place for theories of race and nationality, because it has been for so long a place of rivalries between indigenes and incomers. Of course over the centuries the several strains mingled. The Normans often married Welsh beauties (preferably heiresses), and eventually crossbred with the Saxons to become the English, while the Welsh, for all their obduracy, so far betrayed their principles that there are probably few households in Wales today who do not have some English blood in their veins. The antipathies persist nevertheless, and they are often misrepresented as racial rivalries, when they are really cultural convictions.

As for nationality, another word that crops up whenever Welshness is discussed, it is of course purely artificial. It is ersatz. There is nothing organic to nationality. Lloyd George, the archetypal Welshman, was born in Manchester. You can play rugby for Wales if just one of your grandfathers happens to be born in this country. Nationality is decreed by a line drawn in a map, a chance confinement or a signature on a notary's paper. I have been what is generically called a Welsh nationalist for years, but only because I believe that political power is necessary to secure the cultural integrity of a people, not least a minority people; English critics still sneer at “Welsh Nats,” but in fact the chief Welsh political party makes no reference to nationality, let alone race, but is simply Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales.

But alas the Welsh, especially the Welsh-speaking Welsh, have acquired the reputation of being prickly chauvinists, self-obsessed and introspective. It is true that, like my paternal fighting uncles, they have chiefly wanted to get safely home to Wales, and I myself have suffered always from the debilitating weakness of homesickness. Welsh people have seldom been great emigrants, even at times of national hardship. There are few big Welsh settlements abroad, such as those by which the Scots and the Irish ensure that half the world is permanently unable to evade St. Patrick's Day or the skirling of the pipes. There is such a thing as a Professional Welshman, on the Scots and Irish model, but he seldom travels farther than London, where he can often be found in pubs pretending to be Dylan Thomas. Our contemporary international stars do not unduly belabor their Welshness. Unlike their English contemporaries, even now families of the Welsh bourgeoisie seldom buy themselves cottages in France, or second homes on the awful Costa del Sol.

Like me they have been too homesick, perhaps, to be successful expatriates, and although there have been several attempts to establish Little Wales on foreign strands, only two have really succeeded. One is now the French department of Brittany, but it began centuries ago as a settlement of people from southern Wales, searching out across the Channel a landscape and coastline not unlike their own, and taking with them a language that is to this day the nearest foreign thing to Cymraeg. The other Wales
outre-mer
comprises the Welsh villages and ranches of Argentinian Patagonia, where Welsh is a living language to this day, and where a Minister from our corner of Wales regularly goes to minister to its Baptist congregations. Now that everyone here understands English, Patagonia is the one place in the world where, unless you happen to know Spanish, you may find yourself
obliged
to converse in Cymraeg.

The Welsh have, however, been great wanderers, as against settlers. If you will come with me now, up the spiral staircase with the pebble at the bottom—don't be alarmed, it's perfectly steady—and into the upstairs living room, you will see through the end window Bae Aberteifi, Cardigan Bay, which is an inlet of the Irish Sea, which is a tributary of the Atlantic Ocean, which is an unobstructed highway to the whole world. It would be odd indeed if, living with such a prospect among the sheep and cattle of their shuttered mountains, the people of these parts did not sometimes feel footloose, or tempted to drop everything and see the planet for themselves. Our peninsula stood, after all, on one of the great sea routes of the ancient world, by which the missionaries of the Christian faith crisscrossed the Irish Sea in their wood-and-leather coracles carrying the word from Ireland to Wales to the European continent—evangelists who are remembered to this day as local saints, and honored with place-names.

Welsh sailors from these parts were the first Europeans to reach America. Everyone knows that! Prince Madog ap Owain Gwynedd got there first, in the year 1170, and never came back again—he was, in the words of one of the Triads, one of the Three Who Made a Total Disappearance From the Isle of Britain. You don't believe me? Well not so far from here there is an old sea jetty with a notice upon it, declaring without possibility of disagreement that “Prince Madog Sailed From Here To Mobile, Alabama”—and at Mobile, Alabama, there is a plaque on the waterfront to confirm that he got there. What, you're laughing? Haven't you heard of the Mandan Indians of the Missouri Valley, who were undoubtedly descended from Madog's brave crew? They were light-skinned people, they fished from coracles and they spoke a language recognizably Welsh—
cwm,
a valley in Welsh, was
koom
in Mandan,
prydferth,
beautiful, was
prydfa,
and the words for old, blue and big were identical in both tongues. Who could argue with all that?