Bred of Heaven (28 page)

‘Does dim cig oen eto,' I call. There's no lamb yet. His eyebrows wander upwards in surprise as he wrestles her to the floor and thrusts a forearm into her cervix. He delves around and then stops.

‘Mae e wedi marw,' he says. It's dead. He yanks out a thin sliver of lifeless flesh, mauve with decomposition. Great. My first role as a Welsh farmer is to be a harbinger of death. I ask Dewi when it would have died. He thinks a few days ago. And what, I ask, would have happened if he hadn't pulled it out?

‘Basai'r mam wedi marw hefyd.' The mother would have died too. Lucky she was in the yard then, near a helping hand. Except it wasn't luck. Of the hundreds of ewes dotting the fields that slope up and away from the farmyard, this was one of the few brought in specifically for close observation. There's only one person here who doesn't know what he's doing.

‘You?' people say. ‘Working on a sheep farm?' I admit it: the weeklong rural element of Project Wales is the biggest category
error, bigger even than mining or rugby. I've been indoors all my working life. But no one turns himself into a Welshman without disappearing into the hills and experiencing the Welshest thing of all.

I read about Dewi's father in the
Western Mail
. ‘Hedd Pugh takes home another prize as the Welsh Rural Community Champion,' announced the headline. The Royal Welsh, the annual agricultural show, was on at the time, in its regular week in July on its regular patch in the eastern midlands of Wales, near Builth Wells, timed as ever to coincide with an Old Testament deluge. ‘Hedd and his family,' ran the report, ‘farm 1,600 acres rising from 500ft to 2,900ft in a stunning location at Blaencywarch, Dinas Mawddwy, with 1,200 sheep and a small herd of suckler cows, but he still finds time to play an active role in 24 local and regional organisations.' He sounded like the kind of Welsh hill farmer who might be just about broadminded enough to welcome an urban dweller from the
mwg mawr
(= big smoke). I decided to write – in English (in case he didn't speak Welsh). I mentioned my language studies (in case he did).

A few weeks later my mobile throbbed in my pocket.

‘Could I speak to Mr Rees?'

I couldn't quite place the accent.

‘My name is Hedd Pugh. So you'd like to work on a Welsh hill farm?' He thought the lambing season would be the best time for it.

‘I was wondering if there'd be an opportunity to practise my Welsh now and then.'

‘On the farm,' he replied, ‘we speak nothing but Welsh.'

The dead lamb has been consigned to a plastic sack and dumped by the roadside for later collection when a stout blue Ford 4x4 pick-up rolls up the lane. Hedd gets out and strides over in
wellingtons. He is of medium height, with thick walls of unsheared greying hair, bright beady eyes and a stout beer gut.

‘Croeso i Flaencywarch,' he says. I shake his hand. ‘Ti wedi tynnu oen yn barod?' he says – have I already pulled out a lamb? – in a tone of voice of someone who wishes me to think he's impressed, though we both know it is a polite pretence. We lean on the gate and look at the ewe in the pen. Her surviving lamb has struggled to its feet and is nosing blindly around her undercarriage.

‘Mae'n chwilio am laeth,' says Hedd helpfully. It's looking for milk. My ears prick up.
Llaeth
is very much the test word for telling where you are in Wales. In North Wales they say
llefrith
. Linguistically therefore I must be in the south. To confirm my theory I suddenly think of a clever question to ask Hedd.

‘Hwrdd neu maharan?' Which word for ‘ram' do they use round these parts?

‘Hwrdd,' says Hedd. As I suspected. I am definitely among Hwntws. My people. We watch the lamb take its first glugs of mother's milk. The peace is broken by the roar of a fat, squat quad bike materialising along the lane. Off it steps a darker bantamweight version of both Hedd and Dewi. I'm introduced to Owain, Hedd's second son, who is twenty. (The youngest, Carwyn, is off training as a builder's apprentice in Machynlleth.) We get talking about foxes, possibly because Owain is wearing an Anglo-Saxon T-shirt which says ‘FUCK THE BAN'. At first I don't know what nameless peril they are talking about – for ‘fox' Hedd uses the Gog word
llwynog
whereas the one I know is
cadno
. Perhaps it makes sense to use an alien word for an enemy predator, I reflect. But as father and two sons talk I start to hear other sorts of Gogisms I first came across in Nant Gwrtheyrn – the different constructions and syntactical quirks which are the lingua franca up north. It seems I
am standing on some sort of linguistic fault line. We're just north of the Dyfi river, which Gerald of Wales described as the border between north and south. But there is a much more natural border straight ahead: the mountain wall. It's easy to imagine how vocabulary from the north struggled to filter down into Cwm Cywarch. Until NATO started flying over, not much will have made it past that forbidding barrier.

‘Merionithshire, or Merionydshire, lies west from Montgomeryshire,' recorded Daniel Defoe as he made his way into North Wales:

Defoe's tour of Wales was a catalogue of the country's bounty. Chepstow ‘furnishes great quantities of corn for exportation'. Brecknock-Mere, he reported, is said to be ‘two thirds water, and one third fish'. From the mountains of Radnorshire ‘they send yearly, great herds of black cattle to England'. He approved of the ‘very good, fertile, and rich soil' of the southern Welsh plain which helped supply Bristol ‘with butter in very great quantities'. The cattle-rich fields of Carmarthenshire impressed him, and Tenby was admired as ‘a great fishery for herring in its season'. The flourishing port at Milford Haven, a corner of Wales ‘so very pleasant, and fertile, and … so well cultivated, that 'tis called by distinction,
Little England, beyond Wales'. He made note of Montgomeryshire's stocky but highly prized horses. And then Defoe ran out of compliments to pay Wales.

A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
pre-dated the emergence of the genteel eighteenth-century traveller. Roads had scarcely improved since Gerald of Wales passed along them, and no one went to Wales without some present business to lure them. Published as a series of thirteen letters, the
Tour
saw the light of day in the mid 1720s towards the end of Defoe's life, by which time he had enjoyed an eventful career in commerce including bankruptcy and prison, worked as a government spy, composed a great deal of seditious journalism and invented the English novel.

The Penguin Classic edition runs to 679 pages including Defoe's own prefaces and appendices. Of those, his dispatch from Wales merited fourteen, part of a letter titled ‘The West and Wales'. The problem, simply, was the terrain. Defoe approved of Wales where its landscape aped England or, even better, its land supplied England. ‘Mountains of antiquity … are not the subject of my enquiry,' he sniffed soon after entering the Principality, but he found them hard to ignore. He and his travelling companion had barely entered the Black Mountains when ‘we began to repent our curiosity, as not having met with any thing worth the trouble; and a country looking so full of horror, that we thought to have given over the enterprise, and have left Wales out of our circuit'. Travelling through Brecknockshire, he reported that the English ‘jestingly called it Breakneckshire'. The joke was lost on the creator of
Moll Flanders
. “ Tis mountainous to an extremity,' he complained, and you can hear in him the voice of all travellers who repent of their intrepid decision to seek out adventure. And this was before he traversed the south of the country, reached Pembrokeshire and turned north towards Mid Wales.

Pumlumon soon loomed out of the mist. He declared it probably the highest point in Wales. For twenty miles around it, all he could see was more mountains ‘so that for almost a whole week's travel, we seemed to be conversing with the upper regions'. Being ‘so tired with rocks and mountains' they headed inland, came into Montgomeryshire and fell with relief on the Severn Valley – ‘the only beauty of this country' – before turning back towards the west and the coast. ‘Here among innumerable summits, and rising peaks of nameless hills, we saw the famous Kader-Idricks.' And so the mountains of Wales towered higher and higher over Defoe until he came to ‘Caernarvonshire, where Snoden Hill is a monstrous height, and according to its name, had snow on the top in the beginning of June'. In the town of Caernarfon he approved of the castle built by Edward I ‘to curb and reduce the wild people of the mountains'. But Wales had curbed and reduced Defoe. From his hotel in Chester he concluded that ‘even Hannibal himself would have found it impossible to have marched his army over Snowden, or over the rocks of Merioneth and Montgomery shires'. And with that, he turned his face to England and the east with the relief of Robinson Crusoe being rescued from his desert island.

Anyone who clambers about their family tree will eventually come upon a forebear who worked on the land. They may be only a generation back, or maybe several. My great-grandparents Thomas and Eliza Rees were married in their twenties – she was four years his senior – in 1887 and in the same year took on a farm called Bwlch in the village of Meidrim in Carmarthenshire. It may have been to mark this occasion that one day they travelled into Carmarthen to have their portrait taken by a photographer. They pose in their smart Sunday best, a splendid bowler and cane for him, a white hat frothing with plumes for her. Thomas sits and
looks formally off to the right. Eliza stands, her left elbow leaning on a carved table, dark eyes fixed on the lens.

The following year their first son was born. After Bill came three more boys: Davy in 1890, Jim in 1892 and Harry in 1894. Edith, their only girl, was born in 1895. A gap of four years followed and then came four more boys: Percy in 1899, Bertram in 1901, Howell in 1903 and Robert in 1905. Soon after Bert's birth they moved to a farm called Corn Gafr – Goat Horn. Eight boys may have made for a lot of helping hands on a livestock farm, but Corn Gafr could not support them all. In 1911, Bill took passage for Australia and planted a citrus farm in New South Wales. The other older brothers volunteered when war was declared, and Bert had to withdraw from the local grammar school to work on the farm. Around this time, presumably through inexperience, he lost two fingers in a chaff-cutter. In 1915 he lost his mother.

The 1901 census records that they had three servants. In 1911 there was only a niece. The mother of nine may have succumbed at least in part to exhaustion when she died in her early fifties. Her youngest son, who would grow up to be my great-uncle Bob, was only ten. When in 1918 the older boys returned from the front and it presumably became apparent that they would not be coming back to the farm, Corn Gafr was advertised for sale. Six years later Thomas followed his wife to the grave.

The first four boys went into farming. Edith married a farmer. Percy was the first of the family to abandon the land as a way of life. He went up to London to train at St Bartholomew's Hospital as a doctor and in due course became an eminent psychiatrist. Bert and Howell trained at Guy's Hospital as dentists. Bob also went to Bart's and became an obstetrician. In each case their training was paid for by loans from their older brothers. Apart from Bert, they all practised in England.

After Bill's emigration to New South Wales, the nine siblings would not gather together again in one place for over forty years, when Bill returned with his wife for a visit in 1952. His absence did not prevent the oldest brother from being carefully added to a group photo featuring all nine, spruced and sprigged in morning dress, on the occasion of Bert's wedding in Carmarthen in 1927. In 1952 there were two family reunions, one in England, the other in Wales. At Edith's home near Winchester the nine siblings stood for a photograph with the nine spouses sitting in front of them. They also attended a service in Meidrim. They will have gathered at the foot of their parents' grave and remembered a hard but idyllic childhood on a farm over the hill before cars and telephones and internal plumbing. Perhaps they returned to Corn Gafr too, but I suspect not: the women look far too smart for stepping daintily through Welsh mud.

Six decades later, I ask for directions to Corn Gafr. An old woman who lives opposite the New Inn tells me to drive a mile or so up the hill then bear right up another hill. Wind blows high-speed clouds across Carmarthenshire. I turn west and suddenly through the window I see a low conical mountain prevailing over the landscape. It can only be Preseli, perhaps ten miles distant. What a view to grow up with. I drive on till I reach a modern concreted farmyard.

‘Keep going down that track,' says a farmer in his fifties. ‘There's not much there now, mind.'

A book called
Historic Carmarthenshire Homes and Their Families
records for how long there once was. A lease was granted ‘in the manor of Korn Gavor' to Thomas Griffith Ap Howell by the owner Thomas John Phillipps, gent., of Llanfihangel Abercywyn in 1587, the year before the Armada. In 1672 one resident was High Sheriff of the county, more than three centuries before my grandfather.

Corn Gafr, when I get there after half a mile, feels a long way from anywhere. I edge around a small herd of Welsh Blacks sprawled across the grass in anticipation of rain. The farmyard is surrounded on three sides by ruins. Holes gape where windows used to be, roofless rooms bid welcome to the heavens, and time has bitten chunks out of walls.