Bred of Heaven (9 page)

A final benediction is said and the congregation rises. I am slightly wondering where to put myself when I see the minister bearing down on me.

‘Croeso!' he says, thrusting out a hand. ‘Towyn Jones.'

‘Diolch yn fawr!' (Thank you very much!) I reply. ‘Jasper Rees.' In these situations I am ever grateful for the Welsh surname.

‘Mae'n braf iawn gweld wyneb newydd,' he says. (It's very nice to see a new face.) I shuffle out into the aisle. People file past, some nodding at the newcomer. Towyn Jones ignores them. I explain, in English, that my Welsh is not quite up to proper conversation. But that my grandparents married in the chapel here in 1927.

‘Really?!' says Towyn Jones. ‘Would you like to have a look at the marriage register? I could show you the chapel.'

‘You mean this isn't it?'

‘Oh goodness me, no. This is the vestry. The chapel is under restoration.' I
thought
this room looked a bit small. I hang around as he bids farewell to his congregation. Then when the minister shows me through a door in the corner of the vestry I am greeted by a remarkable sight. The chapel is spectacularly vast. Much of it is under plastic sheets and tall windows have been darkened, but a huge four-square ground floor and gallery are both tightly packed with gated pews. I wander in. Around the sides are plaques raised in memory of departed ministers going back to the late eighteenth century. One refers to a man born in 1645 during the English Civil War. There is stained glass, including two very comely Italianate figurines in ogee-shaped rear windows.

The chapel built on this site by the Independents in 1726 was the first in Carmarthen. William Owen of Haverfordwest, who must have been immensely rich, spent £2,582 rebuilding it a century later. It has seating for a thousand. This is more like it. I can see my grandparents marrying here and not remotely filling it. But then whose wedding would?

‘I meant to ask,' Towyn Jones asks. ‘Who were your grandparents?' I tell him. ‘Bertram Rees the dentist?' he says. I nod. ‘Well I never.' He looks at me over his half-moons. ‘Well I never.'

I in turn ask Towyn how long he's been minister. He explains that he nearly went to art school until a charismatic man of the cloth in Newcastle Emlyn swayed him. ‘He gave the impression to any boy,' says Towyn, ‘that there was no honour on earth like being a minister. It might be OK being a prime minister, but being a minister you'd be a prince of the church.' He took over a rural ministry close to the Pembrokeshire border in 1964, and ten years
later the call was extended by Lammas Street. He has been there ever since.

I ask him what makes the Independents so independent. There's not much to split them from the Baptists beyond timing, Towyn explains. The Baptists allow believers to choose the moment of their baptising. The Independents are so called because they answer to no central authority, which sounds like Towyn to a tee. He is the jauntiest man of God I've ever met, a far cry from the image of the finger-wagging teetotaller steeped in the Nonconformist ways of denial and doom.

‘Religion isn't a big deal for me,' he says. ‘It's a way of life. It's natural. I can't imagine the point of living without it. I'm not particularly interested in theology. I know much more about folklore and art. But I do believe in the Resurrection.' And with that he disappears down some stairs and re-emerges brandishing a thin volume bound in dark-green leather.

I flick eagerly through the pages to 1927 and there, on 20 September, it records the wedding of Edward Bertram Rees, twenty-six years, bachelor and dental surgeon, to Dorothy Owen, twenty-five years, spinster. The document tells several life stories. Bert was the son of Thomas Rees (deceased), Dorothy the daughter of D. G. Owen. ‘Rank or Profession of Father' is listed in Bert's case as farmer, in Dorothy's as bank manager. Dorothy's only sister was her witness. Bert's was Percy Rees, one of his seven brothers.

The farming Reeses conformed. The banking Owens did not. They were Congregationalists or Independents (or Annibynwyr). So it was a mixed wedding in Lammas Street. The register says it was presided over by the minister John Dyfnallt Owen in the presence of B. Davies, vicar of St David's. Church was keeping an eye on chapel.

As Towyn and I stand in the room where this momentous
prequel to my own existence took place, I am struck by a question about religious procedure. I want to know why in his chapel I was allowed to take communion, when the Church in Wales in Conwy refused. ‘We welcome anybody no matter who he may be to take part in this communion,' Towyn says, ‘because this table is not ours: it belongs to Christ, so we are offering it in his name.' He looks at me, bow-tied and dapper, owlish specs glinting. ‘I wouldn't dream of refusing communion to anybody.'

‘Absolutely no talking,' whispers my uncle in the cloister as we line up for lunch. We've come straight from sext, a short dash through a few more psalms at 12.15, preceded by terce at 8.50. Teilo and I fill the gap by packing shortbread. The abbey sells the stuff as fast as it can bake, box and ferry it to its shop in Tenby. Shortbread packing is one of his monastic duties, along with sending the daily rainfall measurements off to the Met Office and working in the archives. They have wisely kept him from the kitchen. Brother Benedict, a wry, worldly monk from Middlesbrough who is the abbey's chef, wheels in a tall trolley of newly baked biscuits, still warm from the oven. There are sugared trays of them galore. Teilo points me to an immensely complex set of instructions he's produced in minuscule handwriting for anyone having to do the job in his stead. I take one look at it.

‘Just tell me what to do, Teilo.'

I stack. He packs. Our through-put is impressive. In forty minutes we've bagged and cellophaned thirty boxes, each containing a dozen biscuits. A new monastic record, I fancy. And meanwhile we talk – copiously.

A silent order strikes me as an odd choice for a man of many words. Teilo is very Welsh in that sense. When as a young man he first thought of walling himself up in here, he recalls that his
mother took to her bed for a fortnight and he thought better of it. In fact the Cistercians gave up on the life of unadulterated contemplation a while back. When Teilo first came here in 1954, no one uttered a word. The second Vatican Council in 1965 concentrated on updating the general life of the Catholic Church. ‘Religious orders were encouraged to consider their way of life and rules and practices,' he tells me as he grapples with a gizmo which fastens the shortbread into its cellophane wrapping, ‘and go back to the spirit of the founders and remove accretions. Silence,' he explains, ‘was a very positive value, but strict silence using sign language was deemed to be unnecessary.' The order considered a revision of its constitution across its 170 monasteries. ‘We had about twenty-five years to think about it,' Teilo adds. Eventually, in the early 1990s, the brothers of Caldey began to talk.

Still, there is no talking in the refectory. Unless it's by Father Daniel, who takes his lunch late so that he can read to the brothers as they eat. The choice of literature is not necessarily devotional. Today's is from a book about the Open University or the World Service or some such. Spoken into a microphone, Father Daniel's kindly Dutch voice booms across the long tall room via an over-amplified sound system. The other top monks are parked at a top table: Brother Luca, a short bald Italian from Port Talbot, and Brother Gildas, a tall and stupendously white-bearded figure. The rest of us sit along tables lining either wall of the refectory. I am sitting very much below the salt – below the psalt, if you will – beyond the last table leg of the last table.

A trolley enters from a door to the kitchen in the far corner, pushed by slow-strolling monks in sandals. The monks look well fed on this simple food: soup, cheese, bread, a rather splendid tortilla with salad. (In one or two cases, they look very well fed.) I go up to the trolley and take a hefty plateful. Father Daniel's lowland
vowels clang off the high walls. We masticate quietly. It's none next. More psalms. Terce, sext, none: the daylight hours codified in cod Latin. The contemplative life is entirely knackering, I think, as I get up and take my things through to the swing door. On the other side a bunch of beaming monks from this formerly silent order, their hands dipped in suds or wielding tea towels, are all yakking their heads off.

After lunch, none comes and goes. As does vespers, after which we embark on fifteen minutes of contemplation, of which I have been forewarned by my uncle. I sit and do not pray, though I attempt a sort of agnostic equivalent. The day-trippers flocking across the sound from Tenby have flocked off again to the mainland in a flotilla of vessels. As my Cistercian immersion draws to a close, the heavens have opened. Through tall narrow chapel windows rain splashes on full green leaves, drips insistently from a leaking gutter. It feels as if I have rifled through the entire Book of Psalms. Supper passes too. The Lord has been my shepherd and I have not wanted for quite a nice paella, a leftover from a feast day. And now compline, the final service of the livelong day. ‘Before the light of evening fades we pray, O Lord of all,' intones Brother Titus from The Hague, ‘that by your love we may be saved from ev'ry grievous fall.' I am a convert to monastic ritual, nodding to the altar without a second thought now. And it's become second nature to bow with every ‘Glory be to the Father' in – for the record – Psalms 4, 90 and 133. I feel quite embedded. The visiting priests have taken their slightly suffocating piety and nocturnal noise pollution back to the mainland. I am alone with the monks of the abbey on this holy island where Welshmen of yore once did much to establish Christianity in Britain.

We sing the Nunc Dimittis very, very slowly. The atmospherics are spot on: tonally calming, hypnotic, suffusing one's frantic
restless grasshopper mind with a sensation of great peace. The bell in the tower is clanged. Most of Wales, land of monasteries and chapels, no longer worships. It has journeyed from faith through doubt to disbelief. St Mary's in Conwy was empty but for me and three short elderly ladies. The Capel Yr Annibynwyr where my grandparents married has room for a thousand believers. Where are they now? ‘I wish one Sunday everyone would come at once,' Towyn says of his scattered flock. God is not in my life either, however much I may wander about Wales looking for Him. The last Rees who believes is Teilo, born and raised in Carmarthen, sent into England and now, after sixty years away, home again. It's an extreme form of repatriation. Tomorrow morning he will stand and wave on the quay. And I, the only passenger on the chugging boat, will wave back at a receding figure with cropped white hair, head hunched into bony shoulders, elderly and stooping but somehow miraculously rejuvenated at nearly eighty on this rock first occupied by saintly Welshmen fifteen centuries ago.

SWITCH ON LAMP
. Tighten helmet. Check belt with battery and self-rescuer. Enter hole in side of hill.

If you're looking for Welshness, sooner or later you will be heading underground. In this case, the way leads into an arched tunnel maybe fifteen feet wide. The left half of the space is taken up by a raised conveyor belt which thrums along at a fair lick, carrying grainy black lumps up towards the light. The earth underneath is rutted and uneven, here hard, there powdery.

‘Best keep your lamp on the floor,' says Brian as the gradient steepens and we start to plummet.

For one shift only, I am becoming a miner. OK, perhaps too self-aggrandising a claim. I am being shown into the clandestine underworld where that Welshest of activities has always taken place with nobody to watch: the mining of the coal which, once upon a time, powered the British Empire's trains and ships and industrial
furnaces. There were always other pits in the United Kingdom, other coalfields. But in the world's imagination, nowhere is as indissolubly associated with coal as the South Wales Valleys have been for two centuries.

Not that there are many mines left anywhere in Britain, of course. The national tally of big pits is currently down to seven. Wales has two of them and they sit on opposite sides of the A465 – the Heads of the Valleys Road – as it hastens through the Vale of Neath. Over the way is Aberpergwm. I've come to the Unity mine in Cwmgwrach.

The valley is one of the least populated in the South Wales coalfield, which stretches from Llanelli to Pontypool. Cwm Rhondda, just over the mountain, is known as the Long Street. But here are no terraced villages running for miles along a deep narrow gulley carved by a river. When George Borrow walked through the Vale of Neath on his way to Merthyr Tydfil, he noted the valley ‘soon became exceedingly beautiful; hills covered with woods on the tops were on either side of the dale'. Pleasing emblems of the local status quo included a passing pack of hunting hounds and, across the valley, ‘a very fit mansion for a Glamorganshire squire'. There was only one breach of the peace: ‘one of those detestable contrivances a railroad was on the farther side – along which trains were passing, rumbling and screaming.'

The railroad has gone. From the road, flanked on either side by mournful coniferous hills, you'd barely suspect that the embers of the old industry still burn.

I feel entirely fraudulent. I have never knowingly got my hands dirty in the course of work, let alone my face. I don't suppose they see many Jaspers at the coalface. Some Reeses, doubtless. There are no miners in my lineage that I'm aware of, though statistically it's likely that someone on my grandmother's side must once have
quarried slate in the north, or on my grandfather's dug for coal in the south.