During a televised fundraising drive, I accepted a dare to shave off all my hair if the listener pledges reached £275,000. They did, and I did – my mother was watching the TV, and dropped her bag of groceries when she saw me sitting there, long strands of curly hair dropping onto the floor beneath the electric razor.
The following day I sauntered into my boss’s office, bald head gleaming, wearing a leather motorcycle jacket. Well pleased with myself, I slumped into his armchair and put my boots up on his desk. He stared at me.
‘Your problem is that you’re too cool for school,’ he remarked. ‘What you need is a couple of kids and a mortgage. A few dings in your fender.’
But that didn’t happen – not for 10 long years. Ten years of hosting my own talk show with over a million listeners a night; 10 years of making myself tough enough to survive the high wire. All that pared me down to a wintry, sinewy set of muscles – I could argue, I could debate and I could entertain – but very little else.
I drove a convertible; I lived in an apartment with a wraparound view of San Francisco Bay, and hired a maid to clean it for me. I couldn’t boil an egg, or iron a shirt. It never occurred to me that I’d ever need to.
And then, one day, my boss called me into his office.
‘Be quick,’ I said. ‘I’m on the air in five minutes.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Your show’s just been cancelled.’
I walked out of his office in a daze. I felt cold and numb. But there was something else, too – a strange sense of relief. There weren’t a lot of career opportunities for a radio talk show host who’d already worked at the biggest station in the area, and whose major talent was making a million people angry, all at the same time. But I was strangely placid in the midst of my fear. Something would come for me – something would turn up. I just didn’t know what.
What turned up wasn’t a job, but a person. A British man on holiday in California. We fell abruptly in love, with the kind of thunderclap that you read about in books, and he took me and my four-year-old daughter back to England with him. We got married. We moved together to Wales. And after that, let’s just say things turned very dark.
Five years later, I packed a suitcase, walked out of his front door and drove away – jobless, homeless and friendless, with my two children sobbing in the back seat of the car.
I spent the next two years living in a stone cottage in this strange country, along with my kids, Joli and Benji. I got my water from a well and dried my laundry on a washing line. There were no neighbours in sight – just a lot of sheep that we could see through the big picture window. We marvelled at the tidy organization and social structure of the herd. It was better than a nature documentary.
‘Come back to California,’ my mother urged me every time we spoke on the phone. ‘Come home.’
I shook my head stubbornly during these conversations, even though she couldn’t see me.
‘I am home,’ I insisted. And somehow, even though things were lonely and difficult, it seemed true. Wales held me – it possessed a power over me that I couldn’t define. There was something for me in those misty hills; something that I couldn’t yet decipher or see, but it drew me and held me all the same.
This was a place with silver rivers running through it like arterial blood, where clouds of sheep drifted over distant hills and castles surged up in the middle of stony towns. This place where I was a stranger, where I didn’t speak the language, where the sky was always grey, where a sense of pure, cold wildness welled up like a spring in my footprints – I didn’t want to leave this place.
There was something elusive and shimmering here, just below the surface. The landscape seemed to me to be assembled with infinite tender significance. It meant something. The soft froth of the beeches and alders and wych elms; the grey-fingered hazel growing along the hedgerows, dividing the green velvet fields into chess squares; the white farmhouses with their definitive, storybook plumes of smoke – these things whispered secrets to me, things that I couldn’t quite hear.
I’d been plunged into a world as alien to me as one of Jaron Lanier’s virtual-reality environments. Here, the houses were made of stone, and the streets were only wide enough for one car. The butcher, the fruit and veg shop and the haberdashery closed at noon on Wednesday, and all day on Sunday.
There were no billboards, no advertisements, no plastic of any kind. Only endless mist, distant hills, ruined castles and cottages painted the colour of emeralds, heather and jonquils. Weathered old men wearing muddy Wellington boots and plaid flat caps – trailed by black-and-white sheep dogs – herded bleating lambs to market in the centre of town.
I lived alone with my children in this strange new world, and it began to feel as though I always would. My chances of meeting anyone seemed to be nil – all I ever did was the school run, and the grocery-store run. Everyone I met seemed already firmly knitted into existing family structures.
As a single woman and an American I was too noticeable to fit in, and too suspect to blend. In California, I might have ventured out solo or with girlfriends, but in traditional Wales, a decent single woman doesn’t go to the pub alone, and in any case, I wasn’t interested in a partner who frequented pubs all the time.
‘You should go online,’ a dear friend from California said, when calling to check up on me. ‘Have a look at one of those online dating services.’ He also suggested that I could make a bit of money from home by doing some writing for people who wanted to enhance their profile.
Why not? I thought. So, a little nervously, I fired up the computer and logged onto a dating website. What a hoot! Shopping for a partner suddenly seemed as easy as shopping for shoes. Type in the marital background and educational history you want, plus the height, weight and physical characteristics. Then decide on tattoos or no tattoos? Children or no children? Earning power? Religious background? The choices are endless.
The writing exercises required to fill out a profile were a revelation to me. What did I want in a partner? I’d never really stopped to think. I’d simply been yanked this way and that by my heart – which was impulsive and never particularly clever, as it turned out – and had followed wherever it led. Now I was getting my brain involved, for the first time. I sat down and made a list.
After my previous experiences, I knew that I wanted someone gentle. Someone kind. Someone who loved children and animals – someone with children of his own. I wanted someone capable and smart and funny – someone strong and humorous who wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty.
I entered my profile, worked out my wish list, wrote up my details, and before I’d even uploaded my picture, there was a ‘ping’ from an e-mail in my inbox. It was from a man named Rich who lived in a nearby town – a harp maker and woodworker with two children of his own.
We e-mailed back and forth a bit, and I mentioned idly that my daughter Joli had just been performing in the local eisteddfod, the Welsh competition for singing and poetry. ‘Da Iawn, Joli!’ (Well done, Joli!) came the enthusiastic reply. He asked loads of questions about the event.
I was taken aback; I was unaccustomed to having keen interest displayed in my children. I’d been a single mother for such a long time, used to sitting at school events looking straight ahead and trying not to shrink from my awareness of the solid, happy family units all around me.
Would I like to speak on the phone? Rich asked. Or would that make me uncomfortable? (Looking back, it makes me laugh – because even then, he knew what made me tick. Of course, I’m not scared to talk on the phone! Me? Scared? I picked up the phone straight away.)
And once I heard his voice, I was hooked. Rich has a deep, lazy voice and a pirate’s laugh. A passionate Welshman born and bred, his family come from a long line of Welsh kings, shipwreckers and smugglers.
After a few days, the question came – did I want to meet for lunch? I agreed. I drove past the café once, so nervous that I nearly kept driving. But I parked and went in. Rich was sitting
at a table facing the door. He looked up and smiled at me.
And that was that.
I was 41 years old before I really fell in love properly. And I had more baggage and miscellaneous life experience behind me than any one woman should really have. But I can tell you this – it was worth the wait.
Rich was tall and broad-shouldered, with woodworker’s hands and green eyes. We talked as if we’d always known each other. We talked until the lunch service was over – all the food had gone by the time we got round to ordering. They closed the café up around us.
He told me that his two teenage daughters lived with him, and that their mother had left the year before. I told him about my two children, then aged two and nine. We exchanged war stories about being single parents.
For our first proper date, he invited me and my children over to his place for a family dinner. As I knocked nervously on the door of the big, rambling old stone farmhouse, I admired the long sweeping view of the sea.
Rich’s daughters, Ceris and Elly, were both beautiful, sweet-faced and very slender, one blonde and one brunette. They were lovely with my little two, sweeping them into the lounge to play.
Rich proceeded to expertly dish up a delicious roast dinner. I watched him, impressed with the way he handled the heavy dishes and very gently moved one of the children out of the way to reach the stove. I’d forgotten what a man who is both strong and gentle looks like.
We had a wonderful time on that family first date. Next I invited Rich and his girls back to my little cottage for supper. I cooked roast chicken, which was just about the only thing I knew how to make at the time! Luckily for me, Rich’s eldest daughter Ceris adores chicken!
We made Easter eggs that day, blowing the insides out of the eggs, colouring them with wax and dyeing them with bright colours. We still have those Easter eggs, now carefully tucked inside one of the traditional Welsh wooden dressers that Rich made from a tree he cut down on his parent’s property.
We carried on in this way for some time. I’m not sure that Rich and I were ever really alone – we were nearly always surrounded by some combination of our four children. It was lovely.
Finally, Ceris and Elly texted me, asking if we – me, Joli and Benji – would move in with them and their dad.
I phoned Rich. ‘Did you put them up to this?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It was their idea. I think they liked the chicken you cooked.’
I talked it over with my children, and they were thrilled with the idea. We accepted. And so we all moved to the farm. I was thrilled, too. Not only had I – finally! – met and fallen in love with the man of my dreams, but it had also always been a dream of mine to live on a farm. It was a misty sort of dream, mind, one in which I wore floating Laura Ashley dresses and skipped down the hill in a wide-brimmed hat, carrying a shiny bucket and gathering flowers.
The reality, as I was about to discover, was very different.
The farm is a traditional Welsh smallholding, perched on top of a hill looking over the Irish Sea. On a clear day, so Rich’s father told me, you can see all the way to Ireland. This is South West Wales, however, so there have only been about two clear days in the past 15 years. (Wales specializes in fog, rain and the kind of floating mist that made it a model for J.R.R. Tolkien’s magical kingdoms.
The saturated environment produces a lush green grass – immortalized by Welsh singer Tom Jones in the song ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ – that makes the UK a world leader in sheep and goat production.)
Here, Rich lived with the girls, and his father, Taid. (His much-beloved mother, Biddy, had lived with them until her death 10 years before.) They kept chickens and sheep, and a few pigs from time to time.
When I first met him, Rich worked as a harp maker in the Harp Centre of Wales – he’s a master woodworker. His hands are big, rough and scarred, with a surprisingly delicate touch. These are hands that can cut down a tree, saw up the wood and turn it into a breathtaking Welsh dresser; weld any kind of metal; create nearly any type of farm implement out of bits of scrap and baler twine; deliver a lamb, and wield a rifle with lethal accuracy. (The only thing Rich can’t handle is plastic – he’s hopeless at opening rubbish bags or the flimsy see-through bags in grocery stores, which forces him to ask passing pretty ladies for help. Or so he tells me.)
They are also hands that are completely comfortable with slaughtering, skinning and butchering an animal. There’s no room for squeamishness on a farm, and the Welsh tradition is ultimately practical. They value above all else the ability to ‘get on with it’.
The Welsh traditionally built cottages that they could raise, with the help of friends and neighbours, in one night of heavy beer drinking. If they could have smoke coming out of the chimney by morning, the cottage was theirs. They claimed their land by throwing an axe as far from the new doorstep as they could manage – which is why many farms have a long, narrow field running down from the farmhouse. Easier to throw downhill than uphill!
The traditional Welsh cottage has tiny windows because the Welsh are less worried about admiring the stunning landscape that surrounds them than they are about surviving the never-ending battle with the cold and damp. It’s a country that has been economically depressed since the English invaded back in the eleventh century – with a cultural heritage that’s passionate, intricate and completely unique.
The Welsh hold a massive, nationally televised competition every year to establish the finest singer, dancer, actor and poet in the land. Thousands of men, women and children compete in this artistic Olympics, which is called the National Eisteddfod of Wales, flocking to inhabit a temporary tent village that’s set up for this very purpose during an entire celebratory week.
In nearly every district in the country, in a tradition dating from the time of the druids, they still robe and ‘chair’ a Bard every year, leading the winning poet to sit on a wooden throne in an elaborate ceremony involving a real sword.
When forced into the mines to feed their families, the Welsh men had a response that awes me every time I think of it – they lifted up their voices and sang. The miners created an exquisite tradition of Welsh male choirs that thrives to this day, although the mines have long since shut down.
All these details and more, I was about to discover. Why? Because suddenly, abruptly, and with no warning or training, I was the mistress of a 10-hectare (25-acre) farm.
This meant that I was responsible for a large and cluttered farmhouse kitchen, dominated by a 2.5-metre (8-foot) long kitchen table (made by Rich) around which as many as 10 people might gather at meal times, looking at me expectantly, ready for food.
No-one here gave a damn that I’d once written for a newspaper and worked in radio. They cared only whether or not I could make a ‘good cup of tea’, bake a tray of scones, cook the traditional cawl, make homemade faggots out of pig’s liver and lights (lungs) and put together a roast dinner on a Sunday afternoon – all the requisites for Welsh farm life. And of course, I couldn’t do any of those things!
In California I’d had a load of restaurants nearby, and a convertible to drive to them. Learning to cook had just never been a priority. But now, stranded in my strange new life, pride and desperation drove me to try. With a battered copy of the Complete Farmhouse Cookbook in hand, I tied on an apron, gritted my teeth and began to produce disasters.
I’d been on this kind of learning curve before. When I first came to the UK from America, six years before, there had been more challenges than just learning to drive on the wrong side of the road, in the wrong side of the car, gear-shifting with the wrong hand.
For example, I’d discovered to my grief that a cup of tea isn’t just a cup of tea. There’s a good cup of tea, and a not-so-good cup of tea. I’d set a timer, testing the tea each time until I worked out that three minutes is the perfect length of time to leave it – strong enough, but still boiling hot.
The next thing I had to master was that mysterious thing the British call a ‘roast dinner
’. We don’t have these in the USA; in fact, we don’t have anything that everyone eats on the same day. Americans simply don’t have traditional foods the way the British do – except on Thanksgiving.
But I worked out that this ‘roast dinner’ has a pretty set menu. There’s some kind of roast meat – possibly chicken but more often beef, lamb or pork. And each meat is accompanied by a specific sauce: mint sauce with lamb, apple sauce with pork. With beef you have mustard and Yorkshire pudding – whatever that was.
Always roast potatoes, too. Oh, the minefield of roast potatoes. They must be crispy on the outside, floury on the inside. It’s not just a dish but a cult – to the point that farm wives actually take their roast potatoes to fairs to be judged.
Creating a dish of crispy roast potatoes wasn’t the worst bit, though. I finally cracked those when I learned to boil the potatoes – and they must be the right type, preferably Maris Piper – for exactly eight minutes, then drain them, put the lid back on the pan and then shake it in a rib-crunching bout until the surfaces get all rough and ragged, then tip the potatoes into a roasting pan with boiling hot oil on the bottom, then into the oven for an hour. Sorted – as the Welsh say about a job well done.
No, the roast potatoes weren’t the worst bit – the worse bit was mastering the Yorkshire pudding. Ah, the agonies of the Yorkshire pudding. Each one I made was flatter and soggier than the one before, and I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong. Put two spoonfuls of beef dripping in the pan, the recipe said, heat that up and then pour in the Yorkshire pudding batter. It ‘should’ rise up golden and puffy. Mine just lay there, pale and flabby, like a wet week.
Until the day that I was wandering through the grocery store, looking for clues, and I saw something on the shelf that made my jaw drop. Beef dripping. It’s a product that you buy! A grease product, like lard or suet. We don’t have it in the USA, and so I’d just been taking two spoonfuls of the water from the roasting tray to cook my Yorkshires in. Aha…
Secrets from Chuckling Goat Page 2