Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Introduction

  –1–

  MONMOUTHSHIRE

  THE GREAT BARRIER

  –2–

  BEACONS

  INTO THE GREEN

  –3–

  GOWER

  WILD RUGBY FOOD

  –4–

  PEMBROKESHIRE

  THE NATIONAL DOG

  –5–

  MID WALES

  A LEGEND IN THE MAKING

  –6–

  SNOWDONIA

  A LILY IN THE VALLEY

  –7–

  ANGLESEY

  WILDLIFE

  –8–

  CONWY

  THAT RIVIERA TOUCH

  THIS IS THE END

  – INTRODUCTION –

  Over the years I have learned to “swallow the toad”. It’s not a Welsh expression. Nice if it was. I got it from Sicily, via Norman Lewis, the master travel writer (Welsh himself, actually, now I come to think of it).

  Was Lewis perhaps a little prone to “embroidery”? Is that perhaps a Welsh romantic trait? I am getting ahead of myself. I can’t start off with wild racial generalisations; there’s plenty of time for that later. I just like the phrase. It has resonance.

  For my part, the toads I have gulped down, straight-faced, include the rejection of virtually every programme idea I have ever proposed to television executives since 1990. I have ingested Catanian swamps of wart-ridden amphibious reptiles, in brown offices in ugly buildings. But this one lingers. It was my “Monkey Tennis”. Ten years ago, I went to a BBC Wales “commissioner” and proposed a televisual entertainment featuring a well-known British television star. I thought this celebrity would add some lustre to BBC Wales’s output – and I could get him cheap.

  There was a sickly pause. I detected what might best be described as a shudder. “No…” he opined, with a wonderful Welsh open-vowelled negative. He was about to present a toad for my delectation, I could tell. “Not him. No. I am afraid he would be insufficiently Welsh.”

  My face was a standing stone. It was useless to point out that my presenter was funny, beloved, celebrated and starry – and a personal friend of mine as well. Pointless to enquire whether Welsh television viewers might enjoy a less parochial presenter. Silly to point out that Wales can cope with outsiders, just as the English embrace Terry Wogan, Gavin Esler and er… Huw Edwards.

  I swallowed manfully. “Yes, of course,” I said.

  Something dark flopped into my belly.

  I realised, however, as I stared into the glassy eye of my interlocutor, that there was a subtext to our conversation. You see, it was not really my proposal that was insufficiently Welsh, or my mate. It was something else. The commissioner was gazing steadily at Griffith Rhys Jones, son of Elwyn and Gwynneth, scion of Megan and Ieuan and Evan, spawn of Betws-y-Coed, Penmachno and the Rhondda, Cardiff-born, dark of hair, thick-thighed and round-faced. And I suspected that he thought that it was me who was insufficiently Welsh.

  Having been brought up in London (founded by a Welshman, according to legend), one of the Essex Boyos, a white-wellington booted Dragon at the end of the Central line and having missed the cultural communal Celtic after-game warm bath of Cymric fellow-feeling, who did I think I was, returning to Cardiff and pretending to have connections?

  So, am I insufficiently Welsh? It’s time to find out. That is what this book is all about. I am going out on the road to search for my Celtic roots and explore “the land of my aunties”. Language, the landscape, rugby, dogs, legends, botany, wildlife, furniture and a few more bits on the side: I looked into them all and here are the results.

  ***

  Just to book-end here, though: a little while later I had another suggestion for BBC Wales. This time they were looking for a satirical show. I have made a few anarchic sallies in the past. A prominent politician had become annoyed with the election results in the principality and vented his frustration in public. We suggested a hard-hitting riposte called “The Fucking Welsh”.

  We didn’t even get asked to an interview on that one.

  – A BIT OF BACKGROUND –

  My father used the telephone as if announcing a concert party on a pre-war radio. If he could ever be persuaded to answer the thing, and then only in the absence of my mother, whose delegated task this normally was, he lifted the heavy, black, Bakelite lump from its cradle in the hallway, straightened his back and addressed the caller as if from the other side of a canyon. “Hellooo?” He would declare. “Who am I speaking with?”

  His usual faux home-counties tones would swoop into a musical lilt. (And he was no musician.) There was immediately a pronounced fruitiness to his vocal chords. We were back in the Valleys. My father became Welsh on the telephone, God bless him.

  “The Valleys”? Ah, but here I show my own ignorance. We were Welsh alright. My mother came from Ferndale, in the Rhondda – which is, I believe, a proper valley. My father emerged from a gloomy red house in the suburbs of Cardiff. (This was more of “a slight hill” than a valley.) Every single relative I have seems to have been vehemently Welsh, but I do not mean that they came from “the Valleys”. I am making wild, clichéd outsider generalities already.

  Elwyn’s was the posh voice of the Cardiff suburbs, of the lawyers and physicians of the great coal port. Their inclination was to be Saxon in their manners. I was born in Cardiff but we moved away when I was six months old. I left a legion of aunties and great aunties, grannies and nans encamped across the lower west from Tonypandy to Pontypridd. It gave us our identity, in English Epping. We had to watch the rugby. I was dragooned into the choir. Sometimes we went to Dagenham to visit fellow Welsh exile doctors, who smoked and cackled a lot and had an easy, soppy familiarity that I came to associate with proper comfortable Welshness.

  My granny and grandpa moved to join us. He had been a miner and wore a cloth cap and swore impressively in pidgin Welsh, as he levered his wheezing and arthritic body into the Morris Traveller. (“Duw, duw, oh fucky!” - “Grandpa!! The children!!”) Granny wrote letters in Welsh to Aunty Betty. There were Megans and Ieuans, Wyns, Gwens, Gwynneths, Gwyns and Evanses all over the Christmas card list.

  “You must have experienced a lot of racial prejudice, growing up in Epping.” One Welsh actor had taken me aside, when we worked together on Russell T Davies’s Mine all Mine for ITV drama.

  I wondered what he was on about. “No, not really,” I started carefully. “Nobody ever really noticed I was Welsh.”

  He nodded sagely. “That’s exactly what I mean.” He looked sorrowful. “They don’t care about the Welsh, you see – the English.”

  In all honesty, nobody did care that I was Welsh. I am not really included in Wales by the Welsh. How could I be, with my weird part Essex tough junior school, part posh Sussex kindergarten accent? Mavis Nicholson once disparaged me to my face for speaking with a “pretentious” voice. (Oh, for your common touch, Mavis, love.)

  I often went to Wales when I was tiny, by the long one-way system that went through every traffic light in Britain. In Cardiff we stayed with the forbidding Nain (North Walian Welsh for Nan). She was a tall woman with a shock of long, long white hair, tied up in a bun, attended throughout her life by my spinster Auntie Megan, who had big teeth and spaniel eyes. They had no idea when we might arrive, so they never cooked. Wales meant imprisonment for hours in that Morris Traveller and then salad: ham and hard-boiled eggs, and I hated salad. Cardiff meant the arcades (“What’s so good about them, Granny?”). It meant walking with excruciatingly slow ancient people. It meant loud ticking clocks in dark drawing rooms, and being on my best behaviour.

  As I grew o
lder, I kept away. The relatives all died. I went to visit my elderly uncle, who dressed like Edward VIII, spent a great deal of time in the South of France and was the only person I ever met who said “…what?” at the end of sentences, like a character in a Wodehouse story. (“Splendid day, what?”) But even he once sat me down in his pink wallpapered modern house near Radyr golf course and gently upbraided me. “You don’t want to make fun of Wales in those sketches of yours, what?”

  Yes, even this dandy, with his Mr. Fish shirts and his Meissen candlesticks and his sports cars and snuffly pug dogs was a patriotic, full-blooded Welshman under the plus fours. (I still have those plus fours. He really wore them.)

  The realisation took me aback. Because, like all of us, I have been fed the clichés. I know the Welshness of coal mines and choirs. What Londoner does not? But Wales is surely much more than truncated witches’ hats and bardic chairs, though even those have their fascination. (And indeed for years we had a proper Welsh hat in a box in a proper Welsh coffer in our Epping front room.)

  When I threw off the shackles of my yearly sketch show and was given a new life in television, as a middle-aged man going “Oh, how beautiful” in scenic travelogues, I was taken beyond Cardiff. I started to range about the Principality. I climbed mountains and I canoed rivers, I walked sea fronts, and plunged into valleys, I went from the noisy, crowded cities to what, I finally understood, were the most remote and beautiful places in Britain.

  I got to further understand Wales’s geography and its size, but always in hurried, speedy chunks, as we rattled from Conwy to Fishguard, or into the Black Hills for a quick photo opportunity. Restoration took me to look at some extraordinary houses. Who Do you Think You Are sat me down in Carmarthen High Court. Mine All Mine showed me Gower. Eventually, I became totally rootsy and bought a small patch of land and a ruined farmhouse on the wild and unearthly coast of Pembrokeshire.

  But it is time to take stock. There is no one totality called Wales. There are many distinct regions in this small country. There are huge variations in geography and landscape. There are hidden wonders and strange attractions. There are unexpected cosmopolitan touches and eccentric ambitions.

  Instead of waking up to eat salad and then going straight to bed, on this visit to Wales I intend to linger and explore and find out what is distinctive, so I am visiting eight separate regions and looking around – not to be comprehensive (the journeys are often deliberately small-scale) – but to get closer. And for each separate chapter in this odyssey I am tying together a loose knot. I have a mission to fulfil, a quest to pursue. Like an errant knight I have a given goal. It is designed to release the Welshness in me. Will I get closer to Cymru through my “challenges”? I hope so.

  –1–

  MONMOUTHSHIRE

  THE GREAT BARRIER

  – BORDERING ON THE RIDICULOUS –

  Have I ever been this way before?

  The thought came to me as we walked down through a reed bed, at the end of a deserted roadway, towards salt marshes and a muddy foreshore, to confront the remnants of a former passenger terminal in a crumbling block overgrown with brambles. It smelled, in that suspicious way that abandoned breeze-block buildings do, but the turnstiles were rusted up so we climbed through a hole in the fence.

  Ahead was the mighty Severn, like a wide, flat, grey sinister pond. Downstream, towards the sea-horizon, (which I have never seen blue, only muddy and dismal) was the new bridge, soaring into the air between its lengthy jetties. Upstream was its far more handsome older brother. This elegant, white, full-span crossing was built in the early sixties. It put to an end the business of the ferry point where I was now standing.

  From 1926 the Aust ferry had been the old posh car route. For a car and driver in 1955, it cost four shillings to cross into Wales. It had to be profitable for the owners; so much so, that it is said that a hearse using the crossing was invoiced a further one shilling and six pence for the coffin.

  The kids from the village used to gather to watch the popstars go through. The famous photograph of Bob Dylan (and that Phantom Rolls Royce as black as his hair) was taken, not in some Mississippi Delta, but right here on this foreshore, when those shaggy stumps in front of me supported wooden planks that made a landing stage. The Aust crossing was notorious. Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was deterred from using it because of the risk, describing it as “an ugly, dangerous, and very inconvenient ferry”.

  I rang my mother. “Did we ever come this way?” I asked. I reckoned that by 1960 I was seven. I was living in Sussex. And we might have got to Cardiff via this route, but she quickly dashed that fantasy.

  “No, we never took a ferry,” she told me. “We must have gone via Gloucester.”

  “Or Chepstow?” I suggested.

  “Possibly. I can’t remember, darling.”

  I was already more sentimental about Wales and my Welshness than my mother ever wanted to be. At 89, Gwynneth has no nostalgia for the land of her fathers. I was the one floundering in the past.

  But as I turned to go the land of my fathers went with me. My “challenge”, my quest (what I had to do this section of the trip), had been stuck in a cleft in a particularly soggy rotten jetty post on the other side of an eel-grass bog. I took my new suede walking boots for a trial in the estuary mud and ended up clutching an instruction. It was “to perform the National Anthem in Welsh”.

  Fair enough. I might seek to avoid an incipient John Redwood catastrophe. No miming for me. I knew the tune. I knew the sentiment and, indeed most of the words in English, but the Welsh element would be a definite step up.

  Germaine Greer (if I can just name-drop indiscriminately and, I think, impressively) once explained to me that the reason we English speakers struggle with Welsh is its orthography. Sixth-century Welsh documents use Latin characters, but there are many extra sounds to cope with. These were already represented by new letters in the alphabet. This means there are 28 letters in the Welsh alphabet, which comprises of seven vowels and twenty one consonants. “Ll” is one letter in Welsh and two in English. So there are six letters in Llanelli, if you are Welsh, and eight if you are English. Early transcribers of the language needed to represent a greater range of sounds. “W”s become “oos”. “U”s are in fact like double “i”s. “F” is a “v” and so forth. The “ch” sound was originally represented by a “k”, but the printers of the Welsh Bible didn’t have enough “k”s so they moved on to “c”s and the “k” fell out of use altogether.

  Welsh was the first language of us Britons. You are reading here, on this page, a more recent immigrant, bastard hybrid – English. Welsh is one of the oldest languages still spoken in Europe and until 1911 Welsh was still the majority language in Wales. Today about half a million people in Wales can speak Welsh. In 1911 it was nearly double that.

  The river that I was now skirting was defined as a barrier during the reign of Athelstan in 926, who ordered that the Britons, the older inhabitants of these islands, should stay to the west and the Saxons to the east. Matters of a national and patriarchal identity have been an issue for over a thousand years, especially at this very gateway to Wales. But I wonder if language is the real barrier. And the real identity of Wales.

  I tried to master some Welsh a few years back. I was renovating a house in Pembrokeshire and I thought I would need the Welsh language to banter with the builders. Alas, it transpired they all came from Essex, like me. Although several surveys commissioned by S4C (the Welsh-language TV channel) have suggested that there are around 200,000 Welsh speakers living in England, none of the builders were part of this so I left it.

  It is superficially difficult. Double “d”s, double “l”s, guttural noises and consonants are yoked together to make distinct and seemingly unnatural traps for the English speaker. But everybody tells me that it is easy. “At least Welsh is spelled as it is pronounced,” I was told. “You just have to speak the let
ters as they appear.”

  So I wanted to start with something simple and the anthem seemed a good choice. I had after ten years mastered road instructions. Araf, (with a v sound at the end). That meant slow. Parcio meant “parking”. When I first crossed the Severn Bridge with my wife, I pointed out that the Welsh began straightaway. “Look there,” I said, pointing to a toll sign. “Manned!” I pronounced it as “manneth”. What does that mean?

  “It means there’s a man to serve you in that booth. It’s in English.”

  – FOOTBRIDGE –

  There wasn’t a booth to get onto the bridge if you were walking. Three hundred million cars have driven over since it was opened; at least half as many seemed to be thundering past now.

  It took three-and-a-half years to build the thing, at a cost of £8 million. Upon opening it in 1966, the Queen hailed it as “the dawn of a new economic era for south Wales” and it was far more emphatic and sculptural than the later rival, further south, which wanders out on a raised platform across the shallows for several miles before it deigns to raise towers and hang a short traverse. White, pure, simple, elegant: the original Severn Bridge is a confident, sixties, geometric design. Like a piece of origami, or a white plastic egg chair, it epitomises groovy pop Britain and now has Grade I listed status.

  Each section of deck was made in Chepstow and floated into position, before being hauled into the sky. Seen close up, however, like many roadways or bits of plant, it seemed gritty, noisy and alien. Solitary human beings are not meant to grapple with this sort of engineering. We had to invent superheroes to hold on to broken cables or fly underneath suspension bridges, or tip cars into the river. It is not for mere mortals.

  As I strolled along, first one bicycle whizzed by and then another. They looked surprised to see me walking there at all. I had noticed dozens of cars parked haphazardly up on verges in the bushy lanes surrounding the approach road. “They park on one side or the other,” a bridge engineer called Paul told me. “Six quid toll. It mounts up every day, so they bike across for free.”