Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Sod everybody. I dropped down into the black water. It was more soft than freezing, speckled with raindrops and wrinkled with wind. And then I struck out and swam away across the deep area, where a legendary invisible fairy island once stood. The legend says it tempted the locals. They took part in an annual Beltane feast, out in the middle of the dark waters, until one stole an apple. It turned to maggots in his hand and the door was shut on mere mortals forever.

  The water, like all lake swimming water, was sweet in the mouth: no chlorine, no salt. It had a peppery, slightly silty taste. No limestone filters here. I wondered, as I splashed about and completed this “Celtic Challenge”, whether this really did link me with my Welsh roots. Surely not many of my fellow countrymen, lurking in the shopping centres of the post-industrial Welsh hinterland, actually swam in wild waters?

  And that’s what swimming in a Welsh mountain lake did for me. An unappealling sense of my own specialness surfaced alongside my pallid dugs in the black water. I think Shelley and Alan Clarke probably felt much the same. Roger Deakin, on the other hand, was far too nice. But at least, for a moment or two, I was at one with Welsh wilderness and away with the fairies.

  –3–

  GOWER

  WILD RUGBY FOOD

  – BEACHED WALES –

  If Wales is a geological “continent in miniature” with its mountains and lakes, populous sea ports and a vast unending steppe (except that last bit, of course, unless you include parts of Borth), then the Gower is a continent in miniature, in miniature: a jut of land that reaches out in the north of the Bristol Channel towards the Atlantic Ocean between Swansea and Llanelli. It seems to cram the lot into its 15 mile length.

  Gower is not especially rugged, except on a few cliff tops, although almost a third of it is a nature reserve. It is comfortable and reassuring. It has deep woods, and sunken lanes with high beech canopies. It has foggy marshes, stony coves and high wild moorland. It has untroubled farmland, hidden meadows, long wild strands and bleak outcrops. Just about the only things it lacks are a geyser and a grizzly bear problem. And all this just a short bus ride from Swansea.

  The bus is vital. There is no train station in the Gower. In the nineteenth century the Lord of Margam thought ‘the rail would destroy the country’. His order not to build a railway has been followed to this day. In 1956 the Gower became the first area in Britain to be designated an Area of Outstanding National Beauty.

  So I started in Swansea, which I love. I know it well and I feel entitlement. I used to own it – if only in Russell T Davies’s imagination. In the early part of the century he wrote a drama series for ITV called “Mine All Mine” and I played a taxi driver who, thanks to an ancient title deed, found that he had inherited the ownership of the city. We filmed everywhere, enjoying the ice cream from Joe’s, the fishing from the Mumbles pier and the lascivious murals by Frank Brangwyn in the town hall (if you are invited to a “Best Welsh Sausage Award”, go.) The paintings are extraordinary and were banned from the House of Lords for being ‘too flamboyant’. Too many naked breasts, they meant.

  I remember the grand sweep of the beach and the curry houses by the university. Russell said at the time that if “Mine All Mine” failed to take wing, then it was probably the end for modern Welsh comedy drama. Alas, it merely bounced along the landing strip, but, luckily, along came “Gavin and Stacey” and that soared into the stratosphere. Wales became cool, but not with us.

  I take the blame. There was one long speech on the top of a hill in the first episode where my Welsh accent set off on a worldwide expedition, visiting Mumbai and Northern Ireland before coming to rest in Windsor Davies – “insufficiently Welsh”, I fear.

  During the making of that series I lived in a cottage on the Gower. I vividly remember my five o’clock starts to get to make-up in the Mumbles, driving off, with the light creeping over the hills, to weave past wild horses and through herds of half-awake sheep. There is a type of horse unique to this area called a ‘Gower pony’. It is said there are hundreds of them on the Gower common lands. Through centuries of living and breeding on rough grazing, they have become happy to eat tough plants such as brambles and gorse. And too tough to get out of the way of cars.

  – RHOSSILI –

  The far end of the Gower peninsula terminates in a claw of headland with two rocky outcrops at either end of it and a huge, sweeping, knock-you-dead beach in-between. It is a favourite for sunset photographs. Somebody has worked out that Rhossili is the seventh most photographed sunset beach in the world (a jigsaw manufacturer perhaps?). You may remember it from the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games when a youth choir sang “Bread of Heaven” from there and it was broadcast at the Olympic stadium. Or not.

  I went out for a morning run, on a stretch of perfect sand, littered with razor shells, soft worn wood and the very occasional bit of faded polyester rope. At the back of the shore is a small crumbling earth cliff and, between the top of that and the beginning of the hill, sits a single, white-painted cottage and its stone outbuildings. It was once a rectory and was plonked down between two parishes, so that the vicar had an equal distance to walk to his Sunday businesses. Today it is available to rent from the National Trust and is possibly the most desirable British holiday cottage on earth.

  I kept looking up at it as I bounced along. Already there were dog-walkers, toddlers and earnest beachcombers dotted about on the sand, and then two blokes passing a rugby ball ran on either side of me. As they did so, they passed their ball into my hands and I discovered my “challenge” inexpertly taped to it. Apparently, I was to find and cook “a feast for a rugby hero”.

  Surely, you ask, that wasn’t a real surprise, was it? That was a set-up. You knew that that ball was coming your way. And, since you ask – of course I did. It was a contrivance. I was out, running about on this ideal beach on an ideal June morning in the name of television artifice, and if it hadn’t been for the pressing needs of the cosy travelogue I would have happily run about on it for the rest of the day. Instead, I went back up to the rectory and while I was waiting for the crew to catch up I poked my nose inside. There were two ladies with pinnies in the kitchen.

  “Hello,” I said, “ We’re from the telly. I expect they’ve told you we were coming.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “But come on in. We’re just cleaning up for the next guests.”

  I didn’t like to. I knew that if we filmed inside we might have to pay the National Trust. But I wasn’t filming, just nosing around.

  Tudor, our cameraman, whose early life seems to have been spent entirely on the very beach I had just left (or so I gathered from the amount of reminiscing he did) had recently rented these plain rooms, with the cream-painted walls and chintz curtains, to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It was his present to himself. He had gazed on this house while building sandcastles as a kid, then while chilling around a fire as a teenager and finally chasing his own children across the sand as a grown man. But getting hold of the cottage had required the sort of foresight that only comes with a doggedly approaching significant date. Me, I never like to queue. Or book. This was my only chance to see inside the cottage.

  After my inspection, to my surprise, I was told by one of the charming guardians that, for the first time she could remember, there were booking gaps later this very year.

  “I imagine it must be the recession,” I suggested.

  She thought it might be the reputation for “unbookability” itself. People like me, believing that they couldn’t ever get hold of it, were put off trying.

  Tudor had another opinion. “When we took it there were broken blinds and knife handles missing.” He said. “Quite honestly, the place was disappointing.”

  There’s always a missing knife handle in paradise.

  – GIDDY UP –

  I took to a horse for the next stage of my journey.<
br />
  This was at a pony-trekking centre. I have done this sort of thing before. I trekked in Colorado up a mountain at a dude ranch owned by a Californian millionaire family, where I made polite conversation with what I took to be an idiot hillbilly until I discovered he was a professor of astrophysics at Berkeley. They always gave me the gentle horse. That’s fine. It means you amble along in a line watching the arse ahead for several hours. In my case the arse was an accountant from New York.

  Freddy, my mount in Gower, was canny enough to know that with me on board he could do what he wanted. Theoretically, I knew which bit to pull to stop him doing what he wanted. I knew I had to firmly grasp his back in my thighs. I knew that my light touch could be suddenly turned into a sharp tug. Freddy knew that too, but because I was not really competent he decided, like a twelve-year-old delinquent with a new teacher, to see how much he could provoke me.

  Off we shuffled. The stables were set in a valley. We had approached it through a tree-lined drive. But as we ambled on we quickly broke through onto the uplands of the Gower and the wild moorland that runs along the top of the peninsula.

  I chatted with Helen, who was riding with me. Like Ruth in the Beacons, she had been a schoolteacher and travelled the world, but had now come back to her childhood home, drawn to the beauty that now lay spread out all around her. I needed to quiz her about Llanelli. We could see it, way across the bay to the north. If I turned I could see the south shore too and knew that somewhere down there was Swansea.

  Both were industrial towns. Llanelli was “tin city”. Swansea was “copper metropolis” (and once home to the biggest copper smelting works in the world). Both had rugby teams that inspired passionate loyalty. Helen now supported the Scarlets. Llanelli had worn a red “first strip” since a famous game against an Irish team in 1884.

  We paused. (She stopped. Freddy walked round and round in circles.) We shared memories of our early years when we gathered with our respective families around the black-and-white television to watch Rugby Internationals. Freddy fretted.

  “He wants to catch up with the others,” Helen explained. The rest of the pony-trekking group had gone on up the sandy track. “He’s just a herd animal and he doesn’t like being separated.”

  Llanelli Rugby Club had enjoyed huge successes in the early seventies and nineties when they had been called the “Cup Kings of Wales”. The game changed to become a regional affair in 2003, but the town team had always provided top players of international quality. I would certainly be able to find a rugby hero in the area, and if not from the Scarlets then from the Whites, the original Swansea team, which was also founded in the early 1870s, and which would later come to form part of the “Ospreys” when they amalgamated with Neath. The Whites had also had huge successes in the late seventies and then again in the nineties. Twenty members of the Swansea Whites had gone on to captain Wales. Hundreds of players had been called in to the national squad. Many of them still lived in the area. I would have to ask around, but everybody would know one or two players.

  Freddy was now short-stepping and turning in tight circles.

  Helen told me that the Llanelli club song was “Sosban Fach”. I recalled my father singing it. I think it was the only Welsh he knew. Even then it was cod-Welsh. He learned it at Welsh Internationals I expect, but it was really a Llanelli song. It meant “little saucepan” and derived from the local industry of tin-plating. Traditionally two saucepans sit on the top of Llanelli rugby posts.

  Freddy was walking backwards and snorting loudly, so we couldn’t talk any more. I had gone about as high as I needed. Now I wanted to get down to the coast. I dismounted, always more complicated than it might seem. A horse is much rounder than you expect. I slid off dangerously and cautiously abandoned Freddy. I would look for a rugby hero later. In the meantime I had to get down the cliffs to visit a cave.

  – CLIFFHANGER –

  “Quite unnecessary,” I said straight out. It was an opening gambit. First riding on a horse, now intrepid dangling from a rope. Naturally, I didn’t want to throw myself off a cliff on the end of a coloured lasso at all. I was seeking a diversion, pretending that the distance we were going to drop was totally unsuitable for the television programme we were trying to make.

  We were doing this abseiling sequence to add a bit of “jeopardy” to the film and, ostensibly, to get me down and onto a coastal path some 50 feet below the top of a steep, rocky cliff (typical of the southern shore of the Gower peninsula). In 1823, an ancient female skeleton was discovered not far from here, which turned out, at over 34,000 years old, to be the oldest ceremonial burial known anywhere in Western Europe. I suspect she fell off her abseiling rope.

  It looked… what? About a thousand feet down? I lay cautiously peering over the edge. Other real climbers at the bottom, waiting to come up, were mere insects. But it wasn’t that far really. Let’s face it, they were really quite big insects and only a hundred feet below me.

  I was getting crotchety though. “We don’t really need to do this, do we?” I grunted.

  Now, this is not properly scientific, but I believe some Welsh people can be a little “moody” at times. And when I say some “Welsh people”, I mean my family. They are virtually the only Welsh people I know, so I am not working to a very large control group here. My family tend to negotiate by mood: stubbornness, panic, alarm, irritation, accusation, defensiveness or aggression. Almost anything in preference to reasoned debate. We have an armoury of emotional weapons. For my part, I sometimes manage to control myself for almost an hour at a time, but when things get tense I start instant manipulation of my immediate social surroundings.

  I have abseiled before. One of the problems is that I have only ever done it on television. I can “act” abseiling, but I can’t actually “do” abseiling. And now, with a proper distance to abseil, I was finding I needed to point this out.

  Usually acting will do. I had just “acted” horse riding, for goodness sakes. Of course I can’t ride a horse, but I’ve seen people doing it. I assume a straight back and supercilious air and a relaxed manner in the saddle. It’s a fake.

  My objection to this Gower descent was that it was too far to “act” convincingly. Having discussed the whole sequence with Chris the director, I imagined they would rope me up, and I would lower myself gingerly off a few feet of gently sloping rock. But the charming people from Dryad Bushcraft, who set up the sequence, had wanted to give the telly people their money’s worth. I could see that they had tied a rope to the highest cliff in Wales, which now plunged vertically downwards for what looked like a catastrophic distance. My acting ability was about to be sorely tested by my skill set.

  This was not for the first time. I once wrote holiday freebies for a daily newspaper. It was many years ago. My children were still small. In Corsica, I needed a bit of real action and decided to take them on a “half-day canyoning expedition”. What on earth made me believe that “half-day” indicated “beginner”?

  The first leg involved abseiling down a waterfall, “letting go” some 15 feet above a mountain pool and plunging into the abyss below. My children stared at the prospect in terror. I stood forward. I was “dad”, fearless and forthright.

  “Don’t worry, darlings,” I said. “It’s really very easy”. Never having done it before, I sent my wife over the side to see how difficult it could be. She didn’t break her neck, so I tried it myself. It was passable. But I got a ghastly shock when the moment came to release my hold. Mountain pools are very cold. I surfaced. Then, from the waters of a chilly mountain pool, I watched as my nine-year-old son wrestled with a French mountain guide at the top of a cliff, trying to fight off being made to do the same. Fittingly, abseiling was apparently invented by a French mountaineer called Jean Esteril Charlet in 1879. He used it to help him descend Mont Blanc. I hope he broke his neck.

  I know abseiling is easy. My advice is not to argue and fret. (Being Epping Wel
sh, I did that anyway and fussed for the requisite ten minutes). I got myself strapped in: one belt around the middle, two smaller belts around each thigh, taking care to separate my nadgers from the buckles (the last time I forgot that little detail and descended in excruciating pain, to the lasting benefit of prime-time BBC One scheduling).

  I locked the various shackles into place and leaned back over the precipice. And off I went. It seems counter-intuitive. “Pretend it’s easy,” I told myself. I leaned back, raised my arm and the rope slithered through a metal ring, exactly as it should do, and I began to walk backwards down the cliff face.

  It was easy. I even started bouncing down, whizzing the rope through the ring. And you know, since it was impossible to look down, I didn’t. The slightly nervous forced smile of my helper became a mere dot above me, and I realised with a titter that I was in fact at the bottom. That wasn’t so bad was it? It was over.

  “Great,” shouted Christopher from somewhere in the heights above me. “We’re just going to bring the camera down and you can do it again.”

  – CAVE BARE –

  The terrible winter had had its rewards. Because of the ghastly weather, all the wild flowers had come out late, but at the same time. It was like a rock garden in Weston-super-Mare. My guide Andrew identified harebell, celandine, crocus, rock rose and an Evian mountain water bottle. Remarkably, litter is seldom a problem in these out-of-the-way areas. It would be nice to say that about the sea’s edge. Most flotsam is jetsam these days: thrown away plastic rather than floating wreckage. But choughs and rock hoppers flitted about us and there was no one else to be seen.

  This included the camera crew. They had gone the road-route and now Andrew and I lounged on the sharp yellow rock and watched a rescue team practising with a bright orange rib out on the surly waters beyond a great plateau of dangerous-looking stony shallows.