Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  “Ah, Rhys Jones,” he opined. “Your name instantly qualifies you, I think. Hah?” And so, a mere thirteen years old and sporting my “Dixie-Deans” (as my hand-me-down curly-toed football boots were dubbed), I ventured out to do the dirty thing on the rugby field.

  We were a feeble crew. Even Savary the school librarian was pressed into service. The gangly, the fat, the knock-kneed, the speccy, the mummy’s boy, the lame, the bronchial and the recalcitrant made up East House First Fifteen. The pampered show ponies of the soccer division stood idly by. They sneered at our resounding defeats every Tuesday morning before assembly, but I was game. I felt it my duty as the youngest boy ever to make a House first fifteen to be game. I felt it my duty as the representative of a great Welsh tradition to be game. I felt that diminutive as I was, I had to be game. And I was game: for the entire opposition.

  Our feeble company tottered out onto the pitch by the chestnut trees on the other side of Ingrave Road to be utterly and comprehensively pummelled every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. Rugby forces intimacy with worm-casts. I can still feel the sloppy smear of a full sprawl into the mire of a goal-mouth. I can instantly recall grappling the dank moist clammy leather of a wet ball, and the desperate fumbling attempts to drop kick it out of the way before they all plunged on top of me.

  There were no great soaring impromptu male voice choirs for us. It was mud and fighting. I was quite gutsy and I could work up a raging determination, which may ring a few bells with later commissioning editors, but we were no good. No one taught us anything. No one cared. We had to pick it up as we went along. And so when Terry, my Gower rugby hero, declared that he would only join me for dinner if I could kick a goal, this was a severe test of my capabilities.

  Terry Davies had been capped for Wales 21 times and even played a handful of times for the British and Irish Lions. He played as a fullback and finished as the leading points scorer on the 1959 British and Irish Lions tour, even though injury restricted him to just 13 of a possible 31 games. He had last played internationally in the sixties. He was eighty now and he had originally come from Llanelli.

  I met him at his old school ground. We walked under the trees at the edge of the playing field while he explained how he had been spotted at this very school, how he had played for the reserves and the county and how he had then been offered a place with a nearby team. The difficulty was that that team was Swansea. “I was considered a traitor,” he explained.

  I had picked up some inkling of this rivalry ten years ago. I was working and staying in the Mumbles. Two matrons passed me near the pier. They stopped me. “Oh, we love your ‘Restoration’ programme,” they said.

  I told them that I was disappointed that the great house in Llanelli, a discovery for the programme and a triumph for Wales, had done so badly in the competition. Scotland rallied to its wrecks. Manchester voted en masse for decaying swimming pools. But there just weren’t enough Welsh votes to secure this intriguing and beautiful townhouse a place in the final.

  They laughed. “We couldn’t possibly vote for something in Llanelli.”

  I looked puzzled.

  “We play rugby against Llanelli.”

  And that was that. Wales is furious in its patriotic antipathy to England but that is nothing compared with the Balkan mistrust of fellow Welshmen. If you want to raise a laugh in Cardiff denigrate Swansea. And Swansea is continually resentful of the unwarranted attention that Cardiff gets. It is even more resentful of warranted attention.

  Llanelli was 10 miles away from that conversation in the Mumbles and the Mumbles was the posh bit of Swansea. Satirist Ian Hislop and actress Joanna Page were born there. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas have a house there. Further along the bay, passions ran even higher and dirtier. Terry had had to keep his head down.

  He was back in Llanelli now, however, and ready to eat my cockles, but first I had to kick that goal on his old school pitch.

  I was never a kicker. Oh, no doubt I had attempted to be. In my house team we were all so incompetent we took it in turns to have a go, but we never got a try so we were seldom put to the test. I dimly recalled that it was sometimes part of my job as a hooker or scrum half (I think I played in both positions) to clear the ball, and this required a drop kick.

  I practised in front of Terry. (An incompetent ignoramus trying to prove to a 21-times capped Rugby International that he could “do” his sport.) I could vaguely get a boot under it, though not a good boot, as I was wearing my round-toed multi-laced hill-walking boots.

  Terry undertook to coach me. He started to mark out the kick. The angle was 90 degrees to the post. It was a straightforward hoof. I had to get lift and a straight path to the trajectory.

  Terry placed the ball and carefully instructed me. “Take three steps,” he said. “Two back, and one to the side. And as you hit the ball lean into it a bit and it will rise up.”

  I stood back, measured the distance, waited for the camera to turn over and then walked forwards, as casually as possible and kicked the ball exactly as instructed. Yes, the ball lifted. It soared straight over the crossbar and through the posts.

  This wasn’t exactly what we wanted. It would have been more useful if I had missed dismally four or five times. But I did really hit it in one. Terry was ready for his supper. We just needed a couple more angles.

  It took another ten kicks before I managed to do it again. And that was because, try as I might, I never quite took it as slowly and methodically as I had the first time. I rushed at it. I put too much effort in. I swung wildly. I sweated and flailed. It’s just like golf. As long as I abandoned all ambition and simply walked it with as little effort as possible, the ball shot straight over the bar. But I had to follow my instructions.

  – WELL DONE –

  The salt-marsh lamb was roasted. The cockles were cooked in a little wine and herbs, exactly as I would cook mussels. I fried the onions in butter, boiled the wine and added the shellfish, waiting until they opened of their own accord before serving. Terry said he loved them, but he didn’t eat many. The lamb, however, he devoured. We did it all in the kitchen of a smart new restaurant in an old tin factory in the remains of Llanelli docks, owned, as it happened, by two more rugby heroes, Stephen Jones and Dwayne Peel. Had I needed to, perhaps, I would have had a choice of subjects. This corner of Wales has produced some of the finest rugby players our country has seen, including Shane Williams, Leigh Halfpenny and the legendary ‘Merv the Swerv’ Davies. But I liked Terry best. I don’t think anybody could have taught me to kick a goal with such grace and charm. It was a result.

  I felt long-forgotten Welsh rugby connections warming the cockles of my heart.

  –4–

  PEMBROKESHIRE

  THE NATIONAL DOG

  – TIPI OR NOT TIPI –

  If you press out and away from St Davids, that tiny cathedral city on the very tip of Pembrokeshire, you soon leave the crowded tourist trail behind. The coastal path runs on for over 150 miles, around the whole county seaboard, passing 58 beaches and 14 harbours. It constantly offers up surprises: a sudden stony bay, a jutting mound of an island, a flower-strewn, exposed headland, or even a tipi.

  Around Strumble Head, nearer to Fishguard, several different aeons of time collide on the geological map. It erupts in identifying colours: red for Ordovician, bright green for Cambrian, yellow for pre-Cambrian. Intrusive igneous or burnt stone competes for space with limestone deposits and volcanic sedimentary rock. Between 650 and 290 million years old, they swirl solidly beneath the flattened gorse and strangely shaped boulders. Wherever this stone breaks through in the jagged hill “castles” there are signs of ancient habitation, with fallen walls and standing stones. Somehow, it’s not totally surprising to climb over Garn Fechan and find a tipi encampment on the other side.

  John, a local small-holder in Trefasser has erected three “Native American tipis” to tempt New Age to
urists. Original Native American tipis were anything up to 16 foot tall and required 12 buffalo hides to cover them. When tipis were originally constructed they were built with the door facing east towards the sun to protect against prevailing winds. John’s were covered with white canvas and had rough hessian covering for a floor, a bed and some basic furniture.

  He had a hot tub too. He showed me how he could fill the bottom with logs. I guess you have to avoid sitting in the hot spot. A ring of stones had been hauled together to surround a camp fire. During the high season John turned people away. But today there was a slight chill. The summer visitors, drawn to Pembrokeshire by the beaches, had gone. In 2010 there were four million of them. The tourism industry is worth more than half a billion pounds. Today, though, the choughs were bundling over the black rock. The sea was flecked with white. Sheep were huddling under the earth banks. I settled by the fire and, pulling at my clothes, I discovered my quest. It was pretty simple. I had to “walk a Corgi” – the Welsh national dog.

  – BONKERS –

  To begin, we headed off to Jack Pontiago’s garage near Llanwnda. I own a cottage in this area. I have driven past his workshop, amongst the fields at the bottom of the hill a hundred times, and have often slowed down to admire a rank of fading Morris Minors on the grass.

  These old motors, standing in front of a painted, breeze-block workshop, bolted onto the corrugated hay barn, where Jack started his car business 60 years ago, weren’t collectors’ items. This wasn’t a dealership. The rounded bonnets were matte with age. The chrome was tarnished. Some had collapsed, like broken barns. Some had sunk onto their wheel hubs.

  And here they were, in close-up. One was a scratched blue, another a scuffed grey and a third was a Morris Traveller, the estate version, with the whole of the rear section and its painted wooden frame fallen into an utter state of collapse. It was a green one, exactly like the family car we had when I was very little, with its pop eyes and yellow wooden superstructure; the one that Bella the black French poodle viciously guarded, the one we took to visit Cardiff. On this wreck, that wood was now faded white and bursting with rot-encrusted fungus. The thing lay on its axles. The number plate (valuable in itself, I would have thought, to any passing Adrian) read “ADE 130”.

  There was only one workable Morris there. Jack had just serviced that particular pale blue bumblebee with an MOT. It was a family heirloom. “A local car,” Jack said, “but the owner passed away and now his son has it in Llanelli.” (A foreign country, by the sound of it, and a long way to come with an old car.)

  Sporting a jaunty navy-blue corduroy hat, Jack escorted me around his domain. He loved his battered charges. “They purr,” he said jovially. He proclaimed the virtues of their simple mechanics and the straightforward engine, which, set down over the front axle, apparently made for an unexpected nimbleness.

  The designer, Sir Alec Issigonis, was later responsible for that other world-straddling, mass-market little car: the Mini. With the Morris Minor, however, Sir Alec had apparently decided, at the last minute, that the car was too narrow. Jack fondly patted a square flat ridge down the front of the bonnet. “He cut it in half and added an extra four inches here,” he explained. During development, it was called the “Morris Mosquito”, a reference to the warplane and a reminder that the car was conceived in an austere age of rationing. “I just love these cars,” said Jack.

  Others did too. It sold a million by 1961 and continued in production into the early seventies. It helped make the fortune of William Morris, Lord Nuffield, who had started with a small business mending bicycles, not unlike Jack Pontiago himself.

  Jack escorted me over the road to show me his great-grandfather’s workshop: a blacksmith’s forge where he still mended tractors. He handed me an object, like a perforated or louvered tin can. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a headlight blackout cover we made for the cars in the Second World War,” Jack chortled.

  Back then most of Jack’s work was for farms. Most of the machinery he mended still involved horses.

  The farmers, out on this huge peninsula, where the mountains of Wales rolling down from the north had been flattened by a distant Ice Age, must have liked the Morris Minor. When my wife and I dug out the wheel pit in a nearby mill (where I am writing this now) we discovered a complete little car crushed flat at the bottom. I wondered if Jack would have accepted it, even as a Morris sandwich. He said he was still up for more (he once had twenty-two in his collection) and would take another “as long as my wife is not looking out from the bedroom window.” Jack gestured across the road at a smart house with a bright green lawn, where, sitting chewing at a ball, was what appeared to be a Corgi dog.

  I laughed. This wasn’t expected. My search was over. Yes, it was a Corgi, called Macsen. We walked over. “Can I walk him?” I asked Jack.

  “No,” he replied, skewering my hopes. “He won’t have a collar. When he was little he pulled his head right out of one. It must have hurt his ears and ever since we can’t get near him.”

  Macsen, named for a character in the Mabinogion, snarled at me from the other side of the gate. I leaned down to get a closer look at him. He started frothing and snapping, wrestling with an eternal canine dilemma. He wanted me to throw his spittle-slimed ball. But he didn’t want to let me have the thing.

  “He’s always had a short fuse, this one,” Jack explained. “We’ve had Corgis for years.”

  “All like this?”

  “No, no, the rest of them have been very friendly. They’re a good family dog, you know.”

  Macsen bared his teeth and growled.

  “How do you walk him?”

  “We don’t. He just runs around in the garden and barks at the cars. It keeps him fit enough.” Macsen was a Pembrokeshire Corgi. There were Cardiganshire Corgis too. But the locally developed breed had a foxier face, pointier ears and no tail.

  My father’s family had had Corgis, I remembered. I never threw balls for them and I don’t know what type they were. It was all in the distant days of tennis clubs and leafy suburbs, growing up in smart Llanishen near Cardiff. The Corgi had become the Welsh canine badge of office. My father’s, fondly remembered throughout his life, was called “Twp” – which means “stupid”, apparently.

  None of this was encouraging. Perhaps I had been given the wrong dog. Pembrokeshire had also produced the Sealyham Terrier. Were they less stupid or bonkers? That Welsh breed for a while had become the Hollywood lap dog of choice for, amongst others, Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis. It was also a favourite of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. But now they were very rare.

  Perhaps everybody had Corgis now. Macsen was clearly not going to play ball. I needed to look elsewhere.

  – NIPPER –

  “The Corgi dog was bred for cattle breeding,” Andrew the vet explained later that day. (He practised in Fishguard – “doing a bit of town and a bit of country”.) “It is a tough diminutive big dog, not a lap dog,” he went on. “It was bred to herd cows. It doesn’t circle the herd like a sheep dog. It runs up and down behind it and nips at the ankles.”

  The Corgi’s low stature helped them roll out of the way of a good kicking.

  Picking me up at Hugh’s farm down near Llanwnda, Andrew was driving me across the open, distinctive North Pembrokeshire landscape. His Land Cruiser was his refuge. He used it to escape from a wild day out of doors, dealing with stock in this weatherbeaten world.

  “In fact the climate is mild. That’s what makes the rearing of farm animals so successful. You get a longer grass-growing season. But the wind blows hard.”

  The south-western coastal strip of Pembrokeshire manages an average annual sunshine total of over one thousand seven hundred hours, but the region can get more than thirty “force 8” gales a year. We were rumbling past that other n
otable mark of this landscape – the blasted tree, creeping cautiously up out of a mud-and-stone hedge bank into a stunted, leaning plume of tangled, inter-growing twig hair rocking in the breeze.

  From the top of rocky Garn Fawr, standing in the tantalising remains of a 3,000-year-old village encampment known as an Iron Age fort and probably more village than castle, it was possible to look down and see the way that the land had been divided 2,500 years ago for cattle.

  The field boundaries still ran away from the defensive site like the spokes of a wheel, so that each of the ancient villagers would have possessed marshland down by the stream, some good grazing land on the gentle slopes and stony stuff nearer the top. There were ancient cattle drifts to get them in for milking, and, if you looked for them, the remains of corrals: round-walled, circular enclosures built by the Britons to keep their herds safe from raiders.

  Cattle is still the deal round here, with recent statistics showing that there are over 1,000,000 of them in Wales. The original Welsh black cattle of this area predated the Romans. “Though they were not actually black, in those days,” Andrew explained. “They bred the various browns and whites out of them in modern times.”

  He meant over the last 200 years. The “Iron Age”, the “Dark Ages” and the long, settled existence before we started mechanising farm life, may seem to blend into one, but it represents 6,000 years of slow, gentle evolution and adaptation. Those Iron Age field boundaries are still in use.

  Above Hugh’s farm, where I met Andrew, with his hand up a cow, checking her ovulation status, there is a little-visited burial site. A great flat boulder has been propped open like a yawning shell just under the rocky summit of a hill. Sitting by it, the land drops away for a mile to the granite cliff and the edge of the St George’s Channel. A warrior, or king, or notable chieftain was buried there 5,000 years ago, with a view across to Ireland; but not a soothing one. It’s a blood-stirring vista that looks out to the grey tumbling ocean and reminds us that Pembrokeshire is an exposed wedge of land in a cold sea.