Insufficiently Welsh

by Griff Rhys Jones

  I shook my head.

  “Four and a half million, ” he said.

  Now he shook his head.

  – Zip Wires –

  A zip wire is not a new idea at the quarry in Penrhyn. There was one in action when it was a fully operational big hole. (“The biggest manmade hole in the world until 1953,” according to my guide.) At that time, it ran across the slate quarry to carry the large blocks of highly compressed mud, which is what slate effectively is, down to the splitters, whose particular skill was to extract a number of slivers of stone out of a single quarried piece.

  I’ve tried it. It requires a knack. I stuck my chisel across the slab, tapped and a tile fell away. Had you roofed your lowly cottage with my slates, though, the rafters would have collapsed. My tile was the width of a chocolate bar. A good splitter could create a dozen, wafer-thin eighteen-inch-square after-dinner mints out of one bit. He bid for the piece he was to work and failure to get his tiles out of it cost him his “profit” (or wages, as his money might more properly have been described). It was a particularly demanding form of piecework.

  The slate-quarrying industry seems to have been an exemplar of ruthless industrial exploitation. In Penrhyn, the workers, dying from lung disease and helpless to influence their wages, even after a three-year strike (the longest in British industrial history) at the beginning of the twentieth century, were Welsh and the owners were English. (Or happened to be so. In the equally notorious Lake District, of course, everybody was English.)

  Welsh slate was used to re-roof the city of Hamburg after the fire of 1842. It created the familiar grey roof-vista, shining blackly in the wet industrial north of Britain. Welsh slate can also be seen in a number of royal treasures. In Penrhyn Castle you’ll find a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria, and in Caernarfon Castle there is the slate stool, designed by Lord Snowdon, used in Prince Charles’s investiture. And as we swerved around hairpin bends on a grey wet sludge of a roadway, I was told it was largely health and safety that prevented these quarries remaining competitive. Or perhaps not, because, when we reached the very top of the slate mountain, there were clearly lorries crawling about way below us. In fact, Penrhyn is still the largest single slate quarry in the world, supplying 85 percent of today’s Welsh slate. “The working quarry is now to the north,” my driver explained. “They still cut the best slate in the world here, but it is expensive to produce.”

  And now people come to fly over the devastation for fun, like human cannon balls, spat out at speeds of 100 miles an hour at a cost of 50 quid.

  – THE FALL –

  “Stand over on the step there with your heels on the lip.” I had already been weighed, helmeted and helped into my red Gore-Tex costume. I had pulled a pair of one-piece disposable plastic goggles down over my face. I was a ziponaut, following an established pre-launch routine.

  “Now lie down and assume a press-up position.” I did so and a part of my protective clothing was wrenched aft and downwards like a tube. “Raise your legs.” A bar attached to the front of my jacket was pulled up and under. My feet made contact. “Press your feet backwards.” I did so and extended my legs. It stretched me out, as if to tie everything together. Don’t do this if you are claustrophobic.

  I was now swaddled. I found it comforting. I was in my own papoose - a baby carriage, hooked up to the wire and, having watched others go, I knew that they were now securing a tie line and snap shackle, which simply stopped me slithering away prematurely. And then I hung there for 10 minutes while they set up the camera.

  Meanwhile the release master was reading out my details: my weight and disposition. (Number one wire or number two. They stand side by side.) Calculations were constantly being made, concerning the prevailing wind conditions and my likely gravitational pull. I had my weight in kilos – 79 – including boots and costume – inscribed on my wrist in marker pen. Had I been heavier, they would have attached a black or yellow canvas triangle to my back designed to slow my progress, had I been lighter they would have added weights. There is a dip down into the middle of the line. If you go too slowly you can fail to gather enough momentum to fly on up the other side. But everything was one for me. I had no choice in the matter and no identifiable feelings of insecurity either. I had become a package. My arms were free, but the rest of me was trussed like an oven-ready chicken in a scarlet wrapping.

  Perfectly balanced, I was simply dangling, face forward, next to a gigantic precipice. I was looking down at a pavement terrace of crushed slate a few feet below me. With a count down of “three, two, one, go!” echoing somewhere on a radio, there was a click above me and I rolled off, not hectically or with any form of stomach-turning acceleration. There was no swoop or lurch, I swept away simply and smoothly with a steady forward motion, immediately picking up alarming speed, and then more speed, and after that more speed again.

  The ground below dropped away from my transit, then rose again as we crossed first one terrace and then another, before it suddenly voided out to reveal the poisonous blue of a lake of water in the bowl of the mine below. The slight, misty drizzle stung my face, my mouth filled with inrushing air and my cheeks walloped out, like Wallace and Gromit at speed.

  Now I was going at 90 to 100 miles an hour. The mile-long distance to the stopping point was covered in well under a minute. And during those few seconds, I was able to glance about me and note exquisite green countryside. There were hill farms and a village with a church at the very edge of the slate bowl. Twisting to the right, I saw how effectively nature was grabbing the territory back. The old workings were already clothed in trees that the “white woolly maggots” of sheep would never have allowed over the rest of Snowdonia.

  It was all gone in an instant. The brown, far side of the pit was rushing up towards me and the galvanised gantries of the other end of the wire were embracing me. There was another click and I slowed. Nothing violent, no sudden jerks, I was just eased into deceleration and a charming girl in mountain gear was holding a metal pole up towards me.

  “Take the hook,” she said.

  I did. More ritual.

  She used the hook to stop me rolling back further than she wanted, and my willing suspension was at an end. Now I was instructed to stand. I did.

  “Did you enjoy that?” I expect that this was more ritual too. But I had, and I told her so.

  – CHOIR PRACTICE –

  I met the boys in the pub in Blaenau and confessed that I was hardly great choir material. On previous form, I should have been sent down for 10 years’ hard practice.

  Does the entire Welsh nation sing well? Are they genetically predisposed to musical capability? My father was a croaker and we took care to stand a distance from him at wedding services. He gave the lie to the claim that Welsh people have “great voices”. Anyway, it’s a minim away from “what a wonderful sense of rhythm you coloured people have”, isn’t it?

  I have experienced musical racism myself, and I accuse my mother. She was convinced I could sing. I was tiny. A Midhurst church throbbing with a full congregation of envious parenthood is not the place to find out that you don’t quite have command of the piping treble solo in “Once in Royal David’s City”. I cracked on the Everest of the treble part – a big climb in a public place – “Mary was that mother mild”. I am breaking out in hives even now.

  I suppose it was my mother’s idea that I would look sweet in one of those cake frills and a red frock marching into Epping Church behind the incense some three years later. Reader, I was “Welsh”, and that meant one thing in Essex (where we had now moved): I could sing. Two services, every Sunday, for five years, never proved otherwise.

  Then Mr Best pointed a finger at me and condemned me to penal servitude in the Brentwood School East House Choir. They beat the time into you. I learned on the gently tapping hoof. I also learned that the best way to survive was to open your mouth in time with the music and let nothing at a
ll emerge. Or, at least, until Mr Best started prowling the back row of the “tenors” and “basses” with an ear cocked.

  So I can bellow along with the best of them. I have even sung in a musical, but all my personal training has been based on the Tony Soprano model – singing along with major seventies classics while driving too fast.

  Mindful of this, I entered the school hall, where fifty members of the Côr y Brythoniaid were sitting in ranks, restless and murmuring, like a dozing monster waiting to be poked into life.

  John, the choirmaster, was addressing them in Welsh so I settled in my seat, poised between the baritones and tenors (just for safety) and honed my look of concerned attention. I would need it if he started talking music. At least I understood three words of Welsh. I peered at my score. Yup. I knew which my line was. He pointed it out. I could see the notes going up and down. It’s surprisingly helpful. But most of all I listened carefully to the bloke with the ’tache sitting next to me and hoped I could pull off the Tony Soprano trick of singing along a nano-second after everybody else.

  Between 1966 and 1974 Côr y Brythoniaid entered 26 competitions and won 19 first prizes. It was founded to bring together a community fracturing with the decline of the slate industry. It became a mighty force in the highly competitive world of battling choirs. We were pretending my visit was a form of audition, but did I really want to pass? They currently faced a demanding schedule of foreign tours and gala appearances in Hungary, with some challenging hotel accommodation thrown in as well, no doubt.

  John Eifon was a big chap. Now he drew himself up and, like a magician, or a druid with a powerful spell to weave, which clearly required sheer force of personality, he waved his magic wand and woke the sleeping dragon.

  Jan Morris, the celebrated Welsh writer, once commented that if you want to experience the power of a male voice choir, you should attend a rehearsal. I can go one better. Attend and sit in the middle of the singers. A great soaring noise engulfed me. Chocolate, dark, swirling, warm, it lifted the hairs on the back of my neck and surged into the cavity of my chest. They began with a famous Welsh hymn, one so revered and sacred and familiar, that, naturally, I didn’t know it at all, but it brought tears to my eyes. And then we sang “Delilah”.

  Here was a tune for me, straight from the Tom Jones catalogue. I might even have sung along with this belter in the car. This was the moment to let my own voice join the swelling throng. For three glorious minutes I fancied that my tenor chords mingled with this great and lovely noise and helped create a harmonious and stirring version of the sixties power ballad. I opened up the mouth and let rip.

  You know the sound that a rip makes, of course. It’s a shredding, tearing noise. On the telly you will hear a magnificent harmonious chorale. Later, however, Brian on sound, who had linked me up to an independent microphone, was able to do something that Mr Best in my school choir had never been able to do. He quieted down the rest of the fifty strong choir and allowed my own voice to stand alone.

  Oh dear. I had better join my father at the back of the church.

  – A LILY OF THE VALLEY –

  Hywel met me at the train station in Llanberis to search for Lloydia Serotina in the mountains. He was a local reserve manager for the region, and therefore an expert on the elusive flower, once known as Mountain Spiderwort. He had himself waited two years before he found a Snowdon Lily. I was to share his secret tryst.

  It felt odd to be setting off to search for an ice age relict of such rarity by public transport. We were on the early train. It was taking the staff up to the café on the summit of Snowdon. High winds had been forecast. There was a feeling of exhilaration in the carriage.

  “What happens if it really blows?” I asked.

  “We get the day off if the train can’t get up there,” a boy in a dark shirt explained. The winds were monitored electronically, as red numbers on marker boards by the side of the track. Nonetheless, there seemed to be an element of human judgment involved, because when we lumbered to a stop, short of the top, there was further debate and a driver and guard got out and peered up the line as if trying to estimate whether they might get blown bodily over the cliff. Unlike most trains, the engine on the Snowdon Mountain Railway actually pushes the train, rather than pulling it, for safety reasons.

  Hywel and I left them at that point and marched off down the great tourist path towards the Black Cliff, revered by some as the “shrine of British climbing”.

  I have to be careful here. You may be more familiar with the geography of Wales’s most populous mountain than I am, so don’t look too hard for clues. This is a secret location. Let’s just say we tramped for a bit along a mountain trail: one of those wide stony thoroughfares that tourists need and I always think must resemble medieval roads.

  Hywel pointed out the exotic natural life like the ravens bouncing on the hillsides; perhaps relatives of the birds that occupy the Tower of London, where Brân, the legendary Welsh King of Britain, had his head buried under the White Tower, according to the Mabinogion.

  It was early and hot, but within two minutes we passed our first semi-unclothed human of advanced age wobbling his pale dugs up towards us. Then we turned left, followed a path back towards the face of the mountain and finally started to climb upwards across a steep slope of scree under a high cliff. As we paused to put on our hard hats, a party of climbers traversed past us to set up station further to the south. “I always wear a helmet now,” said Hywel. “It’s not a difficult climb physically, but there are loose rocks above.” Ten years ago, while he had been exploring close to the cliff something had knocked him unconscious.

  It was a blazing morning. Historically, the earliest amateur explorers climbed at night in order to catch dawn over the Irish Channel, only to be frustrated by persistent cloud cover. Many met nothing but dense fog. Many still do. But I have never climbed Snowdon (or chugged up it) except on a clear day. Now, on this early June morning, after rain, looking out on the sweep of the mountains and Anglesey beyond, with the sharp blue sea stretching out to the horizon, I once again experienced the glory of Eryri. It’s said that on exceptionally clear days from the top of Snowdon you can see Ireland, Scotland, England and the Isle of Man; 24 counties, 29 lakes and 17 islands.

  It was a place of blankness and gigantic geometry. Below us, farms sent cultivated fingers probing into the hills, but they reached no further than the bottom of the valley. An improbable swathe of greensward ran in a colossal smooth parabola down and around the side of the hill. With flat black cliffs, no trees, worn-looking escarpments, and a landscape so airbrushed and smooth from a distance, it is peculiar to discover that it is rough and cluttered close up.

  The sward is not smooth but uncomfortably bumpy. The slopes are huge, impenetrable walls of boulders. The entire surface seethes with water. Marching through rocky areas requires continuous negotiation with the route ahead. But stoop down and the detail becomes more astonishing still. Here in this huge landscape, the tiniest flowers thrive. Hywel pointed out the aconites and the sorrel. The little white petals were everywhere in the wet tussocks of grass between the shattered rock. I thought we might find the lily there. But Hywel said no, and we scrambled higher.

  High on the wall above us was a large white shape. “Ice,” said Hywel. “The sun hardly shines down into this valley and so the snow lingers here.” And there was also a certain acidity to the limestone to be noted. “It is these combinations that create the special conditions for the lily,” he continued.

  Hywel was now directing me like a child looking for an Easter egg. “Up, go on, up a bit.”

  And then, magically, there it was. In a cleft in a rock, swaying slightly in the wind: a delicate flower on a couple of inches of stalk. The light was still low and the sun shone through the petals. It was the perfect time to find the Snowdon Lily. For most of the year it simply looks like a long strand of grass, easily missed, until it blooms in May an
d June.

  “How many petals can you see?” Asked Hywel.

  “Six,”

  “And what do the leaves look like?”

  They were spikey and quite dark. “They look like chives,” I said.

  “Well that directly corresponds with the Welsh name, “the rush leaves of the mountain”.

  Botanists have established the flower as an ice age relict. It wasn’t that tourists had picked them all. In our post-ice age period they had always been rare. The first record of the Snowdon Lily in Great Britain was made by the Welsh botanist Edward Llwyd in 1682. There are varieties in Asia and the Alps but this one, in this valley, on the slopes of this mountain, is genetically unique and it is understood that there are fewer than 100 remaining. Some predict that, with global warming, the plant is threatened and will become extinct.

  For the time being, however, the lily enjoys the cold, icy conditions of Cwm Idwal. The bright day and the sea shining like the Aegean almost mocked its existence. It was exquisite and defiantly alive, bobbing in solitary fragile prettiness on its broken rocky pinnacle. I felt privileged to see it: a survivor in a popular place, cold and inaccessible. A conundrum in itself.

  –7–

  ANGLESEY

  WILDLIFE

  – ROUND THE ISLAND –

  Anglesey is easy to identify, if difficult to pin down. The island juts off the top of mainland Wales in a wide, broken blob of land. Turn around in the middle of its flat plain on a sunny day (and I was blessed with the weather of heaven on my visit) and you encounter the eternal blue rump of Snowdonia, the beginning of mainland Wales proper, rising up on the horizon behind you.

  Is Anglesey particularly Welsh? The ports are connected with the Mersey. Its name is Viking in origin. It is mentioned in history because of the attentions of Italians (or Romans as they were known then). And to cap that, it is full of English people.