A Writer's House in Wales

by Jan Morris

  Until a year or two ago, I must tell you, the gates were more interesting. They were far more ramshackle then, old boards clamped and nailed together with bits of wood, with rusted iron hinges, and splintered patches here and there. The gaps beneath them were so wide that a cat could pass through almost without wriggling, and to keep them closed they had to be propped up with stones. I loved them because they always reminded me of gates on the island of Crete, whose age-old fabrics, repeatedly patched, always seem to me to be sheltering mysterious secrets within. Trefan Morys’s gates used to suggest the same, but they had not weathered the Atlantic centuries as well as their Cretan counterparts had defied the Mediterranean, and so they were replaced by gates of oak so solid that they will last a thousand years, and to the annoyance of Ibsen our Norwegian Forest cat, take a bit of squirming under.

  Anyway we pass through the gates (noting as we go various anomalous knobs and handles inherited from their predecessors—I think of them as generational) and we find ourselves in a stone-walled yard. One side of it is filled by the house, built of assorted undressed granite boulders. It is long and low, with one door downstairs, and a second on the second floor, reached by a flight of stone steps dripping with toadflax. The doors are dark blue. There are half a dozen rather churchy-looking windows on this side of the house, and a clutter of gray plastic downpipes which would look anomalous to architectural purists, but strike me as engagingly functional.

  At one end the second floor opens onto a deck or terrace, balustraded with slate slabs, planked with wood, and above it all rises my own white wooden cupola—well, off-white generally, between paint jobs, and cracking a bit in some places. Long ago I dreamt of settling a colony of storks in it, forever paying honor to my initials above their heads. When I learnt that their wings would have to be pinioned, to prevent them migrating in search of Hans Andersen, I imported instead some fan-tailed doves from England. These turned out to have a strong homing instinct, and promptly flew back to Gloucestershire, so in the end I made do with housing our television aerial inside the woodwork. The weather vane makes a slight grating noise, as the wind revolves it, and I like to fancy the points of the compass rustily replying—East West, groan the English ones, Gogledd De, squeak the Welsh pair slyly in reply.

  There’s a bold iron bell beside the door, embossed with the date 1842. We brought it with us from the big house. In Victorian times it was used to summon the fieldworkers home for their victuals, rather like the slave bells of the American South: now it is meant to be a doorbell, although since it is so stately-looking hardly anybody ever dares to ring it, preferring to knock on the door instead. We’ll use it ourselves, though, to tell Elizabeth we’re here—but no, wait a minute, isn’t that the whine of a vacuum cleaner? She is hastily cleaning up for your arrival—there have been grandchildren about, and at this time of year Ibsen is inclined to moult his luxuriant northern fur. Elizabeth is the designer of Trefan Morys as it is today, and if for me the building is some kind of symbolical abstraction, for her it is essentially a living machine. Give her a moment, then, wait until the motor winds down, and then—Clang! Clang! Clang! sounds the big bell.

  The door is a stable door still, opening in two halves, top and bottom, so that a horse could watch the passing scene through the top part. It now leads directly into the kitchen, which is also the dining room. The dining room indeed! Up at the Plas, in its great medieval days, doubtless the uchelwyr ate grandly enough, but to the stablemen who lived in this house before us I suspect the very notion of an ystafell fwyta, a dining room, would have seemed grandiose. I’m sure they were splendid drinkers, but anything but gourmets.

  Times are changing now, but until very recently most people in this part of Wales, far among the western seas, remote from newfangled ideas of cuisine or even edibility, were never terribly interested in food. Just as the people of Sardinia declined to taste the carrot until the 1950s, so to this day many of my neighbors, living beside waters rich in shellfish, have never eaten an oyster or even a mussel. Within the memory of living people herring was the only fish they would touch. Elsewhere in Wales people subsisted largely on potatoes, and the quarrymen in the mountains ate mostly bread and butter; but for centuries a staple of the rural diet up here was a dish called sgotyn—break a slice of bread into a bowl, pour boiling water over it, add salt and pepper to taste and serve at once. When they were eating roast peacock and oyster pie in the great hall of Plas Trefan, their stable-serfs were deep into sgotyn, so that the advanced cuisines with which Elizabeth experiments, though thoroughly organic, always seem to me a little anomalous to the house.

  Nevertheless, when we open the door the kitchen does look inalienably Welsh, because its floor is of big Welsh slate slabs, and it is dominated by a high Welsh dresser loaded with Welsh crockery. “Ho,” I cry, spotting a book of contemporary Polynesian cookery beside the cooker, “What’s this? Bring me sgotyn!” For my own eating preferences are basic too. I like single malt whisky with bully beef, and marmalade with sausages, but in general I hate anything too fancy, whether of cuisine or of décor—anything to do with gourmetcy or epicureanism—candlelit dinners, elaborate sauces, fashionable interethnic stuff, sun-dried mushrooms or blackened tuna. Give me sgotyn every time. I boast of having drunk a glass of wine every day since the Second World War, but young and simple wines are the ones I most enjoy, fresh from the vineyards, with none of your vaunted bouquets of leather or of pomegranate—wines, as Evelyn Waugh once wrote of Cretan vintages, “lowly esteemed by connoisseurs.”

  Still, the Tahiti chicken in the oven really does smell rather good, there is a bottle of Australian red on the table (no pedantry in this house about white wine with white meat), and after that hair-raising drive up the lane you look as if you might welcome more than a slice of peppered bread in boiling water, so let us sit down on a bench at the table, and have a little lunch.

  Ah, hospitality! To my mind it is much better for the giver than for the receiver. I have not dined in anybody else’s house for several years, far preferring to eat in restaurants, and I would stay in the scruffiest hotel in Zagazig rather than accept the offer of a room for the night from the dearest of friends (“but believe me, you know us, we’d never bother you, we’d leave you quite alone.” Oh yeah?). Nor am I by nature gregarious, cherishing my privacy and my solitude. But I love welcoming people to Trefan Morys. Sometimes, if I hear strangers walking down the lane outside, I leap out upon them and drag them in for a glass of wine or a cup of tea. It is the duty of a house to be hospitable, and especially a Welsh house, for kindness to visitors was compulsory here long before the days of tourism. There is even a sort of folk-saint of Welsh hospitality—Ifor Hael, Ifor the Generous, who was poetically immortalized for his generosity in the fourteenth century, and is still hazily remembered in houses named Llys Ifor, Ifor’s Court, or pubs called the Ifor Arms.

  The kitchen has always been the theater of this style—the Welsh kitchen, where, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins thought in the nineteenth century,

  That cordial air made those kind people a hood

  All over, as of a bevy of eggs the mothering wing

  Will, or mild nights the new morsels of Spring…

  It was the center of every cottage, where the hearth was, where the children slept in cots beside the fire, where the cat dozed among the sheepdogs and the saucepans hung polished from the wall. A thousand Welsh fables are set in the kitchen. Here the tylwyth teg, the Fair People, came knocking at the door disguised as beggars, to reward generous housewives with supernatural favors. Here strange old men crouched in the firelight, telling tales of revenge or recompense. Sinister fairy-harps appeared in the kitchen, driving people mad with their insensate music. And when in the distant past Elen, a young mother, was disobliging to the tylwyth teg, she found her lovely child gradually transmuting, day after day, into a malignant elf, leering at her from its cradle beside the ancestral hearth.

  By and large, though, the kitchens of Wales have happ
y connotations. They were the rooms where families got to know each other, friends met and children grew up from babies to fellow-workers. When Welsh people were far away from home, it was chiefly the kitchen they remembered with fond nostalgia, and when they were old and prolix they talked incessantly of childhood evenings by the kitchen fire. Our kitchen has been a place of children too, and the house is full of their mementos: children who are now men and women, and are represented here by the books they have published, the music they have recorded, the pictures they have drawn or painted, and also children who are children still.

  For those grandchildren that Elizabeth was cleaning up after often come here during their holidays. On the wall beside the door there we have penciled a register of their heights, from babyhood to adolescent: from the days when Jess or Sam could scarcely stand to be measured, to the times when Ruben or Angharad were taller than we were ourselves, and no longer worth the recording. We did it always as we said goodbye to them, and I can still remember the mingled hilarity, sadness and anticipation of the occasions: they were amused by the ritual, they were miserable to be going back to school, they were happy to think they would soon be in their own beds at home (and some of the same emotions, I fear, passed through our own minds, as in loving exhaustion we offered their mothers a last cup of tea for the road).

  Wherever Welsh people have gone in the world, the image of the cup of tea has gone with them. Even now, in the days of universal junk food, Welsh women like to live up to their reputation. The Olde Welsh Tea Shoppe may have petered out but the old Welsh cup of tea, sweet and strong, is still universally on offer. When Wittgenstein the philosopher stayed in the house of a Welsh preacher the minister’s wife urged her hospitality upon him with some diffidence—“Would you like a cup of tea, now, Dr. Wittgenstein? Would you like bread? Would you care for a nice piece of cake?” Sonorously from the next room came the voice of the clergyman himself: “Don’t ask the gentleman! Give!” We have managed to honor these precepts at least to the extent that all around the kitchen hang pictures of Trefan painted or drawn by our visitors, and given to us in lieu of thank-you letters (or perhaps to mask hasty withdrawals).

  Of course hospitality is only a façade of kindness, and I like to believe that kindness is built into my house. Hopkins thought the very smell of woodsmoke in a Welsh house was itself a sort of kindness, bringing sweetness to the souls of its inhabitants. I doubt if everybody who has lived in this house has had a sweet soul, and my own is frequently sour, but in principle I believe that, just as animal lovers are said to grow to look like their pets, so householders acquire some of the characteristics of their houses. The men who lived in our stable loft were charitable fellows, I am sure, good to each other, good to their animals, and if I ever feel evil tempers arising in me, I try to remember their example, passed down to me through the medium of the house we have shared.

  Kindness can be a religion—what Christians call “charity,” greater than faith or hope—and this was holy country once. The name of the village, Llanystumdwy, means “a holy place on a bend of the water,” but there are suggestions that it refers to a river goddess of prehistory, or at least of Roman times. There are several holy wells around here too, beside which hermits of antiquity built their cells, offering cures to the sick, absolution to the repentant and, long after their deaths, bottled water to one of our neighbors who preferred the spring of St. Cybi to the taps of the Welsh Water Board. For centuries pilgrims passed this way on their journey to the sacred island of Enlli, Bardsey in English, where Merlin is supposed to be buried, and which we can almost see from our upstairs window. Enlli was so sanctified a place that in Roman Catholic times three pilgrimages there were declared the equal of a pilgrimage to Rome itself, and throughout the Middle Ages a stream of devotees passed this way to take boats to the island from along the coast. Perhaps now and then, until the Reformation put an end to it all, absentminded pilgrims with their staves and knapsacks strayed along our lane and were welcomed to beer and sgotyn by the fire.

  It is certainly not long since the last of the carol singers came up from the village at Christmastime, to assemble sheepishly outside the kitchen door, sing their songs and file inside for refreshments around the table; and not much longer since children showed up at the New Year asking for pennies according to an immemorial privilege of theirs. The old customs are dying now, even here, but if we want a reminder of them we have a gramophone record in the house of old Welsh men from hereabouts singing unaccompanied plygain carols, ancient songs for Christmas morning. If I play it, close my eyes and hear their cracked old voices chanting polyphonically out of the past, I can imagine it is the stablemen singing upstairs, while their horses stir, chomp and paw the ground in their stalls below.

  Anyway, Hopkins’s cordial smell of the woodsmoke certainly permeates our kitchen, if only because the timbers of its roof have been breathing it since before the American Revolution. The substances of this house are profoundly organic. Most of the timbers that sustain it come from the Trefan woodlands, down to the river, and they are numbered still for the benefit of the haulers who dragged them up here with their teams of horses. A few, straighter and stouter than the rest, came from ships’ timbers—ships wrecked, I dare say, on the seacoast a mile or two away. Wherever they came from, our beams have been matured in benign essences: sea salt, river vapor, the fragrance of damp leaves and summer suns, all marinated, so to speak, in age and hauled up here to my house to bless us all, like incense in a church. I love the woodiness of the house, which makes it feel alive, and I love the odd nails and wooden posts hammered into its beams down the generations, together with boardwood planks to strengthen sagging timbers, and odd chunks of wood to hold cracks together.

  For that matter the big stone boulders of the house’s walls always seem to me sentient, put together as they were with such care and skill in the days of old conviction. The men of Eifionydd are still at home with stone. They lift huge stone blocks with almost supernatural ease. They can match a stone with a gap, a gap with a stone, with an easy measuring glance. If there is one ancient craft that has survived here into modern times unimpaired, even enhanced, it is the art of dry-stone walling; old examples snake their ways over bare mountain moorlands, new ones are exhibited in mile after mile of elegant construction wherever a new highway needs a boundary wall.

  Most of the Trefan Morys stones obviously came from the countryside around, which is rocky and littered with boulders, sometimes standing on end so that they look like holy megaliths. Some of them are holy megaliths, sacred down the aeons to the people who lived in these parts, and a bit sacred to me still. They can be eerie things—not far from here, in a churchyard wall, an ancient stone looks out across the gravestones with the chill inscription Y garreg a lef o’r mur, “the stone cries from the wall.” More often they seem to me to possess an inner warmness, as though there is a small sacred fire glowing somewhere in them, below the lichen that often clambers up their flanks: and when, in moments of particularly ridiculous emotion, I have thrown my arms around them and placed my cheek against their rough surfaces, I fancy a gentle scent issuing from them, rather like the smell of donkeys.

  I don’t often, of course, embrace the stones of my house, but still the jumbled mass of them, jammed together with infinite care so long ago, this way and that, big beside small, wedging each other, balancing each other, supporting each other—the whole assembly of them, piled one above the other up to the slates of the roof, often seems to me like a company of old friends. If ever one falls off, no matter, find another one and stick it in the gap. If that bulge in the corner does seem to have grown a little more noticeable during our years in the house, getting no help from our ill-advised buttress, well, we’ll outlive it, and anyway it is the destiny of Welsh buildings simply to collapse at the last into exhausted piles of stone, attended by rotting beams—a thousand such derelict Trefan Moryses litter the mountain slopes and deserted valleys of this country.

  Other stone
s undoubtedly came from the immemorial quarries in the mountains nearby. I like to suppose they brought some of the mountain strength and mystery with them, and especially some of the wistful beauty of Cwm Pennant, the Pennant valley, whose stone workings were the nearest. This valley, down which the Dwyfor river flows, emerges from the Eryri massif four or five miles from the house. It has inspired many poets in its time. I was once talking to our local roadman, in the days when there were such folk, and happened to mention that some of our stones must have come from the Cwm Pennant quarries. At once he launched dreamily into the classic lyric of the valley, by the local poet Eifion Wyn:

  Pam, Arglwydd, y gwneuthost Cwm Pennant mor dlws,

  A bywyd hen bugail mor fyr?

  O Lord, why has thou made Cwm Pennant so beautiful,

  And the life of the shepherd so short?

  So instinct are the materials of Trefan Morys with what the Arabs call baraka—the quality of both blessing and being blessed—that in my opinion a Rockefeller himself could not build a replica of it. Money could not buy the gifts of age, virtue and experience that imbue it, the allure of the Trefan woods, the cruel beauty of Cwm Pennant. Nor could any tycoon move the house stone by stone to some other place on earth, as Tudor mansions have been moved, and London Bridge: My house is so absolutely of its setting, is rooted so profoundly not just in the soil, but in the very idea of Wales, that anywhere else it would lose all charisma.

  Mind you—here, another cup of tea—Don’t ask, give!!!—mind you, I fear you are sitting in a rearguard outpost of Welshness. There are, of course, countless old houses in Wales, many far more magnificent than this, many far older, but they do not represent the future of Wales, or even its present. In theory most Welsh people would instinctively covet a jumbled old house deep in the country; in practice the vast majority of our citizenry, whether indigenous or incomer, would prefer a home more contemporary. Beams that breathe the flavors of the woods and sea, stones that glow with an inner warmth and smell like donkeys, cold slate floors, echoes of lost songs—romantic fancies perhaps, but obsolete. Even in this far corner of the country, where Welsh ways are still entrenched, and romantic fancies are not scoffed at, the Executive Home is arriving, central heating is a prerequisite of civilized living, and a modern bungalow is more in demand than a venerable cottage. The remote old farmsteads, up high mountain valleys, are abandoned one by one, and all too many young people run away to the towns.