by Jan Morris
And there is always Ibsen. We have had many cats at Trefan Morys down the years, their demises always causing me temporary heartbreak. We had a string of beautiful Abyssinians, until their increasing inbreeding seemed to make them insufficiently resilient for the rural life: Theo, Menelik, Solomon, Prester John, all named after historical or legendary emperors of Ethiopian tradition. We had a couple of fine Maine coon cats, Jenks I and Jenks II, named after the original Maine coon pedigree animal, Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines. But we have never had a cat so suited to the place as Ibsen the skögcatt from Norway, the present incumbent. Do you know these animals? They strike me as hybrids between wild and tame, between truth and fable. They are big, tough and rather raggety, and in Norway they are traditionally supposed to be descended from the giant cats of the forest which used to pull Freya, goddess of love, in her chariot. For ages they were the prime farm cats of Norway, much prized for their hunting abilities, but in the twentieth century they became almost extinct, and were rescued from oblivion only by a few devoted enthusiasts.
By now Ibsen—ah, here he is now, boisterously shoving his way through the cat-flap in the stable door—by now Ibsen, the Nordic cat of sagas and snows, seems utterly organic to this Celtic environment. Ibsen, Ibsen, what have you brought us now? Not yet another half-eviscerated field mouse to deposit under the kitchen table! Ah well, better than a beheaded rabbit, I suppose, or a mangled mole, or half a slowworm, or the poor murdered chaffinch you brought us yesterday. The cat is only doing his immemorial duty, and the corpses he leaves for our inspection in various parts of the house are only testimony to his origins as an implacable hunter of the north.
Like almost everywhere else in the western world, the wildlife here has been decimated by modern farming. Pesticides and artificial fertilizers have done for the glowworms, the grass snakes, the hares and even the foxes, that only a few years ago abounded around Trefan Morys. Drainage more drastic than anything Zaccheus Hughes undertook has deprived the frogs and the newts of their homes. But our wild fauna is still rich, and some of it is reviving. Otters are back in the river, badgers are still in the woods, buzzards glide lordly in the sky, slowworms are in the compost heap, herons are poised above pools, doves gloomily coo, starlings and blackbirds infuriatingly imitate our telephone ringing.
The big stuffed bird that stands proudly over there in a glass case is itself a Te Deum for the recovery of a species. Twenty years ago the red kite, though common enough elsewhere in the world, was extinct in Britain but for a couple of nesting pairs in Wales. When Elizabeth came across a fairly decrepit stuffed specimen in a junk shop, she first checked to see if it had died of natural causes, and then brought it home to Trefan. We had it reverently restored, thinking it would be a sad memorial to a vanished species, but instead the red kite made an astonishing recovery, and today its great wheeling flight over the mountains is one of the grand sights of Wales. So the proud bird stands there preening its dead feathers, not as a memorial at all, but in celebration.
I respect all these creatures, dead or alive, real or fabulous, not just for their beauty, but for their immemorial allusions. I would never laugh at a toad under a paving stone because, as everyone knows, Welsh toads count your teeth while your mouth is open and you will lose them one by one. I revere the rooks roosting in the beech trees, because Brân the archetypal crow is fundamental to Welsh myth: it was the hero Brân the Blessed, bird transmuted into man, whose head was buried at the Tower of London near the beginning of time, and is today apotheosized into the Ravens of the Tower, and fed by Beefeaters. There is a local family who have claimed for some generations to have an insight into the language of the rooks, and have put some of it into writing. It seems to have some affinity with Welsh, but to the only example I possess (I have no idea what it means) there is a distinct suggestion of sorcery or even necromancy.
Ymdeflan ymdetlyn ymbetlanlont
Ymseranlont mewn beddrod eddeugant
A ddêl ac a seliwyd â seliau utgyrn ffliwitsh
Only a fool would antagonize the Toad and the Rook!
Many an uninvited creature shares the house with us. There used to be barn owls in the stables, and very welcome lodgers they were. They preyed upon the pestilential mice which nibbled at the grain-store upstairs, and when Zaccheus built the house he cut a special round unglazed window, to facilitate their comings and goings. They were still here when we came to live in the building, and as I was sorry to have to evict them I had a little inscription cut on a window pane in their memory—er cof am y tylluanod, “in memory of the owls.” A ceramic owl over a door honors them too, and guests have sometimes left little clay owls, rather like votive offerings, and a couple of stuffed specimens are, so to speak, funerary memorials. Nowadays the owls live in the trees outside, and one of the fundamental sounds of Trefan Morys is the hooting, often in the daytime, which I sadly interpret to be the song of their homesickness.
The house itself is full of creature noises. Mice scrabble above the ceilings at dead of night. Squirrels slide down the roof. Bees have often swarmed in the walls, and their mighty communal buzz has penetrated our very thoughts. In the summer the odd bumblebee, poor old fellow, finds himself trapped in a cobweb in the corner of a window, and bellows his protest until I arrive to liberate him (murmuring, as Sterne’s Uncle Toby once murmured to a bluebottle, “Why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.”). May bugs deafeningly appear out of nowhere late on June evenings, burbling incompetently around the lights. Robins and swallows sometimes fly noisily in, to Ibsen’s criminal excitement.
Any old stone and wooden house like ours, slightly damp, full of crannies, is bound to shelter many little creatures. Somebody estimated, in the 1950s, that a larger half-timbered house in England might shelter a couple of mice, 200 spiders, twenty wood-boring beetles, eighty fleas, twenty clothes moths, ten cockroaches and a hundred flies. We can probably match that, with rather more mice, rather fewer fleas, lots of wood lice and infinitely more bats. Bats are protected, and the little species we have, mostly pipistrelles, are generally supposed to be sweet and harmless. So they are, perhaps, if you just see them flitting delightfully about in the dusk, on your holiday visit to the countryside, or skimming so agilely over the surface of the river. If you actually share a house with them, they are less endearing.
Our bat population varies. I have known ninety pipistrelles to swoop out of their holes above the kitchen door when evening comes. I have counted forty-six whizzing and flitting around the upstairs rooms. They can be exciting to watch, but they are no fun as co-inhabitants. I have to cover my bedroom windows with wire mesh, to prevent them coming in, and after their winter hibernation they can leave an all too pungent smell of excrement behind. Often I have been tempted to exterminate them, law or no law, but as yet I have only gone so far as to make Trefan Morys temporarily a bat-free zone by banging on ceilings, slamming on floors, and playing loud hi-fi music close to bat haunts. “This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me,” quoth Uncle Toby to his fly, but even he, the kindest soul in literature, might sometimes have thought differently about bats.
Of course the language of all these creatures is Welsh, and if ghosts talk here they certainly speak in yr hen iaith, rather than in the “thin language,” which is how Welsh-speakers characterize the English tongue. For those who love languages Welsh is a thing of majesty, so nobly defying the worst that history can do to silence it. Is it a practical survival? Perhaps not. Is it strictly necessary, when every Welsh citizen speaks English anyway? No. But it is something beautiful in itself, like the rarest of animals, or a priceless and irreplaceable work of art. It has sometimes been used as a code, being incomprehensible to almost everyone outside Wales, and sometimes as a secret language—English people habitually suppose that when they enter a Welsh pub and hear it spoken, it has been at that moment switched on to annoy them (“the minute we walked in they started their jabbering…”). Its great virtues, though, are not obsc
urant. It is a difficult language to learn, because so many of its words are not related to more familiar roots, and because it goes in for mutations, the altering of letters according to gender, or what comes before: But its grammar is mostly straightforward, and its pro nunciation is entirely logical. And far from being a jabber, it is a poetical language par excellence, as lovely to listen to as it is to read—and as irresistible too, at least to romantics like me, in its intimations of defiance, rootedness and immemorial age.
Welsh still drifts and reverberates around this kitchen, the natural heart of the house. To most of our neighbors Welsh is the first language of life, and there is more to a language than mere words. Conceptions, nuances, allusions and communal memories charge different vocabularies in different ways, so that a horse, say, when summoned into the imagination in the English language, gallops away in one motion, one light, and a ceffyl in Welsh prances off in quite another. I can remember people here who could not speak English at all: Now everybody is bilingual, but a marvelous transformation overcomes the Parrys, the Williamses, the Owens and the Robertses when they switch from yr iaith fain to yr hen iaith.
Instantly they are vitalized, and conversations which have been lumpish or prosaic are charged with humor and quick intelligence. It is as though the ancient genius of the country, cherished by the poets and scholars of other ages, but half-stifled during the centuries of English domination, is suddenly rejuvenated and brought into the light again. Merry evenings were undoubtedly enjoyed around the tables of Trefan Morys, when the farm lads lived here long ago, and merry evenings still come easily now. My own Welsh is too simple to tap the depths of this half-hidden folk-brilliance, but when Twm comes over with his Sioned, and a handful of friends sit where you are sitting, with liquor to keep them in form, Rhys Goch Eryri himself would still feel at home.
One of the hottest of all Welsh patriots, the nineteenth century Lady Llanover of Gwent, allowed not a word of English to be spoken in her kitchen. Although her husband Benjamin was an absolute Englishman—as Commissioner of Works in London he gave his name to Big Ben the clock—she dressed her servants in Old Welsh Costumes of her own design, employed domestic harpers and stuck over her doorway some lines which she had allegedly translated from the Old Welsh, but which I suspect she had composed herself:
Who art thou, visitor?
If friend, welcome of the heart to thee:
If stranger, hospitality shall meet thee:
If enemy, courtesy shall imprison thee.
Whoever wrote them, I like to think my kitchen subscribes to their sentiments (except perhaps the bit about the enemy—it does not invariably respond courteously to busybody officials, intrusive evangelists or abrasive ramblers, and I dare say Lady Llanover’s kitchen didn’t really, either). Certainly the room always offers me a welcome of the heart which I like to think reaches me out of its own generations of hospitable inhabitants, and for that matter out of Wales itself.
I agree with another earlier Morris of these parts, the seventeenth-century Iorwerth Morus, who was a cattle drover by trade, and spent much of his time away from home. This is what he wrote about returning to the kitchen at his own house, Hafod Lom:
Mi af oddi yma i’r Hafod Lom,
Er bod hi’n drom o siwrne,
Mi gaf yno ganu cainc
Ac eistedd ar fainc y simdde,
Ac ond odid dyna’r fan
Y byddaf tan y bore.
I’ll go from here to Hafod Lom,
Although it’s a long journey,
There I shall get to singing a song
Sitting in the chimney-seat,
And probably that’s the place
I shall be until morning.
I have always led a peripatetic life, too, half the time away from home, and no moments of it have been happier than those which bring me flying up that rubble-littered lane, ignoring a sudden rattle somewhere behind the steering wheel, to scrape perilously between the gates of Trefan Morys (it didn’t matter with the dear old ones, which bore the scars of a thousand misjudgments), and stand once more before that dark blue stable door. If I can hear the vacuum cleaner going I ring the big bell, to give warning. If Ibsen comes to greet me I pause to flatter him. And then—well, you know the rest!
Another cup? Or do you feel like a malt whiskey? No? Then come and see the rest of the house.
CHAPTER THREE
A Writer’s House
If the kitchen complex represents the unchanging Welshness of Trefan Morys, bequeathed by history and sealed by its stones and vapors, the other part of the house represents my own contribution to its character—my patina, as it were. There is very little here that I have inherited, only a few books (Balzac, Walter Scott, W. W. Jacobs) and some pictures (mostly of Wales, by great-aunts). All the rest I have acquired myself, so that it represents my own tastes and interests, and adds a purely individual, mostly late twentieth-century layer to the palimpsest of the house.
This part of Trefan Morys, its work-module, consists of two rooms, each forty feet long, one above the other and connected by a wooden staircase. The downstairs room is entirely a library, lined with bookshelves wherever there is space. The upstairs is partly library too, but chiefly a living and writing room. Sofas, chairs and a divan are strewn about it, and a black Norwegian wood-burning stove stands in the middle, its chimney running up through the roof. A heavy wooden door, with a portentous if slightly rusted iron key, leads down that flight of stone steps to the yard outside.
Both rooms are crisscrossed with beams, and both have doors leading into the more domestic quarters of the house. The kitchen and the bedrooms of Trefan Morys, the living-module, speak of hospitality and tradition, but now we are in the workshop. Only I can really assess the true beauty of these rooms. Like red wines, they need warming. They need the caress of long affection to bring out their bouquet, and a cat to sit curled on the sofa there, woodsmoke and crackle from the stove and the self-indulgent, sensual satisfaction of knowing that here down the years, watched by that Chinese wicker goat on the table by the stairs, I have given my best to the writing of books.
Those books themselves, in all their editions and derivatives, fill a long bookcase along one wall, for me to gloat over. Nearby is a wooden armchair awarded as a prize at an Eisteddfod at Cefn-y-Waun. Visitors often ask me if I won it myself, and I am properly flattered, but it is really a backhanded sort of compliment, for as the carved letters on the chair clearly tell us, the prize was awarded in 1912.
English people often grumble that Wales is too narrow a place, too obsessed with its past and its problems. There is something to this petulant complaint. Perhaps some of my neighbors are a little inward-looking. It entertains me to observe how, entering my library, they so often ignore its several thousand books about other countries, other cultures, and make straight for the stacks about Wales! But then you probably think that my emotions about my house are just as obsessive. I do go on and on, you may well think, about the traditions of Welsh hospitality, the mystic power of the Welsh language, the fragrance o-
f Welsh woodsmoke, Ibsen the cat, sgotyn, owls and all that. “Why, you curse those poor bats, but you’re secretly rather proud of having them!”
But the identity of Wales has been so threatened down the centuries, and it still has to fight so hard for its own survival, that it often comes to assume an almost paranoic importance among its patriots. Lady Llanover perhaps rather overdid it, in her day, when she devised her own traditional folk costumes for her domestic servants, and chose a dragon and a horned goat as supporters of her coat of arms, but she succeeded in maintaining Welsh traditions, Welsh culture, in a part of Wales particularly threatened by English ways. If the Welsh activists relaxed their enthusiasm for a moment, all might still be lost, and only the idea of Wales would remain to haunt imaginations for ever after.
Besides, this part of the country was for so long isolated from the wider world that knowledge of other peoples, other histories, was generally limited
. A tremendous stir was created when a black slave-boy turned up here in the eighteenth century: Half the girls fell in love with him, his fiddle music was in great demand, he became an enthusiastic chapel-goer, married a Welsh wife and left behind him seven Afro-Welsh children, their own seed now disseminated, I do not doubt, among half of us. When in 1846 the London government decided to make a survey of public education in the country, they sent teams of piously monoglot English-speaking Educational Commissioners who reported (for example) that children not so far from Trefan thought that Eve was the mother of Jesus Christ and that Moses was married to the Virgin Mary. More disgracefully still, “only one out of the three best scholars,” reported the inspectors indignantly, “was able to find England on the map.” Some imps and urchins may have been pulling their legs, but it was certainly true that in those days most people here were very ignorant about the world beyond their own horizons, and had probably never set eyes on a foreigner in their lives.
I would guess that to those children the earnest commissioners themselves were almost like visitors from another planet, so utterly different must they have been from anybody they had met before, and correspondingly fascinating. Some years ago a cheerful pair of young homosexual men from London, one a hairdresser, one a teacher, came to live in a rented cottage in Eifionydd. Nobody had met people like them. They were probably the first openly gay couple ever to live in these parts, and they were a wow. Everybody was enthralled by them, everybody asked them in, everybody wanted their hair done by the one partner, or their opinions about the local schools confirmed by the other. It was a sadness for all, and a horrible shock, when AIDS caught up with them even here, and frightened mothers began closing their windows when they walked by, in case the germs came in…