A Writer's House in Wales

by Jan Morris

Relatively few foreigners come to our district even now, the most common tourists being those indefatigable travelers, the Dutch, who find their way in ones and unobtrusive twos into every last valley. The most familiar aliens in recent years have been Bretons, who until a few years ago bicycled from village to village, farm to farm, selling their onions; we so welcomed visits from these well-weathered strangers, and so enjoyed drinking wine with them, that we never could resist buying strings of their onions, some of which used to hang for so long from the kitchen stairs that they became part of the room’s décor, and decoratively sprouted.

  There have also been, ever since the Second World War, a handsome company of Poles, now aging—soldiers and their families who declined to live in a Communist Poland when the war was over, but have lingered ever since, with pride and dignity, in a hutted camp of exile down the coast.

  I am Anglo-Welsh myself—Welsh father, English mother. My first loyalty is always to Cymru, but like Giraldus before me I am proud of the best in both peoples, and I like to think that Trefan Morys, besides honoring those old Welsh criteria of the kitchen, represents too a wider empathy. That is why my weather vane lettering is in two languages, the one to represent the rootedness of the house and its symbolisms, the other to express my own dual horizons.

  My two families, paternal and maternal, have in the past been very different. My father’s family has been, so far as I know, living in Wales since the beginning of time, bred from peasant stock not so long ago, proud of itself and its simple style, and devoted down the generations to that seminal Welsh art, music. My mother’s family on the other hand has prided itself upon its Norman origins, which brought its forebears, not so long after the Conquest, to their manor house in the Somerset Mendips—where their brass-plated tombs, with armor and swords and little dogs at their feet, look as remote from the idea of Welshness as the Conqueror himself.

  Could any lines of descent be more disparate? The two families first came into contact at the time of the First World War, after several hundred years of occupying the same island of Britain, and their attitudes to that conflict perfectly reflect their two cultures. Both families suffered a terrible loss in that war, one by shellfire, one by gassing, but as their letters from the front reveal, they had made their sacrifices in very different spirits. My English uncle had gone to battle like a Rupert Brooke, and wrote proudly of it to his father—exalted by the honor of the challenge, head high, with a copy of Tristram Shandy in his jacket pocket when the fatal blow struck him. I found a letter from one of my paternal uncles to another, though, conscientiously advising his younger brother how best to find a cushy billet when he crossed over to France to be asphyxiated. Both were good men, I do not doubt, both were surely brave, but while one was proud to die for King, Flag and Empire, the other was chiefly concerned to see that all Morrises got safely home to Wales.

  Some people would say these are racial characteristics—on the one side the Norman sense of splendor, on the other the Celtic sense of place. Wales is a great place for theories of race and nationality, because it has been for so long a place of rivalries between indigenes and incomers. Of course over the centuries the several strains mingled. The Normans often married Welsh beauties (preferably heiresses), and eventually crossbred with the Saxons to become the English, while the Welsh, for all their obduracy, so far betrayed their principles that there are probably few households in Wales today who do not have some English blood in their veins. The antipathies persist nevertheless, and they are often misrepresented as racial rivalries, when they are really cultural convictions.

  As for nationality, another word that crops up whenever Welshness is discussed, it is of course purely artificial. It is ersatz. There is nothing organic to nationality. Lloyd George, the archetypal Welshman, was born in Manchester. You can play rugby for Wales if just one of your grandfathers happens to be born in this country. Nationality is decreed by a line drawn in a map, a chance confinement or a signature on a notary’s paper. I have been what is generically called a Welsh nationalist for years, but only because I believe that political power is necessary to secure the cultural integrity of a people, not least a minority people; English critics still sneer at “Welsh Nats,” but in fact the chief Welsh political party makes no reference to nationality, let alone race, but is simply Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales.

  But alas the Welsh, especially the Welsh-speaking Welsh, have acquired the reputation of being prickly chauvinists, self-obsessed and introspective. It is true that, like my paternal fighting uncles, they have chiefly wanted to get safely home to Wales, and I myself have suffered always from the debilitating weakness of homesickness. Welsh people have seldom been great emigrants, even at times of national hardship. There are few big Welsh settlements abroad, such as those by which the Scots and the Irish ensure that half the world is permanently unable to evade St. Patrick’s Day or the skirling of the pipes. There is such a thing as a Professional Welshman, on the Scots and Irish model, but he seldom travels farther than London, where he can often be found in pubs pretending to be Dylan Thomas. Our contemporary international stars do not unduly belabor their Welshness. Unlike their English contemporaries, even now families of the Welsh bourgeoisie seldom buy themselves cottages in France, or second homes on the awful Costa del Sol.

  Like me they have been too homesick, perhaps, to be successful expatriates, and although there have been several attempts to establish Little Wales on foreign strands, only two have really succeeded. One is now the French department of Brittany, but it began centuries ago as a settlement of people from southern Wales, searching out across the Channel a landscape and coastline not unlike their own, and taking with them a language that is to this day the nearest foreign thing to Cymraeg. The other Wales outre-mer comprises the Welsh villages and ranches of Argentinian Patagonia, where Welsh is a living language to this day, and where a Minister from our corner of Wales regularly goes to minister to its Baptist congregations. Now that everyone here understands English, Patagonia is the one place in the world where, unless you happen to know Spanish, you may find yourself obliged to converse in Cymraeg.

  The Welsh have, however, been great wanderers, as against settlers. If you will come with me now, up the spiral staircase with the pebble at the bottom—don’t be alarmed, it’s perfectly steady—and into the upstairs living room, you will see through the end window Bae Aberteifi, Cardigan Bay, which is an inlet of the Irish Sea, which is a tributary of the Atlantic Ocean, which is an unobstructed highway to the whole world. It would be odd indeed if, living with such a prospect among the sheep and cattle of their shuttered mountains, the people of these parts did not sometimes feel footloose, or tempted to drop everything and see the planet for themselves. Our peninsula stood, after all, on one of the great sea routes of the ancient world, by which the missionaries of the Christian faith crisscrossed the Irish Sea in their wood-and-leather coracles carrying the word from Ireland to Wales to the European continent—evangelists who are remembered to this day as local saints, and honored with place-names.

  Welsh sailors from these parts were the first Europeans to reach America. Everyone knows that! Prince Madog ap Owain Gwynedd got there first, in the year 1170, and never came back again—he was, in the words of one of the Triads, one of the Three Who Made a Total Disappearance From the Isle of Britain. You don’t believe me? Well not so far from here there is an old sea jetty with a notice upon it, declaring without possibility of disagreement that “Prince Madog Sailed From Here To Mobile, Alabama”—and at Mobile, Alabama, there is a plaque on the waterfront to confirm that he got there. What, you’re laughing? Haven’t you heard of the Mandan Indians of the Missouri Valley, who were undoubtedly descended from Madog’s brave crew? They were light-skinned people, they fished from coracles and they spoke a language recognizably Welsh—cwm, a valley in Welsh, was koom in Mandan, prydferth, beautiful, was prydfa, and the words for old, blue and big were identical in both tongues. Who could argue with all that?

  A
nyway, look out there now, through the trees into the sea. Away to the right is Ynys Enlli, where we are told 20,000 saints lie buried (a sort of honorary sainthood, I think, acquired by being there at all). A little closer are the islands of St. Tudwal, inhabited only by sheep. To the left is a promontory that shelters Porthmadog, once the chief exporting port of the Welsh slate trade—the slate was brought there from the mountain quarries by a narrow-gauge railway which still operates for the tourist trade. And sailing across our line of vision, backwards and forwards, ever again there pass the Porthmadog schooners known as the Western Ocean Yachts. Do you see them? They were built in Porthmadog, owned by local syndicates of farmers, clergymen, bank managers, doctors, manned by local crews, commanded by local captains. They were among the most beautiful little ships ever to sail the western seas, none of them more than 500 tons, but of a grandeur beyond their size.

  They were the ships that carried the slate, the very substance of Wales, all around the world, to all the ports of Europe, into the Indian Ocean, round Cape Horn, up to Newfoundland, coming back to London or Cardiff loaded with fruits, wines or olive oil, and so home in ballast to Porthmadog. Just for a few years they made men of these parts, once so isolated, marvelously well-traveled. In 1897 a boy named David Jenkins signed on for the first time as a deck boy and cook, and this is how his maiden voyage went: to Buenos Aires in Argentina, to Galveston in Texas, around the Horn to collect guano from Peru, to Liverpool, to Newcastle, back to the Gulf of Mexico and sunk in two minutes in a storm off Tobago. Jenkins was shipped back to Wales in another vessel, but after a fortnight at home found himself a new ship and was off to South America again. The Porthmadog schooners, like their crews, were so irrepressible and indefatigable in their brief time that in June 1899 seventeen ships from this remote haven of the Irish Sea simultaneously lay below the Rock of Gibraltar.

  There they go now, swift and sturdy, their white sails billowing, their deckmen waving goodbye to relatives on the shore, or even to us if they notice us at our window—off on voyages that will take them from our little backwater into the farthest corners of the oceans. You can’t see them there? They don’t stir your heart as they stir mine? That is because they are only dreamships. The last of the Western Ocean Yachts sailed out of Porthmadog almost a century ago. One alone is still afloat, as a mastless hulk in the Harbour of Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where she had gone in search of guano. All the rest are scrapped or at the bottom of seas—except only for those phantom fleets outside my window, which I can summon into view whenever I like. In their honor long ago I commissioned a nautical craftsman living nearby to build for me, from the original builders’ plans, models of three of them: And if you look around now, and raise your eyes to the ceiling, there they are, standing on the crossbeams. All three were once familiar to watchers standing in my window, and one ended her life out there, aground on a rock a mile or two from home, after sailing all the way back from Valparaíso. The two-masted Sara Evans, sails spread, is on the beam nearest the window: I once met the widow of her last captain. Then there is the two-master Edward Windus, sails furled. And on the third beam is the grand three-master Owen Morris, a true miniature clipper, and she is the ship whose rotting timbers can still sometimes be seen, when the tide is especially low, among the shallows of Porthmadog Bay.

  I had never seen model ships mounted high on beams, when I first raised them there, but later I discovered that in Carpaccio’s “La visione dei martiri dell’Ararat,” painted in 1515, there is a model galley perched above the processing martyrs in just the same way. Encouraged by this example, I later put those two wooden models of Venetian fishing boats up too, and their bright red sails, enlivened with stripes and arcane symbols, and with devices on their bulbous hulls to ward off the evil eye, provide an allegorical contrast to the severe copper-bottomed grace of the three Welsh schooners. I cherish all these vessels, silent there upon their beams, and it is a constant disappointment to me that most of my visitors, while they all admire the beams, never seem to notice the ships.

  You’re different, of course. You realize that they are not just models, but icons of a kind, testament to the pull of that wider world beyond the gates of Trefan Morys, beyond the coasts of Wales. Ships are all over this part of my house. Propped here and there are models of an American harbor tug, of a China junk, of a paddle steamer from Gdansk, of fishing boats from Greece, the Faeroe Islands and Chesapeake Bay, of a Hong Kong ferry, of a sailing-freighter from Dalmatia, of a gondola, a bottled one of HM Brig Badger that I found in Sydney, and an elegant one of a catamaran that Elizabeth has saved from her childhood in Sri Lanka, where she was born. There is also a French fishing boat immured in a plastic cube, like a bee in amber, and trapped in there beside it is a single hair of its maker’s head, which fell in during the hardening process: because of this irreversible error he reduced the model’s price for me, but I would happily have paid him extra for the curiosity of it.

  Ships sail through many a picture here, too. There is a pierhead painting of the brig Exchange (Master, Robert Ashton) homeward bound from Genoa in 1812; a watercolor by A. G. Vickers (died 1837) of coastal sailing-ships rocking in the swell off the Admiralty in St. Petersburg; a picture of the Isle of Man packet Cambria, painted on china in 1908 and cracked amidships; a colored sketch by a Victorian army officer of a felucca struggling against a hot wind upriver beside the Pyramids; a large oil painting of herring boats lying in the shelter of Cricieth Castle. The colored oleograph of the liner City of New York (10,500 tons) is, I have reason to believe, one of those given to every first-class passenger on the maiden voyage of the ship, from Liverpool to New York in 1888. The Cairo river scene in the bathroom, in oils, was painted by an Egyptian artist from the deck of the houseboat we used to inhabit there: It was done for a friend of mine, David Holden, who took over the boat from us, and when he was murdered in the city in the 1970s I found he had left it in his will to me.

  There is a ship of peculiar rig in one picture. It seems to be a double lateen rig, with a jib, and behind it there is a boat that looks rather like a double-ended lifeboat, with a tall mast amidships. These queer craft are seen sailing into a very peculiar harbor, with a mosque in the foreground, what looks like a Chinese pagoda, a castle on a hilltop, Russian-style spiral domes and a massive waterfront building resembling a railway terminal. I know well what I am describing for you, because I myself invented these strange vessels and this ill-assorted collection of buildings. They figure in a novel of mine about an imaginary Levantine city, and when the publishers commissioned a painting for its jacket, they gave its original to me.

  Do please forgive me my conceit, but I cannot resist also drawing your attention to the meticulous image of the Italian helicopter cruiser Vittorio Veneto at the bottom right corner of this picture over here. I did it myself, laboriously copying it out of Jane’s Fighting Ships, but if you will run your eye to the left you will see it is only a grace note, so to speak, for a much larger artistic project. Five feet long, in ink on seven pages of copy paper stuck together, this is a panoramic view of the city of Venice which I drew during a few idle summer days here at Trefan Morys. It is a Venice squashed flat, to make it long and thin, but a Venice drawn in such besotted detail that with a magnifying glass you can even see my little son Henry hastening back from school over the Academia bridge, in the days when we lived in the city. Isn’t it fun? Isn’t it wonderful? I am so proud of it that I spent months going from framer to framer, trying to get the damned thing framed, until I discovered a sufficiently indulgent house decorator.

  And here is another odd one. Back in the 1980s I was doing some work for New England Monthly, and in the magazine I came across a nautical caprice so entertaining that I asked its artist, Bruce McCall, if I could have its original. It hangs beside my desk now. It records an apocryphal event of a century before, when the Vanderbilts and other billionaires of Newport, Rhode Island, decided to invest in enormous seaborne replicas of their own vast mansions, a
nd took them out to sea in a competitive regatta. There in my picture those palaces sail to this day, puffing and pounding toward my writing desk, domed and pinnacled and cupola’d, with smoke streaming from their tall chimneys, pinnaces on davits beside impeccable floating lawns, imposing watergates at their prows and enormous Stars and Stripes streaming from their flagstaffs. The race was won, Mr. McCall says, “in a legendary sprint to the finish,” by William K. Vanderbilt’s four-chimney, forty-six-room Dunroamin.

  All these pictures have specific meanings for me, as you see, but as a whole they are simply emblems of open spaces and far horizons. Maps equal symbolism here, too. Do you see that brightly colored filing cabinet, there in the corner? I bought that years ago specifically for its colors—blue and yellow—because I thought it would represent, in its somewhat garish vivacity, the spirit of Opportunity, as against the spirit of Content which is paramount elsewhere in the house. It is stuffed full of maps from countries all around the world. Some are up to date, some rather forlornly decline in practical value as new motorways are built, national boundaries change and place-names shift. I keep them all anyway, the new ones because I use them, the old ones as mementos. On top of the cabinet that long row of box files contains city plans, stacked alphabetically from Aden to Zanzibar, by way of Melton Mowbray, and at the end there is a box of panoramic or geodesic maps, which I particularly like: fancifully artistic aerial views of Gdansk or Manhattan, Hamburg or Stellenbosch, some touchingly amateurish, some highly professional in direct line of descent from the city-view painters of the sixteenth century.

  Then there are several stacks of bookcases full of guidebooks, old and new, and fifteen atlases varying in date from the 1860s to the day before yesterday—I have no interest in maps, however beautiful, historical, entertaining, quaint or instructive, that were produced in the days of geographical ignorance. Over there on the table is a mass of miscellaneous road atlases, aerial photographic atlases and gazetteers, varying from the huge National Atlas of Wales (area 8,015 square miles), which I can hardly lift, to a Handy Atlas of the World (area 196,938,800 square miles), which is about as big as a pocket diary. Finally, just try opening a drawer of that chest of drawers in the alcove under the stairs. You can hardly budge it, can you? That is because for half a century I have been more or less indiscriminately stuffing into it every brochure, handbook or publicity pamphlet I have ever picked up during a lifetime of wandering the world.