Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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neck. The white wine in her glass is the exact shade of the highlights in her hair.
‘Most women are boring, don’t you think?’
I don’t really think so, but it doesn’t matter. Rosemary has a disturbing tendency to listen intently to the first ten seconds of a reply and then drift off, as if she’s guessed the rest and lost interest. Perhaps she’s hard of hearing.
So far today I’ve learned the cost of Rosemary’s shoes; the saga of her courtship with Bob, a soon-to-be-unmarried English gentleman from Copenhagen; her opinion that people should marry rather than just live together; that women look better in feminine dress; and that Norway has phenomenally stern drunk-driving laws, the consequence of which is that from a young age her daughters have acquired a good knowledge of Oslo’s mass transit system.
My wine matches neither my oversize orange T-shirt nor my very short dark hair. I seem calm; I focus on Rosemary’s life and decide to buy some Norwegian goat’s cheese to bring to Marguerite in France. But there’s desperation licking the back of my brain. The only way I can explain my presence in this kitchen on this July afternoon is that I’ve come to Norway to practise Welsh. With Welsh I have a purpose; without it my presence here is like a Christmas tree: diverting, but ultimately useless and, to half the world at least, inexplicable.
It’s not that I haven’t tried to get the Cymraeg ball rolling, but without Rosemary’s help I find I’m marooned on the flat with no downhill in sight. Unlike Iori, or Tim back in Lampeter, she’s shown no interest in the role of language mentor. I can’t blame her: I’m still at the stage where speaking Welsh is exercise rather than intercourse, and Rosemary has no stake in doing verbal callisthenics with me. Never mind that’s why I’m here … Instead I learn that Bob is getting a beer gut, and inwardly berate myself for being the gutless kind of person who needs a language mentor. Every time one of us begins a sentence in English I wince under the twin reflexes of relief and shame.
Rosemary gets up and plucks another wine bottle from the fridge. I foolishly hold out my glass. ‘Too bad Aneurin Rhys Hughes, from the embassy, is on holiday. He’s very Welsh. But tell me, did you enjoy the party the other evening?’
‘Hmmm? You mean tonight?’
‘No, Pamela, the Celtic Ladies’ party.’
‘Oh. Um, yes. Ummm.’ Tonight a dozen or so members of Cymdeithas Cymry Oslo will shell out fifty kroner a head for the pleasure of meeting me at a wine and cheese hosted by Rosemary. Earlier in the week one of the five women who call themselves the Celtic Ladies – three Welshwomen, a Scot and an Englishwoman married to a Welsh diplomat – had invited us to a ‘CL’ dinner party. Rosemary was upset that Anne, the hostess, had served plates already fixed with food.
‘That’s absolutely not done in Norway. I don’t know what she was thinking,’ Rosemary told me in the pub we’d stopped at on the way home. Indeed, at her daughter’s boyfriend’s birthday party the next day we passed around a whole cake and each cut our own slices.
‘You’re the Welsh lady writing the book?’ Sion, one of the Welshwomen, had asked shortly after Rosemary and I arrived at Anne’s apartment near Vigeland Park.
‘I’m not really Welsh.’
‘I thought you’d be a dumpy little grey-haired lady, about seventy, with glasses and a big handbag.’
‘Oh no,’ Rosemary countered. ‘I thought she’d be another lotus flower. The last woman who stayed with me who was writing a book removed her shoes and sat in a lotus position on my pink velvet settee.’
‘She looks Welsh, doesn’t she?’
‘Oh yes, she looks very Welsh.’
Was my quest really so bizarre that people thought I appeared too normal for the part? The Celtic Ladies all seemed to have picked up Norwegian with ease, which I guess makes travelling the world in search of Welsh a bit radical. To a woman, they were comfortable in Norwegian, but less so in Norway.
‘I certainly don’t want my ashes scattered over the fjords,’ the friendly, gap-toothed Sion had said.
‘I’m not ready for a little plot in a Norwegian churchyard either,’ echoed another CL. Even Rosemary, who had been married to a Norwegian, who’s lived in Norway for years and who considers herself at least in part Scandinavian, hasn’t ruled out the possibility of moving back ‘home’. For now she makes do with frequent trips to the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show.
It is for expatriates above all, I thought, that Wales glows with its famous once and future sheen. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean that misty, magical, mystical nonsense fed to Wales by PR agencies with the tourism account. That stuff needs to be flushed from the country’s bowels, and fast. I mean that expats share a kindred sense of incompleteness with their ‘non-historical’ homeland. Their experience in Wales is unfinished, yet it is their past and probable future there that give the present boundaries, make it approachable, comprehensible and, above all, impermanent. Wales itself, hijacked by the language of a foreign land, isn’t finished with its destiny yet either.
The telephone rings, bringing me back to the kitchen. It’s Rosemary’s mom, calling from Tregaron. I jealously do the dishes as they jabber in Welsh, until a crash from the living room interrupts their conversation. Rosemary, forgetting my limitations, yells to me in Welsh to investigate. I reply triumphantly, equally forgetful that I’m speaking her language.
‘Beth sy’n bod?’ – ‘What’s the matter?’ I shout. The cats knocking over an ashtray is so far the linguistic zenith of my day.
Siopa to Shop
Early evening, hiding in my room with my face buried in Liv’s quilted bedspread. I’m trying to coax my voluntary muscles into coming to terms with all the booze I’ve consumed, when Rosemary’s lyrical voice ring-sings down the hall (in Welsh you canu, or sing, musical instruments, among which Rosemary’s voice must surely be counted). ‘PAM-eL-A! Can I get you a gin and tonic?’
At this point I’d rather be exposed to radioactive plutonium.
‘Dim diolch,’ I manage, ‘No thank you,’ wondering how on earth I’m going to get through the wine and cheese party. I did cope earlier with slipping out to buy some goat cheese at a local shop. Rosemary’s neighbourhood has the rolling lawns, the scattered, unregimented houses, the semi-rural feel of parts of northern New Jersey, where I grew up. If it weren’t for the architecture – long-profiled, wooden homes that look like the heathen cousins of Lutheran churches – I could forget I’m in Europe.
The convenience store is run by Pakistanis. Liv says that they’re the largest minority group in Norway, and are subject to much prejudice. According to Lynn, Pakistanis sound a lot like Welshmen speaking English: both have the same regular bumps in their words, the same cantering accent. Someone explained this by claiming that a high percentage of the Royal Welch Fusiliers were sent to India in the nineteenth century, but I don’t believe it.
A woman in a sari greeted me and I asked in English for the sweet goat cheese. Since she spoke only Pakistani she went to fetch her husband, who arrived and addressed me, naturally, in Norwegian. Okay, what the hell. I asked again for goat cheese, this time in Welsh. He tried English, but I’d got the devil in me, and besides, if I closed my eyes I could just persuade myself he came from Cardiganshire.
‘Esgusodwch fi, ond dw i’n chwilio am caws afr. Oes gaws afr dych chi? Dych chi’n siarad Cymraeg? Nag ydych? Dyma dreuni.’
However this sounds to you is how it must’ve sounded to the shop owners. I’m repentant now, but then I was on a roll. This was the most Welsh I’d spoken in three days.
Finally, amid a chorus line of hand and foot signals, and a stream of rollicking Welsh from me, we found the cheese. There were six different kinds. I took the red package just for the heck of it, walked directly into the counter, then bid them both a bewildering