Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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and to the world as Percival), in which a tall tree grows by a river bank. ‘From roots to crown one half was aflame and the other green with leaves.’ If the Champs Elysées can become a wheat field overnight, then perhaps Peredur’s river, for now, can be the Seine.
Cuddio to Hide
Locked in Nina’s bathroom is the only time I get to flip through her stack of New Yorker magazines and look at the cartoons in peace. Today I create a furore by staying in long enough to read a story by Robert Olen Butler called ‘Jealous Husband Comes Back as Parrot’. The reincarnated bird intends absurdly more than it can say. It squawks for a cracker and means, why can’t you see that even though I have feathers and a beak I’m your husband? I know just how it feels. I sound so skimpy in Welsh, so matter-of-factly shorn of subtlety and, I fear, tact.
Outside the door, Audrey, Marguerite’s nine-year-old niece, is about to burst – not her bladder but her patience. She wants to talk about air pockets. We’re all travelling tomorrow: Nina, Bernard and the kids to the States for a month, Marguerite and I on a ten-day Eurail trail through Holland, Germany and Luxembourg.
‘Pam-Pam, what are you doing in there?’ she demands in her precise, French-invigorated English.
‘I’ll be right out.’
‘You said that ten minutes ago. Do you know what air pockets are?’
I’m about to explain but she interrupts. ‘They are thief planes. They are like pick-pockets. They are bad planes that steal other airplanes’ passengers!’ She says this with an appropriate sense of outrage.
‘That’s not going to happen to you tomorrow,’ I call out.
‘I hope not,’ she says, and leaves me to my parrot.
Darllen to Read
Gare du Nord: Marguerite and I flip to see who will have to sit backwards on the train from Paris to Rotterdam. I lose.
By the Belgian border things are really steaming up in Y Trip, though my progress – about ten minutes on each page – is as laborious as ever. I check my Welsh-English dictionary to make sure I’ve understood what I just read: Gorffenodd y ferch ddu ei dawns yn gwisgo’r neidr yn unig. The black girl finished her dance wearing only the snake. Useful vocabulary, I’ve no doubt, for chit-chat with the St David’s Society of the Netherlands.
Sharing our compartment are Rick and his mom. Rick is from San Francisco; his mom, whose wig is slightly off-kilter, from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They are incredulous that we missed the Bastille Day celebrations last night.
‘We danced in the streets at a gay ball on the Rive Gauche,’ Rick’s mom tell us proudly.
‘Did you know that a translation of “The Marseillaise” was published in Welsh in 1796?’ I ask, diverting attention from the fact that we spent last evening ironing children’s clothes.
YR ISELDIROEDD (THE NETHERLANDS)
Cyrraedd to Arrive
It’s been about a five-hour trip from Paris to Delft, with one change in Rotterdam. For the past few weeks a Welshman named Philip Jonathan and I have been E-mailing each other under the heading Y Barbiciw, an all-Welsh event which will occur tomorrow afternoon at the home of a woman called Rhiannon, who’s also putting us up this weekend.
At the Delft train station I buy a Dutch phone card with a close-up picture of a belly button on it, and call Rhiannon, who appears a few moments later on foot. Tall and big-boned, with cheeks gone ruddy from a day in the sun with her eight-year-old charges (she’s a teacher in the English-language school here), Rhiannon has the kind of easy-going, friendly face you hope to see after travelling backwards on a train for five hours. Her Welsh accent conjures hills and high spirits – an accent for outdoors, compared to Rosemary’s musical, parlour voice. She leads us down an immaculate canalside street past brick townhouses with brimming flowerboxes. Along the way we discover that she and her husband Ed have lived in Portugal.
‘It took a while to pick up Portuguese, but we did it,’ Rhiannon says. Marguerite and I give each other a look. I was right: the language gods have provided for us both.
‘Go on, you first.’ I nudge her, and she and Rhiannon launch into a nostalgic stream of Portuguese.
I an awed by Rhiannon’s staircase. Ridiculously tall and narrow, it’s like some sheer, vertical rock formation with carpeting. My toes stick over the shallow treads as I perilously climb downstairs to join her, leaving Marguerite to nap in the upstairs guestroom.
‘Hoffech chi gwrw?’
This question catches me like a deer in headlights. One of the most diabolical things about Welsh is the fact that there is no simple way to say yes and no. There’s one set of yes and no answers for the past tense; there’s another that matches a particular sentence structure. Most of the time, though, you can’t use either one: you have to reconjugate the verb, which is why I usually wind up silently nodding my head. Each simple question in Welsh is like a surprise quiz. Hoffech chi gwrw? Would you like a beer? Of course I want a beer, but how to say it? Seconds pass as I shuffle grammatical paradigms in my head. A beer would taste really good right now. Rhiannon waits with the refrigerator door open.
‘Umm.’ I give my head a vigorous up and down shaking.
‘Hoffwn,’ Rhiannon says kindly. Oh god, hoffwn: Yes-I-would-like. Where was that when I needed it?
She puts on a Welsh CD and we take our beers out on to the balcony, which overlooks a well-kept garden and a slew of other balconies. From across the way an old man totters out and stares at us.
‘Not much privacy, I’m afraid,’ apologizes Rhiannon. ‘The Dutch never close their curtains. I’ve been told it goes back to the war. People figured only collaborators had something to hide, so everyone else kept their curtains open. They still do.’
Our Welsh conversation is porous, with plenty of English running through it. Rhiannon is from the Rhymni, one of the narrow fissures – the famous Valleys – that run like curtain folds, up to seventeen miles long by one mile wide, between the Brecon Beacons and the sea in South Wales. By the time she was born there, in the fifties, the Welsh language had been dug out of the locals as thoroughly as the coal had been dug from the ground. English was her first tongue.
‘I’ve been learning Welsh since I was three. It’s lurking in me somewhere,’ she points nebulously at her chest. ‘I went to university in Bangor, where nearly everyone spoke Welsh. But it wasn’t until I came to the Netherlands that I really got a grip on it.’
‘Wrth gwrs,’ I say, which is, and sounds like, Of course! ‘I knew it was a mistake to go to Wales to learn Welsh. I should’ve come to Delft.’
Rhiannon snorts. ‘I took a correspondence course from Aberystwyth. But now there are so many speakers here that I get a lot of practice. You’ll meet quite a few of them tomorrow. Unfortunately Effie can’t make it. Have you heard of her?’
Have I heard of her? Effie Wiltens is fast becoming a quest in herself. Her name came up before I’d even left the States; she was mentioned in Lampeter; Boyd told me in Paris that she has ‘a strong personality’; now Rhiannon says, ‘Effie learned Welsh on the strength of sheer personality alone.’ It would do me good to meet this person.
From what I’ve been able to learn, Effie is a Dutch woman who went to Wales on holiday and never got over it. She’s not only become fluent in Welsh – ‘speaks like a native North Walian,’ Rhiannon claims – but has even learned to fly light aircraft so she can careen between Holland and Wales quicker than I can say awyren, Welsh for airplane.
Sylwi to Notice
Ed has come home, and the four