Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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a pilot and fellow Welsh nut, described to me for the second time in a month as a ‘real character’ who’s learned to speak Welsh like a native, and whom I ‘must meet’. This time, I realize, my unbidden bird’s-eye view has a purpose. It’s set up the board on which we’ll soon start playing global connect-the-dots for real. From what I understand, Irene Williams is what Hollywood would call a ‘major player’ in the dot game.
Mrs Williams comes recommended as a walking address book of the world’s Welsh. Her house is just out of town, past the Cwmann Tavern on the Carmarthen Road (‘Cwmann’, by the way, isn’t a typo; it relies on the perfectly respectable Welsh vowel ‘w’ to give it the sound ‘Coo-man’). Mrs Williams is a lively sprite of a woman in her seventies, wearing striped trousers and a seed necklace. I whisper an apology for my laryngitis as we take seats in her torturously sunny solarium, and tell her I’m hunting foreign Welsh-speakers and expatriates.
‘So, dear, you’re American. Pardon me for asking, but I’ve never understood why your country won’t forgive Cuba for those old missiles.’
This is unexpected. I explain that I haven’t been able to understand it either, but forgo putting my sunglasses on. They suddenly seem way too American. Instead I winch my eyes into slits and begin to leak little tears.
Irene’s husband is Professor of Theology at Lampeter, and she acts as a kind of godmother to the curious lot of foreign students who show an interest in learning Welsh. Takeshi Koike, a student of Hiroshi Mizutani’s, is one of her favourites. She waves his Christmas card at me and I copy the address.
‘He was here for ten months and when he left he was fluent in Welsh. It helped that he played guitar at church. Every Saturday night he’d come over and we’d practise Welsh hymns. He even appeared in all-Welsh theatre productions. Are you all right, dear?’
I think I’ve groaned involuntarily, remembering Mark Nodine. Irene brings me a piece of spice cake and I thank her in Welsh, which is wilfully reckless, but the Takeshi story nettles me. There’s a pause. Will she simply say, croeso – you’re welcome – or launch into the old tongue in earnest? She takes a middle course which requires a few, simple exclamations on my part before she eases back into English. I don’t know how to take this. Is it too painful to hear me croak and struggle for words simultaneously? Am I incomprehensible? God, is she being nice to me?
Irene gives me a number of leads, including one in Poland, which cheers me, as so far nothing has come of my missive to Gdansk. Before I leave we determine that her daughter-in-law, Glesni, is best friends with Rosemary, with whom I’m to stay in Oslo.
‘She called Glesni a few days ago asking about you, and here you are!’
An itchy, small-world sensation tweaks me between the shoulder-blades. I have a feeling I could probably write this book if I stayed long enough on Irene Williams’s sun porch. Instead I thank her and walk away through a tunnel of hedgerows to the tiny village of Cellan to hire a car.
Ofni to Fear
Several years ago Glynne Williams rented a car to me for six weeks. A fortnight into the rental he appeared at my door with an exact clone, another red Fiat Uno. ‘Gave you the one without any insurance,’ he’d said cheerfully, as we switched keys.
His latest offering is a slovenly white Ford, which gets its first outing en route to the Indian restaurant where we’re to meet our troubled friends. As we park Marguerite looks at me solemnly.
‘Let’s make a vow not to go back to their house after dinner, okay? I’m tired, you’re sick …’
‘Don’t worry, it’s a done deal. We will not, under any circumstances, go back to their house after dinner.’
On the way back to their house after dinner I pray that the Ford has insurance. It’s raining and the roads, wavy and narrow in the best of conditions, are slick as sucked licorice. There’s something unsettling about driving in Wales at night; the countryside is so dark that headlights strike me as an imprudent challenge, an invitation to things that shouldn’t be seen – things that belong in the dark – to creep forward into the light. Of course this doesn’t happen, but I get moods when I fear it will.
Our friends’ domestic nightmare is definitely something that belongs in this category. Nonetheless, we’ve caved in to what was ostensibly a polite request to meet their dog, Peanut, but what we recognized as an urgent plea not to be abandoned. In the middle of dessert – or rather my champagne ice cream, which everyone else watched me eat from a miniature Moët et Chandon bottle – they realized she’d forgotten her pills. We left quickly after that.
When we reach their home in an indeterminately rural area that the postal address calls ‘near Lampeter’, we pet Peanut, down a quick coffee and desert them an hour later, leaving gifts from New England in our wake: two small, plastic bears filled with honey.
Scant talismans, it occurs to me now as I plough the homeward curves unnecessarily fast, too fast for Marguerite, who complains, against the demons of depression and this ageless Welsh night, too dark even for shadows.
Dringo to Climb
In the morning it’s still raining. I find it troubling that all my indoor memories of Wales are in English – something I’ve so far done precious little to change. The landscape, however, remains open to translation. I want to be outside with old women and sticks. Indoors we’re willing prisoners of these miserable cats and dogs.
We hem, we haw, we hem and haw some more. Finally we decide to brave the inevitable mud and drive to the Brecon Beacons, one of Wales’s three national parks, then hike to a well-known beauty spot called Llyn y Fan Fach, or Place of the Little Lake. Beacons – a word I’ve had to look up in English, which makes a nice change – means ‘conspicuous hills’, and that’s precisely what they are. From our temporary vantage point, with the motor running on the side of a sheep field, the furrows on their bald, grey-brown flanks look like wrinkled elephant skin. By now the sky has cleared and everything in the treeless mid-distance is super-realist with intense sunshine, but the Beacons remain in shadow with fog boiling over their crests. If I were a fanciful person (which I’m not) I could mistake their northwestern ridge for the frontier between known lands and the Otherworld.
In ‘The Mabinogi’, a quadripartite collection of Welsh wondertales distilled from Celtic mythology, first written down around the year 1060, the Otherworld is known as Annwfyn. (These four stories are generally combined with other medieval tales in an anthology called The Mabinogion.) It’s the lot of Mabinogi heroes to journey to Annwfyn or to some far-off land, usually in search of a woman or a magic cauldron. My favourite cauldron is a doozy: toss in a dead warrior, brew, and the next day he’ll hop out alive, but voiceless.
While Norway and France may not seem very much like Annwfyn, Argentina, five months, half a globe and the better part of a language away, sure fits the bill. I point out to Marguerite that we are on the brink of just such a journey.
‘Sounds like someone already went there and brought you back,’ she says archly. Marguerite is getting tired of hearing what sounds like ashes in my voice.
It’s late, nearly five, by the time we leave the car at an arguable distance from a Dim Parcio sign and begin hiking to Llyn y Fan Fach. A well-trodden footpath slips between rising land that has already lost the tame, parcelled-out look of the pastures around Lampeter. Up ahead an immensity of hills displaces the sky not in craggy peaks but a series of long, oblique planes. As they fold in and out of one another the shadows they cast are the sole interruptions on the landscape: no trees, no shrubs, no bracken, no sheep. A few hikers bound past us on the way down, but we don’t bother to ask the distance to the lake.
From over our shoulders the low sun tosses our shadows ahead of us, mine longer and a little more substantial than Marguerite’s.
‘Did you know that the Etruscans believed their civilization had a beginning and an end?’ I ask. ‘When they thought the