Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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gives me a look. I’m famous for this kind of extranormal information.
‘Mae hi’n oer y bore ’ma,’ she replies instead. This is her only Welsh phrase, which means, ‘It’s cold this morning.’ She can also count to ten.
‘Wrong. Mae’n gynnes y pnawn ’ma. It’s warm this afternoon.’
‘Give me a Welsh lesson. Take my mind off my feet.’ On my advice Marguerite has worn Wellington boots, which are scant protection from the sharp gravel of the path and are fast turning her feet into well-beaten fillets of beef.
‘Do you want to hear about the mutation system or the alphabet?’
‘Are you kidding? Alphabet.’
‘You sure? No one’s really going to believe we talked about the alphabet.’
‘Speak!’
‘All right. Welsh has two extra vowels, “y” and “w”, and no “k”, “q”, “v” or “z”. But “ch”, “dd”, “ff”, “ng”, “ll”, “ph”, “rh” and “th” all count as individual letters, which makes it a big pain to use the dictionary. I always forget and look for “ch” words in with the “c”s, and they’re not there, and I have a fit, and rant about the dictionary leaving out a word. Then I find them after the “cy”s. It’s weird.’
‘If you say so.’
‘“Ch” is that throaty, German noise, like a deep whirlpool of spittle.’ She grimaces. ‘“Dd” is easy, like the “th” in the; “ff” is the English “f”. One “f” sounds like a “v”. Then there’s our old friend, the double “l”.’
She makes a noise like she’s trying to get water out of her nose.
‘Da iawn wir! Very good indeed! Sort of a “tlch” sound. Put your teeth together and blow it out the sides of your mouth. Since every other town in Wales starts with llan – which means something like sacred enclosure – you’ve got to get it right. Try saying “Llangollen”.’
We continue hiking and practising ‘Llangollen’, sounding like breathless gila-monsters on the prowl. A huge mound of a mountain lies straight ahead. Eventually we can make out vertical rents of red soil on its lower flank, like pleats in the earth. The lake is at its base, about a mile and a half straight up from where we started.
Though it’s an unremarkable lake green with the hills’ image, Llyn y Fan Fach has been famous longer than there’s been a place called Wales. The story goes that one day a shepherd was gazing at the surface, when to his astonishment a beautiful maiden rose out of the water. She teased him and pooh-poohed his offer of gifts, but eventually accepted his marriage proposal. There was, however, a hitch. In one version, if the shepherd struck her three times in the course of their life together, she’d have to return to the lake; in another, older account, the same disaster would befall if he touched her with iron. Naturally this comes to pass, and in a shower of bubbles she disappears beneath the surface of Llyn y Fan Fach with her herd of magic cattle in tow.
The maiden’s aversion to iron is the key to this story. Speculation runs that when the Iron Age Celts arrived in what is now Wales, wielding their iron swords and spears, the local Stone Age folk were terrified of the tough new technology. Many took to the desolate places and hid in caves, far up in the hills alongside glacial lakes. To the newcomers, no mean spinners of tales and fables, the native people disappeared as thoroughly as if they’d vanished underwater.
On this sunlit, bronze-coloured evening nothing disturbs the surface of the lake. Two mountain bikers appear trailing a healthy scent of sweat. Far below us, where we’ve left the car, some hills sharpened by the sun cast a tactile impression of boiled wool; others are already blurry with dusk. It’s a long, weary way down.
Colli to Lose
Several hours later, as we’re watching Ruthless People on television, it occurs to me that I am the water maiden’s worst nightmare. I may be on her side, but I and my kind come toting verbal iron. What the folktale of Llyn y Fan Fach fails to account for is the fact that in all probability only a small group of European Celts moved into Britain around 600 BC. Despite their numbers they managed in a very short time to convert the indigenous people who didn’t hide in caves or underwater to their laws, their stories, their language. By the time the Romans arrived in the first century AD, Britons had been speaking Brythonic – the predecessor of Welsh – for time out of mind.
This story has a familiar ring to it. After twenty-four hundred years it was only a century ago, in the decade between 1870 and 1880, that more than half the people in what we now call Wales came to speak something other than a form of Welsh. This didn’t happen because the English replaced the Welsh in Wales – though since the 1960s the number of English immigrants either retiring to or ‘dropping out’ in the Welsh countryside has grown exponentially – but because their language, like that of the Celts before them, powerfully eroded its precursor.
Surely this is a case of déjà-vu, in which I and my English friends at college are cast as the New Celts. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the linguistic sea change we’re heralding is a kind of karma on a national scale, and by learning Welsh I’m throwing the universe out of sync. Maybe I’m just unrepentant about that, even though I can’t begin to say why. Maybe I’ve had too much red wine tonight after too much exercise. And yet … I have a nagging conviction that no matter how much Welsh I master, however well I learn to say ‘Llangollen’, R. S. Thomas’s poem ‘The Small Window’ is a warning written for me.
In Wales there are jewels
To gather, but with the eye
Only. A hill lights up
Suddenly; a field trembles
With colour and goes out
In its turn; in one day
You can witness the extent
Of the spectrum and grow rich
With looking. Have a care;
This wealth is for the few
And chosen. Those who crowd
A small window dirty it
With their breathing, though sublime
And inexhaustible the view.
Peanut’s owner wakes us in the middle of the night. She’s drunk a pint of gin and left her husband. Will we still be her friends, she wants to know, in the morning? I tell her we always will. As the future is a convincing tense in English, she believes me – correctly – and I go back to bed.
Edrych ar y Teledu to Watch Television
The following day Marguerite discovers back-to-back editions of Pobl y Cwm episodes with English subtitles. It turns out that the blonde woman and her husband had been shortchanged on their coal delivery, and were debating whether or not to complain about it. I’m stunned by the dramatic impact of it all. And I sorely regret telling our friend Rebecca, who’s just back from London, about my body-in-the-coal theory.
‘Why did you say you were learning Welsh?’ she snickers. ‘It was the quality of the TV programming, right?’
Gweithio to Work
‘So, when shall we begin?’
‘Now?’
‘Now?’ My voice is regrettably on the mend.
‘Pam lai,’ Tim says. Why not.
He’s just locked up the post office and I’ve delayed the inevitable – our all-Welsh lunch – as far as the King’s Head Tavern. We remain in public long enough to order a pint of bitter and a curry for me, and a ham steak for Tim, then retire to the large