Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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an hour I feel like I’m holding a live wire between my teeth. Sometimes it slips and jabs my tongue and I spray Tim with chwech, the Welsh word for ‘six’; sometimes, when I haven’t understood what he’s just repeated for the third time, very slowly, I feel the heat wave of an electrocution coming on; and once in a while, for a moment or two, that live wire picks up an actual impulse from my brain and I connect and Tim nods and understands and we’re speaking to each other. Even better, he insists on paying for lunch.
At two o’clock I look down to discover someone has miraculously eaten my chicken curry. The beer disappeared long ago. I can’t remember any of it. I can’t even remember what we’ve said, but whatever it was it was in Welsh. When language evolves into something other than commonplace communication – a badge of identity in foreign lands or, in this case, a gift between friends – the urgency of knowing and making known dissipates and the words slow to a speed at which a learner can catch them. I’ve wagered a book contract on the hope that it’s easier to wield a symbol in Singapore and a gift in an empty back room than a verb in a crowded shop out in the still-unaccustomed sunshine on the High Street. So far, so good. My hour with Tim, I realize, belongs more to the Trip than it does to any of the trinity of Lampeters I’ve known over the past twelve years. It’s time to go.
Gadael to Leave
The National Express coach slows as all coaches must. I’ve never crossed the Severn Bridge when it wasn’t crippled by road construction. What’s that fairytale about some luckless soul’s work being perpetually undone in the night, so that for all eternity he has to start over again in the morning? The possibility should be investigated.
The River Severn marks the southern end of the boundary between Wales and England. Small cars have blown off the bridge in fierce side winds, or so I’m told. I remember reading in 1988 about a woman who was stuck in construction traffic so long that she got out of her car, and jumped. Unlike her, I’m not in a rush today because I missed the Croeso i Gymru sign on the way into Wales, and I want to see it now. I spin around in my seat, jabbing my ribs into the armrest. There it is. A yellow sign with a red dragon, the symbol of Wales. I’m pushed harder into the armrest as the coach suddenly accelerates toward Heathrow. Welcome to Cymru. The ‘C’ has mutated and become a ‘G’. That happens a lot in Welsh.
For a long time I wonder about the woman who jumped back in ’88. I sometimes feel that for me, an American with no Welsh ancestry, with no tangible connection to the place, learning Welsh – especially under the circumstances I’ve chosen – is a lot like jumping off the bridge of common sense. And to make matters worse I’m taking Marguerite with me. Before I fall asleep these thoughts give way, mercifully, to a poem by Harri Webb called ‘Ode to the Severn Bridge’, which I hum in a made-up singsong:
Two lands at last connected
Across the rivers wide
And all the tolls collected
On the English side.
NORWY (NORWAY)
Hedfan to Fly
I’ve been bumped to business class, where there are more distractions than in economy to divert my mind from the unassailable knowledge that we’ll all die if the plane falls out of the sky. I hate flying. A drawback, considering this is the second of the seventeen flights it will take us to get around the world. Marguerite has gone directly from London to Paris – well, directly being dependent on the vagaries of her round-the-world ticket, which has sent her via Zürich – to visit her sister’s family. I’ll join her there in about a week.
So for now I’m on my own, half-heartedly attending to the bones in my salmon steak entrée. Somewhere nearby a young American woman is giddy or drunk, I can’t tell which. From what I’ve heard it sounds like she’s going to Norway to visit relatives and is unsure of her Norwegian, learned from grandparents. ‘I just know I’m gonna forget everything,’ she all but hyperventilates. I can see tinsel strands of blonde hair wrapping over the top of her seat by grace of static electricity.
‘Listen, sweetheart,’ I’d like to say, ‘at least you’re going to Norway to speak Norwegian. I’m going to Norway to speak Welsh. Now there’s a reason to worry.’ And I am. Worried.
The truth is I’m really not alone on this flight. I’m with the mysterious stranger who’s travelling the world with me: the Welsh language. On my lap is Y Trip, ‘The Trip’, Nofel Antur i Ddysgwyr – an adventure novel for learners – that I bought in Aberystwyth. The blurb on the back says it’s about Charles, an alluring and arrogant former secret service type who goes bad, starts a drug empire in Liverpool, and enters a sailing race around the Isle of Britain. Or Ynys Prydain, as it was once known, and in some quarters still is.
Not long ago the only marks I would’ve understood on the page were the periods and quotations. Now Welsh no longer looks like undisciplined gobbledygook. The letters fall into formations that I’ve come to expect, that don’t drive my eyes skittish and shy. The first two sentences of Y Trip read, ‘Roedd y dyn yn sefyll yn llonydd, yn hollol lonydd. Doedd dim swn o gwbl.’ I say it under my breath, which sounds something like ‘Rrroithe uh deen un sevultch un tlchonith, un holtchol lonith. Doithe dim soon o gooble.’ This means, ‘The man was standing still, totally still. There was no noise at all.’
These sounds are aerobics for the American mouth. I barely have to open up to speak the lazy, slightly slurry English that is my birthright. If I look down, I never see my lips protrude beneath my nose when I’m speaking Saesneg, which is the Welsh word for English (Saeson, literally ‘Saxons’, means ‘Englishmen’). But when I’m speaking Welsh I constantly catch glimpses of my lips projecting in and out like feeding sea urchins. It takes smiles, frowns, grimaces and active supporting roles from my jaw and neck muscles to get out just one sentence. It’s so much work that half an hour of Welsh makes my face quiver. But there’s no other way to say a word like gwbl. You’ve got to love a language in which you can make the noise ‘gooble’ and have it actually mean something (cwbl means ‘all’; gwbl is cwbl after it’s mutated, but I refuse to clutter my mind with mutations at the moment).
And then there’s the rhythm. You can’t just speak Welsh, you have to ride its waves. If English is a calm, smooth-as-glass harbour for its nearly four hundred and fifty million native speakers, Welsh is the rough open ocean. It bobs and bounces, I want to say it’s a curly language, a curvy language, with the stress in both words and sentences on the penultimate sound. Listen: Dim o GWB-l. Da-da-daaa-da. It’s incantatory.
Chwarae Golff to Play Golf
I have kept my word, and worn a bright yellow top and white trousers. My flight is an hour late and my expectations of being met are low, but there, miraculously, in the midst of the arrivals crowd, is a sign that says PAMELA in yellow and blue letters. The man holding it is also fiercely waving a tiny Welsh flag.
‘Well met, my lady, well met.’ Lynn Edwards is a trim, handsome man in his early sixties, with a tanned face and paler crevices of laugh lines around his eyes. His wiry, greyish hair reminds me of a Brillo pad.
‘I can’t tell you how glad I am it’s you.’
I look surprised.
‘You see, I was waiting here watching the women come out thinking, ooh, maybe it’s that one. Nooo, maybe it’s that one. Oh dear, I hope it’s not that one. Then you appeared. I thought you’d be … older.’ Lynn Edwards doesn’t speak Welsh but you could get seasick on his accent anyway. There’s very little correlation between the thickness of a Welsh person’s accent in English and whether or not he or she actually speaks Welsh.
‘So. Let me see if I understand the purpose of your trip. One, you’re here to learn to speak Welsh; two, to meet Welsh people and anyone interested in Wales; and three, to see a little of the world. Have I got it right, then?’
He