Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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Lynn Edwards flops backward on to the grassy slope of a sandtrap on a golf course outside Oslo, arms and legs akimbo, demonstrating how he may have lost his wallet here yesterday. I root around on my hands and knees looking for it in the lush grass. Norway is nothing if not green. From the plane I’d spied a scattering of natty, wooded hills that had looked like wild bumps of woolliness amid the paler, cultivated plains. So different from Wales, where the hills have been treeless for most of our millennium. Oslo, too, seemed to have a leafy look about it, clarified by the scrubbed northern air. At least that was my passing impression as we sped by on the freeway and zoomed out the other side.
I have come four thousand miles and straight from Fornebu Airport to watch people I’ve never met play golf. All in the name of learning Welsh. I seem to be ingesting particles of surrealism today like so many dust mites. Lynn has brought me here because his best friend, Iorwerth Roberts, is playing in a tournament – the same one Lynn would have been in if it hadn’t been for me. Iori is from Amlwch on Ynys Môn – Anglesey – and speaks Welsh fluently. We’ve hiked on to the fairway to intercept him and have a look for Lynn’s wallet, which seems to be a goner.
‘I’m sorry you couldn’t play in the tournament.’
‘No matter, my lady, no matter. Here they come now.’ Then over to Iori, ‘Yo, boy, how many balls you lost, then?’
A foursome appears led by a compact man with a broad, tanned face and silver hair. He grins and pointedly ignores his friend. As Lynn greets the others in Norwegian Iori asks me several quasi-intelligible questions in Welsh. In my heart I wish very, very hard I’d stuck with French, and stammer the two words most beloved by Welsh learners when asked if they speak the language: tipyn bach, I say, a little bit. This tends to shut people up.
Because they’re only on the third tee and it’s a fine, warm day, Lynn and I decide to drive to the seaside village of Drøbak and catch them later. On the way Lynn tells me there are four Welsh members of the golf club, and several Scots.
‘Never bothered to count the number of English,’ he says, relishing his little bit of wickedness.
Drøbak is about as quaint as it gets in Norway. It was the site of the country’s big moment in World War II – the navy sank a German battleship in the fjord here before the rest of the flotilla successfully invaded – but today the town is serene. The vertical clapboards of its old houses are painted gleaming white, mustard yellow, red and green. The air is aggressively fresh. On the fjordside footpath a Norwegian groom-to-be tries to buy me from Lynn. ‘My last beautiful girl,’ he shouts in perfect if drunken English, before he’s led away by his friends.
Back at the golf club, my heart sinks when we learn that Iori and company have six more holes to go. After what seems like an eternity – the temperature has been dropping fast and there’s an old lady in the group who can’t hit the ball for beans, which makes their progress painfully slow – they finally finish at nine o’clock, in strong sunshine, at five over par. I’ve gone from a sleeveless top to a windbreaker and three sweaters; have learned that Lynn came to Norway in 1960 to work for a computer company, married, and has been here ever since. To my amazement, an outdoor barbecue is just getting under way outside the clubhouse. My teeth are chattering so violently I can barely speak English, much less Welsh. No one is speaking Norwegian.
As the club’s pro – a tipsy, monolingual American – hands out tournament prizes, a woman leans over with the unsolicited information that few Norwegians eat potato skins. I ask her how it is that the crowd of about fifty or so all understands English.
‘Oh, we’re a bi- or probably trilingual society,’ she explains. I feel a sudden, deep shame for my country’s linguistic myopia, and turn suddenly on Lynn, who’s also a learner, and comment on the temperature in Welsh. We exchange a few of what Iori notes in passing as ‘cat on the mat’ sentences, but quickly peter out.
By the time Lynn drops me off at Rosemary’s house, where I am to stay while I’m in Norway, it’s midnight. Rosemary herself is in Denmark, but her three daughters, ages fourteen through twenty, welcome me with touching formality. They and two friends are sitting around the kitchen table, and when I arrive everyone shifts effortlessly into perfect English. Almost too perfect. Maybe it’s creeping exhaustion, but their conversation sounds like the soundtrack from a dubbed film, a half-beat too slow, as if the dubbers were reading the script for the first time.
Liv, the eldest, to Lisa, the middle sister: ‘I believe we are going to the same party tomorrow night.’
Lisa: ‘Yes, I believe so.’
Liv: ‘Shall we go there together?’
Annett, the youngest, to me: ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’
I really need to go to bed. Liv shows me to her room, a little-girl-gone-to-college sanctuary with pink walls, teddy bears, sociology texts, and University of Wales, Cardiff drinking mugs. As I turn out the light I notice that someone has pasted fluorescent stars to the ceiling. Without my contacts, they look like the real thing.
Ailadrodd to Repeat
My second day in Norway, my second golf course. Lynn, who picked me up early this morning at Rosemary’s, points it out – a tiny, green blotch – from our vantage point on the Kongens Utsikt, or King’s Viewplace. Somewhere far below Iori is teeing off for the nineteenth time this weekend. I’ve always considered golf an irredeemably pointless sport: so much lawn, such little holes. Why bother?
I keep these thoughts to myself as Lynn outlines the day. We’re to meet Iori, have lunch, see Oslo. It’s to be an all-Welsh affair once the golf ends. But for now Lynn and I are perched on a vertiginous, rocky ridge above lake-fronted farmland, just northwest of the city. From the escarpment we can see strands of shocking yellow fields threading through the billiard-table backdrop, red roofs of farmhouses, and a very blue lake splayed into fingers, each one dotted with small, forested islands that look like hunkered-down porcupines. In the far distance are snow-topped mountains. All is bright and faultless and northern.
I tell Lynn a story about gateposts in the Welsh county of Dyfed. Many of the decorative stone balls placed atop Dyfed gateposts are of unequal sizes: one is large, the other small. Legend holds that this tradition is based on a Viking practice of sticking a female head on one side of the entrance to a conquered property, and a male head on the other. All along the Welsh seaboard the English versions of Welsh place names descend from the Scandinavian: Anglesey, Bardsey, Swansea, Fishguard. Apparently I’m not the first to make the trip between Wales and Norway, though the others travelled in the opposite direction, with a somewhat more active intent.
Lynn tells me he started the Cymdeithas Cymry Oslo twelve years ago with Iori, and that they now have about fifty members, mostly expatriates.
‘We’ve got ambassadors, artists, teachers, you name it. A sophisticated crowd, it is. Very different from a lot of people back home. These are the ones who left.’
He adds that a number of Norwegians also belong to the society, including a fifteen-year-old boy who’s already gotten a degree in Maths from the University of Oslo and is now going for another in Welsh. More shades of Mark Nodine and his kind. I switch the subject by asking if his Norwegian friends make the distinction between Welsh and English, and Lynn vehemently shakes his head no. Then he looks me in the eyes and squints, perhaps against the strong Scandinavian light, perhaps at the benightedness of his hosts.
‘What I tell ’em, my lady, is “Have it your way. You Swedes,”’ he says, winking, ‘“are all alike.”’
By eleven o’clock we’ve tracked down Iori in the midst of the relentlessly scenic golf course. At three we’re still there. I divert myself from impending starvation by picking Lynn’s wallet, which we found last night in the boot of his car (eventually I give it back). I’m at the point of telling them that golfers who played on Sunday were brutally attacked for breaking the Sabbath in Aberdyfi, Wales in 1927, when Iori saves himself by finally announcing it’s time for lunch. He then proclaims