A Writer's House in Wales (2 page)

 

Certainly many an Old Man of Pencader still answers back, as Old Testament prophets might. The long resistance to the English has continued, sometimes subdued, sometimes raucous, sometimes aimed at complete national independence, sometimes concerned more with linguistics than with politics. On and on the patriots have argued, and although the struggle has never again flared into general violence, nevertheless many a Welshman has gone to prison in the course of it, bombs have exploded and scores of English-owned holiday cottages have been burnt to the ground.

If, by the start of the twenty-first century, passions seem more restrained, fewer patriotic slogans are scrawled on walls, fewer English signs are daubed over in Welsh—if on the face of it Welshness now seems less angrily assertive, that is partly because it has won some of its battles. During the second half of the twentieth century the Welsh patriotic movement made itself a genuine force in the State, and its constant pressure forced concessions out of British governments. The Welsh language, under threat for generations, was given official status and backing. New Welsh institutions were founded. Every child in the country learnt at least some Welsh at school. And in 1999 Wales achieved, for the first time in so many centuries, a modest measure of self-government, with an elected National Assembly and a
Prif Weinidog
—Chief Minister.

It was not much, God knows, not enough to stop the patriots going on and on, but it did dampen the fire, presumably what its progenitors in England intended. Welsh activists greeted it with passionate enthusiasm, but by the start of the new century they found themselves in a state of divided uncertainty, not quite sure what to do next: whether to press for more, or consolidate what had already been won; whether to defy all political correctness, and openly struggle to keep the English out, or knuckle down for a time and resume the fight another day.

They may yet lose the last battle, their beloved language may die, their traditions be forgotten. But what they have achieved is remarkable anyway. There are four principal Celtic regions of modern Europe, all enjoying different degrees of sovereignty. Ireland is entirely independent. Scotland is almost independent. Wales is slightly independent. Brittany is not independent at all. All have as their oldest attribute of nationhood an ancient language, and among them all it is the language of Wales, Cymraeg, which is the liveliest and most successfully assertive—the legacy of all those generations of patriots who have cherished, defended and developed it down the ages.

 

Well, you may be saying, but what about that house of yours? Be patient, I am coming to that—didn't I say we were long-winded?

The one constant, in this protracted progress of the little nation, has been the Welsh landscape. Sometimes Welsh men and women have felt that it was all they could truly call their own, together with their language. It embraces all categories of territory, pastureland, moorland, bog and river estuary, but its archetypal kind, the kind that is associated always with Wales, the kind that is celebrated in verse and painting, fairy tale and tradition, an allegory in itself of Welshness, is the mountain. It is never called a hill in Wales, and is never more than 3,600 feet high; but its summit is bare, its substance is rocky and in bad weather it can be treacherous. It stands at the heart of the Welsh patriotic self-image—so long as the mountains stand there, all is not lost. The best known of all Welsh lyrics, by the Victorian railwayman-poet John Ceiriog Hughes, celebrates the reassurance of the mountains:

For centuries the mountains offered the Welsh people refuge from the encroaching Power to the east, and thus became emblems of refuge in a wider kind, from all the shocks and temptations of the wicked world. Down the ages arcane tales of prophecy assured the people that their redemption would come from the hills. The Irish poet-patriots, in the days of their oppression, looked for their salvation into the skies, whence a faery-lady, a
spéirbhean
who was the incarnation of Ireland itself, would materialize to rescue them from their miseries. Welsh visionaries have always preferred a hole in the rock. Their legendary champions—Arthur, Llywelyn Olaf, Glyndŵr—are not dead at all, but only await a call to arms in caverns in the mountains.

Once, we are told, a Welsh shepherd lad walking across London Bridge was accosted by a man in Welsh, asking him where he had found his hazel staff. On the hill above his farm at home, said he. “Take me there at once,” said the stranger, “and I will show you wonders.” So they hastened back to Wales, and on the hillside where the hazel trees grew the stranger led him to a secret entrance in the ground. In they crept, and there in a great cave they found a prince and all his warriors, sleeping fully armed. “Does Wales need us?” cried the prince, woken by their arrival. “Has the day come?” Not yet, the stranger hushed him, the knights could sleep on; and so the two of them tiptoed away again, and out of the secret door, and into the other world of farm and mere fantasy.

Who was that prince? Perhaps only a generic hero, a wish-hero; or perhaps the poet David Jones got it right:

 

All the land has its legends, but the mountains are not of equal stature throughout the country; and not altogether by chance, where they are highest and toughest, there the Welsh culture has survived most vigorously, and the language lives with most virility. The most rugged of them, and the most allegorical, are in the northwest of the country. It is as if some divine hand has lifted up the peninsula, and tilting it a little in the direction of northern Ireland, let the tallest highlands slide that way. They are clumped there tightly, jammed together, running away from England, climaxing in the peak called Yr Wyddfa, Snowdon to the English, and declining majestically toward the sea.

This is Eryri, Wales in excelsis, Cymru-issimo, where the meaning, passion and loyalty of the nation is concentrated. The last of the independent Welsh princes found their final strongholds in this severe fastness, and the English found it necessary to ring it with formidable castles—Caernarfon and Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris, some of them among Europe's greatest and most famous castles, and all of them terrible symbols of injustice. Today Eryri is sheep-farming, tourist and climbing country, and those grim fortresses are no more than picturesque ruins, but its mountains form a harsh tough nucleus still, and seen on the skyline from a distance, or from a ship at sea, look like a rampart or a secret retreat, where old customs might be cherished, old tales told and old champions reverenced.

Several rivers run out of them. One of the shortest is the Dwyfor, which flows from the western flank of the mountains in seven tumultuous miles into the waters of Cardigan Bay, a great inlet of the Irish Sea. It is a river traditionally rich in salmon, sea trout and eels, its banks bare when it leaves the hillsides, delectably wooded lower down. Around it there is a region of pastureland called Eifionydd, good for cattle and sheep. This is a lovely smiling country, the mountains behind it, the sea in front, the river running freshly through, and it is not surprising that some time in the Middle Ages a Welsh swell, an uchelwr, acquired an estate beside the Dwyfor, built himself a dwelling and doubtless lived out his years in sweet satisfaction. The chances are that he was Collwyn ap Tangno, an almost legendary figure who emerges from the mists in about the year 1100. His house Trefan (pronounced as though it were “Trevan” in English) became one of the best known of the homesteads of Eifionydd, associated with the great families of the day, and with the poets and musicians who were their familiars—Rhys Goch Eryri, one of the greatest of the medieval Welsh lyricists, is said to have supped, played and been inspired at Trefan. We may suppose it to have been a stone-built
plas
of a classic Welsh kind, with its cluster of outbuildings, its yard and its pond and its roof of heavy slate.

The first historical records referring to the place date from 1352, and its devoted historian has traced the fluctuations of its ownership ever since. Down the centuries it frequently changed hands, from Madog ab Ieuan to Gruffudd ap Hywel, from William ab Ieuan ap Rhys ap Tudor to Robert ap John Wynn, by inheritance or by purchase, from one family to another, one generation to the next, until in the eighteenth century it came into the possession of a young Welsh Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Zaccheus Hughes, who was both vicar of the nearest village, Llanystumdwy, and also squire of the estate—what the English used to call a squarson.

Zaccheus was a modernist. Welshman that he was, he was a priest of the Established English church, and he had no time for the nonconformist chapel religion that was by then the passion of the people: When the first services were held at a nearby chapel he sent a brass band to play fortissimo outside its windows, to disrupt the heretic devotions. But he was a reformer too. He had doubtless read the works of the English agricultural progressives of the day, and he set out to rejuvenate the Trefan estate. He enlarged it by acquiring land across the river, and he also transformed it. The house itself, that unassuming Welsh manor, he disguised as a posh Georgian villa, by adding new parts much larger than the old, and for the pleasure of his ladies he made a bridle way to connect it with a stone bathhouse upstream, where they could disport themselves in happy privacy while their servants looked after the horses outside. The land he “improved,” as the saying was, by drainage schemes, new walling and a series of riverine water mills. And in 1777 he erected two fine outbuildings, out of sight of the Plas. One was a coach house, for the housing of his doubtless elegant equipage, and on the roof of this he put a wooden cupola, surmounted by a weather vane with English lettering for the compass points, and his proud initials ZH. The other was a stable block, with loose-boxes for the horses downstairs, and living quarters for the stablemen above.

Zaccheus Hughes went to his fathers, and Trefan struggled on through difficult times. It was the setting for a Victorian morality drama when the poor heiress of the estate, a widowed mother, was heartlessly deprived of her inheritance. Jane Jones had married Zaccheus's son John, and had a daughter by him, but her husband died six months later and at nineteen she was left all alone with her baby as owner of the estate. Unfortunately she herself had been born out of wedlock. This was no great sin among most Welsh people in those days—we read of a Welsh country gentleman horrifying a visiting English judge, as they drove together to the county Assizes, by telling him cheerfully that both the coachman who was driving them and the footman up behind were his own illegitimate sons. In one way or another, however, illegitimacy was a legal handicap under the English legal systems, and fifteen years after her husband's death relatives by marriage, headed by a Samuel Priestley from Yorkshire in England, disputed Jane's possession of Trefan. They argued that as she was illegitimate, her marriage to John Hughes was illegal by the laws of the day, and that she therefore had no right to the estate. After a long and acidulous lawsuit, while Jane struggled gamely on at Trefan, they won their case. The unhappy widow was dispossessed, and for the first time since the days of the Welsh princes, hard-faced grasping English folk—or so I bitterly imagine them—moved into the old Plas.

The estate became an object of contumely among the neighboring villagers, Welsh in those days to the last crone or infant, and the Priestley clan was never truly accepted—they showed not the slightest interest, remembered one local contemporary, in what was going on in the village, and “did nothing to further the interests of the villagers in any way whatsoever.” As it happened Llanystumdwy was the home of the politician David Lloyd George, presently to become the most radical Prime Minister Britain had ever seen, and one of the most charismatic. He proudly proclaimed himself “a cottage man,” and he was the political scourge of great landowners, so it was no surprise that when, between the two world wars, most of the ancient Welsh estates disintegrated, Trefan should go too. Tenant farmers took over most of the land, and the Plas itself passed from hand to hand until it came, one fortunate day, into mine.

“Your house at last!” No, we're not there yet. I brought up a family in Plas Trefan, but by the 1970s, when the children grew up and went away, my partner Elizabeth and I found ourselves rattling about rather in its tall old rooms. We decided to sell it but to keep for ourselves Zaccheus's 200-year-old outbuildings, behind a bank of trees to the east. We put our Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn of the day into the coach house, where it looked magnificently at home, being of an almost Georgian vintage itself; and we ourselves cleared out the horse stalls, retrieved the bookcases from the big house and moved into the stable block.

It was in a state of semi-dereliction, its yard almost impenetrable with brambles, its slate roof rickety, horseshoes and donkey-shoes lying about in the loose-stalls, and many signs of the bonfires which our children used to enjoy making there—perhaps in the hope, fortunately unfulfilled, that they could eventually make a bonfire of the whole place. Upstairs there were piles of the grain that the stablemen had used to fatten and invigorate their horses. Owls sometimes swooped among the rafters, and sundry rustlings testified to the presence of rats, mice and bats. However Elizabeth soon planned the adaptation of the old place, and a pair of young brothers from down the road, sometimes helped by their wives, did the necessary construction.