Bred of Heaven (18 page)

‘In the 1960s there was quite a lot of hostility among political parties and perhaps even many people,' says the guardian of the
Welsh language cautiously. ‘It's not disappeared, but there is a greater consensus now across the political parties that the Welsh language is a good thing, a bit like biodiversity is a good thing. Officially you won't find any party saying that we're wasting our money on promoting the Welsh language.' Or not in Wales, I forget to add. England is another matter.

The health of the Welsh language is measured, as scientifically as possible, every ten years with the national census. Statistics are available to determine precisely the percentage of Welsh speakers anywhere in Wales. People in featureless offices such as this can look at spreadsheets which tell them exactly how many have Welsh as a first language in any given village. If certain vested interests hold the paper to the light at a certain angle and squint to impart just the right level of distortion, the Welsh language can be seen, for all the Herculean efforts of those with their shoulders to the wheel, to be gradually atrophying. American television is corroding interest in the good work of S4C. Older English in-migrants (as they are carefully known) are refusing to learn the language. Younger Welsh speakers have crossed into England in search of work. And yet one of the problems is that the census doesn't seem to ask the right questions. It is thought that the 20.2 per cent of Welsh residents who said they spoke the language in 2001 did not include another 10 per cent who, for whatever reason, felt their Welsh was not quite good enough to warrant a tick in the appropriate box. The Act of Union casts a long shadow: for many who speak it, Welsh is still not a language which they associate with form-filling officialdom.

‘The last census showed for the first time an increase in the absolute numbers,' says the Minister for Culture. ‘The growth is in the younger generation between five and fourteen. It shows that the education strategy may be working to a certain extent: creating children who can speak Welsh. The question then is: Do they
speak
Welsh?' It's a good question. I think of an evening when Mal and I were about to drive over the pass to choir practice. We saw his grandson mucking about in the street in Penrhiwceibr. The boy is part of a generational shift: parents are thrusting their children into primaries which educate through the medium of Welsh, even in predominantly monoglot towns as far east as Wrexham and Newport. The teachers are deemed to be more eager, the teaching more rigorous. But when Mal spoke to him in Welsh he replied in English. ‘He says he doesn't speak Welsh at the weekend.' In short, there's a danger that Welsh, having once been brutally expunged from the classroom by the 1870 Education Act and the infamous Welsh Not, may now be confined to it.

‘You are able to teach people to speak Welsh,' says the minister, ‘but in their everyday lives those young people will probably not use Welsh except in some planned activity. And that is a problem – that you're losing the natural home for the Welsh language. It's not just the fact that it's disappearing from the rural communities.'

I'm starting to feel a bit gloomy. This isn't why I came. I was hoping to be informed by the Plaid Cymru Assembly Member and Welsh Minister for Culture that the future of Welsh has been secured, that English will not finally wipe it off the face of the earth. After all, a survey by the Welsh Language Board in 2002 established that two-thirds of the Welsh population declared the language's future was ‘very important' to them. Please can he now give me that assurance? ‘That's an impossible question to answer,' he says. ‘Minority languages are disappearing at a rate of knots throughout the world. In fact Welsh is probably among the handful of European minority languages which has a fighting chance. But hand on my heart, I couldn't say, “Yes, it will survive.”'

I shake the minister's hand, and tell him I'll be off to Nant Gwrtheyrn to do my bit on the barricades.

A few weeks later, on a Sunday evening, I take the scenic route via Welshpool, Dolgellau and Porthmadog, the slate port where my grandmother spent her first ten or so years. The otherness of North Wales for me as a child was a matter of fact. My father had memories of colourless holidays with Welsh great-aunts in Llandudno, but we never went north. As I push on to the Ll
n in darkness, low-lying fog in high-hedged lanes adds to an ambience of peninsular spookiness. Eventually a single looping lane plummets down the side of a mountain.

It being Sunday night, the office is closed. I find a noticeboard where my room number is listed. I'm in Dwyfor (= two seas). One sea roars faintly somewhere off in the darkness. I walk past a long low row of terraced cottages. The place is utterly deserted. I feel as if I've trespassed onto the set of a horror movie. I find Dwyfor, climb a staircase, locate a nice modern room and, irrationally, lock the door.

When the sun rises on the Welsh Language and Heritage Centre, I step out into crisp morning air and a sort of Welsh plaza, a large walled lawn flanked on two sides by the aforesaid cottages. In all directions but one there is a sense of enclosure, rocky slopes heaving upwards. Nant Gwrtheyrn has been scooped out of the side of a mountain as if by giants. Nowhere in the country are peaks in such towering proximity to the sea. To the south-west there's a long view along coastal cliffs as they turn a stern profile to the Irish Sea. I wander down to a swanky new building, all glass gleam and woody shimmer, and enter a huge floorboarded dining room with only a single round table parked in the middle. A woman with short reddish hair and glasses is already eating breakfast.

‘Bore da,' I say. Good morning.

‘Er, bore da.' She gives me a look.

‘Cwrs Uwch?' Same course?

‘Ydy.' Yes, she is.

‘O ble dych chi'n dod?' The introductory question: Where does she come from?

‘Caerdydd. A chi?'

‘Llundain.' She raises an eyebrow. There's a pause.

‘Do we have to speak in Welsh all the time?'

‘Wrth gwrs!' I say. Course we bloody do.

We introduce ourselves. She's called Roisin. I go over to the counter to get myself some breakfast and give us a breather. The door clinks open and into the vast dining room walks a tall, broad-framed man, with cropped hair, looking friendly but wary.

‘Bore da,' he says.

‘Bore da,' say Roisin and I. He's called David and comes from Conwy. We sit round the table and edge into a conversation as if walking out onto untested ice. There is some nervous laughter, much helpful nodding and considerable stopping preceded by starting. As I participate a thought flits into my head. Are they better than me? That would be most unsatisfactory. Or am I as good as them? I try to ignore it. The supremacist philosophies of Mr Darwin have no place here. Wales, lest I forget, was the wellspring of the equals sign, invented by Robert Recorde of Tenby in 1557. Still, there's early evidence that my word larder is an impressive resource. Roisin gives me a startled look as, buttering my toast, I roll out a percussive polysyllable which I then have to translate. Am I actually better than them at Welsh? The door opens again and another woman enters, short with fine fair hair and rimless glasses.

‘Bore da. Helen dw i.' We all exchange the relevant information. Helen is from Nottingham. No sooner does she reel off a sentence or two than my fantasies of spending the week at the top of the class are put back in the bottom drawer. In comes Richard, a man with a cheerful round face from Anglesey, then Gerry, a tall thin
woman with ringleted hair from Bangor. Age wise we're all in the same neighbourhood, mid thirties to mid forties. Apart from John, who shuffles in last. Wisps of grey hair frame a somehow mischievous face. John must be in his sixties. This is his third time at the Nant. He comes from somewhere in the Midlands but his Welsh sounds rooted in very ancient soil. He perorates for a while until a tall woman in a drapey woollen shawl enters wearing a look of benign, earnest concern. She announces herself as Pegi. It's the tutor who told me I'm good enough to be on
Cwrs Uwch
. She gives an introductory speech about timetables and suchlike, length of lessons, the dining schedule, the shape of the five days to come. I understand about half of it.

So far not a word of anything other than Welsh has been spoken. Or not a sentence. We have started as we mean to continue. There will be no incursions from over the linguistic border. England and English could be as far away as Constantinople was to the men of the Third Crusade. And thus for these five days they must remain.

The original function of Nant Gwrtheyrn grew out of the first Welsh Language Act in 1967, which acknowledged in law the equal status of English and Welsh. However, Welsh not often being the first language of the professional classes, somewhere was needed to nurture the linguistic skills of those working in public bodies. Since the centre's inception in 1978, and as that brief widened to include anyone yearning to learn Welsh or improve what they already knew, over 25,000 students of the language have visited Nant Gwrtheyrn, from Cardiff where so many jobs in the media require bilingualism, from all over Wales and the UK, from countries across the world. In the summer months the weekly head count can be closer to forty. But for now, seven of us will be adding ourselves to the tally.

The classroom is a converted Calvinistic Methodist chapel – in a previous incarnation, from the 1850s to the 1930s, the village of
Porth-y-Nant was home to an isolated and self-contained granite quarry. The chapel, restored like the rest of the village from ruin, is now a tall, light room in which four tables are laid out in a U shape. On the walls are posters about Welsh life, the Welsh language, Welsh celebrities. We take our seats and Pegi begins by asking us to outline our goals for the week. Most of the group need Welsh for professional reasons. Roisin is a town planner (
cynllunydd tref
) in South Wales, David works for the complaints department of Conwy Council (
cwyno
= to complain;
cyngor
= council/advice). Richard is a fireman (
dyn tân
). Helen is about to come and do probation work in Wales. For all of them Welsh is an increasingly vital tool. John, meanwhile, explains that he simply wants to spend a week speaking Welsh, there not being much call for it in the Midlands. Pegi turns to me.

‘Beth amdanoch chi, Jasper?' What about you?

‘Mae rheswm rhyfedd 'da fi,' I say. I've got a strange reason. ‘Dw i eisiau troi fy hunan mewn Cymro go iawn.' I want to turn myself into a real Welshman. The mission statement evinces a perceptible double take from the group. It's a knife-edge moment. It would be awful to be met with suspicion as I was in Welsh Level 1, Module 1. I've got to spend the next five days with these people, and they with me. I look around the room. If I can perceive a distinction, the women have instantly parked me as a classic narrow-focus male from the harmless end of the autistic spectrum, while I'm guessing Richard and David can't quite believe I've volunteered for something so non-specific and unmeasurable.

‘Diddorol iawn, Jasper!' says Pegi. Very interesting! She sounds like a reception teacher praising a tot. It's Gerry's turn.

‘Dw i'n hoffi just bloody speak as well as you lot.' Gerry has been sent here by her employers at Bangor University. It's clear to her that they've booked her on the wrong week. She drives off at the end of the day. We never see her again.

By five o'clock I'm wishing I could follow her out of Nant Gwrtheyrn. Having advertised my eagerness to build my listening skills, I have my chance all too soon. Pegi presses play on a CD and we listen for a few minutes to a male voice talking about … the truth is I have no idea what he's talking about. Not even a hint of a clue. Half-familiar sounds now and then materialise like wall lights flitting by in a train tunnel, but there are nothing like enough of them. When it finishes, Pegi looks up and asks us what we made of it. Most of us wear a gormless look. Pegi offers to play it again. I feel like I'm slithering down a snake again, much as I did when starting to teach myself by CD. Eventually we get to see a transcript and I realise why. The whole thing is in dialect, otherwise known as North Welsh.

I've already noticed something of this in the speech of most of the people on the course. Odd words loom in the middle of bog-standard constructions.

I ask Pegi what
efo
means. It's cropping up all over the shop, like some inexplicable rash. She explains that
efo
is North Welsh for ‘with'. In the south they say – we say –
gyda
.

‘Blydi Gogs.' Roisin emits an imprecation at the next-door table. Bloody northerners.
Gog
is short for
gogledd
(north). The Gogs in the room giggle conspiratorially: they are the masters up at this end of the Welsh compass. Other basic discrepancies are soon making their presence known. I keep hearing the words
o
and
fo
for ‘he' and ‘him' where I would use
e
and
fe
. And then there are different formulations for ordinary phrases. The Welsh, for example, depersonalise simple expressions like ‘I must', ‘I prefer' or even ‘I hate', as if syntactically distancing themselves from the sentiment. ‘There is a necessity with me', ‘It is better with me', ‘It is nasty with me'. In the south ‘with me' is
gyda fi
or
'da fi
. In the north it's
gen i
. And
gen
has different endings, depending on who's doing the preferring or the hating. I've soon discovered that they have alternative words
for ‘milk', for ‘to cry', ‘to try', ‘to find', for ‘out' and ‘up'. To my ears Helen even has a different way of saying ‘yes'.