Bred of Heaven (32 page)

‘OK, let's have a look.' He takes the form and starts to check it. ‘But I'm still a bit confused by this idea of a Welsh passport, sir. I can't say I've ever seen one.'

‘I could swear you can get one. With Welsh writing in it and
things.' I may have been deceived. Or rather I may have deceived myself. I have tried to fantasise the Welsh-language passport into existence. But at least I can get a passport entirely made in Wales, even if it's in English.

‘Could I see your old passport, please?'

Shit. I knew I'd forgotten something.

‘Um, I left it in London.'

‘I'm afraid I can't process your application without it.'

This is turning into a freshly baked catastrophe. I pull my Welsh-language passport application off the counter and head out of Newport. Human error is a terrible thing. The problem is that the clock is ticking. There's now not enough time left to guarantee having my passport issued in Newport. There's only one thing for it.

A week or so later I pedal in baking heat to the passport office in London and enter the teeming premises agleam with cycle sweat but tightly focused on the prize. The wait is much longer here, the system much better set up for inducing application-related neurosis. At least I've filled out the form in Welsh. That's something. They can't take that away from me. The electronic ticket numbers are read out by a computerised voice into which, unless I'm hearing things, they've programmed a clearly discernible tone of boredom and testiness. My number comes up. I head upstairs and come face to face with a uniformed representative of the United Kingdom Identity and Passport Service. He is large and hairy.

‘I need to collect this later today,' I say, handing over the application and photos. Wearily he picks up the literature and starts to study it much as he has tens of thousands of applications before. Suddenly, his movements change in character as he flicks through the pages of the form, pupils darting up and down, across and back.

‘What's this?' he says.

‘It's my passport application form. It's in Welsh.'

‘Blimey.' He gives it another once-over. ‘We don't have any Welsh-language speakers.'

‘But don't you know every word of the form anyway? It's exactly the same as the English one.' I wave my English-language form, which has come along for the ride. ‘It's not as if my answers are in Welsh.' He can hear the distress in my voice.

‘Look, given that you want the passport today, it would be a lot simpler if you quickly filled out that English form.' He's all emollience. ‘It'll take just five minutes.' I sigh the atavistic sigh of the defeated Welshman and slap my English form on the counter. He even produces a pen and watches like a helpful parent as I fill in exactly the same answers as on my Welsh form. I conquer the temptation to put my city of birth as ‘Llundain'.

‘Have you got your photos?' At least I'm wearing my Welsh rugby shirt. They can't take that away from me. I cough up and stomp out of the building.

Four hours later I eagerly open my crisp new passport on the photograph page to find that they've somehow in the processing procedure contrived to bleed the colour out of my Welsh rugby shirt. It looks more Halloween orange than dragon red. Apparently I'm now Dutch. This really has been a demoralising exercise in step-by-step humiliation. My supposedly Welsh passport is about as Welsh as the Post Office Tower. I head back towards my locked bike, shoulders slumped, oppressed by the unfairness of it all. I'm about to pedal off when I think I might as well have a look at the inside front page, which says this:

EUROPEAN UNION
Yr Undeb Ewropeaidd

Then there's line of what I'm guessing is Scots Gaelic. Then:

UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND
NORTHERN IRELAND
Teyrnas Gyfunol Prydain Fawr a Gogledd Iwerddon

In the final lines the order is inverted.

Pasport
PASSPORT

How typical that English needs to flaunt itself in self-important upper case. Must be an insecurity thing. I flick through to one of the back pages, where handy translations for various words are provided in the twenty-three official languages of the European Union. After English, and a long way before French and Spanish, German, Dutch and Portuguese, the other languages of empire and conquest, comes Welsh. Nationality/
Cenedligrwydd
. Sex/
Rhyw
. Date of expiry/
Dyddiad dod i ben
. Holder's signature/
Llofnod y deiliad
. This seems an appropriate moment for one's face to crack into a broad involuntary smile. Which mine now does, exultantly. It feels like I've finally and in the eyes of officialdom acquired Welsh nationality. I am Welsh. It doesn't quite say it in my
pasport
. But it might as well.

Maybe not everyone. But actually I do know people at the Eisteddfod aside from the members of Pendyrus. I poke my nose into the Learners' tent and spot a familiar face.

‘Paned o de, os gwela di'n dda, James.' Cup of tea, please.

‘O helo, Jasper. Ti'n iawn?' My Welsh tutor, who has volunteered to help wherever needed, really is the most unfazeable
person. It's the first time we've met on Welsh soil, but in his tone of voice is an assumption that these casual meetings will happen on the Maes all the time. As I drink my tea I seize this opportunity to thank him for taking me on alongside his regular Welsh classes. His gaze wanders to his feet. I don't think he has any idea how much I mean it.

As it happens I also know someone else here. I bump into him outside a tented bookshop.

‘Beth wyt ti'n gwneud yma?' What are you doing here? It's not a great joke, granted, but it's still a joke in Welsh.

‘Sh'mae!' says the Archdruid of Wales expansively. Rather than his ceremonial garments, he's wearing a dapper light suit and tinted glasses. The face that lights up is somehow both round and sharp, receptive and assertive. He and Manon are all smiles, and so am I. However much he smiles, I'm rather nervous about mentioning my impending gift to the bardic tradition.

It's a bit intimidating speaking Welsh with an Archdruid. Jim grew up before and during the war and has lived his life entirely in Welsh. I have noted in his emails a tendency to deploy formal verb structures which Bishop William Morgan, the Elizabethan translator of the Bible, may recognise but which my L-plated brain finds challenging. Plus his front room is dominated by a tall carved wooden chair, the fruit of victory at the National Eisteddfod three years earlier. But I need to ask him about the rules of Welsh poetry, with a view to having a stab myself. So a couple of months before the Eisteddfod, I request a formal audience. The concepts under discussion being sufficiently complex, I additionally suggest that we proceed in English. He agrees, but with a rider.

‘Please remember,' he says, ‘that English is my second language.' Jim's accent is the closest that I've yet come across to one in which English words sound as if they could be Welsh. When he says
‘brilliant', there's no flattening of the vowels. They come up as crisp and pure echoes of Welsh words like
gogoniant
(glory) or
diwylliant
(culture). He has led a rich full life in the heart of Welsh Wales. In the 1960s he was a Congregationalist minister in Carmarthen until his landmark translation of
Under Milk Wood
(1968) paved the way for a life in literature. As well as the Chair at the National Eisteddfod he has won the Crown twice. This is his first year as
Archdderwydd
. The job is at its busiest, he explains, in the Eisteddfod week itself, when he presides over various proclamations, as well as crownings, chairings and open-air ceremonies. For the rest of the year there are Gorsedd committees to run, honours to confer on new Gorsedd members, Celtic festivals to attend in the Isle of Man, Ireland, Brittany and Cornwall. Can he understand the languages of the latter, supposedly closest to Welsh? ‘I can just about follow Cornish because it's very similar,' he says. ‘Breton isn't at all.' During his term of office he also has to make it to one of the annual
eisteddfodau
held by the Welsh diaspora in Patagonia.

I decide to soften up the Archdruid with a question or two about Dafydd ap Gwilym, the great Welsh medieval bard with whom, in my quiet moments, I've been grappling.

‘So, Jim,' I say, ‘how good is he?'

‘He is one of the foremost European poets. The difference from Chaucer, where we find it so difficult to understand, is that Dafydd ap Gwilym's Welsh is miraculously new. It's not that hard.'

‘So why has no one ever heard of him outside Wales?'

‘He's unsung,' explains the Archdruid, ‘because he can't be translated. You lose so much once you start to translate
cynghanedd
into free verse. You've lost all the music.'
Cynghanedd
, which means ‘harmony', is the word which encapsulates the bardic adherence to strict metre and internal consonance established in the Middle Ages.
‘Unsung' is all too apt, therefore: in translation Welsh poetry speaks but it does not sing. But why do rules suit Welsh poetry? I wonder if there is a part of the Welsh mentality that thrives on conformity.

‘I wouldn't argue with that,' says Jim. ‘Because Welsh is a minority language and its existence has been questioned so many times, one draws strength from tradition. On the other hand it's the realisation that we have something unique. There is no similar scheme in any other language throughout the world. So why not use it? Why let it die?'

The basic unit of Welsh poetry, Jim explains, is the
englyn
, which in its most popular form has four lines. In the commonest type, the first line has ten syllables, the second six, while the third and fourth have seven each. So far so good.

‘The first part is the ten-syllable line, which is broken up into seven/three, eight/two or very seldom nine/one,' he says. ‘There is a connection. Let's call the split a dash. The three or two (or one) syllables have to harmonise with the beginning of the second line, with consonants or different rhymes. The second line itself ends with the main rhyme, non-accentuated. But halfway through that second line you have to have a consonantal echo. But then the stress is also important. The stress has to happen in the right place for it to harmonise.'

I listen. And listen. But the information struggles to settle. I sense it might all be easier with the help of a wall chart, a calculator and a brain transplant. The talk migrates away from poetry to other Welsh matters. We revert to Welsh. The Archdruid, who does most of the talking while I do most of the wondering what it all means, tells me a story about driving through the Brecon Beacons. He mentions a couple of place names – Aberhonddu (Brecon) and Mynydd Epynt – whereupon I hear the word ‘Machlud'. I assume it's another place on the map of Wales.

‘Lle yw Machlud?' I say to Jim. Where is Machlud?

‘Ah brilliant!' he says. ‘Lle yw machlud! I'll write a poem on that. Oh, you've given me a poem! Diolch yn fawr. Diolch yn fawr!' The Archdruid rubs his hands in glee.
Machlud
, he tells me, refers to the sunset. I've just asked where a sunset is.

I leave clutching a slim volume entitled
Singing in Chains
, vowing to compose a poem in Welsh if it is the last thing I do. The book is by his distinguished Gorsedd colleague Mererid Hopwood, tipped to be the first ever female Archdruid. The rules of
cynghanedd
are spelled out with admirable clarity. A child could understand what makes a Welsh poem so distinctly beautiful.

Try writing one yourself though. At least in part,
cynghanedd
boils down to elements one knows from English poetry: the play of rhyme, the bounce of rhythm and stress. But Welsh verse operates on an extra level. If you temporarily ignore the vowels in a Welsh poem, you can detect a pattern of consonants being repeated across the length of the line. Hopwood cites a verse by Dafydd ap Gwilym:

You don't need to understand Welsh to know that the original has a musical sensuality absent from the translation. Take the first line. In six apparently simple words the sounds
r
,
1
,
n
and
d
in the
first half of the line are then repeated in the second half, in order. Then the third line breaks up into three sections: ‘Dilwch/yw dy degwch/di.' The first two have an internal rhyme, while the first consonant in the second section is echoed in the third. ‘And these,' says Mererid Hopwood, ‘are two of the patterns that form the rules of
cynghanedd
as we still practise it today.'

I've got my eye on the basic
englyn
outlined by the Archdruid – four lines whose syllables are distributed thus: ten/six/seven/seven. Other rules to note: the second line has to finish on an unstressed syllable, while in the third and fourth lines, one must end with a stressed syllable and the other unstressed. And so I embark.

After a couple of hours' intense labour, including sundry false starts and fake trails, I hit a roadblock midway through the second line. There are a number of issues. I'm not entirely sure which of the four listed forms of
cynghanedd
I'm meant to be using. Also, the business of creating a sentence in which consonants echo along the line in strict order feels a bit like scouring a beach for identical pebbles. Finally, I have no clear idea of what I want to say. Some vague concepts about Welshness and my various Welsh tasks hover about in my head. I grow attached to a word I think I've coined –
tadiaith
(father tongue) – only for it to refuse to bed down into any meaningful sentence. Then I shuffle the signature verbs of my quest like a general moving battalions about on a scale map:
credu
,
canu
,
gweithio
,
siarad
,
chwarae
,
cystadlu
,
tyfu
,
eistedd
. But they are reluctant to configure themselves into a shape. And then a mutation gets triggered – gets
suffered
– and the daisy chain of consonants is thrown all out of whack.