Bred of Heaven (8 page)

But this is nothing to the nasal mutation, which scrambles the actual names of places as if to hide them in low-flying fog. It occurs infrequently but its impact is devastating, a bit like the H bomb, or man flu. You can see how it happened. Much as we have long since stopped saying ‘inmodest' or ‘inmaterial', Welsh elides and slurs sounds for maximum convenience. Thus my grandmother grew up
ym Mhorthmadog
, went to school
yn Nolgellau
, spent her married life
yng Nghaerfyrddin
. Wherever the hell they all are.

James, forever apologising for the complexities of Welsh syntax, continues bright and breezy, like a good day on the Gower. We get up and start asking each other where we're from.

‘O ble dych chi'n dod?'

‘Dw i'n dod o Llundain,' I say, forgetting to mutate it to
Lundain
.
A couple of times I ring the changes. ‘Dw i'n dod o Gymru' (I come from Wales). I am thoroughly pleased with this geographical riff. Alpha Pete looks at me as if I'm a Welsh verb he'd like to thump. More smart alecry from the self-appointed class swot. I can see I'm not going to make any friends in this room. It's a fallacy, of course. I don't come from any such place. Not yet.

Lauds. It's 5.58. The bell clangs in the cloister. For an hour and a half I have slept the sleep of the shriven as dawn steals up on Caldey. There are more chanted psalms. ‘For you my soul is thirsting,' we sing, ‘my body pines for you, like a dry weary land without water' (Psalm 63). I note an extra monk in the stall this time, bent double with age. ‘Hide me from the land of the wicked,' we chant, ‘from the throng of evildoers' (Psalm 64). Presumably he misses the early shift these days. ‘The Lord is King, let earth rejoice' (Psalm 97). We process out and I slip back upstairs. The air is cool in the cloister. What must it be like in winter here, the spaces big and unwarmed?

Cold Island is also known in Welsh as Ynys B
r, after the island's first abbot, Pyro. Pyro's life was not entirely devoted to devotion. He liked a drink, presumably to keep warm, given that in the sixth century the monks lived in huts and even sea caves. One night he fell into the monastery's well and drowned. So it says in
The Life of Samson
. Samson was the next of many saints to come to Caldey when, after the Romans had gone, Celtic Christianity took root in Wales. Later came Dyfrig, whose name is notched in ogham script into the rim of a stone slab in the island's priory. He sailed to Caldey each Lent for forty days of solitude. Then there was St Illtud, St Paul of Léon and St Gildas the Wise, whose idea it was to pray to the Lord Jesus Christ to enlarge the island. There were more dramatic tides back then; it is said you could walk the mile from St
Margaret's Island to the mainland when the tide was out, but when it was in, the fields which they farmed when they weren't praying would be flooded. (Even now you get letters from Caldey bearing the stamp ‘Delayed by rough seas'.)

I've just settled down with a cup of tea when I hear the shiver of the bell in my eyrie. Saints preserve us, I think, as I trudge back through the cloister. It's like Groundhog Day here, but with the repetition happening
every hour
. Only this time the scene is dramatically different. A riot of colour greets my entrance. The monks are still in their white tunics, but now some are wearing a light-green stole which hangs round the neck and down past the waist. And one is enveloped in a rich bright-green chasuble, the colour of classy Christmas wrapping paper. Rome's genius for design has struck. The colours, Teilo tells me later, vary according to occasion: green for regular days and Sundays; white for the Virgin's major feasts, Christmas and Easter; purple for mourning. They've worn purple a few times in recent years as older brethren have successively given up the ghost.

Holy Mass. We are spared more psalms. The church has lured quite a crowd at this late hour (6.45 a.m.). In addition to me and the visiting priests there are three women scattered about the pews. I'm guessing they're islanders. One in a woolly hat operates a doll's-house organ parked directly behind the abbot. She accompanies us in a doleful hymn, while up front the monk in the chasuble consecrates the wine and the bread at the altar. The monks now surround him in a wide semicircle. They raise their arms, palms held aloft, as they sing. The Cistercian God is a theatre director, I think, as I am wowed by this ritualistic parade of choreographed exultation. And the props are impressive too, the white wafers as big as biscuits, the huge chalice silver and gleaming. They ingest around the altar. Two monks too weak to stand are ministered to in their
stalls. Presumably we the congregants go up to the altar and kneel. But I shan't brave that humiliation again. Oh, but two monks are heading our way. There's no getting out of this. The wafer is proffered. I have no choice but to open my mouth to receive it. It's crumbly, tasteless. And the chalice, rim freshly wiped. The blood of Christ is thick and sweet. I sit in a state of blushing confusion. For the first time in my life, I have taken communion on the holy island where St David may very well have been a monk. How Welsh is that?

In the hallway a grandfather clock tocked and tolled towards lunch. Over the pots and pans my mother would throw in her lot. Perhaps Aunt Joan assisted with the final push to share in the glory. My uncle would offer his services, but they were always declined. He was famously incompetent in the kitchen. None of the other men would lift a finger. Towards one o'clock my grandfather would put down his pipe and rise from his armchair in the corner nearest the fire, and summon us. We gathered, three boys with bright eyes, to follow him down the corridor, carpeted in dark red, slung with long Persian rugs, towards a door at the end. Into a small sanctum we all clustered, supplicants of this forbidding figure who, we knew, was about to dispense largesse.

‘Now, boys, who would like a drink?' A hint of Welsh warmth in the voice.

‘Me!' The reply in triplicate would produce a stern, expectant look. ‘Me, please, Grandpa.' This contritely from my older brother, who was old enough to read the signs. After a nudge, it was echoed in duplicate.

‘What would you like?' A more or less rhetorical question. We all craved the same thing: ginger beer, but ginger beer that you could get nowhere else, to our certain knowledge, in the entire
world. To us it was Welsh ginger beer, Carmarthen ginger beer, Mount Hill ginger beer. From a tall bottle our grandfather slowly poured a fizzing liquid into three tumblers. You wanted to get drinking straight away.

‘Now, what do you say?' Glasses pulled away from mouths.

‘Thank you, Grandpa.' You sipped and felt an instant rasp at the back of the throat. This stuff was toxic. In no time you'd have drained it. Through the bubbled base of the glass you could then watch people, refracted and multiplied, taking their places around the octagonal table. The back of your mouth was searing from the ginger as now trolleys rattled across the hall and into the dining room, one pushed by my grandmother, the other by Aunt Joan flagrantly doing her bit.

My grandfather now stepped up to slice the sizzling bird on a table by the door and briskly sharpened the carving knife as if preparing for something less innocent than lunch. Our grandmother bustled. Uncles and great-aunts nattered. Children chattered. Plates groaned. Even, as the years go by, mine. Until the age of seventeen I mainly consisted of ribs, but this was one meal it was worth not turning up your nose at. You couldn't argue with those crunchy potatoes. The fleshy white meat was perfectly acceptable. Even the odd vegetable from the steam-powered trolley might find a way past your line of defence. It was the gravy that sugared the pill, a rich brown gloop that seemed to have been piped up from some Welsh Middle Earth. It had the smooth consistency of thinnish cement.

It took Dorothy an age to settle. She would spring up to fetch things or to minister to others. No such mania for Bert. Methodically he sliced, silently he chewed, carefully he swallowed. My grandfather never did anything at pace. The food, he was said to believe, was too good to spoil with talk. Which left the field open
to the others. Aunt Joan, a miniaturist, regaled the room with tales of the bishops and ministers, chief rabbis and archimandrites and other assorted panjandrums she'd lately (or not so lately) painted. The first and in fact only time I ever heard my grandmother express intolerance was when Aunt Joan's narrative torrent was in full flow one time.

‘You aren't listening, Granny.'

‘Oh, don't worry, Jasper bach,' she said, leaning in conspiratorially. ‘I've heard the stories before ever so often.' She called us all
bach
– ‘little one'. For years it was the only Welsh word I knew.

After lunch they used to send us to bed. Everyone, so the argument went, would have a nap. It seemed a nonsensical rule. Who wants a nap at two in the afternoon on Christmas Day of all days? So we ruckused upstairs among the bedclothes, and generally waited while engorged Welsh elders slept off their food.

After a respectable period we were suffered to come downstairs, to be greeted by tottering stacks of presents. These should have been sledded in on an overnight delivery, but we were told that Father Christmas came late to Carmarthenshire. I would rip through my pile, barely pausing to give thanks. Children are uniquely vile in that regard. I was, anyway. My ravenous consumerist maw was fed with toys, board games and militarised figurines, which emerged from their wrapping and fanned across the available carpet space. My grandmother would take an interest in these plastic acquisitions, and my uncle too. The peripheral players would purse their lips. My grandfather was lofty in his indifference to all this knick-knackery shipped down from London toyshops. When they were young in Wales such bounty did not shower down the chimney. But who cared what they all thought? Not I. I would take my stock away and lavish it with attention for many minutes. Then I would arrange it carefully in a corner and forget all about it.

Thus was a merry Christmas worshiplessly had by all in Wales. The old house chimed to a Welsh kind of merriment, warm rich smells lingering long into the early evening when pancakes smeared in salty Welsh butter made their appearance. No doubt tensions simmered over our heads: relatives were eager for the time to fly, for twitterers to shut it, children to be silenced and the relentless flow of heavy Welsh cooking to relent. I noticed none of it. To me as a child this was Wales and this was Welshness. And every year it was to be wished for – devoutly.

The list of sundry chapels in Carmarthen testifies to the grip in which Nonconformity held the Welsh population in the nineteenth century: the Priory Independent Chapel, the Penuel Baptist Chapel, the Tabernacle Baptist Chapel, the English Congregational Chapel, the Calvinistic Methodists, the Parc-y-Felfed Unitarian Chapel, the Union Street Independent Chapel.

On a damp July Sunday morning I pause outside fine black railings in Lammas Street. Overhead are grey West Wales skies, heavy with rain. A black board tells me I've got the right place: Capel Yr Annibynwyr – the Independents' Chapel (confusingly, the Independents are also known as Congregationalists). It was here in 1927 that my grandparents married. The minister, the board says, is one J. Towyn Jones, FRSA.

The tall building at the back of the courtyard is behind scaffolding. I slip through a side doorway and enter a chapel. The welcoming smiles are bright and warm. I am handed a hymnal. It seems a small room for my grandparents to have married in. A line of varnished wooden pillars and a curtained back wall intensify the sense of a womb. The other surprise is how many fill the pews. We are led to believe that the Welsh believer is an endangered species, but the streets are running with people in their Sunday best, heading for
places of worship. There are maybe twenty Congregationalists in the congregation, mostly over fifty but not all. I take my place in a row halfway up the left of the aisle and await developments.

Eventually a pianist finishes noodling beatifically on an upright piano and silence descends. The minister – J. Towyn Jones, I presume – who has been sitting among us in a chair behind a lectern, rises to speak. He's wearing a raffish bow tie, which somehow matches the kindly contours of his face and the donnish waves of white hair. We are welcomed in Welsh. We sing hymns in Welsh – ‘Wel dyma'r Ceidwad', ‘Cof am y cyfiawn Iesu' – not so very tunefully, but lustily. We pray in Welsh. The minister addresses us in Welsh, tells jokes. People laugh. It's all extremely benign. He has a lovely soft manner. There are hints of the avuncular entertainer. I notice all sorts of Welsh words, even understanding parts of the sentences. When we sing again, trays of tiny glass goblets with a glistening red liquid are brought out, also a bowl. This time I really shall stay put. Two deacons have picked up the trays by a handle. The glasses clink as they bring the body and blood of Christ to the people. We don't even have to leave our pews. I select a slender glass and knock it back. The wine is superior to the Catholic stuff.