Insufficiently Welsh (3 page)

Just over the bridge and halfway into the village of Tintern I ran across an impressive little secondhand bookshop, perhaps an overspill from Hay-on-Wye, now only a few miles upriver.

It specialised in children's books, and amongst the mint edition Rupert Bear annuals I found a leather-bound collection of early ballads. But the title page informed me that the book in my hands was printed in the very early years of the nineteenth century. No Welsh National Anthem even existed then.

“Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau” was written in 1856 by a father and son team, the James gang, (Evan and James James). It was written as a dance tune. James junior was that Welsh musical hero, a harpist, who played in the local pub. His song, “
T
he Banks of the Rhondda” was composed in Pontypridd (home to my Aunty Betty, though she seldom danced). It had a six-eight time signature. It became increasingly popular as a jig, so much so that it began to be sung at sporting events, to warm up the crowd.

Wales actually gave the tradition of singing the anthem before a rugby game to the world when, in 1905, it was decided to sing the anthem to compete with the All Blacks' Haka. But of course crowds can't dance, they can only wallow and so the tune gradually slowed and grew in portentousness until it took on the rousing form that it enjoys today. Thank goodness for that. Had it had been any faster I would have been slower getting hold of it. All that remained after all the ministrations I had received were a few scraps of paper and a distant memory of the tune.

I needed help and I found it in the form of Ruth Sweet. Ruth offered the musical support that I needed. She picked me up and swept me westwards to Rhaglan. She said her handbell ringing group would accompany me. Now, for the first time, I was seriously cruising into the soothing green of Monmouthsire, and with my stuff in a Range Rover boot, to boot.

“My father always used to say that this was God's own country,” Ruth told me, as we swooped between the neat hedges. “I worked as a teacher and my husband, who is in computers, had postings in southern Ireland and Florida. But as we came to retirement, you know, I had to come back.” She waved a hand in the direction of the misty ridge ahead. “You can see why.”

“And are those the Black Mountains?” I asked, naming Welsh mountain ranges randomly.

“No, they are much further away. What we can see are the lower parts of the Brecon Beacons. That's the Sugar Loaf Mountain over there. Abergavenny is just beyond it.”

Coming from Essex, I loved this vision of “over the hills and far away”. Welsh vistas always provided a valley to drop into, a plain to cross or mountains to climb. In Essex the horizon tended to be flat, even and built over.

The handbells had been discovered in a trunk in St Cadoc's Church in Rhaglan, while the place was being decorated with flowers for a festival. There were two octaves of single bells on leather strap handles, many of which had worn away with age. Later it was established that they had been made in London near King's Cross and, since the foundry had ceased to exist in 1852, they could certainly be declared “old”.

The group decided to have the bells restored as a millennium project and then learned to play them. They took the name “The St Cadoc's Millennium Chimes” and their very first performance was given by candlelight, because of a power cut. Since then they have taken on some experienced hand-ringing assistance and learned to play from notation. So this is what I was confronted with now – a score.

We ate “cawl”, the Welsh soup of vegetables and lamb, and then we went through into Ruth's front room. A large book was dumped in front of me and two bells were placed in my hands.

“You swing forward following the shape of a rugby ball,” I was told firmly. “You swing it out with a smooth movement. Flick… and back.”

I didn't want to say that it was a long time since I had handled a rugby ball. But I got the general idea: another accomplishment that I could perform, if I acted the part. I just had to pretend to be a handbell ringer and no doubt I would become one. I had to embrace the team spirit too. Despite all the beautifully made-up eyes watching me I was after all just two notes in a musical instrument.

I extended my arm and swayed into it a bit, like a child overcome with music in the infants' choir, and a sonorous “dong” rang around Ruth's front room. Everybody applauded. Fair enough.

Now all sixteen of us bent to our task. Reading the score was surely going to be more complex, but, luckily, it was a matter of “beats”. I was responsible for two notes. Each was clearly marked in dayglo colours on my sheet. As long as I could get with the rhythm and extend my arm on cue I would probably contribute. And with fifteen other experienced ringers to help I was in a good place. After all, I only had a choice of two notes. I just had to remember my right from my left. Mostly, I managed.

Let me just say that, in the close confines of a suburban home in Rhaglan, a double octave of bells played by sixteen dedicated players can deliver a wondrous clamour of music. The bells rang out in clear, resonant notes and the vocals rumbled along somewhere in amongst them. Whether a slight residue of double “u”s, wrongly accented double “dd”s, false “th”s instead of “dd”s, “f”s for “v”s, or “yous” insteads of “ayes” emerged, I must leave to others to judge. (Preferably not Welsh speakers).

Let's just say that Brian, our sound engineer, was satisfied that my version would have been “OK on the terraces of the Millennium Stadium”. For my part, I was satisfied that Brian was an expert sound recordist and a fine judge of singing. And you will be satisfied he knew how to bury a dismal cacophony of pseudo-Welsh gibberish deep in the tuneful harmony of some expertly jangled handbells.

It was the anthem. And lovely music too. We should be grateful for that.

I was. Deeply. But I was no nearer the mysteries of one of the most important and rightly revered bastions of Welsh culture, the language. It and I remain on the shelf. It will have to come, but later, later, later.

–2–
B
EACONS
I
NTO T
H
E
GR
EEN

–
HAYWIRE-ON-WYE
–

I think Chris, our director, hoped that the market opposite the hotel on the square in the middle of Hay would gradually take on the appearance of a Breughel-like, medieval fete. (Perhaps it will on film.) It felt like a miserable collection of bric-a-brac stalls to me.

“Just come towards the camera,” he called.

I had to totter through a handsome Georgian door and then stroll nonchalantly across the road towards the bustling market folk, spouting platitudes.

The first take was abandoned. A 50 foot tour bus stopped in front of me and brake-farted. The second take was drowned by a motorbike. The third and fourth got me skipping around speeding BMWs. The final attempt was interrupted by an elderly Australian who wanted my autograph. I don't mind Australians. They are a temporary nuisance. It's the traffic that gets me. Every town I visit would work better if they just shut the bloody place to all the bloody cars.

Other than that, Hay is, of course, a big success. It is a “book town”. It is said that there are more books per head in Hay than in any other town in the world. I first went there twenty-five years ago to interview the self-styled “King” of Hay, Richard Booth, for a series called “The Bookworm”.

He told me that he was indifferent to books. (He was teasing me, and the producer, particularly, who started to sweat.) But of course he loves books; it is said that Richard Booth himself has two million books, equating to 10 miles of bookshelves. His battle, however, he explained, was not for books but for the soul of Hay. In the seventies, Hay's High Street was dominated by unoccupied, rotting shops. Richard was an early campaigner against bypass megastores. He was one of the first to finger Tesco as the great Satan, the massive Moloch, the Miltonic lord of expensive sacrifice. He needed something to keep the town alive and he hit on dead books.

“It could have been almost anything,” he explained. “I don't think of Hay as a book town, I think of it as a single commodity town. I reasoned that if all the old books were gathered in one place then collectors would come.”

I bought into Richard's big plan. I visualised other towns becoming “diving equipment towns”, or “secondhand art towns”, or “model motorcar towns”. Even then, in the late eighties, Richard could point to two copycat book burghs in the US, and another one in France.

But I didn't buy a book. I wandered off into his buckram-covered world in a stupor. Every shop had a damp cardboard smell. Long shelves bent under the burden of slightly-foxed Everyman editions and faded encyclopedias. It looked like home. Faced with such a bewildering choice and no pressing need, I couldn't make up my mind: the complete plays of J.B. Priestley, an out-of-date restaurant guide to Rome, a ten-year-old history of a Balkan campaign in the Second World War? There was no end to the publications I didn't really need, so I didn't choose. In a town of a million cheap secondhand books I bought nothing at all. Not even a Simenon for the train back.

My challenge was to swim in a mountain lake. So I was planning to leave the town for the hills in search of something wet and freezing. I even had a joke. “I would never be able to buy a swimming costume in a book town, eh?”

But now I was back in Hay, I noticed that it was no longer exclusively a book town at all.

There were antique shops, knick-knack shops, perfumed candle shops, antique Welsh blanket shops and humid cafés, but, in order to make my laboured point on camera, we had to actively search for bookshops. We found the detective and thriller centre, the poetry bookshop and countless racks up near the castle, but Hay had turned into “a destination town”. And I had to find another destination up a hill and swim in it to prove my Welsh hardiness.

Tempted by the wholly unsuitable five-toed, acid-green rubber shoes in the window, I found what I think Richard Booth had wanted to preserve all along: a straightforward, up-and-down, old-fashioned haberdashers on the main square. The autumn rain was pattering against the door. The season for wild swimmers was over. They usually stocked bathing suits, but nothing remained in my size. So I discussed the likelihood of extreme weather with the son of the proprietor. “In the Beacons,” he told me, “extreme weather is not extreme. It is normative.”

I pondered this and bought a massive navy-blue coverall waterproof poncho in its own carry bag.

We would have left Hay immediately, but we had an invitation to a regal event. Richard Booth had been the victim of a stroke, but it happened to be his birthday. There was a lunchtime celebration in a club down by the church. We arrived early. While I ate an organic lamb burger I watched the King of Hay's courtiers roll in, sporting the tatterdemalion flourishes of a once flourishing middle-class hippy set. A pug ran around yapping at ankles. Wine glasses were raised and filled and filled again. A man in a black suit on a balcony sang the Hay National Anthem.

Richard, with a gleam in his eye, joined me on a sofa. He outlined his new campaign, bursting with the old rebel mettle. The mantra had changed. Hay was no longer solely a book town. It was a “tourist” town too. (As indeed it was.) It provided jobs and supported a population of roughly 1500. The Hay Festival brings in over 80,000 writers, publishers and literature fans. Bill Clinton dubbed the festival “The Woodstock of the Mind”. But something was amiss.

I gradually gathered that the Welsh Assembly Government and Sky Television had made an unholy pact to seize the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival. This was to be resisted. Rupert and James were mentioned in unflattering terms. The centralising effect of the Welsh Assembly was disparaged.

I wanted to dig deeper, but Richard was ushered outside, to sit under his flags of office, wearing a tin crusader helmet, surrounded by adoring women in cotton print dresses. Toasts were offered. New vows of eternal resistance were sworn. It reminded me of
Passport to Pimlico
. Perhaps it was a fanciful idea. Maybe it was parochial. Except that those few book towns that we had discussed, nearly thirty years before, had now grown to number two hundred, worldwide. There are “food towns” too, in Ludlow and Abergavenny. I still fantasise that there might one day be an “old paintings town”.

While governments fret uselessly about the high street, Hay is packed. And Richard Booth has proved conclusively that local commitment can make the difference.

In the meantime I had hired a bright red Vespa scooter and mounted up to drive out into the Beacons and link cool, cosmopolitan Hay with rugged, out-there Brecon.

Like other iconic vehicles, the Vespa was conceived in the ashes of WWII. Similar to the Lambretta, the Vespa was inspired by an American military scooter called the Cushman, which was used by the Americans to circumnavigate the German lines while fighting on the borders of Italy. This, however, was not Italy. It was Wales and it had started raining.

–
WELSH WATER
–

I have never really wanted to quench my thirst from a babbling brook. What about that decomposing sheep up the glen, the fertiliser in the punctured plastic sack, or the cow hormones in those incontinent cows at the water hole? And yet I regularly drink gallons of refrigerated mineral water, advertised as gushing out of some mountain spring. I needed guidance.

The water for Brecon Carreg comes in from a couple of nondescript huts in the undergrowth round the back of the bottling factory. “No, I can't show you where our source is.” Jeff, our helper, was emphatic. “It's a security issue.”

I nodded, unsure whether he thought we might steal it, or return in the middle of the night to poison it, but now I was confused. I had been told that we were going to the source. In fact I was getting “source” mixed up with “
le source
” thanks to my source (in the information sense). I hope you're following this.

I finally gathered that we were planning to get a look at a river in a cave somewhere else much later on. Nonetheless my confusion served to confuse the director and Jeff, and my information source for a good half an hour, until Jeff took me to a laboratory where a computer could show me the true origin of his own water.

Brecon Carreg water comes from wells and not from a babbling stream at all. Unlike the famous Perrier “
source
” (which is French for spring) there was no unending spout of fizzing “
eau
”. The well-heads were undistinguished boxes sitting in the bushes round the back of the factory. The water may be called “spring” water. It was supine water in reality.

Nonetheless, the computer was reassuring. It showed three bright blue vertical bars. Each represented the level in one of Jeff's wells. For some reason the company never seemed to bother with one of them. “You can ignore that one,” Jeff told me. So I did, and I stared meaningfully at the two other unwavering computer representations.

Numbers were flickering slightly. They told Jeff that he was currently extracting six or so thousand litres an hour. He could go as high as fifteen thousand litres an hour if he were filling litre bottles, but he wasn't today, so they remained steady, consistent and well within his limits.

Jeff's wells never ran dry. As furiously as Jeff extracted the water, so it seeped back from the surrounding aquifer. I was unsure why there was a limit to his powers of extraction, but there clearly was. His licence restricted him. If there was a sudden thirst for Welsh water, however, he could turn to that other well. Or even the one I had been ordered to ignore.

I liked the factory: a glittering city of stainless steel pipes and mini conveyor belts. We marvelled at the ingenuity of factory engineers for a moment or two. Machines jiggled and squirted. A magnificent, Soda-Stream contraption, which added bubbles as necessary, was, alas, idle. They were making or, rather, bottling “still” water today. So the water hurried straight to a Perspex-faced box the size of a caravan. An endless row of plastic bottles entered at one end, met a water pipe and were then combined, at bewildering speed, to create a nose-to-tail traffic jam of bottled water, which made a dainty journey along a wide sweep of conveyor to the next machine. This rotated each bottle through a label applicator and trundled the finished product to wrapping and packing to become big, heavy square blocks of compartmentalised water.

It wasn't always this formalised and industrial. Brecon Carreg (taking its name from Carreg Cennen Castle) began life as a true cottage industry in 1978, but with the help of big investors had taken on mythical overtones. Unadorned nature was meeting highly complex, chemical artificiality. We were all dressed in robes and blue hair nets, which stole our identity and transformed us into sinister robot figures. “We can follow the conveyor belt along to make it look funny,” I told Tudor.

“There's nothing funny about this.” said a passing humanoid in a hairnet, firmly.

Jeff explained that they provided several different varieties of bottled water. The most complex was their mineral water. “You cannot call any old water ‘mineral water',” he said. “
‘Mineral water' has to be monitored for two years to check its consistency.”

“So what minerals do you have in your mineral water?” I asked Jeff, innocently.

He hesitated.

“It's all on the label,” he said.

I had a look. The water was low in sodium at 5mg per litre. But there were 55mg of calcium and some silica, sulphate, magnesium, potassium and nitrate. It was all utterly meaningless to me. I am sure other shoppers examine it minutely.

Later, however, when I finally got to see a river emerging from the cave, several miles from the factory, I began to understand the science of it all. My guide was Gary, a caving enthusiast. He explained that the southwestern extremities of the Brecon Beacons are “Karst Country”: a geologist's term for a limestone landscape.

Limestone is created by the skeletons of sea creatures, deposited on an ancient seabed hundreds of millions of years ago. They died so we could cave and sup clean water. The movement of the earth's crust crushed this stuff into layers of rock. It was laid down in an ocean in the Tropics and made its way to Wales by creaking and juddering across the surface of the planet.

Limestone is eroded by water but in a gratifyingly slow manner. (Everything in geology takes ages – especially the explanations.) Water and lime together create a light carbonic acid. This eats holes into the solid rock: potholes if they are vertical and caves if they are horizontal. Cavers like Gary thrust themselves bodily through fissures and cracks in the stone in order to explore these holes and discover and enjoy (in their own fashion) many kilometres of passages and voids hung with lengthy icicles of rock (which have also taken an inconceivably long time to form). Water just drips through.

The Beacons are a caving hotspot. The Dan yr Ogof cave system is said to be the largest in Europe and covers some 11 miles. Many of these caves have yet to be explored. Experts argue there could be as much as a 100 miles of tunnel. Porth yr Ogof cave meanwhile (also in the Beacons) has one of the largest cave entrances in the United Kingdom. It is 20 metres wide and 3 metres high.