BRED OF HEAVEN

‘O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau’ = O let the old language endure
                Evan James (1856)

Author’s Note

The business of writing about Wales brings up an inevitable question. Place names: to anglicise or Welshify? There is no real method in the choices I’ve made other than pure instinct. It would be perverse to refer to Caerdydd, Abertawe and Casnewydd when almost all of Wales knows them as Cardiff, Swansea and Newport. For most towns I have kept to that rule of thumb. So it’s Carmarthen not Caerfyrddin, Llandovery not Llanymddyfri. But where there is simply an English transliteration, I’ve reverted to Welsh spelling. Thus Caernarfon rather than (the abomination) Carnarvon. Hence also the Lln peninsula not Lleyn. As for rivers, the Severn and the Wye are overwhelmingly known by their English names so I’ve stuck with them but it seems preferable to refer to the Tywi, the Taf and the Dyfi rather than the Towey, the Taff and the Dovey. Finally, most Welsh mountains do not have English names. But two famous ones do. In the case of Snowdon (and Snowdonia) I’ve – mostly – used the English rather than wilfully obfuscate with Yr Wyddfa (and Eryri). However, where the Welsh say and write Pumlumon, I simply cannot bring myself to go with Plynlimon, which may be just as pervasive but is plainly the orthographical product of an Englishman’s failure to listen.

(And it goes without saying that it’s Owain Glyndr, not Owen Glendower.)

Cyflwyno = Introduce

YOU HAVE TO PAY to get in. The current cost, if you’re in a car, is £5.30, though it’s less for motorcycles and more for heavy goods vehicles. Pressing a note and two coins into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker: ‘Diolch.’ Thanks. Then push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers.

Initially there’s not much topographical discrepancy from the foreign field back at the other end of the bridge. Arable land trimmed into rectangles. Grey cloud flattens the light, as it often seems to this side. And now the tidal waters in my passenger window recede from view. I’m not really sure where I’m going. ‘Croeso i Gymru’, says the sign. Am I really welcome to Wales? I’ve been coming here since before I can remember, the atavistic summons dutifully answered at Christmas and in summer. Twice a year we ploughed over the old bridge, into the west, along roads which down the years became broader and smoother and faster until eventually it was possible to drive the ninety miles from the toll gate to my grandparents in not much more than an hour; South Wales was reduced to a race against time, the chain of conurbations whipping by in a blur of turn-offs. Newport. Cardiff. Swansea. Quite early on in my childhood the road signs began speaking in two tongues: Casnewydd, Caerdydd, Abertawe. Services: gwasanaethau. Parking: parcio. How we laughed at that one: the foreign language indebted to the master. The car – in the 1970s we had a succession of Range Rovers which glugged petrol at the dipsomaniac rate of thirteen miles to the gallon – munched on the long column of tarmac and spat it out behind us.

All I knew of Wales was the road, and a house on a hill above the market town of Carmarthen. Caerfyrddin.

‘Haven’t you grown?’ my grandmother would exclaim in her warm Welsh soprano as we squirmed out of her embrace, scrummed through the mock-Gothic porch and past her down the long welcoming corridor. We stayed for a night, sometimes two. My grandmother would leak tears as we snuck over the cattle grid and began the return journey back east. And when ninety miles later we crossed the Severn and accelerated into England, my entirely Welsh father would urge us to cheer.

This is the closest my childhood came to indoctrination. I could never quite work out what we were celebrating. I’m still looking for the answer. It’s what has been bringing me back to Wales time and again: a sort of cultural bafflement, an unfulfilled sense of ancestral belonging. And here I am again. I’ve got a spare week and I’ve answered the westerly summons.

Suddenly I veer left. I’ve always sailed past this little corner of Wales. I decide to follow my nose and attempt to drive south towards the water. Flat, even sunken, and riven with ditches, the countryside looks neither English nor Welsh but Dutch. I follow a track down towards a sea wall and, turning off the ignition, set foot on Welsh soil. I clamber up the steps and there, arrayed in front of me, is the Severn estuary, the Bristol Channel. England fans out along the horizon. I breathe in briny air. Overhead, gulls squawk territorially. Before the wall was raised, high tides would have scurried inland and drowned the fields in salt water.

I turn my back to the water and gaze across the protected plain. Down below, a forthright child pushes its own rickety pram on the rutted road, while a young mother and a spaniel amble patiently alongside. Two grey-haired men arrive stoop-shouldered on expensive bikes and, in neon Lycra which faithfully highlights every contour of slackening bodies, bounce up the steps and onto the sea wall. One day I too will no doubt lever myself onto a crotch-partingly narrow saddle, grasp a pair of drop handlebars and try to pedal away from the inevitable flood tide of old age. I too will look ridiculous. As things stand, there’s no need of death-defiance. At forty-three, for another couple of years my twenty-fifth birthday is still nearer than my sixty-fifth.

It’s hard to say from here where the river ends and the sea begins. Somewhere below the surface of the wide waters, epic undercurrents have been arguing that one since the last Ice Age. It’s hard also, it occurs to me, to say where my Englishness ends and my Welshness begins. My father was born and brought up in Wales. Six decades later my two daughters pushed their own prams in England. I’ve wanted to know this for ever. Do you come from where your parents come from? Or do you, like it or lump it, just come from where you come from? Which I may as well admit is why I am here.

Am I Welsh? How Welsh, in the end, is half Welsh? My yearning, my claim, has always been for my Welsh half to swamp the rest. But it’s hardly had a chance. I’ve never lived in Wales. In fact I scarcely know it outside the little corner I’ve always visited: I’ve never been to the top of Snowdon or along the Rhondda Valley, barely even stopped in Cardiff or ever set foot in the mountainous middle. But on some inchoate level I sense that I love Wales. It feels like having a crush on a long dead star whose face you know only in the black and white shimmer of the silver screen.

These feelings of belonging have had to sprout from barren anglicised soil. If scientists in a laboratory were creating an upbringing designed to inculcate Englishness in a boy, they couldn’t find a much better template than mine. My birth in London took place at a Welsh-sounding address: Gower Street. But everything else about the street is English. The Pre-Raphaelite movement was also born here. Illustrious residents include Charles Darwin, Mr Pickwick and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I then grew up in the smartest crescent in the heart of the royal borough. Every morning we ran to our bedroom window in the garret and watched the Household Cavalry clop and clink glamorously along the Old Brompton Road. On Friday afternoons we clambered into the car and drove down south to the South Downs to spend ineffably English weekends on ponies and Choppers. We were sent to a school called Sussex House, and when we moved permanently to Sussex itself I stopped my tears like many a good English boy, put a little English bung in my little English rear and boarded: the immemorial English expulsion from the English home to the English public school. Envelopes crested with the family’s heraldic device would arrive at school franked with a Dyfed postmark, containing chatty news from Wales in my grandmother’s spidery hand. They would have been more or less indistinguishable from letters mailed thirty-five years earlier to my father. He was of that generation who were sent away to school in England at the age of eight and never really came back. Wales had been educated out of him. He liked to tell a story of how, touring Herefordshire one summer with his medical-school cricket team, he snuck out of the hotel under cover of darkness to steal the ‘Croeso i Gymru’ sign guarding the Welsh border as a trophy for the pavilion back in London. Not long after, he was driving his Welsh mother into Wales. ‘Some vandals have removed the sign,’ she said. He kept quiet. Later, his emotional detachment from the scenes of his youth manifested itself in the ritual we performed every time we crossed into England. In that succession of Range Rovers thumping back across the bridge, we’d hurrah and huzzah like junior zealots.

How Welsh can all that grounding make you? How Welsh can you be on the back of two visits a year? Eventually there came a time when if I wanted to go to Wales I had to travel under my own steam. It didn’t take long for the wool to be pulled from my eyes. By train, and then – when my grandmother gave me her old Simca saloon with its handy orange disabled sticker – by car, I would push along the old corridor to Carmarthenshire with a budding awareness that we had been hoodwinked. Wales, it turned out, was not somewhere you had to get out of as quickly as your four wheels would carry you. In subtle and creeping ways it grew on me. But hold on, I remember realising one evening as loafy hills burned in the slanting western sunlight, Carmarthenshire’s gorgeous. I was much taken with the diesel trains chugging picturesquely to and fro along the shore of the Tywi estuary. I started to feel possessive about the lowing castle at Llansteffan, a broken-toothed ruin put out to grass centuries ago but still pluckily commanding the heights. This would have happened when I was about twenty, and getting past my teenage indifference to landscape. I stopped looking at Wales through paternal eyes.

Many years and many visits to Wales later, and for all my shouting at the telly on match days, I’m still pretty much English. I certainly sound English. I’m like everyone else. I have a deep hankering to come from somewhere. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, but I feel rootless. My kind of middle-class Englishness lacks meaning, at least to me. Which is why I’ve drifted over the Severn this overcast Friday morning. A magnet has drawn me. The Welsh call it hiraeth: longing. But I’m nowhere near Welsh enough to start giving my feelings Welsh names.

It’s on the sea wall where Welsh land and Welsh water meet that it occurs to me: to take the scenic route round Wales, do the whole circumnavigation. It suddenly seems the thing to do: to put a girdle round the old country. I have seven spare days, and no real idea how to kill them. I bet it doesn’t get done much, if at all – coming in on the new Severn Bridge and several hundred Welsh miles later leaving on the old one. I can practically feel obsession, that omnivore of the male brain, sinking its talons in. This is a man-made project that will need rules and order. It will impose discipline and purpose. It will make sense.

Before I skip down the steps and into the car, I invent some instant guidelines. No islands, of which there are several (so Anglesey is out). Always stick to the road nearest the sea, however tiddly. And when I get close to the northern border, cut inland and drive down along the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke, the man-made ridge which once upon a time advised interested parties where England begins and Wales ends.

I unlock my car, lower myself behind the steering wheel, open the map to the relevant corner of Wales, reconfigure my milometer back to zero and turn the key.

What follows is a slow and winding crash course in Welshness, although the Welsh have a more resonant word for it: Cymreictod. On the surface at least, the induction is topographical. Knobbly headlands and beetling cliffs make way for windy strands of white powdery beach. Chimneys belch and cough. There are Georgian jewels and kiss-me-quick resorts. Estuaries bite deep chunks out of the coast. Turrets of innumerable castles prop up the clouds. Mountains tumble into the sea. Along the edge of Offa’s Dyke delineating the old border with England, empty moorlands sound like the winds which howl about them: Eglwyseg, Berwyn, Y Mynyddoedd Duon.

At strategic points I get out and walk. And walk – over heathered moors, up looping paths, along deserted beaches, past trilling woodland streams, onto tufty headlands and into secretive coves. I walk among the stony remains of past incursions: castles raised by kings and barons, abbeys planted by monks, now roofless and naked to the heavens. Welsh weather permitting, it’s usually possible to see along the tumultuous coast towards the site of the next ramble. And the weather, contrary to expectation, does permit. Friendly breezes shoo away the cloud cover. The sun is free to pick out blues and greens, the seas and meadows partitioned by seams of sand and rock. Once or twice it rains old women and sticks, as they colourfully say in Welsh, and I can’t see beyond the fence. Otherwise it wouldn’t be Wales.

The more I stop to clamber up hummocks and take in the view, the more I am baffled by something. When you can see so much of it in one go, the country seems no larger than a postage stamp. One miraculous dusk I sit on a drystone wall, picking at an Indian takeaway, and with the naked eye take in the entire sixty-mile semicircular sweep of Cardigan Bay while Snowdon and her siblings bustle and bristle beyond the shore. I’ve only ever gawped at that from a plane before. Another golden twilight I look down on the long arcadian corridor of Clwyd, beyond it the whole commotion of North Wales as far as the eye can see, and in the distance the magnificent lonely peak of Cadair Idris. Wales, in short, doesn’t go far. On the other hand, criss-crossed by a labyrinth of ridges and ravines, it goes on for ever. Its distances are in its ups and downs, in the intestinal coils of roads pushed this way and that by Welsh geology.

The binary nature of the place is of course underlined, even enforced, by the names of things. Such has been the success of the Welsh Language Society’s rearguard action that this is a country where you can be driving to two places at once: one with a Welsh name, another known by a later English alternative. With only myself to entertain I try to exhume a grandson’s sepia memories of Welsh pronunciation. The signposts are never slow to tease the tongue: I pass through Dinbych-y-Pysgod and Abereiddy, Mwnt and Tywyn and Gyr, Llanystumdwy and Rhydycroesau, Dwygyfylchi and Penbontrhydyfothau. The consonants I’m sort of on top of, but the vowels can seem as alien as Greek. It’s as if they’re encrypted to bamboozle some nameless enemy. Forebears of mine knew their way round every nook of the language. For all my efforts, Welsh keeps its back turned to me. I look at a sentence without the first idea which word’s the verb. And yet the Romans left their Latin DNA in the names for things: pont and porth and castell. Wales is a broth, I tell myself, thousands of years in the brewing.

And then there is the quilt of voices. As I make my clockwise circuit, the accents of the place sing and dance, narrow and fatten. The voice of the capital has a tight, parsimonious tang. The Dyfed accent swoops and dips in a hilly lilt. In Gwynedd delicate wispy vowels flutter as if wind-borne. Across the porous border of Clwyd come abrupt stabs of nasal Scouse, while further south in Powys and Gwent impenetrable inflections form a kind of natural barrier against the enemy over the hill.

By the end the milometer, measuring serrations in the coastline and the jagged eastern edge of the country, has ticked over towards 850 or so long and very winding miles. That tally incorporates wrong turnings, backtrackings, map-reading indecision and evening sorties from my bed and breakfast to the pub for stout and chips. There are also a pair of disastrous mishaps in which I accidentally drive a good hundred yards into England. Manfully I control an obsessive-compulsive urge to turn round and snake back along another route and maintain the Welshness of my footprint. There are only so many country lanes, lurching and burrowing along the fertile length of the border, stuck behind ancient hatch-backs and swaying tractors or even bobbing dinghies on their stately way to water, that even the keenest born-again Welshman can take.

So by the time I drive deliberately back into England with a sentimental lump bulging in my throat, I am confused. On the one hand, I am so bloody Welsh you wouldn’t believe it. On the other, I don’t believe it myself. The symbolism of my chosen route is irrefutable. I have gone around Wales. It’s where a lot of Wales is. But I haven’t strayed into the heart of Wales, or into my own Welshness. I wonder if despite this immersion I can make any claim to be Welsh at all. Maybe it’s all been just a mirage. I try to banish the thought, but a week after my week in Wales I can only look on helplessly as imperious England replants its flag in my head. I am disappointed with myself. The inference is clear. I must be culturally fickle. I’m no more than a flirt. Or, worse, a tourist.

I don’t want to be like one of those American Celts who stick out like sore thumbs in pubs. It seems clear that Wales is not going to claim me voluntarily as one of its own. If I want to turn myself into a Welshman, I’m going to have to force the issue. I’m going to have to look for Welsh experiences, try to get Welsh stuff done. Some are born Welsh. Some achieve Welshness. I am going to thrust myself upon Wales.

So I’m going back in.

1

Dechrau = Begin

ONCE UPON A TIME we all spoke Welsh. Before the Normans came, before the Vikings, before the Angles and the Saxons brought their amalgamated Johnny-come-lately language, before even the Romans rowed across the seas, the inhabitants of the place we call England were, in effect, Welsh. The various invaders, who referred to the natives as Britons, successfully shunted the indigenous language back into the mountain fastnesses in the west, where what was once known as Brythonic evolved into the great survivor that is Welsh.

Did they but know it, compelling evidence confronts anyone who crosses the so-called English Channel and sees rising white cliffs, a geographical feature tightly allied with English identity, gleam across the water. The ferry pulls in at the dock. Vehicles nudge from its innards onto English tarmac. Drivers trickle through customs and excise, brandishing passports, their badges of nationhood. They are greeted by a sign: ‘Port of Dover Ferry Terminal’.

The name ‘Dover’ is a modern transliteration of dwfr. Dwfr is Old Welsh for water. The most English of ports with its blue birds and its chalky ramparts, which could not be much further east of Wales, takes its name from the island’s oldest living language.

Like it or not, in the beginning was Welshness.

‘So tell me, Bryn, what is Welshness?’ As I work on my plan of campaign for Project Wales, there’s no harm in going to the very top. I look straight into the blue eyes of Bryn Terfel, the international face of Wales. ‘How would you measure Welshness?’ I add, for good measure.

The face seems fashioned from rock. The jaw has a kind of jutting mass, a hewn heft. I am reminded of one of those monstrous capstones on the burial chambers that dot the long coastline of Cardigan Bay.

We are in a hotel not far from Caernarfon. Outside the fields are lush from summer rains. Into the mouth from which the famous bass baritone sound has emerged these twenty years, the great man has been shovelling forkfuls of pasta quills with roasted vegetables. But now the loaded fork hangs suspended. There is a ruminant pause. The blue eyes betray cogitation. And then he speaks.

‘For me personally,’ he says, ‘a Welshman that sings, who speaks the language, lives in Wales, brought up, everything Welsh, education, through the medium of Welsh, being taught geography in Welsh, biology in Welsh, maths in Welsh.’ The oracle has delivered its verdict, without recourse to main verbs. But there is no mistaking his meaning. Welshness sprouts from the soil. To define yourself as truly Welsh, you need to have learned about the birds and the bees and the isosceles triangle in the native tongue.

I swallow. According to the international face of Wales, my quest is over before it has even begun. I will never turn myself into a Welshman. I can give up now. But hold on, here comes more.

‘Sometimes people might laugh at the fact that you haven’t read things like Madame Bovary. But you’ve read your Welsh poets and your Welsh writers. That’s something that matters. I read The Mabinogion to my kids most nights. I love to think that my children are growing up exactly as I did, through the medium of Welsh in primary schools. It didn’t harm me at all.’

So Welshness is also about handing a legacy on to your children. I decide not to mention my own Welsh inheritance, the celebratory whoops as we cleared the Severn Bridge and raced into England. Nor my failure to enthuse my daughters about their quarter Welshness. I try to suppress the despondency in my voice.

‘You’re setting the bar quite high there, Bryn.’

He looks at me.

‘This is only from my perspective,’ he says. ‘I love to have my roots firmly planted in Wales.’

I look back at him.

‘You could come and live in Wales now?’ he offers.

The bar is coming down. Not by much, mind. My life is in London: children, work, responsibilities. There really is no hope.

‘And if you showed any enthusiasm towards the language you would be welcome here with open arms. There are two shops in my vicinity that are run by people who have come over from Liverpool, and not one morning have they said “good morning” in Welsh to me. I just need one word. It doesn’t take much, does it?’

There’s a mixed message in the blue eyes lodged in the midst of that giant face. They defy and they beseech. It’s a very Welsh look.

‘It is two hundred miles long and about one hundred miles wide. It takes some eight days to travel the whole length.’ Thus wrote Gerald of Wales, author of the first effort to encapsulate in literature the essence of Wales and Welshness.

It is a structural quirk of travel literature that visitor speaks unto visitor. Gerald de Barri was born in Manorbier on the south coast of Pembrokeshire, and may have called himself Welsh, but the family tree has him down as three-quarters Norman. His Description of Wales was composed in Latin in the 1190s. Much travelled – he had crossed the Alps to Rome – he was nonetheless impressed by the forbidding wall which Wales presented to those approaching from England. ‘Because of its high mountains, deep valleys and extensive forests, not to mention its rivers and marshes, it is not easy of access.’

This would remain a stock reaction for several hundred years. The mountains which had thwarted invaders also kept out visitors. It was in the eighteenth century that the trickle began, when roads became more passable and the leisured classes developed a new taste for luxuriating in the sublimity of untamed landscape. Daniel Defoe was one of the first literary travellers to gasp in awe as he confronted Wales’s natural fortifications. ‘I am now at the utmost extent of England west,’ he noted in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ‘and here I must mount the Alps, traverse the mountains of Wales.’ The comparison with the Alps was apt, he enthused, ‘but with this exception, that in abundance of places you have the most pleasant and beautiful valleys imaginable, and some of them, of very great extent, far exceeding the valleys so famed among the mountains of Savoy, and Piedmont.’

Wales’s peaks and hollows were no longer unassailable to thrillseekers. Indeed the first approving impression of Dr Johnson, arriving in the Vale of Clwyd in 1774, was that the place had been tamed: ‘Wales, so far as I have yet seen of it, is a very beautiful and rich country, all enclosed and planted.’ Travellers flocked west, several sending back dispatches which they would publish. The first impression was not always auspicious. The Revd Richard Warner, setting off on a walk through Wales in August 1797, was fleeced by the ferryman taking him over the Severn but consoled himself with improving thoughts of the river’s classical lineage, known to Tacitus as Sabrina, and hymned by Milton. On landing in Wales he and a companion set out keenly to inspect the nation’s monuments and ruins, only to meet an instant anticlimax. ‘The ruins of Caldecot castle disappointed us,’ he reported. ‘In its appearance there is nothing striking or picturesque.’

Wales was particularly appealing to young men of unplacid temperament. No sooner did he penetrate Wales in 1798 than the excited young Turner was splashing its castles and crags onto canvas in untidy swirls and whorls. Walking into the Elan Valley as a very young man, the proto-revolutionary Shelley reported that ‘this country of Wales is exceedingly grand: rocks piled on each to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, and valleys clothed with woods present an appearance of enchantment.’ The sheer jaggedness of the place exercised a form of convulsion on his febrile mind. A few months later he introduced his young first wife Harriet to Wales. They had a treacherous thirty-six-hour crossing from Dublin. ‘We had been informed that at the most we should certainly be no more than 12 hours,’ wrote Harriet. ‘We did not arrive at Holyhead till near 2 o’clock on Monday morning. Then we had above a mile to walk over rock and stone in a pouring rain before we could get to the inn. The night was dark and stormy.’ It was only when day broke and Anglesey revealed its splendours that her pen seized up: ‘… the beauty of this place is not to be described.’

In dowdy middle age on a warm summer’s day in 1824, Wordsworth had a more pleasant introduction to the north coast on a steam-packet from Liverpool with his wife and daughter. They ‘passed the mouth of the Dee, coasted the extremity of the Vale of Clwyd, sailed close under Great Orme’s Head, had a noble prospect of Penmaenmawr, and having almost touched upon Puffin’s Island, we reached Bangor Ferry a little after six in the afternoon. We admired the stupendous preparations for the bridge over the Menai.’

Even the prospect of Wales, its beckoning landscape an eruption of the unfamiliar, had the capacity to restore the spirits of its visitors. George Borrow, author of the classic Victorian portrait Wild Wales (1862), sped towards the country by train in, he reports, a melancholy frame of mind ‘till looking from a window I caught sight of a long line of hills, which I guessed to be the Welsh hills, as indeed they proved, which sight causing me to remember that I was bound for Wales, the land of the bard, made me cast all gloomy thoughts aside and glow with all the Welsh enthusiasm with which I glowed when I first started in the direction of Wales.’ Francis Kilvert, arriving in 1865 to take up a position as a young curate in Clyro on the river Wye, recalled striding for the first time over the moor to Builth Wells. ‘Then every step was through an enchanted land,’ he wrote a decade later. ‘I was discovering a new country and all the world was before me.’

And then there was the visitor who didn’t know where England ended and Wales began. H. V. Morton, a journalist who popularised travel writing at the dawn of the motor-car age, pulled up on the border near Chirk, where there are no mountains forming a natural frontier, and had to ask. ‘Your front wheels are in Wales,’ he was told by a road sweeper, ‘and your back wheels in England.’ This was between the wars, when Welsh identity was in the doldrums, the language in steep decline and the mining industry rapidly shrinking after the Great Depression. Morton stood and watched the road sweeper ‘sweep the dust of Wales into England’. Looking about him, he wondered why there was no sign to mark the border.

‘Wales should see to this,’ he concluded. ‘Two million people, many of whom speak their own language, and all of whom are proud of their country and its traditions, should tell the traveller where it begins.’ And with that, he motored into Wales.

How do you learn Welsh?

We’ve all had a go at a language. The Teach Yourself learning kits make it sound like assembling a toy aeroplane. Try our unique language-learning tool. Fluency always guaranteed. The common experience teaches us otherwise. Especially when our mother tongue is English. Built into the English-speaker’s psyche is a consensus that speaking in other tongues will not be necessary. English has long since usurped French as the international language of diplomacy; indeed it has deracinated itself and transmuted into something so universal as to be known as globish, an intercontinental mulch of patois and webspeak. If this is your birthright, why on earth speak anyone else’s lesser language? Let the mountain come to Muhammad. In the Microsoft Age, English is the thug in the playground, its bovver boot planted on the windpipe of vulnerable dialects and local lingos, starving them of air.

But there’s one language which, despite a jolly plucky effort, English hasn’t quite managed to murder. As it was right next door, it should have been easy to rub out Welsh, just as it all but managed with Irish. Prevailing attitudes of the empire-bestriding Victorian towards ‘an antiquated and semi-barbarous language’ were enshrined in an infamous diktat penned in London. ‘The Welsh language,’ The Times thundered in 1866, ‘is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence and the ignorance of English have excluded and even now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation … of their English neighbours … The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better.’ And so it was that the 1870 Education Act gave with one hand – free schooling for all Welsh children – but took away with the other: the outlawing of Welsh in the classroom. Naturally the language pupils spoke at home and among themselves would trip inadvertently off many a junior tongue throughout the day. The first to do so would have a wooden tablet hung round their neck bearing the letters WN for ‘Welsh Not’. It would be passed from one miscreant to another until, at the end of the school day, the child who had possession of this instrument of linguistic oppression would be thrashed.

‘Welsh?!’ says someone when I mention that I’m thinking of taking Bryn Terfel’s advice. Her face screws up into a twisted moue of distaste. Some things never change. Her eyes scrunch. Her cheeks pucker. Her mouth gathers into a tight, uncharitable little anus. I swear it’s involuntary. In that face is printed a millennium’s worth of accumulated hauteur. A plume of fiery wrath whooshes up somewhere in the furnace of my guts. I really ought to give her a thorough dressing-down, but I find that I’m too polite – too English – to do it myself. She admits, on being pressed, that she has never been to Wales.

Yes, Welsh.

These feelings are good, it occurs to me. If my knee-jerk reaction is to hate those who hate the Welsh, I must therefore be a little bit Welsh already.

The old English joke about Welsh is the same as the one about Polish. It’s a language which, for whole sections of randomly juggled letters, seems to get by entirely without vowels. If you haven’t been walked through the rules and regs of the Welsh alphabet, it has the look of a sardine can of consonants. Vowels being the breath of a language, Welsh seems bafflingly to subsist without air.

Even if native English speakers are not linguists, some are more inclined that way than others. I couldn’t do the sciences – yes, I hold my hands up: I flunked matrices and enzymes and all that quantum stuff and guff. But I could always find my way around the floor plan of a new language. It was the kind of learning I was good at: the shapes of words, their sinews and musculature, their etymological kinship with root languages, alliances with sister languages, their migrations and false friendships – this was the stuff that fired my curiosity.

But the learning was all literary. We didn’t do much speaking in class, or not in the relevant language. We did reading instead. When I left school I could wade through Balzac and Molière in the original. But in France I could barely order myself a bowl of soup. Spanish and German I’ve basically forgotten. Then at eighteen I went away and for the first time tried learning a language by speaking it. To this day Italian is the comfiest fit. The experience taught me that the classroom is not the best place to pursue oral fluency. Or not the classrooms I was in.

But old habits die hard. Just for starters, I decide to swallow a chunk of Welsh vocab. So one day, when I’m in Wales, I make my way to the back of The Rough Guide to Wales and hoover up their short glossary of useful terms. Being a guidebook, it mostly comprises boilerplate words and phrases for ‘good morning’ and ‘cheers’, ‘town hall’ and ‘bed and breakfast’ and ‘how much is that breathable windcheater in the window’? Many of them are familiar to all-comers from the bilingual signage you see everywhere in Wales. Araf for ‘slow’, gorsaf for ‘station’, in which f, it says here, is pronounced like a v. In heddlu (police) that double d is a hard th sound, as in ‘this’ or ‘thus’. Oh, but here’s the first curveball. That u, The Rough Guide advises, is actually pronounced ee. You basically have to treat it as an encryption. Like Cyrillic. Or music.

In the guidebook there is also a list of topographical nouns. In any other language, you probably wouldn’t want to know how they say ‘mountain pass’, or not for the first couple of years. But more than other languages I’ve learned, Welsh geography is written in the names on the signposts. Llan, to take the most in-your-face example, literally means an enclosed piece of land, though it has long since been taken to refer to the church found within such an enclosure. There are more than 600 Llans in Wales, from the modestly named Llan all the way through to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (which has two Llans in it). Aber, another prefix, means river mouth. Pwll means pool; nant, stream; cwm, valley; melin, mill, and maes, field. And so on. At Aberystwyth is found the mouth of the river Ystwyth. Porthmadog is Madog’s gate. Cwm Rhondda is the famous Rhondda Valley. And so on and on. The w in cwm, it turns out, is actually a double o, so there’s another vowel to add to the collection. Mountain pass, by the way, is bwlch.

That’s fifty or so words in the bag without even breaking sweat. I buy a little red book, write them down and start to learn, like the good old days of O-level vocab. Welsh on the left, English on the right. That’s the way to do it. I tell myself it all seems quite easy.

This facility didn’t take a direct route down the family tree. My father grew up in a bilingual environment. Welsh was the first language of both his parents. A Welsh-speaking grandmother lived with the family. ‘But English was the language of the house,’ he tells me. ‘I can remember driving round Carmarthenshire with my father visiting cousins on farms. My father spoke Welsh to them and I didn’t understand a word.’ How was it? ‘Very dull.’

His older brother by contrast – my uncle – was linguistically attuned. Perhaps because he spoke only Welsh till he was three, he learned languages for fun, much as other boys play with train sets. It was a feature of our childhood, asking our uncle how many languages he spoke. The official tally settled on nine. We used to list them, starting with English as well as, obviously, French, Italian, Spanish and German. One Boxing Day in Carmarthen, when I was about seven and everyone else was out on horseback killing foxes, he taught me to count to a million in German. He wrote a Latin primer at six. For him this was a living language rather than a remnant of the classroom. When resigning from the priesthood in Rome in the year of my birth, he had had to write to Pope John XXIII in the lingua franca of the Vatican. Modern Greek was another of his, also Russian. He once even had a stab at Turkish, though that wasn’t on the list back then. And finally there was Welsh, which he relearned at the age of twelve.

‘I’m thinking of learning Welsh,’ I volunteer when I see him.

‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘It’s a marvellous language. You’ll love it.’ My uncle is an enthusiast.

‘I’ve already learned the words for black mountain and coastal marsh,’ I add. ‘Seems pretty easy so far. Any tips?’

‘Well, there is one real snag with Welsh.’

‘What?’

‘The system of mutating. It’s absolutely horrid. Really nasty.’

‘Yes, but what is it?’

‘You’re used to changing the endings of words in French or Italian. In Welsh they change the fronts of words.’ He pulls a face as if suffering a mildly unpleasant back spasm.

‘That seems manageable,’ I say.

‘Ah, but there’s a bit more to it than that.’ He proceeds to explain that, depending on circumstances, a word like tad (father) may actually change to dad, thad or nhad. He pulls more of an anguished face this time, as if hearing of a relative’s slightly early demise.

I’ve never heard of such a counter-intuitive linguistic model. Change the front of a word? You might as well stick it in a priest’s hole. Still, that’s only one word that changes, in only three ways. Presumably there’ll be a few like that, a small bunch of wildly misbehaving individuals you have to keep your eye on, like incurable show-offs in class. I am undaunted.

‘That’s just one word. Are there other examples of these … what are they called?’

‘Mutations,’ he says. It sounds like a botch-up in a laboratory. ‘I’m afraid so. As a system, it’s more or less ubiquitous. Mutations are absolutely integral to the Welsh language. You just have to learn them.’ This time his voice and face impart outright shock and horror.

And if the mountains denied ease of access, so did the rivers. The Bristol Channel – the Severn estuary – presented the same obstacle to motorists in the mid 1960s as it did to the Romans. Before they built the bridge the journey was interminable. We had a Singer estate in racing green which my father wove along Welsh A roads with, I suspect, a mixture of impatience and dread. Impatience to escape a car with three small fighting boys. Dread at the imminence of home. Not that I knew any of that then. I just felt sick. Sometimes I actually was sick, usually by the side of the road, but once, spontaneously, down the front of my jumper (knitted by my grandmother), into my lap and thence onto the permeable weave of the Singer’s back seat. After that I was allowed in the front. I took to this privilege like an insufferable princeling. Whenever a car journey beckoned, I would assert my rights over both brothers without conscience or let-up.

‘Why does he always get to go in the front?’

‘Because he gets car-sick, poppet.’ My mother called her sons ‘poppet’ a lot. Mothers did back then.

‘We’re only going to Chichester.’ This from my older brother.

‘Yeah, but it’s bendy.’ This from me, with a hard, vituperative edge. That was the answer to everything. It’s bendy. Nowhere was bendier than Wales. After they built the suspension bridge it became less so, but my primacy had been established by then. I spent my entire childhood in the front.

The bridge gave rise to a competition. Who would be the first to spot it? Children are not good with distances. We’d set out from West Sussex, usually quite early, and soon after we hit the M4 we’d start scouring the horizon for the telltale turrets. On and on the road mowed west, but our quarry resisted all efforts to will it into sight. I had the advantage of course, being in the front seat and therefore closer, with a full windscreen to see through. It must be round this hill. It must be over that brow. It must be. It never was, not for aeons. We’d start to lose interest, get bored, perhaps be distracted by the prospect of a squabble.

‘You’re a dimmy.’

‘No, you are, so there.’

‘Am not.’

‘Boys, look!’

‘Are so.’

‘Not.’

‘Can you see what I can see?’

You rounded a hill and there, surprisingly close, would be the Severn Bridge, suspended as if from the clouds. Strangely foreshortened by a trick of perspective, visible long before the stretch of water it spanned, it was a thing of mystery and fascination.

We had a ritual of driving up for a closer look. There was a service station called Aust built on the banks above the Severn. I know now that Aust Services was the direst shitpit and the thought of it caused my parents to sink into morbid depression, but to us it was a wonderland. We’d eat eggs, beans and chips – chips were forbidden at home because my mother objected to the lingering pong – and look up at the bridge magnificently filling the window. Below it the Severn swam muddily by. And on the other side of the bridge you could see Wales. Or so we thought. Actually you couldn’t. It took me decades to work out that Wales begins beyond the Wye, not the Severn, and that the opposite bank was Gloucestershire.

‘How many miles to go?’ We knew exactly how far it was from the bridge to our grandparents. Children with no concept of distance ask such things frequently.

‘Eighty-four … seventy and a half …’ My father would turn arithmetical. ‘Sixty-eight and three-quarters …’ The revolving milometer kept us from fighting. ‘Fifty-nine point nine …’ Progress was slow. In those days, somewhere after Cardiff, the motorway petered out into a single carriageway and the numbers would click along with agonising reluctance. ‘Forty-seven and a third.’ Sometimes there was nothing else for it but to peer out at Wales crawling by beside us.

It looked nothing like England. Children don’t notice countryside. They aren’t interested in the character conferred by the lumps and bumps of landscape. But they know a plug-ugly bungalow when they see one. They also regard deviations from their known environment as somehow deficient, and that was certainly how I saw the towns and villages the Singer hared through in the days before speed cameras. It sure as heck didn’t look like home. The road was lined with squat, drab housing, low-slung shops and hatchet-faced pubs. I remember wondering by what right petrol stations, planted in the middle of nowhere, were permitted to exist with such unfamiliar names. And overhead it was forever grey. From those journeys along that snaking, snailing road, whether I was four or five or eight or nine, I have not kept a single memory of the sun.

‘Twenty-seven miles to go.’

The colour, such as existed, was all in the names of places. And what colours they were. As we drove on we’d ask my father to read them out.

‘How do you say that one?’

‘Cwmrhydyceirw.’ My father had a musician’s ear for sound and a trace memory of correct pronunciation: the rising terminals, the firmly placed stresses that made Welsh sound like both a statement and a question.

‘And that one?’

‘Pontarddulais.’ I might not have liked the look of the western end of Glamorgan as it began to shade into Carmarthenshire, but I liked the sound of it.

‘Thirteen miles!’ The countdown now began to take on a breathless urgency. We really wanted to get there. The hours in the car – five, six; once even epically close to eight – were gladly behind us, done and dusted, gone and forgotten. In front of us lay the golden prospect. Ten miles. The car swept along. Eight and a half. My father would be driving faster by now. Seven. We were in the west. Six and a quarter. No other cars on the road. Five. We swung off the main road and up a hill. Four. Is it just a fantasy or did the sun shoulder aside the clouds around now? Three. ‘Bags I hug Granny first!’ Two. ‘I’m going to!’ One and a half. We thumped along the lane, hearts almost bouncing out of mouths. ‘No, I am!’ One. ‘She’s my granny, not yours.’ I was convinced that our grandmother was exclusively my possession, that my brothers had some other grandmother, as yet unmet, for them to visit as and when they chose. ‘She’s everyone’s granny,’ my mother would say, her own mother dead before we were all born. ‘Mine!’ And there with half a mile to go, it would spontaneously erupt out of nowhere, a flash fight over grandmaternal ownership. ‘No, mine!’ I may have made my older brother cry with my ruthless power-grab. And thus as we bore down on our destination, the atmosphere turned fretful with junior fomentation and puerile wrath.

‘Look, boys!’ My father creating a diversion. Carmarthen beckoning. You could see it on the right-hand side, parked proudly in the valley with hills lofting into the distance beyond. Caerfyrddin. Merlin’s Castle. No sooner there than it disappeared behind a hedgerow, then a brow, then a village of tiny modern houses that had recently sprouted on the hillside. The car rattled as it passed over a cattle grid guarding the entrance to the house. And there it was: low and wide, mock-Gothic windows, a porch painted a glossy black, the door a beckoning white. We exploded out of the Singer and thundered towards the door. I don’t remember if there was a bell or a knocker, but that’s because my grandmother would have heard the car clearing the grate and the voices filling the air and we would barely even get to the porch before the door, heavy and thick, would creak heart-stoppingly open to bid us welcome to the promised land.

I am going back to school. ‘Welsh Level 1, Module 1,’ it says in the City Lit literature. I’ve never gone anywhere near adult education before, and am amazed on flicking through the thick catalogue to find that you can learn more or less anything. Yoga is an option, as is opera. So are sewing and self-defence, Afro-Cuban drumming and personal development. You can make jewellery, study anatomy, learn to podcast. There are options for folklore, myth and spiritual studies, for the philosophy of photography. They will even teach you creative writing. Of course all the usual languages are queuing up, but so too are the unusual ones. You name it, they teach it. Including Welsh Level 1, Module 1.

‘Learn to speak Welsh on this lively course for beginners, with the emphasis on the practical use of Welsh and the development of your listening and speaking skills.’ I am two weeks late for some reason. The course has already started, but I’ve been assured over