A bizarre enterprise
Byron Rogers
TRAVELS IN AN OLD TONGUE: TOURING THE WORLD SPEAKING WELSH by Pamela Petro £18, pp. 325 An image and a mystery have stayed with me from this book. The image is startling. The author, a young woman, is lying on a hotel bed, face down, naked below the waist. She has lain like this ever since the Greek hotel manager breezed Into her room early one morning and, with- out so much as a by your leave, proceeded to give her a massage, yanking off her shorts and knickers in the process.
Her room-mate, another woman, looks on but says only, 'Just what do you think you are doing to her?' And she, too stunned to say anything, just lies there counting to ten. After that image of Miss Petro's bum in air being manipulated by a total stranger, you might think nothing about her book will surprise you. And of course you could not be more wrong. An American graduate stu- dent of German-Hungarian descent, she was commissioned by an English publishing house to travel round the world, interview- ing its Welsh-speaking exiles. That publish- ing house, HarperCollins, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man about as famous for eccentricity as a white shark. Do his accountants know about this book? More to the point, what sort of editor was it that commissioned it and how many people will want to buy it? Mystery, bizarre and impenetrable, hangs like a sea mist over the entire enterprise. But the result is as much of a mystery. I cannot commend it too highly, for, however she may react to Greeks in the morning, Miss Petro knows how to write. Enthusias- tic and indiscreet, funny and learned, she is about as good a travel companion as you can get. Her book is delightful — and this in spite of the guilt it made me feel. It is usually forgotten that the most vigorous protagonists of Welsh, R. S. Thomas and Gwynfor Evans, learnt it when they were already adults. I was born to the purple, to a Welsh-speaking family in the shrinking hinterland of the language, but subsequently I became its first genera- tion to have English as my first language. I still speak Welsh, but this is an old suit hung up in a cupboard now, a tighter fit every time I try it on. There are many like me, products or victims of the 1944 Education Act.
You often hear the figure that 18 per cent of the Welsh speak the language. What you do not hear is that 82 per cent do not speak it at all. Yet everywhere in Wales this huge majority is confronted by bilingual road signs and bureaucratic forms which rub their noses in this fact, when for most of them Welsh is not even a lost lan- guage.
But it is wonderful thing, being able to speak it. Because Welsh is so old and has changed so little, it is possible to travel in time in it, to be at the court of Glyndwr through contemporary verse, or to charge with the cavalry of the seventh century. It is also the most divisive fact in Welsh life, and will probably wreck Mr Blair's plans for an Assembly. For even the 18 per cent who speak it do so with varying degrees of fluency, so that only half of them, as Miss Petro records, can under- stand the television news in Welsh.
The real irony, as she herself found, is that however well you learn to read and write in it you will still find it very hard to conduct a conversation, learners being unable to cope with its rapidity, elisions and accents. Hearing their attempts, native speakers switch to English out of a mixture of embarrassment and politeness. Mixed in with this is suspicion, for what can be their motives, these Japanese, Danish and American academics flooding in to learn the language?
This, oddly enough, is the reason for her book. After her experiences of post-office queues in Lampeter, where she learnt Welsh, Miss Petro travelled the world in the hope that in exile the Welsh would talk to her and understand what she was saying in return.
She will never return to Lampeter, having left us with this description of its academic staff:
No other group of my acquaintance, any- where in the world, is as prone to divorce, alcoholism, suicide, murder, anorexia, romantic malingerings, unwanted pregnan- cies, nervous breakdowns and hauntings as my pals in this academic, rural idyll.
The college librarian, though dead, contin- ues to stack books, naked men run down the main street and rugby players wear make-up. And I always thought it such a quiet town.
What of the exiles? Most, she found, were BBC Wales 'foreign correspondents' (`basically, anyone who can speak Welsh and lives abroad'), who had no wish at all to return to Wales. One mentions a fact I found hard to believe, that twice as many people speak Breton as its sister language Welsh.
The Breton and Welsh word for 'bread' is `gwin', that for 'wine' is `gwin'. Because Breton farmers, en route for the Paris markets, would ask for `tiara' and `gwin' at inns the insufferable French cobbled together the word `baragouinee, to speak nonsense. The English, at least, did not do that; they just ignored the entire Welsh vocabulary.
Abroad, the Welsh are hospitable, linguistically and in person. There is Nesta in Paris, Rhiannonn in Holland and Eleri in Singapore, all of whom could not be nicer to this strange crusader. There is also Richard in India, who once had the chance to learn Welsh, he says, only his mam wouldn't let him. He rings truer than most of those she met, but all the exiles are a merry lot.
Until, that is, Miss Petro gets to Patago- nia, the one Welsh colony, where she encounters the old Wales of chapels and teetotalism, which is the reason so many of us are on the run from the mother country. In this strange society made up of people who can speak Welsh and Spanish but no English, she experiences claustrophobia, another genuine Welsh emotion. There are many bungalows.
Her book, of course, is in English.
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