Western country blues

Byron Rogers

LEI I hRS FROM WALES

edited by Joan Abse Seren, £14.95, pp. 336

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wales was a bit of a shock. If you W in with an army it was much like Eng- laent nd today is to touring cricket sides, a use- ful place to boost your averages. 'After one conflict,' writes an anonymous English knight smugly in 1245, 'we brought back in triumph to our camp the heads of nearly a hundred decapitated Welsh.' But there was a price to be paid for this. The food, he went on, was horribly expensive, a farthing loaf in their camp site on the North Wales coast at Deganwy cost- ingflvepence. And the weather was worse. ''',. s ll was September they had not thought Lo pack winter clothing, 'and we are °IiPpressed by cold and nakedness'. Nothing , a8 tourists apart from the fact that ‘ollrists may no longer collect Welsh heads. This anthology of letters written in inglish but in Wales was a lovely idea. It crackles with life, being at one level a social in political history, and on another an btlit.roduction to some extraordinary human ,etn8s, but at the same time it is unique as c"11 anthology in that it has a structure pre- \,;,,elY because nothing has changed. The Welsh are still there. And the rain. So it starts with that glum 13th-century head-hunter and it ends with an equally glum Alan Sillitoe, a dreamer who in his innocence trusted that the rain would stop some time. The composer Mendelsohn was not so sure. 'The summer is gone, and with- out having a single summer day,' he writes from Llangollen in the August of 1829. `Yesterday was a good day, i.e. I only got soaked three times.' Dean Swift, at the end of the world, grumbles in Holyhead in 1727, 'Not a soul to converse with, hin- dered from exercise by rain, cooped up in a room not half so large as one of the Dean- ery closets.'

The Welsh language, when it was impractical to behead, and thus silence, its speakers, was even more of a shock. 'I had an idea that Welsh was spoken rather as a freak and in fun than as a native language,' recorded a startled Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1850s. 'It was so strange to find another language the people's actual and earnest medium of thought without so short a distance of England.' But then Hawthorne was an American. The Welsh language just made the English cross.

`Machynlleth, wretched town, hardly a person could speak English,' writes Beatrix Potter in 1885. 'The [Welsh] language is beyond description.' Even the dogs seemed to bark in Welsh, broods Swift, theirs being a 'peevish passionate way of barking'.

From Michael Faraday to Evelyn Waugh, travellers, finding themselves lost, found that the Welsh, when appealed to for directions, had said 'Yes' whichever way they pointed. They put this down to cour- tesy, but misdirecting the English was a very old national tradition, initially a means of seeing that their invading armies ended up in bogs or the high places. This function has been taken over by the Wales Tourist Board, which is hot on Outward Bound holidays. Nothing has changed. Coleridge turns up and in 1794 in Abergele on the North Wales coast sees something I haven't seen in half a century of haunting Welsh beaches, 'a number of fine Women bathing promiscuously with men and boys — perfectly naked'. But then, in between the two of us the shadow of the Methodists fell.

John Wesley has already done a quick reconnaissance of Wales. He too complains about the rain but notes beadily, 'Most of the inhabitants are indeed ready for the gospel.' In 1763, preaching in Pembroke, he adds this glorious sentence: 'A few gay people behaved ill at the beginning; but in a short time they lost their gaiety, and were as serious as their neighbours.' In Cardiff town hall he preached on 'Now God com- mandeth all men everywhere to repent.' And they did, very loudly.

Lloyd George writes to his future wife, bawling his innocence over a fishmonger's daughter. 'I know my slanderers — those whom you allow to poison your mind against me. Choose between them and me — there can be no other alternative.' He pauses grandly, and adds, 'May I see you at 7 tomorrow?' No Englishman could have written that letter.

Just as no Englishman could have written this, Caradoc Evans's record of a conversa- tion with his Cardiganshire neighbours.

Mary Tycanol tells me that Hiltler was in col- lege in Aberystwyth. This much is certain. Miss Arnold corroborates. 0 yes, everyone knows that Hitler was in college in Aberyst- wyth. He gave special orders that though London be razed Aberystwyth must be saved.

The Welsh have turned up in an antholo- gy which until then has been mostly about them, bringing their unique bullshit.

The young Dylan Thomas in Laugharne addresses his love object Pamela Hansford Johnson in Battersea:

It's getting cold, too cold to write. I haven't got a vest on, and the wind is blowing around the Bristol Channel. I agree with Buddha that the essence of life is evil.

There is, as Eric Morecambe so often observed, no answer to that one.

Some startling moments of history sur- face, like those extraordinary letters written `in haste and in dread' by the defenders of English castles in the summer of 1403 when Glyndwr came down from the mountains to launch his Tet Offensive in the Towy Val- ley.

Then there is Oliver Williams, alias Cromwell, on campaign in Pembroke, and for once not invoking 'the bowels of Christ' and the rest of the rigmarole in which he usually wrapped up his thoughts. He writes to a Royalist sympathiser: I give you this plain warning... that if you do harbour or conceal either of the parties, or abet their misdoings, I will cause your trea- sonable nest to be burnt about your ears.

Mr Williams was in a hurry.

But it is the bizarre which stays most in the memory. In 1796 a Mr Johnes writes to a London friend, recording how he has set `some mountains' on fire; this has enabled him to see paradise, and also to remember a line by Virgil. The Welsh, ventured Beat- rix Potter, seemed a pleasant, intelligent race, 'but I should think awkward to live with'. Nothing has changed.