Bred of Heaven (12 page)

It's time for the lunch break. I collar a man who introduces himself as Charlie – Charlie Richards. Under the coal dust he has one of those aquiline Welsh faces, quizzical and alert. He's untypical of those working down here, having started at twenty-six. ‘My father was a miner,' he explains, ‘and he dissuaded me from working underground because of the dangers and the dirtiness of the job. But once I got married at twenty-one he told me you have to go your own way and do what you think is right and there wasn't a lot of work about that I fancied so I started underground then.' He worked at a pit in Maesteg until it closed in 1985 and 600 lost their jobs. He then spent thirteen years working in a brickworks in Bridgend. ‘It was totally different,' he says. ‘Nothing compares to being a miner.' I ask him why. ‘It's the type of men you're working with. Everybody watches everybody else. You're looking after everybody else's safety. You can't compare it. No mind that you're working in a dangerous place, somebody will always come out with a crack and we have a laugh. As I say, it's totally different. It's dangerous, but everybody mucks in together.'

That was what he missed. He came back to mining when jobs were going at Tower, worked there till it closed and came on to Unity. He's sixty-one now. I ask him if he still looks forward to work. There's no hesitation. ‘Yeah, I do, funnily enough. A lot of the boys I know say, “Oh, why do you work there? Stinking dirty dangerous hole.” Unless you've been underground and worked with the men I work with you can't say that. You don't know what it's about.' The sentiment is echoed by Wayne Morris from Ystrad Mynach, a wide-faced man who leans in so close that I can see the coal dust dotting the pores on his broad nose.

‘The atmosphere underground and all the camaraderie and the boys and that,' he says in a looping accent, ‘it's something that you will never get outside.' When I ask around, it seems that everyone
at the face comes from a mining background. But no one has mining flowing through his veins quite as much as Wayne. He's one of twelve children, he tells me; of the five boys, three went underground. His father was one of twenty-one; of the eleven boys, nine went underground. From Wayne's class in school, twenty-four of thirty boys went underground. Wayne is the last of all of these men still to work in the Welsh coalfield. ‘It's something that is born into you,' he says. Increasingly it is being bred out of men like him.

These remnants of decimation by the forces of history have come through with good humour intact. With my background I half expect to be ribbed or cut amusingly down to size or even quietly cold-shouldered, but there is none of that. The humour is laced with expletives but drained of aggression. Wayne seems to embody to an almost parodic extent a spirit of optimism and jaunty warmth that exists at the coalface. He tells me a tale he must have repeated a thousand times. ‘There were six girls in my family before there was one boy. Up until the age of sixteen when we used to have hand-me-downs I was in a skirt!'

At sixteen he went underground at Penallta. It was 1979. What does he remember of his first day of work? ‘Frightening,' he says. ‘Standing in that cage and being dropped into the bowels of the earth. The colliery that I did work in was the deepest sunken shaft in South Wales: 998 metres. It was like you was freefalling.' He didn't anticipate that the entire industry was freefalling too. He chose mining over factory work ‘because there was more money there like and more of a future'. It was a fair assumption: the Rhymney Valley where he grew up boasted fifty-six pits at the time. Twelve years later he was one of 360 men who lost their jobs when the last of them closed. Wayne managed to find work, mostly at Tower until it too closed. A week later he started at Unity.

Wayne is forty-eight, a grandfather five times over. Despite the
growth in demand for coal, and the rise in price that has allowed two neighbouring mines to open in the Vale of Neath, there's no sign that the industry is investing in a long-term future. He and Charlie both express anxiety that young men are not being taken on and trained as miners. ‘We are the last of a dying breed,' says Wayne. There is one boy down here, a diffident apprentice engineer called Nathan from Merthyr who signed up because his father mined and all his friends with degrees now work in Tesco. He's twenty. After qualifying he'll do ten years underground, he tells me, and then he'll get out. By then, most of these men will have retired and the world-renowned breed of Welsh miners that stretches back to the eighteenth century and beyond will be all but extinct.

In Welsh phonebooks and Welsh graveyards you are reminded how hard it is to track Welsh people down. It's no mystery why the Welsh use nicknames like Dai the Post and Dai the Brick: to distinguish between two of the countless Dai Joneses in any given village. It's more of a mystery why those names never eventually mutated into surnames, the way Farmer and Cook, Baker and Taylor did over the border. There are few indigenous surnames and only a small pool of patronymics – Jones, Williams and Phillips, etc. Even the ones that look like real surnames – Pritchard and Bevan, Bowen, Powell and Price – are corruptions of ap Richard, ap Evan, ap Owen, ap Hywel, ap Rhys.
Ap
means ‘son of'.

On the other hand it must have made marriage much less complicated. In Wales, the statistical likelihood of finding a husband of the same name meant that many brides could go from Miss Jones to Mrs Jones without any mental adjustment. It nearly happened with my great-grandmother, known to all as Nain. Nearly, but not quite. When she met and married her husband David Goronwy Owens in 1901, convention required her to make only a small
alteration, from Owen to Owens. The story goes that she didn't fancy that extra
s
, and invited her new husband to drop the final letter from his surname. It's hard to imagine how castrating that must have been for a young man employed in the bank during the last gasp of the Victorian age, how much shaking of heads and elbowing of ribs it must have provoked.

The yew-fringed graveyard at Meidrim is teeming with Hywels and Evanses. I'm looking for Reeses. Two in particular. Teilo has told me that Bert's parents – my great-grandparents – are both buried there. I know very little of them beyond their names – Thomas and Eliza Rees.

I am wearing my Welsh rugby shirt for the occasion. It's a bright warm morning. The thick grass on either side of the path is crowded with graves, some of the garish marble headstones relatively new, the masonry of others withered and illegible with age. I decide to work through them meticulously. There are hundreds of names, some going back to the eighteenth century, many of the dead fondly remembered in Welsh.

When Borrow was nosing around a church in Llandovery, elsewhere in Carmarthenshire, he noted ‘no remarkable tombs'. ‘I was pleased, however, to observe upon one or two of the monuments the name of Ryce, the appellation of the great clan …; of old the regal race of South Wales.' It's nice to know one is of Welsh royalty, but there are only a couple of Reeses that I can find in Meidrim and none of them the right ones. I scour the whole graveyard, all the way down the slope beyond the apse. Nothing. Perhaps Teilo was wrong, I think. I'm just finishing my circuit when I hear a voice.

‘You playing for Wales, are you?' I look up and see a short old man wielding a bristly broom. He's noticed my shirt.

‘I'm waiting for selection,' I reply. He laughs.

‘Looking for any grave in particular?' He has a round, open
countenance and wears a cheerful grin, as well as a dark-blue Carmarthenshire County Council shirt. I tell him I'm looking for my great-grandparents, and mention their names.

‘There are a couple of Reeses over there,' he says, indicating one flank of the graveyard, ‘and another one down by there,' pointing down the side of the church.

‘That's not them though,' I say. ‘Maybe they're not here after all.' I ask how long he's lived in Meidrim. All his life, he says. ‘Born in 1932, I was. I was helping my grandfather in 1938, '9, giving him a hand. He was cutting the churchyard with a scythe or a hook. No mowers then.' He has a Welsh accent from another age, thick, musical and almost folkishly rural. I ask him his name.

‘Les,' he says. ‘What did you say your name was again?'

‘Rees,' I say. I leave my first name unspoken. Then out of the blue he says something extraordinary.

‘Did you know Bertram Rees?'

‘As a matter of fact he was my grandfather.'

‘Was he now?' Les giggles. ‘Oh, I remember him. Dentist, wasn't he?'

‘He was. Was he yours?'

‘Yes, he was.'

‘And what was your memory of him?'

‘He was a fucking butcher!' The only reaction I can think of is to laugh. Les warms to his theme. ‘All of my family was with him having teeth out.'

‘Really?'

‘My father was the first person who had a tooth out by him. He was an apprentice then. My father had his teeth out no bother at all and then he went to the pub straight. Well, I couldn't do that. Different type of teeth, you know, because I had big roots on 'em.' He shakes his head. ‘I had bad teeth. He couldn't help it anyway.'
Les is embarrassed that he might have gone too far. We stand in the middle of a churchyard, him remembering and me imagining an event that must have taken place sixty-five years ago.

‘I know I laugh now, but I was crying in them days. Oh, he was very strong. Big 'ands, you know.'

‘He was missing two fingers,' I remind Les.

‘Yes, I know. But I think he had more strength in the hand then. Because he nearly pulled my bloody 'ead off.'

I've been learning Welsh for a few months now, but I've yet to have a conversation in Welsh in Wales. Something is holding me back. It's not just common-or-garden self-consciousness, a perfectly reasonable phobia of looking thick as pigshit in front of strangers. There's a political dimension to my anxiety too. The overarching fear is that you summon up the courage to ask a question in Welsh, spend an age building the sentence in the language lab in your head, tinkering with it, probing it for structural weaknesses, and then you go and waste it on a very Welsh-looking person who is
di-Gymraeg
: a Welsh non-Welsh speaker. In the minefield of the two Waleses, you can very easily cause offence.

However, I'm learning to play the percentages. There are parts of Wales where you can be fairly certain of not being understood. The closer you are to England, for example, the lower the ratio of Welsh speakers per capita. Gwent for that reason is not a good place to try your Welsh on people. In a Black Mountains pub I meet a chirpy old waitress from Pontypool who chats with classical Welsh abandon about her health. I mention I'm learning Welsh. It's as if I've slapped her violently across the face, then spat in her eyes. ‘Oh, are you?' she sniffs peremptorily, turning her back on me. ‘Nobody speaks Welsh around here,' she says over her shoulder as she struts out. Her implication is clear: if I were you I wouldn't bother.

But I am bothering. I've rented a cottage in Carmarthenshire for a week on my own. One day I take the bus into Lampeter and head for the smallest university in Britain. I am following in Matthew's daring footsteps and seeking information about a residential Welsh language course. I am directed from the front desk towards a room in the corner of the quadrangle where I knock on a door and hear a sing-song female voice.

‘Dewch i mewn.' Come in (and that's an order). I push open the door and am confronted with a terrifying sight. The situation could not be more dire. I have to have my first conversation in Welsh in Wales in front of two people, and emasculatingly, two female people. One smiles up at me from behind the desk.

‘Gaf i'ch helpu chi?' May she help me?

‘Er …' Two not unfriendly faces look at me expectantly.

‘Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg,' I manage.

‘O da iawn,' says the one behind the desk. ‘Ble?'

‘Yn Lundain …' An uncalled-for mutation. I am struggling. I can't say the next bit in Welsh. ‘I can't say the next bit in Welsh.' She says something I don't understand.

‘Dw i ddim yn deall,' I say. I haven't got a clue what she's just said.

‘Try.'

I try. No wonder Matthew was nervous. They're content to let you wriggle on a spit in Lampeter. And there is no oxygen anywhere near my head. It's hideously warm in here. Welsh is making me faint. This might as well be the doctor's surgery. I might as well be having to undress. It would be so very easy to slip into one's mother tongue. But no. Tap tap. I trip and stumble, with much bumping into obstacles and patient nursing over hurdles from the two women, towards a request for information about a residential course in Welsh in Lampeter. I sound like the utterest moron, all
tongue-tied blushes and self-recrimination. The woman behind the desk takes my email address and I make my sheepish exit. As I pull the door to I can feel my shirt clinging fast to my back.

That afternoon, to recover from my humiliation, I set out on a walk to the pub over the hill near Pumsaint, where the Romans came to mine gold. This is a more tumultuous Carmarthenshire than the smooth pastoral hummocks around Carmarthen I'm used to. A few miles to the north the road slopes up into the full-blown Cambrian Mountains of Mid Wales, many of whose valleys were flooded to provide water, like so many other Welsh dams, for England. There's absolutely no one about, even on a sunny warm afternoon. Most of the land seems to be private, with few public footpaths to choose from, so I just turn off the road and head up a randomly selected track. I rise and rise until the narrow Cwm Cothi fans out below in a pretty patchwork. Eventually the rutted path bisects a farmyard. A dog of indeterminate breed sets off a racket behind the gate of a house. I hurry on for thirty yards or so only to hear voices. I turn round and spot two people staring up at me, a couple in their sixties. They don't look friendly. I deem it best to walk back down.