Bred of Heaven (5 page)

‘Da iawn.'
Da
must mean good – as in
bore da
(good morning),
iechyd da
(good health/bottoms up). It's like embarking on a crossword, filling in the clues.

‘Now remember that in Welsh they also have words for the
nights
of the week. So let's go through those.' The class draws a collective breath and …

This time they seem more hesitant. ‘Nos Lun.' Clearly they can't pronounce the tricky double
L
on
Llun
. ‘Nos Fawrth.' Eh? What happened to
Mawrth
? The class leaves big gaps after each
Nos
as they read James's lips. ‘Nos Fercher.' Why isn't it
Nos Mercher
? What's with the
F
s? ‘Nos Wener.' And now Friday –
Gwener
– has gone and lost its
G
. It's completely missing its initial letter. The nights of the week are disintegrating before my very ears.

‘Has anyone noticed something odd?' This from James. I'll say. A woman raises a cautious hand.

‘The letters have changed?'

‘Yes, good. And why is that?' With ill-suppressed cockiness, one of the class's few men pipes up.

‘Mutation.'

‘Oh, here we go.' A woman at the back wall is already fatalistic about mutations.

‘Da iawn. Because “nos” is a feminine noun it triggers a soft mutation.' James grimaces. ‘Nothing I can do about it, I'm afraid.' My uncle pulled the same face and said the same thing. He wasn't lying. They really do alter the
fronts
of words. For anyone used to forming an opinion of a word by its first syllable, this seems almost wilfully obstructive. It's like encrypting your face with a false moustache, or collagen, or a burqa. These slippery mutations are shapeshifters and not to be trusted.

I look around the class to see who's coping with the news. They seem outwardly calm, apart from one woman with rodenty cheeks and suffering eyes. Who are these people? Who in London learns Welsh? One assumes it's Welsh expats who have lost the language. Or descendants like me who never had it. Or people who have married a Welsh speaker. Whose children are being educated through the medium of Welsh. You hear that a lot in Wales:
the medium of Welsh
, as if language lessons are a form of seance, a communication with one's forebears. We are exiles and émigrés all drawn to the same redemptive well.

And so the lesson continues. It's ninety minutes of intense Welsh. Basically, a double period. I'd forgotten how one yearns for the bell, how the minute hand crawls and creeps and all but grinds to a halt. But I am diligent in my note-taking. My vocabulary list lengthens as James explains how to introduce yourself in Welsh. ‘Pwy dych chi?' he writes on the board. Who are you? ‘James dw i,' he's saying. He is James.

‘Right, so let's all do an exercise.' There is a clatter and flap of swing-round desks as the class rises as one and shuffles into the open space. People look for someone to introduce themselves to. I gravitate towards a woman with big blue eyes.

‘Pwy dych chi?' she says. Oh God, she's fluent. The accent is perfect – the
ch
properly abrasive.
Pwy
is pronounced ‘poy'.

‘Jasper, er, dw i.' My Welsh accent is direct from Harrow-on-the-Hill. ‘Pwy dych chi?' Poowy ducky. It wouldn't get you served in one of those legendary pubs where they all apparently start speaking Welsh the minute an Englishman walks in. I am nonetheless speaking Welsh.

‘Julia dw i,' she volunteers. ‘Sounds a bit rude, doesn't it, just saying “Who are you?”' Julia is very perky, even flirty. Someone barges in with a notebook. ‘Pwy dych chi?' It's a man with an alpha-male aura about him. ‘Pete dw i.' I try others in the room. Sian is rather serious. Mike wades through like a schoolmaster taking registration. Karen comes next, hesitant, eager. Thus we work the space, a circling clump of adult learners effecting introductions in Welsh. In due course it's my turn with Alpha Pete. His accent is pleasingly shiter than my cut-glass abomination. Eventually I come face to face with the terrified woman. Her hair's in a bit of a bun.

‘Pwy dych chi?' I ask.

‘Anne dw i,' she says, not lifting her nose from her notebook. ‘Pwy dych chi?' The sound stutters out like an old-fashioned tickertape newsfeed, jerky, robotic. Her face is a complex mesh of hurt, fear and seething rage. Languages do that to some people. ‘Jasper dw i,' I reply. She'll never last. Not a chance. Me, I'm in it for the duration.

My pursuit of Welshness has started to give off a vibe. I exude some sort of aura that encourages people to venture polite recommendations. ‘You should meet so-and-so,' they'll volunteer. ‘He/she can tell you all about Welsh politics/flora/universities/carpentry/fauna/surfing/tweed/gastropubs/scriptwriting/whisky/glaciology/grunge/cheese/nineteenth-century vernacular architecture. You really should. It would be good for your research.' They are
always things that every culture has, but on this occasion given an apparently Welsh twist. Welshness seeps into all sorts of areas, into not all of which I feel the need to tread. Sometimes they just say, ‘You should meet my dad. He can tell you lots of stuff about Wales.' And I'll think, I've got my own, if it's all the same. Thanks, but
dim diolch
(no thanks). ‘You should go to Patagonia.' The process of fending off unwanted advice is helpful. It allows me to clarify in my mind what it is I'm looking for. I am looking for experiences that can be had only in Wales. I am chasing the quintessence of what it is to feel Welsh.

Hence, one beautiful sunny afternoon, I find I am going backwards. Despite my very best efforts. Steering on water has its own perverse logic, which, for the moment, is to me elusive. I was never much the oarsman. If you are going to learn to be Welsh, this is where to start. In the world's mind, Wales and Welshness may both subsequently have found themselves attached to other things. But before wool, slate and coal, before song and the oval ball, before leeks and daffodils and all the other better-known brand concepts, there was the coracle. The coracle goes back thousands of years. And like the Welsh language it's still going. Just.

‘Hold the paddle like this!' From across a stretch of water Bernard Thomas is hollering instructions. His right hand grips the notched head, his left halfway down the shaft. I imitate the hold and brandish the paddle.

‘Now, I want you to bring the coracle over here.' Bernard is perhaps twenty-five feet away across the limpid green-brown river. I flap my paddle and, ever so gently, the distance between us grows. Bernard recedes and then, when I make a more forceful effort to move forward, he spins entirely out of view. Now I am going backwards, in circles.

Bernard is as old as the hills that have sent this river and
countless others broiling down through clefts and chasms until calm settles upon them as they meander across flat lovely plains towards the nearing sea. It's easy to confuse the various waterways, at least in this south-western quadrant of Wales where coracling lives on. Defoe noted the odd coincidence of South Wales's alliterating rivers: ‘'Tis very remarkable, that most of the rivers in this county chime upon the letters T, and Y, as Taaf, Tawy, Tuy, Towy, Tyevy.' Or as they say in Welsh, the Taf and the Tawe, the Tywi and the Teifi. (I've no idea what or where the Tuy is.) In this case we're on the Teifi. It begins its journey many miles back in the desert uplands of Mid Wales, makes its way through Tregaron and Llanddewi Brefi, past Lampeter and Newcastle Emlyn, then slips through a quartet of fishing villages known for their association with the coracle – Cenarth, Abercych, Llechryd, Cilgerran – before fetching up at Aberteifi, the mouth of the Teifi, better known as Cardigan.

I have come to the right place to begin Project Wales. Bernard Thomas is the oldest Welsh practitioner of the oldest Welsh tradition. By the time I meet him, he has been retired from coracling for a fortnight. He is eighty-eight, and has spent eighty of those years on the river. As a boy he went on the Teifi with his father; as a young man he used to like taking girls out on the river with a flyfishing rod. It was at the end of the war that Bernard chose to become a coracle man, like his father before him, whose licence he inherited. The first thing he needed was a boat, but the coraclemaker in Cenarth refused to teach him how to make one. He claims that he dreamt how to do it instead. Using willow, hazel and calico, over the years Bernard has made hundreds, taught many others and indeed given a lot of boats away.

Three of them are parked on a low wall in the sun outside his small house in Llechryd when I pull up. They resemble beetles
hunkering in a row. He is standing beside them, a fluffy limping dog at his feet. His face has something of that concavity which visits the cheeks of the extremely old. The voice, which sounded withered and feeble on the phone, has a bit more heft in person. He's lived here since 1946.

During the season, from April to August, he'd go out coracling. It was a nine-to-five job: from nine at night to five in the morning. Then, after two hours' sleep, he'd be back at work wiring houses. Every day the fishmonger would drive along the Teifi Valley buying the night's catch from the coracle fishermen. ‘My average was around eight to ten salmon a night. The largest I caught was thirty and a quarter pounds. That was a
big
fish.'

Coracling being done in pairs, and the net held between two craft as they drift downriver, he's fished ‘with many a chap' over the decades, including his son and latterly his grandson. But Bernard has often been out on his own too. On Saturdays in winter he would paddle out with his twelve-bore to shoot a duck for Sunday lunch. He'd also rescue sheep caught in the water, cows, and humans who had fallen in when drunk, or jumped in when depressed. Bernard even coracled across the Channel in the 1970s. It took him twelve hours.

Now that Bernard is no longer fishing, a tradition that stretches back 3,500 years is one step closer to extinction. No new licence has been granted since the 1930s. There's the inevitable Coracle Museum in Cilgerran. But the drift from living tradition towards the artificial respirator of heritage seems irreversible. Ten years earlier the fishmonger's van stopped coming. ‘Everything's diminished,' he says. ‘There's hardly any trout now, there's no eels coming up the river.
Siwin
[Welsh for sea trout] that have been introduced to the river is all that's there.' He blames the pesticides. If a deloused sheep takes a bath in the river it kills the fish for a mile
downstream. ‘They've turned the river Teifi into a gutter.' His grandson has already given up.

One more tourist with a paddle can hardly staunch the tide. But I want to be Welsh, and Bernard is willing.

To pick up a coracle you grab the little loops at either side of the boat, hoist it onto your back, then loop the longer cross-handle over your neck so that it sits on your shoulders. It takes me three goes. As I totter, Bernard slots the paddle over my left shoulder, the end rammed under one of the hazel slats to take much of the burden. I feel like Dick Whittington with a very big knapsack.

Once Bernard gets his coracle up, we'll be good to go. He leans down slowly, grips the handles and pulls. The coracle rises a few inches off the ground before he lets it drop again. He's like a weightlifter sizing up a load. A second go. This time he puts more into it and does slightly better. But he can't manage to heave it up and swing it round on his back. Bernard lets the coracle drop and looks up at me.

‘The sooner I'm fucking dead the better!' he wails. It's heartrending: an old man suddenly bereft of powers that have sustained and defined him through all his long life. His voice filled with anger and disgust. This is the real reason Bernard has given up coracling.

‘Here, let me carry it, Bernard.'

He looks at me in scorn. ‘You can't carry two, boy!' The prospect of help horrifies him. ‘Just give me a hand lifting it.' So I deposit my coracle and lift his on his back while Bernard mutters about being good for nothing but the knacker's yard. To think coracle men used to walk miles under one of these, down to the river at dusk, then back up at dawn, while also lugging a heavy catch. We set off along the road. It's a slow trudge down to the nearby river. Salmon fishers on the Tywi, noted the Edwardian angler and author
A. G. Bradley, look ‘uncommonly like some prehistoric monsters waddling down to drink'. Gingerly, he struggles down a deep cut in the bank.

‘Now,' says Bernard, ‘put the coracle down and put it in the water.' Years of instructing have made him terse and peremptory. ‘Stick your paddle in the ground like this and then put one foot in the coracle and then the other.' He demonstrates, the blade in the earth, the other end in his armpit. Three-legged, he nimbly transfers his weight into the craft. When I try my body tenses. I don't trust the coracle not to float off while I've only one foot in it. Won't the calico crumple under the pressure of twelve or so stone pushing through one leg? I'm not sure I believe the evidence of its 3,500-year history. But carefully I transfer my weight from land to water and somehow it works.

‘Put a foot in each corner, please.' The lesson begins. My spread feet impart balance and steady the vessel. Bernard pushes off into mid-river, swishing the blade of his paddle like a tentacular extension of his anatomy. Me, I swirl about like a cork in a whirlpool. ‘Use the paddle like this!' he calls, holding it in front of the boat, stroking across from starboard to port. He twirls the vertical blade through ninety degrees so that it cuts thinly across the water, then repeats the stroke. My effort is less efficient. I copy the motion. Though the Teifi runs gently westwards, my coracle jerks and bobs as if caught in a foaming torrent. Bernard continues his patient coaching. I grow fretful at the boat's obedience to my flailing instructions. One false swish and I'm spinning to port. Then back again.