How Blue Is My Valley Read online

  She panics ‘I don’t know,’ she says and I give up while her husband can be heard prompting in the background, ‘There is snow up there.’ Perhaps we’ll have a sisterly chat another time ...

  That was the wrong sister to discuss the goat cheese project with so I phone the other one, who is also the mother of my youngest best friend, my five year old niece Ellie. I can’t wait for the children to come here and play ‘cache-cache’ (hide and seek) in the cellars.

  Neither apparently can Ruth, who would happily put them both on a train tomorrow and party in their absence. Nine-year-old nephew James seems to approve of me; I am the eccentric aunt of every fantasy book, in whose attic you can drink ginger beer, in whose wardrobes lurk unicorns and satyrs, and in whose conversations appear some very rude words.

  Like some obsessive greenie trying to reintroduce an endangered species to the wild, I plan their environment – outdoor chess set, swings, perhaps some fruity ice creams in the freezer – in hopes that the children will come, so I will be able to tell stories again, to live in a world where the apple with which Snow White was poisoned has accidentally got muddled with the apples from my orchard – is anyone brave enough to taste one of my apples? Or would you like to get your mother to take a bite first?

  It is not only the children who fill the house in my imagination; I am a benign grandmother heading the long dining-table set under the trees, laden with the food I have prepared lovingly in my custom-designed kitchen. My student son and his friends are all sleeping in the attic, my four grown-up ‘filles’ by proxy, who are all ‘belles’ to me, are in various bedrooms or tents with their partners or friends and even my little belle-petite-fille will be toddling around, the step-grand-daughter who allows me to wear my gray hairs with pride.

  Mozart will be playing gently in the background and I will look up, smile and catch my husband’s eye. But, even in my fantasy, John is turning an apoplectic purple... my dream is his nightmare. I will have to sneak our people in one or two at a time so he hardly notices. I check the time; I have not died of mushroom poisoning so I will pick my man up from the station and we will think only of each other for a few days.

  5.

  Your own country, where you’re from

  I am an immigrant and I am British, but that word ‘British’ is an administrative nationality and has no roots. My parents were deeply Scottish and, as far as they were concerned, so are their children. I know which tartans I am entitled to wear (dozens of them) and am always vaguely disappointed with Hogmanay, but my Scottishness does not run deep – or is too deep for day-to-day.

  Apart from a few months aged six, when I went to school in Kirkcaldy and was thumped in the toilets for having an English accent (not the last time this would be a problem), Scotland was the place we went back to for holidays, in between my soldier father’s postings abroad.

  Until I was fourteen, I had spent a maximum of two years in any one place and postings had sometimes been for as little as six months; based on where I lived, I could consider myself German or Chinese with as much reason as any other nationality.

  I discovered early on that it really annoyed my parents if I said I was English so from then on I was English, having been born in Aldershot. My father used to ask, ‘If the cat has kittens in the oven does that make them biscuits?’ his only contribution to questions of national identity. He was very quick to get British passports for the two of his children who were born in Hanover.

  York gave me six years and northern vowels, so there is something north-of-England-ish that I feel comfortable with but it was when I moved to Wales that I really changed from migrant to immigrant – worst of all, English immigrant. There was no doubt in any Welsh mind about my nationality, whatever my own confusions.

  Twenty-five years on, Wales is my main country and the goodbyes when we left for France were as good as funeral orations, with the bonus of us getting to hear them. There were prepared speeches from friends on the lines of, ‘I want you to know you have always been ...; a handwritten note from the milkman (he of the melt-in-your-mouth beef, who had been our milkman for an astonishing nineteen years); the travelling fruit-and-veg man’s good wishes delivered with exceptionally strong boxes for packing (you were right Steve, those were good boxes); the grateful goodbyes from parents of a lad I once taught (grateful because they would no longer have to mow our field, a favour which lasted over a decade) – ‘We’re sorry you’re going – it’s all newcomers in the village now,’ made me realise I had come a long way in twenty-five years.

  Everyone wished us well; many told us their own retirement dreams - a little cottage in the Vale of Glamorgan, where, unlike in the Gwendraeth Valley, the sun always shines – allegedly (I wasn’t tempted to change my mind); a villa in Spain for someone else; more than one wanting to return to childhood roots on the Welsh coast in Carmarthenshire or Pembrokeshire. Even the newsagent told me that he dreamed of the States while he worked in Tumble, a typical ex-mining village of terraced houses in a steep ribbon curving grayly up to the Rugby Club.

  I stayed dry-eyed through all of this. Closeness is a state of the heart not an accident of geography and I have said goodbyes before; the important ones are only ‘au revoirs’. I tried to give my news personally to everyone I could manage; I even told Llanelli’s Big Issue seller, whose name is Peter. He shook my hand and wished me luck but this wasn’t enough. He unwomanned me completely by giving me a big hug, wishing me all the best and saying ‘I’m glad you told me or I would have worried about you.’

  He would have worried about me. In the past, he has shown me photos of his children and a glimpse into another world. Peter would make a superb concierge for an apartment block; he is unbelievably patient, good with people, conscientious and cheerful in doing a boring job – and he is unemployed.

  Twenty-five years ago, Llanelli still offered the steelworks, the tinplate factories and the coalmines – men’s jobs. Now the new jobs are jobs in retailing or call centres and even those are mostly in Swansea. The politicians of Wales celebrated when it gained the Objective One grants from the E.E.C., missing the point that it had Objective One status – as one of the poorest areas in Europe. I snuffled all the way down Stepney Street after saying goodbye to Peter.

  There are of course ‘Big Issue’ sellers in France – ‘les Sans Abris’ can be aggressive in their approach to tourists, prowling carparks of large towns on market days, thrusting a magazine into your hand and demanding the money. One of the saddest acronyms in France must be S.D.F. ‘Sans Domicile Fixe’ hiding the cold, hunger and vulnerability of homelessness in three cold letters.

  As in urban Wales, there are those who sleep in doorways and there are beggars, the usual range from genuine hard-luck to easy-way-to-quick-money and it’s only if you talk to them that you start to tell the difference. I was particularly impressed by the guy begging outside Super-U with a few cents in his upturned cap – it was a slack day in October so he was reading a novel and smoking, quite relaxed.

  Along with a photo of a Montélimar market stallholder, who was also reading a novel on a slack day, it could have been a poster for the ‘Get Boys Reading’ campaigns popular amongst us literacy experts in Britain.

  I am not homeless but I am an outsider, who gave twenty-five years to belonging in Wales and was rewarded with a place in the community of which I am immensely proud. No trip into Llanelli passed without a friendly word, usually from potential muggers and rapists who had starred in my classroom twenty years earlier. Even when I thought I was safely anonymous, I was greeted with ‘Oh yes, you’re that woman with the big dogs’ (It could have been worse). I have grown used to Welsh ways and if it is indeed a small world, Wales is a very small country, so that when someone starts a conversation by the traditional route of ‘You must know Dai Thomas, the engineer, he lives down by you’, I can usually respond with the appropriate, ‘Is that down by Gwyn Williams’ place then?’ and we can keep the names rolling for hours.

  It was not
always so. I had only visited Wales once, to stay for a weekend with my brother at his residential centre in Snowdonia, before I went to live in Carmarthenshire. I was living in Wakefield, working in Leeds and had graduated recently from York University so was free to move anywhere. If the pin had landed differently, it could have been the north of Scotland, Cornwall or anywhere near the sea and with some open spaces. Those were the criteria for the place in which my first husband was going to find promotion and, at twenty-one, I was going to gain a teaching certificate. The promotion turned up in Carmarthen, I was given a place at Swansea University and we were delighted to be given council housing as part of the interview package for the new job. Little did we know.

  The first time I saw south Wales was from the train to Swansea. It reminded me of the Yorkshire mining communities, terraces tumbling down hillsides and gray-green hillocks rising behind them, but the difference was the sea, a working sea of half-glimpsed docks and a bay curved around its bed-and-breakfast semis. Having sorted out a place on the teacher training course, I returned to Wakefield for another few months until I was organised to join my husband in the council house, where he had spent a desperately miserable few weeks.

  There are council estates in south Wales where neighbours are friends, their houses are immaculate and the views are so good that local councillors fight to live on the estate; this was not not one of them, which is why it was easy to find a house for us. Between May, when I moved into Maesglas, and October when I enrolled as a student, I don’t remember a single local person speaking to me outside of their day’s work selling me stamps or houses (unless you count the kids who threw stones at the front door, yelled ‘Saes’, ‘English’, and ran away).

  The other half of our semi- was occupied by a man with seven children, presumably a widower, who gathered the family around the organ on a Sunday night and led the hymn-singing, loudly. At the time I thought that this was what every Welsh family did on a Sunday night.

  Another local character was a goat which moved from garden to garden, whether illegally parked there or grazing with permission, who knows – perhaps that was the true origin of my wild-goat-chase? Certainly I spent longer watching that goat than I did making new friends. It was a lonely time but during the day I had my cats and my books, and in the evenings my husband was home from work. Two of his workmates invited us to their homes; it was the English couple, immigrants like ourselves, who became friends. Coincidence?

  I remember seeing graffiti on a bus shelter, ‘Rock against racism’ and thinking how good it was that the Welsh were aware of the problems suffered by English settlers; I still hadn’t realised that hating the English was an accepted national sport. Neither had I realised all the ways in which the English in general – and for historical reasons – had asked for it. But I was twenty-two, rootless and had never even heard of Llanelli (sorry, but I wasn’t a rugby fan) before I moved there – it really wasn’t my fault.

  My integration moved forward a little when I found a Llanelli born-and-bred fellow student who could drive. Having commuted the twenty-odd miles between York and Leeds, then Leeds and Wakefield, without any problems, I couldn’t believe that it took me two hours and three different transport systems to travel what was the same distance on a south Wales map. It was to be another three years and several lessons in dependence before I finally learnt to drive.

  My first chauffeur, Jeff, taught me the words to ‘Mae’n hen flad’ and enabled me to enter a pub without getting one of those silences and switches to Welsh. However, he disapproved of me swearing and refused to buy me a pint, always returning with a half when it was his round. I was homesick for Yorkshire pubs, also full of old men, but ones who would have been playing dominoes and darts with me before I could have said ‘Mine’s an Old Peculiar.’ It looked as if my Camra membership was going to be a waste.

  Despite the gloomy predictions of my mother’s friends in York, I quickly found a teaching post and my new colleagues were only too willing to teach me Welsh, or rather Llanelli English. I had to stop saying ‘here’ in that hilarious received-Yorkshire-with-Scottish-undercurrents-sort-of-way; instead I was to say ‘by yeeeur’. You have to ‘yeeeur’ that famous passage from the bible read in a strong south Wales accent to believe it; you know the one – it goes ‘Let those that have yeeeurs to yeeeur let them yeeeur.’

  I spent many a happy half-hour on ‘Dewi’ practice, a name which included the Welsh vowel ‘ew’ which does not exist in English or in any part of my mouth where I could place my tongue and teeth. Among the many mistakes I made was the unforgivable one of travelling to work with a north Walesian and copying some of his accent – trust me, this goes down worse than Yorkshire in south Wales. I once perfected my north Walesian ‘Iola’ (Yoll- a) only to have the friend in question decide that she had moved to south Wales and she preferred the local Yoe-lah.

  There was a time when I thought it odd to hear classroom Shakespeare in strong Gwendraeth Valley; now I even wonder why Shakespeare cocked up the number of syllables in a line of verse. And if I hear a deep male voice with exactly the right Welsh accent like a big cat’s purr hypnotising you beneath the words, it reaches parts that only D H Lawrence has described; think Richard Burton or Anthony Hopkins.

  But what about Welsh Welsh? By December I had moved out of Maesglas, which still boasts a regular appearance in the magistrates’ courts column of ‘the Llanelli Star’, usually for cases of violent assault or for drugs offences, and my new home was in Bancffosfelen (another half-hour’s pronunciation practice for me, and my parents always pointed to the name on a piece of paper when they came to visit).

  This is in the heart of the Welsh-speaking Gwendraeth Valley in Carmarthenshire, the most Welsh-speaking of counties, the one responsible for the casting vote which brought the Welsh Assembly into being.

  My neighbours were mostly retired miners and my first contact was a phone call from Dilys-across-the-road to tell me that I ought to wipe the condensation from my window or I would get mould. I didn’t wipe the windows and I did get mould but Dilys carried on trying to turn me into a good Welsh housewife.

  My second contact was Will-over-the-hedge who was doing things in his garden. I had my own quarter acre of heaven and was raring to go so I asked him what and how and when, and we were friends. My neighbours taught me about the mines, about ‘the Durhams’ who had settled the village of Carway and never gone back to Durham even when the mines closed, and about the hooks in my kitchen, as in their own, which had been used when the time came for the pigsty-pig to trough in endless autumn.

  Their memories led me back through the traditions still carried on, like the brass band playing up our two-mile hill on Boxing Day, to the time in the sepia postcards they brought out in tin boxes to show me. In return, I was the only one light enough to shift the snow from all our attics the year of the hard winter – no-one had laid boards and a heavy foot in the wrong place would have taken a man through the ceiling below.

  I learnt enough Welsh to break ice and build bridges but little more. Perhaps more importantly, I learnt that if you speak a minority language, you share your language with a few but you share your perspective with everyone who speaks any minority language, anywhere in the world. To speak English as your first language is to be born into hereditary privilege and many of us abuse this accident of birth every time we open our mouths.

  When I was shopping in Llanelli, an old chemist once came up to me and, when I said (in Welsh) that I didn’t speak enough Welsh to carry on in that language, he shook his head and said in English, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing. It’s like seeing the world monochrome when you could see it in colour.’

  What I saw twenty-five years ago was Welsh dying out in three generations; grandparents were first language Welsh, parents understood it but rarely spoke it (except to their parents and their dog) and the children neither spoke it nor understood it. There were local variations on this and it is all changing again, from political, educational
and human pressures.

  Nowadays, it is difficult in many jobs to reach a high level unless you speak Welsh; as an immigrant, I accepted this until I realised that my opportunities for Headship were limited by my lack of Welsh and yet I was offered neither the time nor the opportunity to learn the language. As a busy teacher, mother, writer and pet-owner there were limits to what I could cram into my life – and into my husband’s, supportive-beyond-the-call-of-duty – so my stop-go attempts to learn Welsh have left me a beginner still. As the majority of those born and bred in Wales do not speak Welsh, they face the same barriers that I have, and there is, understandably, bitterness on all sides of the debate.

  Local dialect in Dieulefit has followed the same pattern of three-generation decline without the measures taken in Wales to ensure that the language survives. Monsieur Dubois’ father could chat for an hour with his neighbour, totally in Provençale; Monsieur Dubois himself understood most of the conversation but couldn’t join in; and his son, who told me the story, has not a word of dialect. Unlike in Wales, there is little co-ordinated action to preserve the language, although it has its supporters, particularly for its literature and history.

  My French is better than my Welsh but – or perhaps because - here there is rarely the option of speaking English, which was always a common language in Wales. So, how welcome have I been in Dieulefit? Like Iola, I have changed my name. The Mrs Gill who lived and worked in Wales was ‘Gill’ as in fish-part. In France, I am Madame Zheel (still spelt G- I-deux-L) and that suits me fine.

  My first name is more of a problem. When I was working as an Education Officer for Neath Port Talbot, I was lucky enough to be invited to an Education Conference in Nice, where I quickly discovered that Monsieur Zhion Zheel had been expected. ‘Zhion’ is not really an option without other aspects of a gender change and I have been ‘Jean’ too many years to let that go now. French does not contain the sound ‘j’ as in ‘Jean’ and the immensely popular Jean Auel has a full French explanation in the fly of her ‘Cave Bear’ series telling her French readers to say ‘Jean’, ‘d-zh’ – as close as French gets to the sound. Prompted by a trendy sales assistant, I have finally settled on ‘Jean comme le pantalon’ as the American ‘blue jean’ seems to be known everywhere. If it turns into ‘Gin’ in a French accent, I can live with that.