Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees

Author:Jasper Rees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2011-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Hawddamor, glwysgor glasgoed …

The less euphonious English version opposite has this down as ‘Greetings, splendid greenwood choir’. I feel like George Borrow bar the small discrepancy that I recognise only half the words. But there’s time yet.

The next morning Richard reports back from Anglesey, where he has had to return home for the night. He has a son who attends a Welsh-language primary school. For the first time ever, he says, the previous evening they had a conversation in Welsh. We practically burst into whoops and cheers. It feels as if a small but important victory has been won on behalf of all of us.

The morning is devoted to marrying Welsh verbs to Welsh prepositions. As with all languages, the little words in Welsh have their behavioural quirks which, like small boys picking their noses, one would like to erase but can’t. Gwrando ar y radio. In Welsh they listen on the radio. Chwarae dros y tîm = to play over the team. Maddau i rhywun = to forgive to someone, which seems somehow more forgiving. Eleri wants to make us correct but also colloquial. Thus we spend the afternoon in the company of Welsh idioms. Llyncu mul: lit. swallow a mule = sulk. Gwneud ei gorau glas: lit. do his blue best = do his very best. Tipyn o dderyn: lit. a bit of a bird = a bit of a lad. Mynd dros ben llestri: lit. go over the top of the dishes = go too far. This is all done through games and competitions. During the breaks – morning, lunch, tea – as we continue to yak and crack jokes (‘Dyna Iwerddon!’), the feeling dawns that I have somehow known my classmates for aeons longer than four days. Such has been the intensity of the learning experience. I think of the Welsh camaraderie described by Charlie and Wayne whom I met half a mile underground in the Vale of Neath. We have bonded at our own kind of coalface.

In the evening we are sent up on our own to dine in the village pub in Llithfaen at the top of the hill. Our linguistic task after eating is to watch a weekly broadcast of a Welsh drama on the big screen. A big right-angled bar juts out under a low ceiling. There are a few cloth-capped hill farmers round one table by the fire. We sit at another next to the window and order a bottle of wine. Helen and I somehow get into a discussion about hill farming, both of us obviously being experts in the field. Somehow it sharpens into an argument about the Welsh word for ‘ram’. I insist that it’s hwrdd. She wrongly thinks it’s maharan. As I’ve swallowed a dictionary I stick to my ground when, halfway down my first glass and thus duly emboldened, I decide to consult our neighbours. Being hill farmers, they can probably settle this one. I get up.

‘Esgusodwch fi.’ The three hill farmers look up from their pints of cwrw da.

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