The Man Who Went Into the West by Byron Rogers

Author:Byron Rogers [Rogers, Byron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845137571
Publisher: Aurum Press

John Jones, that Heimdall of the hills, was also there. ‘I was very bored. I was eighteen or twenty, and when H.D. had asked permission for him to come, people hadn’t said “No”, but not many had said “Yes” either. You know how it was then between church and chapel. His Welsh was a bit lumpy, rough you could say. I can see him now. He was just like...an object really. We had a job to understand him, people were not taking a lot in. Vicars are not like chapel ministers, they don’t give much of a sermon, they just read it out. Afterwards nobody said anything.’

Thomas would climb the hills most days. ‘He must have known every nook and cranny up there,’ said Eric Jones Llwyn Copa. It became a talking point among his parishioners. ‘Sometimes my father would see him up there, and he’d look wild,’ said Megan Humphreys of Manafon.

His fitness even in old age was remarkable; in his late thirties on the hills it must have been fearsome as he paused up here to see the Wales of his imagination, the mountain Cadair Idris to the north-west, the Berwyns to the north-east, ‘a prospect to raise the heart and make the blood sing’, wrote the pacing vicar. His responsibilities were far below him, and from 1,000 feet seemed manageable. ‘Turning to look down into the valley he would see “everything in perspective ...”’ It is a significant choice of phrase, and what he saw in perspective was ‘the people like ants below him, the church a small hut in the fields, and the river like a silver thread flowing down the valley’ (Neb).

But two things still worried him. The first was that the Wales of his imagination contained that company to which he aspired, the writers in the Welsh language: would they accept him as one of their own?

That he was not sure of this must lie behind the rather mysterious parable in Neb which involves the Welsh-language novelist Islwyn Ffowc Elis, a chapel minister, then living some ten miles from Manafon. ‘The rector called by one day to invite him to come for a walk to the moorland around Cwm Nant yr Eira, but Islwyn refused. He was too busy trying to save his own Wales. Were the two Waleses the same?’ That is it, there is no more.

Then something happened. In 1951 the War Office decided to extend a British Army camp at Trawsfynydd in North Wales. Now the War Office already owned 10 per cent of the whole surface area of Wales, having requisitioned more land from a country itself one-tenth the size of England and Scotland than from the other two put together. This time some Welsh writers and nationalists decided to block the road in protest. ‘The rector started first thing in the morning,’ wrote Thomas in Neb, but what actually happened, as described by Islwyn Ffowc Elis in the Welsh-language magazine Taliesin, was a little different.

Whatever Ffowc Elis’s aversion to

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