I suppose the rejoinder to Ursula’s wisdom is that I haven’t flown a jet or pierced my eyebrows or gotten married yet, and I’m not racing off to do any of those things for fear of potential regret. So it’s ‘Pam, Pam?’ again: Why travel around the world when I could just as easily – and for a great deal less money – go back to Wales to study Welsh?
There are two answers to this question. One is, simply, that I like to travel and make up shameless excuses to do so. The other is that learning Welsh is like digging a hole in the sand. You make a dent at first, but as you bore deeper you encounter a frustrating snag of nature called the angle of repose; you can only dig so far before new sand spills in from the top, eternally preventing your hole from getting any bigger. All you wind up with is grit under your fingernails. It’s the same with me and Welsh: whenever I try to practise Welsh in Wales I get only so far before English comes spilling in from all sides.
The fact of the matter is that the principality of Wales is buried beneath the verbal tonnage of English. Of Wales’s nearly three million inhabitants – compared to around five million apiece for Ireland and Scotland, and 48 million for England – only about 18 per cent, or some 540,000 people, speak Welsh. And these folks are fluent in English as well. Now imagine waiting your turn at a post office in rural Wales. Behind you is a line that winds out the front door, peopled with old men in tweed jackets and ties, leaning heavily on identical canes and making preliminary retching sounds in their gullets; redolent farmers with manure-caked Wellingtons; a mother with three uncontrollable children; and at least one old woman struggling beneath the weight of a heavy shipping box. Your turn comes and you approach the window. The clerk raises his eyebrows in efficient expectation of your request. Do you say: ‘Um, bore da.’ Clear your throat. ‘Um, gaf fi, no, um, gai, uh, bruny stamp, um, os gwellwch chi’n dda?’ Or do you say, ‘Good morning. May I have a stamp please?’
If you are a worthy and courageous language learner, you do the former, and sweat, and hold people up, and tell yourself it’s for a good cause. If you’re a coward like me, you backslide on to the easy cushion of English. I imagine that giving in to the majority language is a lot like drowning. The familiar words, like the waves, come as a relief when they finally wash down your windpipe once you’ve decided to quit the struggle. But you lose big both ways.
Like Basque or Breton or Catalan, Welsh is a minority language, and it takes fierceness and mental blinkers to learn it by pretending that you and the person with whom you’re practising really don’t share another language – say French or Spanish or English – in which you are both perfectly fluent. The essential wink and nod between you is a fragile conceit, and it usually invites its hangers-on, self-consciousness, the giggles and a sense of unreality, to come and enjoy the struggle.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to learn Welsh in Wales; plenty of people do it every day. But because I’m gutless in crowded post offices, because Welsh-speakers tend to be indulgent with American learners and hold us to lower standards than their fellow countrymen, and because a five-hundred-year-old blanket of English is pinned tightly to the land, I’ve had a hell of a time. The truth is, I got so infuriated with myself one day in 1992, when after five years of semi-serious study I still couldn’t conduct a coherent telephone conversation in Welsh, that a radical thought came to me. I’d heard there was a mother-lode of Welsh-speakers in Argentina whose other tongue was Spanish – a language in which I knew only menu words like guacamole and burrito; but suppose there were Welsh-speakers in other non-English-speaking countries as well? If they existed, they had to be pretty unusual people. That was a plus. If they didn’t speak English, I’d have to speak to them in Welsh. That was scary. And even if they turned out to be bilingual Welsh expatriates, they and I might prove less likely to succumb to the high tide of English than we would in Wales, the nearest moon orbiting the planet England, where the gravitational pull of the imperial language is harder to resist. By visiting Welsh-speakers in places such as Norway and France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Singapore, Thailand, Japan and Argentina, I’d have an unheard-of opportunity to use Welsh as an international language. Even better, I’d get to travel around the world.
The mere thought brought on goosebumps. Could it be, I wondered, that the Old Man of Pencader was wrong? He’s the cheeky devil who foresees the future for Henry II of England at the end of Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-century travel guide to his native land. Henry asks the Old Man what he thinks of the Welsh army’s chances against the English (an impertinent question, even from a king). The Old Man replies with dignity, ‘Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all for this small corner of the earth.’
God give me such self-possession in the face of kings (the irony is that Henry would have asked his question in French – another language that makes me weak at the knees). Now I didn’t doubt the Old Man of Pencader’s prediction, but, I thought, maybe the Supreme Judge should just get his ear ready to hear accounts of Oslo, Tokyo and Buenos Aires in Welsh as well.
Of course, all this was just pub talk. I never expected any of it to happen, and spent the next three years wallowing like a happy sow in the murk of American English.
Paratoi to Prepare
Mind you, I didn’t quite abandon the idea either. I took to baiting the bio-lines of articles I wrote for the Welsh journal Planet with the bare bones of my scheme – more to prove to readers that I had an association with Wales than anything else. Then one day I got a letter from Philip Gwyn Jones, Planet subscriber, Welshman and HarperCollins editorial director, who thought it might be a good idea. Six months later he called to say that my travelling the world in search of Welsh-speakers – not to mention questing after the language itself – was officially a good idea and, well, bon voyage.
To say I was not prepared is like saying the Titanic didn’t expect an iceberg that night. Philip had called in January; the earliest I could possibly leave for the world was June, the same time my friend and housemate Marguerite, a bilingual Brazilian-American, was due to finish her doctoral dissertation on Brazilian fiction. By then she’d be PhD’d but jobless. I invited her to come along. You never knew, I pointed out, when we might run into a pack of Welsh-Portuguese speakers, whereupon her presence would be invaluable. She agreed, we drank a bottle of champagne, then we became devotees of the god of Panic.
While Marguerite wrote night and day about fictional Brazilians I hunted the Welsh. My strategy was to find address lists of all the Welsh societies in exotic (that is, non-English-speaking) spots around the world and write to them. Simple enough, but procuring the lists took time. The daffodils were up before I was actually addressing letters to the Mashonaland Cambrian Society in Harare, Zimbabwe and the St David’s Society of Singapore, among thirty-four others.
In March I made a brief foray to New York to try to persuade newspaper and magazine editors to assign me enough travel stories to pay for the trip. One night after a long day of wheedling I met my friends Mary and Tom at Tom’s office. They’d just hooked up to the World Wide Web and he wanted to show us how cool it was. ‘See if it does anything with “Welsh”,’ I asked. He pressed some keys and in moments had overcome the space-time continuum.
‘Here’s something.’
The screen held a message from the Clwb Cymraeg – the Welsh Club – of the Shimizu Girls’ Junior High School in Shimizu City, Japan. They were looking for Welsh-language pen pals.
‘Now that’s just plain weird,’ said Mary. ‘But it looks as if you’re in business.’ I felt like I’d finally made contact with aliens. So they were out there after all. We were high above Central Park late at night and the lights of Manhattan receded from our office tower like a distant galaxy.