Till now I’ve spent most of my time here speaking English among the academic crowd, the majority of whom find my smittenness with the Welsh language a little unseemly. Their Welsh, gleaned over decades of opening the campus’s bilingual doors and parking in its bilingual lots, is of the utilitarian or Dim Parcio (No Parking) variety. They’ve all picked up enough to know that Welsh actually has vowels – unlike those who express amazement at my wanting to learn a language composed exclusively of consonants – but that’s about as far as their skills go. I forgive them: they’ve got other things on their minds. No other group of my acquaintance, anywhere in the world, is as prone to divorce, alcoholism, suicide, murder, anorexia, romantic malingering, unwanted pregnancies, nervous breakdowns and hauntings as my pals in this academic, rural idyll.
Today I can’t walk across campus without exploding one emotional landmine after another. Coming toward me from the library is an acquaintance whose path since we last met has been crossed by murder, attempted suicide and divorce. I want to sympathize but don’t know how, so I duck back into the Canterbury building only to bump into an old friend whose wife, also a close friend, just confessed to me that her nervous breakdown is abating, but she still sees disembodied eyes when she’s tired. From him I learn that their marriage is on the rocks. Dinner at the Indian restaurant seems a hazardous idea, but I agree anyway.
In the library the talk is of Mr Ryder, the old librarian, who despite his death last month nevertheless continues to prowl the stacks shelving books.
This may seem callow, but I confess that Lampeter’s dark eccentricities have long been what’s lured me to the place. Everyone likes to be touched by lunacy now and again, and Lampeter is my source of the stuff. Its fecundity in the department of recklessness and whimsy is legendary: a friend of mine, on his first day on campus, was kidnapped by students in pith helmets and genially held hostage down a manhole. I spent my first week here locked in an old library with eight people I’d never met before, preparing an exhibition of incunabula: it was days before I learned that the word meant nothing more sinister than books printed before 1500. Naked man have been spotted chasing pigs down the main street, rugby players have been seen in make-up, and I, before I became sane, have been known to speed along country roads at night through barricades of mist with my headlights switched off, just for the hell of it.
Over time, however, whimsy has grown a sharp edge. I’m now an occasional visitor from across the sea, and find myself on the threshold of voyeurism. Acquaintances die in car crashes and friends have nervous breakdowns. Now it’s language that gives me my fix of loopy thrills. Welsh – a tongue few speak and fewer understand, with vowel sounds so rich I’d swear they have calories – is the grown-up corollary to all that attractive eccentricity and slight touch of peril. (The Welsh word for danger is perygl, testimony to the occupation of Wales by one Latinizing army or another – the Romans or the Normans, I forget which, both were liberal with seed vocabulary – and the nature of the words that followed in their wake.)
For me learning Welsh is a way of growing up, though few people may see it that way. I make appointments to meet with members of the Welsh department to discuss my book, grab Marguerite, who’s been in the library trying to avoid Mr Ryder, and head home.
Ymarfer to Practise
‘Home’ for now means Dolwerdd, my friend Rebecca’s bungalow on a sheep farm a mile or so out of town. It’s a little cube of a house set amid a wayward grid of vivid green sheep pastures, marked off from one another by dark windbreaks and low, shrubby hedgerows. The air smells of sweet earth and sheep. A hay-swaddling machine is busy in the next field over, snatching up Swiss rolls like a diabolical gift-wrapping device and imprisoning them in black plastic.
‘Looks like you got mail.’ Marguerite gingerly scoops up several envelopes lying in the hall near the birthing box of Rebecca’s cat, Usurper, who’s just had kittens.
‘Hey, you hit the jackpot. Someone named Ursula – look, she writes in green marking pen – invites you to stay with her in Tokyo. You’d better tell her you’re travelling with a friend.’
I nod.
‘What’s this?’ She shows me a letter with a red dragon on it.
‘Cymdeithas Dewi Sant Singapura,’ I rasp, ‘the St David’s Society of Singapore.’
‘… will be delighted to meet you. And it seems that a man named Lynn is picking you up at the Oslo airport, but you’ll be staying with a woman named Rosemary, who reputedly speaks Welsh “with music in her voice”.’
This is good news, but I worry that all the letters are in English. Maybe I won’t find Welsh-speakers out there. Then I worry that I will. Then I remember my growing fears about my Welsh comprehension ability. I decide to watch S4C for a while.
S4C is Sianel Pedwar Cymru, Channel Four Wales; it is also work. For a learner the Welsh-language television station is about the farthest thing on earth from entertainment. I start to reminisce about watching the strong-man competition back in 1992, a prime-time show in which beefy guys named Davy and Hywel would hold a row of four bricks at arm’s length for as long as they could – not much more than a minute, as I recall – before they began to shake, sweat and drop them, but Marguerite shushes me and points at my throat.
On TV a shrill children’s programme is in progress. A loudmouth, shrieking maniac of a host is tossing kids into something that looks like a vat of unformed jelly. Beneath my comprehension, I decide with relief. Alas, Heno, a news magazine which means ‘Tonight’, is not. Most of it goes over my head. It’s followed by Pobl y Cwm, which has ensnared Marguerite although she understands not a word. From seven to seven-thirty we both stare fixedly at the screen, trying to crack the code. A blonde woman and her husband (?) seem perturbed by a delivery of coal. There’s trouble brewing at the hair salon, and someone’s in a funk at the estate agent’s.
‘Are those two supposed to be engaged?’
I have no idea but I don’t want to admit it. ‘Uh huh. But these people are terrible mumblers, so I can’t be sure.’ I’m feeling very discouraged.
‘What’s with that couple and the coal? Is it some kind of conspiracy?’
‘Who knows? Maybe somebody’s buried in it. Wait! That guy just said, “Come over tomorrow around three.” I understood that!’
‘See, you’re getting it,’ she says brightly. I don’t know if I’d call one phrase in half an hour cause for celebration, but at least I go to bed with the rhythm of the language pounding in my ears, beating time to the night rain. Mae’n bwrw hen wraggedd a ffyn. My brain chugs it out in nine counts, over and over and over. It’s raining old women and sticks.
Chwilio to Search
An odd thing sometimes happens to me when I’m walking in Wales. Without warning a chip breaks off the corner of my mind’s eye and goes careening up and away, faster and faster – I can almost feel the rush in the depths of my stomach – until it stops in space and turns back to show me myself as a dot on a tiny bump protruding from an island on the north-western corner of the map of Europe. It seems such a funny place for me to be.
I lose my gravity like this on the way to Irene Williams’s house. The sun is shining as if Lampeter were the bloody Caribbean. As ever, I’m the only one in sunglasses (my ‘most American’ affectation, according to Welsh sources). Wales, this land of tumultuous, messy clouds that bank around the heavens like airborne glaciers, is lazing today under a faultless blue sky. It bothers me.
This morning I’ve been hard on the trail of far-flung Welsh-speakers, gleaning addresses and telephone numbers. One is Hiroshi Mizutani – who’s