when you adopt the language of the oppressor, the imperial power or whatever it may be, you are taking part in the oppression. You yourself become guilty. You therefore have this terrible nightmarish conflict, which has been with me all my life in the form of an inner tension. (131)
This comment of Humphreys is key to understanding his position as a postcolonial writer. Equally important is his desire to contribute to the preservation of Welsh identity through the subject matter of his work. Most of his fiction, particularly the later work, is concerned with Wales and what it means to be Welsh; it is not just set in Wales. His best-known works both analyse and educate the reader in matters Welsh: the diversity within Wales, the effect of the approach of war, Wales in the war, Wales in the twentieth century, Nonconformity in Wales. Alongside the historical details he uses Celtic myths to reinforce the separateness and uniqueness of the nation in the minds of readers who may be ignorant of, may have forgotten, or may have been reared and educated with no connection with their Welsh heritage. So why did he take this role – of ‘People’s Remembrancer’2 – upon himself? What turned the English-speaking boy from north Wales, almost on the border with England, into the committed Welsh nationalist he became?
CHILDHOOD AND ROOTS IN NORTH-EAST WALES
It began with his childhood: ‘in many ways I had an idyllic childhood’ (124). The mature Humphreys’s ability and desire to express notions of the ambiguity and marginality of ‘the Welsh condition’ stem from his upbringing in ‘one of the four corners of Wales’,3 where he was reared and educated in the English tongue with perhaps the same kind of ‘good intentions’ that other leading Welsh writers in English experienced during the first half of the twentieth century. Humphreys himself has drawn attention to similarities in detail between his own childhood and the vision of childhood expressed in A Toy Epic, much of which comprised his first unsuccessful attempt to be published.4 The character of Michael, in particular, and his family background appear to have many similarities with that of the author, without denying any of their fictionality.5 In A Toy Epic, finally published as his seventh novel in 1958, Humphreys uses the three boys, in whose words the story is told, to represent aspects of the social and circumstantial differences amongst Welsh people and simultaneously to indicate the differences within Wales between one area and another – to stress that Wales is a diverse nation and that stereotyping its people as having a certain character is not only unjust in the obvious way but also inaccurate and misleading.
One of the points made in several interviews is the importance of the effect of the local landscape on the young Humphreys, and the instinctive connections it instilled in him with the past, mythic and historical. Much is made of ‘The Gop’, the hill behind his parents’ house in Trelawnyd: ‘Local legend had it that it was Boadicea’s grave’ (4). This vantage point gave the young Humphreys the impetus to see himself as marginalized: ‘it was in a sense the view from the border’ (2). However, there were other ways in which the author’s early life impacted upon his later ideas of nationality, and of his own marginality, brought up on the border between two nations and with English as his mother tongue, whilst his roots were Welsh. In ‘Conversation 1’ Humphreys makes the point that ‘the structures of the fiction very much reflect the structures of the family’ (7). This is intriguing for more than one reason. First, it leads us into the importance of Humphreys’s own family in his fiction, and secondly it marks a clear way in which novels can reverberate the individual’s own experience, even when the background of a reader, for example, is very different from that of the author. Chiefly, however, it led to a variety of families being used over the span of novels as a tool by which to reflect Welsh society.
This use of the family is closely intertwined with that of the local community, and further entangled with the young Humphreys’s perception of the First World War as a thoroughly damaging enterprise due to its effect on his father, whom Humphreys remembers as being in and out of hospital, affected long term by the damaged ribs and gassing he had sustained.6
The whole trauma of the experience affected my father very deeply: he came out of the war a very different person from what he had been when he went in … I always remember him as an invalid, a wounded man in every sense … A lot of them had been gassed, and if they survived then they survived as a damaged generation. (124)
This perception, originally very personal, has had a clear effect on Humphreys’s fictional male characters, and not only those whose timescale within a given novel means that they would have experienced that war, causing his presentation of the male to be frequently that of weak, ineffectual, dispirited and cynical characters, fitting the syndrome explained by Ato Quayson as the trope of disability, a feature he has found prominent in postcolonial literature.7 This is particularly significant for Humphreys’s presentation of Wales as a nation given that in a number of his most significant novels he uses the protagonists as characters who are representative of the Welsh nation, or elements of it. John Cilydd, in the sequence, is an obvious example, and it is no coincidence that in the final novel of ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence Cilydd’s traumatic experience in the trenches of the First World War is explored and found to be key to his later life. Humphreys is well aware of the war’s effect on himself and for Wales as a nation:
it was a huge event that had taken place and marked off a way of life that was totally different. That was when a new, modern world began, … It was a huge watershed really. But it was only later – much later – that I came to understand its implications for Welsh culture, although I think I held it responsible for the fact that I was not brought up Welsh-speaking. When he was in the Army, my father turned away from the Nonconformist religion in which he had been raised and became an Anglican. (123)
Simultaneously, the relationship between Humphreys’s parents – ‘My mother was much younger, and much stronger physically, and a very headstrong, impulsive woman’ (124) – has had a corresponding effect upon the presentation of female protagonists in his fiction, not least the feisty Amy Price Parry, and equally on his use of female representation of both elements of and on occasion the whole Welsh nation, a particularly effective tool in its convenient linking with the essence of Welsh rather than English character through connotations of the Celtic mother goddess as opposed to the English tradition of male Protestant Christianity and patriarchy.8
I think she [Amy] is the central character, the dominant female, and John Cilydd a weak male, and this correspondence between the sexes seems to be a fair reproduction of Welsh experience in the twentieth century. Everything flows from that. She’s like a mirror walking down the street, but not the only mirror, so you have a multi-perspective portrait. Many of the characters are marching down the street of history, the march of time, and each one reflects something of the times. (138)
The small community in which Humphreys grew up has also made an impact on his work. In an interview Humphreys mentions the fact that ‘the man I based Albie on is still alive. We were great friends as children …’9 and ‘We had a maid, and she used to read in exactly the way I depict in A Toy Epic’ (124), which gives an indication that he does, at least in A Toy Epic, use real people as the basis for fictional characters. Humphreys himself comments on this use of autobiography:
In the process of hammering out a work of fiction you do tend to mix things that actually did happen with things that might have happened and things you’ve imagined … A Toy Epic looks as if it might be autobiographical, but if you look closely there are three distinct characters and there is a sense in which I must be all of them because every author is the father and the mother of the thing that he produces.10
It is clear from this that, whoever the friend was, Albie is not a direct representation of him, but was used extensively in the fictional creation. Humphreys has also explained that a lot of autobiographical material was used in A Toy Epic, although the character of Michael, for example, is a work of fiction.11 The Rector James Joel Morgan lived opposite Humphreys’s father, who was headmaster of the church school. Humphreys transferred Michael (the character closest to the author’s real self) to be the son of the rector in the fictional parish rather than the headmaster.12 Similarly,