Humphreys has used family as well as friends. His introduction to the 1996 edition of Outside the House of Baal explains clearly that the novel stemmed from his realization that a gift had been presented to him.
My mother and father-in-law were living with us in our farmhouse oddly marooned in the middle of Penarth … They had that wealth of recollection and the more piercing awareness of reality that comes with old age. They had emerged from monoglot Welsh societies and in spite of wars, revolution, famine, mass unemployment and mass communications, their existences and concerns had continued to revolve around chapels. (7)
So he would use their memories and details of their pasts. But for Humphreys his relatives were not to be directly identified with Kate and Lydia or J.T. who, he argues, ‘might have attended my father-in-law’s theological college and it was equally possible that his sister-in-law would have been in school with my mother’.15 They are influences and inspirations but not exact counterparts; they are nevertheless grounded in Humphreys’s experience of Welsh life.
Thomas shows in his article on Outside the House of Baal that Pa in the novel is in part based upon Humphreys’s maternal grandfather, ‘an old-style, philoprogenitive patriarch, puritanically stern and somewhat of an autocrat’16 and that Humphreys, wanting to show through a character’s family how Welsh society had changed during the twentieth century, was able to make extensive use of his own mother’s family. Thomas also draws connections between Lydia and the author’s mother, and consequently between Ronnie and Humphreys himself. On the other hand, the opening of the article with its suggestion that Humphreys drew his basic inspiration for the contrast between past and present in a character’s memory, which led to the construction of the novel in two time periods, from a conversation he had with his elderly mother suggests that his mother may in some ways have also inspired his creation of Kate. Thomas draws more direct parallels between J.T. and Humphreys’s father-in-law, the Revd Jones, who had been living with Humphreys and his family for several years before the novel was written, but there are ways (his experience in the trenches of the First World War, for example) in which J.T. may be connected with Humphreys’s father. Humphreys by this time has become expert at creating realistic fictional characters from conglomerations of people whom he knows personally, ‘famous’ people and his own imagination.17 He also does this throughout his sequence of novels, in order to make the novels historically representative and ‘truthful’ in distinctively fictive terms to what he believes happened in history.
THE PENYBERTH INCIDENT AND SAUNDERS LEWIS
Other childhood contacts had a strong influence on the young Humphreys – ‘I did have a couple of very stimulating teachers – Moses Jones, and Silvan Evans, who was the English teacher’ (125) – but nothing equalled the resounding impact made on him by the Penyberth incident in 1936, when he was seventeen.
That was a kind of explosion in my mind, and I became a nationalist before I had learnt Welsh. Then, having acquired that point of view, I realized that the language was the essential piece of equipment in order to make this commitment a real, substantial thing. (125)
There was strong Welsh opposition to the British government’s decision to site a bombing school at Penyberth, a farmhouse near Pwllheli on the Llªn peninsula. In spite of the house’s having cultural significance, the campaign against the siting was unsuccessful, which led to three members of Plaid Cymru – Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams – setting fire to some of the bombing school property (not the original farmhouse). Immediately afterwards the three protestors reported what they had done to police but were arrested and tried at Caernarfon, where they were freed by the jury. When this happened the judge ordered a retrial at the Old Bailey, and there the three men were given prison sentences. Saunders Lewis was punished further by the loss of his lectureship at the University College of Wales at Swansea. Issues of political inequalities and government from London were important in this case but the language question was also paramount, including not only the differences between the English-speaking judge and Welsh-speaking jury, but also the right for Welsh people to be tried in Welsh and by Welsh speakers. The whole incident and its repercussions affected a range of individuals, not least amongst whom was the teenaged Emyr Humphreys, to whom it meant:
[The] Reassertion of a national identity. It made you feel that after all there was something important in being Welsh – there was a value attached to it: it wasn’t something to turn your back on, it was something to adopt and to cherish and to defend. (126)
Humphreys explains the effect this realization had:
I was committed only to Welsh nationalism, and not to any other; and for me this related to the recovery of a Welsh identity that had been lost in my family. I had no intellectual preconceptions about nationalism: it was just an awakening to being Welsh, as it were. Because in the general tone of the thirties, the political outlook was, of course, anything but sympathetic to nationalism in general. (125–6)
This meant a rejection of the politics of his parents, who were Liberals, although his elder brother was at the time more fashionably left wing,18 as well as a linguistic rebellion in his decision to learn Welsh, given that he had been brought up as monoglot English speaking and to regard speaking Welsh as conveying an inferior status; in an interview he says: ‘I think the maid in A Toy Epic was very like the maid we had when I was a boy: she looked down on Welsh as only being spoken by old Methodists.’19 Humphreys’s Welsh nationalism became a lifelong commitment and this personal conviction has clearly affected his novels’ themes, content and style. Its more specific influence can be seen in two separate works: his first novel, The Little Kingdom (1946), and his article ‘The night of the fire’, published in 1980.20 An additional, important effect of this incident was the long-term influence Saunders Lewis was to have on Humphreys.21
Later in his career Humphreys had a close working connection with Saunders Lewis.22 As well as being influenced by Lewis’s principles and views, Humphreys may also have been influenced by his literary use of myth and his use of history.23 This relationship was to occur after the writing of the first novel. Before it, however, Humphreys had met Lewis at Plaid Cymru summer schools and had also avidly read during the war Lewis’s influential and controversial column of political commentary in Y Faner. It might well be argued that the fictional conspirators in The Little Kingdom are based upon the three real-life activists: Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams. The protagonist, Owen Richards, combines the charisma and looks of Valentine with the principles and position (university lecturer) of Saunders Lewis, and his death is perhaps the author’s comment on the treatment of Lewis by the University College of Wales, Swansea. What is clear, however, is that many details of the characters, positions and lives of the three real-life conspirators are spread amongst the six fictional ones, giving the novel a kind of ‘fictional accuracy’. In his 1980 account, ‘The night of the fire’, Humphreys makes very clear his sympathy with the way in which Lewis represents Wales as opposed to another famous Welshman, Lloyd George. Humphreys’s sympathy and admiration is even more evident in his essay ‘Outline of a necessary figure’. It is interesting that Lewis’s own pamphlet, ‘Why we burnt the bombing school’ (1937), was very influential among young people in Wales whilst Humphreys was still at school and the Welsh teacher at the school, Moses Jones, remembers Humphreys’s selling the pamphlet, causing the chairman of governors to complain that