They were great Bible readers, these Welsh people, and I was sure he was thinking of the text O death, where is thy sting?
"I'd take the long way to the bus stop if I were you," Mr. Peevey said.
On the bus to Haverfordwest—the bus went slowly, and always down country lanes—I decided what it was that bothered me about the Welsh villages and towns. There was only one kind of cottage in the villages, and it was not a particularly pretty style; there was only one kind of terrace in the towns, and it was mournfully flat. They were one note, one color, one class, and in some places every house was identical, and equally ugly. This in itself was not remarkable—such towns had counterparts in the United States—but these Welsh ones were entirely surrounded by woods and hills and fields, and so they looked sullen, with faces averted from the green hills.
Some towns can be transformed and given a memorable character by a chance encounter. And then it is your secret—you alone were the witness. I had this experience in Haverfordwest. Three people stood in front of a fruit shop. An old woman was using sign language to speak—she was flapping her hands. A young woman was translating this sign language into spoken Welsh to an old man with a dog. The man replied to the gesticulating dumb woman in Welsh. It was all Welsh and flying hands, and finally the old man took out a beaded purse and squeezed it open. He removed a pound note that had been folded into the size of a postage stamp—he unfolded it (this was like origami) and handed it to the old woman. She thanked him in sign language: this was translated into Welsh. The man replied in Welsh. The woman kissed the pound note and went away with the younger woman.
I still lingered, wondering.
The old man jerked his dog's leash. He said, "Come on, Jasper!"
After all that, he spoke to his dog in English!
This incident colored my feelings for Haverfordwest much more than if I had spent my time scrutinizing the voided lozenges on the church crests or marching up to Wiston and reminiscing myself into a stupor over Wizo the Fleming.
From here to Fishguard the land was green and smooth, occasionally erupting into rocky heaps, like the great hill of boulders at Wolf's Castle. As I looked north from the village of Letterston, the rocky heaps in the distance seemed like fortresses and castle ruins. The Welsh landscape was the landscape of legend slightly out of focus, full of blurred castles and giants and dragons that were actually cliffs. The coast of Fishguard was like that, stonier and bleaker and more ragged than I had seen in South Pembrokeshire. The stonework on some cottages was as patchy and colorful as a quilted blanket.
It was twenty-eight miles from Fishguard to St. Dogmaels on the coastal path. I thought it would be a hard day's walk, but it took almost two, because of the steepness and the river detours. As I approached the end of it I met two fishermen, both named Jones, who told me with a kind of urgency that most nights they went out fishing for salmon, which they caught with nets slung out from coracles, and what did I think of that? I asked them how big the salmon were and what they got a pound. They were ten-pounders, worth two quid a pound.
These men directed me to a hotel in Cardigan, up the River Teifi, where they fished. Perhaps they did not like my face—it was a very bad hotel, and I had a very strange encounter there, and not just very strange, but...
But first I had to face Cardigan. Cardigan was poor, a place of high unemployment and hard-up people. The poverty was not immediately obvious; but with a growing sense of unease I began to notice that something was wrong. It was a frailty and uncertainty: things were very quiet—and then I studied the clothes, the houses, the food, the signs, the faces; and I saw that it was simple, they were poor.
"And the trouble with these depressed areas in Wales," a nationalist named Humphries told me, "is that they get a lot of cranks."
What did he mean by cranks?
"Food cranks, like," he said.
I said I inclined toward vegetarianism myself, and had even stopped smoking.
"And lesbians," he said, in a challenging way. "They paint pictures and have exhibitions in the Cardigan Town Hall."
I said that seemed fairly harmless.
"Pictures of"—he swallowed—"things I wouldn't mention."
I went to the town hall. It was an exhibition of feminist paintings—mainly scenes of childbirth done in a simple spattery way. The people running the exhibit were grave bearded men and cape-wearing women; they had an affected Gypsyish look, and were rather young. But I saw what Humphries meant by cranks: he meant English people.
Cardigan was Welsh-speaking Wales; so was North Pembrokeshire; so was the west coast, parts of Dyfedd and Gwynedd. The limits of Wales spoke Welsh. This was the Celtic fringe, spiritual home of the Plaid Cymru Party—the nationalists—and this was also where English-owned cottages were burned down. Sixty cottages had been put to the torch in the past three years.
I wondered whether the Welsh could be explained in terms of being bilingual, which is so often a form of schizophrenia, allowing a person to hold two contradictory opinions in his head at once, because the opinions remain untranslated. The Welsh had that mildly stunned and slaphappy personality that I associated with people for whom speaking two languages was a serious handicap. It made them profligate with language, it made them inexact, it had turned them into singers—well, that was no bad thing, they said. I did not think it was a question of good or bad, but only of a kind of confusion.
The Welsh stared in a friendly way. It could be disconcerting. The English never stared unless they were very angry (an English stare is like the Evil Eye) or wanted to score a debating point. The Welsh were like members of a family, but a large suspicious family. They certainly did have common characteristics, and they were more a nation than I had ever imagined. Sometimes it seemed to me that there was no such thing as English culture in a definable way. But Welshness was palpable; it was chattery and backward-looking. It surprised me that the Welsh had not burned down more cottages, the family feeling ran so strong.
"And they killed the commander," a court clerk named Davies told me, describing a Falklands' battle that had just been fought. Then Davies winced and said, "His name was Jones."
He let this sink in. He was moved by it. The Argies had killed one of their own Joneses! I had the feeling that if the soldier's name had been Brown, it would have made less of an impression.
And Marion Lewis at a public house in St. Dogmaels said, "They burn these cottages, the Plaid Cymru," and she smacked her lips. "Some of the chaps are very tough, you know. That's what I don't understand—there are still so many English cottages! The chaps do try, but they haven't "been successful."
She seemed a bit sorry there hadn't been more arson attacks.
I was bemused by the Welsh intonation. It was a whining, West Indian lilt, and it could be very soft and lisping, with slushy throat-clearings. It was full of interesting words. Some like toiledau and brecwyst —"toilet" and "breakfast"—did not appear to be ancient. And some were grunts, like the place names Plwmp and Mwnt. But corn was the Welsh for horn and was obviously from Latin, and so was cwn (dog) and bont (bridge), and the word for church was eglwys, the same word as the French église and with the same pronunciation. I wondered if it was my imagination that suggested that, given the whine and squeak, and the rising querying tone on most words, it was hard to express anger in Welsh. I wanted to see someone lose his temper in Welsh, but I never did.