Mislaid in Wales
Jan Morris – Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (Viking)
Poor Wales. It is grimly appropriate that the setting up of its Assembly should have been clouded by the Ron Davies affair. No matter how hard Wales tries to turn itself into a serious, quasi-autonomous political entity, circumstances conspire against it.
Peter Hain was on Radio 4 the week after the Davies debacle, describing what the Labour Party in Wales might do to fill the vacancy. You couldn’t help laughing when he envisaged a ‘team of all the talents’; he appeared to be referring to Alun Michael and Rhodri Morgan.
Jan Morris’s book – a revision of The Matter of Wales, which was published in 1984 – was completed after the 1997 referendum and before the incident on Clapham Common. Morris believes the narrow vote in favour of devolution “changes everything”; one hopes, for Wales’s sake, that she is right. Welsh politics, Welsh Labour politics in particular, have been devoid of talent and purpose for decades.
Morris’s subtitle is “epic views of a small country”. No Bryson-esque resonance is intended; hers is the opposite of his stroppy worldview. She is lyrical, effusive, adoring: of the land, the language, the people, the poetry, the very soul of the nation. One example will suffice, her paean to the language: “The language is the truest badge of Welsh identity . . . it gives notice to all-comers that Wales is still a separate place. It is, as everyone agrees, a poetic language – even those who do not understand a word of it marvel at its strength and resonance.” But everyone doesn’t agree. Welsh is seen as the talisman of Welshness by some, the protector from centuries of anglicisation and cultural absorption; but others in Wales see its influence as divisive – setting Welsh speakers against non-Welsh speakers, rural Wales against urban Wales, north against south, nationalist Wales against Labour Wales. One-fifth of Welsh people speak the language, bask in its cultural glow; where does that leave the four-fifths who do not? To stress the language as the litmus test of Welshness is to deny the majority their Welsh identity, to leave them caught between two cultures, awash somewhere in the Bristol Channel.
Morris’s unremitting, at times unquestioning, pro-Welshness made me turn, as an antidote, to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, with its portrait of hemmed-in, drink-sodden (embittered?) lives and its satire on the stage Welshness of writer and TV celebrity Alun (note the bogus spelling) Weaver. When he returns to live in Wales after a long exile in England, he is asked how it feels. His reply is well rehearsed: “Many things grave and gay and multi-coloured but one above all: I’m coming home. That short rich resounding word means one simple thing to a Welshman such as I, born and bred in this land of river and hill. And that thing, that miraculous thing is – Wales.”
Morris of course doesn’t write in those clichés, but is her view of Wales really so different? “I see it [the matter of Wales] not as a continuum, but timeless, one kind of Welshness blurred into another, one influence absorbed into the next, the whole bound together, often unconsciously, by the age, strength and fascination of the Welsh tradition and the spell of the Welsh language.”
Throughout the book Morris identifies with Owain Glyndwr (Owen Glendower to the politically incorrect), the 15th-century Welsh landowner who rose against the English and briefly gave Wales a separate political identity. She calls him “the patron of my book”: he is hero and mentor; a voice, a will echoing across the centuries. Her sense of identification with past, present, future, with the spirit of Welshness, is total: “I am all Wales in one! The peasants are me, the miners, Rebecca’s horsemen are me . . . the princes and their ladies, the bards, the priests – I am Owain himself, and the divine Dafydd, and Nest, and Hywel Dda, and before them too I inhabited the ancient mysteries of stone and seer – myth-maker, shape-changer, there go I!”
There is a desperation in the attempt to convince us that Wales is a great nation. Frank Lloyd Wright is claimed as a Welsh architect; the list of Welsh firsts include lawn tennis, the Sealyham terrier and buying by mail order; and the Eisteddfod is described as if it were an event of global significance.
I was born in Wales but in Newport, Monmouthshire (aka Gwent), in that corner of Wales where the English influence is most pervasive, the Welsh language least widespread, and where for almost two centuries heavy industry dominated the culture. Owain Glyndwr was not a hero, but Gareth Edwards was, and the great Welsh rugby teams of the 1970s, and Glamorgan’s 1969 championship-winning cricket side, and the thousands of miners and steelworkers who lost their jobs in Mrs Thatcher’s experiment in social engineering, and the teachers who taught me brilliantly but were starved of funds in the 80s and 90s and saw the successful comprehensives they had established wrecked by government ineptitude, and a population that adapted to deindustrialisation and rationalisation and reskilling and downsizing without blowing up the smugly, ugly white civic centres in their towns. They were, and are, heroes too.
I don’t recognise Jan Morris’s Wales. She is sharp on the national characteristics of the Welsh, adores Wales, feels the presence of its past, is optimistic than it can express itself fully in the future. But what about the here and now; what about its people? All the photographs in the book are of timeless Welsh landscapes – waterfalls, lakes, rocky outcrops. But where is the other Wales, of rundown estates, rising drug use and social dislocation; the Wales that has lost its industrial heart and is unconvinced by talk of its timeless, mystical soul? Let the new assembly and the “team of all the talents” embrace that Wales. In the name of Glyndwr – and Gareth Edwards.
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