A Fresh Start

Gosh! Guest posting..! This feels like I’m poking around in someone else’s house when they’re away. Writing stuff in someone else’s control panel. (Em, why is the writing box so WEE?! And why do the images not float left properly like they do on my site?!)

Heh. I can say whatever I want here. Oh, the power! Oh the potential!

But no. I’m going to behave myself, and talk about Wales. Seeing as Em’s Welsh (yes, really!) and I’m half-Welsh, I think I’ll tell you folks what Wales means to me.

One of the things I absolutely love about Wales (which people like Em probably don’t even notice) is the bi-lingual stuff. Welsh is everywhere. In Cardiff you can’t get away from it, and although I see it more in writing than I actually hear it, there’s a real sense of difference there. Foreignness, almost. All the road signs are in Welsh, and what’s more, even the shops have Welsh first, English second. This is great. This is a country whose language was endangered but is now reviving.

Go into Marks & Spencers. It’s just so, so peculiar seeing all their signs written in two languages. If you’re abroad “proper” and go into shops, everything’s in the indigenous language only, not English, but in Wales we have both. It appears as if priority is given to Welsh, as that’s the one that usually appears first, and fair enough - why not? It’s their country; their language. Okay, partly my country, my language, but I don’t feel as much claim to it as I’d like. I’m envious that Welsh has equal status to English in Wales, yet Gaelic doesn’t have equal status in Scotland.

I love the sound of Welsh. I could sit and listen to it all day and all night, not understanding a word of it but not caring. I absolutely love it. I learnt to count to ten in Welsh which wasn’t too problematic as a lot of the sounds are very similar to Gaelic, which is what I’m used to. Even the words for 1, 2, and 3 are practically the same. I can say basic stuff likes, “cheers”, “good morning”, “good night”, “thank you” and if I ever moved to Wales, the first thing I’d do is sign up for a course in Welsh and get stuck right in. English folks who can’t pronounce the word “loch” properly would have a hell of a job with both Welsh and Gaelic. But ohhhhh, I love hearing Welsh spoken. Best wait I’ve ever had at a train station was in Cardiff as all the announcements are in Welsh as well as English - “next train to Swansea is due to arrive at platform 4″ doesn’t sound half so enticing in English.

Shame, then, that Welsh hasn’t been spoken in my father’s part of the country for a long, long time. “Little England”, Pembrokeshire is called, and even though the signs are bi-lingual, the accents are Welsh, the names are Welsh, there’s not much of the language spoken there at all. You don’t tend to hear it on the streets as you do elsewhere, and certainly those of my father’s family who are still there don’t speak it.

Pembroke Dock, where my father’s family is from, is a funny place. Very industrial, and not really that bonny to tell the truth. The place has been a royal dockyard since the end of the 1700s, and naval warships were built there between 1816 and 1926. Though the people down there seem really friendly and nice, it’s definitely not the most beautiful place in Britain.

West Pennar power station blights the landscape, and at night you’d think you’d think it was the set of a science fiction film. Eerie, but I’ve grown rather attached to it in a strange sort of way. It’s a constant which seems to have a life entirely of its own.

As an outsider (sort of) to Wales, I’d say Pembrokeshire seems to have an air of remoteness from the hub of the country. Pembrokeshire; Cardiff. Like Shetland and Edinburgh, almost. Leagues apart in atmosphere and distance. Perhaps it’s because it’s over three hours on two trains away from the capital, Cardiff? Or perhaps it’s because it’s at the very end of the train line, far in the west? To me, Cardiff feels much more aligned with England and I just don’t get that feeling at all down in Pembrokeshire. I much prefer it there to Cardiff (sorry Em!) - I like that more remote feeling.

There are two streets high on a hill above Pembroke Dock which have a lot of ghosts of the past for me. Every time we visit and stay with our family there, my father relates stories of who lived in which house. “Auntie Annie and Uncle Albert were in number 3, Winnie was at number 5, then my mother and father were at number 8 …” it goes on. And many more. Trouble is, I never knew any of these people, and although I see their houses now, years down the line, I have difficulty in putting the pieces together. My mother’s side of the family is easy: my mother’s brother has traced our family tree in the Western Isles and Wester Ross back for about five centuries, and I knew the generation two above me. I spent a lot of time over the years in that part of the country and feel like I belong.

Not so Wales. I only met my father’s father a few times, and he died when I was about 6 or 7. My father’s mother died the Christmas before I was born. We didn’t visit until after I had left home, as we spent all the holidays with my mother’s family. So the Wales connection was not so much of a connection but almost a myth. Despite me having a Welsh surname, and my brother and father having Welsh first names, Wales always seemed remote to me. I don’t think I ever went there till I was about 20, and when I eventually got there, I spent the whole time searching for some feeling of connection and not finding it.

What makes you feel a strong attachment to a particular area or country? For me it’s my family connections to a place through the ages. I go up to the Isle of Lewis and feel a hand snaking out of the past and landing on my shoulder. A chain of vague, half-seen people stands behind me with arms linked stretching back so far behind me that they disappear into infinity. I’m the solid living entity, but this incorporeal chain of ancestors anchors me and no matter where I go, it’ll always be attached to me somehow. And I like that.

Since my first visit all that time ago, I’ve been to Pembroke Dock a fair few times, staying with my father’s family, and the place is starting to feel a wee bit more “mine”. We walk down to the beach and my father tells me stories of when he tried to swim to the other side of the bay when he was a boy, and I can see these Welsh ancestors I never knew standing out in the street talking to each other, having bonfires on the beach, throwing stones in the water just like I am now. The pieces are starting to come together and even though I feel no less Scottish, I’m starting to feel I’m that little bit more Welsh now.

Driving down from Edinburgh and crossing the border into England feels like I’m abroad, in a strange land, and then when we cross into Wales it’s not exactly like coming home, but almost.