The Kingdom by the Sea

  Llanelli had looked promising on the map. It was in the southwest corner of Dyffed, on the estuary of the Loughor River. I walked from the station to the docks. The town was musty-smelling and dull and made of decayed bricks. My map had misled me. I wanted to leave, but first I wanted to buy a guidebook to Wales in order to avoid such mistakes in the future.

  I passed a store with textbooks in the window. Dead flies lay on their sides on the book covers; they had not been swatted, but had simply starved; they seemed asleep. There were shelves in this bookstore, but not many books. There was no salesperson. A husky voice came from behind a beaded curtain.

  "In here."

  I went in. A man was whispering into a telephone. He paid no attention to me. There were plenty of books in here. On the covers were pictures of naked people. The room smelled of cheap paper and ink. The magazines were in cellophane wrappers. They showed breasts and rubber underwear, and there were children on some of them—the titles suggested that the naked tots were violated inside. No guidebooks here, but as this pornography shop was Welsh, the door had a bell that went bing-bong! in a cheery way as I left.

  Welsh politeness was soft-hearted and smiling. Even Llanelli's Skinheads were well behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets and bleached hair and earrings or green hair and T-shirts saying Anarchy! —even they seemed sweet-natured. And how amazing that the millions of Welsh, who shared about a dozen surnames, were the opposite of anonymous. They were conspicuous individuals and at a personal level tried hard to please. "You're a gentleman!" one man would cry to another, greeting him on the street.

  At Jenkins the Bakers ("Every bite—pure delight") I saw a strawberry tart with clotted cream on top. Were they fresh strawberries?

  "Oh, yes, fresh this morning," Mrs. Jenkins said.

  I asked for one.

  "But they're thirty pence, darling," Mrs. Jenkins said, warning me and not moving. She expected me to tell her to forget it. She was on my side in the most humane way, and gave me a commiserating smile, as if to say, It's a shocking amount of money for a strawberry tart!

  When I bought two, she seemed surprised. It must have been my knapsack and my vagabond demeanor. I went around the corner and stuffed them into my mouth.

  "Good morning—I mean, good evening!" Mr. Maddocks the stationmaster said at Llanelli Station. "I knew I'd get it right in the end. It's patience you want!"

  The rest of the people on the platform were speaking Welsh, but on seeing the train draw in—perhaps it was the excitement—they lapsed into English.

  This was the 16:28 to Tenby. We slid out of Llanelli, past the tiny cottages and the brick houses. The average price of these houses was £15,000 and quite a few cost less than £10,000. I got this information from the Llanelli Star. On another page some automobiles were being advertised for £7000.

  Across the yellow-brown puddles of the Llanrhidian Sands was the lovely Gower Peninsula. We passed Burry Port and Kidwelly—there were rolling hills on one side and the muddy foreshore of the Gwendraeth estuary on the other. Then up the Tywi River to Carmarthen, which had a mundane grandeur—it needed either more ruins or fewer. After Carmarthen, the real countryside began—the first I had seen in South Wales since crossing the Severn. The hills were green and lumpish and the valleys tangled with short leafy trees, some standing as hedges and boundaries and others in jumbled woods. I always expected to see small ponies in this landscape; they would have suited it. The land pattern and the foliage was new to me. I liked its wildness—it looked wild from neglect, like a place that had once been neat but was now overgrown. It had an untrimmed charm—the grass too long, the boughs drooping, like the shaggy imagery in a Dylan Thomas poem. Thomas had lived four miles south of this railway line, at Laugharne on the River Taf.

  Narberth was a small white iron-girt station in a green glade of whirling gnats, a beautiful place for the train to stop in the late-afternoon sun, and I felt a bit sad when we pulled out; and then sunset at Saundersfoot—I kept saying that phrase to myself—and Tenby, a town on a high cliff with more cliffs around it and boulder islands in its bay. It looked perfect. It was the loveliest town I had seen so far. I found a boardinghouse with a view of the harbor and made no plans to leave.

  ***

  The elegant houses of Tenby standing tall on the cliff reminded me of beautifully bound books on a high shelf—their bow windows had the curvature of book spines. The town was elevated on a promontory, so the sea on three sides gave its light a penetrating purity that reached the market square and fortified the air with the tang of ocean-washed rocks. It was odd that a place so pretty should also be so restful, and yet that was the case. But Tenby was more than pretty. It was so picturesque, it looked like a watercolor of itself.

  It had not been preserved by the fastidious tyrants who so often took over British villages—the new class who moved in and gutted the houses, and then, after restoring the thatched roofs and mullioned windows, hid a chromium kitchen in the inglenook, which ran on microchips. Such people could make a place so picturesque that it was uninhabitable. Tenby had been maintained, and it had mellowed; it was still sturdy, and I was glad I had found it. But it was the sort of place that denied a sense of triumph to the person who secretly felt he had discovered it—because its gracefulness was well known; it had been painted and praised; it was old even in Tudor times; and it had produced Augustus John (who wrote about Tenby in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro), as well as the inventor of the equal sign (=) in mathematics, Robert Recorde. But, then, there were no secret places in Britain that I had seen; there were only forgotten places, and places that were being buried or changed by our harsh century.

  Tenby had been spared, and it was the more pleasing for being rather quiet and empty. I walked around dreamily. For the first time since I had set out on this trip I felt that a watering place was fulfilling its purpose—calming me, soothing me, making me want to snore over a book on a veranda with a sea view.

  "This place is a madhouse in the summer," a publican named Nuttgens told me. "It's chock-a-block. Pavements full of tourists, roads full of cars. You can't move! And there's usually a tail-back all the way to Saundersfoot—"

  It was hard to tell whether he was boasting or complaining, but in any case I did not want to imagine Tenby being trampled. I liked to think of it always like this, quietly lived in, with bookshelf terraces of houses and twisty streets and that marvelous gauzy light.

  Nuttgens said, "Every business here is owned by an Englishman." He himself was from Birmingham. "And all the employees are Welsh."

  I asked him why this was so.

  He tapped the side of his nose with his finger, suggesting that the English were cleverer.

  Other English people in Tenby also told me this, but it was not so. My landlady was Welsh, the pub across the street was owned by a Welshman, and there were Welsh names everywhere on shop signs. And yet it was true that part of Tenby's appeal was that its English elegance had been softened by Welsh charm, and it had the faintly asymmetrical look one often sees in the most dignified former colonies.

  ***

  There was a coastal path that went from Tenby to St. Dogmaels. a hundred and seventy miles, around the shore of Pembrokeshire. I walked the few miles to Old Castle Head—the rocks at the shore had the look of lions' paws—and because I hated retracing my steps, I walked on to the nearest railway station and took the branch line to Pembroke Dock. This station was Manorbier Newton. We passed Hodgeston ("The church chancel contains a double piscina and mutilated triple sedilia"), and then strange events overtook the train. Or perhaps not strange but merely old-fashioned.

  The train came to a sign at a road, saying, STOP: Open Crossing Gates Before Proceeding, and it stopped. The uniformed man who was both guard and ticket collector got out and swung the gates open wide enough so that they blocked the little motor road and unblocked the railway tracks. Then the train shuddered and the birds sang and the train moved across the road. The guard closed
the gates, latched them, boarded the train, and we resumed our journey through meadows and farms and low woods.

  There was another sign: STOP: Whistle Before Proceeding. The train obeyed—its whistle was a two-note trumpet blast—and we crossed the road. It was a hot afternoon, and the country roads smelled of warm tar and looked like dusty licorice; and we stopped at short platforms, halts in the middle of farms, and at Lamphey in a pasture, the cow parsley lazily brushing the sides of the train.

  When most of the rural branch lines were closed in 1964, this line was spared, and it continued to be spared because it carried people to the ferry that traveled from Pembroke to Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, or "Error," as some Welshmen called it.

  We pulled quietly into Pembroke. There were only seven of us on the train; it was not a ferry day. Pembroke seemed a very ordinary town, but it had a grand castle. Across the harbor was Milford Haven ("described by Lord Nelson as the best natural harbor in the world"), which was densely and blackly industrial, with its tanks and refineries and its oil-cracking plant. Why were the most prosperous places the ugliest?

  I asked Mr. Peevey the stationmaster the way to Haverfordwest. It seemed there was no train that day, but there was a bus. As he explained where the bus stop was, his voice grew faint, and then he said, "Listen. What's that?"

  He squinted across the railway platform and turned his head, inclining his ears and spreading out his fingers, listening in a tense sort of way.

  "Yes," Mr. Peevey said after a moment. "Look."

  I did not see anything. I had not heard anything. Mr. Peevey was smiling, and he looked at his watch—a stationmaster's instinctive reflex, I supposed. He nodded at the air.

  Then I saw the specks, thousands of them, just above the ground, like a veil descending through the air. It made me slightly dizzy, their motion, their numbers—it was like seeing spots.

  "Bugs," I said.

  "Bees," Mr. Peevey said. "They're swarming."

  They were darkly gathering, a large fuzzy gust of them approaching the platform.

  Mr. Peevey was not worried. "My grandfather kept bees," he said calmly. "He could stir them around and get the honey and what-not. He never got stung. You get immune to bee stings. Most bee-keepers are immune."

  "I suppose they could be dangerous?" I indicated the swarm.

  "Kill you," Mr. Peevey said. "That's how dangerous."

  He smiled again, marveling—as people do—at murderous Nature.

  "If you start flaking around, look you, that lot will bite you." He giggled a little, in amazement rather than malice. "You could be stung to death!"

  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 ki
nd 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.