Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees Page A

out on the town after a rummage in the dressing-up box. Every time I think I’ve got the system locked down, another rule will pop up like a fresh carbuncle. Fired by enthusiasm to approach the problem from several angles rather than learn Welsh entirely through the medium of Matthew’s dysfunctional experiences in Lampeter, I invest in a book of Welsh grammar. The first chapter doesn’t mince its words. No one would ever guess how many different triggers there are for the soft mutation in the Welsh language. It comes to an inconceivable tally. Thirty-one! A soft mutation can be caused in THIRTY-ONE different and separate ways. If they told you that before you started, you wouldn’t start. The book even talks of how certain words ‘suffer a mutation’. I know
exactly
how they feel.
    â€˜The real traveller in Wales must explore the coal valleys which stretch northward like the fingers of a hand, of which Cardiff is the palm.’ Long before Bill Bryson, there was H. V. Morton. The first of the mass-appeal travel writers, the puppyish Morton leapt aboard his open-top, two-seat Bullnose Morris in 1926 to go
In Search of England
and came back with a picture of a pleasingarcadia that, even then, didn’t quite exist. Books on Scotland and Ireland promptly followed, both based like their predecessor on articles for Lord Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
.
    Morton had defected to the
Daily Herald
by the time
In Search of Wales
was published in 1932. It managed more than any other travel book on Wales to capture the binary nature of the country. Remote and rustic North Wales mesmerised Morton with its antiquity and foreignness. Excluded from all conversation only a few miles from the border, he began to have paranoid hallucinations in the classic English manner: ‘It seemed to me that they were hatching another Glendower rebellion,’ he said, as he looked at Welshmen chattering incomprehensibly all around him. ‘A Roman might have felt like this in a British village.’
    But Wales worked away at him. By the time he had driven to the end of the Lln peninsula and back he had seen and heard enough to be lecturing a Welshman in an inn in Llanberis about the shameful way the English misunderstood the Welsh. ‘Too many people come to Wales, look at it and go home without the slightest idea that they have encountered an alien culture.’
    The first two-thirds of
In Search of Wales
concerns itself with the north. Morton kept his gaze fixed on the Wales of old, of Merlin and Arthur, the Romans, of Llewelyn the Last’s doomed resistance to Edward I, Owain Glyndr’s heroic campaign against Henry IV (‘I will stick to Shakespeare’s spelling,’ he said). It was only halfway through the tenth of twelve chapters that he entered what he called ‘Black Wales’. Suddenly the observational journalist in Morton had a more urgent sort of spectacle dancing in front of his eyes. He visited a steel works in Llanelli, a copper works in Swansea, an oil refinery at Llandarcy, a zinc works in Llansamlet, an iron forge in Pontypridd. He also spent a blustery day on the Gower with female cockle-pickers on donkeys who hid their faces from the camera forfear of incurring bad luck. (Never mind that rather worse luck was invited by Morton himself when he and a photographer from the
Herald
, using ‘a new safe-light apparatus’, took the first ever flashlight picture in the potentially explosive methane-rich environment of a coal mine.)
    Morton’s Welsh journey concluded in the Rhondda. His compassionate portrait of dignity wrestling with poverty reads like the complex, layered climax to an epic symphony. In Heartbreak Valley, as it was known in the Great Depression, Morton found the river running black, chimneys no longer belching smoke, jobless men loitering on street corners and stoical women feeding and clothing ‘insanely large families’. But when he spoke to the