upon the Welsh air where the tang of the sea persisted in mingling with the reek of the smoke. Swansea might have been raped by the industrial revolution but she had survived with her vitality, if not her beauty, intact.
“I feel such a foreigner in England sometimes,” said my brother John, gazing out of the window at our native land. “I feel so torn between one culture and another.”
“Well, stitch yourself together again because here comes the station.” I always felt John exaggerated the conundrum of belonging to two countries. Wales was home but England was the center of the world and if one wanted to get on in life one moved freely between the two without making a fuss.
To our surprise and pleasure we found that my father had dispensed with the services of his coachman and had motored himself to Swansea to bid us welcome.
“It’s not often you come home nowadays, Robert,” he said as we shook hands, “so I felt this was a special occasion.” Scrupulously fair to John he then added: “And you deserve a royal welcome too after three such successful years up at Oxford!” I might be my father’s favorite, but my father was always most conscientious about not neglecting his other children.
We retired to my father’s motorcar which, though new, looked elderly because it was covered with white dust from the Gower lanes. My father loved his motorcar with a passion which John shared. The two of them spent much time discussing the merits of this new soulless brute, which was called a Talbot, while I yawned and thought what a bore the subject of mechanics was. A passion for horses I can understand; a horse is an aesthetically pleasing animal with an honorable history of service to mankind, but a passion for a few scraps of metal slapped on four wheels seems to me not only irrational but also indicative of an unintellectual, possibly even of a working-class, cast of mind.
With my father at the wheel we were soon careering through central Swansea. We roared past the ruined Norman castle, blazed past Ben Evans, the largest store, and swept by the grandest hotel, the Metropole. Other motors hooted in friendly admiration, the carriages and carts jostled to escape and the pedestrians dived for cover. While my father and John laughed, I amused myself by planning how I would defend my father against a charge of manslaughter by motor but presently I was diverted as we ascended the hill out of the city and our pace became funereal. John offered to push but my father said that would be an admission of defeat. We toiled on.
With the summit of the hill behind us we soon found ourselves on the outskirts of the city, and then with that suddenness which always took my breath away we entered a different world. A wild moorland wilderness stretched before us. Mysterious hills shimmered in the distance. We had crossed the threshold into Gower.
“Swansea’s secret—the Gower Peninsula!” said my father in Welsh with a smile, and John, exhibiting somewhat showily his parrotlike trick of bilingualism, made a swift response which I failed to comprehend.
We drove on into an England beyond Wales, into a hidden land, pastoral and idyllic, which basked innocently in the summer sun. Beyond the moorland stretch which bounded the outskirts of Swansea, fields drowsed between English hedgerows and little lanes twisted through the countryside to villages which looked as if they had been transplanted from far beyond the Welsh border. We might have been a thousand miles now from teeming Swansea and a thousand years from that industrial wasteland on the bay.
“How peaceful it looks!” said John to me, but as soon as he said that I thought of Gower’s lawless past. This was a land where the King’s writ had so often failed to run, a land soaked in the crimes of smuggling, wrecking and piracy, robbery, murder and rape. I have always thought it an irony that we have become so civilized that we can now regard places such as Gower as
“I feel such a foreigner in England sometimes,” said my brother John, gazing out of the window at our native land. “I feel so torn between one culture and another.”
“Well, stitch yourself together again because here comes the station.” I always felt John exaggerated the conundrum of belonging to two countries. Wales was home but England was the center of the world and if one wanted to get on in life one moved freely between the two without making a fuss.
To our surprise and pleasure we found that my father had dispensed with the services of his coachman and had motored himself to Swansea to bid us welcome.
“It’s not often you come home nowadays, Robert,” he said as we shook hands, “so I felt this was a special occasion.” Scrupulously fair to John he then added: “And you deserve a royal welcome too after three such successful years up at Oxford!” I might be my father’s favorite, but my father was always most conscientious about not neglecting his other children.
We retired to my father’s motorcar which, though new, looked elderly because it was covered with white dust from the Gower lanes. My father loved his motorcar with a passion which John shared. The two of them spent much time discussing the merits of this new soulless brute, which was called a Talbot, while I yawned and thought what a bore the subject of mechanics was. A passion for horses I can understand; a horse is an aesthetically pleasing animal with an honorable history of service to mankind, but a passion for a few scraps of metal slapped on four wheels seems to me not only irrational but also indicative of an unintellectual, possibly even of a working-class, cast of mind.
With my father at the wheel we were soon careering through central Swansea. We roared past the ruined Norman castle, blazed past Ben Evans, the largest store, and swept by the grandest hotel, the Metropole. Other motors hooted in friendly admiration, the carriages and carts jostled to escape and the pedestrians dived for cover. While my father and John laughed, I amused myself by planning how I would defend my father against a charge of manslaughter by motor but presently I was diverted as we ascended the hill out of the city and our pace became funereal. John offered to push but my father said that would be an admission of defeat. We toiled on.
With the summit of the hill behind us we soon found ourselves on the outskirts of the city, and then with that suddenness which always took my breath away we entered a different world. A wild moorland wilderness stretched before us. Mysterious hills shimmered in the distance. We had crossed the threshold into Gower.
“Swansea’s secret—the Gower Peninsula!” said my father in Welsh with a smile, and John, exhibiting somewhat showily his parrotlike trick of bilingualism, made a swift response which I failed to comprehend.
We drove on into an England beyond Wales, into a hidden land, pastoral and idyllic, which basked innocently in the summer sun. Beyond the moorland stretch which bounded the outskirts of Swansea, fields drowsed between English hedgerows and little lanes twisted through the countryside to villages which looked as if they had been transplanted from far beyond the Welsh border. We might have been a thousand miles now from teeming Swansea and a thousand years from that industrial wasteland on the bay.
“How peaceful it looks!” said John to me, but as soon as he said that I thought of Gower’s lawless past. This was a land where the King’s writ had so often failed to run, a land soaked in the crimes of smuggling, wrecking and piracy, robbery, murder and rape. I have always thought it an irony that we have become so civilized that we can now regard places such as Gower as
Similar Books
