While the rest of the country is apparently melting under 30C plus temperatures we’re sitting under thick Atlantic clouds and sea mist for most of each day. It seems to brighten up for a couple of hours in the afternoon – so poor sunbathing weather but excellent for walking and mooching around looking at plants. We’re a mile or so away from the nearest village and eight miles from a very good supermarket in Nefyn which deserves an award for its community spirit. They cook a daily hot lunch, and every day customers queue for a decent takeaway meal at a very reasonable price. They also support local businesses – farms and dairies and (in this last bastion of the Welsh language) show no signs of tourist fatigue. They’re also very adept at recognizing us and speaking English before we’ve even spoken. Must be something about the way we dress! I’ve yet to say ‘thank you’ in Welsh (‘diolch’) for fear of provoking a conversation. Far from the stereotypical view of the Welsh we’ve always found people extremely friendly and helpful. What still remains a challenge is the long history of asset stripping by the English (think coal, slate, minerals and especially water) and the scandal of second homes. A couple of years ago I had a long chat with a local farmer’s wife and she quizzed me quite fiercely. We parted on friendly terms after she asked me “but if you lived here would you learn to speak Welsh?” and I answered “In a breath!” – and it’s true. As my old Greek tutor, Gerry Angel once said – “there are only two languages worth learning, Greek and Welsh” – but I should add that he was an ardent Welshman. I had to learn to pronounce Welsh place names when I was running a writers’ group in South Wales and needed to travel everywhere by bus. Welsh has the great advantage of having phonetic spelling so once you’ve learned a few basic rules about sounds and stresses, you can find your way to Ystradgynlais without provoking amusement among the other passengers.
The Lleyn peninsula, the thin strip of land that leads west from Snowdonia into the Irish Sea, is – if you’re a poetry reader – RS Thomas country. He was vicar of Aberdaron for many years and became a campaigning Welsh speaker even though he only learned the language as a young man. Like many reformed smokers and drinkers he out-did most people in the ferocity of his new attachment to Welsh and (according to the excellent biography “The man who went into the West” by Byron Rogers) even berated the local butcher for labelling his meat in English. I met RS once at a reading and he was charming, although his bone-dry sense of humour could be misleading to anyone unable to tune in to it. I was far too awestruck to say anything sensible to him but I’m still in love with his work which is all in English because he never felt confident enough of his grasp of the nuances of the Welsh language to write poetry in it – the complete opposite of Samuel Beckett who wrote in French after 1945 because (he said) it allowed him to write without style.
Elsi, Thomas’s wife and a fine artist in her own right, is buried above Aberdaron in the bleak churchyard of St Maelrhys Church, Port Ysgo, with their son Gwydion; near to the grave of Jim Cotter who was also Vicar of Aberdaron and a pioneer of modern liturgy as well as being a significant campaigner for gay rights in the church. I knew Jim quite well from some of the retreats he led; a delightful man. Yesterday while out walking near Rhiw we met a couple whose next-door neighbour RS had visited regularly. Apparently he would often bring a piece of cake in his pocket when visiting. Local opinion about him was always divided. Some thought him a saint and others thought he was “a miserable old bugger”. His bishop and the church in Wales hierarchy had no grasp of his gift so they hated each other cordially and refused to let him continue to live in his house when he retired. The house now appears to be empty and there’s a hole in the roof (reported by Madame as we drove past) , so it seems the churches’ incapacity to cope with gifted and creative clergy is undiminished.
Elsi and RS Thomas were great friends with the Keating sisters who owned the estate of Plas yn Rhiw. They too lived pretty austere lives in their house (now owned by the National Trust) and when we visited it in 2019 I was very moved by finding, in their kitchen, a very similar paraffin stove to the one my grandmother had in her cottage in the Chilterns. The Keatings had Plas yn Rhiw extended and some of the furnishings including a fine staircase were salvaged by Williams Clough Ellis who also designed an extra floor for them whilst not working on the italianate village of Portmeirion.
So to cut a very long story short, we’re moving later this week to stay for a few days in a rather inaccessible and tiny cottage on the National Trust estate, overlooking Porth Neigwl bay within easy walking distance of Plas yn Rhiw, The Thomas’s retirement home – Sarn cottage, and St Maelrhys Church all joined by footpaths across the abandoned manganese mines I mentioned a couple of days ago. How much good fortune is proper in such a short visit. Thomas’s poems speak to me and often kept a few embers of faith smouldering in me when I read them during hard times in the past, because unlike the prophets of Baal and all their certainties he practiced doubt, uncertainty and steadfastness in the face of an overwhelming emptiness. It has a posh theological name – kenosis – but I prefer Wittgenstein, “whereof one one cannot speak thereof must remain silent” or perhaps the Taoist saying – “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao”.
