Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 11

‘Home’ for now means Dolwerdd, my friend Rebecca’s bungalow on a sheep farm a mile or so out of town. It’s a little cube of a house set amid a wayward grid of vivid green sheep pastures, marked off from one another by dark windbreaks and low, shrubby hedgerows. The air smells of sweet earth and sheep. A hay-swaddling machine is busy in the next field over, snatching up Swiss rolls like a diabolical gift-wrapping device and imprisoning them in black plastic.

‘Looks like you got mail.’ Marguerite gingerly scoops up several envelopes lying in the hall near the birthing box of Rebecca’s cat, Usurper, who’s just had kittens.

‘Hey, you hit the jackpot. Someone named Ursula – look, she writes in green marking pen – invites you to stay with her in Tokyo. You’d better tell her you’re travelling with a friend.’

I nod.

‘What’s this?’ She shows me a letter with a red dragon on it.

‘Cymdeithas Dewi Sant Singapura,’ I rasp, ‘the St David’s Society of Singapore.’

‘… will be delighted to meet you. And it seems that a man named Lynn is picking you up at the Oslo airport, but you’ll be staying with a woman named Rosemary, who reputedly speaks Welsh “with music in her voice”.’

This is good news, but I worry that all the letters are in English. Maybe I won’t find Welsh-speakers out there. Then I worry that I will. Then I remember my growing fears about my Welsh comprehension ability. I decide to watch S4C for a while.

S₄C is Sianel Pedwar Cymru, Channel Four Wales; it is also work. For a learner the Welsh-language television station is about the farthest thing on earth from entertainment. I start to reminisce about watching the strong-man competition back in 1992, a prime-time show in which beefy guys named Davy and Hywel would hold a row of four bricks at arm’s length for as long as they could – not much more than a minute, as I recall – before they began to shake, sweat and drop them, but Marguerite shushes me and points at my throat.

On TV a shrill children’s programme is in progress. A loudmouth, shrieking maniac of a host is tossing kids into something that looks like a vat of unformed jelly. Beneath my comprehension, I decide with relief. Alas, Heno, a news magazine which means ‘Tonight’, is not. Most of it goes over my head. It’s followed by Pobl y Cwm, which has ensnared Marguerite although she understands not a word. From seven to seven-thirty we both stare fixedly at the screen, trying to crack the code. A blonde woman and her husband (?) seem perturbed by a delivery of coal. There’s trouble brewing at the hair salon, and someone’s in a funk at the estate agent’s.

‘Are those two supposed to be engaged?’

I have no idea but I don’t want to admit it. ‘Uh huh. But these people are terrible mumblers, so I can’t be sure.’ I’m feeling very discouraged.

‘What’s with that couple and the coal? Is it some kind of conspiracy?’

‘Who knows? Maybe somebody’s buried in it. Wait! That guy just said, “Come over tomorrow around three.” I understood that!’

‘See, you’re getting it,’ she says brightly. I don’t know if I’d call one phrase in half an hour cause for celebration, but at least I go to bed with the rhythm of the language pounding in my ears, beating time to the night rain. Mae’n bwrw hen wraggedd a ffyn. My brain chugs it out in nine counts, over and over and over. It’s raining old women and sticks.