Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 15

Several hours later, as we’re watching Ruthless People on television, it occurs to me that I am the water maiden’s worst nightmare. I may be on her side, but I and my kind come toting verbal iron. What the folktale of Llyn y Fan Fach fails to account for is the fact that in all probability only a small group of European Celts moved into Britain around 600 BC. Despite their numbers they managed in a very short time to convert the indigenous people who didn’t hide in caves or underwater to their laws, their stories, their language. By the time the Romans arrived in the first century AD, Britons had been speaking Brythonic – the predecessor of Welsh – for time out of mind.

This story has a familiar ring to it. After twenty-four hundred years it was only a century ago, in the decade between 1870 and 1880, that more than half the people in what we now call Wales came to speak something other than a form of Welsh. This didn’t happen because the English replaced the Welsh in Wales – though since the 1960s the number of English immigrants either retiring to or ‘dropping out’ in the Welsh countryside has grown exponentially – but because their language, like that of the Celts before them, powerfully eroded its precursor.

Surely this is a case of déjà-vu, in which I and my English friends at college are cast as the New Celts. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the linguistic sea change we’re heralding is a kind of karma on a national scale, and by learning Welsh I’m throwing the universe out of sync. Maybe I’m just unrepentant about that, even though I can’t begin to say why. Maybe I’ve had too much red wine tonight after too much exercise. And yet … I have a nagging conviction that no matter how much Welsh I master, however well I learn to say ‘Llangollen’, R. S. Thomas’s poem ‘The Small Window’ is a warning written for me.

In Wales there are jewels

To gather, but with the eye

Only. A hill lights up

Suddenly; a field trembles

With colour and goes out

In its turn; in one day

You can witness the extent

Of the spectrum and grow rich

With looking. Have a care;

This wealth is for the few

And chosen. Those who crowd

A small window dirty it

With their breathing, though sublime

And inexhaustible the view.

Peanut’s owner wakes us in the middle of the night. She’s drunk a pint of gin and left her husband. Will we still be her friends, she wants to know, in the morning? I tell her we always will. As the future is a convincing tense in English, she believes me – correctly – and I go back to bed.