Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 17

‘So, when shall we begin?’

‘Now?’

‘Now?’ My voice is regrettably on the mend.

‘Pam lai,’ Tim says. Why not.

He’s just locked up the post office and I’ve delayed the inevitable – our all-Welsh lunch – as far as the King’s Head Tavern. We remain in public long enough to order a pint of bitter and a curry for me, and a ham steak for Tim, then retire to the large dining room at the back of the pub. It’s entirely empty but for an encampment of about fifty tables draped in unaccountably elegant pink cloths. We sit at one, I take a shaky breath – and plunge.

For an hour I feel like I’m holding a live wire between my teeth. Sometimes it slips and jabs my tongue and I spray Tim with chwech, the Welsh word for ‘six’; sometimes, when I haven’t understood what he’s just repeated for the third time, very slowly, I feel the heat wave of an electrocution coming on; and once in a while, for a moment or two, that live wire picks up an actual impulse from my brain and I connect and Tim nods and understands and we’re speaking to each other. Even better, he insists on paying for lunch.

At two o’clock I look down to discover someone has miraculously eaten my chicken curry. The beer disappeared long ago. I can’t remember any of it. I can’t even remember what we’ve said, but whatever it was it was in Welsh. When language evolves into something other than commonplace communication – a badge of identity in foreign lands or, in this case, a gift between friends – the urgency of knowing and making known dissipates and the words slow to a speed at which a learner can catch them. I’ve wagered a book contract on the hope that it’s easier to wield a symbol in Singapore and a gift in an empty back room than a verb in a crowded shop out in the still-unaccustomed sunshine on the High Street. So far, so good. My hour with Tim, I realize, belongs more to the Trip than it does to any of the trinity of Lampeters I’ve known over the past twelve years. It’s time to go.