Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 22

Dim ond Cymraeg! – Nothing but Welsh! That’s what Iori had said when he and Lynn left me at Rosemary’s house on the suburban outskirts of Oslo a few days ago. Rosemary was back from Denmark with lots of booze and new suede pumps. Her middle daughter, Lisa, had just auditioned for Holiday on Ice and was waiting to hear if she’d been hired. Since then, Lisa’s fate has yet to be resolved and her mother and I have hardly spoken a word of Welsh.

Rosemary is the most enigmatic woman I’ve ever met who perpetually wears pearls. Lynn was right, she does have music in her voice – her words peal like a clear bell choir up and down the scales of a Welsh accent as thick as his – though until now I’ve heard her words ring almost exclusively in English. What I’ve heard mostly is ‘PAM-eL-A, where is your glass?’ Today she and I have downed enough wine to fill a large birdbath. Miraculously, it seems to have no effect on her. She remains the scrubbed, buffed, pink toe-and-fingernail-polished image of a head-turning widow in her mid forties. Her bright red cheeks and tanned skin damn well glow with good health. Her hair at any given hour can only be described as ‘coiffed’. Only Rosemary’s laugh, a raucous, high-speed blowout straight from Tregaron, her home town in mid Wales, gives a little tickle to the outer edges of propriety. It’s her laugh that makes me inclined to believe the story of Rosemary being dragged out of the Lampeter Post Office in the sixties, following a Cymdeithas yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) sit-in protesting the absence of bilingual signage (now standard procedure).

In Tregaron she’s known as ‘Rosemary BBC’. Tregaron is a grey place not far from Lampeter, on the edge of a great bog. On our first evening together we traded stories about the Talbot Hotel in the centre of town: she didn’t know there’s a circus elephant buried out back, and I didn’t know it’s haunted by the ghost of Elsa Wilde, a London ballerina who married the publican, tried too hard to stay young, and died pining for the great world she once knew. I hope Rosemary doesn’t have plans to move back home. The townspeople listen when she gives reports from Oslo on Radio Cymru, even though they have trouble understanding her.

‘I once met a Tregaron woman at the Lampeter Eisteddfod,’ she told me. ‘We used to call her the chicken lady. And she came right up, wagged her finger under my nose and said sternly’ (Rosemary drops into a parody of her own accent), ‘“Now you speak so we can all understand you, you hear?”’

Even Rosemary’s mother can’t make her out. After her latest broadcast, in which she vehemently defended the notion of homosexual marriages, her mother called up and said, ‘Well, I couldn’t understand what you said, but I know you were talking dirty.’

Herein lies the problem – well, one of the problems – of contemporary Welsh. Because she went to university, Rosemary, like the nation’s newscasters, speaks what people in Tregaron call ‘posh Welsh’, a politically correct strand of the language stripped of its sloppy Anglicisms. It’s the difference between computer (pronounced ‘com-PU-tearrr’), and cyfrifiadur, a synthetic Welsh word for the same thing. This rift is a source of no small inferiority complex among the hundreds of thousands of people who speak what’s derisively called ‘Kitchen Welsh’, or the even more adulterated ‘Wenglish’. I have acquaintances in Lampeter who won’t talk to me for fear of corrupting the ‘correct’ Welsh I’m learning in books. To me, an American of dubious linguistic breeding, this is ridiculous, but then I also think the French make too much of a fuss. Many in Tregaron consider Rosemary a traitor.