The
Welsh were invented by an ancestor of mine, a Pictish
chieftain
called Cunnedda. Nothing very grand about that.
He
is only an ancestor by marriage and I share him with most North
Walians because Wales is not so much a country as a family. If they
took the trouble most Welsh people could claim similar nobility.
It
is said of the Welsh that anyone who can take his
ancestry
back to the sixteenth century can prove a personal
flow
of princely blood, so avid were our national forebears in matters of
descent.
In
Anglesey I had three neighbours. One, my landlord the Marquess of
Anglesey ,claimed King Lear as an ancestor; the vicar's wife laid
claim to Adam's son Seth - a less modest woman would have claimed
Adam; whilst Sir Kyffin Williams, the painter, carried the blood of
every Welsh prince you could shake a stick at.
What
is more, all of us could all show you family trees to prove it. My
own begins triumphantly with a sister of the Virgin Mary. Had there
been a Booker Prize for Fiction in the Middle Ages it would certainly
have been won by the genealogists.
The
sad truth is that these ancient links are not my blood
kin.
I am a professional alien. I shuffle through life with
the
yellow patch of the stateless trusty sewn on my soul's
tunic.
My name is pure Viking and my first recorded blood ancestor was
brought from Normandy by Edward the Confessor to build castles on the
Welsh border. His name was Ralph the Knight. When it became
fashionable among the Norman men about town to have surnames, more
often than not associated with their properties, he chose the name of
a field at Dewchurch (then in Wales and called Dewichurch). The field
was called Skudmer. No linguist, he did not know it meant Shitty Bog. .
Since
then, more or less equal portions of Scots, English and Welsh have
gone into mixing the substantial soup which is me. The fairies at my
christening wore tall Welsh hats, tartan shawls and Lancashire clogs.
I can always feel this mixed ancestry jostling me. Pushing me into
dimly remembered loyalties; making me sing words I do not know to
tunes I only remember by the curling of my toes.
Wherever
I go I am a stranger. It is the proper condition of a writer, of
course, but the fact remains I can call no country home; no patron
saint mine. Living in my body is like driving a vehicle with three
quarrelsome passengers, each of whom wants a different programme on
the radio.
I
am not Welsh by accident of birth but by choice. I am a volunteer. I
chose to be Welsh because I detected in the Welsh those human
qualities which I believe are important. They are: a dizzy
infatuation with life and with words; exuberance; an ability to be
dazzlingly bright and desperately dull, sometimes within the same
hour; wit and the generosity of a drunken sailor with eight arms,
full pockets and only fifteen minutes left of his shore leave.
Add
to that a strong, sometimes crippling, sense of family. a respect for
scholarship; but above all an indefinable quality which I can only
describe as a sense of warm embrace. Going to Wales fifty years ago
was like slipping into a pair of old slippers after a long day
wearing tight shoes.
I
do not think it an accident that so many Italians settled in Wales
which Rene Cutforth called the Mediterranean in the rain. I believe
this happy, talented, tempestuous race settled here because they
found total compatibility.
I
suspect this description of the Welsh might come as a surprise to readers on the other side of Offa's Dyke. The caricature of the
Welshman printed on many Saxon minds is of a narrow faced, foxy
hypocrite, dressed in a suit made from the covers of old prayer
books, leaping from cottage to cottage, flaming torch in hand. Or
coming up from the netherworld in a cage after a pit disaster singing
Cwm Rhondda.
Useless
to explain that in Wales hypocrisy is an art form, lovingly
practised, and you get points for it on a sliding scale.
But
it is not practised by every Welshman. Nor is every Welshman steeped
in the Old Testament and lechery.
Another
art form, which I suspect has its roots in the tribal past, is the
ability to hate. Not just the English who are casually cast as the
old enemy. The truth is that when Edward I marched into North Wales
looting and slaying, the Englishmen in his army were outnumbered by
South Walians three to one. North against South.
I
know an editor of a South Wales newspaper who refuses to employ
anyone from the North.
