PERSONAL COLUMN

In love with an island

EMYR HUMPHREYS

on the mainland side of the Menai suspen- sion bridge which is now the single slender carry into Anglesey, there is a bold legend which reads Mon Mam Cymru. This is our county motto and it means 'Anglesey the mother of Wales.' In any context this is a formidable responsibility. Geologically, it was first undertaken millions of years ago and we are told that because the island stood firm, mountains were born out of the dome- shaped massif which the tourist calls Snow- donia and the native, Eryri. Geography, which is juster than history, still allows us on the island the best view of those myth-mak- ing mountains.

This island on which I live was the last refuge of the Druids, that mysteri- ous mandarin priesthood that seems to have administered the lost Celtic world that stretched from the Alps to the Irish Sea. This is where the grim pursuit ended and those inhuman robots the Romans conducted their slaughter in 'silence while the female dependants of the solemn order fled shriek- ing into the dark oak forests. Today the island looks bare and small but in prehistoric times, before the Romans and the Druids, it was a wooded continent. Adventurous tribes arriving on the west coast from the Iberian peninsula or from Ireland would wander into the woods and be confronted by astonished beaker folk who had made the long journey slowly overland from the Rhine and the Lowlands. They must have stared at each other with the same unease and sus- picion which we see today when a monoglot farm labourer resentfully empties the sum- mer dustbins of a caravan occupied by a cheerful mono with a different glot who has brought his family and his outboard motor boat all the way from Walsall or St Helens.

Throughout its long history Mon (the name 'Anglesey' is inappropriate except for titles and railway timetables) has always had these two functions: a refuge and a meeti9g-place; and to be thoroughly unkind about it has regularly made a mess of both. Proudly detached from the main- land, it is exceedingly vulnerable from the sea. Oddly enough it was many centuries before this elementary strategic fact bore in upon the ox-like consciousness of the Eng- lish, Norman and Plantagenet kings. (We can't count the Vikings, bent on plunder rather than conquest.) Throughout the Middle Ages, Mon was the granary of in- dependent Wales. It had to be ravaged be- fore the princes could be brought to their knees.

Less than half a dozen miles away from me as I. write is the traditional home of the Tudor family. They served the Princes of Wales with fidelity and distinction and they were well rewarded. Somewhere above the shifting sand-dunes of Aberffraw those ancient princes held their court, and to that court the story-tellers would come from all over Wales and the borders, to reassure them that in the fullness of time they would be restored to their rightful place and the crown of Arthur would once more rule from the throne of Britain. The Tudors proved themselves the more attentive listeners. Long after their first masters had been crushed they fished successfully in troubled waters. An island like this one. exists in order to give birth to poets as well as mountains. The past, like the western sea, never stops lapping its shores, giving the most simple men illu- sions of grandeur. Man has its own annual eisteddfod held in different parts of the island every Whitsuntide. Last year it came to our parish because the date was also the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Gor- onwy Owen in faraway Virginia, and he was born here, a small man with a great talent and an unfortunate love of the bottle. In his chequered career he was an eighteenth cen- tury Dylan Thomas, as fine a letter writer as he was a poet. A handful of his bewildered American descendents were firmly initiated into the Order of Anglesey Bards by our aged archdruid who in his younger days earned his living as a gamekeeper. They were mostly natives of Mobile, Alabama and there was no means of knowing whether it was our Whitsun weather or our rituals that made them shiver. Certainly their stay was brief. They had business elsewhere. Perhaps they were wise to leave. It is difficult to live in Anglesey for long and not to risk becoming some sort of a poet.

Our poets come in all shapes and sizes. There was John Evans, for example, who cherished the strange ambition of marrying the widowed Queen Victoria. He was known as Bardd Cocos (the Cockle Poet) and chil- dren still recite his immortal lines to the lions which guard—rather ineffectively as it turns out—the Britannia Tubular Bridge.

'Four fat lions without any hair., Two over here and two over there.'

His dynastic ambitions were not as insane as all that: had not Owen Tudor of Pen- mynydd managed to marry a royal widow?

From the field above this house I can see Moelfre which was always a fishing village. Now. alas, it is more of a holiday resort: but the lifeboat is still famous for saving lives at sea. Mr Evans, the coxswain, who has two George Medals, is a typical re- presentative .of a family of remarkable sea- men. Over a century ago Charles Dickens came bustling up from London to praise the parson and the fisherfolk of Moelfre for their rescue and recovery work at the wreck of 'The Royal Charter'. And more than a century before that, Lewis Morris wrote a savage poem to denounce the wreckers of Grigyll (on the other side of the island). The three Morris brothers (from this side) remain one of the wonders of Anglesey: antiquar- ians. scientists, surveyors, botanists, poets and above all great letter-writers. Their col- lected works read as though James Boswell had written the Paston letters.

In the nineteenth century the normal island alternative to being a poet was to be a preacher. Anglesey threw up ('nurtured' per- haps would be a happier expression) so many eloquent men that it developed an oratorical style of its own (Dawn Mon). A Tory Meth- odist named John Elias took the island in hand and built or caused to be built more than a chapel a year for the rest of his work- ing life. Popularly known as Anglesey's Methodist pope, he became an outstanding figure of Welsh nonconformist life and created that mould of eloquence and admin- istrative ability that made, among many others, David Lloyd George. Curiously enough this island is also the birthplace of

the only Welshman to get anywhere near being elected Pope: Owen Lewis, bishop of Cassano and founder of the so-called Eng, lish College in Rome.

'So-called' betrays that after five years residence I have caught the prevailing island disease. It has, as far as 1 know, no Latin name: but the outstanding symptom is an insane affection for the place, which spills

over into inanimate objects and turns even a broken gate into a relic. The disease is not new. To return to the poets for a moment, among the 'Hail to thee' subjects Man ranks with Caesar, Hitler and the skylark. In its milder forms it makes otherwise harmless- looking men turn their homes into museums which they open at impossible hours to visitors who can produce fervently written testimonials to the sincerity of their interest. Roadmen (1 know at least two) write splen- did books which ostensibly are about their experiences in the Great War or working on paddle steamers on the Mississippi, but are in fact paeans of unrestrained praise to the island of their birth. Farm labourers work themselves to a shadow all their lives to be able to buy smallholdings that consist chiefly of rocks and gorse in order to feel that part of the island at least belongs to them.

This mysterious disease must account for the universal detestation of caravan sites, especially if they belong to someone else. On village street corners and at crossroads the laws of conversation have long ago decreed that contractors from Manchester (or any- where else) should not he allowed to carry off headlands and other wellknown land- marks. It has been agreed that monster cara- vans should not be allowed to sneak across the bridge at three o'clock in the morning and that all builders—spec, council or gov- ernment—should be compelled to use slate only for roofing material, and that farmers large and small should receive subsidies to enable them to double their labour force and solve the island's unemployment problem. It was the general view that pylons should he banned and all cables routed through sewers that passed unobtrusively through our net- work of marshes, Resolutions to reopen the old railway lines were passed by acclama- tion. They could be run as a tourist attract- ion, provide free transport for the islanders and relieve congestion on the roads.

Alas, democracy does not work in this old- world way. The headlands are disappearing, the pylons are multiplying almost as fast as the nasty tiled roofs and the farmers are re- duced to turning their fields into caravan sites without even being obliged to camou- flage them like wartime aerodromes.

Can you really blame us for our hostility to such things as caravan sites, speedboats, yachting clubs, racing cars, gift shops, cafe- terias. amusement arcades, car parks and massive public conveniences which have taken over every available inch of the coast- line from the shrine of St Seiriol to the shrine of St Cybi (or in signpost language, from Beaumaris to Holyhead)? What can - we do from June to September except re- treat inland to glower malevolently at the invaders enjoying themselves and helping giant organisations like Rio Tinto and Shell and the Central Electricity Board and their allies in the London government to pollute our sacred shores for ever more? Up in our cottage bedrooms and granite towers we dream of myths more potent than Branwen who taught a starling to speak : and these will enable us to put a language barrier across the bridge and buy back the soul of the island.