Wales
Mary Wakefield
FOUR years ago, in a pub in Canary Wharf, I discovered that it was OK to hate the Welsh. It was my first week at work, and I was excited to be making friends with real journalists. It wasn't as difficult as I had feared — just a matter of staring morosely into one's pint and occasionally disturbing the silence with a despairing sigh. About half an hour into this routine, the agriculture and fisheries correspondent remarked that he had been sent to cover a story in Wales. The mood changed in an instant. 'It'll be hell,' said the deputy comment editor, suddenly animated and beaming from behind his beer, 'rain-sodden. dwarfs everywhere, mining obsessively.'
'You could always treat it as a mission of mercy,' said a senior columnist, forgetting to look haunted by integrated transport policy, 'and run over a few children in Cardiff.' After ten minutes. even the glummest leader writers were eagerly detailing all the different ways in which the Welsh are grim.
It took about six months and a visit to Wales before I found an excuse to join in the fun without feeling guilty. Keen to seem spontaneous and youthful, a group of friends and I drove for four hours down the M4, across the Severn Bridge and up into the Black Mountains for an annual rave called the Dragon. It was a baffling and miserable experience. For two days and one night I squelched up and down a narrow gravel path, tripping over mongrel dogs, numbed by 1,000-decibel drum and bass, in the middle of a Forestry Commission pine plantation in the rain. It was entirely my own fault, but I blamed Wales.
The weekend before last, after three-and-ahalf happy years of unreconstructed racism, I returned for a second visit. If I was going to write about Wales, it seemed unfair, even to me, not to get a glimpse of something more of it than a few wet trees. I took a friend who knows the word for 'petrol station' in Welsh, and set off with the vague idea of seeing both picturesque landscapes and industrial areas. After four hours on the M4 from London to South Wales, we arrived at Felin Fach Griffin Inn, just west of the Black Mountains. Thank God, 1 thought, when we arrived. I need never move from here: huge leather sofas, open fires, four-poster beds, food, drink and a spaniel.
Forcing ourselves to leave the Griffin the next day, we drove away from the famous beauty spots and headed for the valleys. After 20 minutes, my friend was winning 'I spy a colliery' by 15 points to two. We stopped at Resolven in the Neath and Port Talbot district, a group of low, modern concrete houses surrounding an older village lying along the A465. On the high street, an old lady had ground to a halt walking up a hill. She stood still for as long as we watched, staring at her feet. Other hunched-over octogenarians wandered past, ignoring a vast and incongruously cheery banner advertising Holy Trinity Brompton's Alpha Courses 'for those who have questions about the meaning of life'. At the edge of the town we followed a woodland path, secretly suspecting it would lead to a cesspit. Instead, we found Afan Forest park and a deserted waterfall, 40 foot high, thundering on to the rocks and forming pools below.
Later, as we headed for Neath, I was beginning to enjoy the incongruous mix of ugliness and beauty: bleak buildings, bulky skies, and weak sunlight shining through the clouds on to dramatic countryside scarred by the coal industry. Down the road from Resolven is Neath Abbey, the remnants of a large 12th-century Cistercian community. Elegant stone columns support chunks of sculpted arches remaining from the old chapel; some cloisters are still intact, winding around squares of perfectly mown grass. There was no one in the ticket office (£1 entry fee) and no other tourists. If you could only avoid focusing too far into the distance, you'd never know that it is ringed by major thoroughfares and backs on to a complex of prefabricated industrial buildings. As we pulled out of the abbey parking lot, the only other car was a blue Ford Fiesta, in which two teenagers wearing football strip were skinning up.
Instead of leading us back on to the highway, the road out of Neath Abbey became progressively rougher and more pockmarked. The track turned into a trench, and, after a few wonky 'Keep Out' signs, it became obvious that we had inadvertently driven into the middle of a colliery. 'Sixteen points for me,' said my friend. Everything was a different and oddly beautiful shade of grey: pyramids of gravel and dusty coal heaped in corrugated sheds, bordered by what looked like tramlines on one side and, on the other, by a canal of murky water carved out of the clay. On the hills opposite, rows of squat houses ran up and down over the horizon.
On Sunday, I was all fired up for more coal-related tourism, but my friend, understandably, put her foot down. We headed north to a hill called Lord Hereford's Nob, on the border between the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains. I'm glad I didn't see the countryside properly during the Dragon festival of 1998, as it would have been impossible to sneer at it over the following years: great curved promontories covered in grass and bracken, as aweinspiring as the Lake District but without the windcheaters. As we reached the top of Hereford's Nob, there was a drubbing on the ground and a herd of rough-coated horses galloped over the horizon towards us. A minute later they were followed by five men on cross-country motorbikes.
My favourite Welsh moment came as we drove deeper into the Black Mountains, searching for a pub. After several hours we found instead a tiny wooden chapel, set back from a road, barely visible through the mist. Sitting, sheltering from the rain in the dust and dark, listening to wet sheep groaning in the mud outside, I felt again uplifted by the gloom. Later, back in England, I discovered a perfect explanation in 'The Chapel', by Wales's grumpiest former inhabitant, the Anglican minister and poet, R.S. Thomas:
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness there is a chapel, ugly, without appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by,
and the river Roes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow hut saved in a way that men are not now.
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