Weep for Wales

I remember Wales: the early start from a sleeping Liverpool, the changes of trains and freezing waiting-rooms at polysyllabic stations, the endless trek across the permanent Sunday that was Anglesey in the 1950s. None of this was supposed to be fun. There were family connections stretching back over 100 years to a fiercely biblical great-grandfather, who had walked from Somerset to Amlwch for a job on the new railway. The austerity of the grey, disapproving little town must have suited; he married a Welsh monoglot, ‘went chapel’, and put down a taproot. It wasn’t until my father escaped into schoolmastering and England that a chink of light was let in. Grinding our slow way back in those pre-Beeching days was a kind of penance to the maiden aunt who had stayed behind to nurse my spectacularly incontinent grandfather. Amlwch was full of women like Olwen; black-garbed skivvies oppressed by the dead hand of a nonconformist patriarchy, they stare out from group photographs of annual outings to Chester or Llandudno, apologetic and prematurely decayed.

The long, duty days behind the net curtains of Bethesda Street were dominated by the list of prohibited things: making any sort of noise, being seen in the garden on Sundays, talking to the local children – who my mother suspected might be common or, which was worse, might try to speak to me in Welsh. A high spot was the walk to the shops, and the trick here was to catch them open. Like some Latin American pueblo beset by holy days, Amlwch’s retailers much preferred to stay shut but found Saturday mornings difficult to ignore. My mother felt herself plagued by the elderly ladies who would stop us on our brief journey and, insisting on some ancestral relationship (which, much to her mortification, seemed to involve calling me ‘bach’ quite a lot), would press half-crowns on me and invitations to tea on my poor mother.