Insufficiently Welsh (7 page)

Before I left Penclawdd we called in at the Roma fish and chip shop. We Welsh, as you may have heard, are “Italians in the rain”. And the Italians are all over Wales, in unexpected places, running chip shops, making ice cream and preparing frothy coffi in countless caffis. Given that several square miles of cockle beds lay stretched out in front of the corner chippy on the other side of the sea wall, I asked if they had any cockles.

“Of course. We deep fry them in batter, if that's OK?”

“Sure.”

OK? When it came, straight out the fryer, it was cockle popcorn bliss; a tempura heaven. Great batter, sweet cockles, tiny bites. A quid paid for a huge portion.

In between gazing at the sepia photos on the wall, of big ladies in woolly dresses and head scarves leading donkeys across the marsh, most of whom turned out to be Glyn's aunties, I wandered round the chip shop offering battered cockles to the customers.

Most turned away. “Not cockles, no.”

One went as far as “Eeuurgh”.

I was disappointed. I thought I had discovered a new craze. It wasn't catching on.

We would leave all the rest to the Spanish then except, perhaps, for a very few for my rugby hero.

–
SHEEP MAY SAFELY...
–

Although Weobley Castle is called a “castle”, from a technical point of view it's a fortified manor house, and one of the best preserved in Wales. The whole place is essentially a medieval “panic room”, thanks to thick fortifying walls, turrets and sturdy gates, but quite a civilised one. “There are galleries, withdrawing rooms and ancient toilets inside,” I was told in advance, and I was looking forward to some respite from the dripping weather, except that, when I got there, I discovered that Weobley is a bit of a ruin that Owain Glynd
w
ˆ
r knocked about a bit. It was roofless.

The evening clouds had faded down the grey of the stone. A light drizzle was adding to the gloom. I pulled my coat around my neck and zipped it up tight. I wasn't there for fancy interiors. My quest was out there – on the impressive salt flats, over which Weobley had such a commanding view and over which it might have fired the odd cannon from time to time. It was dusk and the tide was coming in. It was time for a daily mass migration.

I was there to help, to safely gather in the sheep, and then maybe to eat one. There is of course a stereotype about Wales and sheep. It has to be admitted that there are three times as many sheep in Wales as people; nine million to three million. A thousand of this woolly majority were out on these flats. Salt marsh is a great inter-tidal resource. Fish breed there and wading birds nest there, but samphire, sorrel, sea lavender and thrift grow there too. Sheep that chomp on these strongly flavoured herbs of the marshes become flavoursome themselves.

But where were they exactly then in the darkening twilight? I could see nothing.

“Oh, they're off out there somewhere,” said Roland and we trudged down a muddy path to the flat lands below. He was pointing ahead to the glistening water. I could make out the odd sheep shape right out in the marshes.

“Surely it's a huge job to get them in?”

Roland was unworried. It was routine. “No, no,” he said casually. “They'll come when they see the Land Rover. They want to get to the grass, you understand.” He pointed behind me at the startlingly lurid pasture lying directly under the castle.

His son, Will, was driving away from us, very slowly out along a causeway. At the absolute extremity of the rough track, he turned his distant vehicle and then came back at a creeping pace.

The sheep were spread over three hundred acres of damp sludge and tough, juicy herbiage. Now that their secret call had come, they noisily began to clop in towards the central road. They had the distinctly uncertain and nervous manner that sheep maintain whenever they are not actively consuming. With a steady purpose and heads bowed, scattered groups were working their way from distant muddy outposts towards us.

The dogs were there mainly to hassle the strays. They ran out to the extremities. Even though the Land Rover was still way behind, we could see the outriders of the leading mob of sheep coming clearly into view, making their way down to the single gate that led to their evening safety. Except that, about fifty yards away, they halted.

“Oh, they've seen us,” said Roland. “They won't want to come through with us standing here.” But he didn't move. We watched as the sheep became increasingly fretful. His dog made a wide encirclement to encourage them a little, but that just caused some to bolt to the side: scrambling away across the hundreds of acres of salty bog and disappearing into the drizzle again.

“They don't like
that
you see,” Roland pointed at our camera team, “and the camera on legs in particular.”

I was parading in a bright red jacket too. We were placed discreetly back from the road, or so we thought, but the herd stopped. The swivel eyes swivelled again and more ran off sideways.

I might have expected Roland to become concerned, but he stood exactly where he was, calmly chatting on about sheep: how the herbs added flavour, how the speed of the tide could be very quick especially on springs, and how the lamb was very popular with French chefs. Meanwhile ever huger numbers of his nervous flock backed up at the bottle neck.

The camera crew slunk backwards into a muddy gully.

Then it happened. A couple ran for it. Two more followed but one went back. Another group chanced it. The noise of baaing and ovine groaning grew ever more insistent. The rest of the flock decided that they would risk it. They started to scissor legs and trot and baa even more loudly. A great racket of sheep-like communication went up and, like a bad encore, suddenly they were all heading for the exit.

“There you are,” said Roland matter of factly. “They will all go now.” And they did. The stragglers suddenly felt very alone and they ran to catch up. The side-wanderers thought better of their waywardness, the rampant individualists (and sheep are by no means sheep-like) suddenly fancied mass company and they all seemed desperately to need to be in the sloping pasture under the trees.

We turned to watch them. I marvelled at the huge flock crowding up the hill.

“Yes indeed,” said Roland, nodding slightly. “I think somebody must have left that lower gate open.” He nodded to himself. ‘They're not supposed to be there in the grounds of the castle, you see.”

Typically, Roland didn't seem unduly alarmed. The sheep, like the tide sluicing up Llanelli bay, came in every day. I guess they had done since long before that ancient castle had been there. They would continue to do so, as long as the taste for this special meat from Gower continued to grow. Roland left the sheep and his son to sort themselves out. He got me a leg of lamb from the freezer. I went on my way.

–
RUGBY BALL
–

And now to the great game. Ah, the crunch of shoulder blades, the scrape of the ear protector against the bare cheek, the warm embrace of Fatso on your left and Jimpson on the right as the scrum plunged together and collapsed on itself for the third time. I haven't played rugby for 48 years. I haven't been to a Black Sabbath concert either. Yet the same welling conviction that here was my heartland, my identity, my birthright comes back whenever they are mentioned.

I was in East House. We were a soccer house. Most of the school soccer first eleven were drawn from our ranks and, during the spring term, when the squared-off goals were lifted out and replaced by the gaunt “H”s of rugby posts, many of the senior boys were carried away to trounce Bancrofts and Merchant Taylors in a continuing interschool soccer league table.

At that point Mr Cluer would survey the remainder of his flock and nominate fifteen boys to get out there and pretend to be the House First Fifteen.

“Ah, Rhys Jones,” he opined. “Your name instantly qualifies you, I think. Hah?” And so, a mere thirteen years old and sporting my “Dixie-Deans” (as my hand-me-down curly-toed football boots were dubbed), I ventured out to do the dirty thing on the rugby field.

We were a feeble crew. Even Savary the school librarian was pressed into service. The gangly, the fat, the knock-kneed, the speccy, the mummy's boy, the lame, the bronchial and the recalcitrant made up East House First Fifteen. The pampered show ponies of the soccer division stood idly by. They sneered at our resounding defeats every Tuesday morning before assembly, but I was game. I felt it my duty as the youngest boy ever to make a House first fifteen to be game. I felt it my duty as the representative of a great Welsh tradition to be game. I felt that diminutive as I was, I had to be game. And I was game: for the entire opposition.

Our feeble company tottered out onto the pitch by the chestnut trees on the other side of Ingrave Road to be utterly and comprehensively pummelled every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. Rugby forces intimacy with worm-casts. I can still feel the sloppy smear of a full sprawl into the mire of a goal-mouth. I can instantly recall grappling the dank moist clammy leather of a wet ball, and the desperate fumbling attempts to drop kick it out of the way before they all plunged on top of me.

There were no great soaring impromptu male voice choirs for us. It was mud and fighting. I was quite gutsy and I could work up a raging determination, which may ring a few bells with later commissioning editors, but we were no good. No one taught us anything. No one cared. We had to pick it up as we went along. And so when Terry, my Gower rugby hero, declared that he would only join me for dinner if I could kick a goal, this was a severe test of my capabilities.

Terry Davies had been capped for Wales 21 times and even played a handful of times for the British and Irish Lions. He played as a fullback and finished as the leading points scorer on the 1959 British and Irish Lions tour, even though injury restricted him to just 13 of a possible 31 games. He had last played internationally in the sixties. He was eighty now and he had originally come from Llanelli.

I met him at his old school ground. We walked under the trees at the edge of the playing field while he explained how he had been spotted at this very school, how he had played for the reserves and the county and how he had then been offered a place with a nearby team. The difficulty was that that team was Swansea. “I was considered a traitor,” he explained.

I had picked up some inkling of this rivalry ten years ago. I was working and staying in the Mumbles. Two matrons passed me near the pier. They stopped me. “Oh, we love your ‘Restoration' programme,” they said.

I told them that I was disappointed that the great house in Llanelli, a discovery for the programme and a triumph for Wales, had done so badly in the competition. Scotland rallied to its wrecks. Manchester voted en masse for decaying swimming pools. But there just weren't enough Welsh votes to secure this intriguing and beautiful townhouse a place in the final.

They laughed. “We couldn't possibly vote for something in Llanelli.”

I looked puzzled.

“We play rugby against Llanelli.”

And that was that. Wales is furious in its patriotic antipathy to England but that is nothing compared with the Balkan mistrust of fellow Welshmen. If you want to raise a laugh in Cardiff denigrate Swansea. And Swansea is continually resentful of the unwarranted attention that Cardiff gets. It is even more resentful of warranted attention.

Llanelli was 10 miles away from that conversation in the Mumbles and the Mumbles was the posh bit of Swansea. Satirist Ian Hislop and actress Joanna Page were born there. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas have a house there. Further along the bay, passions ran even higher and dirtier. Terry had had to keep his head down.

He was back in Llanelli now, however, and ready to eat my cockles, but first I had to kick that goal on his old school pitch.

I was never a kicker. Oh, no doubt I had attempted to be. In my house team we were all so incompetent we took it in turns to have a go, but we never got a try so we were seldom put to the test. I dimly recalled that it was sometimes part of my job as a hooker or scrum half (I think I played in both positions) to clear the ball, and this required a drop kick.

I practised in front of Terry. (An incompetent ignoramus trying to prove to a 21-times capped Rugby International that he could “do” his sport.) I could vaguely get a boot under it, though not a good boot, as I was wearing my round-toed multi-laced hill-walking boots.

Terry undertook to coach me. He started to mark out the kick. The angle was 90 degrees to the post. It was a straightforward hoof. I had to get lift and a straight path to the trajectory.

Terry placed the ball and carefully instructed me. “Take three steps,” he said. “Two back, and one to the side. And as you hit the ball lean into it a bit and it will rise up.”

I stood back, measured the distance, waited for the camera to turn over and then walked forwards, as casually as possible and kicked the ball exactly as instructed. Yes, the ball lifted. It soared straight over the crossbar and through the posts.

This wasn't exactly what we wanted. It would have been more useful if I had missed dismally four or five times. But I did really hit it in one. Terry was ready for his supper. We just needed a couple more angles.