“It’s one of my favourite places,” he replied. “I wanted to show it to you. My dad used to call it ‘Y bryn i'r nef’.
“What does it mean?” I asked, bringing my attention back to Gwyn.
“The hill to heaven.”
I tried to imitate what he’d called it in Welsh but it came out a mess and I could feel my cheeks burning up as he laughed at me. “Have you always been able to speak English?” I asked.
“Now that’s a long story,” he replied.
“We’ve got time.”
“Ah, here we go,” he said with a smile, and he settled in on the rock beside me and began to talk. “My mam insisted that we learn to speak English but my father was dead against it. She thought it would give us better prospects as we got older but my dad thought it shameful. It was bad enough we had to speak it in school, he didn’t want it anywhere near his house.”
“Why is that?” I asked. Sophia had said something to me when I first arrived about speaking English at school and Mrs Hopkin seemed less than pleased about it, but I’d never considered that it was some sort of rule.
“Your men up in London. Nobody speaks Welsh in schools anywhere in Wales. Not openly, anyway. Mair took to English really quickly. She’s a smart one but she hated it. She was very much on my dad’s side and didn’t see why she had to speak differently to everyone else. One day she got caught speaking Welsh when we were at school and had to wear the Not. Got a whipping from the mistress and a whipping from my dad. He might not have wanted her speaking English but he didn’t want her breaking rules either.”
“What's a ‘Not’?”
“A heavy lump of wood on a rope. They’d hang it around your neck if they caught you speaking Welsh and make you wear it for the day. Then, at the end of the day, anyone wearing one would be lined up at the door for a whipping on the knuckles. You didn’t do it twice.”
“That’s awful.”
“It was the same at church. We were never a very religious family but my father wouldn’t be preached at in English so he used to cart us off every week to the Methodist chapel in Pisgah until they started using Welsh again in the church in the village.
“But what about the rest of the village? Don’t they feel the same?”
“Some do. Most just want an easy life. Not everyone has the means to go elsewhere and for lots of people, it doesn't matter what language their prayers are in as long as someone’s listening. My father was just stuck in his ways. When I went to work in the mine and he found out that we couldn’t speak Welsh there he was furious. If our farm was still up and running he’d have dragged me home within a day, but we needed the money.”
I shifted about, uncomfortable on the rock but engrossed in his stories, and unintentionally got closer to Gwyn. Rather than move over, however, he seemed to move towards me a little and I felt a rush of nervousness flutter in my stomach.
“Wouldn’t it have made more sense to speak Welsh at work?”
“The mines bring people for work, and people come from all over. Most of the ones in this area are owned by Englishmen so it was English speaking only.”
“No wonder your father was mad.”
“He wasn’t the only one. There were and are many like him, trying to push back, to keep our traditions and customs and language. We were all raised on tales of what was and what could be and our words, our language, is the most important part of all.”
The change of perspective made me suddenly understand why some people, like Jenkin the previous day, had been so hesitant to speak to me in English even if they could. Why should they?
“Teach me,” I said, taking both of us by surprise. I hadn’t entirely thought it through and I’d blurted it out on impulse but I meant it, especially when that wide smile of his spread across his face.
“What? Now?”
“Just some basics. Even if I can only say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’, it would be a start.”
“Well, I’m no teacher, that’s for sure.” He rubbed his forehead like he was already regretting it and I gave him my best pleading eyes. “But I guess we can give it a go. And I’m handy with a cane if you get out of line.”
We sat next to the stream for over an hour while Gwyn tried to teach me some words and phrases but it seemed like we spent most of the time laughing. Mostly it was him laughing at my efforts to pronounce strings of letters that seemed to have no logical reason for being next to each other, but the time flashed by in an instant. When the church bell rang from the village and he said it was time to go I found myself disappointed to have to leave.
“We should come back here sometime,” he suggested as we started to walk back along the stream.
“I’d like that,” I replied.
We walked in silence for a little bit and every time I turned to him he seemed to be deep in thought so despite craving the chance to prolong our discussions I remained quiet and gathered my own thoughts. Since I’d first met Gwyn we’d become fast friends and I liked the time we spent together. More than that, I’d come to look forward to seeing him. The day spent walking and talking with him had been my favourite in a very long time and really solidified the feelings I’d had since I’d arrived in Wales that I’d been doing my life before I got here all wrong.
“Tom,” he said firmly, finally breaking the silence as though he were about to say something serious. He stopped in his tracks and turned to me, setting his foot down in a particularly boggy patch of grass. As if it was happening in slow motion his eyes immediately went wide as his leg went out from under him. I instinctively reached out to stop him from falling but he grabbed hold of my arm awkwardly and his whole weight pulled down on me, sending us both crashing into the dirt.