Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro

are in the oil business, Rhiannon and Eryl are teachers. Geoff’s a translator. They all said they’d go back and live in Wales in a second, but they can’t because their jobs don’t exist there. Everyone but Geoff. He’s not Welsh.’

      I sigh. I’d heard the same thing in Norway. There’s a limited apparatus in Wales to support people with specialized educations and high incomes.

      Marguerite continues. ‘They all agree that living abroad is better than living in England. Here they can be in a safe, mid-size city, drive three hours and wind up in Brussels. In England they’d probably live near London, commute to work, and after a three-hour drive only get to Bristol.’

      As she’s talking we come upon Market Square, a cobblestoned plaza the size of a football field where the bells of Nieuwe Kerk, or New Church – begun in 1383 – inexplicably begin to play ‘Frère Jacques.’ In my pocket I find a nest of grape seeds. Earlier, speaking to Rob and Eryl in Welsh, I’d been explaining our route around the globe when I’d recklessly eaten a grape. Had I been dealing in English I could’ve discreetly spat my seeds into a napkin, or on to my fork – jeez, I could’ve blown them into the air and caught them behind my back and still made my point. But because I was concentrating so hard on Welsh all I could manage was to put them in my pocket.

      The grape seeds are emblematic of the afternoon. In six weeks I haven’t improved in Welsh so much as lost some of my fear of speaking (to all but Catrin); yet while I can understand what’s being said at the time, I can’t repeat later what we’ve talked about. It’s a strange and particular kind of amnesia. When I’d mentioned this to Rhiannon she’d got a wise look on her face.

      ‘I know what you mean. It goes in your ears, through your brain, but just can’t come out your mouth.’

      Precisely. I explain to Marguerite that my Welsh brain knew all she’d just said, though I had no corresponding memory of it in English.

      ‘Isn’t that the language your book is supposed to be in?’ She sighs again.

      Shops have begun to close and waiters are hunched down over outdoor blackboards, chalking in the evening’s menu. Tight, canalside parking places are filling up with expensive cars, and the brick façades of gable-fronted townhouses, which look to me like rows of ageing, uneven teeth, send the clop-scrape of high heels on cobblestone echoing back to the street. I like the townhouses’ immense windows – in these narrow enclaves they’re a necessity through which furniture must come and go by means of hoisting hooks that dangle from the upper gables. Tonight the window panes look like oblong ponds spawned from the dark canals below.

      There is a cosy taste of wealth in the air, which neither Marguerite nor I can afford. We go back to the house for leftovers and dark yellow Dutch cheese, which Rhiannon told us comes from summer milk, when the cows graze on grass; in winter Dutch cheese is pale yellow, made from the milk of cows who eat hay.

      Mwynhau to Have Fun

      Rhiannon and Ed both have hangovers, and I empathize (the word Norway still makes my brain throb). In the middle of my shower this morning, just after I’d shampooed my hair, the water ran to a trickle, then vanished altogether. Marguerite had to wake Ed, who uncomplainingly performed some voodoo with the kitchen door and made it flow again.

      After breakfast we leave them with reluctance to catch the hour-long train to Amsterdam. It’s bliss to have left most of our stuff back in Paris; for this ten-day trip we’ve borrowed two small bags of Nina’s which are a cinch to hoist after our wretched backpacks. We’d been too clever by half in getting bags that convert into standard, hand-held suitcases. They were supposed to be a cagey merger of form and function, but lacking a frame they ride low on our torsos, converting us into the image of tall box turtles on holiday, and swing from side to side if we walk too fast. The swinging action has a dire effect on one’s panties, which tend to roll up in a tight little ball under the buttocks.

      No packs today, no Welsh. The Dutch, bless them, speak English. All the Dutch: the Asians and blacks as well as the big blond people. Unlike Norway, it’s a pleasure in Holland to have our expectations assaulted and thwarted by the diversity of the population. The day is warm and our shoulders don’t ache, and in this city where you can get a rush from ready pot as easily as from Vermeer’s lapis lazuli blues and deep golds – probably for the same price, since the Rijksmuseum costs a fortune – we choose to sit on the edge of a canal and lick icecream as tourists line up to visit Anne Frank’s house.

      Geoff has offered to put us up for the night. He lives in Lelylaan, which is pronounced Lay-lee-lan and sounds to me like a suitable home for Winken, Blinken and Nod. That it’s really a nondescript suburb of Amsterdam doesn’t change my opinion. Besides, Geoff, in short white shorts, legs splayed over the side of his chair, head framed in the crook of a high intensity lamp that gives a luminescent sheen to his cropped hair, has the off-beat appeal of a high-strung, hospitable elf.

      ‘What can I get you? There’s some food. A sandwich? Beer? Wine? Hashish? Maybe a cuppa tea?’ At the barbecue he and I both clung to Welsh, no matter how halting our tongues; tonight neither of us makes so much as an attempt.

      I choose wine and he sweetly brings me a glass and my own bottle. He seems disappointed that Marguerite – who projects a frail quality when she’s tired – wants nothing more than water, and appeals to her throughout the evening to let him in some way provide for her. I sense a crush in the making.

      Geoff translates from Dutch to English for a living but has taken up Welsh as a hobby. He recently spent two weeks at Nant Gwrtheyrn, a famous language school on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales, and has a firmer grip on structure and vocabulary than I do, though there’s a nervous tic in his cadence. He puts on a tape he made off Radio Cymru of news broadcasts and Welsh rock music, and for a long time there’s a sequence of synthesized wails and human screams. Coupled with the white walls and high intensity wattage, it makes for compelling evidence that we’ve slipped into an innocuous version of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.