The Australian saint who is looking after my mother as she recovers from her broken hip, speaks to me in the corridor. ‘Is your mother Scottish,’ she asks. ‘No, Welsh,’ the Spouse says, grinning, and then warns her it might be better not to accuse her of being otherwise.
Reading through Lloyd Bowen’s ‘Early Modern Wales’, I have learnt that the Welsh have long been proud of their nation and their culture, even those, like my mother, who are monolingual English.
At the moment, I am trying to immerse myself in Welsh-ness. Duolingo in Welsh twice a day, Welsh news headlines, Welsh tweets. I even try to understand them a short while before tapping on the link for translation. Sometimes I find I can understand them a bit and it’s encouraging. And once, through these tweets, I somehow came across a song called ‘Yma O Hyd’ (‘We are Still Here’) It was written by Dafydd Swan, who was a Welsh Nationalist in his youth, and celebrates the fact that the Welsh, and their culture and language are still here, even after being abandoned by the Romans in 383AD.
It is a powerful song. Each time I hear it, I feel I am stepping back into Wales, and all those holidays I took as a child and then as a mother myself. I remember the walks along the cliffs, the honey-flavoured ice-cream, and the mountains we had to drive through to get there. They are not far from me here. I used to have a view of them through my bedroom window before some housing was built in the way. But from her window in her care home, my mother could see Wales – the Flintshire outliers marching along in the west – some days clearer than others.
‘Look, there’s Wales,’ I told her when she moved in there, ‘do you see it? One day, we’ll go in the car and see it again.’ But Covid came along and we never did.
Clare Dudman 