Bred of Heaven Read Online Free Page B

well as, obviously, French, Italian,Spanish and German. One Boxing Day in Carmarthen, when I was about seven and everyone else was out on horseback killing foxes, he taught me to count to a million in German. He wrote a Latin primer at six. For him this was a living language rather than a remnant of the classroom. When resigning from the priesthood in Rome in the year of my birth, he had had to write to Pope John XXIII in the lingua franca of the Vatican. Modern Greek was another of his, also Russian. He once even had a stab at Turkish, though that wasn’t on the list back then. And finally there was Welsh, which he relearned at the age of twelve.
    â€˜I’m thinking of learning Welsh,’ I volunteer when I see him.
    â€˜Wonderful,’ he says. ‘It’s a marvellous language. You’ll love it.’ My uncle is an enthusiast.
    â€˜I’ve already learned the words for black mountain and coastal marsh,’ I add. ‘Seems pretty easy so far. Any tips?’
    â€˜Well, there is one real snag with Welsh.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The system of mutating. It’s absolutely horrid. Really nasty.’
    â€˜Yes, but what is it?’
    â€˜You’re used to changing the endings of words in French or Italian. In Welsh they change the fronts of words.’ He pulls a face as if suffering a mildly unpleasant back spasm.
    â€˜That seems manageable,’ I say.
    â€˜Ah, but there’s a bit more to it than that.’ He proceeds to explain that, depending on circumstances, a word like
tad
(father) may actually change to
dad
,
thad
or
nhad
. He pulls more of an anguished face this time, as if hearing of a relative’s slightly early demise.
    I’ve never heard of such a counter-intuitive linguistic model. Change the
front
of a word? You might as well stick it in a priest’s hole. Still, that’s only one word that changes, in only three ways. Presumably there’ll be a few like that, a small bunch of wildlymisbehaving individuals you have to keep your eye on, like incurable show-offs in class. I am undaunted.
    â€˜That’s just one word. Are there other examples of these … what are they called?’
    â€˜Mutations,’ he says. It sounds like a botch-up in a laboratory. ‘I’m afraid so. As a system, it’s more or less ubiquitous. Mutations are absolutely integral to the Welsh language. You just have to learn them.’ This time his voice and face impart outright shock and horror.
    And if the mountains denied ease of access, so did the rivers. The Bristol Channel – the Severn estuary – presented the same obstacle to motorists in the mid 1960s as it did to the Romans. Before they built the bridge the journey was interminable. We had a Singer estate in racing green which my father wove along Welsh A roads with, I suspect, a mixture of impatience and dread. Impatience to escape a car with three small fighting boys. Dread at the imminence of home. Not that I knew any of that then. I just felt sick. Sometimes I actually was sick, usually by the side of the road, but once, spontaneously, down the front of my jumper (knitted by my grandmother), into my lap and thence onto the permeable weave of the Singer’s back seat. After that I was allowed in the front. I took to this privilege like an insufferable princeling. Whenever a car journey beckoned, I would assert my rights over both brothers without conscience or let-up.
    â€˜Why does he always get to go in the front?’
    â€˜Because he gets car-sick, poppet.’ My mother called her sons ‘poppet’ a lot. Mothers did back then.
    â€˜We’re only going to Chichester.’ This from my older brother.
    â€˜Yeah, but it’s bendy.’ This from me, with a hard, vituperative edge. That was the answer to everything. It’s bendy. Nowhere wasbendier than Wales. After they built the suspension bridge it became less so, but my primacy had been established