For decades I have been living in two places at once – at least in terms of imagination. This double life has stretched me, sometimes painfully, but that creative tension has fed into my work. My short story collection A City Burning emerges from that double life. It has recently been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Most of the 26 stories are set in Northern Ireland or Wales.
Reader, I married a Welshman. In fact, I married the first one I met – apart from those soldiers on Belfast’s High Street with the wee silver leek in their berets; and Owain Glendower who had a street in east Belfast named after him. I saw it every day from my bedroom as a child. My mother said he fought against the English and was “in Shakespeare”?
It’s hard not to bump into the English when encountering the Welsh. It was very good of my husband to marry me because at our first meeting I greatly offended him by asking what part of Scotland he came from. Well, I hadn’t “got my ear in” to the accent at that stage.
In 1981 I left Northern Ireland, a place of very overt hostilities compounded by covert ones, to live in Wales where the surface is relatively calm and the conflicts deep. I began to learn Welsh as soon as I got there because I understood from home how important language is; how it carries levels of meaning; and how powerful silence is, and the act of silencing.
In my birthplace even nuances of accent were significant. They were used to sift for clues of allegiance, crucial to survival, actual or social. At the local swimming baths I would be pilloried by other children and made to recite the alphabet, my pronunciation of the letter “H” taken as a sure sign of my religious and cultural identity.
My homeplace of Northern Ireland, and Ireland as a whole, is the source of my earliest engagement with language and with conflict. Wales is the place where I have met these same issues in a register that, since it was new to me, obliged me to re-examine my assumptions about both. Such adjustment to the lens is good for a creative person. Perception is baffled, tested, enriched. The new place has its orthodoxies which seem to the incomer questionable, even bizarre, and the reverse is true.
From the Northern Ireland of the hunger strikes I moved to a Wales which, just two years earlier, had voted four to one against establishing a devolved assembly. The Welsh value consensus. They seemed to have come very close to one on this issue. Most of them wanted the status quo.
I was working in TV, with my newly acquired, but very Northern Irish, fluency in Welsh. Off I went around the country, Belfast accent and all, mystifying the locals with my Welsh-as-they-had-never-heard-it-spoken. I was stopped for speeding north through Dolgellau on a rain-soaked night. I lowered my car window to hear the police officer, rain dripping from his peaked cap, asking me in Welsh what my hurry was. I replied, in Welsh, that I was trying to get out of his way. (That’s what I would have done in Belfast.) Wasn’t he heading somewhere crucial, some incident? You can imagine how that went down.
But what stays with me is his expression of uncomprehending comprehension. He understood me but (given my accent) he wasn’t sure why, or how. He was exasperated at my behaviour; and pleased to be booking me in his own language.
At this time, threaded through that part of Welsh society which wanted self-government was an admiration for the efficacy of violence in achieving political change. Northern Irish politics showed, it was asserted by some, that a willingness to kill and be killed would get you what you wanted.
Wales had little leverage at Westminster. Welsh was denigrated. There were sizeable in-migrations from England to rural communities which risked overwhelming the indigenous culture. In the face of annihilation, wasn’t there only one sure way to respond and get a response?
Having seen political violence first-hand, I believed it to be an immoral and short-sighted means of righting injustice. Other means had to be chosen. My first job in TV in Wales came to me because, in 1981, the Welsh-language TV channel, S4C, was established, with a broad remit of programme genres.
However, I could see a hidden silencing going on which many seemed to miss. Westminster, ever quick to say it understands Wales and slow to show much penetrating interest, told itself that the broadcasting needs of Wales were “sorted”. In fact, the English-speaking Welsh were almost invisible and inaudible in British media. This was not a norm I wanted any part in. What, or who, is not seen and not heard affects the inner and outer world. A spurious hierarchy of value is created. I knew that from Northern Ireland, where the blind eye was turned for too long.
I involved myself deeply in the media politics of Wales because one aspect of leverage is the capacity of a country to represent itself. A country’s media are the means by which its life-blood circulates. If they don’t express the life that is actually being lived in that place and if they don’t carry that life beyond its borders, then the media do little but enervate and obscure.
Wales needs excellent media in both its major languages and it should never be a case of one at the expense of the other. Engagement with policy, which creates the frameworks within which the media operate, has been a constant for me, as chair of the Campaign for Quality Television, Wales in the late Eighties and Nineties and as chair of the Media Policy Group of the Institute for Welsh Affairs more recently, until 2017.
I had the chance to tackle the myth that violence “works” when I produced and co-wrote the Oscar-entrant feature film Branwen. It’s about a Welshwoman who emulates the Northern Irish example of terrorism. The film, in Welsh, English and Irish, is based on a tale from the ancient Welsh story cycle, the Mabinogion, about war between the Welsh and Irish. In the original they fight to the brink of mutual annihilation. The film homes in on the price paid by those who kill and find they can’t control the consequences.
I was also fortunate to work on many programmes about Welsh history and with eminent historians. Ever aware that I am not a native of Wales but privileged to have lived there, I have tried to be of service as a critical friend. An outsider's questions can reveal chinks in the accepted narrative, provoking fresh approaches. As development producer, I helped to shape the BBC's The Story of Wales, the major TV history of the country, presented by Huw Edwards. It's a perennial task for a nation, that grasping where it has come from, in order to see where it wants to go.
Now, in A City Burning I have brought Wales and Northern Ireland together, often around the handling of injustice and anger. In Snapshot, the down-trodden wife of a retired police officer, on the prom of a Co Antrim seaside resort, watches as her husband, Richard, browbeats a Welsh tourist whose car has brushed theirs. She can tell from the accent of the Welshman’s Ulster-born wife what persuasion of local she is, and that this woman is about to explode the hard-won balance of her unhappy marriage.
“And your name, sir?” the Welshman asked, respectfully.
The woman gave a quick, incredulous shake of the head and raised her eyes to heaven.
“Meikle. Richard Meikle. Magherabwee House, Kildart.” Uncertainly the Welshman said, “Meek...?”
“Meikle,” the woman said aggressively. “M,E,I,K,L,E. A good Ulster name, that.” The ‘that’ came out like a slap.
The three Northern Irish characters operate within an intricately coded exchange of what is said and not said. The Welshman lacks the antennae to decipher the mounting conflict. He thinks they are merely exchanging names and addresses.
In All Through The Night a Welsh-speaking Welshman remembers a crisis point in his marriage. The contrast between the tritely sentimental English translation of this famous Welsh song and the profoundly poetical original embodies for him his struggle to risk everything to break out of his damaging inarticulacy and save the relationship.
Ar hyd y nos. All through the night.
Nothing like the crappy English version. Sickly-sweet, that. And boring. “Soft the drowsy hours are creeping... visions of delight revealing... hill and vale in slumber steeping”. And the stars don’t get a look-in! Not a mention. You pointed that out to me. When you were learning Welsh. “How come...?” you asked. You were always asking that. “Why is the verb here? Why do I have to say...?” Whatever. And I’d say, “It just is, Mari. I don’t know why. Ask your teacher, cariad. Gwyn knows all that stuff.” Yes, he did, didn’t he? Holl amrantau’r sêr... amrantau – such a great-sounding word for such a workaday bit of us: our eyelids. “All the eyelids of the stars are saying”. Eyelids speak? Oh, yes. They shield or conceal. They widen to reveal.
Dyma’r ffordd i fro gogoniant.
“This is the way to the land of glory. All through the night.”
In my collection there are many stories of witness and therefore of decision. Having seen, what must I do? In The Scale a domiciliary care-worker, in the south Wales valleys at an early stage of the pandemic, contrasts the comradely solidarity and sense of purpose on the front line of the 1984 miners’ strike with being sent alone, without PPE, to the most vulnerable of her clients. She has been betrayed; why should she stand by anyone else?
One story, Coasteering, has dialogue in Ulster-Scots. This is the speech heritage of my father’s family. A perceptive coasteering instructor helps his client overcome her distress and make progress.
“Afore we gae bak A jest want tae remine ye o tha basics.” I nodded, not looking at him. “Credit tha watther tae houl ye up an mine yer braithe.” I turned, surprised. “Aff ye wurnae tae draw braithe, whut hope wud thair be? An credit tha watther or ye’ll wear yersel oot thrishin an thrashin.” I gazed at him. Was that it? Breathe. Believe. “Are we fur tha shore?” he asked briskly.
The effort to escape the nets that seek to keep us swimming with “our own” and prevent us from engaging with “the other” is one that has to be repeatedly renewed. I’ve written the first draft of a novel about the politics of language in Northern Ireland where Ulster-Scots and Irish are too seldom seen in partnership.
While my debut poetry collection is under consideration with a publisher I am currently working on a collection on the theme of Sanctuary. This theme is resonant in our present global circumstances: migration, the sharing of space, escape, safety, the holy, the Earth as a protected, or violated, place.
My own experience of the abrasive side of living in more than one place prompted me to two design decisions about the collection. I want it to embody the welcoming aspect of sanctuary and I want to expand my own understanding of the phenomenon of mass movement of people seeking safety.
So I invited four other poets to contribute a poem each, working with me: two poets from Northern Ireland and two from Wales. I’ve sought one poet from each place who has experience of having been a refugee. In Wales an Iranian (pseudonym Moon) has contributed a moving poem – in rhyming couplets, no less. I am still seeking a counterpart in Northern Ireland, preferably a female poet.
South Walian poet and photographer Phil Cope is an expert on sacred places in the British Isles with a book on holy wells in Ireland on the way. The other writer in Northern Ireland is Italian poet and novelist, Viviana Fiorentino. She lives in Belfast and works with migrants. She has taken an ecological approach to the theme.
The Portadown poet, Glen Wilson, is acting as mentor for my own work in the book. As Northern Ireland, Wales and the wider world spark off each other, our collaboration is proving to be very fruitful. The book will be finished in a few months.
In Wales there has been a quiet revolution since that 1979 referendum: devolution has bedded in; English / Welsh bilingualism is normal (partly because of an acceptance that languages are not ‘owned’ on the basis of ethnicity) and the Welsh Senedd has stepped up to being increasingly proactive on media policy. In Northern Ireland the potential of language to bridge divides has not yet been fully exploited but I see tremendous potential for improvement. The two places have much to learn from each other and great tales to tell.
A City Burning is available from Seren Books in paperback or as an e-book.
Actor Geraint Lewis reads from All Through The Night
