Reflections on Wales. Part 2
The next time in Wales was another summer holiday in Rhosneigr, a large coastal village/ small town on Anglesey. I don’t remember about the journey this time but my family had moved so I think it likely that we took the coastal road along North Wales rather than through the hills. We were going to stay in a holiday home for a couple of weeks, the first week with some family friends, the second week with our Grandmother.
That Summer was a transition phase for me as I had just finished junior school and was due to start senior school in September. The Summer was also a significant one for the UK. It was the Queen’s silver jubilee, which meant the monarch visiting even more parts of the country than usual with seemingly large crowds waving to her as she passed by in a limo or, if they were lucky, as part of a ‘walkabout’. Although the royal family were probably going through a peak of popularity there was also a whiff of discontent in the air. The ‘post war consensus’ was starting to fall apart, inflation was eating into peoples’ standards of living which was fueling wage demands which led to large numbers of strikes. Unemployment was rising. Music wise, punk hit the mainstream particularly The Sex Pistols. Their ‘God Save the Queen’ single wasn’t airplayed on the media outlets I was aware of but I knew about it and although my cultural awareness was minimal even I could tell they were a different sort of beast from the glam rock, disco and roots music that was prevalent at the time.
The other background things I remember in that Summer were of a sporting nature. Firstly Virginia Wade won the female Wimbledon singles title which was the first British victory for a number of years and to this day is still the most recent British female triumph. Even at that age I’d realised that Wimbledon was very much a celebration of a certain type of Britishness (or maybe Englishness), very deferential to tradition, suspicion of professionalism, class conscious. The teenage girls in the crowd seemed to love the brash American Jimmy Connors but middle England hated his seeming disdain for tradition and his athletic approach to the game.
This was also John McEnroe’s first prominent tournament. Enough said but that Summer also announced the arrival to international cricket of Ian Botham, perhaps the most significant British sporting figure of the late 70s/ early 80s. ‘Beefy’ (though he wasn’t to be known as that for some time) was an instant success. He was wonderfully skilled as both a bowler and batter but also was a gifted athlete despite always seeming to carry a few extra pounds. This was still an era that preceded sports science and Beefy’s appetites appeared prodigious but in a way that was more celebrated, or at least tolerated, rather than criticised. However unlike Paul Gascoigne a few years later who reputedly ate ice cream for breakfast, Botham’s refueling was far more within the cultural ambit of most Britons. Cricket has changed a lot since then and one of the most obvious is that owing to the tighter packaging of cricketing events (due to media and financial considerations) the narrative arc of the English team’s progress through each summer has been lost. Despite the obvious talents of players such as Joe Root and Ben Stokes, their profile compared to Botham’s is probably lower due to the increased competition for the public’s attention.
The house in Anglesey that we stayed in didn’t have a TV and I recall a lot of time was spent by me listening to the ‘test’ cricket on my Dad’s car radio. I don’t know whether people thought that was strange or not but I didn’t care. Rhosneigr had a nice beach with a few rocky islets. Dad had recently bought a ‘mirror’ dinghy so we went sailing a few times which I quite enjoyed but I always found the prep tedious and I never had the aptitude or perhaps the inclination to learn the technical aspects of it.
One slightly disconcerting aspect of Rhosneigr was the tendency of shops to give change that often included Irish currency (pre Euro obviously). I was worried that Irish currency wouldn’t be usable and my parents spoke to one or two outlets much to my embarrassment. I wasn’t yet versed in local economics. The reason for the existence of such coinage was our proximity to Holyhead which is the British side of the main ferry link between Ireland and us. This was the pre-Ryanair era when most people travelled by boat.
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I don’t remember much about Rhosneigr except it didn’t seem very pretty but the surroundings were nice. It didn’t help that after the exceptional summer the previous year we were back to normal. I vaguely remember visiting a Victorian castle in the pouring rain.
It couldn’t have been raining all time though otherwise Botham’s career would never have got off the ground.
A couple of years later we were in Welsh border country. Although I was born in this area we left before I was old enough to take it in. Most of the 150 miles of the border between the Severn and the Dee estuaries is lovely countryside with rolling hills. The river Wye was recently voted “Britain’s favourite river” and is a significant feature of the Southern half of this area. It’s not dramatic in the way it is further West and North but very pleasant nevertheless.
One day we did a longish walk along some of the Offas’s Dyke path which I think had only been created a few years previously. I’m referring to the path here, the dyke was built over a thousand years ago by the Saxon king of Mercia, Offa. It was built as a protective barrier between Mercia (which covered central England) and Wales. In my view it differs from Hadrian’s wall as a geopolitical edifice because the wall created a new political reality (i.e. pax Romana and non-pax Romana). There was nothing particularly significant about the place the wall was built prior to its building, there were tribes to the North and to the South but their differences were not qualitatively more than say differences between tribes South of the Thames and those to the North. The dyke however I think was a response to an existing problem of a perceived threat to the kingdom of Mercia from the peoples to the West. In other words there was ‘otherness’ to the people of the West.
The footpath itself, as can be guessed, doesn’t follow the dyke exactly. The dyke in many places has been built over, destroyed or faded over time. I don’t remember much about the walk itself except that we drank shandy which no longer seems to be in fashion and we walked in the fairly open countryside with very few trees. I think there had been a reluctance on my part to go on the walk but I changed my mind for reasons I don’t recall.
Other days I recall being in pleasant wooded valleys and quiet market towns in both England and Wales. One day we encountered a bridge near where we were staying which straddled England and Wales. There was no song and dance about it though. A stone in the bridge marked Wales on one side but only indicated Herefordshire County Council on the other.
I don’t think where we stayed, Presteigne, is a large Welsh speaking area. It didn’t feel as different to England as other parts of Wales I had visited but its peaceful aura betrays the history of conflict over centuries much of it concerned with national identity.
