HIRAETH

In the Welsh language, the word hiraeth, is, he thought, most beautifully defined as longing. His whole family - at least those whom he knew or who wanted to know him - were from Wales, scattered from Kidwelly, to Neath, Cardiff and thereabouts, Aberdare, Newport and, beyond the Lanskaer line to the little England beyond Wales - which is what you say to annoy a Pembrokeshire native.

And it was longing. When you were there and most of all, when you were not. John had been brought up in Somerset, a little lonely, really - something missing; part of the puzzle. An introverted young man, he was thought a bit prudish by his contemporaries at teacher training college, but, in a a moment of uncharacteristic, boldness, he had proposed to the first woman he fell in love with. She, he thought, was the most beautiful girl he had ever clapped eyes on. They married just after leaving college, to the disgust of his family. Too hasty; she was pregnant, too. "If you want your furniture", said his mother, better come and get it sharpish because your father's having a clear out."

John didn't criticise. He did, however, feel a shift. That longing thing again. Time to go.

So, with Mary, his new wife, they shifted across the river Severn. John found a job in mid Wales and, eventually, in Pembrokeshire. Mary, in the bosom of her large and shambling family, had her baby and was able, with their help, to take her first teaching post at Wiston, in Pembrokeshire, when there was still a school there. It wasn't a complicated life, but he could see the Prescelli hills beyond the school, watch the mist come down all of a sudden and walk out to St David's Head and be alone and still.

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So, today, it is a very short story, because I am off to Wales today. To Cardiff, Penarth, Merthyr (I'm not just speaking of what is pretty, but also of what is there and of what is), then on to the Brecon Beacons, Ceredigion and into Pembrokeshire. In a church at Walton West, above Broad Haven and gazing out at the sea, are buried two uncles, a cousin, my grandmother, my great grandmother and various other more distant relatives - all Becketts and, allowing for variant spellings, LLewelyns. And I feel it -that sense of longing - too. I was not, unlike, my family, born to it. But there is something about Wales. It is brooding, mysterious and, somehow, it feels ancient in a way that England, to me, does not. It is affecting in a haunting and entirely visceral way. That, I think, is hiraeth for me. I may not have been born in it but I am and have always been, of it.


Reader: we have to have a pause in our stories here because I am without internet connection for a few days. Perhaps you were under the impression that the whole of the U.K. had broadband connection or WiFi? Not in one little corner of our family! When I can, a batch of children's stories for you -- featuring Bethany Bluebottle -- plus some vampire stuff for 16 plus!!!