Gwytherin

Family photo

How to begin? With a proposal? This is about a village and a wedding – and doesn’t a wedding, like a book or an article, always begin that way?  And what’s this one about? Not a scientific study, more a personal response. More a kind of musing on belonging.

On how I – and those who look like me – are more certain of belonging now. Now, I never felt this was not a place that lives inside my heart. It is as surely part of what has shaped me as the London street where I was born. My own mythology. Now, though, it can be a national conversation. A national storytelling, a way of making the world, those deep, dark, damp stories belong to all of us. Wherever we are, whatever we look like.

One of these stories begins on the 28^th of August, the Saturday of Bank Holiday weekend, the year 1954, in a tiny village in the fold of the high hills, just east of Llanwrst, called Gwytherin. If you stand on the ridge above the village and look west, if the weather is clear, you can see Eryri. It’s a bit breathtaking. And if you go south or east you are surrounded by the high moorland of the Mynydd Hiraethog. Crown land, open grazing. Empty and vast, lots of lakes, no reservoirs, peat and those tall reeds my Nain made candles from.

I can’t pretend to be an authority on any Welsh Black experience. We went to chapel, yes, but mostly in London off Holloway Road. But there is more to this part of Rhos that meets the eye. Colwyn Bay, fourteen miles from Gwytherin, saw the Congo Institute, where children from Congo were trained as missionaries to return home and spread the word, and also where Nile Rodgers (Le Freak! C’est Chic) spent several love-struck months in 1974. The first ever Congo Instutite boys, Kinkasa and Nkasa, died young, far from home, and I can’t but think how sad their lives must have been. Shuffled between chapels, reciting in Welsh and English, maybe to Gwytherin, probably to Llansannan or Llanwrst. At least Nile was in love.

I like to think I might have seen him (Nile that is, I would have been twelve) in Colwyn Bay on a shopping trip. I would have nodded at him. The nod of recognition, like the only other people we knew in North Wales like me, one family in Abergele; their mother, like my aunty, a nurse in Liverpool.

I never had to do the nod in Wales, as a child. Now of course, I have ceased to be surprised by people that look like me speaking the language. A good thing. Because the most important change I have seen, as an outsider, is the change the car has made – the A55. People now live in rural villages and commute. A village now is a dormitory, a place where disparate folk sleep at night and work in Manchester, or Broughton, or in the hospital in Bodelwyddan.

When I first knew Gwytherin it was heterogenous. If you weren’t related to me then you were very close to someone who was. Everyone spoke Welsh.

My parents met at the Polish Club in London. My father’s village in Jamaica is called Achtumbeddie.  It’s high up, remote, in the mountains of Cockpit Country. It was named for German immigrants, apparently. The remains of my grandfather’s house were on a rise. The sound of birds and frogs and the green moistness of everything all around. At least twelve stumps of coconut trees, one tree still alive, planted over thirteen placentas, one for each of the children. 

Gwytherin sits high in a fold of the hills on the edge of the wild moors of the Mynydd Hiraethog, only six miles from Llanwrst. That sounds close, but even today it’s a twenty minute, half hour drive in bad weather. When I was a child, it seemed to take forever. The narrow lanes sometimes hedged high with green, sometimes fenced with wire, sometimes hung with crows. I always wondered whether the birds, seeing their dead brothers, really knew to keep away.

There is a river, the Cledwen, flowing north to the Elwy, and one pub, The Lion. Gwytherin is famous for its saint, Winifred. The church is sadly a Victorian rebuild, but Winifred is a premier league divine, who lived out the end of her life in a religious order she set up after her head was restored to her body by her Uncle, Beuno, also a saint. There’s also the Court of Estrays, a 12^th century tribunal to decide the ownership of sheep.

Gwytherin is not on the road to anywhere. At the end of the road is the farm at Pennant, where the land slopes up and a scattering of large stones – thrown down by a giant as he fled – punctuates the fields. There is a road up and over the hill to Nebo, but it’s very steep, and grass grows down the middle all year long. The farm off this road, Llwyn Sant, is where I imagine Winifred had her retreat. Her Ty Clos. Not quite a nunnery.

Of course my people were not Come with me up the road, out of the village to Capel Siloh, built in 1860 at the height of the nonconformist revival. In the steep angled graveyard, my Nain and Taid are buried. The Chapel is not a chapel anymore, but it is lived in. Full of life and dogs and children.

I can show you the photos taken in the lane outside. There, my dad, my mum, Nain and Taid and Uncle Wil who was the priest. It was the first wedding in that chapel ever, they had to get a special licence. Where, I wondered, did folk get married before? Llansannan? Pandy Tudur? Maybe best not to ask.

It’s cut off. So much so, German Prisoners of War laboured in the fields. My mum, Erinwen Williams, fourteen in 1944, found (from where? ) a teach yourself German manual, Heute Abend! Ten years later she was getting married, to a man she met one evening in the Polish Club in West London. He was my father, Sturdee Johnson. Jamaican, a tailor.

They might have been the first, but perhaps the Congo boys had been there before; perhaps some of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show riding the route of the A5 across the moors got lost and wandered north from Pentrefoelas.

The names of the farms are a sort of poetry. Cornwal Isa, Dolfadyn, Ty Newydd, Bryn Tan; and those names named the people. You know this. From every Welsh cliché going. But it was true, even when I was a child.

And of course there were stories about every corner, every field, every farm. The one where the farmer and his wife were found hanging. The field where a spitfire downed, the place where a schoolboy lined up six shivering (or was it seven?) fox cubs on the wall and shot them all dead, one by one. The road my uncle told my mother led straight to Rome. The place where a carpet of rats had crossed the road on their way to the watermill. The farm where my mum helped out and the wife showed her a baby, dead in a drawer in the dresser.

The house where they lived and where my Auntie Marian saw ghosts. 

The story of my parents.

In the last two years of my mother’s life (she died in 2022 ) I would visit every month, and unless the weather was difficult, we would drive the tiny roads to Gwytherin. She would name the fields, the farms, the people who were no longer here. She would tell me how, on the day of her wedding, the roads from Gwytherin to Llanwrst were lined with people come to see my father. He was not English, which was in his favour.

On their gravestone, in Mynydd Sion, Abergele, it says in English and Welsh, “If God is with us, who can be against us?”

I grew up in a family who stood against the world, together. These days, thanks to them and all the others – the myriad of different kinds of Welsh people – people who look like me don’t have to.