Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [140]
This community of incomers lived side by side with the indigenous Welsh, but divided from them, not only by language but, perhaps even more, by class, lifestyle and the growing separatism of the locals. Sex apart, there were really very few close friendships across the ‘interracial’ divide, and little of that easy neighbourliness and village spirit that made coming to our present, equally remote and even more agricultural community in (Anglophone) Mid-Wales such a relief, especially to that spontaneous socializer, Marlene, after the growing tensions of Croesor.
Unlike the passionately Welsh but 100 per cent Anglophone native gentry, e.g. the Williams-Ellises, by the 1970s permanent settlers from outside began to learn the language themselves, not to communicate, but in deference to the increasingly obvious nationalistic feeling in the region. By the 1960s all except the very oldest and isolated locals were bilingual, bilinguality being essential to any Welsh person, even in the most Cymric village, who expected to watch television and have dealings with people from outside the neighbourhood, including the 80 per cent of his or her country’s non-Welsh-speaking inhabitants. That, indeed, was the fundamental problem for Welsh-speaking areas like ours, and the basis of their increasingly strident nationalism. Even the full linguistic assimilation of a few score foreigners was as nothing compared to the irresistible Anglophone flood of modern civilization.
For most of the mountain people the Welsh language was chiefly a Noah’s Ark in which they could survive the flood as a community. They did not so much want to convert and converse: people looked down on visiting South Walians with their ‘school Welsh’. Unlike Noah, they did not expect the flood to end. They turned inwards because they felt themselves to be in that most desperate of situations, that of a beleaguered, hopeless and permanent minority. But for some there was a solution: compulsory Cymricization, imposed by nationalist political rule. In the meantime the incoming invaders could be discouraged by burning down their second homes. Those who claimed to know said that some of the activists came from Clough’s kingdom, though it was not a centre of cottage-burning. People distinguished between the neighbouring summer visitors they knew and ‘the English’ in general. And although nothing can be kept secret in the countryside, unlike in the big city, no case of terrorist cottage-burning was ever solved by the police.
In some respects the indigenous inhabitants of Clough’s kingdom, and of the mountains of North Wales in general, were therefore as uprooted as the seasonal or even most of the permanent English immigrants, who moved into the farms and cottages abandoned by the natives. Like a house built on subsiding land, the foundations of their society were breaking; unlike such a house, they could not be shored up. Isolation had kept the society together in the past, along with poetry, puritanism and the general poverty of an essentially rural society. All this was now going. The chapels stood empty. (I cannot recall meeting any ministers of religion in our years in the Croesor valley, except the highly anomalous, because Anglican, R. S. Thomas, who came to bury our neighbour and his fellow-poet, in English, Thomas Blackburn, in a steeply sloped graveyard with an unforgettable view of Snowdon.) Total abstinence from alcohol, which had to be the defining criterion of puritan Protestantism in a population so energetically interested in (officially non-existent) non-marital sex, was in retreat. The locus for the new culture of militant Welsh nationalism was not the chapel but the pub. (Clough had built one,