Harsh lesson as unflinching tale tells us not all is Cool in Cymru
COLUMNIST
THE 20th anniversary of Wales saying Yes to Devolution is providing some thoughtful reflection – including a day-long conference devoted to dissecting its legacy – and some woeful social media, including a vox pop where no-one could name the First Minister and one bloke thought devolution had something to do with mankind going backwards.
There have also been some very amusing images from the 1997 Results Night archive, not least Huw Edwards looking about 15 in his Harry Potter specs and BBC politics guru Vaughan Roderick sporting the most magnificent ’tache since Magnum PI.
And let’s not forget the impact of the 1997 referendum wasn’t confined to self-government. It was a vote of self-confidence that provided the political backdrop to the cultural phenomenon of Cool Cymru.
A wave of Welsh self-belief washed over music, politics and sport. A generation that had grown up with no-one homegrown to watch on Top of the Pops beyond Shakin’ Stevens and Bonnie could revel in a rich bilingual music scene that burgeoned beyond the Severn Bridge, including the Manics, the Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and 60ft Dolls.
I remember in particular the arrival on the Western Mail features desk of Stereophonics’ debut CD, Word Gets Around.
At that point word hadn’t got around who these cheeky-looking lads from Cwmaman actually were, but as soon as I put the album in the CD player it was obvious they were something special.
Kelly Jones’ rasping rock vocals rang out of the speaker telling the tale of how it “started with a schoolgirl who was running, running home to her Mam and Dad...”
Mam and Dad? When had that phrase ever been heard in a pop lyric? It was the first time I’d ever heard songs that told stories, in a powerfully authentic voice, of real Valleys experience. By the second album they had fallen into the usual trap of writing about the irritations of touring and international stardom, but I will never forget the freshness of that first CD.
I’ll always remember the first sighting of a cherubic Matthew Rhys on the big screen as I attended the premiere of House of America.
It was a rather surreal Welsh film classic which made Banwen look more like Kansas, but Rhys made an indelible impression in his breakthrough role. And he wasn’t the only one; 1997 was also the year a young Ioan Gruffudd shared the Hollywood credits with Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio in Titanic, while Rhys Ifans would soon be stealing every scene in Notting Hill.
The late ’90s also brought the rugby rollercoaster that began with the arrival of Great Redeemer Graham Henry and peaked as Wales played host to the 1999 World Cup. And as Cerys Matthews provided the soundtrack to the opening ceremony in our new national stadium we all Thanked the Lord We’re Welsh.
But was it a real transformation of Cymric identity? Or a hyped-up offshoot of Cool Britannia? And what is the legacy 20 years on? Have we built on the foundation of this fresh rebranding of Wales? Or did Cool Cymru soon revert to Naff Taff?
Even at the time this pop cultural phenomenon didn’t spread its benefits everywhere. It may have been Cool Cymru in Cardiff, but there was no sense of a confident post-devolution dawn at the other end of the Valleys Line. I have been reminded of this recently when asked to write the introduction to In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl, the powerful and provocative novel by Rachel Trezise which is being republished in the Library of Wales series almost 20 years after it was written.
Before Rachel Trezise there were two things I’d never experienced in my home valley.
One, a female literary voice from the Rhondda. Two, a writer who dared to expose the darkness, dysfunction and despair that can exist beneath the warm clichés of community life to which we still cling.
It was an uncomfortable, yet entirely necessary epiphany.
Here was I, a valley girl contentedly exiled in Cardiff, reflecting on the Rhondda at arm’s length. Proud of its past. Unwilling to concede some of the more difficult realities of its present.
My Rhondda was steeped in the nostalgia of family history. Not that these tales were cute and cosy, of course.
The miner grandfathers I never knew, both dead in their fifties – one claimed by dust, the other paralysed in a pit accident. The grandmother who saw four of her 12 children die before their sixth birthday and whose life was consumed by the relentlessness of domestic toil.
But our Rhondda narrative was selective. It was built on looking backwards at the nobility of the men and women who endured that hardship and saw education as the escape shaft and community kinship as their survival strategy.
The Rhondda Rachel portrayed in her semi-autobiographical book was a place of post-industrial decline, with all the issues that come with that unravelling of community.
In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is unflinching in its portrayal of a young girl growing up in a family fractured by domestic violence, alcohol and drug dependency and child abuse. The first-person narrative traces the story of Rebecca Trigianni as she attempts to navigate childhood and adolescence with an alcoholic mother, an absent abusive father and a stepfather who subjects her to repeated sexual assaults.
Raw, visceral and brutal, the novel moves beyond its complex protagonist’s interior monologue to examine the difficulties of another character – the Rhondda itself. We see not so much the scars of industrial decline, but the open wounds inflicted on those who struggle with the socioeconomic problems of the 1990s.
But just like that other great Rhondda writer Gwyn Thomas, Rachel can still extract laughter from the dark. Her exploration of taboo topics is made all the more powerful by the dry and waspish valleys wit that undercuts it. There is tenderness and poignancy too.
Yet most of all there is honesty and courage. Here is a young woman’s voice telling a story many would prefer had remained untold because it is not valleys life as we would like to see it. In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl doesn’t just remove our rosetinted Rhondda spectacles, it rips them off and smashes them underfoot.
In doing so it provides a lesson to the rest of Wales. How often do we seek to celebrate our successes with blind patriotism rather than scrutinise our failures with mature and considered analysis?
In an essay arguing that In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl be considered a contender for the Greatest Welsh Novel, Emma Schofield comments: “With her nation on the cusp of the post-devolution era, Trezise offered a story which reflected the Wales she had grown up with; her decision to tackle, not mask, the problems she had encountered is to be commended, not condemned. The fact that the novel is now included on the syllabus for Welsh literature modules at a number of Welsh universities is testament to the recognition it has received as a literary text of relevance to contemporary studies of Wales.”
I’d argue that this novel is the most significant work to emerge from the post-devolution Cool Cymru era because – without sounding flippant – it reminded us that all was not Cool with Cymru. And as we mark the 20th anniversary of Wales saying Yes we should move beyond congratulating ourselves that we ever voted for devolution in the first place and focus on what it should now be achieving for every man, woman and child in Wales.