South Wales
When Roger Lewis returned to Wales for a funeral, he found his church unchanged but mourned the superior attitudes of his youth
I’ve been to South Wales for a funeral, and the Welsh are very good at funerals. Everybody was dressed in black. There was a real solemnity and dignity. None of those rubbishy sentiments about the deceased’s not being dead because they’ve only popped into the next room.
I once went to a funeral in Sussex, and the widow and her children came in as if for a wedding, smiling and waving at people, pausing to kiss members of the congregation on both cheeks,
laughing gaily as they went up the aisle.
In Wales, as the pipe organ murmurs and the coffin is placed in the chancel, the womenfolk discreetly dab their eyes with a laundered handkerchief and the men stare into the middle distance and blink very fast. We Welsh can sing, too.
It was the funeral of Dorothy Prescott, 89, former landlady of the Aberdarcy Arms, the cheerful pub in Machen, long closed, which was decorated with what could have been genuine copper plaques.
Back in the last century, when in the sixth-form at Bassaleg Comprehensive, near Newport, it was where I began my close personal involvement with intoxicating beverages. Sam, Dor’s husband, who was big in the Freemasons, died about 25 years ago. I went to that funeral as well, but I have seldom been back to my home patch otherwise.
I was in the Aberdarcy when I opened my A-level results, and realised I was going to leave this district for ever. How callous we are when young, turning our back on everything that has
created us – formed us – for good as well as ill. I’d found Wales claustrophobic – in the same way that Muriel Spark felt hemmed in by Edinburgh.
When the prevailing view in the land of one’s fathers is that everyone knows not only who your father was but also your great-grandparents on both sides, it is hard to think of yourself as an individual. Escape is the only option.
Yet return I did, for Dor’s funeral and, inevitably, how small that world now seemed. When I was growing up, the few miles between wholly English-speaking Newport and Caerphilly were the limits
of my existence. I seldom ventured beyond it for 18 solid years. Now we whizzed through from one end to the other in the car in half an hour.
It had become, it seemed to me, more rural in the intervening years – more trees. The Rhymney River, a channel of chemical sludge – burnt oil and hydrochloric acid – had been cleaned up. The district was altogether less bleak and industrial, and the mines had closed; almost prosperous-looking, the renovated cottages. The Gelli, the farm where my grandparents lived, is an ice-cream and cappuccino parlour.
I was particularly thrilled, in St John’s Church, Machen, to see the lovely old Victorian-era pews. So many churches have lost their pews and original interiors have been vandalised in the name of progress; kitchen areas and disabledaccess lavatories and the rest of it installed, to create a community centre. This happened in Herefordshire, where we used to live – the robed choir disbanded and the Book of Common Prayer liturgy chucked out as elitist. This did no good. Congregations don’t get bigger because of bongos.
Machen Church – where my parents were married, incidentally, and the vicar in the 1950s was Harry Secombe’s brother, Fred – remains a peaceful centre of worship. The original builders and architects knew what they were doing with the stone and wood and glass.
I met my mother, very much alive at 84, in the graveyard, and we poked about in the undergrowth looking for her parents’ tombstone. I also found the tombstone of Mrs Harrington, my chain-smoking teacher when I was a Mixed Infant. She was thrilled when I got into Magdalen College, Oxford.
I had to sit at the front of the church, as my wife, Anna, was reading a poem.
My mother preferred to sit nearer the door, so she could clock who was coming in and out. I am glad she was on guard. One of the reasons I don’t go back to South Wales is perhaps that I have used it shamelessly as material in some of my silly books, poking fun at people and generally causing offence.
A lady came in, whom I almost recognised. ‘That’s Elaine Jenkins, the ironmonger’s wife,’ warned my mother. Christ. Elaine used to sing in the local operatic society productions, and I think I’d called her ‘the Bedwas Montserrat Caballé’. I hadn’t seen her for more than 40 years, when I bought some plugs and washers. She swooped up to me and said with a smile, though I’m not sure her eyes were smiling, ‘You put me in one of your books!’ She was at Dor’s funeral to play the organ.
Afterwards, we trekked to Thornhill Crematorium, on the outskirts of Cardiff, where I spotted Kingsley Amis’s famous tacsis. The tacsi spelling, Amis wrote in his Booker Prize winner, The Old Devils, was ‘for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before’. We saw off Dor to a recording of Tiger Bay’s Shirley Bassey – though, as she’s a highly popular artiste at the crem, maybe she comes over from Monte Carlo now and again, returns to her roots and performs live. Shirley’s robust brassiness is very South Welsh.
We then repaired to the rugby club for the eats and the drinks, and my mother kept up a monologue from the back seat about how all her appliances are demonically possessed. Her Hoover, iron, sewing machine, microwave, mower and kettle have in recent weeks ‘all gone pop, started smoking, and flames shoot out’. It was always like this, my home life. The Mabinogion, as if translated for Penguin Classics by Patricia Highsmith.
When Anna asked for prosecco, I scoffed, ‘Prosecco! This is a South Wales f***ing rugby club!’ But they had prosecco, nor did it seem an eccentric fad. Needless to say, I suddenly saw any number of former schoolfellows who are now large and bald and lumpy. Formerly slender girls – who, when I last saw them in the 1970s, you’d want to pull their knickers down – are today frightful old bags. Not that I am anyone to talk, with my XL clothes. I look back at those early days and I wince at how I was simply too clever for my own good.
‘Always moving!’ a chap who is in laminate flooring said to me at the wake – and it’s not that I have moved house and place a lot, which I have, and that most of the people I was at Bassaleg Comprehensive with are still living not far from Bassaleg Comprehensive; it’s more that my temperamental restlessness hasn’t led to very much, save a life and career rocked by illness (pancreas trouble; diabetes) and controversy (I have been sued in my time by Graham Stark), though I do know Olivia de Havilland.
I also forgot to take my pills with me and had to make an emergency visit to the Machen chemist. The lady there was very helpful, took down all my details, phoned the surgery in Rochester to doublecheck my prescription, and handed over the tablets. This procedure only took about 40 minutes. ‘I don’t know about a diabetic coma,’ I said, ‘but if this takes any longer I’ll die of old age.’
‘I know who you are,’ she said. ‘I was at school with you and you put me in one of your bloody books.’
‘My mother kept up a monologue about all her appliances being demonically possessed’