Learning Welsh with Owen and his parsnips

My linguistic journey with Welsh via Duolingo continues, with Owen and his surreal obsession with parsnips featuring regularly. Owen's world is very, very strange. He pops up randomly and adds some humour to an activity that I don’t find particularly easy. But it keeps me stimulated. Here’s a selection of what Owen gets up to. And, I'll admit, I didn’t get all of the exercises correct. Hwre i Owen a'i pannas.

War Horse and Mr Lewis the Milk

We went to watch War Horse at the Theater Royal in Plymouth last night and it was a lot better than I had anticipated. The technology of the puppets was amazing and the puppeteers were obviously at the top of their game. I won't give anything away about the plot but I will say that it was unexpectedly gritty and even macabre in some parts. Well worth going to.

As the plot unfolded around the exploits of a cavalry unit, it occured to me that I was probably in the minority in the audience as being one who actually knew someone who had been in the cavalry in World War 1. And that got me thinking about Lewis the Milk and I thought I'd repost something I'd written about him a few years ago. I think it's worth retelling, if only to revive a little of the history of my home village, Bedwas.

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I helped on Kenvyn Lewis's milk round for a number of years. It sounds positively Victorian now to say that I started doing this when I was around 10 and finished when I was about 15. At the beginning, it involved collecting eggs, milking cows by hand at his farm (the wonderfully named Llywynllynffa half way up Bedwas Mountain) filling and capping the bottles and going out on the van delivering all around Bedwas and Trethomas. Ada the Milk joined us for the deliveries and their's was the original hate/hate relationship. They couldn't stand each other and rubbed along, just short of braining each other with a pint of steri every day. Initially I just worked weekends but it soon included all of the school holidays. Things changed significantly when a semi-automatic milking system was installed on the farm and all the milk went off to Cambrian Dairies for processing, coming back ready bottled for us to deliver. I can't remember how much I was paid but two old shillings for a weekend (6am - 2pm each day) springs to mind. Child labour? It didn't seem like it at the time. It was something I always enjoyed and, for a while, I had the accolade of being known as Deri the Milk.

Watching War Horse sent me down memory lane about those times, particularly about Mr Lewis - I never called him by his Christian name as it wasn't the done thing at the time. He had a rather irascible manner but I always got on well with him and he was easy to work for. He was a born gossip and I learnt more about some of the people we delivered milk to than I should have and probably more than someone of my tender years should have been aware of! He was also a fount of knowledge about the history of Bedwas and I was a willing audience for his tales. He had lead a colourful life and he told me bits and pieces when he was in the mood. It's worth recounting what I can remember and what I've been able to piece together over the years.

The Lewis Family showing the patriarch, Wyndham Garnett, in the centre. Kenvyn Lewis is on the right of the back row. I have a feeling that this photograph was taken near the abattoir at the back of W.G's butchers' shop in Church Street, Bedwas.

Francis John Kenvyn Lewis, to give Mr Lewis his full name, became a second-lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, being commissioned in August 1914. He was ordered to France and fought on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, where he stayed for six months. He did tell me that he took part in a cavalry charge there but, at the time, I had no idea of the significance of this. He came though all that, plus Ypres and Passchendaele, and was finally invalided out with typhoid and put in hospital in Wandsworth. He next went with his regiment to Ireland. On 10th October 1918, intending to travel home from Ireland on leave, he boarded the RMS Leinster, which was sailing to Holyhead at 9 am. He went to his cabin, began to get sorted out, when the purser appeared with a telegram from the CO in Limerick, telling him to get back to base. So he disembarked. Sixteen miles out of Dublin, 43 miles west of Anglesey, the German submarine UB-123, which had sneaked around the Irish coast from Scotland, fired two torpedoes at the Leinster, which in a rough sea sank with the loss of 529 lives – most of them officers and other ranks from the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Mr Lewis often mentioned his good luck.

 After all these adventures and near misses, he was demobilised with the rank of captain, which he never seemed to refer to, at least to me. He became a JP and, as such, he had the dubious honour of being reputedly the last person to read the Riot Act - to striking miners in the early 1930s (my grandmother never forgave him for this). During WW2 he commanded the Bedwas Home Guard, which meant patrolling the railway bridges at the top of the village and taking up prime position in the saloon bar of The Church House Inn (the first place I ever had an underage pint). When Dad’s Army was first broadcast in the Sixties, someone (Mervin the Butcher was it?) told me that Arthur Lowe was Mr Lewis to a tee. On the milk round we used to stop for breakfast in Lui Rabiotti's Café in Trethomas and, every now and again, Mr Lewis, Mervyn  and Lui would exchange tales of their time in the Home Guard. And, yes, it did sound exactly like Dad's Army. Thank goodness the Rhymney Valley was not on Hitler's target list.

Mr Lewis's base was a small dairy farm on Bedwas Mountain called Llywynllynffa (I've always liked that name and we used it for our house in Westerham in Kent. We never did get our postman to pronounce it). As well as the normal outbuildings associated with agriculture, I remember the outside lavatory that had two wooden seats, side by side. I could never understand how or why two people would ever want to go and have a cosy defaecate like that, though it is true that even now ladies vanish into the toilets together and spend ages there. Doing what? No man knows. No man wants to know. No man needs to know.

Mr Lewis was married to the lovely Mrs Violet Lewis. She was a Woodruff from Machen, a family of iron foundry owners who had a mansion called The Vedw, which was already in a ruinous state by the 1960s. when I used to roam around it with friends. Mrs Lewis - never Violet or Vi - used to help us wash, fill and cap the milk bottles at Llywynllynffa but never came out delivering. The only other help on the farm was the very shy, almost invisible, farm labourer called John Burt, who lived in ramshackle corrugated tin shack at the top of the farm drive. He was very difficult to engage in any conversation and was always described as being "a bit twp". I don't know whether he was or just preferred to keep himself to himself.

Mr and Mrs Lewis had a tragic family life. Their first child, Richard, tipped a kettle over himself and died of burns after a pioneering skin graft treatment went wrong - or so my mother said (and she had a good memory for this sort of thing). Their other child, Rodney, had muscular dystrophy and died in his teens. I can just about remember him and the fact that Mr Lewis used to take Rodney upstairs to bed by carrying him on his back - again told to me by my mother. So that’s the First World War, reading the Riot Act, two children dead and then death by lung cancer. Not so lucky after all.

 

Mr Lewis was a chain smoker, a real chain smoker. His brand of choice was Kensitas and one of my regular chores as we went around was to buy his cigarettes for him. No proof of age necessary in those days. All I had to do was to say that "they are for Mr Lewis" and they went down his account. This was the time when cigarettes came with coupons and he was always saving up for something. The cabin of the milk van was always festooned with coupons and redemption books. To be fair, he always warned me of the evils of smoking and never offered me any. His illness meant that he had to sell the business (and he made sure that I was taken on by Dai Davies who took it over ....but that's a story for another time) and eventually killed him. I visited him once when he was on his deathbed, his chest wheezing and heaving and the oxygen tanks lying about the floor. I went to his funeral but only at the graveside in St Barrwg's in Bedwas. His family grave is not too far from where some of my forebears lie.

 Mrs Lewis lived on her own at Llywynllynffa for another twenty years or so. I say she lived on her own but she did have the shy cowherd to look after her. John Burt, or so my mother said (again), did all her shopping, tended to the garden and did all the odd jobs on the farm. In effect, he was her manservant. She died in Caerphilly Miners' Hospital. Thinking about it, it was a miracle that she wasn't more affected by depression after all she had been through during her married life (and the death of her beloved niece, Linda Woodruff, in a horse riding accident, in 1961 when she was only 12. I was in Bedwas Junior Mixed School with her). But she was always cheerful and lively. It was as if, blessedly not of a fractious disposition anyway, she'd deliberately cut herself off from her woes, which were never mentioned. But that's what people did back then, just got on with it. She deserves to be remembered.

William Kendall: A discovered life: Part 1 - The Beginning

Mrs P's great great grandmother, Mary Johns Cook, was born Mary Johns Williams in St Germans, Cornwall, about 10 miles from where we live. As part of my researches into her family, I came across the burial record for her younger sister, Catherine Elizabeth Kendall (nee Williams), who was Mrs P's great great great aunt.

As the entry below shows, she was buried in St German's graveyard on March 22nd 1919. And then the next entry in the register caught my eye.

This was an entry for William Kendall, also buried on March 22nd. What was intriguing about this entry were the notes added: 'Scots Guards South Africa, "Old Contemptible" France '14. Died in the Military Hospital, Devonport'. I did establish that William was, indeed, Catherine's son as it's always unsafe to assume any relationship until it's validated. Which makes him Mrs P’s First Cousin, three times removed!

So, mother and son were buried on the same day- a double tragedy for the family. But did they die on the same day. Their respective death certificates tell the story.

William died first, on 17th March 1919 at the Military Hospital in Devonport. The cause of death is given as influenza/pneumonia, sadly not uncommon in this era. His rank and profession details are interesting: Corporal in the 343rd Road Construction Company of the Royal Engineers and also Labourer with the County (presumably Cornwall) Council. These details could be useful later.

His mother, Elizabeth, died three days later, on 20th March, at home in St German’s. Her cause of death is given as ‘heart disease’. Her death has been described as ‘sudden’. Is it too fanciful to suggest that it was the shock of her son’s death that caused her own demise?

Fittingly, they were buried together in St German’s graveyard and both lie in a grave marked with an official Commonwealth War Grave’s Commission headstone. I would have thought that having son and mother buried in an official war grave is a unique occurrence.

It comes as no surprise, then, to see William’s name appearing on the St German’s War Memorial, although his rank is given as ‘Private’ whereas his headstone shows ‘Corporal. In my experience, it’s not unusual to come across small errors of fact like this as there was no prescribed way of gathering the information for those appearing on these memorials.

The information gathered so far suggests that William Kendall had quite a long military career, taking in the Second Boer War, an early entry into France in the First World War (as an ‘Old Contemptible’) and continued service until the end of the war. It’s going to be intriguing to see how much more of the detail of William’s life can be discovered. Let the next phase of research begin.......

Dw i’n dysgu siarad Cwmraeg - with Owen and Parsnips

Hopefully, an old dog will be able to learn a new trick.

All my adult life I’ve made excuses about why I didn’t speak Welsh, like “I didn’t learn it in school” or “my family didn’t speak Welsh” or “Welsh speakers are strange and come from North Wales where the sheep are”. I was a little embarrassed every time I was asked but the truth was the real reason I didn’t speak Welsh was that I had never bothered to learn. Even when I spent 3 years in Welsh-speaking Aberystwyth - a retrospective major regret.

Anyway, I’m trying to remedy this by setting out to learn, what has been described by my friend Bill, “the language of the angels”. Of course, he’s biased as his first language is Welsh (and he comes from North Wales so I won’t mention the sheep). It’s very early days but my aim is to reach a stage that, when people ask me at some point in the future if I can speak Welsh, I can take a deep breath and say, “Ydw, dwi’n siarad Cymraeg” – although I will always have to add that I’m learning.  I’m realistic about it. It could be a life-time journey but what a great journey it has been so far. It’s not easy. It’s challenging. It’s mentally stimulating. It’s enjoyable. And it's definitely not like English! Or French.

Although Welsh is a 'small language', there are quite a few useful resources on the internet dedicated to learners at all levels. For now,  I’m using a basic grammar text book, a mix of digital bits and pieces for vocabulary and pronounciation , a YouTube channel taught by a 'proper' teacher, and a Duolingo course that’s like a book but with more bells and whistles and jingles and jokes. It sounds a lot but, as most of it is done in bed in the early hours with ear plugs in, it's not that intrusive.

Welsh Duolingo has a few characters with iconic Welsh names. (Some of them are gender-neutral and this confuses me a lot.) Sadly, they don’t show up as cartoons but as totally unrelated, faceless characters in the sentences. Sigh, the woes of a small language. Nevertheless, what they do do is to go on with their daily lives. And you do learn about them. Unfortunately, because the course is designed to be repetitive, the things they do are quite mundane. Usually household chores and travelling around Wales.

With one exception: Owen.

Everyone who’s done any amount of Duolingo Welsh knows Owen. He’s probably a middle-aged man who is a terrible influence on everyone.

Because of his parsnips addiction.

He’s always eating parsnips or trying to get his hands on more. He would travel all around the world to get the best parsnips. And sometimes sell them too. People around him are under his malign influence. Some might even say, these must be very special plants. Either 'parsnips' is a euphemism for something stronger, or Welsh nightclubs are strange places where enterprising types like Owen sell root vegetables.

Duolingo isn't perfect (the audio pronunciation can be somewhat erratic) but it's cheap (there is a free version but that's full of ads) and its gaming approach encourages sticking at it. If for no other reason,  I'll do it for Owen and his parsnips.

And who could fail to love a language that has a word like 'llwgrwobrwyo'?

Dartmoor Walk: White Tor from Peter Tavy

 A good day was promised so it was a good chance to go up onto Dartmoor whilst we could. It's been relatively dry for a while now and we could walk without having to slosh around too much. In the event, it was quite dry. I;m not too sure how much longer we'll be able to end a walk dry shod.

We've already done roughly two thirds of this route previously, but in the opposite direction to the way we took this time. Starting outside the church in Peter Tavy, we followed the West Devon Way to the church at Mary Tavy and then took miners' track and footpaths to Hill End Bridge. From there, we headed across Cudliptown Down and up to White Tor. From the lofty heights of this tor, we dropped down to Stephen's Grave and rejoined the West Devon Way back to our starting point. It came in at 7.25 miles and I'd rate it at the top end of the moderate range, although some might question this as the ascent of White Tor certainly had its moments.

St Peter's at Peter Tavy was built in the 14th century, with an older church on this site from the 1180s and the named rectors going back to that date. It has been restored in the 1800s. It's a typical granite church on the western side of Dartmoor.

The church interior - lots of stained glass and some wonderfully colourful ceiling bosses.

 These Renaissance carvings started life as a very specially carved pew set, maybe placed in the south transept, maybe up near the chancel, then they were taken down in the nineteenth century and made into a tower screen (note the keyhole and cutting for a door). After that, they were once again disassembled and placed in the south transept.

A green window into another world. We only get a beguiling glimpse of the garden beyond but, in this instance, I think it's enough. I don't want to see more, no matter how tempting it might be, just in case the mystery is lost.

And across some fields and alongside the River Tavy, we come across the second church on our walk, St Mary's at Mary Tavy. We've been here many times but it's never been open for us to visit. That's why the church is in silhouette as what lies within is a mystery to me.

Heading out of the valley now and heading onto the moor. That's a sunlit Cox Tor to the right and Boulter's Tor looming on the left.

The 19th Century Miner’s Dry of Wheal Friendship Mine – where the wet clothes of miners would be dried prior to their next shift. 

The lane leading up to Horndon. We've never actually walked up here when it's been as dry as this. Normally, it's like the bed of a stream.

Isn't it nice to see a welcoming sign? This is a private woodland but the public are invited to enter. If only all Dartmoor landowners had that philosophy.

Looking along the Creason Leat, with the leat itself curving away. The undergrowth is still very lush. coming in from Horndon Lane alongside mine leat. Originally water from the leat would have been used to feed the south area of the Wheal Friendship complex in Mary Tavy. But nowadays the leat is one of two sources of water for the Mary Tavy power station (built in 1930’s). The leat feeds Wheal Bennetts reservoir before entering a 36in pipe and descending the 230 ft to the station to feed #1 plant at the power station.

The weir on the Tavy at Hill Bridge. The fish pass is on the right and the take-off for the Creason Leat is on the left. I like the way all the leaves are lined up like a brown strip.

Look very, very closely and you might just make out the finger post pointing us in the direction we wanted. Perhaps there should be a finer post pointing to the finger post to make certain that walkers do not miss the way.

That pile of rocks just off centre at the top marks the fort on White Tor. That's where we were heading. The vertical distance makes it look closer than it actually is. It was quite a slog getting to the top, through a fairly extensive field of granite clitter.

To the north-east, the sun is shining at the top of Tavy Cleave, the source of the River Tavy.

The army observation post at the top of White Tor. The tor is just on the edge of the Merrivale and Willsworthy military ranges and, when they are firing, the red flag of warning will be flying.

Looking roughly south, with a glistening strip of the sea in the distance.

Looking through the granite clitter surrounding White Tor, with Leeden Tor in the distance. We were there a few weeks ago.

This is a sorry tale of a young man called George Stephens who lived in nearby Peter Tavy around 300 years ago. He fell deeply in love with a young local girl, however either she did not return his advances or her parents deemed George not to be suitable and they never were together. As a result George was heartbroken and committed suicide by poisoning himself. Any death from suicide could not be buried in hallowed ground so George was buried on the edge of Dartmoor at this spot, hence Stephens Grave and the headstone above.

Not sure that closing the gate will be very effective at keeping the ticks out.

A fairly typical low level deciduous woodland on the edge of the moor. A mixture of trees and boulders of varying sizes.

The most moss covered boulder I've seen in a long while.

Sunday afternoon stroll at Cotehele

 It's never less than a pleasure to visit Cotehele House and walk around the gardens. There is always something different to see each time we come and this visit coincided with the early stages of the construction of the Chistmas Garland. Enjoy the photographs.

The house settling in for the winter.

A rather striking Maple/Sycamore that has yet to shed all of its leaves.

The low setting sun and the Mother Orchard. It was a just a few weeks ago that we were here with our friends, Glynis and Mike, for our annual apple scrumping visit.

A copper sculpture celebrating bees and their vital role in pollinating fruit trees, such as those in the Mother Orchard. 

Apple trees and shadows.

The pond in the Upper Garden, with the dogwoods catching the late afternoon light very nicely.

Those autumn leaves come tumbling down.................

An early flowering single camellia, with guest.

Looking over the herbaceous border, towards the viaduct at Calstock.

The Christmas Garland under construction.

This year it looks a little more colourful than last year. Coincidentally, the following clip from the BBC was put up today.