C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 52

#AmReading: Wales, Land of the Living Dead III: Welsh Vampire Lore & Vampire Lit (1940s-1997)

Introduction

The vampires of Wales are few and far between, and Aaron only looks at novels featuring vampires set in the Welsh borders.

In this post, I start by looking at some of the vampire/vampiric lore in Wales, from Arawn’s doomed men of the Hunt to seriously weird tales of vampiric furniture, and then at the texts that Aaron considers. There will be some spoilers, but to be honest the spoilers in Aaron’s discussions just make me want to read them more.

Vampires in Welsh Folklore

There are hardly any vampire legends of ancient or medieval date in Wales, but they do exist. Some proto-vampire tales exist, such as the tale told by an English knight c.1149 of a “Welsh wizard”, deceased, who returned by night to call the names of his former neighbours, who instantly fell sick and died within three days.

In terms of mythology and folktales, it was said that dead men doomed to join Arawn and his Hounds would visit earth to drink the blood of the living and the dead (that is, the blood of corpses). Arawn hunted the avaricious and sinful, but you did not have to be doomed to join the Hunt in order to return as a vampire.

An old story attached to a Carmarthenshire yeoman was very curious. The family had lived for generations in the same house, situated in a lonely spot. The old yeoman in question was very grasping, and in his generation they said he would “suck blood out of a stone.” He died, leaving his money and possessions to his eldest son. When that man died, he was duly laid out, and the death-chamber was shut for the night. In the morning they found marks on the body, which everybody said had been made by a vampire. The family came to the conclusion that the old yeoman had been sucking the corpse to see if he “could get something out of it.” In later generations, if any marks were found upon the body of a dead member of the family, they said the “Old wretch had been at work again”.

~ Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales, p. 58. 

That said, one of the weirdest vampire tales I have ever heard comes from Llantwit Major, South East Wales, and the tale of the vampire chairs. This is a little misleading: the tale is apparently from the 16thC and tells of the spirits of the dead residing in their old furniture, who will bite anyone who sits in the chairs if the spirits are displeased. One armchair in Glamorgan especially dislikes ministers, and one such guest in its room was plagued with bites.

The story goes that a minister came to stay in a farmstead which used to be a dower-house, and spent the night peacefully in the best bedroom which was kitted out with antique furniture from its old dower-house days. All was fine until the next morning, when he sat in an old armchair by the window to read his Bible. When he got up to get breakfast, he found the back of his hand was bleeding from what looked like a bite mark. He washed and bound his hand, and his host said that yes, there must be a nail in the chair, as several guests had complained of scratches on their palms when they sat there. The minister thought this was odd – his marks were not on his palm, after all – but thought little more about it. He went to bed the next night and this time woke up in great discomfort, feeling a pain in his left side ‘like the gnawing of a dog’. He got up with difficulty and struck a light, and found marks across his ribs, just like on the back of his hand, which were bleeding. It took him a while to staunch the blood, but he managed it, and sat up for the rest of the night reading his Bible.

He went to fetch his grey mare from the stables the next day, and found that the mare had bleeding bite marks on her neck that looked the same as the ones on his hand and side. He deduced that the chair was ‘a vampire chair’, that is, it contained a vampiric spirit who disliked men of God.

Ministers were called to lay the vampire and it was thought this had been achieved (in 1850), but afterwards people still complained of scratches, so perhaps not.

Other vampire furniture is also reported in Glamorganshire, including a vampire bed in Cardiff. This bed claimed the life of a baby, and the doctor examining the infant said that something had sucked its blood from a hole in its neck “like sucking an egg”. When a second baby was born to the family, this time the husband slept in the best bedroom in the four-poster which was the cause of all the trouble, and he too experienced a suffocating weight upon him in the night and saw that he had the same mark on his neck. His friend wanted to stay in the bed to see if this was true, and also confirmed the same experience. No one used that Elizabethan bed after that.

These stories appear in Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales, pp. 54-8.

Baron Hill, Beaumaris, Anglesey, certainly looks like it contains the undead. Built in 1612, it underwent various stages of development, but was fire damaged in the Second World War and abandoned. There are some reports of vampiric activity connected with the mansion, but … these are modern in origin, and it’s probably not a vampire.

Vampirism in Welsh Gothic literature is also more of a modern phenomenon. References to the folklore surrounding Arawn and his association with vampires are more the preserve of Speculative Fiction. There are modern takes on it like historical fantasy The Arawn Prophecy, C. David Belt, (Bentley Enterprises, 2018), erotic Fae/paranormal fantasy Steal the Sun, Lexi Blake, (DLZ Entertainment, 2014), but even in Spec Fic, Arawn’s connection with blood-drinking undead is not a commonly explored motif compared with other vampire legends and lore.

 

Border Vampires

Aaron only looks at a couple of texts here, and these are all Border fictions. The Borders (what are now known as the March, but not to be confused with the medieval definition of the Welsh Marches), have a complicated relationship with Welsh/English identities. Wales can be seen as the blood-sucking entity draining resources over the border, while from the Welsh side, the view is the same, but of the English.

Aaron looks at the second book in the John Mayo series, written by British pulp-fiction author Guy N. Smith. The first John Mayo book, The Black Fedora, first published in 1991 and re-released as an eBook in 2012, is a kind of paranormal pulp noir set in Lichfield, Staffordshire, featuring, among other things, assassination threats against a descendant of Jack the Ripper, threats of vandalism and theft made against the priceless Lichfield Gospels, and the Antichrist. The second book in the series is The Knighton Vampires (1993), set in the Welsh town of Knighton on the border, where Mayo goes to recover from the events in Book One. Knighton, however, is also getting to grips with some recent trauma: the vandalism and terrorist activities of the Welsh National Activists, and mysterious deaths linked to vampirism.

The town’s oldest inhabitant, Sid Knowles, explains to Mayo,

‘”These Welsh loonies are trying to drive out the English. I’m Welsh,” he added, almost apologetically. “But Knighton’s multi-racial. Welsh and English. We mix, no bother. It’s these activators, or whatever you call them, stirring it all up.’

~The Knighton Vampires (1993), Guy N. Smith, p. 27

Knowles later describes the Welsh dead in the same way as the living terrorists, as waiting to rise out of their graves ‘like that Dracula chap’ and drive out the English. The vampires in this case may not actually be vampires at all, but this is up to Mayo to find out.

Aaron notes that the positioning of vampires in Border fiction reflects the inhabitants’ ability to Other both the Welsh and the English at the same time; neither ‘side’ is properly one or the other, but instead occupy the liminal space of a frontier society (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, pp. 131-2). Within this liminal space, the supernatural can embody a variety of positions and metaphors.

Originally published as Crybbe in 1993, Phil Rickman’s standalone novel published as Curfew in the U.S. (repr. 2013), is a clash of cultures and perspectives as a New Age forward-thinking protagonist struggles to understand the apparently backward-looking town of Crybbe, which falls into the Town With A Dark Secret Gothic trope. In this case, the local traditions turn out to be holding an old vampiric evil at bay, but the inhabitants won’t talk about what’s going on or admit that they have seen apparitions or spectres. It is their position as a border town historically caught between raids from the Welsh and English that have bred a people who survive by silence and keeping their heads down. These themes echo the critiques of Welsh society and culture by frustrated Welsh-language authors of the 1980s that we looked at in the previous post.

In Bridge Across Forever (1993) by Regan Forest, another pulp supernatural fiction, an outsider feels the divide more keenly, demonstrating the foreigner’s view of this borderland and a more simplistic contrast. The protagonist, Ellen Cole, is American, interested in her Welsh ancestry. While visiting the border village of Wrenn’s Oak, she stands on the medieval bridge connecting Wales to England, standing with one foot on each side, and is overcome with a deep sorrow. She is drawn in and wooed by the Welsh demonic figure of Brennig Cole, her own 17thC ancestor, cursed by a witch. She is rescued, of course, by her American boyfriend who unexpectedly turns up to find her. He appears on the English side of the bridge, and she tells him not to cross into Wales – she goes to him, instead, and thus escapes the malignant Welsh influence. On the surface, this novel is a straightforward Gothic romance, but when set in context of the main themes that characterise the Welsh Gothic, the Welsh past is again represented as a threat to modernity and to the new identities of the American Self. There is a danger in looking too deeply into the dark waters of Welsh history and ancestry; it will consume you, possess you, drag you down to the watery depths of its own grave, and you will drown with it.

Aaron puts it like this, drawing parallels between this type of ‘American discovery’ novel with the ‘first contact’ Gothic novels of the 1780s:

In texts such as these, Offa’s Dyke is a liminal zone between the natural and the supernatural, as well as between two countries; along its path the powers of the underworld are released. Such portrayals reflect the view of the Welsh as exotically ‘other’, as ‘strangers’; to cross the border and enter the Welsh ‘Reservation’ is to enter alien territory, and encounter exotic ‘others’, who harbour a repressed but perpetual resentment against their dispossessors, likely to manifest itself in a demonic manner particularly at the crucial barrier point of the borderlands.

~Jane Aaron, Welsh Gothic, pp. 133-4.

There is also, however, the chance that those crossing into this zone will ‘go native’, chasing nostalgia for a freer way of life and a means of escape from their own oppressive and repressive lives.

Fairy Tale (1996) by Alice Thomas Ellis (the pen-name of Anna Margaret Duckworth, 1932-2005) plays with this theme, but this is a Fae story not a vampire tale, although the fairy men do kill human males and mate with human females. Blood is used in a Brothers Grimm sort of a way to get the protagonist, Eloise, with magical Changeling child, but otherwise it doesn’t fit this post. Aaron discusses it last, as a springboard for Part II which covers ‘Things That Go Bump in the Celtic Twilight’.

My next set of posts, covering Welsh folklore and fairy lore, will continue to draw on Aaron’s chapters in the second part, but I have moved her Epilogue on Post-Devolution Gothic (1997-2013) to be the next post in this series just for the sake of chronological completeness.

Next time: Post-Devolution Gothic

The next post is the last one that looks at these texts by time period – this one has some personal reflections too, and after that it’s all about the Welsh folklore and fairy lore that has found its way as motifs into Welsh Gothic through the ages.

Meet the Locals: Mercy Hillsworth, Resurrectionist

Here’s a cut scene introducing Mercy, a side character in The Crows (coming January 2020). You can pre-order/buy the novel via Amazon and Smashwords! The printed edition will be available from January via Amazon with five original illustrations (the ebook versions have three).

Mercy, who trained as a hairdresser after school, is now a supervisor at SupaPrice, the local supermarket on the high street. She prefers the term ‘human-passing’, since, unlike humans, she and those like her are born with a birthmark indicating the number of years they have to live. Mercy’s number is in the 90s, and until she reaches this number, she can’t stay dead.

Her Pinterest mood board is here: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/cmrosens/pagham-on-sea-mood-board/mercy-hillsworth-supermarket-supervisor-resurrecti/

14 April

“Me toe’s acting up,” Brian Folger complained to his younger customer, leaning against the vegetable crates outside his shop. A large, balding man with an arresting voice that made escaping a conversation difficult once he’d decided to start one, the greengrocer was a familiar sight on the high street, bearing a strong resemblance to a flour-sack in overalls. “That means trouble. June’ll tell you, me toe is never wrong about trouble. Like an antenna for trouble, is me big toe.”

Mercy Hillsworth was already late for work, and, for once, didn’t want to chat. The anniversary of her grandmother’s death was always a difficult day. Mercy’s dad always went to the grave at ten o’clock, taking a half-day at work if he needed to, a well-worn annual routine he had undertaken since the tender age of eight. Every year since passing her driving test Mercy stood awkwardly by with a bunch of lilies in one hand and her car keys in the other, ever the family’s get-away driver.

This morning, Mr Hillsworth had been predisposed to reminisce, work pressures getting to him along with a myriad of other small niggling concerns, all of it finding their outlet in a diatribe against the cold-hearted woman long in her grave.

Mercy wasn’t in the mood to shoulder Brian’s podiatric concerns on top of that.

“Sorry about that, Bri.” She clutched the bag of cherries June had weighed out for her, her break-time treat, concentrating on the high street traffic.

“Started as soon as that woman bought the Fairwood place, you know, The Crows,” Brian went on, talking more to himself than to her. “Been playing up for months now. Off and on, you know, but now more on than off. Did you hear, Evie Rogers’ lad said they found a skeleton in the well?”

Mercy had already stepped off the kerb, but this piece of gossip startled her. She had known The Crows long before the army of contractors had worked their magic.

It loomed in her mind’s eye, the roof caved in, the whole of the west wing crumbled away into the weeds. She remembered the remains of the proud front wall with its single empty window frame at the very top, staring down like a defiant Cyclops at its own decay. There had always been something odd about that house. It had always seemed as if it was waiting for something – or someone, perhaps.

She had never liked it.

Mercy remembered breaking into the house through the French windows and taking a small token to prove her bravery like every other local child. In her case, it had been a paperweight. She remembered the creak of decaying wood, the smell of damp and smoke damage from where other kids had set fires which never caught. The paperweight was in what had once been a study, dust-sheets draped over what little furniture was still there, and it had been lying in a corner on the floor. She’d been drawn to the pretty coloured spiral at its heart, fair compensation for being drawn further in than she’d meant to go. Some of her friends had said it called you like a mermaid, and the sadder you were the stronger you could hear it. Mercy couldn’t hear anything except the wind soughing through the holes and cracks, and that sounded more like sobbing than singing. Perhaps she had never been sad enough to hear the song.

Only once had she thought she knew what they meant: driving up Redditch Lane on the afternoon Jazz told her, after five dates, he didn’t think they could see each other anymore, it was all too weird for him, what she was, what she could do. And it was only five dates and she hadn’t known him long, and he was older than her and not her type and he spent all his time fiddling around inside dead people, but she had her sister on speaker in the car and could barely keep herself from crying. And there it was – The Crows. Broken and ruined and waiting for her. She’d stopped the car outside the gates, not meaning to park there, not knowing why.

The house was the same as always. Silent. Watching. A sullen wreck. But over the sound of her sister’s common sense and supportive outrage and a thousand variations on “he doesn’t know what he’s missing, babe”, she could almost hear a resonance in the air, something magnetic, melodic, almost like a call.

Was that what people meant?

But she’d let Hannah talk her around, composed herself, and carried on driving up to the A-road, gone to Hastings for the day and met up with some school friends, and Jazz had, after all, come around. It had been a roller coaster week where, just once, reality had allowed a happy ending. They’d been together ever since.

She hadn’t thought of that for years.

[image error]Tumblr Collage https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/814659020070917635/

Lost in thought, she stepped out into the road without looking.

There was a hard thud as Mercy was thrown against the bonnet of a speeding car, followed by a sickening smack as she hit the tarmac.

“Bloody hell,” Brian Folger muttered, as the car swerved off without stopping. “Ju-une! June love, get out here a minute! Mercy’s copped it!” He shambled inside to report the hit-and-run, while June Folger bustled out, wiping her hands on her apron, to see if she could help.

“Oh, not again, poor lamb! I wish she’d look where she was going…”

Mercy had been thrown into the middle of the road. Another car braked sharply, stopping inches from her head. Her platinum bob, streaked with highlights of shocking pink and bubble-gum blue, was matted with fresh blood. Her sightless eyes were open, fixed on the sky. June pulled down the hem of Mercy’s short peach dress to preserve her modesty, tutting at the large hole in the younger woman’s creamy lace tights. Her neck was obviously broken.

June rearranged her, puffing as she kneeled down (“Not with your hip, June!” Brian shouted from the shop door), and carefully – or as carefully as she could while exerting the necessary force – yanked Mercy’s broken leg into a straighter position. She tried to hold the limp head straight.

June was down there for ten minutes, holding up the traffic, before Mercy’s chest swelled with air and she sat bolt upright in the road.

“Bastard!”

“Didn’t stop, love,” June said, checking the bones in Mercy’s neck with practised fingers. Onlookers had gathered, cars queuing up or trying to turn around. Community Police Officers were running towards them in their hi-viz jackets. “Bri got his plates though, he’ll be for it when they catch him. CCTV at the front of the shop and everything. Some people are brazen, aren’t they?”

[image error]https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/814659020070925118/

Mercy drew her knees up, checking her legs. They had mended, but her tights and bag of cherries were not so easily salvageable. “Bugger.” She caught sight of the approaching CPOs, one already on his radio as he ran towards them. “Bugger.” She didn’t have time for this.

“Oh, I’ll get you a new bag,” June said, waving a gobsmacked bystander off like a fly. “Come on.”

June needed more help than Mercy in getting up off the road: Brian had to waddle over to heave her up, leaving Mercy to scramble to her feet without assistance.

“I’m going to be so late,” Mercy moaned, dusting herself down. “You can tell the officers my details, right June? I don’t have to stay?”

“No, no, you get on, are you sure you don’t want those cherries?” June limped to the pavement, leaning on Brian’s arm.

“No, thanks though!” Mercy was safely across the road on the other side. She waved. “See you again!”

Off she went, still intrigued by the newest Crows story.

#AmReading: Wales, Land of the Living Dead II: Zombies and Zombification (1940s-1997)

Introduction

This post looks at the novels that Aaron discusses in Chapter 4 of Welsh Gothic which features zombies, and the themes that the novels use. In the next post, I’ll look at the vampire stories of the Welsh borders that Aaron picks out. Again, this is not meant to be exhaustive, and there are probably many more!

Aaron also talks about the [metaphorical] resurrection of the repressed in the form of retaliation – what happens when the contemporary Welsh of the post-war Gothic fictions turn on their English masters (violently) and take over their position in the community. I’m going to skip these in this post, but this is worth a read too.

Not discussed in Chapter 4 are the psychological horror stories set in Wales which definitely do fit the Welsh Gothic genre – Sheep (1994) by Simon Maginn fits this description, ‘adapted’ for the film The Dark to the point of being entirely rewritten in 2005. I’ve reviewed Sheep as an example of the Isolated Protagonist trope in my previous Goth is [Not] Dead post, Isolation.

When the Past Attacks

The main themes of a lot of these stories revolve around the dismissal of the Welsh past by the contemporary inhabitants of Wales. This frequently leads to possession, insanity, horror and death. The attitudes can be ambiguous: the protagonists may feel they deserve this treatment by the ancestors, but at the same time their present state of impotence prevents them from doing anything constructive. Equally, the protagonists may not wish to be dragged back into the bogs and lakes of prehistory, but their exacting forebears won’t let them live their lives in the present or allow them to take their place in the future.

Chwedlau’r Meini (Legends of the Stones, 1946) by Meuryn, the pen-name of Robert John Rowlands, (1880-1967), is one such tale. Because the main character has not defended his family’s inheritance as he ought to have done, the prehistoric (un)dead come back to haunt him in a spine-chilling supernatural encounter.

Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night, 1961) is an iconic novel of the 1960s by Caradog Pritchard (1904-1980), translated into English by Phillip Mitchell. The novel is pervaded by a sense of hopelessness, night, and death. The protagonist is a haunted boy who grows into a haunted man; his mother is committed to an asylum, and his frustration and growing impotence to change his situation result in tragedy when he kills a girl to end her own suffering. After imprisonment he returns to the same village, where he is still plagued by the conquered Queen of the Black Lake, a supernatural figure who has haunted him throughout the story. She lives in the depths of the lake and her woes echo the woes of his mother, the dead girl, his community and his country, yearning for someone to avenge her.

Vengeance of the conquered as a key theme in fiction was fuelled by real-life pessimism. The leader of Plaid Cymru, Saunders Lewis, expressed the belief that nothing short of revolution would halt the decline of the Welsh language in his radio broadcast of 1962. This fear was also expressed in Welsh-language fiction, which continued to be published despite its ever-shrinking audience.

Y Gromlech yn y Haidd, (The Cromlech in the Barley, 1970) by Islwyn Ffowc Elis (1924-2004) features an English [and English-speaking] farmer, Bill Henderson, who is angered by the presence of three Celtic standing stones on his property and is determined to get rid of them. In pulling them down, holes are left in the ground from which primeval forces rise to possess him. Here, things conquered 700 years before return to castigate the present inhabitants of the land for disturbing their rest, in some ways taking vengeance by occupying said inhabitants after being rejected from their own place in the world by their conquerors and by Henderson himself.

Henderson addresses the ‘hairy, knotted, satanic things’ rising from the ground:

O’r gorau. Mi’ch codais chi o’ch bedd. Ond fe gawsoch ddigon o amser i farw. Tair mil a hanner o flynyddoedd. Ydy hynny ddim yn ddigon ichi? . . . Sut roeddwn i i wybod ych bod chi yma o hyd? . . . ‘Dydych chi ddim i fod yma, Mae’ch amser chi wedi hen fynd heibio. Does dim lle ichi yn y byd ‘ma heddiw. Dydyn ni ddim yn credu mewn pethau fel chi . . . Na, peidiwch . . . peidiwch â dod i mewn imi . . . gadewch lonydd i ‘mhen i, beth bynnag! F’ymennydd i, Henderson, ydy hwn!

All right, I disturbed you in your graves. But you had plenty of time to die. Three and a half thousand years. Is that not enough for you? . . . How was I to know you were here still? . . . You’re not supposed to be here. Your time has long gone by. There’s no place for you in this world today. We don’t believe in things like you . . . No, don’t, don’t come inside me, leave me alone, my head, at least! This is my brain, Henderson’s!

~ Y Gromlech yn yr Haidd, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, pp. 90-2.

The zombie as it appears in film, arising from Haitian Voodoo culture and associated closely with the revolt of the colonised against their oppressors, first appeared in Welsh-language fiction in Rev. David Griffith Jones’s 1966 novel, Ofnadwy Ddydd (Day of Horror/Fearful Day).

Ofnadwy Ddydd features the dead rising from their graves all over Britain in response to a pious man’s prayer, who appeals to God to raise the dead and prove the atheists wrong. We are back to the Gothicization of chapel culture here, since the dead prove a bit of a liability and start eating living people. Eventually, he is persuaded to ‘undo’ or rescind the prayer, and lay the dead to rest again.

Jones’ second novel, Y Clychau (The Bells, 1972) has the preservative powers of a local bog as the reason why prehistoric zombies have clung to a half-life for two thousand years. In this novel, the English protagonist is a sympathetic character, a scientist passionate about preserving the bog where 2000-year-old plants have survived as well as the inhabitants of a drowned settlement whose bells can still be heard, according to local legend. The discovery of the undead inhabitants of the bog only makes this mystery fluid more intriguing, and he becomes even more determined to save it… FOR SCIENCE!

In this novel, it is the English government who are the antagonists, and the order to drain the bog is given. The bog is duly drained despite the best efforts of the scientists and their team, destroying the ancient figures who drag their rotting corpses into town, too decomposed to do any real harm. Aaron argues that, ‘[t]he centralized state is the enemy of both the zombies and the modern-day Welsh, whose religion and Celticity the zombies represent’, (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 122).

In Roy Lewis’s short story, ‘Y Bwystfil’ (‘The Beast’), published in his collection Dawns Angau (Dance of Death, 1981), is about a loving family pet Doberman called Rolo who is killed by the supernatural forces he attacks, and returns as a possessed zombie dog to attack his family. [Cujo was published in 1983 and Pet Sematary in 1989, so Stephen King had no influence on the plot in this short story]. Rolo’s owners disturbed the ancient powers of Caer Arthur, and, as in other tales, the witnesses of the old world will not forgive the modern Welsh for ignoring or discounting their responsibilities towards their heritage and culture.

Zombies are also metaphors, and do not always literally appear.

This is echoed in one of the the influential women’s prison novel, Yma o Hyd (Still Here, 1985), by Angharad Tomos. Tomos is an author of many Welsh-language children’s books and a tireless campaigner for the Welsh language, and her novels (for adults) reflect challenging and painful views of her own experiences and the tensions of the 1970s and ’80s. In this novel, the narrator, Blodeuwedd, imprisoned for her actions in defence of the Welsh language, describes herself as a zombie and the Welsh as a masochist nation unwilling to fight for themselves. The title echoes Dafydd Iwan’s far more optimistic Welsh Nationalist song, Yma o Hyd, which features the refrain,

We’re still here,

Ry’n ni yma o hyd,

Despite everyone and everything,

Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth,

We’re still here.

Ry’n ni yma o hyd.

A version of this song with an English translation is available on YouTube.

In another of her novels, Hen Fyd Hurt (Mad Old World, 1982), a disillusioned young woman named Heulwen struggles with unemployment after college, and is inspired to do something proactive for Wales. Llewellyn the Last appears to her in dreams, demanding action: when Prince Charles makes a royal visit to Caernarfon to display his new bride, Princess Diana, in 1982, Heulwen feels a protest should be made and looks to Llewellyn for further guidance, but he doesn’t appear again. No protest occurs, and Heulwen is frustrated and depressed at her own impotence and the state of her society. Struggling to live with her guilt and shame, Heulwen hears a repeat of the Saunders Lewis speech on the radio about the state of the Welsh language and its decline, and in utter despair throws herself out of a plate glass window. Committed to the local psychiatric hospital, Heulwen at last feels as one with the other self-confessed ‘zombies’ in this ‘mad old world’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 128).

For an English-language author, Mary Jones, the Welsh language was no zombie language but a living reality, encountered by her English-speaking protagonist who decides to walk around Wales when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Her novel, Resistance, is a good note to end on. Although her protagonist has been disinherited from the language, she reconnects to it and to Wales more strongly through the characters she meets at a hotel. For her, Wales is not a land of the living dead, but a land of the living.

After all: it is a base instinct, the need to survive.

Next time: Land of the Living Dead III (1940s-1997)

Since the vampire section of this chapter is the shortest, in the next post (coming on Monday!) I not only look at Aaron’s discussion of vampires in Welsh Gothic border fiction, but also at actual Welsh vampire folklore! I promise, it’s less depressing!

#AmReading: Wales, Land of the Living Dead I: Context and Poetry (1940s-1997)

Introduction

In this first post (this time, one of three) I will look at Chapter 4 of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic, (UWP, 2013). This time, it’s a look at Wales as the land of the living dead in metaphorical terms, putting these texts into historical context, and looking at these themes in poetry. Next time (Thursday 28 Nov), I’ll look at the zombies/walking dead that Aaron identifies, both figuratively and literally, and the third one (Monday 2 Dec) will be vampires on the Welsh borders and some actual vampire folklore!

Depending on the story, the living dead represent different things: usually, it’s the state of Wales, its language, and its communities, clinging to places where the industry has gone, leaving behind mass unemployment and no reason for the towns to exist anymore.

Some of the novels Aaron discusses in this chapter are in Welsh, and translations of the quotes as well as the quotes themselves are provided side-by-side in the text.

Land of the Living Dead

Aaron briefly discusses the background to the dark feelings expressed and fictionalised in the Gothic texts of this modern period, but I will give a bit more information here too.

Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist party founded in 1925 advocating for Welsh independence from the Union, grew in membership during the 1950s when proposals came in to flood the village of Capel Celyn and turn the valley into a reservoir to serve the people of Liverpool, England.

By obtaining authority to create the reservoir via an Act of Parliament, Liverpool City Council didn’t need to consult the inhabitants of the Trywern valley or the village itself, and didn’t need the consent of the local Welsh authorities. Capel Celyn was one of the last Welsh-language-only communities left in Wales, and the proposal was highly controversial. The bill was opposed by 35 out of 36 Welsh MPs in Parliament (the 36th MP didn’t vote) but it passed in 1962. The village was evacuated, the community scattered, and the valley flooded in 1965. 48 people lost their homes, and all the buildings, including the cemetery, the chapel, and the school, were submerged. Families who had relatives buried in the cemetery were given the option to disinter them and move them somewhere else; eight bodies were disinterred, but the remainder were left where they were.

It is this event that inspired the metaphors in R. S. Thomas’s 1968 poem, ‘Reservoirs’, quoted below – and his is a challenging perspective, given that he blames the Welsh people for their own complicity in the drowning of their culture.

[image error]Flag of the Free Wales Army By Trashcanmonkey – Image:Gb-w-eag.gif (www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/g/gb-w-eag.gif), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3262051

The ineffectual opposition of the Welsh MPs on this issue underlined Plaid Cymru’s argument that they were essentially powerless. This episode gave impetus to the question of devolved government for Wales. Paramilitary groups founded in the 1960s like the Free Wales Army and the Meibion Glyndŵr were not taken seriously by the mainstream media, but they did pose a threat to public order.

A key moment of national trauma came in 1966, when, after years of demanding the National Coal Board take responsibility for the spoil heaps on the mountain above the village of Aberfan, one of the spoil heaps finally slipped down the mountainside on 21 October around 09:15, and engulfed the junior school, killing 109 children and 4 teachers. Anger grew as the British government forced the Aberfan Memorial Fund to pay for part of the clean-up operation – to the tune of £150,000. The remaining tips were not immediately cleared and were only taken away after a lengthy legal battle with the residents. It did, however, lead to the passing of the Mines and Quarries (Tips) Act of 1969.

The injustice and trauma of Aberfan rocked the nation and fuelled protests and support for Plaid Cymru and, in some quarters, for the paramilitary groups. The FWA were accused of plotting to disrupt the investiture of Prince Charles at Caernarfon in 1969, and nine men were arrested and kept in solitary confinement for 11 weeks after their arrests. Bombings did occur after the flooding of Trywern and the submerging of Capel Celyn, but they were carried out by groups unconnected to the FWA and this trial was ‘about free speech’, according to John Mortimer QC. For more, you could read John Humphries, Freedom Fighters: Wales’s Forgotten ‘War’ 1963-1993, (UWP, 2008).

The 1970s get painted as the worst post-war decade, the years of civil unrest, police corruption and porn, but there are other takes on that. Ending with the 1979 election that swept an Oxford-educated grocer’s daughter from Grantham into No. 10 as the new Prime Minister, it was definitely the decade of change. The changes it brought were not all welcome.

Meibion Glyndŵr [The Sons of Glyndŵr] firebombed around 220 English-owned homes between 1979 and 1994, and planted bombs in Conservative party offices in London, and in estate agent offices across England and Wales. In 1989, clarifying their position and explicitly rejecting violence against migrants and immigrants of colour, they declared, “every white settler is a target. We will bury English Imperialism“.

The reasons for the founding of the Welsh-language TV channel, S4C, in 1980, was also controversial. The late Plaid Cymru MP, Gwynfor Evans, threatened to go on hunger strike if the channel was not funded, a move that was criticised at the time and since by political opponents and some of his political successors.

Meanwhile, for many in Wales, the feeling was that it was better-the-Devil-you-know, and ironically the terrorist acts of these groups helped to push public feeling in the opposite direction. My grandfather, a lifelong Labour voter, refused to vote for Plaid because he associated Welsh nationalism with extremism, citing Evans’ hunger strike and the firebombing. There was a referendum concerning Welsh devolution in 1979, and this was resoundingly defeated.

[image error]Poster for Pride (2014), Source: http://www.impawards.com/intl/uk/2014/pride.html, Fair Use Policy Wikimedia Commons

During the 1980s, however, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) became a hate-figure for her policies, many of which were regarded as inhumane, and in particular miners blamed her for the pit closures and for gutting Wales of its industry. The 2014 film, Pride, is one of the best-known films about this era, although was criticised in some quarters for not casting Welsh actors in the roles and for the dodgy accents employed by the ‘Big Name’ members of the cast.

In the 1990s, support for devolution was gathering momentum, although many in South East Wales were opposed and voted overwhelmingly against it in the referendum. Some believed that the cronyism and tribalism of Welsh politics would scupper any meaningful action that a Welsh Government could undertake, that the powers would not go far enough and we would be saddled with an expensive drain on our economy viz a viz the salaries and expenses we the tax-payers would have to fund, and white elephants of shiny new buildings we didn’t need but would have to pay for.

My grandfather believed a combination of these things, and grimly watched the news with real anger and resignation as the Yes vote won out by a narrow majority of only 6,721 votes.

He remained a critic of the Welsh Government and of politicians in general, and when I once, as a fairly young child, said maybe I could go into politics and help change things, he told me, “Don’t. You’ll become like all the others.” I protested that I wouldn’t, that I would be different, that I cared. He said, “No. They all say that at the beginning, but they aren’t. And you won’t be any different either. You’ll change. It’s what happens.” (He also advised me not to become an actor, or I would lose myself and go mad. “That’s what happened to Peter Sellers.”)

 

Zombie Nation

Ruth Bidgood (b. 1922) has been described as one of Wales’ foremost English-language poets in the last half-century. Her poetry, an intense evocation of place, meditates upon the landscape of Wales, the constructions of past and present, and the complexities of the notion of ‘home’. Aaron opens the fourth chapter with Bidgood’s poem, ‘The Zombie-Makers’, written in 1969-70 but first published in 2012 in Matthew Jarvis, Ruth Bidgood, Writers of Wales Series, (UWP, 2012), ‘Appendix B: Two Unpublished Early Poems’, pp. 133-4.

Her anthology Above the Forests, which marked her 90th birthday, was also published in 2012. You can listen to some of Bidgood’s recordings, including the titular poem ‘Above the Forests‘, which also plays with a sense of undead and living dead within the landscape, on the Poetry Archive.

Seventh hell is for the zombie-makers

who cut the heart out while it faintly beats

and clamp whole valleys to a heart-and-lung machine

of reservoir and forestry – work now, die later –

then switch off. As the blood congeals,

here come the corpse cosmeticians, bland embalmers,

to prettify the violated body

with labelled forest trail and picnic area,

and fake a ghoulish animation

that is not life, and mocks at death.

~

If you must kill a land,

let it die, then.

Llewelyn’s head, a death-in-life on Cheapside once,

rotted at last to the dignity

of dust, like the sundered body

under the altar in remote Cwmhir.

~ ‘The Zombie-Makers’ by Ruth Bidgood, (1969-70)

The poem evokes the death of Llewelyn the Last (1282), whose head was severed after his death and whose body was entombed in the Abbey of Cwmhir. The reference to his head in Cheapside, London, refers to the fact that Edward I took it to show to his English troops at Anglesey as proof of his death, then sent it on to London for general public display. There, it was set up in the city pillory for a day, and crowned with ivy to show he was a “king” of outlaws. This was also an act in mockery of an ancient Welsh prophecy attributed to Merlin, which said that a Welshman would be crowned in London as king of the whole of Britain.

[Edward’s great-grandfather, Henry II, had already ‘disproven’ one of Merlin’s specific prophecies relating to Ireland, exclaiming after the refutation, “Who now shall believe that liar, Merlin?“, although this didn’t stop James VI of Scotland claiming he had fulfilled this ‘King of Britain’ prophecy when he took the English throne as James I, referring to his own mixed ancestry to bolster his legitimacy.]

Aaron makes the comparison between this early Bidgood poem and ‘Reservoirs‘ by R. S. Thomas (1968):

There are places in Wales I don’t go:

Reservoirs that are the subconscious

Of a people, troubled far down

With gravestones, chapels, villages even;

The serenity of their expression

Revolts me, it is a pose

For strangers, a watercolour’s appeal

To the mass, instead of the poem’s

Harsher conditions. There are the hills,

Too; gardens gone under the scum

Of the forests; and the smashed faces

Of the farms with the stone trickle

Of their tears down the hills’ side.

Where can I go, then, from the smell

Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead

Nation? I have walked the shore

For an hour and seen the English

Scavenging among the remains

Of our culture, covering the sand

Like the tide and, with the roughness

Of the tide, elbowing our language

Into the grave that we have dug for it.

~‘Reservoirs’ by R. S. Thomas, (1968)

The complicity of the Welsh in the death of their language and culture is what haunts these later poets and writers, and the death of the industry and slide into economic depression and deprivation was (and in some cases, still is) a source of pain and anger.

From 1900-1970, the percentage of Welsh speakers dropped steadily from 49.9% in 1901 to 20.9% in 1971. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 109). In 1935, the poet Gwenallt (the bardic name of David James Jones, 1899-1968), mourned the existence of the Welsh language and culture as a cross the inhabitants of Wales were made to bear, or as if they were its zombified pall-bearers, in thrall to its demands upon them.

Addressing Wales the country, he asked her:

Paham y rhoddaist inni’r tristwch hwn,

A’r boen fel pwysau plwm ar gnawd a gwaed?

Dy iaith ar ein hysgwyddau megis pwn,

A’th draddodiadau’n hual am ein traed?

Mae’r cancr yn crino dy holl liw a’th lun,

A’th enaid yn gornwydydd ac yn grach,

Nid wyt ond hunllef yn dy wlad dy hun,

A’th einioes yn y tir ond breuddwyd gwrach.

Er hyn, ni allwn d’adael yn y baw

Yn sbort a chrechwen i’r genedlaeth hon,

Dy ryddid gynd sydd gleddyf yn ein llaw,

A’th urddas sydd yn astalch ar ein bron,

A chydiwn yn ein gwayw a gyrru’r meirch

Rhag cywilyddio’r tadau yn eu heirch.

Why give us all this misery? The wrack

Of pain on flesh and blood like leaden weight,

Your language on our shoulders like a sack,

And your traditions fetters round our feet?

The canker rots your colors everywhere.

Your soul is scabbed with boils. Your song a scream.

In your own land you are but a nightmare

And your survival but a witch’s dream.

Still, we can’t leave you in the filth to stand

A generation’s laughing-stock and jest.

Your former freedom is our sword in hand,

Your dignity a buckler at our breast.

We’ll grip our spears and spur our steeds: go brave

Lest we should shame our fathers in their grave.  

~’Cymru’ gan Gwenallt Jones | ‘Wales’ by Gwenallt Jones

Translated [into American English] by A.Z. Foreman

Aaron compares ‘Cymru’ to ‘Hon‘ [This] by T. H. Parry-Williams (1887-1975), who uses ‘hon’ in a feminine way in Welsh, suggesting that Wales is female and England, by extension, is therefore male, evoking Seamus Heaney who does the same thing with Ireland/England (female/male) and Alexander Cordell’s acclaimed 1959 novel, The Rape of the Fair Country, published thirteen years later.

The final couplet of Parry-Williams’ poem depicts Wales as a savage creature, not only full of ghosts and spectres of the past but also a monstrous mother actively dragging her children down with her into the grave:

Ac mi glywaf grafangau Cymru’n dirdynnu fy mron.

Duw a’m gwaredo, ni allaf ddianc rhag hon.

And I can hear Wales’ claws torturing my breast.

God save me, for I cannot leave this place.

~ ‘Hon’ gan T. H. Parry-Williams (1946) | ‘This’ by T. H. Parry-Williams (1946)

Translated by Gareth/’Amadeus’

The sputtering reanimation of Welsh culture in the 1960s increased alongside the growing sense of Welsh political impotence. After the drowning of Capel Celyn in 1965 and the investiture in Caernarfon of Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969, something that strongly divided Welsh public opinion, tensions were high.

In 1972, poet Gerallt Lloyd Owen (1944-2014) published his collection Cerddi’r Cywilydd (Songs of Shame), deploring the investiture and accusing Wales of ‘passively proceeding on course to its obliteration’ (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 125). One of the poems in this collection is ‘I’r Farwolaeth’, or ‘To the Death’:

Awn heb yr hoen i barhau

I’r nos na ŵyr ein heisiau,

Awn i gyd yn fodlon gaeth

Efo’r hil i’r Farwolaeth.

~

We go on without will to survive

To a night that won’t need us alive.

We go willingly, all, every breath,

In a race to the death.

~‘I’r Farwolaeth’ gan Gerallt Lloyd Owen (1972) | ‘To the Death’ by Gerallt Lloyd Owen (1972)

Translated by Gillian Clarke

But the will to survive is exactly what is brought out in many of the English and Welsh language novels that fall within the scope of Gothic fiction. I will end this post with a quote from a novel, one of those that will be discussed in the next post:

“Killing a language is like killing an octopus, you know. Not simple, like killing a man.”

~Resistance, Mary Jones, (Belfast, 1985), p. 123

This novel ends on a note, not of optimism, exactly, but an observation on the primal strength of the need to live:

“It is a base instinct, the will to survive.” (p. 149).

Base, yes. But it is vital, and survival is just what Welsh language and culture did, despite the pessimism and the gloomy predictions.

Next Post: Land of the Living Dead II (1940s-1997)

Next time, the prose fiction of this period that invokes the zombie metaphor (or literally has zombies in it)!

#AmReading: The Pendragon Legend, Antal Szerb (1934)

One book not mentioned in Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic but that deserves some more attention is The Pendragon Legend, a gem of a book by Hungarian author Antal Szerb (1901-1945), published in 1934. This counts as Welsh Gothic, albeit by an outsider looking in, and has much in common with the ‘first contact’ Gothic novels of the earlier period discussed in the first few posts.

The protagonist in this case is Hungarian, like the author, and as such can poke fun at the Welsh, English, Irish and Scottish alike with the (sometimes bitingly) gentle humour of an East European abroad.

[image error]

Don’t let the title fool you: there’s nothing Arthurian about it, except the borrowed name. The novel is narrated by a Hungarian scholar, János Bátky, a witty academic studying 16th-18thC alchemy and Rosicrucianism, who is invited to the Earl of Gwynedd’s stately home. The Pendragon family have many occult secrets, and what follows is a humorous, tongue-in-cheek Gothic murder mystery with occultism, the secrets of life and death, apocalyptic drama on North Welsh hillsides, and the wild Welsh forests as dark forces lying at the edges of civilisation.

This could well be classed as Welsh Gothic due to the setting and the subject matter, the use (and adaptation) of Welsh folklore and mythology in particular. Naturally, there are esoteric secret societies, mysticism and black magic, a femme fatale and plenty of stock characters for comic relief, including a number of stereotypes, and of course, an external satirical view of the British class system.

Gothic Fiction does not have to be serious, and Szerb enjoys playing the fool with the genre conventions to mixed effect (it really depends on personal taste in this regard: I enjoyed it). In some respects it’s a parody – in others, it’s hard to tell. It twists into the absurd and more fantastical by the end, and if you are the kind of reader that requires things to fit into genre-boxes, be warned that this book won’t do that. It’s best to put presumptions of genre to one side and take this as it comes.

More Books by Antal Szerb

(Translated to English)

The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy (1936)

Journey by Moonlight (1937)

The Queen’s Necklace (1942)

Oliver VII (1943)

Love in a Bottle (1946, published posthumously)

(Hungarian)

A magyar irodalom törtenete (1934)

Budapesti kalauz Marslakók számára(1935)

A világirodalom története (1941)

#AmReading: Haunted Communities II: Industrial Gothic (1900s-1940s)

Introduction

The mining history of my town was the first independent research project I ever did (in Primary School). Granddad took me up the mountain into the woods to see the site of one local mining disaster. There was nothing much left to see now that nature has reclaimed the site – I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. However, in 2010, the memorial stone was ‘rediscovered’ by a team doing their community service. There are no mines left here now, but the pits and shafts remain, and so do the miners who were never brought back to the surface, but still lie deep under our feet.

The history of Industrial Wales is an enormous topic which Aaron doesn’t attempt to cover in her chapter, apart from providing enough basic context around the working conditions to frame her discussion of her chosen texts, so I’ll provide some links and images here in the first part of this post, and then look at Aaron’s discussion of the fiction.

Industrial Wales

The Empire needed more and more coal to fuel its advances, with the increase of technology, infrastructure and, of course, profit. The South Wales Valleys were coal-rich and this led to Wales becoming ‘the first industrial nation in the world‘ according to the National Museum of Wales’s article, meaning it experienced mass internal migration rather than mass emigration (although some Welsh did go to America and Australia for new lives beyond the coalfield). There is much debate about whether this was a good or a bad thing for the Welsh language with the massive influx of English-speaking migrants. It certainly had mixed results for communities, forcing people into particular jobs and trades, and keeping them there despite the often horrendous conditions. The only way out was through education, and this was expensive and often part of a family’s long-term plan for the third or even fourth generation, pouring resources into their children and encouraging them to learn English in order to get ahead.

My father-in-law, originally from Aberdare, is himself a product of this 3-4 generation plan, one in a succession of only-children who achieved peak occupation-Nirvana by being the first to get a postgraduate degree (in Mathematics) and becoming an engineer. His father, a Welsh-speaker and white-collar worker, the success story for his blue-collar parents, was dissuaded from speaking Welsh by his wife, who spoke none herself and saw it as a drawback for her son.

My mother’s father’s family, all English-speakers except for his mother, who was from North Wales, had a different approach and were a large family already out of the mines: granddad’s father was a grocer, his oldest brother a baker. Granddad himself, the youngest, was a mechanic who worked on haulage vehicles, and then went into the steelworks. His son got a job at the bank before becoming a Baptist minister; my mother went to Warwick University and got a degree.

In each case, this was the culmination of several generations of working-class couples trying to ensure the next generation did slightly better. In my mother’s mother’s mother’s family’s case, there was the story of how one of their male relations, an illiterate signalman (back in the days when signals were pulled manually and the main tracks were used for coal and quarried stone rather than passenger trains) taught himself to read in the signal box. Nana (my mother’s mother’s mother) was the daughter and wife of miners.

[image error]Three Welsh Miners, (1966), oil on canvas, Josef Herman (1911-2000)

By 1830, half the iron exported by Britain was produced in Wales, and by 1851 Wales was the second leading industrial nation, behind England. In order to improve the lot of their children, workers took things into their own hands, such as the founding of Bangor University in 1884 through the raising of public funds. Working Men’s Clubs were set up across the country – and not just in Wales, but part of a wider movement to educate the working classes in England and Scotland, with a few in Ireland too – providing recreation and library access for the working man.

Phil Jenkins’ website, ‘Industrial Gwent’, looks at Wales more broadly too, providing a number of photographs and information relating to the mines, brickworks, canals, quarries, railways, tram roads, etc., by region.

[image error]Cefn-Cyfelach Colliery, oil on canvas, Evan Walters (1893-1951)

Merthyr was the ‘engine of empire‘, the technological leaders of their day, producing vast amounts of the coal and iron.

It should be noted, after all this emphasis on the British Empire and the references to debates regarding Wales as a colonised nation, that Wales is often left out of British narratives around the slave trade. Needless to say, Wales does not have a clean record on this score. The Welsh copper and wool industries linked Wales to the slave trade and to the exploitation of enslaved people even after the abolition, prior to which Welsh landowners and entrepreneurs got rich through their direct involvement, and through their plantations in the West Indies. This is one of the reasons why it is still debated as to whether Wales, despite its history of ethnic subjugation and cultural suppression by its neighbour, can be viewed as a ‘colonial victim’. Prof. Chris Evans certainly doesn’t think so, and you can buy his book, Slave Wales: the Welsh and Atlantic Slavery, 1660-1850 (University of Wales Press, 2010), to find out more.

Moving forward to the 1900s and the outbreak of war in 1914, Wales was still a leading industrial nation and now produced munitions for the war effort. The Great War led to ugly outbreaks of xenophobia and violent anti-German feeling, especially towards German immigrants even if they were politically opposed to Kaiser Wilhelm. Concerns about the morals of Welsh women and ‘khaki fever’ (a supposed animalistic attraction to men in uniform) led to purity crusades and women in Cardiff faced imposed curfews. The AHRC-funded project, World War One at Home, has revealed stories such as this from this era that would otherwise remain untold.

During the Great Depression of the interwar years, caused by a serious drop in foreign demand for coal, saw unemployment rates soaring among the miners, from just 2% in April 1924 to 28.5% in August 1925. After the 1929 Wall Street Crash and its detrimental effect on the American economy, which had a knock-on effect in Europe and the British Isles, things only got worse, and by 1932 unemployment had increased to 42.8%, making Wales one of the Western world’s most depressed countries. Both my Nana’s father (my great-great-grandfather) and her husband, my great-grandfather, were among of those who left the Valleys and took his family across to Birmingham to look for work, returning when things in the Western Valley picked up again.

The depression caused mass emigration: Wales lost a large proportion of its population as people moved to America and Australia, and there were mass protests in the streets at inadequate and inhumane government responses to the crisis. The collapse of capitalism was a victory for socialism and the Unions, which gained mass support. It was also a blow for the chapels, whose numbers saw rapid decline.

By 1939, with the dramatic drop in population and a slight improvement in the economy, unemployment had dropped again to around 15%, but it was the Second World War that “solved” the issue by providing jobs not just in the armed forces but in all sectors, in the interests of the war effort.

The armed forces, and the evacuation of children from English cities to Wales (as had happened in the First World War to a much lesser extent) helped to raise awareness of Wales’ distinct regional identity. As people met and mixed via the armed forces and the evacuation programme, they learned about each other, and a greater awareness of Britain’s regional diversity opened up. Dr Martin Johnes, in his book, Wales Since 1939 (Manchester University Press, 2013), reviewed in the Wales Arts Review, has discussed the impact of WWII more fully, and the other events and debates that have shaped Wales in the modern world.

There are plenty of resources to look at regarding Wales and the First and Second World Wars, and I’ll list these at the end of the post.

Coalfield Gothic / Industrial Gothic

The productive peak of the South Wales coal industry was c.1911, and the working conditions readily evoked horror. Miners worked under the daily threat of death – the ceilings could cave in, gas pockets could explode, the pit props could give way, and the air may become too toxic to breathe safely. Between 1850 and 1914, at least 90,000 miners died, and workers’ rights were hard-fought and hard won. Men and boys – and until 1842, women and girls, worked in terrible, dangerous, dark and claustrophobic conditions. In terms of Gothic inspiration, the fear of being buried alive haunted the imagination of writers. The price of coal was, too often, paid for in human sacrifices.

This was depicted in various ways.

In ‘The Kiss’ (1937), a symbolist fantasy by Glyn Jones (1905-1995), a dead miner lying beneath the ground reawakens and pushes his way back to the surface, and encounters his [living] brother whose hand is bound up, after being horribly mangled in a pit accident. Their mother cannot bear to see her sons’ wounds uncovered, but the (Un)Dead miner uncovers it and kisses it in a tender act.

In ‘The Pit’ (1945), a short story by Gwyn Jones (1907-1999), a man becomes trapped underground in an old pit and is traumatised by his awareness of the unnatural sacrifice the mine demanded during its working days.

In Rhys Davies’ stories, the depths of the pits are both actual and metaphorical, a place of suffocating darkness blighting the lives of his characters and trapping them regardless of their striving or situation. Aaron discusses a few of these: ‘The Pits Are on Top’ (1942), where respiratory diseases are the pits’ haunting legacy from which those above ground cannot escape, ‘The Dark World’ (1942), in which the key death is that of the young wife, not the young collier, and ‘The Last Struggle’ (1946), in which an unhappily married woman finds hope when a mining disaster apparently claims the life of her husband, only to find her hopes dashed as he unexpectedly returns, trapping her in her own (metaphorical) pit of despair.

Oscar (1946), a novella by Gwyn Thomas (1913-1981), fictionalizes the Gothic metaphors of Marx, with the titular character being the exploitative, inhumane capitalist landowner. The novella is narrated by his servant, Lewis, whose identity is so entwined with his master that Oscar’s ultimate (and deserved) destruction is also, in an existential way, Lewis’s own.

Simeon (1946), another tale by Gwyn Thomas, is also about a capitalist landowner (named Simeon) and again narrated by a servant, Ben. Both Oscar and Simeon express the difficulties of acting against social injustice when the said injustice has become a community’s social norm. Both also suggest that, should the ‘haunted community’ withdraw its collaboration from the oppressive system and stand firm, the system’s unregulated greed will destroy it.

In 1946, there was reason to be optimistic. Labour’s landslide victory in the 1945 election promised to fulfil the demands of Welsh socialism. The coal industry was nationalised in 1947, and in that same year Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan championed the development of the National Health Service. But long-term injustices were not dead, and their spectres were waiting to be resurrected. The drowning of the village of Capel Celyn by the Liverpool Corporation in 1959 was one incident that proved this, as Aaron’s fourth chapter (and the last in Part One of Welsh Gothic) illustrates.

Next Post: Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997)

Chapter 4 of Welsh Gothic, looking at Welsh Gothic Fiction up to the 1997 Devolution Referendum, will form the next three posts in this series – one on the historical context and the Gothic themes in Welsh poetry, one on zombies and their symbolism, and one on vampires!

The next post (Saturday) is a short review of The Pendragon Legend by Hungarian author Antal Szerb, a fun 1930s book not covered by Aaron but which could count as a pastiche of Welsh Gothic.

If you’re enjoying my posts and you’re able to support me, I’ve set up a ko-fi to help cover costs of my WordPress Premium account & domain name (my target is £30.00). I’d be very grateful for the support!

https://ko-fi.com/cmrosens

Further Reading: 

Miner-Artists: The Art of Welsh Coal Workers (Exhibition Booklet)

Industry in Welsh Film (BBC Arts)

Portraits of Former Welsh Coal Miners (The Guardian article | Art and Design)

Women’s work in industry and agriculture in Wales during the First World War. (PhD Thesis, Cardiff University (2015), Thomas D. George)

Cymru 1914 (A mass digitization of primary sources relating to the First World War from the Libraries, Special Collections and Archives of Wales, relating to Welsh life, language and culture)

First World War Collections (National Museum of Wales)

Wales Between the Wars (Open University)

The Coal Industry in Wartime (BBC History)

Public Health in Interwar England and Wales: Did It Fail? (Martin Gorski, PMC)

World War Two and Wales (BBC History)

‘Welshness, Welsh Soldiers and the Second World War’, (Hanes Cymru, the blog of Dr Martin Johnes)

The Ration Years of the Second World War (National Museum of Wales)

 

#AmReading: Haunted Communities I: Gothic Dissent (1900s-1940s)

Introduction

Chapter 3 of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic, (UWP, 2013), focuses on the shift in themes that characterised Welsh Gothic Fiction in the first part of the twentieth century.

This post looks at the historical religious background in brief in the first section, and in the second part highlights some of the fiction that Aaron discusses. As I was reading through the chapter and writing up my thoughts for this post, it triggered some interesting personal reflections, so this time I’ve also framed the second part of this post with my own experiences. For this reason, this post is a bit longer than usual, but rather than drag it out over a few posts I thought I’d keep it in one.

 

The Religious Landscape of Wales

The religious census of 1851 recorded that nearly 80% of worshippers in Wales attended a Nonconformist chapel. The Temperance Movement came in large part out of a need to respond to and to deny the charges of drunkenness and moral laxity laid on the Welsh people by the Blue Books of 1847; but the chapels were also bastions of the Welsh language, and although many gradually turned from Welsh to English as more and more English-speaking migrants moved into the industrial areas, the chapels remained a strong social and cultural force in their communities.

The chapels were also democracies, and nonconformism was founded on democratic principles. Individual members got a vote and a say in the running of the chapel, unlike in the established church, and debate was part and parcel of chapel life. With the 1884 Reform Act, which gave most men the vote, Nonconformists – the majority of whom had been the largely disenfranchised working class – could now flex more political muscle, and the chapels, where meetings were held throughout the week, were the perfect place to debate the hot topics of the day.

Since Anglicans in Wales still enjoyed privileges over and above Nonconformists, which was considered grossly unfair, and tithes were still taken for the local parish churches despite their members being in the minority, violent social unrest broke out.

[image error]The Royal Lancers camping at Llanfair Talhaearn during the Welsh Tithe War, c. 1886-90, Denbighshire Record Office
PUBLISHER REFERENCE: GTJ15064

One of the most violent of these episodes ran from 1886-90 and was dubbed ‘The Tithe Wars‘ by the press, during which Denbighshire farm labourers had running battles with local police over the issue, and the Anti-Tithe League was set up. The disestablishment of the Church in Wales became a major issue, particularly as the Church itself was strongly opposed to its own disestablishment. Nevertheless, it was eventually disestablished in 1914, and became the Church in Wales.

The spiritual side of chapel culture was rich in revivals, and 1904 saw the ‘Great Revival’, something that the free churches of today still look back on with religious nostalgia. The English press dismissed it in some reports as Welsh emotionalism, the result of the typical “Celtic” ‘instability of character, a tendency to exaggeration, and a greater love for music and oratory than for veracity and purity’.

[image error]Detail from a photograph of a Revival Meeting, 1904, from the records of Moriah Presbyterian Chapel, Loughor

But chapel culture did not treat the outsider as well as they should have, and to be on the outside was to be cut adrift from social groups, as well as religious communities.

The conflicting perspectives and experiences found their expressions in Gothic fiction, and Aaron sets out some of the above context in brief (again, just enough for the reader to get the flavour of the period), as well as emphasising the agricultural depression of the 1870s and ’80s, before beginning to dissect the texts.

The second part of this post will look at the fiction Aaron uses in this section of her third chapter of Welsh Gothic, sub-headed ‘The Devil in Zion’, but this so resonated with some of my own ‘haunting’ experiences that I wanted to use this post to exorcise the spectre of own dealings with early twentieth-century Welsh chapel culture, resting in its unquiet grave. Feel free to skip to the next old photo I found if this doesn’t interest you!

‘The Devil in Zion’

“I will forgive what you have done,” my great-grandmother (1908-2006) said to me when I was about eight years old, after I let go of her hand while crossing the road after she had told me not to. “But I will never forget it. I do not forget.” [Doom One…]

Nana had been gloomily anticipating her own death for decades, and repeatedly told me that, when she died, she would watch over me from heaven. “And if you ever are tempted to do something you shouldn’t ought to be doing, I will be the little voice that whispers to you, ‘No, love. Don’t do that.‘” This was apparently intended to be comforting. [Doom Two…]

Born and bred in the South Wales Valleys, chapel culture had provided Nana and her iron-fisted matriarchal rule with a kind of divine legitimacy; she was, after all, the Elect of God. Her devoted husband, a miner like her father, signed the Temperance pledge more or less as a condition of the marriage. My grandfather, the husband of her eldest daughter, also had to agree to a life of teetotalism as a result of his courtship of my grandmother. The power of words was held in high regard, both in terms of verbal promises but also regarding education and Doing As You Were Told.

Nana was well aware that words had power: she had always been able to literally turn words into gold. As a child with a precocious gift for oration, she had won whole guineas for her poetic recitations at the local Eisteddfod competitions. Typical of her generation in that part of South East Wales she knew no Welsh, but untypically she spoke with no trace of a local accent (and wouldn’t let me cultivate one either), and taught elocution lessons. Accent snobbery is nothing new.

[image error]The opening of Zoar Presbyterian Chapel, 1908, from the Risca Museum Photo Archive

In her heyday she had been an elder of her Presbyterian (Calvinistic Methodist) chapel, a lay preacher and the regional President of the Sisterhood (women-only religious meetings).

There were only two things she could not do, despite her lofty position: she could not legally conduct a marriage service (but she could conduct a funeral), and she could not serve Communion. [Doom Three…]

In 2018, some twelve years after her death, when I was in my early thirties, I was asked casually by the (new, young, English) associate pastor of my Baptist chapel to stand in as a Communion server, as in our tradition although I am not a deacon or an elder, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t pass a plate of symbolic bread around.

I said yes, of course, and thought nothing more of it until during the service a little voice in my head said: Nana wouldn’t like it. [THE DOOM HAS COME UPON ME cried the Lady of Shallot…]

And, even though she had been dead for over a decade, and I’m pretty sure I’d done a hell of a lot of things in that time that she would strongly disapprove of (I stopped being teetotal almost immediately after her death, for a start), I started to panic, as if she were sat behind me somewhere in the back row in full Silent Outrage Mode with her blue hat pinned to her head, watching me.

The service continued inexorably to the point where Communion was about to take place. The hymn was announced, and the servers invited up to the table. The Moment of Crisis had arrived. By this point, I was physically unable move or breathe properly. I was on the verge of a full panic attack.

I forced my legs to manoeuvre me into the aisle, at this point physically shaking, so that I could lean across to the nearest pew in the middle section and tap someone on the arm, let’s call her Mrs S-, an older member of the congregation whom I’ve known since I was a child, and ask her to go up and do it for me. Mrs S- is also not an elder or a deacon, and had just as much or as little right as me to go and serve. This wasn’t an intellectual or theological issue – it was purely emotional, and, in that sense, completely irrational. Mrs S- took one look at me and guessed what was wrong. During the prayer, she slipped out of her seat and took the (now conspicuously) empty place. The relief was instant, and I was back to normal in seconds.

I talked it through with people (and the pastors) at the end of the service, and we agreed that one day I would have another go. That’s one spectre that needs to be put to rest.

This probably explains quite a lot about how I think about and write family dynamics and culture, and my preoccupation with the Grande Dame trope in Gothic Fiction. This, then, is a part of my own “haunting” story of the Welsh past and the long shadow of an undead culture, and one of the reasons why I can deeply appreciate the Gothicization of these aspects of Wales in the twentieth-century fiction that Aaron discusses.

[image error]Sunday School Barge Outing, Llanwenarth Baptist Church, Govilon, 1910 http://www.govilonbaptist.org.uk/history.htm

As a woman with what is politely termed ‘a strong personality’, not to mention a great deal of religious and social influence over her family and community, Nana was far from atypical in twentieth-century South Wales.

Women of Nana’s type, aspiring to the [lower-] middle class despite being the wives and daughters of miners and steel workers, were the moral backbone of the home, the driving force of the family’s ambitions, firmly in charge of the money their husbands were sent out to make, and also largely in charge of the Sunday School, bringing up the next generations in the fear of God [and of them]. They organised mass Sunday School outings and holidays and other major community social events. Sunday Schools were originally attended by adults as well as children in some places.

The darker side of twentieth-century chapel culture still leaves scars on the psyche of communities and individuals today. Those who fell pregnant out of wedlock [“Put them to work, the wicked girls!!” screeched Nana in a moral fury] were ‘read out of membership’, and bore the weight of their sin through social ostracisation (even if they married the father). Pastors were elected by the members but treated as God by their congregations, the golden calf of their own choosing. Thunderous oratory was in vogue, and hellfire and damnation preached energetically from the pulpit in exuberant Calvinist style.

Calvinistic Methodism or Presbyterianism was a major denomination in Wales, and Methodism in particular was subject to frequent attacks in English- and Welsh-language literature, while anti-Dissent plays and stories appeared in English from the eighteenth century.

Aaron sets this in context and lists a number of examples of anti-chapel sentiment in Welsh Gothic fiction, including Mary Robinson’s Anna, or, Memoirs of a Welch Heiress (1785), and Walsingham, or, The Pupil of Nature (1797).

The Stranger by Robert Evans (1798) also features an avaricious Methodist.

Fitzmaurice (1800) by William Frederick Williams, features the evil Reverend Tone, who disinherits the titular protagonist, Edward Fitzmaurice, when Tone marries Edward’s rich aunt Deborah. Methodism drives Deborah to the brink of madness, and Rev. Tone locks her in a garret, using the Calvinist doctrine of the predestined elect to justify his behaviour. This theme was also taken up in Scotland and was well-established by the time James Hogg wrote The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justifed Sinner (1824).

After the [Nonconformist] revival of 1859, the Welsh-language periodical Yr Haul, an Anglican publication, serialised the mock memoir Wil Brydydd y Coed in their issues from 1863-6, satirising the Nonconformists, their preachers, and their deacons.

Revivals – of which there were about fifteen prior to 1904 – were said to stir up emotions and sexual licentiousness.

Queen of the Rushes (1906), by Allen Raine, picks up on this aspect of religious fervour, and how it can lead to mental instability and transgressive sex. It echoes the concerns of 1847 Blue Books report on night-time prayer meetings in the chapels ‘and the intercourse which ensues on returning home’, which, the school inspectors feared, could lead to ‘illicit sexual liaisons’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 91).

Following in this tradition of marring the reputation of Nonconformism, Caradoc Evans (1878-1945) Gothicized Welsh chapel culture in his series of linked short stories about the poor communities he’d been raised in. The first, My People: Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales (1915), ‘was greeted with horror in Wales, where an attempt was made to ban it’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 87). Its sequel, Capel Sion, was published in 1917.

Evans was called ‘the most hated man in Wales’ for the controversial volumes. My People painted rural Wales as a dystopian hell-on-earth, where the impoverished lower classes scraped a living in the dirt and were under the tyranny of hypocritical chapel ministers. He created an idiolect for his characters that was viewed as deeply insulting to the Welsh language, and worse, he published the stories in English and in London, ‘so that the English could laugh at the satire of the Welsh by one of their own’. (Prof. Katie Gramich, ‘‘My People‘: Controversial Text Turns 100‘, 2015).

[image error]William Roberts’ cover artwork (1927) for The Withered Root by Rhys Davies

Despite the backlash and outrage, Welsh anti-chapel fictions continued into the 1920s and ’30s. Calvinism and the chapel creed is represented as a blight upon the lives of the protagonists and people, such as in The Withered Root (1927) by Rhys Davies and The Deacon (1934) by Alun Llywellyn. Suicide, inhumane treatment of others, tragic deaths and madness all await the characters as a result of their beliefs and doctrine, but also as they wrestle themselves free of an inhumane, exacting Calvinist God, as in The Creed (1936) by Peggy Whistler (1909-1958), published under the pseudonym Margiad Evans.

Throughout the early twentieth century, the chapels began to empty as increasing numbers of their congregations sought to free themselves from this stranglehold, like their fictional counterparts, in favour of Socialism and Trade Union meetings, but the secular world was also haunted by death and disease that was a daily part of industrial life.

Next Post: Haunted Communities II: Industrial Gothic (1900s-1940s)

The next post (Thursday!) will look at Industrial Gothic, and the influence of the mines on Welsh Gothic Fiction.

Meet the Locals: Carrie Rickard, Cursed Newcomer

Meet Carrie Rickard, main character in The Crows (coming January 2020).

Her Pinterest Mood Board is here: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/cmrosens/pagham-on-sea-mood-board/carrie-rickard-cursed-newcomer/. 

This is part of a cut version of the first draft, set about a month before the novel begins. To go back further and see Carrie’s first experience of Fairwood House (a.k.a. The Crows), see my post A Prelude: Love Song to The Crows. If you haven’t met her neighbour, serial-killing eldritch soothsayer Ricky Porter, then you can read The Crows: Teaser to get to know him.

03 March

Carrie Rickard’s alarm sounded at 06:30, echoing around the crypt with a jarring jangle and flashing coloured lights. Roused from a dead sleep, Carrie struggled up off the mattress and flung her hand out to grab her vibrating phone. Throat lined with a thin patina of stone dust, she clambered drowsily out of the tangles of her sleeping bag and duvet, space blanket protesting her escape from its insulating clutches. The crypt was always chilly, and the cold spots – which Carrie determinedly did not associate with paranormal activity, or she would never get to sleep at all – came and went at inconvenient hours of the night. This was, after all, a final resting place, not somewhere a sleepy twenty-something should be waking up.

The crypt was the only structurally sound part of the building, the original thirteenth-century masonry providing the only shelter that Carrie could now afford. It probably served her right for thinking she’d be safe from the departmental downsizing and sinking her savings into the renovation project. Now she was stuck under the only roof she had left, the Georgian structure above her a skeletal mess of rotting boards, half-finished plaster and exposed wiring.

She groaned with the stiffness in her neck and dressed in the dark.

The auctioneer had raised his gavel and brought it down, and there went most of Carrie’s share of the sale of Grampa Jim’s flat. The renovations swallowed everything else, money pouring into the maw of the old estate and trickling away through pipes and wires, absorbed in carpentry and plastering, lining the pockets of surveyors and architects.

It was all going so well… until her insurance company went bust.

And still, even after her job was gone with little to tide her over, and the London flat was too expensive, her relationship over at last in an explosion of threats and phone calls until she had changed her number and moved in temporarily with her dad, The Crows welcomed her with the promise of a new start. It sheltered her in all its derelict splendour. She couldn’t explain why she preferred the ruin in the back of the Sussex beyond to her teenage bedroom in Croydon, but perhaps it was as simple as the desire to shed old skins, wriggle out of her past and all its shadows, and find something clean and fresh and new. Fix someone else’s past, restore something tangible, put the wreckage of her own life in perspective. Whatever drew her there, the house intended her to stay.

I AM YOURS, it told her, louder and stronger with every improvement, every contractor, every cheque.

I AM YOURS, AND YOU

ARE

MINE.

 

It was no wonder she had sunk the entirety of her savings into it.

It was where she belonged.

 

The electricity wasn’t connected, so Carrie was using a solar panel device she’d bought off the internet to power her lamp and charge her mobile. She bundled her scattered laundry into her tote bag, then, jeans securely belted and blouse buttoned incorrectly, she donned her hard-hat and headed up the stairs.

Braving the trip to the kitchen, Carrie ducked beneath the wires dangling from the ceiling where the rotted beams had been ripped out and replaced, and the doorway gaped, door-less, into the vast space. Carrie went on autopilot. The birds were barely awake yet, although the clouds were lightening a little, underbellies mottled with the promise of dawn. The window glass had been put back in, thank God, and through the bevelled panes the building site of a garden greeted her with the sight of JCBs at rest.

The top of the mineral water was being stubborn, and Carrie winced as it chafed against her palm. Eventually she gave up and loosened it with her teeth, picturing her mother’s horrified face with a slight inner smirk. She was too tired even for a mental grin.

She did everything with bottled water except shower – she did that at the Community Centre – and flush the toilet. There was a chemical

[image error]Fairwood House by Thomas Brown (c) 2019

Port-a-loo outside that the builders had left, and Carrie, armed with a can of air freshener and her own toilet paper, had been using it too. Since some of the work had been paid for up front, the renovations were still continuing. Soon, the money would run out and the gaping black hole of uncertainty yawned at her. Back in February she’d been promised running water by the end of the month, and Carrie had no idea how she was going to pay for it. Still, with February now over, Carrie had yet to see so much as a wet spanner.

Just as the water began to boil, Carrie’s phone rang. It took her a minute to figure out what the noise was, and that it wasn’t just her alarm going off again.

It was Jess, probably up for her run.

“Hello?” Carrie croaked, her throat dusty and dry. She had to squint at the coffee jar twice to make sure it wasn’t decaff, but even when she dumped some into last night’s mug straight from the jar she wasn’t one hundred per cent certain.

Jess’s voice was sickeningly lively. It was a lunchtime voice, Carrie thought, attempting to pour the steaming water from the small-lipped saucepan into the mug with her left hand. It was very nearly not a disaster.

“I was just online,” Jess blurted down the phone, as Carrie swore vehemently and swayed on one foot, boiling water pooling around her pumps, “And I just saw your status! Are you ok? When did this happen?”

“It’s half six, Jess.” Carrie stared blankly at the mess on the tiles.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jess bulldozed through the deflection, her one-track mind not easy to derail. “You’ve actually been living there since last month?”

Carrie gave up. “Yeah… I told you I lost my job, right?”

“Yeah, but you said you had severance pay, and you were applying for all those other jobs…”

“I know,” Carrie said dully. The coffee had turned to mud in the mug, an oily instant sheen staring back at her from its half-filled depths. The streaked stains on the ceramic turned her stomach. She put the offending coffee down. “I’m sleeping in the crypt, the original abbey bit. The actual house itself is more or less structurally sound but there’s basically no upstairs still. I’m hoping they’ll sort that out soon, and then I can get around to the rest of it when I can afford to, you know?”

She could almost hear Jess’s eyes roll. “Why didn’t you just ask to crash at mine?”

“And do what with all my stuff from the flat?”

“Keep your stuff there, where you are, and come and sleep at my place! Have you even got electricity?”

Carrie turned to look out of the window. The garden would need to be restored, once the builders were gone. A sparrow, oblivious to her presence, swooped onto the path and hopped forwards towards the wall. He came quite close, beady eyed. A little green caterpillar was moving across the broken stones, unconscious of any risk. Carrie watched it blindly inching towards its own doom with morbid fascination.

“Carrie? Hello?

“No, I don’t have electricity yet,” Carrie murmured. “There’s a generator in the garden but the house isn’t properly wired.” She decided she might brave the coffee after all. The cycle of nature played itself out without her as its audience, and the caterpillar’s story was left unfinished. It struck a raw chord in Carrie.

“Do you have water?”

“Should do by the end of the month.”

“But you don’t now?”

“No.”

The coffee was still warm, but just as bad as she expected. It left a bitter coating on her tongue.

“Do you even know anyone in Pagham-on-Sea?”

“Not really.”

“God, it looks like a dump.” Jess was evidently on her laptop – Carrie could hear the faint tapping of keys as she Googled. “Oh crap. Look at the buildings, holy shit. The morgue is in the middle of town. Not the town hall. The bloody morgue. Shouldn’t that be attached to a hospital, or something? Carrie, seriously. Just come and crash with me.”

There was no point in arguing. Carrie had the feeling she would end up on Jess’s sofa by the end of the day, and although that made her feel like some kind of parasite, she half-hoped that would be the case. She wasn’t really a parasite. Some were parasitical by nature – others had a parasitical state of existence thrust upon them. She was a naturally independent creature, and that made her the more endearing kind. Like a leech, but fluffy rather than disgusting. A fluffy leech. A fleech.

She, Caroline Rickard, was a fleech.

Hopelessly side-tracked with this early morning attack of whimsy, Carrie realised Jess was still talking.

“…And I really don’t know what you see in the place, it’s awful – it’s going to be a nightmare for you to fix…”

Something hot and angry balled itself up in Carrie’s stomach. “Are you talking about my house?”

A pause. The deepest crack in the plaster wall gaped in an angry frown.

Carrie tensed, jaw clenched, the coffee slopping against the sides of her mug as her hand trembled.

“It’ll be great when it’s done,” (Jess, backtracking), “But… it’s just… you know, it’s so stressful for you…”

“The house,” Carrie said through gritted teeth, “Is fine.”

Small flecks of plaster dust trickled from the crack.

“I don’t need help,” Carrie went on as her temper snapped, “I’ll get stuff sorted soon. I don’t care what you think of it, Jess, because I live here now. So you’re just going to have to get over it.”

“Oh, right, like you don’t need your mates anymore? Is this because I’m still talking to Becky? I think you just need to get over that, especially since she’s having a hard time right now.”

“Maybe she’d have an easier time if she didn’t shag other people’s boyfriends.” The bile burned her throat on the way out. If she hadn’t found out about Becky and Phil, she’d probably still be with him, still thinking their problems were all in her head, that she was imagining things, that he was the saint her friends (her lying, cheating friends) told her he was.

Jess hung up.

Carrie was left with a void of silence, and the realisation that Jess had, essentially, chosen to take Becky’s side.

The headache came on her suddenly, like an invisible blow to her temple. It thumped into her head and flooded the back of her skull with pressure.

…YOU

        …ARE

                 …MINE

“It’s alright,” she told the kitchen as if the house had been listening. “We don’t have to listen to that. We’ll do just fine, you and me.”

Just fine? You’re talking to your house.

That didn’t bode well. She wasn’t so much a fleech as a little green caterpillar, crawling slowly towards disaster. Although she peered hopefully out of the window again, both the sparrow and the caterpillar had gone.

#AmReading: Welsh Gothic Fiction (1830s-1900s) II: An Underworld of One’s Own

Introduction

This post is going to look at Jane Aaron’s example texts from her book Welsh Gothic (UWP, 2013), particularly those from Chapter 2, ‘An Underworld of One’s Own (1830s-1900s)’. 

Part 1 of this post looked at the social unrest and historical context of Wales in the 1830s-40s, which Aaron touches on in this chapter but doesn’t go into much detail with. If you missed it, check it out for some (brief) historical context!

 

II: The Doomed and the Damned

The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people … [The Welshman’s] language keeps him under the hatches … he is left to live in an underworld of his own and the march of society goes completely over his head. – Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales … in Three Parts, (London, 1847), Part II: Brecknock, Cardigan, Radnor and Monmouth, p. 66, emphasis mine: also quoted by Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 52.

Accused of being in thrall to a dead language that refused to die, Welsh Gothic authors looked for support in the upper echelons of Welsh society, and saw instead a lack of leadership. The Anglicization of the Welsh gentry, who had distanced themselves from their culture and were not patrons of the literary arts nor encouraging the growth of or appreciation for Welsh literature, was well underway before 1847.

This perception influenced the shift in tone and theme in mid-nineteenth-century Gothic writing in Wales. Instead of focusing on the experiences of visitors to Wales or political narratives evoking and critiquing English/Welsh union, more authors turned their attention to ‘cursed Welsh families, doomed to obliteration by the sins or negligence of their forefathers, and on images of the Welsh as dragged back into the suffocating womb of their dark past’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 55).

Some of these dark tales included:

‘The Legend of Iolo ap Hugh‘, by ‘Beuno’, Cambrian Quarterly Magazine and Celtic Repertory, Vol. 1 No. 1 January (1829), 41-3. [This tale features a terrible cave associated with a dark pagan past, wherein Iolo ap Hugh is dragged by an unseen force one night while capering and playing his fiddle]

‘The Legend of Bala Lake‘, a traditional folktale, Cambrian Quarterly Magazine and Celtic Repertory, Vol. 1 No. 1 January (1829), 53-4. [A tragic folktale of a cruel Welsh prince who is told vengeance will fall on the third generation, this tells of an old harper who is at the castle to celebrate the birth of the prince’s grandson but is lured far away from it by a mysterious bird calling his name, and when he turns around to go back he sees that a flood has swallowed the castle and all that is left is his own harp, floating in the middle of the waters of the newly formed lake.]

The Mountain Decameron, 3 vols., Joseph Downes (1836). [This is set out in a framed narrative echoing Boccaccio’s work, set out in epistolary fashion. An English patient instructed to go to Wales for his health is so struck by the colourful stories he hears from his fellow travellers that he writes them all down for his physician.]

Most of the stories in The Mountain Decameron feature cursed families, but one, concerning an unhappy man named Marmaduke Paull, has a particularly Oldboy twist. Tricked into thinking his daughter Ruth isn’t his biological daughter (a lie that she is also led to believe), they meet again after many years of enforced estrangement only to find they are mutually attracted to each other. It turns out (obviously) that this isn’t as fine as they thought it was, and end up drowning together in a particularly classic Watery Grave trope.

‘The Doom of the Griffiths‘, by Elizabeth Gaskell (Yes, North and South Elizabeth Gaskell), first printed in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1858). [In this tale, available via the Gutenberg Project (linked), the ill-fated Tremadoc family are plagued by a fifteenth-century curse after their ancestor, Rhys ap Gruffudd, plotted to betray the national hero Owain Glyndwr.]

‘The Doom of the Prynnes‘, in Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse (1868) by Sarah “Sadie” Williams, a London-Welsh poet, pp. 27-52. [In this verse tale, the Prynnes are cursed to be incestuous (i.e. inward-looking and inward-loving) and self-destructive, an analogy for the Welsh themselves].

A Prynne can only love a Prynne;

Doom One.

The Prynne who weds a Prynne weds Death;

Doom Two.

The Prynne who weds not Death goes mad, like me;

Doom Three.

This formula mirrors the form of the Welsh Triads, an additional connection to the Welsh heritage, in this case where the very ancestral form is used against them.

Reclaiming the ‘Underworld’

In the second part of the chapter, Aaron discusses the cultural backlash against the gradual eradication of the Welsh language, the key figures in this movement, and how these themes are expressed and interwoven in Gothic fiction by sympathetic authors.

These authors frequently had a special interest in the occult, and in the pre-Christian religion of the Druids.

Across the Hills, by Frances Mary Owen (1883) is one such novella, in which the unnamed narrator, a well-to-do and well-known ‘public man’, has a [positive] life-changing experience on a walk in Wales after a train breaks down. A re-imagined form of Druidism is merged with the Christianized present and rising interest in Spiritualism, playing with themes of resurrection, spirit guides, and other such transcendent, life-changing topics.

[image error]Allen Raine

Aaron considers several other authors, including Anne Adaliza Beynon Puddicombe, née Evans (1836-1908), who is better known as the author Allen Raine, and one of the pioneers of Weird Fiction, Arthur Machen (1863-1947).

A Welsh Witch (1902) is one of Allen Raine’s better-known works, but Aaron considers her 1909 novel Where Billows Roll: A Tale of the Welsh Coast. This novel features the otherworldly twins Iolo and Iola Lloyd, who try to help the Gothicized and scapegoated Welsh-speaking inhabitants of the nearby offshore island Ynysoer [Cold Island]. They battle the projected frustrations and anger of the townspeople who view the islanders as everything they want to distance themselves from, but become so intertwined with them that, when tragedy and injustice strikes, the twins are also doomed.

Where Arthur Machen is concerned, Aaron investigates his complex representation of Wales in his pre-1900 works.

 

[image error]Arthur Machen c.1905 – By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35251272

Recent critics of Machen include Kirsti Bohata in ‘Apes and Cannibals in Cambria: Images of the Racial and Gendered Other in Gothic Writing in Wales’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays 6 (2000), p. 126, and Darryl Jones in ‘Borderlands: spiritualism and the occult in fin de siècle and Edwardian Welsh and Irish horror’, Irish Studies Review, 17/1 (2009), p. 38.

Bohata and Jones see Machen in a less than pleasant light, as a Welsh writer who wants to be ‘”English” (the superior race) but fears he is contaminated by (undesireable) Welshness’ and as a traitor to his [Welsh] people who wrote ‘a unionist narrative of doomed native races’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 71)

Aaron considers a number of his works including ‘The Novel of the Black Seal‘, one of the short stories included in The Three Imposters (1895); The Hill of Dreams, (written 1895–1897; published 1907) a story of spiralling madness that is considered to be Machen’s masterpiece; The Secret Glory, (written 1899–1908; published 1922); and Far Off Things (1922).

The tones of mystic transcendence permeate Machen’s later works, inspired by the Welsh landscape and the influences of the (re-imagined) Celtic Christian church. His London protagonists attempt to discover the dark secrets of hallowed Welsh ground, but immersion in the Welsh underworld paves the way to satisfaction despite contrasting views of the Welsh voiced by different characters.

Although by the 1930s the occult had become tainted with fascist associations, this didn’t limit Gothic fiction. In Wales, throughout the twentieth century, the destructive influences that leeched life and vitality from the protagonists and, by extension, from humanity, became representatives of capitalism, religious hierarchies (in this case of the chapel, rather than the church), and the hierarchies of the state.

Next Time: Haunted Communities – Gothic Fiction in Wales 1900s-1940s

Chapter 3 of Welsh Gothic looks at the early- to mid-twentieth century incarnations of the Gothic in Wales, and my first post of two on this chapter will be up on Monday! It looks at the Gothicization of Dissent and Welsh chapel culture.

 

#AmReading: Welsh Gothic Fiction (1830s-1900s) I: The Doomed and the Damned in Context

Introduction

Chapter 2 of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (UWP, 2013) is titled ‘An Underworld of One’s Own’, and focuses on the Gothic fiction of the 1830s-1900s. The chapter looks at mid-nineteenth-century Welsh Gothic within the framework of postcolonial literary theory.

This post (Part One of Two) will focus on social unrest in Wales in the 1830s-40s to set these texts in their historical context. This is only briefly mentioned by Aaron, who gives a paragraph of brief explanation but assumes some background knowledge (or enough to get to grips with the texts). Here, I’ll cover three key events/movements: The Merthyr Rising of 1831, the Chartist Movement, and the Rebecca Riots.

I: Historical Context of the Doomed Cymry

The ‘Imperial Gothic’, as categorised by Patrick Brantlinger, was a way of justifying the subordination of other peoples, by Othering and alienating them in fiction. This was a means of perpetuating entrenched racism and popularising racist stereotypes to propagate a lack of sympathy with the colonial subjects and justify the ‘moral dimension’ of Imperialism, pushing the ‘civilising mission’ narrative.

‘Postcolonial Gothic’ fought back, with texts that re-positioned the colonisers as the Gothicised monsters and horrors, bringing the atrocities of colonials into the spotlight.

In terms of ‘first contact’ Gothic fiction written by the English about Wales, the English tourist … ‘participates in a process designed to encourage the Celt to shed his ‘sinister’ darkness and accept the blessings of the anglicized light’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 51)

Governing Wales had become increasingly difficult. As Aaron points out, it is one thing to be Gothicised in fiction, but quite another to be Gothicised in an official government report, which is what happened when the Blue Books of 1847 were published with the report on the state of education in Wales. The result was a long-lasting national trauma, and the slow death of the Welsh language as families became convinced the way for their children to better themselves was through Anglicization. The ‘primitive’ language of the people was blamed for the lawlessness, laziness, debauchery and various other sins the Anglican inspectors laid at the feet of the Welsh, going above and beyond the scope of their inspection of the schools to damn Welsh society more generally than just the state of their education system. The Welsh language, the inspectors claimed, kept the Welshman in an underworld of his own making, as the march of Progress went over his head.

While in the 1840s about 70% of the total population of Wales were Welsh-speakers, this figure plummeted to 49.9% of the total population by 1901 as a result of the policies put in place after the damning reports in the 1847 Blue Books. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 53).

The decline continued into the 20th century until the figure was below 20%, with 80% of the Welsh population effectively disinherited from their own language. Today, the Welsh Government’s Welsh Language Strategy is aimed at reversing this decline, with mixed results: by this year (2019), just under 30% of the population are Welsh-speaking (and of these, even fewer are fluent, with some only having basic conversational Welsh). This, however, is a big improvement on 18.7% in 1991.

The Blue Books of 1847 came out of a period of social unrest that English officials blamed on the lack of [what they deemed ‘proper’] education of the Welsh people.

The Merthyr Rising of 1831 is not mentioned in Aaron’s chapter but nevertheless had a great impact on the way the Welsh working class were demonised in English thought. Coal miners in Merthyr Tydfil and the surrounding area had long warned and protested about conditions, but in 1831, after the defeat of the Parliamentary Reform Act in the House of Lords, they took to the streets of Merthyr, protesting against lowered wages and increased unemployment. By the end of May the whole area was in full rebellion, sacking the debtors courts and destroying account books. In June they marched to the local mines and persuaded the workers to join the protest.

[image error]Y Faner Goch – the Red Flag flown in 2012 in commemoration of the Merthyr Rising of 1831 By Diobaithyn at Welsh Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81185115

Among the cries of the protesters was the treasonous ‘Lawr i Brenin!’ [Down with the King], and they flew the red flag, then a symbol of universal workers’ suffering associated with the French Revolution (1789-1794), which were essentially banners soaked in cow blood.

Troops were dispatched to Merthyr and regained control of the town by 7 June 1831. One of the martyrs of the Rising, a miner called Richard Lewis but more commonly known as Dic Penderyn (Dick of Penderyn), was executed on trumped-up charges, after allegedly stabbing a soldier called Donald Black in the leg. Black was not killed, but Dic Penderyn was arrested. There was no evidence to suggest he had been involved in the stabbing of Black, and it’s unclear why he was singled out.

Black did not identify either Dic Penderyn or his cousin, Lewis Lewis, who was arrested with him. It became apparent during the trial that Dic had been there more as an observer than a participant and, it was claimed, had in fact saved the life of a Special Constable by shielding him from the rioters. A petition of 11,000 signatures was presented to Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, calling for a reprieve, but despite the complete lack of evidence against him, Dic Penderyn was sentenced to death and hanged as an example – the clear message being, the (English) law and political powers could do as they pleased with their (Welsh) subjects. Recent calls for his posthumous pardon have been made in Westminster, but so far the conviction has not been overturned nor a pardon granted, and some believe Dic Penderyn was guilty after all.

[image error]Dic Penderyn’s gravestone in Aberavon

Dic Penderyn’s fate has also been the subject of contemporary folk songs; for example, The Ballad of Richard Lewis by Welsh singer-songwriter Martyn Joseph is available on YouTube and Spotify: the lyrics can be found here.

The Chartist Movement was a popular social uprising in support of democratic rights including votes for all men over 21 (some – but certainly not all – also supported votes for women, but this was dropped from the Six Points of the Charter as tactically unwise), secret ballots to ensure people could not be pressured into voting a certain way [votes were public at this time and records printed recording how people voted], and annual elections to keep politicians accountable.

[image error]By http://www.oldukphotos.com/monmouthshirenewportpage4.htm – Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10767131

The Chartist Movement began in London in 1838 and was taken up enthusiastically by the disenfranchised Welsh working class, mainly in South and Mid-Wales. Newspapers, including The London Dispatch and People’s Political and Social Reformer, reported on meetings taking place across Wales. The middle classes and aristocracy, who already had the vote, feared that wider political rights would threaten their own rights and property. The Newport Rising, 1839, was the most serious mass protest in the history of the movement, with the Chartists armed and ready for confrontation, and ended in a bloody skirmish with the British army at the Westgate Hotel. The leaders were arrested and sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to transportation (to Australia).

[image error]Portrait of John Frost (1784-1877), Welsh tailor and Chartist leader, commemorated in Newport in John Frost Square. Portrait by Unknown Artist – This image is available from the National Library of Wales – Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73322179

Meanwhile, the economic conditions of rural Wales were resulting in a series of subversive protests known as the Rebecca Riots, which took place between 1839 and 1843.

The population had nearly doubled in these areas despite migration to industrialized towns and emigration to America, and it was increasingly hard to earn a living. If one could not support oneself or family, then the threat of the new workhouses loomed, where conditions were said to be worse for the unemployed labourers than they were for the worst-paid labourer outside them.

[image error]

Farmers still had to pay tithes to the local church (Anglican/CofE) to support the local vicar, but the majority were nonconformist and attended chapels instead. With money tight, and the roads bad, toll gates were erected to help pay for the upkeep of the highways, but at huge expense to small farmers. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back – riots began to break out targeting these gates, but the protests were against conditions more generally. The men disguised themselves as women and called themselves “Daughters of Rebecca“, a reference to Genesis 24:60 where Rebecca [wife of Isaac], is blessed by her brothers: ‘let thy seed possess the gates of those who hate them’.

In the face of these dramatic disturbances, the threat to landed interests and the subversive Otherness of the rioters, who used the language barrier effectively to put off those seeking to infiltrate meetings or discover what the conspirators were up to, not to mention the differences in religious culture and the demand for greater political rights, it is unsurprising that the Welsh were Gothicized in both factual report and fictional tales for popular English-speaking consumption.

In return, the Welsh Gothicized the English, but also the Welsh gentry themselves who were increasingly Anglicized and cut off from their cultural heritage. Welsh Gothic fiction featured rapacious colonials, Byronic (English) antiheroes who destroyed the lives of all they came into contact with, but also doomed Welsh gentry, isolated cursed failures who were too out of touch with their own heritage and could not be saved.

 

II: ‘An Underworld of One’s Own’

Part Two will look at the Gothic fiction of this period covered by Aaron with a focus on the doomed families and slow death of the Welsh language, and will be posted on Thursday this week!

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