Bred of Heaven (33 page)

I develop a headache, plus a feeling of desperation which locates itself in the urethra. I go back to the book and start looking for easier types of
englyn
. Words start to swim in front of my eyes. You can't write a poem without a thought in your brain. Then it strikes
me. I practically slap my forehead. Of course! I've already written my first line. Unwittingly I blurted it out to the Archdruid. He thought he'd write a poem inspired by my accidental
cynghanedd
. ‘Diolch yn fawr!' he said jubilantly.

And so I begin. The
englyn
I end up with after several more hours is free of sophistication. Its imagery is illogical, its sentiments cloying. It probably flouts a number of rules I don't know about. There's one word in the second line into which I have to crowbar the most tenuous meaning in order to make an internal rhyme. I can say without fear of contradiction that it is glib moronic tosh about the sun sinking bleakly in the east, if not for you then for me, and rising over Wales, which mutates my future from black darkness. As I say, melodramatic and nonsensical. I will make a point of never showing the Archdruid. Not ever. But it is my tosh. My Welsh tosh. And with it I am able to tack myself onto the end of the long and noble history of Welsh bards, the latest and the least.

Familiar faces are mustering towards the north corner of the Maes. Graham, the choir secretary who invited me into the fold, has the commanding air of a brigadier before battle. The second tenors exude an air of readiness: Mal and Alan; Dai and Colin; the redoubtable Prof; Roy, who joined after me, waiting quietly. The top tenor French Horn is a-buzz. Barely out of their teens when Pendyrus last came to the National, they're now all over sixty. Jakey, hair as dark as it was then, was there in 1968.

Above us the pink pavilion shines obscenely whenever the light stabs through gaps in the cloud. Through a door is a holding room, filled with white-haired choristers in blazers of various hues: burgundy, black and, in Pendryus's case, navy blue. On a live video feed piped in from the pavilion stage, one of our rival choirs is bashing out its version of the test piece, ‘Heriwn, Wynebwn y Wawr'. As in Cardigan, we feel we can look everyone else in the eye.

I can't help noticing that the camera gets in good and tight on choral faces. And it strikes me that, if you don't know the words, you are going to look like a chump. Worse, you are going to look unWelsh. Somewhere in my guts a butterfly clambers out of its chrysalis and begins to flutter about in a businesslike fashion. Another soon joins it. If a camera catches me Redwoodising in the warp-tempo ‘Hela'r Sgyfarnog' … it doesn't bear thinking about. Trip over one syllable and you will never get the thread back. I have the words in my pocket. I go into an emergency eleventh-hour session.

‘Wyt ti'n barod i ganu, bychan?' After a minute or so Mal catches me at my revision. Am I ready to sing?

‘Wrth gwrs!' Course! ‘Dw i'n jus' siecio'r geiriau unwaith eto.' Just checking the words one more time. Mal gives me a probing look, smile half suppressed. We like having you in the second tenors, it says, but don't you go letting anyone down now. Especially yourself. I suddenly need to rehydrate. By the water cooler a choir in black tie is receiving a pep talk in Welsh. That'll be Côr Meibion Taf, whom we thumped into third place in Cardigan. They look suspiciously young. And very much swollen in numbers. When we beat them there were barely thirty in the choir. They're now double that. Hm. I get my water and retreat.

Clapping thunders through the loudspeakers. Another choir has finished its fifteen minutes. Word spreads among Pendyrus that we
should now proceed to the next chamber to await our turn. All eighty of us form four long lines, each consisting of five second tenors, five tops, five baritones and five basses. The maths is relatively simple. Or it is until an instruction drifts back from somewhere even closer to the wings of the stage that choirs are actually standing in five rows, not four. Panic spreads like a bush fire. Choristers who have sung next to each other for a quarter of a century are not easily dislodged. Eventually, exasperated looks flung, flare-ups defused and deals struck, the four-row Pendyrus reconfigures itself into five rows for its most important musical moment in decades.

Throughout all this Stewart is standing quietly by a wall. The conductor is up for judgement as much as the choir, if not more. I go over to shake his hand. That winning grin of his is looking perhaps a little tight.

‘Pob lwc, Stewart,' I say.

‘I chi hefyd.' To you too. (Stewart prefers the formal mode of address.)

I resume my position at the far right of the back row. My flank's feeling a bit exposed. I put it to my neighbour – one of several schoolboys brought in by Stewart to fatten the sound – that maybe we should swap and he go on the end. He doesn't put up a fight. Now I'm in the winning position I occupied in Cardigan.

Pendyrus falls silent. One's breathing is becoming shallower, nails shorter. I do another word run-through of the two songs I know least. ‘Awn ni hela'r ysgyfarnog' (‘Let's go and hunt the hare'). ‘Fe wylwn ni, o genin aur, o'ch mynd yn ebrwydd iawn (‘We weep, o daffodil, that you leave so very soon'). All in working order. Any minute now I'm going to be on Welsh television, singing Welsh at the national festival of all things Welsh. If anyone had told me that two years ago … or that the president of Plaid Cymru would
recognise me on the Maes … or that the Archdruid and his distinguished prose-writing wife would burst into the waiting area and hurry over to find me and pump my hand and wish me luck …

Suddenly we're moving. An expert will be discussing our prospects with a presenter on S4C. And now here's the green light. Pendyrus's long-awaited return to the Eisteddfod will be their subject. I feel like a sportsman emerging for combat as I follow the long single line round the back of the stage, and am suddenly on the national stage of Wales. The stage is aglow. Somewhere out there beyond the lights an audience of several hundred can be made out, including near the front – I've just spotted them – three judges.

A hush descends. I am aware of cameras waiting to pounce on telltale evidence of word-fail like a bird of prey scoping the floor for the scuttle of rodents. As Stewart raises his baton I glue my eyes on him and, I swear, don't remove them for the next fifteen minutes.

We embark with Bellini. I've often thought Welsh had an affinity with Italian – the heavy commitment to the penultimate syllable, the many verbs ending in -
io
and -
o
, including
seinio
in the title of ‘Pan Seinio'r Utgorn Arian'. Pendyrus duly make the trumpets sound with a bravura display of florid Latin melodrama. The song reads like a public conversation, chatty and bustling, full of extrovert purpose. It goes on a bit, with lots of orchestral squiggles for Gavin to impersonate on the piano. But the Italian flavours are rich and colourful and, on a personal note, I am practically word perfect. The all-seeing cameras won't have caught a sniff.

We glide into ‘Cenin Aur', a ballad of haunting beauty into which I could afford to put more facial expression but so tight is my focus on Stewart's lyrical conducting that I may as well be Botoxed. There is no piano accompaniment for this, so it's down to us to conjure up an atmosphere. The bewitching harmonies spread a
lovely pall of Welsh melancholia across the floor of the pavilion as we sing of life's evanescence and man's empathy with the sad passing of the seasons. I'd be a pool of tears by the end of it if the dominant emotion weren't relief at mastering the second tenor's sinuous line, which slithers scarily high and topples towards the floor before curling up into the quietest, tenderest sigh of sorrow.

No sooner has the audience's appreciation melted away than we crash into the dissonant world of ‘Heriwn, Wynebwn y Wawr'. The opening was delivered at full welly in Cardigan. This time, with amplification, we might as well blow a hole in the back wall of the pink pavilion. ‘Miloedd ar filoedd sy'n amau bob dydd …!!' The lines feel like second nature to me now. Every word has made its way into my marrow, like songs sung in school and never yet forgotten. Every surge or drop in volume, each dynamic stress is like a feature in a much-loved landscape – a dramatic Welsh one, naturally. For some reason, familiarity does not allow me to relax and work on my facial performance. Later, when watching it back online, I see that this is the song in which a rogue camera chooses to seek me out and linger on my marble features. The level of concentration is chiselled on my face. I look like I'm successfully laying an egg of inconvenient diameter. My lips move to precisely the right specification. ‘Mae'r dyfodol yn dechrau,' I sing. ‘Mae'r dyfodol yn dechrau, yn dechrau, yn deeeechraaauuu.' The future is beginning. As Pendyrus sing the climactic words of this rugged paean to the power of song, here on the stage of the National Eisteddfod but also broadcast into homes across Wales, it's as if I can feel my own Welsh future joining hands with the Welsh past. How thrilled my grandparents would presumably be to know that a grandson of theirs, born in England and educated in Englishness, had somehow managed to paddle this far upstream towards the source of Wales and Welshness. ‘Mae'r dyfodol yn dechrau … yn awrrrrrrrrrrrr.'
The future is beginning now! The
r
is rolled once more like an unfurling red carpet as Stewart turns to the audience and accepts forthright applause.

A single song to come, a brief merry afterthought to send us on our way. Let us go and hunt the hare, again without the piano, a harum-scarum chase across wide-open fields of song, words tumbling out at such speed that one or two go missing from the rear corner of second tenors. We're the only section with words, everyone else la-la-laing along, so the risk of exposure is considerable, but the long hours spent reciting pay off. With a final exclamation of national fervour – ‘Cymru lân!' – all of a sudden the fifteen minutes' traffic of Pendyrus's time onstage is up.

Finally I can take my eyes off Stewart and look out past the lights towards an audience clapping hard and long. I note the judges writing. Pendyrus didn't put a foot wrong, surely. It was a Rolls-Royce performance, all effortless power and precision cornering. Welcome us back to competition with a gong, would you please?

Out in the open air, choristers are free to start unwinding. As the afternoon proceeds the sun stops vacillating and puts in a decent shift. The forecourt of the beer area is full of T-shirted wassailers while up on an outdoor stage Dafydd Iwan strums boisterously through the old favourites – ‘Carlo', ‘Yma O Hyd'.

After a contented hour or two in the sun we wander back for the adjudication. The tented stalls are closing for the last time, the streets of the Maes emptying. In the pavilion I sit in the wings on the right with Alan and Roy, my fellow second tenors. Just across the aisle the massed ranks of Côr Meibion Taf fill row upon raked row of seating. After a couple of minutes the judges make their way onto the stage. One of them approaches the microphone and starts talking in Welsh. I don't understand much amplified Welsh but there is no mistaking the moment when he announces, in reverse
order, that of the seven competing choirs the one which has been adjudicated third best is Côr Meibion Pendyrus.

The heart sinks just a little. We haven't won. But we have been placed. The official line is that a placing will be deemed a success. Third is no disgrace. Until they announce the second-placed choir. Llanelli. Heads around me turn to one another in shock. Llanelli? Llanelli, it is widely agreed among my colleagues, are not in the same league as Pendyrus. What other enormities have the judges in store for us? Who can they possibly have picked for choir of the year? Instantly I can feel the result rise in my waters so am not at all thrown when Côr Meibion Taf, the black-jacketed mob across the aisle, leap to their feet like a football crowd and start hugging, yelling, fisting the air in triumph. As their exultant conductor emerges to collect the cup, Pendyrus choristers clap sportingly. But no sooner have we emerged into the open air and started following the human tide towards the exit than the mutterings begin.

Mutterings swell to splutterings in a pub in Tredegar, one of the smarter mining towns over in the next-door valley. A story fans around the floor that we have been the victims of a slippery interpretation of Eisteddfod rules. Côr Meibion Taf, whom we beat into third place in Cardigan when they could barely muster thirty choristers, were performing with an unfair advantage. So goes the rumour. Sure, our numbers were slightly plumped with the recruitment of half a dozen schoolboys. But theirs were mysteriously doubled –
doubled
– with the help of the chorus of the Welsh National Opera and the BBC National Chorus of Wales. There were up to ten from each, apparently. One of our number, who sings with the BBC Chorus, recognised a bunch of them. The talk is all of larceny, effrontery, skulduggery, conspiracy. And if it's one thing to lose to a choir packed with professional singers, what about Llanelli? Llanelli!

I'd be inclined to dismiss all of this but for the head-scratching of Stewart, who can't quite believe that we didn't at least finish second. Outside, shadows lengthen across the Valleys. Inside, the atmosphere fugs with grumbling about miscarriages of justice and brooding over murky politickings. I am in my Welsh rugby shirt by now, with Welsh rage boiling in my Welsh veins. I am as scandalised as the next Pendyrus chorister at the whims of judges and the tactics of rivals. I am appalled, truly. Something must be done, letters fired off, objections tabled. Cudgels taken up. But as the evening darkens, the beer swimming into our arteries mutates anger to sorrow and the old Welsh acceptance of fate's whims.