Free Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees Page A

For years it was the only Welsh word I knew.
    After lunch they used to send us to bed. Everyone, so the argument went, would have a nap. It seemed a nonsensical rule. Who wants a nap at two in the afternoon on Christmas Day of all days? So we ruckused upstairs among the bedclothes, and generally waited while engorged Welsh elders slept off their food.
    After a respectable period we were suffered to come downstairs, to be greeted by tottering stacks of presents. These should have been sledded in on an overnight delivery, but we were told that Father Christmas came late to Carmarthenshire. I would rip through my pile, barely pausing to give thanks. Children are uniquely vile in that regard. I was, anyway. My ravenous consumerist maw was fed with toys, board games and militarised figurines, which emerged from their wrapping and fanned across the available carpet space. My grandmother would take an interest in these plastic acquisitions, and my uncle too. The peripheral players would purse their lips. My grandfather was lofty in his indifference to all this knick-knackery shipped down from London toyshops. When they were young in Wales such bounty did not shower down the chimney. But who cared what they all thought? Not I. I would take my stock away and lavish it with attention for many minutes. Then I would arrange it carefully in a corner and forget all about it.
    Thus was a merry Christmas worshiplessly had by all in Wales. The old house chimed to a Welsh kind of merriment, warm rich smells lingering long into the early evening when pancakes smeared in salty Welsh butter made their appearance. No doubt tensions simmered over our heads: relatives were eager for the time to fly, for twitterers to shut it, children to be silenced and the relentless flow of heavy Welsh cooking to relent. I noticed none of it. To me as a child this was Wales and this was Welshness. And every year it was to be wished for – devoutly.
    The list of sundry chapels in Carmarthen testifies to the grip in which Nonconformity held the Welsh population in the nineteenth century: the Priory Independent Chapel, the Penuel Baptist Chapel, the Tabernacle Baptist Chapel, the English Congregational Chapel, the Calvinistic Methodists, the Parc-y-Felfed Unitarian Chapel, the Union Street Independent Chapel.
    On a damp July Sunday morning I pause outside fine black railings in Lammas Street. Overhead are grey West Wales skies, heavy with rain. A black board tells me I’ve got the right place: Capel Yr Annibynwyr – the Independents’ Chapel (confusingly, the Independents are also known as Congregationalists). It was here in 1927 that my grandparents married. The minister, the board says, is one J. Towyn Jones, FRSA.
    The tall building at the back of the courtyard is behind scaffolding. I slip through a side doorway and enter a chapel. The welcoming smiles are bright and warm. I am handed a hymnal. It seems a small room for my grandparents to have married in. A line of varnished wooden pillars and a curtained back wall intensify the sense of a womb. The other surprise is how many fill the pews. We are led to believe that the Welsh believer is an endangered species, but the streets are running with people in their Sunday best, heading forplaces of worship. There are maybe twenty Congregationalists in the congregation, mostly over fifty but not all. I take my place in a row halfway up the left of the aisle and await developments.
    Eventually a pianist finishes noodling beatifically on an upright piano and silence descends. The minister – J. Towyn Jones, I presume – who has been sitting among us in a chair behind a lectern, rises to speak. He’s wearing a raffish bow tie, which somehow matches the kindly contours of his face and the donnish waves of white hair. We are welcomed in Welsh. We sing hymns in Welsh – ‘Wel dyma’r Ceidwad’, ‘Cof am y cyfiawn Iesu’ – not so very tunefully, but lustily. We pray in