“The Life of Rebecca Jones” is translated from the Welsh,
and like some other bloggers I didn’t think I’d see the day where I’d be
reviewing a novel that had been translated from that language. Here we have,
what could be described as, a simple rural tale, Rebecca Jones telling her
story of growing up in Tynybraich, on the road to Cwm Maesglasau. This is a
celebration of what it is to be Welsh. The language, the poetry, the isolation
of the village, the rural lifestyle and of course the scenery. Our day to day
activities are intertwined with stories of streams, our lives the metaphor?
This is a simple story, told in simple language
The year 1905 was a year of death
in the annals of the world. Czar Nicholas II slaughtered five thousand in the
city of St Petersburg. Then thousand were killed in an Indian earthquake. Two
hundred thousand Russians were killed by Togo’s Japanese navy. Sailors on the
Russian ship Potemkin killed their own officers. Jews were killed by the
Russians of Odessa. And in Wales, nearly a hundred-and-twenty miners died in a
pit explosion in Rhondda Fach.
But for Rebecca and Evan Jones,
Tynybraich, the birth of their first child was enough to counter all that
death: an armful of flesh and a thatch of black hair. I was named Rebecca after
my mother and grandmother. Tradition had a hold on me from the moment I was
born.
Catrin Jones, my grandmother,
never came for the birth, not for some weeks later. She eventually came to
bestow her curt blessing and declared me “bonny like my father”. These were
hard times for Mother. But Aunt Sarah lent her support, both at my birth and
afterwards. Father only too glad to make his excuses and escape to the fields.
Sarah continued to help with the housework and with bringing up “little Beca”.
And when my brther, Robert, was born in August 1906 she came to us every day,
despite her mother’s reproaches.
I have only a child’s memory of
Aunt Sarah. I remember her as a tall and handsome woman, serious and quiet,
unlike her more mischievous brother. I remember how my mother’s face would
light up with a smile as she greeted her every morning; a smile of thankfulness;
a sister’s smile.
Sarah died in 1910, a young woman
of thirty-four years, a year after the death of her own mother. What has stayed
with me most is an impression of quiet gravity. Or maybe that impression comes
from the short poem – an englyn –
composed in her memory, which is carved into her gravestone on the hillside at
Dinas Mawddwy:
Early
was Sara silenced – tranquil, serious,
She
fell quiet ere the crowd’s applause;
But
the spell cast by her life’s goodness
Radiated
over her cold resting place.
Rebecca has three brothers who are blind, two born that way,
one who loses his sight.
His favourite pastime was seeing
through the eyes of others. He loved listening to visual descriptions: evocations
of landscapes, the description of a face, or a painting. Using a memory of
colour he’d imagine the sights for himself.
I remember well sitting by his
side one day at Tynybraich, and he said to me: “Tell me what you can see.”
Unthinkingly, I looked around and
said “nothing”. I immediately realised my error and hastened to describe the
scene around me.
The language may be simple but the tale is not. Just stop
and dwell on that section for a moment, such awareness. The story here seems
simple, the day to day existence of Rebecca in the Welsh valley with her parents
and siblings, but the depth and complexity is astounding. We have the tale of a
blind painter, the relationship between the visual and your own personal
interaction with the world. This then seamlessly slips into a section about the
beauty and the flowers of the valley. The visual and the natural blending
again.
You could look at this novel as a celebration of a lost era.
The simple activity of harvest time and hay baling becomes:
Getting the hay into the barn was
a great relief, guaranteeing food for the animals for the long winter. This
sense of relief belongs to the past. We no longer experience it with the
arrival of the big-bales’ polythene shrouds.
A story that also laments the loss of a language through the
loss of traditional ways of farming and the youth moving to cities. The valley
becoming filled with English speaking city people wanting to purchase a weekend
“view”.
Our story is also laced with metaphor, for example the
family being described as an anchor, holding us secure in a storm, holding us
back in fair weather. The comparison of life to nature, the trickling of the
streams, the passing of the seasons, the meandering of 100 years of Rebecca’s
life. This is presented by prose from Hugh Jones “The tips of the trees wear
white lace and the eaves hold sharp swords. Everything endeavours to hide its
head under whatever guard it can find, to save itself from the tempests and icy
frost which seek to obliterate it.” Winter = the passing of a life.
An interesting book which reads easily and pleasantly,
however one that contains many layers and levels and one that celebrates
(through the lamentations) being Welsh, the country, the way of living, the
language and more.
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