Q J Med 2003; 96: 547
© 2003 Association of Physicians
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Welsh blood
I have Welsh blood in me. This may come as a surprise to anyone who knew my mother and father, who came from Vienna and Prague, respectively, but I will explain the mystery soon.
My first visit to Wales took place in the 1950s, when I was a child of about ten. My father consulted the AA concerning the route to Snowdonia, as there were no motorways yet. We had to book phone calls in advance to the farmhouse where we were going to stay. It seemed at that time a place unimaginably remote from London, where we lived.
It turned out that the farmhouse, at the southern foot of the Carnedd mountains by Llyn Geirionydd, was even more remote than we had imagined. The road for the last three miles was unmetalled. It wound through dark forestry, past the looming ruins of lead mines, slate-coloured lakes, and a stark obelisk commemorating the great Welsh poet Taliesin. In the house itself there was no electricity, so we ate supper by the light of paraffin lamps and we made our way across the yard with candles—unless the fierce wind extinguished them—to the icy outhouses where we slept. In spite of the austerity, or perhaps because of it, we all fell in love with the house and the area. That love has never faded (although nowadays there is a pay-and-display car park by Llyn Geirionydd, a jetty for speedboats on the lake, and a ‘heritage board’ put up by the local council, giving historical details of the area for those in too much of a hurry to read a guidebook).
The farmhouse went through two changes of ownership, but on both occasions the new owners continued to take in holiday guests, and we continued to visit. In time, my father bought the former housekeeper’s cottage a hundred yards up the lane. It became our second home and a family refuge. On two occasions it became a literal refuge, as relatives and friends emerged unexpectedly from eastern Europe and needed a roof over their heads. When my parents died we had to sell it, but my sister and I never stopped visiting that extraordinary part of Britain—both bleak and luminous at the same time—to share it with our own partners and children, and to visit local people we had now known for decades.
The people who now had the farmhouse became more reclusive and shut it down to visitors, but further down the road—past the tiny mediaeval church where Llewellyn the Great was married—another couple had opened up two of their bedrooms to guests. So when I first took my wife up to north Wales, we began to stay there instead. It was an ancient long house, almost as old as the church, and formerly used as a lookout post for Gwydyr Castle in the Conwy Valley. There must be other parts of Britain where every corner breathes history and national identity like this, but I have never come to know any as well.
It was there that I was staying when I was taken ill. It was not my first serious illness, but it was possibly the most perilous, because the north Wales mountains are not the best place to have a gastrointestinal bleed. I went for a run to the lake and back, and when I rested afterwards, my tachycardia of 120 did not settle. It was then that I recalled how dark my stools had been that morning. Later a friend told me he had driven past in the opposite direction as I ran and had not recognized me, as I looked so ashen. That night, when I was already safely in a bed in Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor and on a drip, I virtually lost consciousness from a massive melaena.
It would be hard to do a controlled trial of the effects of landscape on hospital in-patients, but there can be few more recuperative views than the northern silhouette of the Snowdon range, as seen from the ward where I stayed. There was also something recuperative about the sound of the Welsh language, spoken by many of the hospital doctors and nurses as well as most of their patients. The sense of community and mutuality was strong, but I felt as welcome there as I ever did in the hills. When ‘Songs of Praise’—recorded in a Welsh church—came up on the telly on Sunday, most of the men on the ward wanted to watch it, but with a tact that brought tears to my eyes, they sent a small delegation to my bed to ask if I minded, since they knew I could not understand Welsh, and was Jewish.
By then, of course, I was able to tell them how proud I was to have Welsh blood in me: six units of it.
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