I don’t think I’ve managed to join in Reading Wales before – an annual project led by Karen at Booker Talk. To be honest, that’s largely because I have no idea which authors on my shelves are Welsh. I imagine there are quite a few hiding among the vintage books, and perhaps I should do some digging into the more Welsh-sounding surnames (though, as someone with the surname Thomas and no Welsh blood, I know it’s not always a given).
But I knew about one Welsh book: Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis. It’s a classic of Welsh literature, hovering somewhere in the hinterland between novel, memoir, and children’s book. I suppose it falls down most certainly on ‘novel’, but it feels very like a memoir of childhood – four siblings living in Pengarth, called Delia, Lucy, Maurice and Miriam – as well as the vicarage children nearby. The oldest is 11 years old and the youngest ‘Miriam – who ran to width rather than height – barely managed to reach the key-hole at three and a half years’. (We are introduced to them by that most familial of things – heights etched into a doorpost.)
As far as I can tell, Pengarth isn’t a real village, but it represents any similar community in the Welsh borders. The novel was published in 1934 but is set in a hazy past. As Charles Morgan hints in his brief prefatory letter, Dew on the Grass is aimed at those who have ‘said “My childhood is gone!” and mourned for his giants’. Childhood is bathed in a glow of nostalgic innocence. The children here may have minor feuds and grievances, but you know that they will not outlast the sunlight. They experience nothing that will scar them psychologically – significant, as Morgan writes, in an era with ‘legends, now intellectually in vogue, which represent children as Freudian Yahoos incontinently abandoned on the doorstep of the London School of Economics’.
I’ve been calling this a novel, but it’s really a series of vignettes. Here’s a taste from the beginning of one of them…
The Rectory children had come to tea and now all of them had run out into the garden and were deciding what game they should play next. Released at length from the spell of Louisa’s eye and the cool, leaf shaped nursery, they danced out on the lawn, shouting, hopping with excitement, ready for something adventurous, scarcely able to contain their glee.
“Rounders!” someone shouted. But were there enough of them for rounders? Yes, if they got Dick the stableboy to join in; then Delia remembered that Dick was cleaning out the hen-house under Jarman’s eye, so it was no use counting on him.
“Hide and seek!” called out David. “I vote for hide and seek.”
“No, no, not hide and seek,” Lucy thought to herself. “Oh God,” she prayed rapidly – half shutting her eyes because you should always pray with your eyes closed, but only half because the others might notice and laugh at her – “let it not be hide and seek. Please, dear God, let it not be hide and seek.”
But it was. Perhaps God didn’t mind what game they played, although it mattered so much to Lucy; or perhaps He was punishing her for being rude to Louise that morning.
That’s about as high as the stakes get in Dew on the Grass. So, what did I think? Well, it’s undeniably charming. It crosses the line into twee, really. And sometimes I am happy for a dose of twee.
In an episode of Tea or Books?, Rachel and I talked about books that do or do not have ‘bite’, and I’ve found it a useful categoriser in my head ever since. This book has the least bite of any novel I’ve ever read – which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a choice and something that can delight in certain moods and irritate in others. The children act like children, so it’s not a case of unlikely Victorian moralising from their mouths – but they also live a fundamentally happy, peaceful, contented life in a narrative totally absent of irony.
I can see why Morgan found it delightful, and I can particularly see why it was precious to buyers of my 1944 reprint. In the midst of war, this was exactly the sort of world that people believed they were fighting for. It’s a very selective vision of any era – but, why not. It wouldn’t suit every mood, but sometimes it’s lovely to read something in which happiness is so evident on every page.