WHEN A STRANGER GOES TO A CHURCH IN WALES.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 833, 5 August 1933, Page 8

WHEN A STRANGER GOES TO A CHURCH IN WALES.

To-day’s Special Article.

Part-Singing by the Congregation: Inspired Preaching by Deformed Boy.

By

Rona Wheeler.

Wales isn’t a bit of Great Britain, in spite of what maps may indicate. It is a separate country with a separate language; the people are different; they look different, and the lovely lilting of their voices is as different from the nasal squeak of the Cockney or the dragging rumble of Sussex as chalk from cheese. It is a tiny place but so much of it is up hill and down dale that, as someone has remarked, it would be quite as hig as England if you rolled it out flat. But after all, mountains rocky or otherwise and valleys cultivated or otherwise are much the same the world over. Parts of Central Otago could be Wales, quite easily.

JT’S THE PEOPLE. This amazing browneyed race that have kept themselves to themselves for generations. They have preserved their language in spite of the times and times English hordes have swept through their lands. Any other people would have given up their national characteristics decades ago, for, after all, it would have been so much easier to absorb English names, customs, speech. But not so the Welsh.

a beautifully bound hymn book. There wasn’t a single thing in it that conveyed anything to me, except, perhaps, the name of the printer. But it did not matter. One does not want to join in chorifses at a philharmonic concert. And then, the sermon. The ginger-haired boy with the deformed back took off his overcoat and looked younger than ever; for forty minutes he spoke, and there were no rustlings in the congregation such as one hears and feels elsewhere. Only once did he lapse into English, and that may have been my fault. Through the window I could see little white lambs skipping about on the hillside (and lambs in Wales are whiter than anywhere else), and seagulls from the coast eight miles away were wheeling high. In Dramatic English.

Innumerable times have I stopped small children, partly to ask the way, partly for the fun of talking to them. Half the time I couldn’t get any sense out of them at all. Their English was simp]} 7- non-existent. And in the smaller villages—the type that consist of one pub, one church, one schbol, one large and two visible houses, wherever people were monolingual, it was Welsh that they spoke. Welsh Church Music.

Suddenly, in the middle of the torrent of barbaric sounds: “‘Brethren, I would not have you ignorant of the Lord Jesus Christ,” and I came back with a jerk from the lambs and the seagulls. It may have been my fault, but I think it was more likely to have been a method of achieving emphasis. A Welshman is nothing if not a born actor with an amazing sense of dramatic effect.

There was a quaint little chapel in the Nant Francon Pass, solid, squat, thoroughly non-conformist and glorying in it. If anything, the inside was even more aesthetic than the outside. We crept in, pretending not to notice our hob-nailed boots. At the door, remembering Saint Paul’s admonitions to ladies, I wrenched my companion’s sou’-wester hat out of his hand and rapidly did things to the brim of it. The organist was improvising on the asthmatical organ. He slid into minor keys and out of them with amazing ease. There was no choir, and as far as I could see no minister, and no trimmings to the church except the plain wooden pews with white globed oil lamps at the ends, and a plain wooden pulpit, no more than a desk.

Another hymn in a minor key with extraordinary cadences, and then a man in the front seat got up; a very brown man, probably a miner from the slate quarries on the other side of the valley. What he said I haven’t the slightest idea, but a small girl detached herself from the body of the Church and trotted up to stand beside the organ and the minister, who had struggled into his overcoat again. She was a very small girl. Her hat was on the back of her **head and her scarf hung straight down the front of her in two long green tails. She put her hands behind her back and commenced reciting something in a faint whisper. It went on and on and on. And as she went on and on and on she gained courage and her voice got louder and louder. The minister sat beside her with his elbows on the table and propped his chin on his hands. At the end of her recitative they held a short conversation in Weffli, which must have been amusing as the entire congregation smiled at them and at each other, before she slipped down the aisle and into her pew. Then the elderly organ broke out again, we opened our little pew doors and clumped out in our hob-nailed boots. “Is this England?” I demanded of my companion as we walked back up the beautifully curving, smooth-surfaced motoring road that sweeps down through the narrow pass to the sea. But he, being German, could not cope with a rhetorical question. So we went on in silence. Anyway, it is not England—it is Wales.

Suddenly we began. A ginger-headed boy with a deformed back got up from a side seat and climbed the two steps to the pulpit. He wore an overcoat. Very solemnly he gave out a hymn and read the whole thing through. The organist shook back his too long black hair, and the congregation rose to its feet and started. Never in my life have I heard anything so amazing. The . women sang the melody, but the men let themselves go.

I have heard since that Welsh babies are born with this part-singing flair, and apparently they are also born with lovely rich true voices to do it with. By the middle of the hymn the enthusiasm was growing. By the end. of the hymn, it swept everyone along so that, for pure joy, they sang the last verse twice. And not one single word did we understand. One might as well have been in Indo-China. A lady from the row behind leant over my shoulder.

“ Would you care to use this?” she said with a perfect English accent, handing me