No Welcome in the Hillside

In which The Author punctures an old myth

A few weeks ago, on a Friday evening, I was chatting to my old pal Adrian T. over a pint in the Lighthouse. He'd come in after a short stop in Thereisnospoon, just around the corner, and was telling me of an interesting experience he'd had.

He was having a smoke in the beer garden when he struck up a conversation with three young women. They turned out to be from Germany, and were in Aberdare because they're working as language teaching assistants in the local area. I had a bit of a flashback to meeting three crazy girls from Brittany in the Cambrian, ten years or so ago. They were language teaching assistants, also staying in Aberdare. They'd found their way to the Cambrian in time for the Wednesday night quiz one week, had a great time, and made it a regular stopover during their time in Wales. (I'm still in touch with Judith and Sarah via Facebook; Marine didn't do social media.)

Anyway, these three girls were new to town, and asked Adrian's advice on what to do for a good time on a Friday night. My first answer – 'Get on the first train to Cardiff' – didn't occur to him, so he ran down a virtual pub crawl for them: a quick one in the Lighthouse, with the free jukebox; one in the vodka bar (which used to be the Carpenters back when it wasn't full of blokes in muscle T-shirts and bints in white stilettos) just to say they'd been there; one in the reopened Bute (ID permitting); one in the Cambrian, where Jocelyn would be doing the karaoke; finish up either in the Bush or in the Con Club, both of which open late.

Times have changed. When we were the age these frauleins were, our circuit involved the Black Lion, the Bute, the Cambrian, the Carpenters, possibly the Bush, possibly the Boot, possibly the Market Tavern, and possibly the Depot, always ending up in the National Wine Bar until chucking-out time.

The Depot and the National are long gone. The Black Lion and the Boot are covered in scaffolding; I don't know what's happing to the former, but the latter is going to converted into flats and a retail space. I imagine we can add it to the growing list of empty premises in Aberdare (three more since Xmas, with another to come after this weekend).

Until fairly recently, the Market Tavern used to be packed early on a Friday evening, then everyone would descend on Judges, just up the street. Last time I was in Market Street at about 9.15 on a Friday night (the even sadder prequel to one of the Cure's earliest songs, maybe) neither place was open.

I refer the honourable ladies to the answer I gave some moments ago, as John Major might have said.

Anyway, Adrian went back inside and approached a group of young lads sitting at one of the tables. He outlined the situation I've just described, and suggested that it might be a nice gesture if they invited our visitors to join them on a little pub crawl. He sounded quite surprised when he told me his idea had been dismissed out of hand.

'I thought we Welsh were supposed to keep a welcome in the hillside,' he said, rather bitterly.

On the other hand, I wasn't surprised in the slightest.

Anyway, after Adrian moved on (possibly to one of the places I've listed, or maybe to one of the other three) I started thinking about what he'd said. One of the first things that came to mind was a lovely compliment that Jamila, the Nigerian Princess, paid me during a rambling late-night phone call from Nottingham when she was working on her MSc in Forensic Science. (I know – in anyone else's blog that sentence would sound totally avant-garde, wouldn't it? Every word of it is true. We'd become friends when we were studying together in 2009, and we're still in touch via Facebook and Instagram.)

'I'm so glad I met you,' she said. 'You were the first person in Wales to make me feel welcome.'

Bear in mind that she'd been here for the best part of two months before I invited her to share my table during a wet Thursday lunch hour towards the end of October. By the time we'd finished our puddings, we both knew we'd be friends for life.

She also told me that she'd felt excluded by many of the students in her group (we went in different directions after our first year), and she thought that their racist attitudes were almost certainly at the heart of the problem.

And I thought of many other minor incidents (quite a few of which I've recounted in my old Wordpress blog of the same title) which I've been witness to during my time in Aberdare. I thought of the countless racist comments I've heard in pubs, at bus queues, in the streets, and which have been reported to me via Facebook by some of my friends.

I thought of the number of times some Daily Star-reading fuckwit has remarked, 'It's getting like the fucking United Nations around here,' every time a non-white face passes the pub window.

No – what it's 'getting like' is a proper 21st Century town, a real contemporary community, including people from all continents and cultures. Maybe because I spent my first year at university in London, where this way of life was a novelty at first and quickly wore off, I'm pleased to see the Valleys diversifying and opening up to the world. How long it will last once Britain leaves the EU and the far right start to feel vindicated in our new-found isolationism, remains to be seen.

And I thought of the numerous sickly ballads romanticising life in the industrial Valleys, especially those churned out by a guy named David Alexander which are fixtures on the pub jukeboxes in Aberdare.

Mr Alexander (not his real name, apparently) did indeed work down a coal mine after leaving grammar school, but then trained as an engineer. He was born in Blackwood, so whether he'd ever seen the Rhondda is a matter for conjecture. It didn't stop him from singing at length about it, though. On one of the live recordings which torture us youngsters regularly, he introduces a song about the Rhondda as 'a song my daddy used to sing' – which itself appears to be bollocks, because it was written by Byron Godfrey and Johnny Caesar and released in 1971.

It's this sort of sentimental trash which has done much to perpetuate the myth of South Wales as 'welcoming'. Just last night, a guy called Lee sang a karaoke song which notched up pretty much the full Valleys Cliche Bingo card: 'coal', 'miners', 'daffodils', 'Rhondda', and – naturally – 'welcome'. Just as the Jewish people dream collectively of returning to the Promised Land, so it seems that every Welshman dreams of returning 'home'. We've even got a word for it: hiraeth. It's often translated as 'nostalgia' or 'homesickness', but it's one of those mysterious words that simply doesn't map exactly on to any target language. Only a real Welshman can truly understand hiraeth, it seems.

Well, in that case, I put my hands up. I'm not a real Welshman.

I was born in Mountain Ash, I grew up just outside Aberdare, and (apart from my year in London) I still live here, but even when my first bout of real clinical depression was in full trough, in the spring on 1985, I never wanted to pack my course in and head back here. In fact, I would quite happily sell up tomorrow and get the fuck out, returning only for family events.

And, to judge from Adrian's bemused retelling of the Thereisnospoon comedy episode 'the Germans' a month or so, you're only really welcome here if your grandparents can trace their ancestry back to Owain Glyndŵr's time on both sides, with no genetic intervention from any other source. Unless you can point to at least a dozen names on the long lists of the mining industry casualties and prove via documentation that they were your distant cousins on your Aunt Eirlys' side of the family, you'll never be part of the community.

Sure, there are numerous cheats and tweaks you can play with your identity in an attempt to become Welsh. You can look as white as you like, so much so that have to lie on a sunbed simply to reassure your neighbours you aren't actually dead. You can wear your red shirt every weekend during the 6 Nations and sing the anthem which as much hwyl as you can muster. You can even join your local rugby team, if you really want to look the part. To pretend to assimilate even further, you can send your kids to Meithrin and Welsh-medium school, and dress them in manufactured costumes for school photos every St David's Day (please see the classic book The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, published by Cambridge University Press, for more on this subject). To go all the way, you can mumble your barely rationalised Wenglish racism as inarticulately as you can manage. But no matter hard you try, you'll never really pull it off.

Even Plaid Cymru, the only political party operating solely within this country, raised eyebrows about ten years ago when Pakistan-born Mohammad Ashgar was elected as the first Asian member of the Welsh Assembly. He simply wasn't 'one of us', after all.

That's the state of things in the Valleys in 2017. Nearly seventy years after the MV Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing the first wave of Caribbean immigrants to London, simply the imminent opening of a Turkish restaurant in Aberdare is enough to incense the locals to vocal apathy. They can't even be bothered to get off their fat fucking arses and start a race riot. As long as they can sit in the pubs, or in front of their huge fucking TVs, and moan about 'these people taking over the place' they're happy. And that's the way it's going to stay.

And if three young German girls stroll in here tonight, I'm sure I can call on some extremely rusty phrases to say 'hello' and make some new friends. Whether any of us will be allowed to stay for a second pint is debatable, of course.

So, I hereby renounce all claims to Welsh nationality, citizenship, identity, whatever, everything. If all I can look forward is another twenty, thirty or even fifty years in this place, where even the sight of someone reading a book in the corner of the pub strikes terror into the heart of the regulars, I have nothing to live for any more.