The Welsh word cynefin is often translated as “habitat” in English, but in usage it goes deeper than that: an individual’s homeland, their topographical idiolect, the place where they belong. My favourite definition is “a landscape which, as you step into it, feels like arriving at your hearth”. For me that hearth-place is the countryside within a 10-mile radius of the old Welsh longhouse outside Abergavenny my parents bought as newly weds. When I was three they moved the family to London. Six years later we returned to the longhouse where I lived for the rest of my childhood and teenage years.
Despite those formative years in London, the life and culture I associated with that longhouse always remained “home”. Wales, which we returned to nearly every weekend, offered me an access to otherness, to belonging within what felt like a more ancient, visceral world than the streets of Blackheath or Richmond.
As I grew older it was the internal borders of the area – social, linguistic and topographical – that became increasingly informative, its latticework of division and meeting between Welsh and English, the housing estate and the rural, the tended field and the wild plateau, the industrialised valleys and the low-lying market communities. My comprehensive school was what my mother called a “proper comprehensive”, meaning that pretty much everyone went there. It was situated beneath a beautiful hill, but also one of the poorest housing estates in the country. Both filled my classroom windows – the graceful dome of the Deri’s deciduous woodland rising above the grey pebbledash two-up, two-downs of Underhill Crescent.
Playing rugby, meanwhile, meant making frequent bus journeys into the south Wales valleys to witness yet another strikingly different way of living: poor in wealth, rich in community. And then, at the end of the school day, I’d get off the bus and return across the fields to that low house again, beyond the town, beyond the village, it’s own defiant, isolated statement of location and already, for me, deeply clothed in association and memory.
When I think of those adolescent years I remember them as a time of border crossings, of moving easily between extremes of natural beauty and petty violence, destructive young men and elemental hills, the claustrophobia of small-town life and the freedom of hilltop midsummer skies. And I remember, too, those crossings provoking my early attempts at trying to render in language what I saw and heard around me – the epiphanies of the natural world and stories from the unreported lives of people I had yet to find represented in my reading.
These attempts became my first poems – character sketches, moments from the secret myths of small-town big men, farmers, friends. That endeavour – to deploy the writer’s voice as a conduit for the voices of others – has since become a consistent vein in my work. The early Welsh bards called themselves “carpenters of song”, and that has always felt like the truest description of my writing, whether in poetry, prose or drama; an attempt to create a shape in words through dovetailing my voice with the experience of others. It was in Gwent’s landscape of borders I began sharpening the tools for such work and where I first discovered a pressure to speak and a purpose as to why I should put the blade to the wood.
The Green Hollow by Owen Sheers will be published by Faber next month.