A BARD FOR HIGHGROVE A Likely Story
Meic Stephens
Cambria
2010
Published by Cambria, PO Box 22, Caerfyrddin/Carmarthen SA32 7YH Š Meic Stephens 2010 The right of Meic Stephens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder. This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Cover design by Henry Jones-Davies
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A Bard for Highgrove: a Likely Story When the Prince of Wales takes it into his head to appoint a Household Bard he hasn’t reckoned on the delectable but subversive Cerys Gifford Huws, fine poet in the strict metres and staunch Nationalist, who tries to teach him Welsh and encourages him to make his Principate more truly reflective of the country from which he takes his title. Under her influence, not only does he introduce Highgrove and Floomerwormwood, his little place down in Wales, to all things Welsh but insists on innovations like bilingual road-signs in England, Welsh on the school syllabus and in the law-courts, a Welsh page in all the Sunday papers, and much else besides. ‘Do remember,’ he says, ‘English was thrust upon the Welsh for centuries and they didn’t complain.’ But eventually the English Establishment reacts against ‘the Welsh Prince’ and the monarchy falls into disrepute. By 2020, the Yookay having broken up after Scotland’s secession, Cymru is an Autonomous Republic within the Celtic Confederation and ruled by a permanent green-red coalition. Charles has renounced his title and his claim to the throne, and gone to live quietly at Gregynog, where he has found contentment at last and no longer fidgets with his cuff-links. At the last, with the death of his mother at the age of 91, and William’s succession, the Windsors troop out on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace and in a scene reminiscent of the Winter Palace in 1917, the sound of gunfire is heard echoing down the Mall. And all this happens because of a Welsh poet . . . This novella, at once provocative and percipient, but never bland, is partly a critique of the institution of monarchy and partly a satire on the culture and politics of contemporary Wales. Laying no claim to ‘literary merit’ (the bane of so much of what is published in Wales nowadays), but elegantly written, it will make some readers grin and get up the noses of others, in about equal measure.
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The Author Meic Stephens was born in Trefforest, near Pontypridd, in 1938. Educated at the University Colleges of Wales, Aberystwyth and Bangor, and at the University of Rennes, he was for many years Literature Director of the Welsh Arts Council and latterly Professor of Welsh Writing at the University of Glamorgan. He has written, edited and translated about 170 books, most of them to do with the culture of Wales, and founded Poetry Wales in 1965. His novel, Yeah, Dai Dando, appeared in 2008. He is Literary Editor of the magazine Cambria and Secretary of the Rhys Davies Trust. He has lived in Cardiff since 1966. The language of his home is Welsh, which he learnt as an adult, and he writes verse in it. He also contributes obituaries of eminent Welsh people to The Independent.
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If we could learn to look instead of gawking, We’d see the horror in the heart of farce; If only we could act instead of talking, We wouldn’t always end up on our arse. Bertold Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
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I The Writing on the Wall ‘NOW THAT ONE has one’s own little place in Wales,’ said Charles to Camilla over a game of Scrabble in the small drawingroom at Highgrove, ‘one rather thinks one ought to brush up a little on the language. It would make such an orf’lly good impression, don’t y’think?’ Camilla lit another Balkan Sobranie, waited for the flunkies to finish bringing in the afternoon tea-trolley (a gift from the good folk of the Western Sahara) and then, when they were quite alone again and she was handing him a plate of cucumber and watercress sandwiches cut just the way he liked them, in dainty triangles and without the crusts, she said, ‘But darling, I’d always thought you spoke fluent Welsh.’ ‘You may very well think that, my dear, but one couldn’t possibly comment. By the way, there’s no such word as “yrneh”.’ ‘Oh knock it orf, sweetie, everyone knows jolly well you picked up the lingo at that college in west Wales just before your Investiture.’ ‘You mean Aberystwyth.’ ‘Oh I can’t pronounce those outlandish names they go in for down there, but yes, Aberistwatch, or whatever. Dreadful place, full of beastly Welsh Nationalists, so I’ve heard.’
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‘One rather looks back on the term one spent there with a certain fondness, brief though it was. Autres pays, autres mœurs, and all that. D’y’ know, one was taken into several public houses and once into a branch of F.W. Woolworth, and from time to time one was allowed to pop one’s own letters into a real postbox. What an experience! One met quite a number of interesting folk down there, especially among one’s fellow students at the College by the Sea . . . and yet, for some unfathomable reason, they would insist on calling one Carlo . . . not to one’s face, you understand . . . One was so sorry to read the other day that the Principal was in the habit of reporting students to our people at MI5 on account of their extreme views about one’s presence among them. One had been given to understand he too was a Welsh Nat, so one never can tell . . . ’ ‘I’ve watched the ceremony so many times, you were such a nice boy in those days. You carried it orf so well. It totally freaked me out. I was like “Wow!”’, and she fluttered the fingers of both hands above her head. ‘But the noise, my dear, and the people!’ ‘I did so love the horses and the gun-carriages. They were totally cool. Do have another buttered scone, ducky.’ ‘That was Caernarfon, not Aberystwyth.’ ‘Oh, yes, Carnarffon, how silly of me, where that big thingummy is, the castle I mean. But surely you spoke Welsh then, didn’t you, poppet? You used to say you read Daffid ap Whatsisname in bed every night. Oh, how those rustics cheered!’ ‘One had to make a good impression. Actually, one was quoting a scurrilous song the Nats used to sing about one. The chorus went something like “Carlo, Carlo, Carlo’s playing polo with Daddy,” . . . in Welsh, of course . . . frightf’lly amusing, really. It occurred to one that the song’s author, a rum cove called Daffid Youwan, if memory serves, merited an MBE for adding to the gaiety of nations. One shall have to have a word 8
with Number 10,’ he said in that droll manner and with the lopsided grin which made him so attractive to the Duchess. ‘Oh, you are so gallant, lover boy.’ ‘But the whole thing was such a damned pantomime from start to finish. Cooked up by that dreadful man George Thomas to keep the Welsh Nats in check. He was Secretary of State for Wales at the time, you see. Everyone in the Firm thought him the most frightful brown noser. And d’y’know, it later transpired he was a – ’ ‘But you behaved so beautifully, as you always do, and that’s what matters.’ ‘Let’s share a State Secret, shall we, my dear?’ ‘Oh goody-goody, do tell. I lurv State Secrets. Come on, buster, hit me with it.’ She gave him that gap-toothed smile he found so appealing. ‘Well, one’s lines were written out more or less phonetically by someone at the Welsh Office so that one could get one’s tongue round the trickier bits, and it was a great help, one must say. The London papers and lots of old ladies in Wales were convinced one was fluent. One can still remember a few phrases of what one had to say, as a matter of fact. Ur roov vee, Charles, Tu-wuss-oc Kum-ree, un toung-ee ee chee (ch as in loch) . . . ee vode un futh-lon ee chee (ch as in loch) . . . un err-bin (roll the r) pobe marth o bow-bol . . . ‘It was all one could do to keep a straight face. For some curious reason one kept thinking of sausage rolls. And then one had to say it all again in English. I, Charles, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb . . . to live and die against all manner of folk. One doesn’t know which version was the more preposterous. But if one had giggled it would have spoilt the show and Mummy wouldn’t have been at all pleased, poor dear. She’s such a brick.’ ‘“Jnana”? That’s not a proper word, sonny boy.’ 9
‘Oh yes it is. It means “knowledge acquired through meditation”. It’s what one does when one has a moment to oneself, my dear.’ ‘Really? Then you’re going to have to accept “yrneh”. It means “a unit of reciprocal inductance”, or so it says in my Scrabble dictionary. So there, poo-bah!’ ‘Mmm . . . this foie gras is tasty. Do we make this at Highgrove, too?’ Three clocks deep in the House’s west wing struck four, or thereabouts.
THE SUN WAS going down in the darkling sky of Gloucestershire. The parliament of rooks was in full cry beyond the Duchy Home Farm. The last of the visitors, members of the Historic Houses Association almost certainly, had long left and from the House’s high windows only one or two of the junior garden staff could be seen picking up litter. The unsold Highgrove ice cream tubs were back in the freezer and the unsold Highgrove honey pots back on the shelf. The meadowsweet, the umbelliferae, the gloxinias, the hoelboellia, the spotted orchid, the catalpa, the gingko biloba, the ox-eye daisies, the meadow crane’s bill and the buddleia were all in bloom, thanks to the uncommon skills of old Alf Passant, the Head Gardener, and the scent of gardenias (a gift from the good folk of Tromsø) was wafting in the balmy air. Prince Charles was never quite sure whether he was in Highgrove or Clarence House, so similar were the furnishings and ambiance in both, but one glance out of the window this fine evening told him he was in his country seat in l’Angleterre profonde, near a village called Doughton a little to the south-west of Tetbury, within driving distance of the Duchy of Cornwall and with easy road or helicopter access to the Principality of Wales, 10
where he owned a lot of land, and yet close to the natural world by which he set such great store. He spent almost as much time at his other home, Birkhall, in Scotland, but here he was chez soi. ‘Is there any more of our Highgrove preserve left, sweetie? It’s so totally lush, let’s finish it orf. Be a love and pass me the dish, please, Pringy. Gee, thanks. Wicked.’ With that His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor, Duke of Rothesay, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Great Steward of Scotland, Earl of Chester, Knight of the Garter, Knight of the Thistle, Great Master of the Order of the Bath, Order of Merit, Order of Australia, Companion of the Queen’s Service Order, Privy Counsellor – oh, and Prince of Wales – did as he was told by the woman he loved, Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall (the former Mrs Andrew Henry Parker Bowles and née Miss Camilla Rosemary Shand but not, for politic reasons, to be addressed as the Princess of Wales), and passed her the jam.
SIR PEREDUR Myles Stradling Tristram Crispin St John RiceBoothby – as he is listed in the current edition of Debrett’s People of Today - Principal Private Secretary to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, known to intimates and the Firm as Sir Perry, was not entirely happy in his work. In addition to having to put up with the Heir Apparent’s idiosyncrasies and increasingly eccentric ways - talking to plants was just the one the public heard about - it was part of his duties to deal with the brouhaha that sometimes ensued when he spoke in public. The Prince was good at declaring this and that open – a brake linings factory, perhaps, or a young offenders’ hostel, subjects about which he knew absolutely nothing - and could even speak on black-tie occasions if well briefed, as he usually was. Most of the time there was no controversy, because he stuck 11
to his notes and what he said was as ditch-water-dull as the occasion that had prompted him to dilate, and so could easily be passed over by news editors. But from time to time His Royal Highness would speak on matters about which he knew a little, such as the ‘monstrous carbuncles’ episode (this was before he had unveiled his own model village at Poundbury, an exercise in the architecturally bland); or on environmental issues of which his experience was more or less limited to the time he had spent as a young man rambling, hunting and fishing on the royal estate at Balmoral; or alternative medicine, for which he had no need himself because he was attended by the best physicians in the land; or road safety - he was driven everywhere by liveried chauffeurs; or the psychological problems associated with unemployment – he had a job for life, a guaranteed income and the prospect of promotion in due course; or the need for affordable housing – he owned the Scilly Isles where he charged rents that local people could not afford; and so on. The press would then have a field-day. ‘If a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ thundered a Times editorial, ‘the Prince is one who has tasted not the Pierian spring.’ The redtops went in for more demotic headlines like ‘Knock it orf, HRH’. For a few days after each gaffe he would once again become ‘the controversial Prince’, held up to ridicule on such programmes as Have I Got News For You and in countless cartoons in the gutter press, until such time as the latest capers of that winsome pair, Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty, or yet another scandal emanating from the Palace of Westminster, usually to do with sex or money, or both, brought a brief respite and removed him from publicity’s harsh glare. The man was given to criticising everything, though not himself, mused Sir Perry, despite all the glum introspection he went in for. To paraphrase the broadcaster, Jonathan Dimbleby, the Prince had, by the age of fifty, accumulated a number of 12
certainties about the state of the world and did not relish contradiction. This was a man who had no direct, personal experience of the quiddities of everyday living: mortgages, dry cleaners, cold calling, overdrafts, doctors’ waiting lists, council tax, plumbers’ bills, Mormons at the door, junk mail, postal strikes, double glazing salesmen, passports, voting, cinema queues, shopping for food, petrol stations, carparks, neighbours, estate agents, gas boards, refuse collection . . . and yet he would go on and on about the world the rest of us have to inhabit without the wealth and privilege he enjoyed. His only gesture towards the possibility that he might be misinformed was his constant use of weasel expressions like ‘If memory serves one aright’ and ‘Don’t y’think?’. It was one of the reasons why the Prince of Wales was so unpopular and, the Fourth Estate rarely being able to distinguish between man and wife, why the Duchess of Cornwall was generally tarred with the same brush. There was constant complaint about his use of the royal train, at £20,000 a trip, and the cost of his lavish lifestyle. Furthermore, the Great British Public, ever fickle, could not put aside the knowledge that the marriage had taken place after years of persistent adultery and was still tainted by the memory of the Prince’s first wife, the incomparable but deeplyflawed Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, who had lived her life ‘like a candle in the wind’, notably enjoying a last torrid fling with Dodi Fayed of the unroyal House of Harrods, and of the horrible way in which the couple had died in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. One of the things everyone who watched television knew was that Lady Di had said, in a Panorama interview in 1995, ‘There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded’. His Royal Highness had gone very red in the face when, searching for something else (a poem attributed to Diane de Poitiers, mistress to Henry II of France, as it happened), he came across it in the Highgrove copy of the Oxford Dictionary of 13
Quotations. He tried to have a word with the Secretary of the Delegates of Oxford University Press, who had been at Gordonstoun with him, with a view to removing the offensive quote, but there was nothing doing. The Prince’s second wife, Camilla, was plainly a nice, sensible, easy-going, no-nonsense woman who, if she wasn’t as glam as Diana or as much given to intellectual pursuits as her husband, was nonetheless a good old sort who made him happy. But she too was damaged goods in the eyes of the red tops, for was she not a former mistress elevated to the status of Wife to the Heir Apparent? Yet in such a dysfunctional family as that of the Windsors, even this fact was beginning to be played down, thanks to royal apologists in the right-wing press. Even so, it had been a great sadness that Her Majesty the Queen had been unable to attend the civil wedding ceremony at Windsor Guildhall because both bride and groom were divorcees and the Church of England, of which she was Supreme Governor, was known to be a bit fuddy-duddy about such matters, but she had been present at the Blessing and at a reception for the newly-weds held in Windsor Castle afterwards, so the nuptials had passed off as happily as might have been expected in the circumstances. The bride’s father, being a Roman Catholic, thought it prudent to stay away. The traditionalists needn’t have worried overmuch. After all, it was not as if the Duchess would one day become Queen. Just as it had been decided that Charles, on succeeding to the throne, would be known as George VII, to avoid invidious comparison with the unfortunate precedents of his two namesakes, so Camilla, having already been denied in practice the title Princess of Wales, which again would have chimed most lamentably, was to assume the title Princess Consort. So that, the Palace had thought, ought to have been that. Such complexities weighed heavily on His Royal Highness in his desperate desire to do what he could to improve 14
his public image and boost his popularity ratings, though his attempts often back-fired. Even with the clout of an Heir Apparent and in a milieu where the blood royal brooked no dissent, the Prince’s reach sometimes exceeded his grasp . . . though he never could remember how that quotation finished. So whenever the Prince opened his mouth and put his foot in it Sir Perry Rice-Boothby, Spinmeister Extraordinaire (to use a macaronic expression of which he was not fond), would have to acknowledge the letters that were delivered to Clarence House and Highgrove by the van load. Some were from the hoi polloi whose addresses had numbers in them and who could easily be fobbed off by a couple of equerries with a standard reply. But others were written on official notepaper by some of the most distinguished people in the land, or even on crested paper from country houses in the shires. These Sir Perry immediately recognized, and he had to answer each and every one personally, giving His Royal Highness a list of the more unsympathetic names to be kept against the time when the Birthday Honours were under consideration: no one got a gong who had written to complain about the Prince shooting his mouth off. Sir Perry was beginning to find this aspect of his duties irksome, though he said not a word to anyone, not even his wife. In recent months, however, a new difficulty had arisen which he found even more tiresome. Now Peredur Rice-Boothby had been appointed to his post partly on account of his being, as he put it, sort of Welsh, which some thought might have been an advantage in the household of the Prince of Wales. On the other hand, because the Boothbys were distantly related to the ginmakers, and could therefore be said to have been in trade, eyebrows had been raised and some deplored the appointment. Not quite of blue blood, or the blood royal, as were so many of the Old Etonians, Old Marlburians and Old Harrovians in the higher echelons of the royal household, he was 15
nevertheless the son of a wealthy landowner descended, so he liked to claim, from that Rhodri ap Cadwgan who, about the year 1400, had rallied the men of upland Glamorgan to the cause of Owain Glyndŵr (to whom Sir Perry always referred as ‘the rebel Owen Glendower’ to avoid giving offence to his English friends), and who then, some fourteen years later, when the rising showed signs of fizzling out, had demonstrated a remarkable grasp of realpolitik by going up to London as Roderick Cadogan to seek favour at the English court, where he eventually prospered. The family crest bore the motto Spero meliora. Sir Perry’s father, Aleck Redvers Evelyn Otis Pomeroy Rice-Boothby, with his seat and several hundred acres in the vicinity of St Donat’s in the leafy Vale of Glamorgan, whose grandmother had been a Stradling, came of good stock, although his reputation had been tarnished somewhat by his father’s decision, in the 1930s, to sell the castle to William RandolphHearst, on whom the newspaper tycoon, Citizen Kane, was modelled. He had had a good war and had since served as Lord Lieutenant of the old county of Glamorgan and, inevitably, as one of the Great and the Good on the umpteen quangos by which the life of the Principality had been run in the days before the establishment of the National Assembly. The boy Peredur - the name was said to have Arthurian resonance - had been brought up in Chelsea and sent to Eton, whence he went up to Clare College, Cambridge, to read for the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Tripos, in due course taking a starred first. He had gone on to do a Master’s in Business Administration Studies at the University of East Anglia, and that was thought to have given him a grasp of the real world after the groves of Academe, though there hadn’t been much evidence of it so far. On his appointment to the Prince’s household, at first as an equerry, it was thought Perry’s academic prowess might lend lustre to the somewhat dull escutcheon of the Prince, who had 16
come down from Trinity with only a Desmond. His Royal Highness cared not an ermine’s fart about the discrepancy in their academic achievements, or was too well-mannered to show it; be that as it may, he was once heard to remark in what was doubtless an unguarded moment, and with the famous tact inherited from his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘One has honorary degrees from thirty-seven universities – thirty-eight if one counts Glamorgan’. Needless to say, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic seldom came up as topics of conversation at either Clarence House or Highgrove, or indeed at any of the other houses where the Waleses rested their weary heads from time to time. Nor was Sir Perry often called upon to speak to His Royal Highness about things Welsh. Welsh just didn’t figure in the scheme of things. All that was about to change, however, and it would turn Sir Perry’s world topsy–turvy. Sir Perry’s wife was The Hon. Jane Ankaret Heleth Letitia Fortinbras-Pryce, a Viscount’s daughter who belonged to an old Powys family that had come over with the Conqueror. After grabbing as much land from the native Welsh as they could manage in two or three generations they had decided they rather liked it in Wales and eventually came to think they had become integrated, more or less, with those they had conquered, who looked up to them with uncommon deference, the Welsh being always ready to kow-tow to their social superiors. One of Jane’s ancestors had been Mistress of the Robes to the first Queen Elizabeth, another a mistress of a rather different sort to George II, and yet another had served as Home Secretary in one of Gladstone’s administrations until he was obliged to spend more time with his family as a consequence of a most unfortunate incident involving Tilly Lothar, a leading actress of the day. But otherwise the Fortinbras and Pryce families had been content to stay at home, serving their communities in modest 17
ways as patrons of the Established Church, pillars of the Tory Party and nowadays as bigwigs of such influential bodies as St John’s Ambulance Brigade, Friends of Friendless Churches, the Distressed Gentlefolk Association, the Welsh Landowners’ Association, International Rotary, Toc H, the Historic Houses Association and the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show. The family was not at all wealthy but they were unmistakeably well-to-do and what money they had was most definitely old and, like old gold, it wasn’t at all flashy. Jane’s mother had been christened Cymbriana, a name which had come down in the family from the first Elizabeth’s time. For a short while The Hon. Jane Fortinbras-Pryce had been one of Princess Diana’s ladies-in-waiting, but after that dreadful business in the Paris tunnel, and the subsequent engagement of Prince Charles to Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, whom she had already observed at close quarters at both Clarence House and Highgrove, her exquisite taste and sense of decorum, long bred in her very fine bones, had dictated that she give up her position, after which she and an old chum from Cheltenham Ladies’ College opened a sandwich-bar in Rodney Street, a particularly salubrious part of King’s Cross. But that, as it turned out, was not to be her station in life. A little later, by a stroke of great good fortune, she had been introduced to Perry Rice-Boothby at the Beulah Hunt Ball, the social event of the year in the green country between Builth and Llanwrtyd, and after a whirlwind romance, gosh and golly, the strawberry blonde with the good teeth, fine bone structure and cornflower-blue eyes had bagged the Private Secretary. Shortly afterwards he had been knighted, as he might have expected if he knew anything about royal protocol, and then promoted to Principal Private Secretary. Her father, the old Viscount, whose family motto was Aquila non capit muscas, on hearing of the engagement, could only exclaim, ‘’Pon my word, girl, not much of a catch!’ but her 18
mother, a real Lady, said, ‘Congratulations, darling, I do hope you will be happy.’
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