TWISTED GILDED GHETTO by Eric Page

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus

St David’s Day was my original experience of the transformative power of donning a costume. My fundamental inkling that an amazing outfit would change who you were – magically. People would act differently, be charmed and amazed and this would give you power and freedom to do things usually not allowed. Admittedly being dressed as a leek by my smouldering Aunt Olga is not Drag Race quality (although a quick dip into H&M or hot gluing paper bags to your ass is setting a low bar…) but that green felt costume, with white crepe paper decorations, was my introduction to the quivering, magical potential of ‘Dressing Up’.

My Aunt Olga, Russian, magnetic with her waist-length thick black hair, ample bosom and ability to drink anyone under the table at the Oddfellow’s Arms, was very popular in the village most of my family lived in. My parents had moved across to the Ebbw Valley, another world in those days, so our visits to her childhood home, where my grandparents and aunts lived, was always a big day out.

The white crepe paper body of the costume, combined with a daringly long white fringe as the roots, borrowed from her fandango ballgown, combined to make me feel the best Welsh Vegetable in the Valleys

Olga had fallen in love when she met my uncle in Libya when they were both working on water pipelines. She’d married him then they chose to live in Pontnewydd and Olga, from the Ural Mountains just outside Yekaterinburg, instantly fell in love with slate grey, damp South Wales, and most of Wales with her. Having been brought up in the Soviet Union she could do everything – weld, tango, backcomb, butcher, brick lay, type and play anything which was put in front of her. My grandmother Ivy called her ‘that lovely raven tornado’. She had toured the USSR playing in an orchestra and also making costumes for the cast and adored making sophisticated outfits for my sisters and I. My St David’s Day leek costume was exceptional, with long starched green felt leaves wrapping up and around my head, my green face poking out from a hole in their curved leaves, which she’d made to look like a caterpillar had nibbled, which I also wore as a knitted moustache. The white crepe paper body of the costume, combined with a daringly long white fringe as the roots, borrowed from her fandango ballgown, combined to make me feel the best Welsh Vegetable in the Valleys. She’d embroidered ‘Cymru am byth’ – Wales forever – on the back, in the 70s a seriously shocking and daring thing to do. Welsh had been suppressed for many years, not taught in schools and was only spoken by my grandmother’s generation. To wear it was provocative, Olga knew that but having married into the Cymru and being fiercely anti-colonial and hating the English for their mono-cultural dismissal of our much older culture had been learning Welsh herself. She already spoke a half dozen languages, including Mongolian and Arabic, so that wasn’t a challenge.

Olga

Olga not only made the leek costume, but with a plate of huge chocolate ginger biscuits spent an hour teaching me how to Be Leek, Think Leek, to ‘feel the power of the leek in your blood’ while my father looked on disapprovingly, surreptitiously checking out her breasts in her push-up bra. After an hour I was ready to wear and Be Leek, an essential symbol of the Cymru and somewhat confusingly connected to Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus.

Now when I put any kind of costume or drag on and feel that electric transformative power surge through me, I remember Olga, standing back, smiling at little Eric-da-Leek-boyo, pushing an extra chocolate ginger into the secret pocket she’d stitched into the costume and telling me as a leek I could do anything, that I would win the Ty-Sign Junior School costume competition (which I did), that I was powerful beyond belief behind the magical folds and fringes of my costume and to step out there, be exquisite and never explain.