Although One Moonlit Night was written in 1961, the first English Translation was made in 1995 and it has now been published by independent publishers Canongate (who’s new website, Meet at the Gate is rather good). While I read a lot of translated books, I think this is the first book I have read translated from the Welsh language.
Caradog Prichard was born and brought up in Bethesda and after working on Welsh newspapers as a journalist spent most of his working life in London on the Daily Telegraph. He was a noted Welsh-language poet and won the Crown in the National Eisteddfod in 1927.
One Moonlit night tells the story of a small boy in an un-named town in North Wales (but as Jan Morris tells us in the foreword to the book is almost certainly Prichard’s home town of Bethesda). This book sits well alongside Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, for this seemingly quiet backwater has a soap-opera life of sadism, sexual perversion, adultery, insanity and domestic violence. Add to that the backdrop of the mysterious Black Lake, the bogey-men who inhabit the adjoining forests, miraculous healings and visions, and the reader soon sees that beneath the “church-going” veneer, this book does not depict an idealised or nostalgic view of small town Wales.
Prichard was a wonderful writer. I found myself easily swept into the un-named boy’s stories as he roams the streets and quiet countryside around his home with his friends Huw and Moi. The boys are at that phase of boy-hood just before teen-age interests replace childhood inquisitiveness. This is matched with a relative independence which gives them a freedom to roam go where they please without too many restrictions. The village is full of gossip and stories and the boys pick up with relish on the intrigues and minor scandals of small town life, passing on stories to their scandalised parents who seem unable to wholly bring their own behaviours into line with their moral pronouncements.
The boy’s mother is a widow living on Parish benefit, and life is a struggle. A favourite meal seems to be potatoes in milk, and bread and butter is the staple food – but not in as great an abundance as the boy would like. Neighbours and relatives are generous within their means and nobody seems to go hungry despite the grinding poverty of much of their lives.
The Bible is an important part of their lives. It is read and memorised, and memories are still strong of the Great Revivial of 1904/05 when whole villages were swept up in religious fervour. It is interesting to see however how the revival fires have largely died down and are being replaced with an almost folk religion of visions and voices.
Nothing can quite describe the lyricism of this book. Although it is a translation, it still retains a poetic, mythic quality in which the reader is drawn into the mystery which surrounds these peoples’ lives. Every so often Prichard departs from his story to launch into an almost psalm-like passage extolling the wonders of the earth,
I am the Queen of Snowdon, the Bride of the Beautiful One. I lie upon the bed of my ascension, eternally expectant, forever with child and awaiting the hour of his delivery. My thighs embrace the swirling mists and my breasts caress the low-flying clouds; they in their precocity explore the secret places of my nakedness, luxuriate among the wonders of the deep, then rise again in guilty satisfaction to the Heavens.
These passages remind us that it may be impossible to discern the borderline between the hallucinatory and the reality of the boy’s experience. This is not just an Angela’s Ashes tale of childhood poverty but shows a very Welsh desire to get behind the meaning of things, to remember that we feed on the Bread of Heaven as much as the food on our plate.
I greatly enjoyed this book. It is short and not at all a difficult read, but is a book which will be remembered for a long time to come. As Niall Griffiths says in his Afterword, “the loss of this childhood intensity is tremendously painful of course but the memory stays in us, like the woods themselves, in all their askew beauty; the style and the mood remain, close and unreachable”.
