How I Became Welsh 🏴 … Part 1
This Child’s First Christmas in Wales at the Windsor Castle Hotel, the pub my family ran. Meet my big Brother Paul, my father Eddie, my mother Thelma, and on her lap looking agape at the world, the star of this story, 3-month-old me. Coincidently, about 90 miles to the West in the small town of Laugharne, Dylan Thomas was hard at work writing his version of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
Not long after they were married in 1947, my American father Eddie returned to New York with his Welsh bride, Thelma. When my big brother Paul was born, the story is that they didn’t know what to name him. When Thelma looked out the hospital window and saw “Paul’s Fish Market,” she said, “Oh Eddie, Paul is such a lovely name. Let’s name the baby Paul.” Later in life, one of Paul’s great interests was fishing. I suspect he was trying to take revenge on that slippery species that gave him his name.
Because Thelma wasn’t happy living in New York, the family returned to Wales where I was born. But Thelma was unhappy living in Wales, so we moved back to New York, then back to Wales, then back to New York where, sniff, she died.
Eddie never mentioned Thelma or Wales again. Poof, just like that she disappeared. Because I had a funny accent, I thought I was English, which would have horrified my Welsh relatives had I known they existed. My “Englishness” was pounded into me, literally, when my fifth grade class studied the American Revolution. I was called a Tory and got beat up after school. Of course I was left back, and when the new fifth grade studied the American Revolution…you guessed it…I got beat up again. I couldn’t wait to get to sixth grade when we would study the American Civil War because I was pretty sure I didn’t have a Southern accent.
Growing up in New York, all I knew about Wales was Shirley Bassey, Richard Burton, Tom Jones and Dylan Thomas. On a good day I might be able to find Wales on a map, but I wasn’t having very many good days.
By the time I was twenty, I screwed up my life so badly and was in so much trouble I decided to flee. Wales seemed as good a place as any, so that’s where I fled to. My original plan was to stay for two or three weeks until things in New York cooled down. But when I arrived in the UK, I realized that no one in the entire country knew I was a screwup, so I decided to stay. And I did…for almost a year.
I hoped that maybe I could “unscrew up” my life. But hope is not a method, which happens to be the title of a film about birth control. While crashing in a commune in Cardiff, I changed my name to “Garry Morgan.” I couldn’t even spell Gary right.
However, while exploring Wales I felt a connection like nothing I’d ever felt before. I fell in in love with the beautiful landscapes that seemed to change wildly every few miles from forest to mountain to coal slag, to stunning cliffs looking over the sea. But it was the people I met along the way who asked where I might be from, what might I be doing in Wales, the people who offered me biscuits and beers, who offered me rides in their cars and told me about the country they loved and its poets and its history and tried to teach me its beautiful, unpronounceable language that sounded like water streaming down a hill. That’s what got me. That’s when I realized I was Welsh.
I’ll share more about How I Became Welsh in a week or two. But if you can’t wait, take a look at A Tipsy Fairy Tale and learn the rest of the story. Well, most of it.
