Welsh Wales, that’s where I’m from.
My old stomping ground is one of the remaining pockets of my Motherland where Welsh is predominantly spoken. Cymraeg yw fy iaith gyntaf (Welsh is my first language). I think in Welsh, I sing in Welsh, I count my chickens in Welsh, and I live with Welsh ancestry coursing through my veins.
I love words – especially the written word – and the fact that I excelled at English at school gave my father the absolute shits.
My English teacher saw a word-wielding kid with a vivid imagination harnessing a second language to express his creativity and vanish into another world; my father saw something quite different – a deviant kid who was being de-Welshed, one foreign-sounding, semantic unit at a time, before his disapproving and exasperated eyes.
My father vehemently hated English and the English. There was layer upon layer of history between the English and the Welsh that struck the match to ignite his mood, and the bad blood served nothing but contempt.
A quick history lesson from my Dad I shall never forget: “They invaded our country, flooded and drowned our village so they could drink our water, ridiculed our language and tied wooden plaques around our necks. They’re buying up all of our houses so they can leave them standing empty as second homes.”
Dad was a staunch nationalist, so I grew up in a household where the English language was something to be berated. A viewpoint that I was at odds with and regularly wrestled over with my father.
We spoke Welsh at home, and to utter any other tongue would have drawn the thunderous ire of Mr. Malcontent. Welsh was compulsory at school, and the only English I spoke was during English lessons or with some of my friends who’d settled in the area in their first, not second, homes. Those friends were learning a new language, too, so eventually, Welsh was the lingo of choice we’d use to communicate between us.
I love my first language, because, for someone who has spent a great deal of his life feeling like he belongs neither here nor there, Welsh speaks to my whakapapa, where I come from, my identity, and where my story began before I stretched my legs and went way south.
But my father’s extreme nationalism always made me feel nauseous because he shoved it down my throat like foie gras; he was almost blinded by it and he forgot how to see. He was so consumed by hatred, he rarely, if ever, saw beauty. What he found foreign about the English, he saw the same foreign in me.
I knew that the English language would ultimately be my passport to venture beyond the square mile, to take the path less travelled and see the bloody world. And it has, it really has.
This bird has flown.
He’s looked into the eyes of ‘I wonder’, answered calls of ‘why’ with ‘why not’, he heard ‘I can’ when he was told ‘you can’t’. He wanted to stick his head above the parapet, to get soaked in the rain. He’s flown over oceans, crossed continents, shaken hands with a carnival of cultures and touched the soil of countries he thought would only exist inside his head.
This bird has been incredibly fortunate.
But no matter where I’ve gone, no matter where I am, I always carry a piece of Wales with me. My roots are incredibly important to me because they ground me, nourish me, and they take me back to a time when I had all of these life-altering adventures ahead of me.
My most vivid memories of early childhood all have the same backdrop – the farm we lived on near the village of Llangybi before we moved to Y Lôn Goed. And they were halcyon days because I was innocent enough to not know any different and Dad (aka the Eye of Sauron) had yet to fully register who I was.
I have a carousel of warm and fuzzy memories from my days on the farm. Those were the days when I felt like I was flying with the sun on my fledgling unicorn wings. I had animals to nurture and pat on tap, streams to block with makeshift dams, acres of paddocks to frolic in, and the freedom to create memories of a playground I would in later years call upon as a touchstone for neutrality.
The local primary school, Ysgol Llangybi, was only a kilometer or two away for me, and I could have easily sauntered across a field or two to arrive at its gates, but myself and the other country bumpkin kids were transported by minibus because the geography of our locations reached far and wide.
I haunted the tiny halls of Ysgol Llangybi until the age of 11. During that time I sampled a smorgasbord of subjects through the medium of Welsh and cultivated friendships with kids who lived on nearby farms.
I can vividly remember roll calls at morning assembly under the watchful gaze of the poker-faced headmaster, gathering around a big-ass transistor radio for storytime, defrosting cartons of milk on the classroom radiator in the depth of winter, and spooning back delicious dollops of apple crumble and custard.
I particularly enjoyed the class excursions we made as to the local points of interest. The length of a field or two away was the picturesque and tranquil idyll known as Ffynnon Gybi (St Cybi’s Well), a well associated with St Cybi, a 6th-century Welsh saint who reputedly lived in the area.
The well was a place of pilgrimage and its waters were believed to cure all manner of ills. I can attest to the palatability of said water, but my endorsement falls short of championing any supposed magical powers. I once knocked back a flask of the stuff, and I’m still mortal.
There’s something special about Ffynnon Gybi, something that speaks to me. The storytelling stone walls that surround it, the bridge over the river that divides it, the pathway that leads to a sacred space at the foothill of a mountain that stands as a monument to a magical chapter of my life.
School life wasn’t, of course, all sunshine and lollipops.
The school’s footprint was tiny, so if you had a falling out with one of the other pupils, and you needed some space, you were shit out of luck. And there was one teacher in particular whose idea of discipline ran into the extreme. This teacher had the personality of a pencil and towered over our desks with her stick-like frame, gazing at us scornfully like a power-hungry praying mantis.
One day, the praying mantis was in full rhetorical swing, commanding the classroom’s attention to something or other. Whatever it was, it must have bared all the hallmarks of boring because the neighbour directly to my left was deep in slumber, his weary head resting on the desk before him. He managed to elude the praying mantis’ gaze until he started snoring.
I chuckled as the insect grabbed a piece of chalk and hurled it towards him, landing square on his desk and shattering it into tiny pieces. Now we were both in the shit.
The praying mantis marched both of us to the front of the class, uttered something about being seen and not heard, opened the door to the cupboard behind her, and told us to get in. She slammed the door shut and left us in there for a good hour while she carried on teaching the rest of the class.
Despicable, wicked woman.
Mistaken identity
My age, my appearance, my beliefs, my choices, my creations, my culture, my habits, my heritage, my gender; my language, my name, my nationality, my personality, my sexual orientation, my values, my work, myself: My identity. Me.
When I hit the age of 11 I entered the secondary school system. That’s when I experienced a barrage of growing pains. I was bullied relentlessly from the age of 11 until I was about 16. That’s five years of alienation, belittling, epithets, name-calling, physical assaults, rejection, and feeling ashamed to express who I was.
I thought I had an identity crisis, but in truth, it was more a case of mistaken identity – I was slowly growing into my own skin, but people mistook me for someone or something they thought I was instead.
I didn’t display what was deemed to be the masculine qualities of my male contemporaries. I was short for my age, I wasn’t butch or brooding, I didn’t care about dominance, I didn’t grow a moustache once my voice and testicles had dropped, I didn’t care about being a ‘proper bloke’; I wasn’t afraid of emotional expression or demonstrating empathy. This boy did cry.
I wasn’t interested in disconnecting from my feelings and being left with few acceptable emotions besides anger. I hated the whole idea of collectivism, of fitting in, or behaving and looking a certain way so my identikit identity would be engulfed within a countryfied collage. I was surrounded by toxic masculinity, and I refused to swim in it. I also flatly refused to play in it.
My aversion to playing sports was legendary, so much so that my teachers knew that when physical education was timetabled, I’d have a sick note at the ready.
Diarrhoea, toothache, headache, back pain, neck pain, finger pain – you name it, I proffered it as an excuse not to face the indignity of being decked out in my ill-fitting, garishly-coloured football kit, while aimlessly chasing a poorly-inflated ball around a muddy field. In the end, I stopped making excuses and suggested my time would be better spent grabbing a bin bag and cleaning the school grounds of rubbish.
The school grounds never looked tidier.
The bus stop in our village of Llangybi would invariably smell of wee. Come rain or shine, we’d rather stand outside of its concrete and pebble-dashed walls than line our lungs and nostrils with a bouquet of stale pee. That bus stop was a landmark of sorts, the place where the local country schoolkids would congregate and await the arrival of a bus to cart us on a weekday pilgrimage to Pwllheli, the coastal town where the “big school” lived.
Whenever I saw that bus approaching around the corner, my heart would sink. One by one we’d hop on board, and by choice, I’d always be the first to join the queue. By the time the bus arrived at our stop, bums would already be occupying the majority of its seats.
Head down, I’d shuffle and swoop down the gangway, park myself wherever I saw a spare double seat, and hope like hell the gang of reprobates at the back would leave me be. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t – I guess it hinged on what they’d had for breakfast, and which of the posturing hyena felt like being a prick.
And poke me with a stick that hyena-like prick did one day, while I had my nose deep in a book claiming to be a warts-and-all Madonna exposé. I think I was somewhere between Live to Tell and Like a Prayer, when the hyena grabbed the book out of my hands, tossed it to the back seat where it was caught in one of his tosser mate’s clutches and ripped to shreds. Tossers, indeed.
The ironic part of the story didn’t play out until years later when the culprit in question sent me a Facebook friend request. There alongside his bid to be buddies was a mugshot that, at best, would suggest life had fallen down the tree of life and hit a few branches along the way.
That’s good enough for me, I mused. Now I’m not bitter, because life’s too short to be bitter (and I’m too short to be bitter), but if you’re reading this my high school fiend, you can stick that request up your Khyber Pass. Too bloody late.
Monolithic sin
I’m often asked what it was like growing up as a gay child, teenager, and young man in Welsh Wales.
As a kid, I knew I wasn’t the only gay in the village. We had Albert and Eric. Albert and Eric lived in the nearest town and had been a couple for donkey’s years. While they were frequently labelled as exotic peacocks, I remember observing that they were generally accepted in the community. However, they probably have another side to the story.
But a postcode or two away, where the “men were men” in the wop-wops, my gayness would have been perceived as a symptom of a possession that needed an immediate exorcism.
To be overtly gay, a little bit gay, gay curious, moderately gay, occasionally gay, fairweather gay, straight gay, gay gay, or just a little bit queer meant you were a walking advert for deviancy. A pariah who lusted after everything that walked, because you had nothing but sex on the brain and, ultimately, you’d had more pricks than a dartboard. Bullseye. It was a sin stemming from a proclivity, a mental illness within.
I remember a darkened sky, an erupting volcano, apocalyptic imagery of cascading rocks and an industrial drill chiselling the word AIDS into a monolithic tombstone. Those were the sinister images that emanated from our television set in the living room one inconspicuous day in early 1987.
“There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all,” the grave and ominous voiceover kicked in. “It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure. The virus can be passed by sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman.
“So far it’s been confined to small groups, but it’s spreading. So protect yourself and read this leaflet when it arrives. If you ignore AIDS, it’ll be the death of you. So don’t die of ignorance.”
The bleak, hard-hitting imagery and unambiguous message delivered in what was part of the British government’s Aids-awareness campaign terrified me and left a long-lasting impression on my consciousness. I was eleven years old at the time, and although I knew little about the disease, I knew the foreboding language of the campaign signposted to something sinister that was lurking “out there”.
I knew the disease had been touted as the ‘gay plague’ because the tabloid newspaper we’d inherit from a neighbour each day made sure of that. The truth about the disease, as time would tell, was that it impacted not just gay men. But in our household, that truth was an inconvenience to quell. The truth was a sin.
When that advert faded to black, there was a deathly silence in our living room, only to be punctured by my father’s rhetoric that gay men were to be demonised, marginalised and what was happening to them was, in his eyes, the product of sin.
You can imagine what hearing those words did to my eleven-year-old self. I kept my sexuality hidden, or at least I tried to. Because I was different, being gay felt as though it was a betrayal of the country ways I grew up with.
So I kept quiet. I never uttered a word. But all the while I was fasting, I could have killed for a manwich.
Masquerade
What does a bully look like? Do they all have shifty, scornful eyes, and razored tongues that complement their twisted faces? Do they all know how to wound you in all the right places? I couldn’t tell you what a bully looks like because they don’t all look the same.
My gayness and I had a rocky road as we metamorphosised in our teens. There was conflict, but not from within. I consider myself fortunate because I never truly wrestled with the idea that I was gay – I knew I was, and I knew I wasn’t deviant, dirty, nor was I as one schoolkid surmised “the spawn of satan”.
I don’t know where it came from, this strong sense of self, but I’m so grateful it was there, otherwise, in all honesty, I don’t think I’d be here today.
No, the conflict wasn’t about me – the fear came from the outside in.
People are conditioned to fear things they don’t understand. The conflict wasn’t about me, it was about what other people would feel. I struggled with the dark side of collectivism for years. That people could swallow their individuality, and swim with a school of fish while behaving like a total heel, was surreal. Surely that number of people can’t be assholes? Get outta here. Trust me, it’s real.
I saw school as a bit of a masquerade, rather than a convivial seat of learning. My time at school was a masquerade ball I somehow gatecrashed and never RSVPd to attend. All around me were masked-up faces, dancing to a discordant tune I’d never heard of, while my mask would slowly slip and my true identity – braces and all – would be revealed.
I wore braces on my teeth in my early teens, the old fashioned type that made me look like that James Bond villain with a metallic grin. For two years I was braced, and it compounded the bullying I faced.
Like the opening of a tunnel, the Mersey Tunnels in Liverpool, to be exact. That’s how one particular school kid described my nose. So adamant was he that my nose was deformed, he’d remind me every day that my nostrils were that large, traffic could flow through them.
A collision my hooter had years before as an infant. I have no memory of the incident, but apparently, I was standing on a kitchen benchtop when I slipped and took a fall. My nose was broken, and when it healed, its shape had taken a different form.
For years I was self-conscious about my snout, which stemmed from the teasing and name-calling that I was ugly.
How does a bully behave? Bullies abuse and use power. Bullies know exactly what they’re doing, and they’ll keep on doing it over, and over, and over – even when you tell them to stop. They’ll bully you until you break. Bullies manipulate, threaten and tease, they harass, humiliate and go beyond what it means to be mean.
I used to hang out with other guys who were also on the fringes of the school playground. In hindsight, they were also easy targets – one was slightly olive-skinned and the other was an introvert like me.
“Bum boys!” was how we were frequently greeted by other kids in the corridors. There was relative strength in numbers until the other two decided that our little triangle was under attack because of me. So I was rejected and they turned on me. The whole experience was painful and isolating.
All I wanted to do was to fly away.
My ugliest memory happened when we were commandeered to a tarmac-laden corner of the school grounds for one of those panoramic year-end photos with the whole of the school ensemble.
Being a diminutive sausage, I was planted in the first two rows next to the other shorties. Seconds after the cameraman yelled for us to “hold still and smile” for what felt like a lifetime, I heard a voice projected from somewhere behind me.
I heard “all gay people should be put to death in a gas chamber”. My eleven-year-old self didn’t turn around and challenge the hurler of the abuse that day because he was too scared to. My 46-year-old self, however, would turn to that voice and challenge it with every fibre of my being. As a man, I’d stand up for the boy who couldn’t.
I’m now a teacher, and I abhor bullying in any shape or form. I won’t tolerate bullying for a nanosecond, and if I see it, I’ll cut right through it and silence it.
Behind every bully is a backstory, there always is. Now that I’m older, I can acknowledge that something or someone has happened to a bully to make them a bully. But as a youngster, I couldn’t wrap my head around that – I just wanted the humiliation to stop. No more rain.
The bullying continued and was a bit like a persistent toothache that no painkiller could reach. One morning I’d had enough and told my mother I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t go to school. That was one day among many “sick” days when I just couldn’t stomach the thought of walking the school corridors and being treated as a human skittle.
Eventually, the floodgates opened and I told my mother why I slammed the brakes on going to school. She was stunned and had no idea what had been happening. I can vividly remember crying my eyes out in front of her. There was no reassuring hug because my family didn’t do those. My father reacted to the news in the bullying bulletin with his signature scowl. His biggest concern was that he had “raised a sissy as a son”.
The next morning we were in the headmaster’s office, and my Mum wanted answers. She didn’t get any. I was told I was “making a mountain out of a molehill” and that I needed to stand up for myself. As far as he was concerned, there was no bullying at his school.
That afternoon I was at the doctors’ – my acne had broken out again. My mother mentioned what had been happening at school to the doctor. He turned to me and said: “Fight back. I’ll fix you up if you get hurt.”
I did fight back, but not in a physical way. I did heed some of the words of that prick of a headmaster – I stood up for myself. Resilience was the key for me, and I learned how to nurture it. How? As luck would have it I was about to move to a bigger school just down the road, so I’d have a degree of anonymity in the crowds. And that worked, to a degree.
A switch had been flipped for me, and I’d had enough of the bullying bullshit. Rather than retract like an anemone, I answered my bullies back. I barked. Once I barked I walked away, occasionally with a piece of chewing gum in my hair which one of the little shits had thrown at me.
My school experience eventually settled down, and the bullying stopped.
By the time I was sixteen I was focused on my studies and chose my A-level subjects which would be my passport to life beyond the paddocks – university. Alas, that plan didn’t exactly pan out as I’d hoped either.
I chose biology and chemistry as my subjects. I loved chemistry because it was science-based, and science is all about absolutes. Learning about atoms, elements, chemical interactions and reactions was like flipping open the bonnet on life for me.
My chemistry teacher was also brilliant. Her name was Marilyn, just like my Mum. Marilyn was tall in stature, her nature was kind, she held court when she was teaching – even when the gobby shits in the back row would tease her relentlessly and call her an old maid.
One of them let rip with an almighty fart one day, and amid the grimacing and giggling pointed to the periodic table and enquired of Marilyn if she could point out the symbol for the gas that came out of his bum. Marilyn kept her calm and dryly replied that the identity of the gaseous emission was unknown, but she doubted it was volatile and that he needn’t stand back from the bunsen burner flame.
I credit Marilyn for inspiring me to become a teacher – how could she not with that kind of class, composure, and courage under playful fire.
I wasn’t thinking too deeply about long-term goals and careers at that stage in my life, I just knew that I was drawn to science and that one day I’d figure out my path. Sure enough, the universe caught wind of my thinking and bit me on the ass. I flunked my subjects and missed out on university.
By flunked, I mean I scored the lowest grade possible for both of the subjects – the kind of grade you bag if you forego answering any of the questions on your exam paper, and all you do is sign your name.
A group of us gathered in the headmaster’s office on exam results day, and one by one he handed them a piece of paper with a breakdown of their grades. My name was finally called. He hadn’t saved the best for last. “I’m very sorry, Myrddin” he muttered sheepishly as I felt all of the air being sucked out of the room and the embarrassment and shame of my failure kicked in. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.
One of my friends took me under her wing and helped carry me that day. Her name is Nia, and I’ll never forget how the compounds and elements of that friendship equated to the kind of support you need when the shit hits the fan.
Once I’d processed my disbelief, my mind switched gear and I felt defiant. I asked for my exam papers to be re-examined and marked. Sure enough, they came back and the verdict was different – I’d gone up a couple of grades.
That was round one. For round two I worked part-time at an ironmonger store, studied biology and chemistry again, paid for tuition out of my own pocket and worked my butt off. It paid off. I passed the exams and enrolled on a chemistry degree course at Bangor University.
I wasn’t an academic superstar by any stretch of the imagination, as you can tell.
When I look back on my school life, I remember studying subjects and texts before exams was an exercise that filled me with dread. The only way I could retain any information was to learn it word for word and then regurgitate it Polly Parrot style. I was so afraid of failure that I became machine-like when I knew exams were not too far down the line. And it worked, most of the time. But, oh boy, you can imagine the anxiety that came along with my scientific approach.
I swore I’d never sit another exam after my university days. And I haven’t. I think exams are a flawed cookie-cutter mechanism of gauging someone’s ability, how ‘smart’ they are. They only provide a snapshot of where that person is at at that point in time.
And time is what I needed before I would even contemplate immersing myself in a learning environment again. I did go back but as an adult learner to gain a teaching qualification. My head was in a very different space, I was older, wiser, emotionally smarter and ready – ready, willing and positively euphoric when my assignments were submitted and would boomerang back to me with A grades.
I graduated with a Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Teaching in 2017.
Back in my late teens, I still fancied myself as a bit of a chemist. I loved swanning about the laboratory in my white lab coat, tinkering with potions and test tubes. It was a gas. The theory part wasn’t anywhere near as sexy, in fact, it pretty much left me cold. So cold, I eventually had the balls to admit to myself that just because I was attracted to science, it didn’t mean I was any bloody good at it. I pulled the plug on chemistry and experimented with my true passion: Wordplay. I found journalism.
My days as a mad scientist weren’t entirely wasted, however. If I hadn’t studied chemistry, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Just like changes in chemical reactions can be modelled using equations, I observe my affinity for science in those early days as something that changed the course of my life.
I remember catching the lift to the chemistry laboratory one morning, and just before the doors closed in popped this affable-looking fellow. As it turned out he was a fellow chemist, and we struck up a friendship. Beersies were on the menu at the student bar that evening, along with a confessional.
There we were, propping up the bar like two peas in a pod. I liked him, he was a good guy, but I never fancied him. I liked him, even more, when he took a sip of his pint, looked me in the eye and nervously told me that he liked men. I bloody knew I wasn’t the only one in the village. I confessed that I liked men, too. Actually, he was the first person I ever told that I was gay. And from that point on a solid friendship was formed.
My new mate introduced me to my first gay nightclub. Well, that’s not strictly true. The nightclub was only part-time gay. Every two weeks there’d be a special night at the club, a night when so-called friends of Dorothy could descend on a dry-iced dancefloor, prop up a bar and banter, or peruse the stock for someone who tickled their pickle.
I have a lot to thank that nightclub for. Not just for being the soundtrack of my “coming out” chapter, but for the fun, the frivolity, and for giving me my man. I met my man there in 1994, and we’ve been together since. He’s now my husband.
Chemistry + Friendship + Gay nightclub + Attraction → Marvellous matrimony.
How did a Dutchman and a Welshman scale the stone walls of a paddock in Welsh Wales and end up in New Zealand? Now there’s a story.
But before we get to the lovey-dovey bit, there’s something else I need to say:
I knew that one day I wouldn’t be creeping sheepishly out of the proverbial closet – I’d be breaking the bloody door down. And I have committed my life so that I never have to compromise myself for other people’s love, and neither should you.
And that, as Forrest Gump would declare, is all I have to say about that.
Chapter 4: The Look of Love (I Deserve It)
Mental health resources – where to get help
Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor.
Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP).
Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO).
Depression Helpline – 0800 111 757 or free text 4202
Healthline – 0800 611 116
Samaritans – 0800 726 666
Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz or online chat.
