Ar Hyd Y Nos (All Through the Night)

 Ar Hyd Y Nos

Add there, in my dream, it’s Wales, just outside of Llangollen, just in the wilds of tumbled down buildings and it Christmas morning.
There half wild, half wilder with a shock of white bristling through his hair in green willies and heavy knit jumper is The Bard himself. Father Wales. Gwilym! As I live and breathe it’s Gwilym! I hear his voice first in the mush and muddle there are after all so many of us there. We are at his workshop, we are in the Welsh cold air. In the Welsh cold of Christmas morning. The smell of excitement and hot spiced wine is in the air and he is talking .
At first I am distracted by the other people there, Bryony is there, be-mittened and beautiful in the crisp cold air. We are there to listen but most of all we are there to dig.
Father Wales voice rings out, he sings, not as himself but with my father’s father’s voice. A deep bouncing sound of songs I don’t remember, from a choir I never heard. It is a huge sound but it is only the first line of all through the night, Ar Hyd Y Nos, sung exactly the way my father sung it. Like the life of him would end if he sung it quietly.
Then it is over and we, there must be thirty people there now, head towards the workshop and he say
“I kept finding things. Things that ort not to be there, things they said could not possibly be here, under the black mud. Timbers to start, then other things and I knew, I knew I must follow it. It was not but a lump when we started. A lump of what we didn’t know”
Then the hot spiced wine is brought and the smell of it in the Welsh cold, on the Welsh damp air, so cold it is green and cleaner than pine, colder than death, lifts me to purest joy.
He has not stopped talking and now in my mits I have a small trowel.
He say "So I began to strip it away piece by piece brick by brick and clear as day there was something there. There were bricks and tiles, there were pieces of timber black but there, more whole in the mud. Tiles like jewels of medaval design with copper flowers and leaves the colour of flour. Under the ivy and the black mud it was all still there. Glass too.”
As he speaks as so often when he speaks I see the landscape shift and change. The world shifts and the gems spring to mind the different things happens in moments before my eyes. And I am left breathless.
On and on, his voices (that is also so many voices) talks and my head is down digging, picking at the black black mud and I see it. The place -the place as it once was. It looks like a cottage but it is so much older.
So much joy and excitement! Such a buzz of doing something, seeing something hidden be revealed. Then back to the workshop, to the fire , all of us milling when Gwylym grabs Bryony and she laughs then his voice become serious they move a log between them.
“You must not add anything. You must only take from it what was there, show what is really there, and you are here because of the liver, not your liver, your Mother’s, you stay because of how hard it is, when it should be soft., nothing to do with dogs.”
Her face darkens but it is because we both know it is the truth of it. It is the truth of it and he turns to me with eyes like weirs and says
“We only reveal what is there. You should know, that soft things become hard and hard things become soft if it is left in the mud. Come the pub is warm and they have the best pies."
“Not the best!”
“The best for Christmas morning!”
Everyone laughs and jokes and our willies leave foot prints as all of us, the throng sit by the fire. I am so full of joy I wake with tears in my eyes and know I must write. That I must not forget what I have seen and heard, All through the Night...