Kate Roberts

Katie Gramich

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783162550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This is an introduction to the life and work of Kate Roberts, the most important woman writer ever to have emerged from Wales. It offers a comprehensive account of her life, from her birth into a life of poverty and hardship in the slate-quarrying region of Snowdonia to her death almost a hundred years later in Denbigh; in between, she had attended University, at a time when very few Welsh women did, worked as an impassioned and inspirational teacher in the south Wales valleys, run a major printing press and published the main Welsh national newspaper, Y Faner, helped to found Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, campaigned tirelessly for the Welsh language, challenged gender stereotypes and restrictions in traditional patriarchal Wales, and produced a body of literary work in the Welsh language which makes her rank alongside Saunders Lewis as the greatest Welsh writer of the twentieth century.

1

‘Before 1917…’: the making of a writer

Born and brought up in the small Caernarfonshire village of Rhosgadfan, the daughter of a formidably capable mother who cared for the household, children and smallholding, and a hardworking, stoical quarryman father, Kate Roberts asserted in her 1960 autobiography that ‘everything important, everything that made a deep impression, happened to me before 1917’.1 What follows, then, is an examination of this formative background to her life and work, the cultural and social milieu of Roberts’s youth, and the effect that the First World War had on her life and her self-fashioning as a writer.

Katherine Roberts was born on 13 February 1891, the eldest of what would be the four children of Catrin and Owen Roberts. She also had four older half-siblings, three from her father’s first marriage, and one from her mother’s. Her father, a quarryman and smallholder, was 40 years old at the time of her birth, her mother thirty-seven. Roberts spent most of her childhood living in a cottage called Cae’r Gors in the village of Rhosgadfan, today an arts centre dedicated to the memory of the great writer who was born and raised within its walls. In the 1890s, it must have been quite a crowded little dwelling. She had three younger brothers: Richard, Evan and David, the youngest. Cae’r Gors means ‘the field of the marsh’, and the name is an accurate indication of the landscape surrounding it: this is upland Caernarfonshire, not far from the massive peaks of Snowdonia. The historian O. M. Edwards, who also had his origins in north-west Wales, used to assert time and again in his influential lectures and books of the turn of the twentieth century that ‘Wales is a land of mountains’, and that this stubborn geographical fact ‘give[s] a unity of character to the people who live among them’.2 But, as the cultural geographer Estyn Evans has pointed out, no people actually live on these rugged peaks; rather, what gives Wales its distinct ‘personality’ is the 60 per cent of the country that lies above 500 feet, this great upland mass which is the heartland of Wales and where people like Kate Roberts’s family lived, and continue to live. Evans argues that ‘the physical continuity of an extensive heartland favoured the survival of old ways and an old language’;3 no one was more conscious of this fact than the adult Kate Roberts. As her autobiography, Y Lôn Wen (The White Lane), clearly indicates, she came to see herself, her family and their native community as representative of an old Welsh way of life which was rapidly being eroded. Roberts’s life and work, then, can be seen not only as the chronicle of an exceptional individual but as the expression of a representative Welsh sensibility.

The land around Cae’r Gors is indeed marshy, and the biggest natural crops are peat and heather, two products that feature frequently in Kate Roberts’s fiction. The landscape also, of course, is rich in another natural material: slate, and the landscape today still bears the scars and traces of the slate quarrying industry which briefly brought prosperity to this bleak and inhospitable but strangely beautiful landscape. These are the uplands, and Kate Roberts is by instinct an upland writer. There are many descriptions in her work of characters climbing to hilltops and looking down on a magnificent and far-reaching view – to the eastern side the ramparts of Snowdonia, and to the west the coastal lowlands of the Llŷn Peninsula, the lovely old town of Caernarfon with its magnificent, if ominous, Norman castle, and the Menai Straits, separating the Welsh mainland from the island of Anglesey (Ynys Môn – Milton’s ‘Mona’). But when Roberts’s characters take their eyes away from the distant prospect, the immediate surroundings are full of small details: the pointed yellow flowers of the gorse, the paler petals of the broom, the fragrant bells of the heather, tumbled granite boulders, outcrops of slate and pools of dark, peaty water.

Kate Roberts was brought up close to the land. She, like her siblings, helped her parents with the smallholding: feeding animals, cleaning their pens, milking cows, gathering heather from the hillsides for fuel, making and carrying hay in order to feed the animals over the long, severe winters. The hard work and constant anxiety of the subsistence farmer’s life is continually evoked in Roberts’s early fiction. At the same time she brings home to her readers the close intimacy between the smallholders and their animals. It is not surprising to find that in later life the childless Kate Roberts kept a series of dogs as companions, dogs who were clearly of great emotional importance to her and with whom she lived in close proximity. Time and again, particularly in her later stories, characters perceive human qualities in animals, especially dogs, responding to them almost as one would towards a child.

In the 1972 volume entitled Atgofion (Memories), based on a radio series of personal memoirs, Y Llwybrau Gynt (The Former Paths), Kate Roberts gives an account of her life to date. Tellingly, she begins her talk with an extraordinarily detailed description of the interior of her childhood home, Cae’r Gors. She remembers, it seems, every single tiny detail, from the red tiles of the kitchen floor which she would wash every Saturday to the strange hearthstone made out of an old grave, with the carved words still legible upon it. The volume Atgofion contains the reminiscences of four prominent Welsh people from the quarrying area of north-west Wales, three men and Roberts. The three men begin with outdoor scenes: a hill with a magnificent view, a row of houses in Blaenau Ffestiniog, a mad woman wandering the streets of a town, but Roberts begins with an intimate delineation of the domestic space. This is entirely characteristic of her work: most of her stories and novels have domestic settings, and it is in these constrained interior spaces that the dramas of her plots take their course. Like Jane Austen’s, Kate Roberts’s fictional world tends to be small, domestic and dominated by women. Yet, her memoirs also give an account of her very public adult life: writing and performing drama in the towns of the Tawe valley; in the streets of the Rhondda, canvassing for Plaid Cymru; educating the children of Ystalyfera and Aberdare; collecting and distributing aid to poor families during the Depression; running a major press and newspaper. And yet at the centre of Roberts’s world remains that hearth at Cae’r Gors. The homestead included the adjoining animal sheds; two other parts of the old grave which formed the hearthstone of Cae’r Gors were in the cowshed, propped behind the manger. The writer still remembers the words carved on that gravestone, possibly, she says, the first poetry she ever read, and a particularly macabre englyn it is, as she quotes it in Atgofion:

Gorff a’r galon oeraidd gu – y mae’r gwên
A’r gwyneb yn llygru.
Y mae breichiau wedi brychu,
Tan garchar y ddaear ddu.

(The dear cold body and heart – the smile
And the face are rotting.
The arms have become mottled,
Under the prison of the black earth.)

The threat of death was thus graphically present in Roberts’s earliest memories, as is also testified in Y Lôn Wen, where she remembers vividly the dead body of a quarryman killed in an accident being carried past the house, and the small memorial card for a 12-year-old boy also killed in the quarry. Set against this evidence of a cruel and unremitting outer world is the warmth of the domestic hearth, kept in perfect, shipshape order by the mother, who works hard herself and allots tasks to her offspring. Moreover, the kitchen of Cae’r Gors is the scene not only of work, comfort and sustenance, but also of culture and entertainment – storytelling and singing.

The four small named fields around Cae’r Gors formed part of her childhood world; she speaks of them affectionately and intimately, naming them and remembering her childhood game of keeping house on the flat stone in Cae Bach (the little field). Further off, the heather-covered slopes of the mountain, Moel Smythaw, also featured in her known map of the world, since she and her brothers would gather heather there together, an activity remembered with affection and described for example towards the end of her 1936 novel, Traed mewn Cyffion (Feet in Chains). More ambivalent is her memory of the centrality of the chapel in the family’s life, and yet they spent a large proportion of their time there as children, learning and reciting their Bible verses, attending Sunday school, seiats and literary events. ‘Dyna gylch ein bywyd, y tŷ, y capel, y caeau, y ffyrdd, y mynydd’, she concludes (That was the circle of our life: the house, the chapel, the fields, the lanes, the mountain).4 Roberts’s recollections of childhood are warm: she recounts humorous incidents, colourful characters, excellent storytellers, naughty cats and funny sayings. Though she never idealizes and characteristically emphasizes economic imperatives, she conjures up a vibrant, stimulating childhood world, despite the restriction of its physical boundaries.

Roberts began to move away from this tight circle of family life in Rhosgadfan when she won a scholarship from Rhostryfan Primary School to the county school in Caernarfon. In line with the educational policies of the time, the education she received here was entirely in English, and she remembers the sense of disorientation she felt as a 13-year-old moving from a virtually monoglot Welsh community to a regime of Englishness. But Welsh was not absent from her experience in Caernarfon for, as she observes in Atgofion, although all the teachers were English, all the children were Welsh and spoke Welsh together during breaks and playtimes.

She contracted typhoid within six weeks of starting at the new school and because of her protracted serious illness missed out on most of the excitement of the 1904–5 religious revival which was sweeping the country. She recalls going to hear Lloyd George speak in Caernarfon in 1909 and being reduced to tears by her history teacher who upbraided her for writing an essay condemning Edward I for seeking to unite Wales with England. Yet, as she concedes, she was quite happy during her six years at Caernarfon County School.

In 1910, she went to University College, Bangor, where she was one of a small number of female students in university at that time; she was acutely aware of her privilege and of the financial sacrifice her education meant for her parents. But she blossomed in the college as one of fewer than a hundred female students there altogether; she enjoyed the social life and got to know most of her fellow students at the hostel in Bangor. She studied Welsh under the charismatic John Morris-Jones and the formidable scholar, Ifor Williams, though again, as in the county school, all the lectures were given through the medium of English. The Welsh Society at Bangor was vibrant, and there was much literary and cultural activity: eisteddfodau, debates and student newspapers; the bright, industrious and strikingly good-looking young Kate Roberts was at the heart of this cultural ferment. As she concludes in Atgofion, ‘dyma amser hapusaf fy mywyd’ (this was the happiest time of my life);5 this is the period before the First World War which she describes as being bathed in ‘tegwch y bore’ (the fairness of morning) in her 1958 novel of that name. She had a close relationship with fellow-student and poet, David Ellis, during her three years at Bangor; he was later to join the medical corps during the First World War and in June 1918 he disappeared in Salonica. Alan Llwyd and Elwyn Edwards have argued that Roberts later tried to cover up the fact that she and David Ellis had once been lovers, though she did confide it to her friend and co-worker Gwilym R. Jones many years later.6 Whatever the precise nature of their relationship, the loss of Ellis in the war must have been a source of grief and anger for Kate Roberts at this stage of her life.

But before the advent of the war, Roberts had embarked on a new stage in her life, making use of her expensive education and beginning to repay her parents by becoming a schoolteacher. She left Bangor in 1913 with a second-class honours degree in Welsh and a teacher’s certificate. A letter of recommendation from her former lecturer, Ifor Williams, among her papers in the National Library, sheds light on her degree result: he writes on 7 April 1927:

In the University examination Miss Roberts was awarded a Second Class, because she did not attempt the whole paper. There was no doubt as to the first class quality of the work she sent in; but the examiners based their decision on the total aggregate of marks instead of on quality; to my great disappointment our most brilliant student got a second.7

Perhaps because she had not gained the First that her lecturers had expected, she took a post as a teacher in Ysgol Elfennol Dolbadarn (a primary school) in Llanberis for a year; her salary here was only £60 a year, and she was unable in the small local school to teach her own specialism, Welsh, leaving her feeling frustrated. She does not describe this period in Atgofion but gives it fictional form in her autobiographical novel, Tegwch y Bore, where her protagonist, Ann Owen, teaches in the narrow-minded and claustrophobic community of Blaen-Ddôl before the war. It is the Great War that, ironically, brings Ann employment worthy of her talent and qualifications because she takes over the post of a male teacher who has joined up. This is precisely what happened to Roberts herself in February 1915 when she took up such a teaching post at a secondary school in Ystalyfera in the Swansea valley. The move to ‘y Sowth’ (the south) was quite a wrench for the home-loving young woman and at first she found it hard to understand the unfamiliar dialect. But her memoirs show that she soon overcame that obstacle and began to relish the rich cultural life of the area, as well as teaching at a higher level, and the pleasure of having able pupils in her classes, such as the boy who would later become the great poet, D. Gwenallt Jones. In Atgofion, she is warm in her praise of Ystalyfera: ‘Yr oedd cymdeithas hapus a phobl hynaws yn y cwm diwylliedig yma’ (There was a happy community and friendly people in this cultured valley).8

This was the beginning of a twenty-year period of ‘exile’ in south Wales for Roberts and, although her homesickness for Caernarfonshire was powerful at times, it is clear that she profited from her different experience there, both as a writer and as a person. Arguably, it was during her time in Ystalyfera that the first inklings of her future life as a writer manifested themselves, for she threw herself enthusiastically into the literary and dramatic activities of the area, as she had done in Bangor as an undergraduate, both co-writing and acting in short plays. She was an active member of Cymdeithas y Ddraig Goch (the Red Dragon Society), which had regular literary meetings and events, reported in the local newspaper, Llais Llafur (Labour Voice), and she formed a close friendship with two other young women there, Betty Eynon Davies and Margaret Price. These were the two collaborators with her on the plays that the Red Dragon Society performed in the Tawe valley during the war. According to Nia Williams, the three young women were well known locally as ‘y tair B.A.’ (the three BAs), which indicates the unusualness in those days and in that place of university-educated women.9 In addition to Nia Williams’s valuable research on this period in Roberts’s life, Francesca Rhydderch has written illuminatingly about this formative period for Roberts as a writer, noting how important collaboration with two female colleagues was for her at the time.10 Intriguingly, given that Roberts’s subsequent writing was occasionally criticized for being too unremittingly sad or humourless, this early work in dramatic form was largely comic. Of course, she and her collaborators were aware that in order to achieve an audience they had to entertain and, perhaps particularly in the sombre time of war, the way to attract an audience was by offering the release and distraction of laughter. Indeed, perhaps the distraction was partly for their own benefit too, since Kate Roberts’s own brothers were by now soldiers in the British army, their lives in imminent danger. The intense anxiety of this period is unforgettably rendered in Roberts’s retrospective autobiographical novel, Tegwch y Bore.

Although the plays that Roberts co-authored and performed during the war were not published until the early 1920s, it is fitting to discuss them in this chapter focusing on the period ‘before 1917’ – arguably, it was Roberts’s experience at collaborative playwriting which first made her believe that she could fashion herself into a writer.

The first play to be formed by the pens of two of ‘the three BAs’ was Y Fam (The Mother), a one-act play subsequently published by the Educational Publishing Co. in London and Cardiff in 1920. Its authors are listed on the title page as Betty Eynon Davies and Kate Roberts, in that order. The play is set in a remote farmhouse in rural Wales the night before Hallowe’en (‘nos cyn Calan Gaeaf’). The dramatis personae comprise a father, Ifan and his two wives – the first, Mair and second, Nano – along with his son, Gwyn, his small daughter, Eiry, and an old manservant, Siencyn. The speech in the play is unmistakably that of Roberts’s native Caernarfonshire. The play turns on memory, contrasting the loyalty of Siencyn, who lost his beloved, Mary, forty years previously, but still remembers her with intense grief, and his master, Ifan, who was widowed just a year before, and has already taken a second wife. Already, despite the fact that Roberts is still a young woman, the tenor of her work is regretful, looking back at the past and emphasizing the losses and disappointments of life. The situation in the play is both sentimental and melodramatic, reminiscent of late nineteenth-century children’s literature and Grimm’s fairy tales, where the orphaned children are mistreated by their self-centred, wicked stepmother. In the middle of the night, there is a visitor, Mair, the dead mother, who has come from the ‘llan’ (the churchyard) because she heard her little daughter, Eiry, crying. The spectral Mair enters the house and comforts both her children, rubbing Gwyn’s cold feet to warm them and finally taking Eiry away with her. Ifan and Nano awake suddenly to find Eiry gone: she is discovered lying dead outside, having fallen down the steps. This is very much in the vein of late Victorian child deathbed scenes, both in Welsh and English, as found in the work of Winnie Parry and Moelona, as well as Dickens and Charles Kingsley. The play ends on a strange note, with the repentant Nano thinking that from now on she will never be lonely, since Mair will always be with her. Although the play is far too sentimental for modern tastes, it is interesting from a feminist point of view, since it clearly dramatizes the return of the mother, that figure who, according to French feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, has been so thoroughly devalued and expunged from the patriarchal symbolic order. Drawing on fairy tale tropes, Kate Roberts and Betty Eynon Davies create a fictional world in which the mother never in fact dies but constantly haunts the living, particularly those young women, like Nano in the play, who seek to escape the responsibilit...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Illustrations
• 1: ‘Before 1917…’: the making of a writer
• 2: From playwright to prose writer: 1917–1928
• 3: Finding a voice: 1928–1946
• 4: ‘The struggle of a woman’s soul’: 1946–1960
• 5: ‘This stiff, indomitable queen of Welsh letters’: 1960–1985
• Notes
• Bibliography