A Welcome from the White Cottage by Liz Williams
2003
The first time I saw the white cottage, its coarse walls sprouting up from quaking, too-green grass and its roof a distant triangle sandwiched between clouds and stone, I was 11 years old and caught up in a story.
‘This is it, the ancestral homestead!’ Dad said.
He pointed from the driver’s seat of our rental car, and from the back I saw the cottage framed by my parents’ lolling heads as the vehicle jerked from side to side up the gravel driveway. As a young girl plucked from my hometown in New York and dropped on the crest of this wind-swept hill in Wales, the house didn’t look like anything special to me. It was small, unassuming, simple. And yet I saw how it roped my father in like something ethereal.
The gravel popping beneath our car stilled as we reached the top of the driveway. Dad swung open his door and the car rocked as he transferred the weight of his body onto the grassy earth. From within the car, I pressed my cheek against the window and the icy wetness spread a chill down my neck. My upturned eyes took in the structure—the cottage where my great-great-grandfather had grown up, before migrating to America when he was 20 years old. It was a story Dad kept telling with ever-wide eyes, as if willing me to absorb its sacred significance to our family history.
I watched as he approached the house. He walked tentatively on the grass, reuniting himself with the land he had visited with his own father many years ago. I opened my door to join him. The February wind rolling in from the sea bit my ears and I tugged down my hat to warm them. My family and I fumbled on the lawn of the property, awkward in our foreignness, our clumsiness with treasures of the past we didn’t know how to handle. I took in the slope of the cottage’s moss-tinged roof, its rough stone walls, the chimney at the centre which would have provided warmth through cold mornings like this. From the distance, beyond the hedges that lined the property, I could hear the roar of the Irish Sea.
If the walls of the cottage were speaking to me then, my ears were not yet ready to listen. Or rather, I did not yet speak their language, so their whispers were lost to the wind.
2012
I was 21 years old when I returned, without my family, to visit the cottage again. Wales was an old crush I couldn’t shake. The solitude of its remote coastlines; an oldness that boasted permanence; a coaxing to come home to where I was from—all these things pulled me in.
I had been studying abroad in England for the semester and was invited to stay with distant relatives on a farm in North Wales. Eirlys was into genealogy. She was in her seventies, with white-blonde hair and delicate glasses, and had recently located our family in New York as a long-lost branch of her family tree. She, too, was descended from one of ten children raised in the cottage. But of those ten children, my great-great-grandfather was the only one to leave Wales for America. Despite cleaving himself from the sturdy trunk of that tree, its branches had continued to splinter and spurt new growth, leaving dozens of our distant relatives still living in the area.
Eirlys and her husband Griff picked me up from the train station in Bangor, heaving my red suitcase into their SUV and starting the drive back to their village.
‘This is our first time speaking English in six months!’ Griff said, smiling back at me in the rear-view mirror with a flash of pride. My raised eyebrows revealed my surprise then, but over the next few days I would get used to both him and Eirlys carrying on their lives in their native tongue. Welsh was the language they spoke when entering the shops of Aberdaron, the seaside village nearest to the cottage and about 40 minutes from their home. It was the language on Griff’s lips as he leaned out the window of his SUV, asking a man on his front porch for directions. It was the language sung by young girls and boys performing at a noson lawen or ‘joyous evening’, a musical community event to raise money for the local medical services. Welsh trickled through the village, ricocheting off the river. And it was the language carved into the gravestones Eirlys showed me behind the stone church, where my ancestors were buried.
When we finally made it up the gravelly hill for the grand reunion with the old stone cottage, a meeting I had been anticipating for months, my breath caught in my throat. There was the cottage, but it wasn’t as I had remembered it. It looked like two or three cottages patchworked together, with multiple roofs sloping up into the sky above. My eyes darted from one modern detail to the next: the freshly-trimmed hedges, the doorbell, a bench by the entranceway, mounted floodlights to show the way at night. This was someone’s home, and we had come here uninvited.
At the top of the driveway, we came to a metal gate. I didn’t remember it from our last visit, either, but maybe I could no longer trust my childhood memories. Maybe it wasn’t the cottage that had changed, but me. Eirlys jumped out of the SUV, lifted a latch, and pushed the gate open for us to drive through.
‘Here we are!’ she said, releasing a satisfied sigh as she leaned back a little to look up at the cottage. I stepped out of the vehicle hesitantly, to join her on the lawn.
‘See that part in the middle?’ she said, pointing to the central section of the house. ‘That’s the original structure.’
She explained to me, in English, how the cottage had been expanded on over the years and all that remained of the original building were a few stone walls. I could see them now. They were closer to the romanticised version of the cottage I remembered from my last visit, along with my memories of the wind. Now, I was sure the walls were speaking to me across the wild air, slipping me phrases: ry’n ni yma o hyd (we’re still here), croeso adre (welcome home), dyma’r wlad eich tadau (this is the land of your fathers)…But these Welsh words, though entwined so inextricably with the land and the wind, were lost on my American ears.
Eirlys and Griff leaned against the SUV to take in the sight of the little cottage on the hill overlooking Aberdaron and the glittering coastline below. I wanted to join them, but despite the picturesque view, my body would not relax. The wind whipped harshly against my face, causing my eyes to water.
‘Here, why don’t you take this,’ said Griff, shrugging off his coat and draping it around my shoulders.
My muscles remained taut. None of us spoke. I kept eyeing the driveway, tense at the thought of two headlights climbing the hill. Griff and Eirlys would be able to explain why we were there, trespassing on someone’s lawn. They could rattle off sing-song sentences with ease, weaving in the local expressions. But I just felt like a fraud, standing on the land of my ancestors while their language snared my tongue.
‘Well, then,’ Eirlys said, standing, after some time had passed. ‘We’d better get going.’
I would never admit my eagerness to leave the ancestral homestead, but the instant relief in my body betrayed me.
2023
The grey-green waves of the Irish Sea crashed against the shore outside the Gwesty Tŷ Newydd hotel in Aberdaron, where Eirlys was staying. It had been 11 years since we had been together last, and in that time our worlds had changed.
On the other side of the globe, in Canberra, Australia, I sank into the couch in my living room, relaxing finally after putting my 18-month-old son, Levin, to bed. The sun had just set over the Brindabella mountains outside our window, casting sheets of pink and purple across the sky. I felt my phone vibrate and there was a message from Eirlys: an 8-second video of waves breaking along the coast at Aberdaron. I recognised the scene instantly and read the corresponding message. It was in Welsh, of course, as this was the only way we communicated these days. Even Eirlys’s daughter, who had reached out to share information about how to watch Griff’s funeral online six weeks earlier, knew to text me in Welsh. Since my last visit to the white cottage, I had been studying the language of my ancestors—first in the US, and now in my adopted home of Australia.
‘Aberdaron. Dwi yn aros yn Nhy Newydd am ddwy noson…angen amser i fi fy hun i fyfyrio ac ymlacio…Mae hi’n noson stormus iawn ac mae fy stafell yn wynebu y mor gwyllt,’ Eirlys wrote. ‘Aberdaron. I’m staying two nights in Tŷ Newydd…I need time for myself to rest and relax…It’s a very stormy night and my room faces the sea.’
From where I sat on my couch in Canberra, I could see a photo of the white cottage on the top of our bookshelf. I had taken it on my last visit, and now the photo occupied a prominent spot in the home I shared with my Australian husband and our American-Australian son. More than a hundred years after my ancestor left his home and the family within that home for another country, I had done the same. We had been in Australia nearly six years. The adjustment to a new country had been disorienting, and sometimes harsh. When seeking comfort in this period of transition, I found myself gravitating not toward the American expat community, but toward the Welsh. I moved my lips around their ancient words, grasping onto something old, steady, and permanent—desperate for that deep sense of belonging that pulled my father onto the lawn of the cottage all those years ago.
‘Dw i’n gobeithio ymweld ryw ddydd gyda Levin,’ I messaged Eirlys. ‘I hope to visit someday with Levin.’
I could picture all the places I would take him—into the shops of the village, for a walk along the rocky shore, to the cemetery to see the graves of our ancestors. Maybe I would translate the chatter we overheard, or the words on the gravestones. Maybe, when later that day, we climbed the hill to the white cottage, my knowledge of the language would ease me into the land even more. I knew the owners now, after another distant relative had connected us. I had never met them, but we emailed each other from time to time, exchanging what we knew of the cottage like currency. I shared with them old photos of ancestors who had lived there; they sent me pictures of the house in a storm and in the sun. We each had a son, and when I visited Wales someday with mine, I would explain to him that although we were both dual American-Australian citizens, this country was also a kind of home. I would tell him that, if he wanted to, someday he too could hear words of welcome lilting on the Welsh wind.
My phone buzzed with another message from Eirlys, and a photo. Now that the storm had cleared, she could see the old cottage from her hotel room. The sliver of green grass on the hill in the photo was small compared to the wide expanse of grey sea and sky. But if I zoomed in far enough, I could see the tiniest white speck. There was the cottage, waiting just like it always had been, to whisper in my open ear whenever I was ready: croeso nôl, welcome back.
***
Liz Williams is an American writer based in Australia with family ties to Wales. Her story about learning Welsh and investigating her ancestry from Australia has been featured in the media including the BBC, Radio Cymru, and Wales Online, and she can be contacted through her website.
The photograph at the head of this essay was taken by the author.