You’re in Wales. Act like it.

Molly Stubbs

With hindsight, the MacMillan car park attendant at Hay Festival simply chose a bad time to make his joke.

It had been a scorching few days, the kind we rarely get in this country.

“I think, if there is a God, he’s got to keep Cymru rainy,” I told my husband on the drive through Bannau Brycheiniog. “We appreciate it more when the sun’s out.”

“Glorious, innit?” He agreed.

“Would’ve brought the English over here much quicker though, if it was sunny all the time.”

Nationalism is a pretty new addition to my political personality. If you’d asked me at age 18, as my university lecturer did, whether it is foolish to be proud of where you’re from, as you don’t get to choose where you’re from, I’d have said yes.

Foolish, indeed.

And then I learnt about our history, and more generally about English colonialism, about Celtic oppression and alliance and prospects of freedom. I started smiling when I heard Michael Sheen’s accent slip in a film, and holding back scowls as fellow wedding guests raved about their second homes on ‘Anglesey’. I talked for hours to friends about my hatred of The Crown’s Aberfan episode — Oh, was poor old Lizzy so sad about all our dead children? Well, bless her little cotton bloomers how will she cope with all that guilt?

I felt ashamed I was only ‘half Welsh’, and compensated for it wherever I could. I began to speak Cymraeg beyond ‘T’in iawn?’, even as the default in conversations, especially as the default, and encouraged others in their learning no matter how lacklustre. I got a job that didn’t just accept Welsh pride, but encouraged it. And then Plaid won the election.

Now? Well, count me among or against you: informed, radicalised, brainwashed… a nationalist.

And then I went to Hay Festival.

Out of touch?

“It’s a little pretentious nowadays,” my friend said, explaining why he wouldn’t attend. But I’m used to that – bookish people, the kind who can attend a literary festival, those with the upbringing, leisure time and bank balance necessary to earn the title ‘erudite’, don’t tend to be of the swinish multitude like myself and my husband.

We grew up the granddaughter of a miner and the son of a steelworker, are minimum wage approaching middle age, and homeowners only thanks to the good financial habits of dead grandparents who worked their lives to scrape together droplets in the oceans of the profits of the corporations that employed them.

Hay Festival is expensive. It took two months of disposable income to sort out our three days, granted we booked quite a number of events. But in the monetary class binary, Cymry at the bottom shouldn’t have to spend half a grand to sit in a field and listen to some Londoner wax lyrical about why it’s a bad thing that Donald Trump is president.

Not that the events are in any way bad. There must be a place where these conversations can be had, particularly concerning the strong tradition of working-class Welsh literature, and the best of them manage to be both enjoyable and educational in equal measure.

Mel and Sue were funny because their privilege and pretension enables them to turn a phrase so unexpected and surreal and punch-uppy that I couldn’t help but laugh. In the Mubi tent I listened to two ‘well-educated’ Englishmen talk about their favourite book to film adaptations, and loved it. Miriam Margolyes was a staunchly left-wing delight as always.

Those in charge of the programme chuck a few of us Welshies, and other Celtic writers, in there too – the Writers at Work bear specific mention, many of them immigrants to this country and embracing it as their own even at its least helpful and most hostile. (And a lot of them on the dole, it also bears mentioning, and receiving little help beyond the publicity of speaking to a crowd and a few ‘industry insiders’, despite Hay’s frequently touting itself as a charity).

Ruth Jones telling stories of home, Carys Eleri and her medieval Welsh pussy poet, Maya Jordan revealing little known tales of working class Wales, Will Hayward who, for some reason, has taken this country as his charge and benevolently attempts to educate us on our politics. And the Manics, de facto gods of Cymru, though I’m still smarting that I didn’t get to see them.

This all, thankfully, served as a reminder that yes, while its festival office may be across the border in Hereford, the Hay Festival site is in Y Gelli Gandryll, Hay-on-Wye… in Wales.

‘We’re not in England anymore’

I say this because there is a distinct, and to some of us very uncomfortable undercurrent running beneath the festival. Now, now, don’t start with that “Not all English [insert act of perpetuation of Celtic oppression here].” Yes, I can recount how the confused woman at the food stall said: “Don’t stop speaking Welsh, I’ll get it,” when asked “Allau gael caws ar top?”

I can talk about how we all, Cymry and English, rejoiced at the mention of the River Wye getting rights, one of which is to avoid pollution (though we’re still waiting on rights for those Welsh rivers the English don’t deign to swim in – how’s that sewage spill in the Tywi doing, by the way?).

I can tell you about the wonderful old Yorkshireman I chatted with about ‘How Black is My Valley’ and his support of the 1984 Miners Strike as we perused the Welsh section at Hay’s bookstore. I can talk about how Hay has a Welsh section in its bookstore.

But I can also talk about how Welsh island-owner Bear Grylls, who “loves Wales”, couldn’t wait to tell us he was climbing ‘Penny Fan’, and did a great amount of his military training here.

About how Plaid Cymru got a customary congrats at the Private Eye show before we went straight back into digging at the UK Government (the more I think about this, the more it’s a good thing they didn’t think PC worth satirising – it mightn’t have gone down well with yours truly).

What about how a podcaster dared not talk bad about a book written about Wales by a middle class English woman because she “wanted to make it out of here alive”, savages that us Welsh are.

I can talk about how Hay Festival is partnered with AirBnB, and a lovely little advert pops up on the big screen before shows encouraging all in attendance to enter a competition for £1,500 to book a writing retreat — how about one in this country? We’ve got holiday lets coming out of our ears.

None of this will seem a big deal to a depressingly large majority of those with the loudest of voices. “Oh here we go, more complaining from a Taffy. Lighten up, would you! Without English money there wouldn’t be a Wales at all, let alone a Hay Festival.”

But to those of us in Cymru who consider ourselves Cymry, the insidious nature of such subtleties, often disguised as lighthearted jokes or even compliments, is obvious, unavoidable, and at its very worst, invincible.

I can’t offer a way out for little kids who have to share their beach with Dŵr Cymru discharge, or pay the rent of young adults priced out of their cynefin by holiday-homeowners and retirees, or do anything bar encourage the refugees living down the street from Reform supporters in their Cymraeg lessons.

I must stamp my feet, vote in the vague hope we can trust Rhun to lay the groundwork for an independence referendum at some point in the next century, and get mad, whenever possible on behalf of whatever Cymru is.

The Welsh nationalists I talk and listen to focus more on solutions than grudges, eloquence than anger, negotiation than demand, compromise than curse. The spot at the head of our not-yet-free table is undoubtedly and quite rightly reserved for peace.

But there is also an important place set, whether the diplomats think it helpful or not, for righteous indignation. Have we not earned it? Do we not deserve it? Because if not all Saes are bad, not all Saes are good either.

So, as I said, it was not the best day for the MacMillan car park attendant to point at the Ddraig Goch on my husband’s top (seemingly the only one on show anywhere in the festival) and say “You’ve got some shit on your shirt, mate.”

I can accept that this, a standard and largely accepted line of football banter, is thrown around with assumed consent from all involved and provides the insultee a chance to bite back in humorous fashion.

But not in my country. Not when it’s 30 degrees and I’m hot and bothered. Not when I’ve had to endure quiet reminders of subjugation. And certainly not from an Englishman.

Because while I’m not able to put to rights 700 years of oppression, our own subsequent complicity in the oppression of others as ‘Western England’, what I can do is take off my Glamorgan bucket hat, turn round to the parking attendant in luminous green vest, and shout:

“You’re in Cymru, you twat!”