I HAD A really strange experience last week – almost what you would call an ‘out of body’ experience. I actually heard my grandmother’s voice for the first time in fifty-six years. She was chattering away about the family legend about a bit of folk medicine – a family heirloom called a snakestone, or Mamacal. My grandmother died in 1952!
So has the First Minister for Wales gone completely loopy and is now hearing voices among his many other sins? Have I become the Doris Stokes de nos jours, chinking upside-down tumblers around the dining table? No, it isn’t like that actually, although that might make a more interesting story in some ways. But the story of how my grandmother came to make a tape recording in 1936, three years before I was born, and then how I heard it in 2008, is pretty weird. It means that my six grandchildren, aged between eight and two, have all now heard thier great-great-grandmother’s voice talking as though she was still here, when in fact she died half a century before they were born.
She recorded her story about the snakestone because she spoke an industrial-area dialect of Welsh from the Llansamlet area of Swansea – then the heartlands of the zinc and copper smelting industry. The kind of Welsh she spoke, with industrial inflections and peculiarities, was suspected not to be able to survive the impact of the Great Depression and the forces of Anglicisation as they travelled along the A48 east-west artery of transport which passed right through Llansamlet on the way from London to Cardiff and all points east on its way to Swansea and westward to Carmarthen and Pembrokeshire. My grandmother was an endangered species, in other words!
It is wonderful to hear my grandmother’s voice again when she meant so much to me because she died in our house in 1952 and I in turn had nearly died in her house in 1942 when I was three years old and contracted pneumonia during a Christmas holiday. It must have been pretty awful for grandparents and parents if one of your children got pneumonia in those days before antibiotics. All you could do was to keep a coal fire in the bedroom and have the GP on hand and if the temperature went up and over 103, or whatever it is, that was the end of you.
I survived. Sadly, my grandmother did not survive cancer of the womb, which she developed in 1949. I remember to this day the terrors of the somewhat primitive radium therapy treatment that was all that was available sixty years ago. I recall my mother telling me what the consultant had told my grandmother to warn he of the painful side effects of undergoing radium therapy in those days. The consultant had said, ‘Mrs Rees, it’s going to be very painful.’
My grandmother asked, ‘Well, how painful?’
And the doctor replied, ‘Do you remember childbirth? And on getting a nod from my grandmother, he said, ‘Well, it’s going to be a thousand times more painful than that, but your heart is as strong as a horse, so you should be able to survive it’!
I think that particular consultant may have just been brutally honest or he had missed out the ‘bedside manner’ module at medical school.
When the treatment failed, or rather the cancer came back a second time, she couldn’t have another dose of radium therapy. Only morphine and trying to control the pain was left. It used to be my job to run down to the chemist to sign the Poisons Register and pick up my grandmother’s morphine. I’d then usually nip in the newsagent next door to the chemist to buy the Dandy or the Beano and walk back with my oddly assorted shopping basket of morphine and comics. I don’t think Health and Safety regulations would allow that now. My grandmother was probably, to all intense and purposes, an opium addict by the time she died and I suppose I was the unwitting agent of that but it saved her the terrible pain of her cancer.
The other legend about my grandmother is that she had been warned by her prospective mother-in-law on no account to marry my grandfather, John Rees, because he was far too stubborn ever to be a decent husband to anyone! Perhaps that is where my stubborn streak comes from. Luckily for me, my grandmother ignored the advice.
By an odd coincidence my mother had introduced my father as a prospective husband to my grandfather and grandmother and he had his tea and cakes and left. My mother asked my grandparents, ‘what do you think of him?’ My stubborn ‘man of few words’ grandfather grunted ‘siarad gormod’ – which means ‘He talks too much’ – so there’s another genetic cross I bear!
The actual legend that she talks about on the tape recording made in 1936 was about a snakestone; in Llansamlet dialect Welsh – a ‘Mamacal’ – a prized family heirloom which we still own. A snakestone is formed by a congregation of young male adders fighting for supremacy and leaving behind the kind of congealed amalgam of spit, venom and goo which then forms a ring-shaped residue, supposed to have magic powers to cure sties or other eye ailments.
It could either be applied direct on the eye or more usually used to form a potion by pouring boiling water over the stone and waiting for the water to cool to a temperature when it could be used as an eye lotion.
It was part of a small business-dominated Welsh society where if you could make a halfpenny or a penny from hiring out the snakestone, it was a valuable top-up to the family income.
This was not the National Health Service, after all.
Not only does it pre-date the National Health Service, it may even go back to druidic times, according to accounts written by Pliny describing this kind of folk medicine in use in Roman Gaul as well as Celtic Britain.
I imagine that at least one member of the Royal Family might feel deeply comforted that the First Minister for Wales still keeps a prized family heirloom, a homeopathic treatment for eye ailments going back to the druids!
As one of my cousins had been one of Wales’ leading ophthalmologists over the past thirty years until she recently retired, I am not sure what she would think of this legend, although certainly she was very fond of my grandmother too.
Hearing my grandmother’s voice and seeing the wonderment of my own grandchildren listening to their great-great-grandmother’s voice is really a very special experience and reminds us of how the generations are all bound together. I just happen to be one of the lucky ones that can bring together five generations of one family via the tricks of the trade of the early tape recorders and the later generation’s CDs to hear that mellifluous voice and that wonderful Llansamlet dialect and that weird Celtic legend of the magic snakestone that cured people’s eye infection before the NHS and modern spectacles broke the link with our ancient past.
Rhodri Morgan became First Minister for Wales in 2000. He is married to Julie Morgan, MP for Cardiff North. They have three children and seven grandchildren.