SandDune reads in 2018: thread 2

'Anna pictured the seeds beginning to stir. Plump nubs of green feeling their way up through the earth, unfolding, fattening, changing hydrogen and oxygen and all the rest of it into solid, succulent food.'

'The streets are almost empty. She passes the hump of a body frozen into a doorway, covered with drifted snow. It looks like a bag of rubbish, but Anna knows it's a body because she saw it before the snow hid it. It's an old woman. Maybe she stopped to rest on the way back from fetching her ration. Anna doesn't like going past the park anymore. There are people sitting on benches, swathed in snow, planted like bulbs to wait for spring. They stay there day after day. No one comes to take them away.'

'He cut off from the dockside and walked on into the Back Trace, the infamous Bohane Trace, a most evil labyrinth, an unknowable web of streets. He had that Back Trace look to him: a dapper buck in a natty-boy Crombie, the Crombie draped all casual-like over the shoulders of a pale grey Eyetie suit, mohair. Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses. It was a pair of hand-stitched Portuguese boots that slapped his footfall, and the stress that fell, the emphasis, was money.

Hard-got the riches –oh the stories that we told out in Bohane about Logan Hartnett.

Dank little squares of the Trace opened out suddenly, like gasps, and Logan passed through. All sorts of quarehawks lingered Trace-deep in the small hours. They looked down as he passed, they examined their toes and their sacks of tawny wine –you wouldn’t make eye contact with the Long Fella if you could help it. Strange, but we had a fear of him and a pride in him, both. He had a fine hold of himself, as we say in Bohane. He was graceful and erect and he looked neither left nor right but straight out ahead always, with the shoulders thrown back, like a general. He walked the Arab tangle of alleyways and wynds that make up the Trace and there was the slap, the lift, the slap, the lift of Portuguese leather on the backstreet stones.

The Great Field, as it was properly known, lay in the bend of a broad, meandering river. Irregular in shape, it was bounded in the east, south and west by water, and in the north it dwindled gradually into wilderness. As far as I knew it had never been cultivated: it was grassland pure and simple. To many eyes the field probably looked insignificant; after all there was nothing to distinguish it from the countless neighbouring fields. For a select few, however, it was the chosen field: the place where momentous events would unfold and come to fruition.

Suppose you read the word ‘nghymoedd’. . You will search in vain in the dictionary. Naturally, because it’s a plural and plurals don’t have separate entries in the dictionary. The last letters, -oedd, are a fairly common plural marker in Welsh, but in this case the plural form is created not by adding a suffix to the singular form - the vowel, too, is different. In the singular, the vowel is not y, but w, pronounced as oo....

Right: putting the suffix -oedd aside and replacing the y with w we get nghwm. But that seems not to be in the dictionary either. Because the right place to look for ‘nghwm’ is under ‘cwm’ (coombe or valley) a word that shares just one letter with ‘nghymoedd’...

What is typically Welsh though, or rather typically Celtic - are the changing consonants at the beginning of words. ... But it’s not an easy system. ‘Cwm’ in the singular has three ‘mutations’ (the technical term):the soft form gwm; the nasal form nghwm; and the aspirated form chwm. ...Some other words have only two mutations, still others only one and some have none. It all depends on the initial sound.