From its beginning words, Richard Llewellyn’s Welsh book How Green Was My Valley reads like a well-written memoir. In reality, the book is a novel and the author is not Welsh as he claimed but English, though with a tad of Welsh ancestry. This interesting tidbit is beside the point when one is looking for entertainment during a pandemic and both the book and the movie are available. I watched the movie and then read the book, which is backwards to my normal sequence, and found both to be excellent pastimes while sheltering in place.
Huw Morgan, the protagonist, sets the tone with his first line as he leaves the Welsh village that has been his home after his parents and siblings have died. “I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the valley.” The blue cloth will reappear as Huw remembers his life in the village. This is the first of several slight foreshadowing hints that he drops almost unnoticed into the narrative that keep the reader wondering. Later favorites were, “I wish I had taken more notice then,” and “But not as Blodwen thought, bless her heart.”
The story revolves around a mining town in the late 19th century when the dark dangerous world of the mines becomes a conflict on the inside between the owners and the workers who are divided on whether or not to form a union for more equitable pay and working conditions. On the outside, the slag piles up covering the greenness of the valley. Into this mix is the story of the people of the village including the preacher, the shop and mine owners and workers, along with Huw’s parents, three sisters, and five brothers. Work, education, song, and church permeate the background for the different siblings’ love stories and Huw’s own coming-of-age.
I found it interesting that no one discovered that the author was not actually Welsh until after his death with the book receiving the 1940 National Book Award given by the American Booksellers Association. I think the feel of authenticity of the language and times kept the discovery at bay, like the importance of Huw’s first pair of long “trews” (trousers) to mark his becoming a man. The author did his research and sets the reader gazing down from the Welsh hill into the green valley and singing along.
Another quote from the book is its own best description, “O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.” Both the book and the movie fulfill this promise – your choice as to which comes first!