Correspondence Course

Lesson 1

Dear Mr Okafor,

Croeso. Welcome to Cwrs Cymraeg — Beginners' Welsh by Post.

Please complete the enclosed exercises and return them in the envelope provided. Do not worry about mistakes.

Pob hwyl,
Menna Tudur (Tutor)

Lesson 4

Dear Mr Okafor,

Very good. You have understood the soft mutation faster than most, which I say to nobody.

One note: bore da is good morning and nos da is good night, and you have wished me good night eleven times in a letter dated 9:15am.

I found this funnier than I should have.

Lesson 9

Dear Menna,

You ask why Welsh. I have been asked this by everyone including my wife, who has a theory.

I am from Enugu. I came here in 1981 to a town where I was, for four years, the only Nigerian, and where a man called Emrys Pugh who ran the newsagent spoke to me in Welsh every single morning for those four years.

He knew I did not understand. He did it anyway. He said — I understood this much later — that he was not going to have the language die out of his own shop because of who was standing in it.

He died in 1996. I have his newspaper round book. I cannot read a word of it.

That is why Welsh.

Lesson 14

Dear Chidi,

Thank you for telling me that.

I am going to work you harder now.

Lesson 31 (1999)

Dear Chidi,

Your translation of the passage is correct and I want to complain about it.

You have rendered hiraeth as "homesickness." This is what the dictionaries say and it is what every English speaker says and it is wrong, and the fact that you of all people have written it has annoyed me for two days.

Try again. You know the answer. You wrote me a letter about a newsagent in Lesson 9.

Lesson 32

Dear Menna,

I have thought about it for a week.

Hiraeth is not missing a place. It is missing a place that will not be there when you get back.

Is that closer?

Lesson 32 (reply)

Yes.

Lesson 58 (2001)

Dear Chidi,

You are past the point where I have anything structured left to teach you. From here it is reading and talking, and I cannot do the talking by post.

I am enclosing a novel. It is not a beginners' novel and you will hate me for about forty pages.

Lesson 71 (2003)

Dear Chidi,

A short note. The college is closing the correspondence department at the end of the summer term. Not enough enrolments; everything is moving online, where I do not intend to follow.

I have four students left. Three have been informed.

Pob hwyl,
Menna

Lesson 72

Dear Chidi,

Ignore my last letter, which I have decided not to send.

Here is the next exercise.

2003–2019

The letters continued for sixteen years.

They came on the same college letterhead, which Menna Tudur had taken four boxes of when the department closed, and which lasted until 2016, after which she had more printed at her own expense at a shop in Aberystwyth.

There were, by Chidi's count, three hundred and eighty of them.

They stopped being lessons somewhere around 2006 and became, without either of them marking the transition, letters. In Welsh. Twice monthly. About her sister, and his daughter's exams, and the state of the college, and a long-running disagreement about a poet that ran from 2009 to 2014 and was never resolved.

He never paid a fee after 2003. He tried, twice. The cheques were returned without comment.

2019

The letter came from a solicitor in Machynlleth.

Menna Tudur had died in August, aged eighty-eight. She had left instructions regarding a Mr Chidi Okafor of Shropshire: a box of papers, and a short note.

The note said, in Welsh:

Chidi — you were the last one. The department shut in 2003 and I did not tell you because you were forty pages into the novel and I did not think you would finish it if you thought nobody was marking it.

You finished it. Then you finished eleven more.

I have been retired for sixteen years. Do not be cross.

Menna

Now

Chidi Okafor is seventy-one. He runs a Welsh conversation group at the library on Thursdays; there are nine of them, and two are learners, and he is harder on them than they expect.

He has Emrys Pugh's newspaper round book on the shelf in the front room.

He can read every word of it. It is entirely uninteresting — names, house numbers, who paid — and he has read it perhaps two hundred times.