About Mother Wales

From one of my Q & A sessions, first published in 2012:

Many readers have remarked that Mistress Martha is really “Mother Wales.”   Have you set out to encourage that belief?

When I wrote On Angel Mountain I was simply intent upon writing a rattling good story with believable characters and enough twists and turns in the plot to keep readers happy.  Young Martha Morgan was my heroine, but I had no plan to develop her as an iconic figure.  But then I had to develop her character greatly in the story called House of Angels, in which she has to cope with the death of her husband and with other very dramatic events.  A good friend read the novel and asked me whether I had modelled Martha on Chris Guthrie in Grassic Gibbons’ Sunset Song.  I had not even heard of that novel or its author.  But I went off and read all three novels in A Scots Quair, and was bowled over by them.  I can quite understand why Chris Guthrie is viewed by many students of Scottish literature as Mother Scotland.  But she is a victim, and Martha Morgan is anything but a victim.

I have not tried to manufacture Martha's character, but I have tried to bring out different aspects of it in the eight novels of the Saga.  Maybe she does embody all that is best and worst about Wales.  On the one hand she is beautiful, passionate, feisty, strong-willed and fiercely loyal and protective of those whom she loves.  On the other hand she is prone to introspection and even deep depression and paranoia.  At times she becomes arrogant and manipulative.  Because of these wild swings in her temperament, between euphoria and hyperactivity on the one hand and deep, grinding and long-lived depression on the other, some have suggested that maybe Martha suffered from Bipolar Disorder.  Now that I come to think of it, maybe she did.  She cannot keep her nose out of other peoples’ business, and becomes involved in great campaigns which can only lead her into trouble.  But she hates injustice and suffering, and is prepared to take huge personal risks in the rightings of wrongs. At times she seems unaware of the physical danger in which she places herself -- to the point of naivety, and to the exasperation of her family and friends.  She has an almost mystical relationship with the landscape in which she lives and the house which gives her shelter.  She belongs to Carningli, and the mountain belongs to her. She is also proudly Welsh and refuses to submit to any authority which she does not respect.

The early stories have as a running theme Martha's sexuality and her passionate relationships with her husband David and then with Owain, the man to whom she is betrothed but whom she never marries.  In the second book she learns how to cope with both motherhood and widowhood.  In Dark Angel she faces up to insecurity and her own tendency towards depression and paranoia.  Sometimes she is a good mother, and sometimes she makes disastrous mistakes.   In Sacrifice and Conspiracy of Angels she is in her prime, still with a young family to look after -- but having to survive appalling brutality and personal humiliation as a result of her tendency to get sucked into affairs that a wiser woman would have avoided like the plague.  But every time she is knocked over, she bounces up again.  She is nothing if not resilient!  She is also very liberal and liberated -- and in that sense a very "modern" heroine, very different from the other subservient and suppressed women who belonged in her peer group.  In Rebecca and the Angels she is in middle age, and as the children fly the nest she needs to learn how to let go -- and how to find a new role for herself as a philanthropist and activist, espousing more than one great cause.  In Flying with Angels she becomes increasingly eccentric,  but she is in some ways liberated as the next generation takes over the estate -- and she has to learn to cope with THEIR mistakes and misjudgments in her role as family matriarch.  She has one last fling, and confronts the fact that even she will not live for ever.  And finally in Guardian Angel she is involved in a strange and allegorical adventure, with a new persona -- and has to explore in her own mind the meaning of identity.....

Throughout every phase of her life she is passionately WELSH, frequently expressing his disdain for  the establishment and the crachach and always siding with the poor and the oppressed in their battles with the government, the church, the mean-spirited gentry and the taxation system.  In every one of the eight books her relationship with Carningli and her own sacred territory is a strong theme --  so this strange thing called hiraeth is at the very core of her being.

 If all that makes her Mother Wales, so be it!