THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 1

Fatter Sheep

I cannot now remember the classroom, the Love Peacock’s sheep first wandered into my life. I remember no blackboard, no exercise book and no great educational revelation descending upon me as the words were read aloud. What remains is the rhythm of the opening, neat and slightly ridiculous, telling me that mountain sheep were sweeter but valley sheep were fatter, and that this difference was sufficient reason to carry off the latter. It sounded less like poetry than a piece of playground logic polished by rhyme, which may explain why it stayed when so many supposedly important lessons packed their bags and left.

A child did not need to know where Dinas Vawr was, who Ednyfed might have been or why an army was so enthusiastic about livestock. The attraction lay in the sound of it, because “sweeter”, “fatter”, “meeter” and “latter” seemed to tumble after one another with the confidence of words that knew exactly where they were going. There was something almost comic in the certainty of the conclusion, as though the quality of the sheep had been carefully assessed by a committee before the military campaign was approved. The mountain sheep may have tasted better, but the valley sheep offered more meat, and so the matter was apparently settled.

That was the part I carried with me, although I doubt I understood that I was carrying anything at all. Children collect words in much the same way they collect smooth stones, bits of string and objects adults cannot imagine having any value. The object does not need to explain itself before it is placed in a pocket, and the words do not need to reveal why they deserve room in the mind. They wait there until experience gives them another use, by which time we may have forgotten when or why we picked them up.

The opening of The War-Song of Dinas Vawr¹ looked like nonsense because it gave greed the structure of a nursery rhyme. It did not begin with a declaration of war, a disputed border, an insulted king or even one of those noble causes later generations could carve into stone. It began with appetite. There were sheep in a valley, they were fatter than the sheep on the mountain, and the men who wanted them deemed it “meeter” to take them.

The word “meeter” did a great deal of work for such an innocent-looking word. It did not say that taking the sheep was kind, lawful or necessary, because even the marauders may have struggled to maintain that fiction. It said the action was more suitable, more fitting, perhaps even more sensible, which allowed desire to dress itself in the respectable clothing of judgement. They had decided what they wanted first, then supplied the reasoning required to make the wanting appear almost responsible.

I did not hear that as a child. I heard the rhyme, saw the sheep and probably imagined the sort of raid that belonged in an illustrated adventure, with warriors charging down from a mountain while the sheep looked on with the patient disappointment animals reserve for human beings. The violence had no weight because the language refused to carry it solemnly. Even when the expedition forced a strong position and killed the men who held it, the rhyme kept marching as though death were merely the next item on the itinerary.

There was a touch of Death and Glory in that movement, although the glory was being awarded by the people doing the killing. The army met a host and quelled it, forced a position, overthrew warriors, sacked a house and cellar, removed a king’s head and then sang about the result over dinner. It was conquest reduced to a sequence of efficient verbs, each one pushing the army towards the feast that had apparently justified the expedition from the beginning. The dead were part of the cost, but the cattle were the prize and the carousing was the point.

That makes the poem sound heavier than it felt when it first reached me. Its trick was to make the horror almost cheerful, allowing the rhythm to carry me past what the words actually described. “On Dyfed’s richest valley, where herds of kine were browsing,” created a picture broad enough for a child to enter, and the “mighty sally” that followed seemed to promise movement, danger and adventure. I was led away by the speaking pictures before I noticed where the adventure ended.

The valley was rich, the cattle plentiful and the men confident. Nothing in those first movements suggested that the appetite might contain the seed of its own defeat, because armies rarely begin their songs by admitting they may have misunderstood the campaign. They sing of strength, courage and what will be taken, not of the quiet thing already moving against them. The hidden enemy is seldom invited into the first verse.

Peacock’s raiders were defeated in no conventional sense within the song. They returned with two thousand head of cattle, the king’s head, his wine and enough evidence to declare the expedition a triumph. They had beaten every visible opponent placed before them. Yet the adult in me cannot hear their celebration without wondering whether the something else that defeated them was already present in the reason they went to war.

Appetite is not satisfied by proving it can be fed. It becomes educated by success, learning that wanting can be converted into action and action into entitlement. The first raid needs an explanation, but the second can point to precedent, and the third may be called strategy. Before long, the people taking the sheep are no longer thieves in their own account of events; they are practical men making sensible use of an available resource.

I would spend much of my working life listening to versions of that argument. The sheep changed into money, clients, market share, tax advantages, property, staff, contracts and opportunities that would apparently disappear if somebody did not seize them quickly. The valley became a business sector, a neighbourhood, a government program or another person’s weakness. The word “meeter” survived beautifully, although it usually arrived wearing a suit and carrying a spreadsheet.

Business does not function without appetite. A person does not start an enterprise because they are entirely indifferent to whether it survives, grows or provides something in return for the risk involved. Profit is not a moral failure, and ambition is not evidence of a defective character. The difficulty begins when appetite is permitted to write its own justification and then present that justification as independent advice.

I have sat in rooms where the conclusion had been reached before the discussion began. Somebody wanted to buy the property, expand the operation, enter the arrangement, minimise the tax, remove the partner, extract the cash or secure the deal. My supposed task was to assess whether the action made sense, but there were occasions when the real request was for a respectable sentence that could be placed beneath a decision already made. They did not always want advice; they wanted a rhyme for “fatter”.

That may be too neat, and neatness is one of the dangers in looking backwards. Not every business decision is a raid upon somebody else’s valley, and not every person seeking professional support is disguising greed as logic. Sometimes the sheep really are needed, the opportunity is sound and the action is fair to everybody involved. The analytical Jeff remains obliged to test the numbers rather than convict the client because a poem from childhood has wandered into the meeting.

The human Jeff, however, has learned to listen for the point at which explanation becomes camouflage. It can be heard when every risk is treated as somebody else’s problem, when the consequences are pushed beyond the horizon and when the person asking for advice becomes irritated by any question that slows the march. It can also be heard when the language grows grander as the motive grows smaller. A raid for fatter sheep may become a strategic acquisition if enough syllables are applied to it.

Capitalism is particularly skilled at producing respectable words for appetite. Growth, efficiency, optimisation, shareholder value and wealth creation can describe legitimate and useful activity, but they can also be used to remove the people affected from the sentence. A business may become more efficient because fewer wages are paid, more profitable because a supplier has been squeezed, or more valuable because the cost has been shifted somewhere the accounts do not bother to look. The language reports the cattle brought home and leaves the widows and children outside the ledger.

The poem does not leave them outside completely. After the house and cellars have been sacked and the king’s head removed, the song admits that the victors orphaned children and widowed women. It is a remarkable confession because it arrives without repentance, almost as another measure of the army’s effectiveness. They had spilled enough blood to swim in, glutted the eagles and ravens, and still the rhythm drove towards the feast.

Perhaps that is what unsettles me now. The men knew what they had done, or at least knew enough to sing about it, but knowledge did not interrupt celebration. The suffering of others became evidence of victory rather than a reason to question it. There was no hidden cost in the ordinary sense, because the cost was visible and proudly counted; what was hidden was the moral capacity to recognise that the cost should matter.

I have written and spoken often about abundance, the modern excess of information, opportunity and promises that more is waiting if only we reach quickly enough. Abundance sounds generous, but it can create its own famine by persuading us that what we have is never sufficient. The richer the valley appears, the more foolish restraint can be made to look. Somebody else will take the sheep, we tell ourselves, and that becomes another practical reason to move.

“Enough” is a difficult word in business because it refuses to keep marching. It asks the owner to decide where growth ceases to be useful, where accumulation stops improving life and where the additional prize begins to cost more than it provides. Those questions are not anti-business, although they are sometimes treated as if they have arrived carrying a red flag and a plan to nationalise the photocopier. They are questions about purpose, and purpose becomes inconvenient when appetite has already selected the valley.

I cannot pretend I spent forty years standing nobly on the mountain, content with the sweeter sheep while everybody else rushed towards the fatter ones. I wanted success, recognition, security and the authority that seemed to come with being the person who understood what the numbers meant. I wanted to build something substantial enough that nobody could dismiss the boy from the bush as merely clever in a classroom. There were times when I worked beyond what was sensible, accepted responsibilities I did not need and measured progress by what remained to be conquered.

The self-interest was not always financial. Being needed can become its own form of carousing, particularly for a person who has learned to turn usefulness into identity. The client with a crisis, the business with a problem and the organisation requiring somebody to make sense of the mess all offered a valley in which my particular herd was browsing. I could tell myself I was helping, and often I was, but the explanation did not always disclose what I received from being the helper.

That is where Peacock’s apparently simple logic becomes uncomfortable. We may not merely construct respectable explanations for taking money or possessions; we may do it for attention, status, control and the reassurance of being indispensable. The desire can be generous and selfish at the same time, which makes it harder to examine honestly. It is easier to condemn a marauding army than to ask whether one’s own kindness occasionally arrives with an unstated invoice.

The two Jeffs do not settle that question easily. The analytical one points to the results, the people assisted, the businesses saved and the practical work completed. The human one asks why rest felt like irrelevance, why saying no resembled abandonment and why responsibility was so often accepted before its true cost had been measured. Both can be right, which is far less convenient than allowing one of them to cut off the other’s head and carry it before the feast.

Long before business supplied those complications, school offered a different kind of valley. Education was presented as the route by which ability would become possibility, and I believed enough of that promise to imagine a future in the air. Flying represented more than an occupation, although the boy I was may not have had the language to explain the difference. It suggested movement, distance and escape from the limits other people had placed around what a life like mine might become.

There is always danger in giving childhood dreams the tidy shape of adult narrative. I may now be arranging fragments into a flight path that seemed less certain at the time. What I know is that the dream of flying existed, and that the Higher School Certificate mark landed with sufficient force to bring it down. The result was 215 out of 500, a number that did not resemble the person I believed myself to be or the future I had allowed myself to see.

It was not an enemy army that defeated me. There was no rival at the gates, no dramatic contest and no king marching forth in rage. The something else was quieter: a mark on a page, the circumstances surrounding it, the narrowing of choices and the sudden conversion of possibility into practicality. The dream did not end in battle; it was processed.

That may have been my first adult encounter with the difference between intelligence and outcome. I had assumed, as clever children often do, that being capable of understanding would eventually be recognised as the principal qualification for moving forward. The world had other measures, and examinations had no obligation to report the private evidence I carried about myself. A result can be technically correct while still failing to describe the person who receives it.

The anger attached to that has never been entirely clean. Part of it belongs to circumstances, expectations, the limitations of the education placed before me and the ease with which a number could close doors without asking what stood behind it. Part of it belongs to me, because the older Jeff cannot demand an inquiry into every system that failed him while granting the younger one immunity from responsibility. I did not obtain the mark required, and no amount of later intelligence can alter what was recorded.

Yet the mark did more than report performance. It became a hidden enemy because I allowed it to invade territory beyond the examination, carrying an implication that perhaps I was not what I thought I was. The dream of flying crashed, but the doubt survived the impact and found other forms. It would later appear as the suspicion that success had been accidental, that authority belonged naturally to somebody else and that the next room might finally discover I had entered under false pretences.

An army can lose to a greater army and preserve its idea of itself. It was beaten by superior numbers, stronger weapons, better ground or a commander whose strategy prevailed on the day. Defeat by something less visible is harder to contain because there is no clear opponent to blame and no battlefield from which to withdraw. The enemy can follow you into the next occupation wearing your own voice.

Accountancy was not the valley I had imagined from the mountain. I did not look down upon columns of figures and decide they were fatter than the clouds, making it meeter to carry off a ledger instead. Employment arrived through the narrowing that follows when one route closes and another becomes available. Practicality took command, as it often does, and practical decisions have a way of becoming a life before we have finished describing them as temporary.

There was no disgrace in that work, and I do not wish to rewrite a long career as the consolation prize handed to a failed pilot. Accountancy gave me a language, a livelihood, relationships, responsibilities and eventually a way to translate complexity for people who did not want to be diminished by it. It also provided an arena in which the analytical and human parts of me could struggle, cooperate and occasionally pretend the other did not exist. The flight path changed, but movement did not end.

Still, the poem’s march from appetite to conquest has something to say about the way careers can gather momentum. We enter because the opportunity is present, progress because progress is rewarded and continue because turning aside becomes harder to explain than moving forward. Each success supplies the feast for the next expedition. Before long, we can no longer tell whether we are choosing the valley or merely following an army that has forgotten how to stop.

The HSC result was therefore both defeat and recruitment. It defeated one imagined future while pressing me into the practical campaign that followed. I learned the disciplines of work, qualification, service and endurance, and I became good at them because being good was one answer to the doubt the mark had left behind. If the world had reduced me to a number once, I would produce other numbers it could not so easily ignore.

That response contained courage, but it also contained appetite. Achievement could restore the territory lost to disappointment, recognition could answer the insult and usefulness could make rejection less likely. The more I achieved, the more evidence I accumulated, yet evidence does not always satisfy the case it was gathered to prove. Sometimes it merely enlarges the file.

This is where the victorious army finally meets the something else. It can conquer every visible opponent and still remain governed by the hunger that sent it into the valley. It can bring home cattle, wealth, status and applause without discovering what quantity would allow the campaign to end. Defeat does not necessarily mean losing the battle; it may mean winning repeatedly without becoming free of the need to win.

The raiders of Dinas Vawr finish with their overthrow of Ednyfed as the chorus. They have converted another man’s destruction into the music of their own success, which is perhaps conquest in its purest form. The adult world often performs the same trick with greater discretion, celebrating the result while moving the cost into smaller print. We call the feast progress and wonder why the appetite remains.

I do not believe Peacock’s poem stayed with me because the child understood all of that. It stayed because the rhyme was memorable, the pictures moved and the logic was funny enough to enter without resistance. The serious meaning arrived later, after work, ambition, disappointment and abundance had provided their own valleys. Words sometimes form us by waiting patiently until our lives have supplied the missing definitions.

I can still hear the child’s delight in “sweeter” and “fatter”, and I do not want the adult to confiscate it entirely. Nonsense has its own value, and not every remembered rhyme needs to be interrogated until it confesses to shaping civilisation. Yet the opening no longer sounds innocent, because I have heard too many desires become plans and too many plans become necessities once the preferred conclusion has been chosen. I have also heard myself perform the same conversion.

The mountain sheep may indeed have been sweeter, but sweetness was not the measure that mattered to the men looking down upon the valley. They wanted more meat, more wine, more celebration and the story of themselves as men entitled to take it. Their defeat was not delivered by a stronger army; it was concealed inside the appetite they mistook for reason. My own transition from school to employment began with a different defeat, but the hidden enemy travelled with me in much the same way, quietly encouraging me to prove, acquire, achieve and continue long after the original battle had ended.

Now, from the other side of work and much closer to the question of enough, I hear the war-song differently. I hear the jaunty rhyme, the clatter of the expedition and the boy who once saw only an adventure moving through speaking pictures. I also hear the mark that grounded him, the career that followed and the long campaign to demonstrate that one result had not measured the whole man. The words remain funny, but they are no longer nonsense, and the fatter sheep are still browsing in every valley where desire has begun preparing its respectable explanation.

Notes

1. “The War-Song of Dinas Vawr” was written by Thomas Love Peacock and appeared in his comic historical novel The Misfortunes of Elphin, published in 1829. The song is sung by conquerors celebrating the storming of Dinas Vawr in ancient Wales.