How Green Was My Valley by Claudio Tabotabo (April, 2004)

I could only make a rough recollection. Three years ago justice Isagani Cruz wrote an article about books imported from America which were donated to some deserving public schools in the country. The justice advocate who was also a voracious reader of novels asked his wife to bring him from America a novel, How Green was my Valley by Richard Lywellyn.

I saw a copy of the book in the library of Saint Estanisalaus Kostka College. The school was located by the sea which is not susceptible to acquiring dust, but the book when I saw it had gathered a heap of dust, a sign that it had not been touched for a quite long time already. One day my teacher picked up the book and dusted. Mr. Gil Raval, the teacher handed it to me which I received with a flashing eyes. He told me to read it not as a requirement but just a friendly suggestion. I said yes, but when he disappeared, I shoved it back to its natural dungeon. I could hardly finish a required reading what more the unassigned one. Besides, the book was not glossy which does not catch the attention of the teenaged reader. The book was forgotten. I graduated and taught literature in the said school enjoying all the privileges of a young teacher. There was money, time and there were mountains to climb every weekends, the freedom that most people of Manila have missed to experience.

The town had a green valley then. There we lay down our back watching the night sky that was sown with stars. We counted the number of the falling stars and in the morning we summed up. We had counted many. Back to the school, we did not do so much appreciation on the beauty of arts that was captivated in the books of humanities. We did not enjoy the reproduction of beauty because right before our very eyes were the original objects of arts which God is the artificer. At the back of the school one can see the far-flung pastures where cows grazed themselves freely. Far away but visible to the eye, dark mountains touched the white sky. From the benches in front of the school one can see a schooner that moved lazily to the north following the thin transparent line of the horizon. Life had meaning but I had to leave for a reason I did not know. Lately I went back to the place and the green valleys there are none. The gold mines have almost consumed everything, even a shadow of the past.

At Ateneo de Zamboanga when I was a graduate student, I saw the book again. This time it was on the shelf among the novels of Steinbeck, Faulkner, Tolstoi, Hemingway and other classic authors. I picked it up and skimmed over the remarks of the previous readers. Again another teacher, a Jesuit priest told me to read it. That I did not. Green valley but the cover was too gray to look at.

Finally the suggestion to read was no longer resisted when I read the article of Justice Cruz. At the time I had already done my graduate studies so no more pressures and I had learned to love all kinds of books despite of their cover, glossy or not. I went over the place where I threw it away to its shelf. In the loitering old magazines, broken armchairs and old typewriters, I saw the book covered with ball weevils but still readable.

I made up my mind to read it after several refusals. I read it and began my journey to the large collieries of Wales. There are good mining people of Wales in the story whose names are difficult to pronounce. Like other novels, there is also bunch of scoundrels, harlots, rogues and robbers. When I finished reading, I found me wrong in refusing to read it earlier.

The nostalgic passing of time, which is also the passing of the green valley, is the force that provokes the writer to muster this novel. Growing up in the large and happy family, the writer is one of the characters of the novel. Like most people of Wales, the writer in the story lives on the pay from the coal-mines where he works. Money was not a problem. The green valley was very kind to its inhabitants.

But the change of time does not exempt anything. Everything has a given time to begin that moves to a given time to end. The one time young whose laughter reechoed over the green valley grew old and whose aspirations the valley can not accommodate left one by one to their aspired place. The happy days at home shall come to end until nothing was left except the memory that there was a green valley.

All of us have a green valley, the time when we were all one in a big compact family bound by affection. But like a grass on the lawn, the valley shall turn gray. Then one day you will wake up and find nothing left of the green valley even a fragment of it. There is a certain end of everything.