A Rootless Cosmopolitan: David’s Story 

My name is David Evans, and although I often say I was born and brought up in Wales, the truth of who I am and where I come from is far more tangled than that simple sentence suggests. 

My father’s family are Welsh in the deepest sense of the word. They come from Tonypandy, or Tonn Refail, and have lived there for centuries. I grew up knowing I was related to half the valley. Those roots are old, coal-stained, and steady. But the other half of me was always a mystery. 

My mother, Patricia McGurty, came from Atherton in Greater Manchester and was curiously silent about her past. I assumed she was Irish Catholic, partly because of her name and partly because so many Irish families settled in Manchester after the famine. Her great-great grandfather had arrived there as a starving eight-year-old and gone to work in a brick factory in Salford. That felt like enough of a story. She never spoke about her father, and it was only much later in my life that I learned why. 

My grandfather was a Polish Jew from Borislav. Today Borislav is in Ukraine, but at the time of his birth it belonged to Austria-Hungary, and later to Poland. Most of his family were murdered in the Holocaust. The few who survived scattered, mainly to the United States. Some of them only found me, their Welsh relative, in recent years. Reuniting with them has been joyful and deeply painful at the same time. We speak across oceans, grateful to have found each other at all, and acutely aware that our connection exists only because entire generations before us were erased. 

My mother never truly integrated into Welsh life in the way people expected. She was a teacher, spoke no Welsh, and sounded English in a place where language signals belonging. She lived slightly on the edge of the community. In some ways, I inherited that feeling. I have always been a little different, even in the place where I was born. I could pass easily. I look Welsh enough. But inside, I never felt entirely one thing. Not Welsh enough in Wales, too Welsh in England. A rootless cosmopolitan, as Theresa May once used dismissively, though I have since reclaimed the phrase with affection. 

It all made more sense when I learned who my grandfather really was. He was a travelling jazz musician, creative and itinerant, moving from place to place across Europe. My brother and I both work in the arts. We write; we make music. No one else in the family does. Suddenly there he was, explaining us across a century. 

When I was young, I left Wales out of necessity rather than adventure. After the Miners’ Strike, the valleys were economically devastated. There was no work. Many of us left, just as generations before us had done. I bought a ticket to Barcelona almost on a whim and ended up staying seven years. 

Spain then was not the Spain of today. It was still emerging from decades of dictatorship. It was loud, emotional, chaotic, and completely alien to a punctual, over-polite Welsh lad. One of my clearest memories is sitting in a bar at Christmas, three months into life there, able to say nothing but “Do you have a cigarette?” and “Do you have a light?” before bursting into tears because I could not communicate. I was lonely, lost, and desperate for language. 

Months later, after isolation, grammar books, and cassette tapes, I ran into people I had not seen in a while. I opened my mouth and suddenly I was speaking fluent Spanish and Catalan. Their jaws dropped. Mine nearly did too. Language returned like oxygen. I think that is why I stayed so long. Speaking other languages unlocked parts of myself I did not know existed. 

Living abroad taught me how deeply culture shapes communication. Spanish conversations are loud, direct, and unapologetic. To get a waiter’s attention, you shout for coffee. The first time I tried it, I nearly died of embarrassment. In Wales, I apologise when someone else bumps into me. In Barcelona, people asked me why I was saying sorry at all. 

These differences matter. I have seen how small cultural misunderstandings around tone, timekeeping, or queuing can escalate. It later made me more empathetic in my work with refugees. Learning vocabulary is not enough. You have to learn the personality of a language. 

Spain taught me many things. What I missed most about home, surprisingly, was punctuality. Not food. Spain wins that easily. But the comfort of knowing that nine o’clock really means nine. 

I have lived in Barcelona, Berlin, the United States, and Bosnia. Yet Wales always pulls me back. I think I was drawn to places where no one had a ready-made story about who I was supposed to be. There is freedom in being culturally fluid. 

The older I get, the more I see migration as the spine of my family. Economic migration brought my father’s ancestors to the coal valleys. Persecution forced my grandfather from Poland. My nieces in Dublin will grow up Welsh, Cockney, and Irish. Nothing stands still. Identities shift. 

That is why I wish people understood something simple. There is no Wales without migration. Cardiff would not exist without it. The coalfields would not. Scratch almost any so-called pure Welsh identity and you will find a story like mine. An Irish labourer. A Polish musician. A grandmother from somewhere else entirely. 

After a recent brush with cancer, I have been thinking more about what comes next. I want to write honestly about these migrations and collisions of history that shaped me. I want to travel to Borislav with my brother and lay stones on the mass graves of our relatives. I want to see more of my family in Dublin. I want to keep piecing together the mosaic. 

Because one small decision, a child sent away during famine, a musician stepping off a boat with a drum kit, ripples across generations. And here I am, decades later, sitting in Wales, talking about belonging and identity. 

Maybe that is my truest identity. A curious, ethnically tangled wanderer who belongs everywhere and nowhere at once. 

A rootless cosmopolitan. 

And I’m at peace with that.