by Oliver Balch
The Steels were mostly medical folk. It was Owain Steel, my mother’s grandfather, who made the big move north from Monmouthshire to Radnorshire. He landed a job as a doctor shortly after the Great War. The post was based in the remote but beautiful Ithon valley. My brother carries his name, although my parents opted for the anglicised version, Owen. He never uses it nowadays, preferring his second name, Robert, or his childhood nickname, Bo.
It is to Owain’s son that I owe my lifelong connection to Pen Ithon. As a young officer in the Royal Artillery regiment, Eustace Steel met and married an elegant young visitor to the Haig estate. Her name was Patience Bell, known to everyone (for reasons lost in time) as Perd. She was from a coal-owning family in Northumberland. Today, the couple lie buried together in an overgrown patch at the back of Llananno churchyard. They abut the Ithon’s bank, listening to the gossip of the river as its gabbling waters rush by. Or so I like to think.
It would be too much to say that my grandparents called me back. Yet knowing that their remains lie on the Silurian rock of Radnorshire eased our transition from Buenos Aires to the Welsh countryside. It robbed the idea of its randomness. In some small way, too, it felt as though I was reconnecting, retreading old ground. For me, this was enough.
Having quickly assimilated the prospect of Powys, Emma made the idea her own. She surfed all the relevant property websites and quickly identified three possible houses. Two were holiday lets deep into mid-Wales. Another was an old worker’s cottage in a village called Clyro, located on the easternmost fringes of Radnorshire, a mile outside the market town of Hay-on-Wye.
We spoke to my parents. They were heading down to Pen Ithon the following month and agreed to visit the three potential properties on our behalf. Their verdict was less than positive. The holiday lets were too small and too remote, they said. Clyro they thought a better option. The village had a small primary school, a shop, a pub, a community hall. The downside was the house. Four hundred years old, it was showing its age. The roof buckled and the rooms smelled of damp. Needed a lot of work, my dad reckoned.
An appealing factor of the Clyro cottage was its proximity to Hay-on-Wye, or simply ‘Hay’, as all the locals call it. With around 1,800 residents, this miniature market town is more than twice the size of Clyro. Even so, it feels more like a township than a town. A rural hub, perhaps.
Hay’s size may be small but its ambitions are not. Today, this small border settlement enjoys an uncontested reputation as the nation’s ‘Town of Books’. The title owes its origins to Hay’s penchant for second-hand bookshops, which first began springing up in the mid-1960s and which today number more than two dozen.
In the late 1980s, Hay embarked on its very own book festival. Over the decades, it has grown into an annual literary love-in. Every town seems to have a book festival these days, but Hay’s ten-day jamboree stands out as one of the country’s largest and most iconic. With each passing year, the town’s bookish status becomes that bit more cemented.
Emma and I had been to Hay once before. As with many other visitors, it was the festival that drew us. We had only just started dating and were too wrapped up in one another to pay much attention to our surroundings. The vague recollections I had of the town were all broadly positive: bright sunshine, stripy deckchairs, fresh-cut grass, new books, second-hand books, young novelists, old novelists, first love.
Having Hay on the doorstep appealed especially to Emma. She needs the movement and energy that busy conurbations bring. In Radnorshire, such opportunities are slim. Even by Welsh standards, the now defunct county is judged ‘out-of-time’, to quote the biographer and academic Peter Conradi. As with frontier states the world over, it suffers from being neither in nor out, neither one thing nor another. ‘[It’s] ignored or forgotten by the English as too remote, and by the Welsh as too English,’ Conradi writes. Its demographics seem to back this up: at 26,000 people, its population is a mere one per cent that of Greater Manchester, despite both covering an equal area.
Given our respective tugs towards the rural and the urban, Clyro struck us as a rare middle ground. Removed, but not too removed. One foot in the countryside, one in a town (of sorts).
A steady flow of new arrivals has found its way here over the centuries. First came the Marcher lords, sent by William the Conqueror to quell the troublesome Welsh. Then the hill farmers and the drovers, the merchants and the landed gentry, the artists and the hippies. Folk ‘from off’, as the vernacular has it. If the area remains true to its past, we wouldn’t be the only new guys in the village.
A few background enquiries reinforced our expectations. Although Hay’s name derives from haye, the Norman word for ‘enclosure’, it sounded like the kind of place that would be open to fresh faces. In the months before we moved, Emma’s hesitations about rural life were further alleviated by her close reading of Life in Hay, a well-informed blog by an idiosyncratic local bookseller. The site includes a profile picture of the author in historical re-enactment garb as well as links to websites such as Hay Feminists, Brilley Buddhist Retreat and Cosy under Canvas.
Aside from the desirability of Hay and Clyro, Emma liked the house, which she thought quirky and brimming with potential. It once belonged to Adaš Dworski, a Croatian ceramicist of Polish descent, a memory kept alive in the first line of its address: Pottery Cottage. Some of the potter’s glazes still adorn the exterior wall; a twinkling star, a colourful jester, a crescent moon.
The house sits beside the Hay road amid a cluster of mostly modern houses on the eastern fringe of the village. Immediately opposite is a heavily wooded hillock, home hundreds of years ago to a defensive fort. Locals, we’d later learn, refer to it as the ‘castle tump’, or simply, ‘the tump’. Today it’s overflowing with brambles and nettles and trees of all types; oak, ash, sycamore, yew, hazel, rowan, alder, beech, field maple. From the back garden of the cottage, it looks as though a jungle is sprouting through the roof.
Despite the work it would require, Emma’s mind was set. As part of the renovations, she reckoned we could make an office for me out of the garden shed. I was sold and we started packing.
*
Several months after we move, I receive an invitation to contribute to an evening discussion at The Globe in Hay. A former Congregational church on Newport Street, the venue is now reinvented as a popular spot for live music and cultural events.
The topic for debate centres on the impact of digital communications technologies on rural communities. Are they welcome? Do we need more or less of them? On the platform with me is the local Welsh Assembly member, an academic in urban studies from Cardiff University and a film-maker for a media firm specialising in rural issues.
We meet backstage in a temporary yurt, where a young assistant fusses over our clip-on microphones and briefs us on the format. As he speaks, we surreptitiously weigh one another up. I feel distinctly ill-equipped. Removing myself from my fellow panellists, I find a seat to the side and go through my notes. They are sketchy but I hope their underlying argument is sound.
The main thrust links to the idea of belonging and place, two themes of abiding interest to me. The American novelist John Updike captures my thinking best. I’d been listening to the radio before leaving Argentina when a clip came on from an interview Updike had given in 1970. He was discussing the arrival of his second child and his subsequent decision to leave New York, the advantages of the Big Apple ‘counterbalanced’ by his new responsibilities. So the couple sold up and moved to Ipswich, a small coastal town in upstate Massachusetts.
The scenario felt familiar to me. You leave college, go to the big city, get a job, live it up, fall in love, make a home, tell yourself, ‘This is it, this is us.’ Then kids arrive. Your job gets tougher. And slowly everything begins to change. The nights out become more infrequent, your friends begin to spread out, your world begins to shrink. Somehow, time shortens; your days are spent chasing your tail, bemused, fraught.
If your income allows it, then you can sai
l through. You have a nice house in a safe neighbourhood with good schools nearby. For you, city living remains good. If not, if every spare penny you earn is going on childcare and the only green space you have is littered with dog mess, then it’s demonstrably worse. Soon you’re thinking it’s so much worse that anywhere might be better. The burbs. Upstate Massachusetts. Even the countryside.
Surprisingly to me, Updike didn’t lament leaving the big city behind. The throb of the streets, the energy of the crowds, the thrill of the new: their appeal seemed to weaken as this leading light of American twentieth-century intellectualism stumbled on something else. A replacement, just as rich and seductive, yet almost unknown to urban life.
He had found a place where people knew each other, he explained in the interview. Not just to share a ‘hello’ at the bus stop or a smile at the newsagent’s. People who really knew each other. Knew one another’s name and the names of their dogs. Knew where one another lived, where they took coffee, what they did at weekends.
This information came to them not because they spied on one another or because they were busybodies. They knew it because the residents of Ipswich, MA, numbered in their hundreds rather than their tens of thousands. Their paths crossed more often. And when they did, they’d stop and share the time of day, asking about friends or Aunt Maud’s operation.
A few of Updike’s phrases had struck a particular chord with me and I’d scribbled them down. Now, transposed into my notebook, I reread them as I sit in the yurt. The first quote runs:
It’s a kind of community really in what I take to be the classic sense. In that if your child has a toothache on the weekend, you can call up the dentist you personally know. There’s that kind of knit.
This idea of ‘knit’. It resonated with me powerfully. I loved Argentina, loved it passionately, but I was never fully part of it, and it dawned on me that I probably never would be. It was the little things that made me realise. The subtleties of topical jokes that I didn’t quite catch, the children’s TV shows I had never watched, the football chants I could never remember. These kept us on the margins. Embraced, but never quite integrated.
This didn’t bother me especially. I accepted it as inevitable. What’s more, I found it immensely liberating. The ties that bound us back home – the cultural mores, the family expectations, the relational obligations, the social pressures – undid themselves. At the same time, we weren’t beholden to their equivalents in Argentina. We could make our own rules, chart our own path. If we wanted to take the kids out to dinner with us at midnight, we could. No one would scowl. For seven sweet years we were footloose, unencumbered, floating free.
The more my mind turned to the prospect of returning, the greater the appeal of Updike’s picture became. I liked the idea of finding a place where I could truly belong. It would be good to be on the inside for once, to be a thread or stitch in the social fabric. I wanted to live somewhere I could walk down the street and know the grocer and the postman and the café owner. If it turned out to be claustrophobic or insular, as well it could, then we could always move on.
Updike’s observation didn’t end there. In the interview, he went on to elaborate on the benefits of this ‘knitted’ community that he had stumbled upon beside the sea. As the next quote in my notebook read:
And also you’re exposed to people that aren’t in your game. In the city I think there’s this temptation to see only people who are very likeminded. In a sense for a writer, it’s good to live between a widow and a plumber, and in a sense love your neighbour and know your neighbour in the old, old sense.
The five words, ‘people who are very likeminded’, are underlined in red. It is this phrase that had stopped me short when I first heard the radio clip. Within it is a subtle yet clearly discernible criticism. But of what? Surely building a friendship group around people you like and who have the same broad outlook on life is the most natural thing in the world?
To a certain extent it summed up our social circle in Buenos Aires. We had what might be called a ‘crowd’, a gang of friends with whom we got on well and who got on well with us. We had a lot in common; similar ages, similar education, similar politics, similar incomes, similar worldviews. All of us worked, although none of us in conventional office jobs.
We lived in the city’s less salubrious, more edgy neighbourhoods, making sure to shop in the corner store where everyone else shopped, to drink our café con leche in the pavement cafés where they drank, to ride the same cramped and creaking buses that our neighbours rode.
More important than where we lived or what we did, we desired to integrate. We wanted to speak the language, imbibe the culture, make friends. In truth, the latter is no great trial in Argentina, as gregarious and generous-spirited a nation as you can hope to find, a country of much cheek-kissing and unexpected kindnesses where it’s never difficult to fill the house for an asado or bag a weekend invite.
Even so, without family links or cultural ties, I couldn’t escape the feeling that we never quite fitted. Alongside thoughts of moving home, I became increasingly beguiled by the notion of living in a genuinely enmeshed community. The Spanish have a word for this kind of social interweaving, convivencia, which literally means ‘together-living’. The emphasis in Spanish is on the ‘con’, the together part.
It suggests a mindset as much as a place; an attitude of being that opens people up to mixing together, talking together, drinking together, gossiping together – fighting together, even. Whatever the activity, the point is that they do it together. It’s this sense of togetherness – of life being a social exercise rather than a private pursuit – that so captures my imagination.
The problem comes when this togetherness is forged through our own selection and bound by our own terms. A community that rests on mutual similarity and mutual likeability is certainly a good foundation for a life well lived, but maybe, just maybe, it falls short of the best.
For the gain of shared understanding is offset by the loss of diversity and difference. Conversations in such milieus serve to affirm existing beliefs rather than challenge them. Surprises are thus fewer and opportunities for learning more scarce. It is the friendship equivalent of always reading op-eds from the same newspaper; a means of entrenching the engrained, not opening up to the new.
I don’t doubt that ‘together-living’ in its truest sense is no easy task. If it were, the burgeoning worlds of gated communities and immigrant ghettoes would not exist. Such phenomena are far from new, of course. Today’s retirement complexes and bijoux beach communities serve the same purpose as the monasteries and garrison towns of antiquity. They create protective fences, establish rules of entry and design codes of common behaviour. In doing so, they help us stay safe and keep us from feeling threatened.
Yet to live in such a place is to inhabit a demographic desert where everything is homogenous, monocultural, the same. We had moved to Argentina in part to seek out an alternative. Could we try to do the same now we were moving back? When Updike spoke of rubbing shoulders with plumbers and widows, he was thinking primarily in his capacity as a writer. But surely the knock-on benefits go beyond art. Could they not flow into the living of our everyday lives as well?
I was ready to bet they could. Or at least that they might.
Of all the factors that made me think the Welsh Marches might work for us, this idea of convivencia was the most compelling. It was not an especially good time to return to Britain: the economy was flatlining, the government’s deficit cuts were at full tilt, the weather was as bad as ever.
The possibility of finding our own Ipswich, MA, kept me upbeat and excited. The little we had gleaned about Clyro and the surrounding area gave me encouragement. The population was small enough to be familiar, but large enough to harbour all sorts. The area was remote, although not cut off. The culture we could only guess at, but we hoped it would be open and friendly.
This hope also forms the backbone of my argument for the evening event. The community ex
perience I have come in search of depends on real-life interactions. People have to be out and about, calling in on one another, shopping in the local stores, filling the same spaces, attending the same functions.
An internet-based society would mean the end of all that, I tell the audience. Everyone would stay at home and start shopping online. Kids would disappear into their rooms to game with their Minecraft buddies in Hanoi or Snapchat their pals in Hamburg, while parents would be glued to Netflix or Skyping far-flung family. People would be on their phones constantly. Scrolling, Tweeting, messaging, WhatsApping, searching, crushing candy. Anything but talking face to face, anything but living cheek by jowl.
I fully expected this to land me in the minority. Faster internet connections will revitalise small businesses locally, the other panellists were bound to say. Inner Mongolia has faster dial-up speed than the Marches. Becoming properly wired-up would enable us to engage the world, to stretch our horizons, to overcome the limitations of rural life. And they would be right, of course, I admit, getting my retaliation in first.
But at what cost to society? The whole social media circus perpetuates the likemindedness point that Updike disliked about cities. Only with Facebook, Twitter and so forth, the effect is amplified exponentially. If someone posts something we disagree with, we defriend them. If a Twitter feed starts annoying us, we mute it. The digital ‘echo chamber’, the Financial Times’s Gillian Tett calls it. The result is the virtual gathering around us of friends and followers whose views we approve of, whose jokes we laugh at, whose lives we recognise. People, basically, who are just like us.
In case a mauling awaits me, I’ve brought back-up. The Reverend Francis Kilvert or, more specifically, his diary.
Published as the nation was on the verge of war, the simple Arcadia evoked within was lapped up by British readers. Kilvert’s Diary quickly became a minor classic in the flowery canon of Victorian pastoralism.