by Oliver Balch
Read today, the entries remain fresh and compelling, skipping as they do between anecdote and history, reflection and fact. A Romantic man in a Romantic age, Kilvert would take himself off on long all-day walks into the hills, returning in rhapsodic mood to share with his diary the sound of the year’s first yaffingale ‘laughing in the dingle’ or the sight of fawn-coloured turkeys ‘mourning in the stubbles’.
Emma had bought me an abridged copy of the Diary shortly after moving to the area. It covers the years 1870 to Kilvert’s premature death in 1879. In sympathy with its contents, the cover of my edition carries the sun-dappled image of a rustic church. Beneath the branches of an ancient chestnut is a wooden lychgate, which gives way to open fields beyond. A brown heifer stands alone, grazing. In the foreground, a mother with three girls, all in Victorian frocks, sit around a picnic basket in the long grass of the graveyard.
I devoured the Diary greedily, particularly the Clyro sections. Kilvert’s descriptions of the landscape speak forcefully across the centuries, but it’s his depiction of village life that totally absorbed and entranced me. The Clyro women who ‘stride about the village like storks’. The industrious blacksmith who chinks away at his forge night and day. The ‘harvest man’ absented by grog. The mole-catcher drunk on folklore.
Equipped with a university education and a common touch, the affable curate was uniquely positioned. Every layer of society lay open to him, and he submerged himself in each. One minute he’s sitting in a pauper’s hovel, the next he’s playing battledore and shuttlecock at Clyro Court. The result is a pen portrait of remarkable breadth and intimacy.
Eccentric and ordinary, rich and poor, old and young, characters of all colours spill from the page. Real people. People with future hopes and worldly worries. People who mourn and sob as readily as they sing and feast. People, above all, who inhabit a vital, interwoven, living community. Not a perfect one by any means. Poverty and privilege were too common. But a living community without doubt. And one not at all dissimilar to the one I had envisioned for ourselves.
In preparation for this evening’s debate, I have bookmarked a passage that I hope will offer a flavour of the above. Intentionally, I have steered clear from overt ‘community’ events, of which there are many. Such as Easter Sunday, say, when children in new clothes ‘bright as butterflies’ filled the churchyard, or Clyro Feast Ball, when Kilvert sat in his lodgings listening to the ‘scraping and squealing of the fiddle’ and the ‘heavy tramp’ of dancers’ feet.
Instead, I have selected a passage from an unexceptional Thursday in the village. The morning sun had decided to flash a rare springtime smile, but otherwise the entry captures nothing out of the ordinary. It is as typical a day about the parish as I could hope to find. I read it in conversational style, in the way I imagine Kilvert would have written it.
… A heavenly day, lovely and warm, real spring. People busy in their gardens planting and sowing. Everyone rejoicing in the unclouded splendid weather, and congratulating each other on it in their greetings on the road. The roads lively with market women riding to Hay. A woman on a cream coloured horse with black mane and tail riding past the school and alternately in sunshine and the shadow of the Castle clump …
By ‘clump’, Kilvert meant ‘tump’, which I have no time to explain since the moderator is keeping strictly to the clock. Still, I say most of what I want to say, which cheers me. Less encouraging is the look of puzzlement on some of the faces in the audience. Their sympathies definitely fall more with the other panellists, whose claims that countryside dwellers are being ‘left behind’ and that our youngsters are being denied opportunities hit home with enviable effect.
Legitimate though their positions are, their efforts to contrast the lot of the countryside by portraying city-living as some sort of wired-up, interconnected nirvana strike me as somewhat exaggerated. I do my best to burst this bubble. Has anyone read Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone? Are they aware of the staggering levels of depression and loneliness in the atomised cities of today? Do they really believe the adverts for The Gap that show all those young hipsters hanging out in happy interracial harmony? A few heads nod. One or two grimace. In general, the audience remains unmoved. Their minds are set.
On the drive back, I play over how it went. As I pull into the driveway, a wave of gut-wrenching doubt pours over me. I sit in the car for a moment, gripping the steering wheel tight. Am I fooling myself? This ‘knit’ that Kilvert experiences so tangibly and that holds such appeal for me, is it still obtainable in twenty-first-century Britain? Or is it an anachronistic fantasy?
Calming myself, I remove the key from the ignition and step out. As I walk towards the house, it occurs to me that I have forgotten something. I turn back, unlock the door and reach over to the passenger seat.
Retrieving my copy of Kilvert’s Diary, I clasp it close and head inside.
PART I
Locals
1
The Clyro Tour
In the afternoon Mrs. Bevan, Mary and I drove to Clyro. As we passed along the old familiar road that I have journeyed over so many times a thousand memories swept over me. Every foot of Clyro ground is classical and sacred and has its story.
Kilvert’s Diary, 23 March 1874
The village tour leaves from the steps of the Baskerville Arms pub.
We number about twenty in total, an even split between women and men. Most of the women are wearing dark glasses against the glare of the Saturday afternoon sun. The men are dressed uniformly in plain, long-sleeved cotton shirts, staples of their working wardrobes now redeployed for retirement. They are white-haired and stiff-gaited.
But they are all smiling. For the members of the Kilvert Society are a contented, amicable bunch. And, with the curate’s former stomping ground beneath their feet and a steel blue sky above, today is a happy day.
Of the nine years covered in Kilvert’s Diary, only the first two and a half encompass the young curate’s time in Clyro. Yet it is during these years that we find him at his happiest and most effusive. A zesty, enthusiastic tone courses through his earliest entries.
The images he paints carry a palpable vividness. The clamour of geese, twinkling leaves, old-fashioned September fog, keepers’ cottages, orchard banks, freshly dug red potatoes, crimson ball sunsets, melting hoar frost, trees thickening with bursting buds, dazzling snow, cider presses, purple grasses billowing like the sea.
The scenes feel very different from the output of a disciplined diarist who sits down at the end of the day to set down with diligence what’s gone before. They are too bright and bubbling for that, too sprinkled with the present.
It’s as though he has dashed to his desk direct from sleep, pen working furiously, grasping at the lucid fragments of a dream as they swirl around his head before the dawn light swoops in and snatches them away.
Kilvert’s world-view leans undeniably towards the rosetinted and poetic. Even accounting for his florid style, the picture he paints of Clyro is enticingly dreamy. A rural idyll tucked away on the Welsh borders, protected by the mountains and cushioned from the present, a private garden of calm in tumultuous times. As a reader, it is difficult to resist the enchantment of it all.
The tour group moves off in a north-easterly direction along the sinuous main street that divides the centre of the village.
Behind us the square stone tower of St Michael and All Angels rises above the pub roof, the bronze of its cockerel weather vane transformed into dazzling gilded foil by the sun. A bank of low-ceilinged cottages huddles around the churchyard’s outer wall. Scattered among them is a collection of newer brick buildings, which grow in number as the village spreads outward.
Two primary features define the topography of Clyro. The first is the precipitous hill at its back, which rises with a slag heap’s sudden steepness directly behind the church. The hill is lush and green and populated by grazing sheep. Along its western flanks, a brook cuts down through Pen-y-lan Wood before coursing wilfully thr
ough an array of villagers’ gardens.
Halfway up the pitch stands a pair of wizened oak trees, their upper sections bent over in a courteous, wind-blown bow. At either end of the village, two narrow country roads wind off into the hills; one to Cold Blow and the heart of Wales, the other to Newchurch and the fertile soils of Herefordshire.
The village’s second defining detail is its bypass. Built in the late 1950s to divert traffic from the centre of Clyro, the now busy extension road cuts a straight path along the village’s eastern edge. In Kilvert’s day, open fields would have stretched out beyond it all the way down to the River Wye and the bridge into Hay.
Shortly after the bypass’s arrival, an enterprising local farmer saw the opportunity to sell off some of his land for development and now two small housing estates occupy the far side of the road. The effect has been to divide the village between old and new.
Pottery Cottage finds itself on the new side despite being one of Clyro’s oldest properties, an anomaly of uneven stone and timber amid an abundance of right-angles and red brickwork.
Across the bifurcating bypass, back in the heart of the village, the main street is quiet enough for us to ignore the pavement and stroll along the tarmac road. An archivist from Llandrindod Wells, a sprightly man with rolled-up sleeves and a knapsack on his shoulder, is leading the way.
He stops briefly by the pub car park and points out where the blacksmith’s workshop would once have been. The smithy’s fire and anvil are long gone, replaced by a square of asphalt and a pub garden with picnic benches and a child’s slide.
I fall into step with a gentleman called John, a retired English teacher who lives in Bristol. Bespectacled and pale-faced, he sports a wispy white goatee beard and the whiff of academia. To quote the society’s current chairman, John is the group’s ‘star turn’.
We had met briefly at the annual general meeting several months beforehand. The event was held in the timber-framed chambers of the Radnorshire Arms hotel in nearby Presteigne, a historic market town further up the border.
John had delivered the keynote lecture, a lengthy exposition of Kilvert’s interest in mineralogy. It went down a storm with his fellow Kilvertians. He tells me he is currently putting together a paper about the diarist’s religious beliefs, and touches the side of his nose. He is, I should know, a ‘bit of a controversialist’.
The main body of the group has drifted off ahead. To the left of us is a row of bungalows, single-storey toadstools at the foot of the towering grassy bank. To the right is a short modern terrace and beyond it a collection of new three- and four-bedroom homes built where an orchard once stood. They are all inhabited by newcomers to the village. At the rear of their neat fenced-in gardens runs the busy bypass.
After about 400 yards, the village proper runs out, splitting between the hilly back road to Newchurch and the main road to Hereford. A clutch of brave cottages cling to the slanting sides of the former, which is known locally as Thomas the Cutter’s Pitch, or simply Cutter’s Pitch. The name is a throwback to a Mr Thomas, who used to live at the bottom of the hill and who earned a living as a castrator of rams and bulls.
A little way up the steep slope, the road is joined on the left by a threadbare tarmac track that wiggles back above the village and then away into the distance along the contour of the hill. The lane leads up to the ancient farmhouse of Penlan, which sits on the ridge line almost directly above the church. A whitewashed aerie, it is one of Clyro’s most striking buildings.
Our friends Mary and Chris Bird live there now. They have two boys, similar in age to Seth and Bo. Mary grew up in the house, which was a working farm for generations until her father retired and passed it on to his son. He then sold it to Mary, who, like many young people born and brought up in the area, had moved away in her twenties. She worked as a nurse on film sets before returning home to start a family. Chris is a Londoner and a lighting technician for television and films. They met on location.
From Penlan’s eagle vantage point, Pottery Cottage seems squashed and flat, an oblong waymarker dug into the ground at the exit to the village. Beyond, the rumpled bedspread of the Wye valley expands in sandstone lumps and bumps before ceding to the pretty pillowed foothills of the Black Mountains and their arching headboard peaks behind.
Kilvert often admired the view from here too. Once, while visiting ‘old Meredith’ in Bird’s Nest Cottage a little up the way, he found himself taken back by the ‘sublime spectacle’ of a white and golden cloud on the far horizon, before checking himself and realising that the cloud was actually the ‘long white rampart’ of the mountains, their slopes bathed in snow and lit up by the setting sun. The snowfall so stilled the countryside that the church bells in Hay could be heard from across the valley.
I like looking up to Penlan almost as much as down from it. The farmhouse’s square front is so intensely white and the grass around it so strikingly green that it stands out with the stark intensity of a lighthouse on a cliff. Kilvert recalls waking up and admiring how the sun’s early rays ‘struck red’ against its whitewashed walls.
At the bottom of the pitch stands another white, square building. This used to be the New Inn, a notorious drinking spot until its licence was revoked in October 1871. Between the Baskerville Arms (which Kilvert insisted on calling by its former name, the Swan) and the New Inn, Clyro was not without its night-time rowdiness. More than once, he observed a parishioner the morning after with a cut lip or swollen eye.
The tour group stands across the street from the former New Inn in an untidy semicircle as the archivist recounts a story about the gipsy Henry Warnell, who once ran cursing and blaspheming down this same stretch of road. A poacher from up on Clyro Hill, Warnell had recently been jailed for six weeks’ hard labour after kicking the New Inn’s publican in what Kilvert prudishly describes as ‘the bad place’. The fast-moving innkeeper had moved just in time to save his corduroy trousers from being torn.
Today, the New Inn is a private home. The Baskerville Arms remains open for business, although it’s far from the drinkers’ pub it once was. A steady flow of ploughman’s lunches and bed-and-breakfast guests makes up most of its trade nowadays, not barrels of beer or whisky shots. To drum home the point, the publican often calls time at nine o’clock.
*
The group turns on its collective heel and makes its way slowly back to its starting point.
There is much chattering. To my right, a gentleman in a light flannel blazer remarks on the fine weather. ‘Uncle Francis smiling down,’ a man with a West Country drawl replies with a chuckle.
Behind me, a pair of elderly ladies are trying to recall the parish to which Kilvert was assigned before Bredwardine. Despite their best efforts, the name escapes them. One declares herself to be having a ‘senior moment’. The other, who says she has always had a terrible memory, gets as far as ‘St Something’. John cannot restrain himself. ‘St Harmon,’ he tells them, his tone paternal as though instructing a young child. Their faces shine with glee. ‘Of course, of course.’ John’s stature as the society’s Kilvert expert edges up a notch.
Soon we are back at the Baskerville Arms. Our attentions are directed not to the pub but to an austere, awkward-looking three-storey building across the street. Set back behind low metal railings with looping paper-clip tops and a narrow front garden, Ashbrook House stands withdrawn behind a rash of ivy stubble. Four stone steps curve up towards a gunpowder grey door. The property is empty.
We wander through the gate and poke around. To the right of the house, beside a little lane, runs Clyro Brook. It gushes noisily in joyous infant bounds. On the other side is a lawned garden with thick hedges that provide privacy but steal the light. The building’s most remarkable feature is set within the north wall, a huge Gothic window once thought to have graced the village church.
I’m presuming we have permission to be snooping on private property, but it’s possible we may not. A wealthy London couple own it, according to Ted, an accou
ntant from Buckinghamshire who retired to Clyro about a decade ago. He references a dispute that upset the neighbours. It involved a rampant Russian vine, apparently.
The editor of the society’s journal chips in. He too has found them awkward. The Interiors section of The Sunday Times recently ran a feature on the house and he is hoping to republish some of the photos from the shoot. Gaining permission to use the images is proving devilishly difficult, however. The society’s members tut censoriously.
Our trespassing, if that’s what it is, has its reason, for this is where Kilvert lodged during his seven-year sojourn in Clyro. The house was called Ty Dulas back then, John explains to me. Kilvert had the two corner rooms on the north-west angle.
He sketches out the household at the time: Mrs Arabella Chaloner, the widowed landlady; her invalid daughter Elizabeth; Catherine Wiles, a young live-in maid; and Arthur Clark, a fellow lodger who worked at a solicitor’s firm in Hay and who vexed Kilvert with the smell of his tobacco smoke. There was also a house cat called Toby.
Kilvert doesn’t refer to the lodging house very often. When he does, it’s invariably from the perspective of looking out, rather than in. The hooting of the owls ‘across the dingles’. The merry tunes of the volunteer band as they practised. The nattering of housewives on their way back from the market. Kilvert would not have taken well to the modern introduction of soundproof windows.
Life inside Ty Dulas isn’t entirely shrouded in darkness. Despite the size of the house, every indication is that the home was a modest one. Insulation was minimal, a layer of single brick behind the grey stone exterior. Bare floorboards ran through most of the rooms, a mix of oak and deal. The house lacked a central meeting place and the bachelor clergyman appears to have taken his meals alone.
In comparison with the living conditions of many of his parishioners, Kilvert had it good in Ty Dulas. Downstairs there were two lodgers’ sitting rooms, the scene of his diary-writing and thus a hallowed space for the society.