by Oliver Balch
Community-wide events are rare, yet special interest groups abound. Take volleyball, which boasts a practice session in Three Cocks every Tuesday. Or T’ai chi classes in Cusop village hall. Choirs, Bible study, mums and tots, Pilates, table tennis, badminton, local history clubs, the University of the Third Age: all are there on tap for whoever wants to go.
Although it’s not advertised, Clyro village hall plays host to a life-drawing class on a Monday and a willow-weaving group on a Thursday, as well as providing a regular meeting space for the Community Council and resident groups such as the Women’s Institute.
My own introduction to the life of the hall came via the Monday-night bowls club, which I went along to at the invitation of my neighbour Ann, a buxom, chatty lady who lives on the estate opposite our cottage. The experience proved fun even though I was the youngest by about thirty years and by far the least expert.
*
With their photographs now taken, the members of the Kilvert Society reassemble and begin to move away from the church in a southerly direction. Ahead, at a distance of about 200 yards, lies the bypass. The passing cars are more audible now that we don’t have the houses on the main street as a buffer.
Three relatively modern detached houses occupy the left-hand side of the road, the last of which has a brace of shiny black solar panels on the roof. Dominating the opposite side of the road, meanwhile, is one of the largest properties in the village.
Built in a Regency style typical of the early nineteenth century, its two-storey bulk has dual roofs; one seemingly flat, the other shaped in a spiky ‘M’. The house is painted completely white, bar the eaves, window frames and masonry blocks along the building’s edge, which are black as creosote. Embedded into the garden wall is a rectangular slate on which the property’s name is etched in a gold calligraphic font: ‘The Old Vicarage’.
In this slightly grandiose abode lived Mr Venables, Kilvert’s boss. Widowed just before Kilvert’s arrival in Clyro, Venables was childless, although the household included five or six servants, so it was far from empty. Kilvert was a regular visitor, especially during the initial years of his curacy when ‘Dinner with Mr V’ and equivalent entries often appear in his diary.
On one memorable occasion, Venables tried to cure his youthful aide of ‘face ache’, a malady of which the diarist frequently complains and which medics now think was probably a severe localised migraine. Whatever Kilvert’s precise ailment, the effects of Mr V’s prescription of four full glasses of port were short-lived at best. All the next day, poor Kilvert suffered a ‘bursting raging splitting sick’ hangover.
The vicar proved a better counsellor and adviser than he did a physician. Kilvert clearly looked up to him as a dutiful son might his father. Mr Venables cut something of a patrician figure. Well intentioned but removed, he appeared to get along with his new appointee well enough. ‘He seems to be a gentleman,’ the vicar wrote to his brother soon after Kilvert started in post. And, although he identifies him as ‘quite young’ (Kilvert was twenty-three at the time) and still awaiting formal ordination, he believed the task of finding a curate was firmly settled.
The letter contains a rare physical description of Clyro’s famous curate. As a writer, Kilvert had an uncanny gift of capturing people in a few well-chosen words. Etty Meredith Brown, with cheeks ‘the dusky bloom and flush of ripe pomegranate’; Mrs Stone of the ‘fierce eyes and teeth’; the ‘thin grey-bearded nutcracker face’ of old Hannah Whitney. It is one of the frustrations of his genre that the fêted diarist never turned the same skill on himself.
Venables’s account is precise, if less poetic. The new curate, he tells his brother, is ‘tall with a black beard and moustache’. Kilvert’s facial hair we know about because of the cameo role it plays in various scenes. Such as the time a bee stung him between the eyes, only then to buzz around in his beard in what Kilvert regretfully assumed was the insect’s ‘dying agony’. Or the occasion when he walked through a snowstorm that caused his whiskers to grow stiff with ice and his beard to freeze to his mackintosh.
Kilvert’s hair colour and physical size, meanwhile, are confirmed by the only known photograph of him. The image shows him seated in a chair looking square on to the camera, a book open in his lap. Dated to around 1875, the portrait shows him to have a good head of hair; thick, neatly cut and with the tiniest hint of a curl. The beard is long but orderly, as though recently trimmed. Although the picture is taken against an empty background, an indication of his height can been gleaned from the way in which his body envelops the chair, the back of which ends well below his shoulder blades.
His precise features are difficult to make out from the surviving photograph; the nose is enviably well proportioned, the eyes slightly hooded beneath heavy brows, the forehead flat. Reading anything into his expression is impossible as it’s set firm for the camera. Even with no knowledge of his diary, however, it’s a face that looks generous and well-tempered.
Three years into his curacy, Mr Venables married a second time. This time his wife was twenty-five years younger than he, so far closer in age to Kilvert than the vicar himself. In as much as the social mores of the time would allow, the curate and the new Mrs Venables became good friends. The vicarage was no longer the lonely widower’s home it once was, however, and Mr Venables’s time for fireside chats was understandably diminished. Indeed, one popular theory has it that Kilvert started keeping a diary as an effort to replace his lost confidant.
As well as his employment, Kilvert had his boss to thank for his introduction into rural ‘society’. As a pleasant, university-educated clergyman, Kilvert may well have found his way into the country set anyway. Having Mr Venables, who wore a second hat as Chairman of Radnorshire Magistrates, verify his gentlemanly credentials certainly helped.
The Revd and Mrs Venables aside, it was possible to number the landed gentry in the immediate area on one hand. In Clyro itself there were the Baskervilles of Clyro Court and the Morrells of Cae Mawr, two houses whose drawing rooms and croquet lawns Kilvert visited frequently. Below the lip of the hill between Clyro and Hay lived the Crichtons of Wye Cliff, while a couple of miles downstream on the banks of the Wye were the Hodgsons of Lower Cabalva.
Further afield were the Thomases from Llanthomas in Llanigon, whose daughter, Daisy, Kilvert was to fall head-over-heels in love with. Her father refused to countenance the match, however, marking one of the deepest sadnesses in Kilvert’s life and the subject of several particularly melancholic sections of the Diary. ‘The sun seemed to have gone out of the sky,’ his pen would confide.
Another family that moved within this inner circle of minor gentry was that of Archdeacon William Bevan, vicar of Hay for over fifty years. Throughout his incumbency, the long-serving cleric lived in the town’s castle, which was the property of his uncle, Sir Joseph Bailey, Baron Glanusk, a wealthy ironmaster.
A mishmash of Norman, Jacobean and Victorian styles, the building was as structurally dubious as it was architecturally unorthodox. By Bevan’s time, the outer walls and keep already lay in ruins. Much of what hadn’t collapsed would later burn down in two major fires. Today, the gutted remains of the embattled castle sit rather forlornly above the town, its gap-toothed turrets and fat-fingered chimney stacks silhouetted against the mountains behind.
Rarely does a week go by without Kilvert receiving an invitation to a dinner party or luncheon at one of the large houses in the district, although summer was when the social calendar really switched into gear. From July through to September, the pages of the Diary skip to the sound of fruit-filled wine cups clinking and silk dresses swirling, to jolly quadrilles and ‘flying fiddle bows’.
*
The lunar-eclipse party at Clifford Priory on a fine day in mid-July perfectly captures the mood of the season’s encounters. To reach the early afternoon event, Kilvert strolls several miles across the fields with friends, enjoying a pleasant conversation about Tennyson and Wordsworth as he walks.
On arriva
l, their host comes out to greet them and ushers them into the drawing room, where Kilvert finds ‘the usual set that one meets and knows so well’; the Dews, Thomases, Webbs, Wyatts, Bridges, Oswalds, Trumpers, ‘& co.’.
The party moves from the house to the lawn, where they have ‘great fun’ playing six simultaneous games of croquet and sending ‘balls flying in all directions’. High tea is served at seven thirty, with more than forty people sitting down to eat. The iced claret cup catches Kilvert’s eye, as do the ‘unlimited fruit’ and enormous strawberries.
Their stomachs full and their heads a little dizzy, the partygoers drifts back to the lawn to admire the eclipse. Some of the young men take turns racing up the slippery terrace bank, while the ladies walk around arm-in-arm like ‘tall white lilies’, their summer dresses looking ghostly pale in the twilit garden.
Two features of the account jump out at me, both small asides amid the jovialities. The first is the date: the party took place on a Tuesday.
In defence of the hosts, eclipses keep their own calendars. Unlike debutante balls or wedding parties, they cannot be booked for an August weekend. For the Crichtons and Thomases of this world, a Tuesday is as any other day; twenty-four hours to be filled with their artistic pursuits and charitable endeavours, with hobbies and house visits. Such was life for the Victorian rentier classes, a people who flaunted their free time and luxuriated in leisure.
Today, it is markedly different. The majority of us still work nine-to-five, five days a week. By necessity, employment and the constrictions of office hours govern our time. Prize them though we may, our social lives come second, a few precious hours snatched at the end of the working day or squeezed in at weekends between domestic chores and kids.
Everyone aspires to a ‘work–life balance’, but few achieve it. Even if you negotiate every Tuesday off, the chances of swanning around at a garden party remain slim because, unlike you, everyone else is still in the office working.
The exceptions, I suppose, are the retired and the unemployed. Around here, the former dominate. They are the early twenty-first century’s pastime generation. While many take a well-deserved rest to write that book, go on that trip, learn that instrument, a good number throw themselves into civic life. Sitting on committees, organising events, attending meetings, jollying people along. In many ways, the baby boomer demographic comprises the dynamos of contemporary community life.
Retirement’s leisured hours lie a long way off for me, if they ever come at all. The days of fat final salary pensions are over for most of us. Certainly for me. Downsizing and digging in, that’s about the sum of my long-term financial planning.
I am not complaining. I had a well-paid job and I chose to give it up. In exchange, I have a working week that is mine to do with as I wish. Freelance journalism pays my bills and, in theory, leaves me time for my other passions. No waiting until retirement.
With this in mind, I decided to embark on a doctoral programme in Latin American studies shortly after we moved back to the UK. My idea was to keep a toe in a part of the world that continues to fascinate me. The course is compelling but time-consuming, and I find myself at my desk more than my free-floating plans first envisioned.
On the upside, my daily commute is minimal. Emma delivered on her promise and had the tool shed in the garden converted for me. As a work space, it has everything I need; a phone line, internet (like most people, I am an exception to my own rule) and an electric heater for when the winter cold creeps under the door.
The furnishings are simple and functional, which suits me just fine. A few bookshelves along the walls. A filing cabinet in the corner. A large wooden table, complete with a view onto our vegetable patch and through to a wild flower garden that blooms into bright oranges and pinks in the summer.
Pleased as I am with how the shed has turned out, it will not help me integrate into community life. Indeed, its galvanised walls are positively prejudicial to such a quest. I cannot follow in Kilvert’s footsteps ensconced in my office chair.
So I set about cutting back my workload. I tell my editors that I’m no longer as available and ask my PhD supervisor if I can go part-time. Neither objects. Nor have the fears that all freelancers face when turning down work been realised: the world hasn’t fallen in. That said, neither has my invitation to a Tuesday afternoon garden party arrived yet. If and when it does, however, I shall be ready.
The second thing that catches my attention in Kilvert’s account of the eclipse party is a remark that he makes about his fellow guests. They are all very pleasant and friendly, he notes, before going on to say that they meet ‘almost like brothers and sisters’.
It’s the word ‘almost’ that brings me up short.
One of six siblings, Kilvert enjoyed a close relationship with his family. As the Diary reveals, he writes to all of them regularly and thinks of them often. Occasionally they visit him or he travels back to his parents’ home in Wiltshire. Most of the time they were absent, however, and it is out of this relational void that a sublimated desire for a surrogate family appears to grow. If true, it seems to me to be an entirely natural urge.
Finding a replacement for familial warmth among the local aristocracy was never realistic. Throughout the Diary, there’s a niggling feeling that Kilvert doesn’t quite belong. He speaks frequently and in affectionate terms about Mary Bevan, for instance, daughter of Archdeacon Bevan, yet her references to him in her own extensive diaries are scant and cursory.
In reality, Kilvert, a vicar’s son without a private income, was destined to be the nearly man: always the guest, not the host; forever the welcome visitor, never quite the full insider. Final proof of his almostness is seen in Mr Thomas’s rejection of the curate’s request to court his daughter Daisy. Kilvert’s prospects and position, he is led to understand, are unbefitting.
In many ways, the position of impecunious clergyman must have been a tricky one to hold in the Victorian period; too poor for the nobility, too removed for the masses, and very possibly too religious for many of the businessmen and professionals who made up the early ranks of the middle classes.
Kilvert’s closest ties appear to be with the laymen who shared his faith, such as Hope Morrell, the young, evangelically minded owner of Cae Mawr, or the clergymen who shared his cloth, like Andrew Pope, the curate in Cusop, who suffered the embarrassment of having himself confirmed by the bishop in a case of mistaken identity that had the whole congregation tittering.
*
Pondering Kilvert’s exact place in society, I follow the tour group as it moves on from the Old Vicarage towards the bypass. Walking in twos, we stretch out in an elongated crocodile.
‘So are you new to the area?’ an elderly lady with grey curler-set hair asks me.
I tell her I am. She thinks it must be very exciting, ‘living where Kilvert once lived and that’. She once thought about moving here herself, in fact. Then – she waves her hand at the busy road and the estate houses opposite – she decided against it.
Up close, the village’s imperfections are hard to hide. The unsightly amalgam of old stone and new brick, of aged wood and uPVC. The sprawl of the garage workshop. The fluorescence of the Texaco garage with its luminous fuel prices. The sheer existence of the busy bypass and its surfeit of signage.
Observed from a short distance, however, Clyro is as picturesque a place as you could hope to find. Pointing down the bypass towards the Cutter’s Pitch end of the village, I tell her about a run I have recently discovered.
Just beyond the most recent of the two developments in ‘new Clyro’, there’s a stile half-hidden in the hedge. Go through there and it brings you out into an open meadow that brightens with buttercups in the spring. Below on the left is the old mill pond where Kilvert would come looking for primroses in the hedge before Easter, and where he and the pub landlord once saw a white-bellied shrew darting and tumbling about in the reeds.
If you were to carry on up along a claggy path alongside a corn field, I
explain, then over some sloping grazing land just above Tirmynach Farm, you’d eventually come out on the crest of a humpbacked hill.
‘Is that Boatside?’ she says, familiar with the surrounding geography from the Diary.
That’s right, I tell her. ‘Used to be a Roman camp up there as well,’ she adds. I’m not sure, I confess, although it would certainly make sense. Perched above the Wye valley flats with a horizon-stretching blaze of colour and countryside running north and south, the soldiers would certainly have had a commanding view.
The Wye is at its nearest to the east, huddled in the dip below two rippled fields of honeyed wheat and brilliant yellow rapeseed, its emerald-green waters rushing fast above the reeds. For sheer handsomeness, Wordsworth’s ‘wanderer through the woods’ is a match for any river in the British Isles.
Burrowed among the trees above its far bank stands Hay, a blue-grey patchwork of tiled rooftops amid a swathe of sylvan green. Poking above the tree canopy is the castle, a wonderfully hotchpotch emblem of the town’s borderland confusions. And then beyond, of course, the barren bouldery bulk of the Black Mountains. Implacably wild. Their beauty hard, unremitting, almost brutish in their bluntness.
Looking back west to Clyro, the view is altogether different. Softer, kinder, lusher. Scattered rooftops breathing trails of chimney smoke. Forested hillsides swooping down together, backs arched in a springboard dive. The church tower cushioned by a tree-softened vale beneath an ocean of sky. Kilvert thought the village at its prettiest from this same spot too, its dingle sides shining with ‘gleams of green’ and the dotted houses washed by a ‘tender blue haze’.
I do my best to describe the scene to the lady, who tells me she can well imagine it. The Kilvert Society’s outings used to involve a fair amount of walking. ‘Not that you’d believe me to look at us now.’ Overhearing, an elderly lady beside her jabs her arm and the two women share a laugh. No, but seriously, she says, in their younger days they would follow Uncle Kilvert up into the hills. ‘Visit his old haunts, we would.’