Under the Tump

by Oliver Balch

  I remark on Kilvert’s pastoral work around Clyro. ‘Villaging’ he called the practice. The 1871 census shows 130 families living in the parish, putting the total population at over 800. It amounts to almost the same today. The young curate would aim to get round every household once or twice a month, making for an impressive workload.

  ‘Villaging in the morning,’ he sometimes writes in his diary. Or elsewhere, ‘Been villaging all day.’ Sometimes he provides a fuller itinerary, such as this entry for late January in 1872:

  Visited Edward Evans, old Price the paralysed keeper, Mrs. Lacy, Catherine Ferris, James Smith, and Mrs. Price of the Swan who showed me preserved in a box part of one of Price’s whiskers pulled out by the Clyro women in the late row at the Swan.

  It’s Kilvert’s memorable first-hand accounts of these visits that explain much of the Diary’s enduring appeal. Flesh-and-blood characters step off the pages, every one of them deftly described, all of them bristling with life.

  Such as ‘old Witcombe’, the deaf, helpless and nearly blind ninety-year-old, who leaned on the friendly curate and fondled his hand, ‘talking earnestly but incoherently and repeating himself almost every moment’.

  Even those at life’s end gain vibrancy under Kilvert’s pen. Edward Evans with his ‘ceaseless moaning’ is one such luckless character. Catching him at death’s door, the curate’s eye is drawn to the ‘gaunt ghastly’ cat waiting at the end of his bed as though ready to ‘begin upon him’ the moment he breathes his last. Another bedside visitation was to the dying William Meredith, who lived beside the tump and whose eyes ‘rolled … wildly in the darkness’ as a fierce storm shook his old house and roared in the roof.

  Of the dozens of villagers mentioned by name in the Diary, two stand out in Kilvert’s affections. Both are elderly, hospitable and God-fearing. John Morgan, an octogenarian soldier who saw action under Wellington in the Peninsular War, is one of the few residents ever to have left the village. Kilvert would often make his way up to the veteran’s modest cottage at Cwmbythog to listen to his stories, about whispered conversations with night sentries in France or scaring off marauding wolves with the flash of musket powder in Spain.

  Hannah Whitney, she of the nutcracker face, was his other favourite. She lived alongside the stream by Ashbrook House, the water rushing in the gutter at her door. On sunny afternoons, she’d often sit on her front step, ‘cloaked and with her rusty black bonnet fiercely cocked and pointed, crown uppermost’, doing her knitting or just watching the world go by.

  Even older than Mr Morgan, this elderly parishioner would turn her ‘withered grey face’ towards the attentive curate and, with shining eyes, share ‘her reminiscences and tales of the dear old times, the simple kindly primitive times “in the Bryngwyn” nearly ninety years ago’.

  It’s easy to picture Kilvert seated at her side, listening intently as she tells of the ghosts that once haunted ‘sheep cot pool’ just beneath Cold Blow or the fairies who were once said to dance at night to ‘sweet fiddles’ at Rhosgoch Mill.

  Quaint and colourful as many of the Diary’s entries are, they are not without a hard edge. Beyond the gilded drawing rooms of the gentry, day-to-day life for most of Kilvert’s parishioners was one of abject poverty. Consider old Laver. ‘Shaggy and grey like a wild beast’, Kilvert struggled to say which was the more unkempt: the man himself, who was ‘swarming with lice’, or the ‘filthy den’ he called home. The dying Edward Evans was no better off, his ‘hovel bedroom’ in the attic ‘almost insupportable’ because of the ‘close horrid’ stench.

  I mention to the lady the grim conditions that Kilvert encountered around the village. Clyro may have changed, but not altogether for the worse. She accepts the point, noting that the most precarious of the village’s housing stock would have been demolished long ago.

  Talking of housing, she asks where I live. I point across the road to Pottery Cottage. ‘The white house,’ I explain. Looks old, she notes, and asks if it’s mentioned in the Diary. Not as far as I know, I have to admit. She gives me a pitying look.

  Directly in front of the house, across the entrance road to Castle Estate from the tump, is an allotment. The lady comments on the triffid-like sunflowers that look out onto the road, their smiling paper-plate faces towering above the cabbages, carrots and runner beans behind.

  They belong to my neighbour, Elwin, I explain. He regularly puts second-hand bikes and gardening equipment out on the main road, propping up a ‘for sale’ board beside them on the fence. Although they often take weeks to sell, no one ever thinks to steal them.

  The archivist begins a patter about the former village school, which was decommissioned some time in the 1960s. From my shed window, I look out onto the square lavatory block at the back of the low-rise stone building, now renamed ‘Kilvert’s School’. This flat-roofed rear extension acts as the boundary line for the front part of our garden. Emma has attached two wooden trellises to the wall and is urging a combination of fig trees, rambling roses, sweet peas, vines, honeysuckle and a clematis to grow up it. I enjoy watching their progress from my office chair.

  During Kilvert’s curacy, responsibility for instructing the children of the parish fell to Josiah Evans, a man of whom we learn little other than that his violin suffered from a broken string, In Kilvert’s opinion, the instrument had ‘something wrong with [all] the others’ too. As the school’s only master, the faceless Mr Evans was assigned a modest house next to the school, the back of which I can also see peering up over my garden hedge.

  Never a parent himself, Kilvert was fond of children – overly fond, some modern readers might think. Reading the diaries today, some of the language he uses to describe the prettiest of his charges is certainly ‘florid’, let’s say.

  Kilvert saves his most amatory ink for the ‘darling child’ Elizabeth Harris (‘Gipsy Lizzie’ to the diarist), whose drooping white eyelids and exquisite little mouth he finds of ‘indescribable’ and ‘unsullied’ loveliness. If that doesn’t raise eyebrows, then his confession to have walked six miles to kiss the ‘sweet face’ of little Janet Vaughan may well do.

  According to Kilvert’s biographer David Lockwood, this is the poetically minded diarist engaging in literary dramatisation. The language, he suggests, is ‘pure Pre-Raphaelite’, more an idealised benediction inspired by divine beauty than the sordid confessions of a clerical paedophile.

  I am prone to give him the benefit of the doubt and I take it from the Kilvert Society’s general silence on the matter that they are too.

  Whatever the case, Kilvert’s life was very much intertwined with that of the village school, although how much of the actual burden of teaching sat on the curate’s shoulders isn’t clear.

  One occasion when he really did pull out all the stops was in the run-up to the government inspector’s visit in July 1871. For weeks, Kilvert had the whole school cramming intensively, turning up in person three times a day to ensure that no students were slacking.

  On the big day, thirty-five of the school’s fifty-one ‘scholars’ turned up. The attendance rate brings to mind one of the Diary’s most poignant vignettes. That of little Mary Thomas sitting on the floor at home with a broken piece of slate and a stick of chalk ‘trying to think she was at school’. She was unable to attend school, Kilvert laments, because the ground was wet and her boots were full of holes.

  In this context, he judged the turnout commendable. He cannot resist a tiny boast either, pointing out that Hay’s school was only able to drum up seven more pupils despite having twice the number of children on its books.

  Once the students had sat their examination, Kilvert retired to his lodgings with Mr Shadrach Pryce, the inspector, who had been joined for the day by his wife. The curate pressed various ‘substantial’ offerings of food and drink on them, but the couple contented themselves with a glass of wine and a biscuit each.

  Whether it was Kilvert’s hospitality or the students’ scores that swung it we shall never know, but the
next month the inspector delivered a ‘capital report’ from the Education Office. With it came a much welcomed grant for £36 10s.

  At the mention of the cash, Ted the accountant whistles loudly. He wishes Powys Education Department was still as quick with its chequebook, he says.

  He is a governor at the current primary school, he explains to the group. In response to a question about its location, he points towards the southern edge of the village.

  ‘Ysgol’ shouts a red-rimmed road sign along the pavement, ‘School’. Further along, another triangular sign depicts an elderly couple crossing, the taller of the two clutching a stick, while the second grabs at the other’s elbow. No explanatory text is provided, the inference being obvious. Further into Radnorshire, there are similar signs for sheep, though without sticks.

  Government cuts mean a couple of smaller schools in the hills nearby have recently had to close. Class sizes at Clyro Primary have consequently swelled. Resources, however, have not. Bo and Seth are both pupils at the school, so I listen with interest as Ted describes ambitious plans laid out by the local education authority to build a new campus. Construction is set to begin in two years’ time. Ted’s manner suggests a healthy degree of scepticism. Similar promises have been made in the past, he notes.

  Emma and I would welcome better facilities, of course, but the children seem happy enough. The ethos is inclusive and the teachers attentive. Our two boys head off enthusiastically on their bikes in the morning and return tired but happy at the day’s end. Both appear to be making progress in the classroom and with friends in the playground. As parents, we couldn’t ask for much more.

  If there’s one thing I could change, it would be the school’s homogeneity. Every morning, the entire student body gathers for assembly in the main hall. Scanning the hundred or so pupils, there’s not a single non-white face among them. Diversity is having freckles. It’s no good complaining. All the other village schools hereabouts are the same. They merely reflect the Marcher population as a whole, which, like its sheep, happens to be very white.

  For parents of young children, the school gates are where many acquaintances are made and friendships struck. Typically, I accompany the boys in the morning and Emma shepherds them back in the afternoon. We live about 500 yards away, making us the closest household to the school. We’re also among the least punctual. With everyone rushing to get started with their days, morning interactions don’t often get beyond a quick ‘hi’ and ‘bye’. Pick-up, in contrast, is more relaxed. You find people, to steal a Kilvertian phrase, ‘in full chat’.

  Keen to get into the hills soon after we arrived, I suggested to a couple of the dads at the gate that we should go for a hike. The tradition has stuck and every other month or so we pick a route in the mountains and head off together for the afternoon. The group includes an electrician, an insurance expert and a manager in the forestry department. Men ‘not in my game’, in other words. By Updike’s measure, I feel this is progress.

  My attentions are drawn back to the old school. ‘We did a penny reading there once,’ the lady says, pointing her forefinger across the street. Her voice is hushed as though their reading of poems and their singing of songs were in some way shameful.

  John, who has rejoined us after a lengthy conversation with the retired vicar, overhears. Popularised by Charles Dickens, penny readings were first introduced to Clyro in Kilvert’s day, he clarifies for me. Mr Bevan in Hay was very keen on this chaste form of evening entertainment, which he thought a far more edifying alternative to the pub.

  A report in the Hereford Times from February 1871 provides a brief description of one such event. Held in the ‘National School Room, Clyro’, the article records. The Reverend R. Lister Venables is cited as ‘kindly presiding’ over an audience of some 250 people.

  Among the highlights was Mrs Partridge’s and Mrs Haines’ ‘rendering of The Barber of Seville’, which was judged to be ‘everything that could be desired’. The choir’s rendition of the part songs ‘Hail, Smiling Morn’ and ‘The Carnovale’, meanwhile, was singled out for the ‘capital precision’ of their execution. Both performances would have been repeated were strict rules not in place against encores.

  I suppose the nearest equivalent of the penny readings today might be open mic night at the Globe in Hay. Pitched as an opportunity for amateur poets and musicians to test out their material, the evening tryout takes place on the first Tuesday of every month and attracts a small but faithful crowd.

  Before the group wheels around and heads back to the church, there is one more landmark to see. Unfortunately, Cae Mawr, the seat of Kilvert’s friend and regular walking companion Hugo Morrell, resides behind a barricade of Leyland cypresses that screens it almost completely from the bypass.

  We walk up a tree-shaded driveway that runs off the main road just beyond the bus stop, our path lit by a luminescent strip of lichen running right up the middle. At an inhospitable set of mechanical gates, we stop. An oval blue plaque on the stone post declares that the invisible residence beyond belongs to the Historic Houses Association. Shame it’s not winter, John laments. We’d have been able to peer through the foliage.

  The owners once arranged to put on a Victorian tea for the society, he recalls. Back in the late 1980s. They ate sandwiches with the crusts cut off and listened to Gilbert and Sullivan. Various pupils at Clyro Primary School performed readings. Each one was a descendant of a villager mentioned in the Diary. A generation on, John wonders aloud how many candidates there would be now. Not as many, I suggest. Regretfully, he agrees.

  Arriving back on the bypass, I say my goodbyes. I had promised Emma I’d be home in time to take the boys swimming.

  As I watch the elderly Kilvertians stroll back towards the churchyard, I realise my question about the curate’s place in the community remains unresolved.

  Pinning him down to one single group certainly seems problematic. Kilvert spread himself widely. In contrast to the prevailing social prejudices of his day, he talked to anyone, anywhere. His ear always cocked, his eyes ever open, his diarist’s pen never far from hand.

  His approach struck me as a sound one. But where to start? My thoughts turn to the faithful guardians of the diarist’s memory and their rendezvous in the pub.

  2

  The Rhydspence Inn

  The night was cool and pleasant as I walked home under the stars. About midnight I passed over the Rhydspence border brook, and crossed the border from England into Wales. The English inn was still ablaze with light and noisy with the songs of revellers.

  Kilvert’s Diary, May Day, 1872

  ‘What’ve we got?’ the landlord repeats back to me. ‘Bitter, you said. Well, there’s the Bass or there’s the Otter.’ He lays a hand on each pump. ‘Otter’s a good beer.’

  ‘I’ll try the Otter, then,’ I tell him, and wait as he pulls the pint.

  The lounge bar is empty except for five men huddled around the circular table nearest the fire. Two of the drinkers are pressed shoulder to shoulder on a wooden bench. Positioned tight against the wall and with high sides at either end, the piece of furniture resembles a truncated church pew.

  The bench is designed for two, yet one of the occupants is unusually large, which makes the arrangement look rather cramped. Neither man appears to mind. Truth be told, they look rather snug. The three others sit around the table opposite, the trio evenly spread at three points of the compass. Their chairs are of conventional pub design. Dark varnished pine, thin cushions, a slatted semicircular back.

  Five pint glasses line the table’s rim. They are filled to various depths and all within easy reach of their owners. In the grate beside them a gnarly log smoulders, its steady heat giving the room a tea-cosy warmth. The drinkers’ cheeks are ever so slightly aglow.

  Around retirement age or a little younger, the men are entirely without haste. Sitting there, they seem cushioned against time. Periodically, one of them will push back his chair and head outside for a smoke or go to the
gents. Otherwise, they remain stationary, as if cemented to their seats.

  A sense of acute self-consciousness washes over me at having disturbed what feels like a private gathering. In a way, trying to settle into a new area marks a string of long awkward baptisms like this one. A succession of walking into unknown places, encounters with group after group of new faces.

  So the first kids’ birthday party, for instance: parents already locked in their friendship huddles, jabbering away among themselves, me loitering by the cupcakes and jelly hoping for a stray smile or a welcoming word. Or the running club, which I joined a few months after arriving: heading off in the dark along routes I didn’t know, with people whose names I couldn’t remember, wondering if this was really something I wanted to do.

  Unsure of the best step to take, I focus on the landlord and watch as the beer shoots from the swan-neck tap into the base of the empty pint glass. The liquid strikes the bottom in a puddle-brown swirl, muddying a little more with every pull of the landlord’s arm. The publican wheezes as he tugs the baton-shaped tap. As if in sympathy, the pump system wheezes along with him in a low-pitched, hydraulic gurgle. To the sound of their gasping duet, the beer bubbles and pushes its way towards the brim. A sudsy cap layers the surface, a million pin-head eddies all awhirl in the froth.

  ‘There you go, young man,’ the landlord says, his accent unadulterated Derbyshire. He places the foamy-headed pint on the bar. ‘That’s two pounds eighty, please.’

  I hand over a five-pound note and he steps across to the till, his movement stiff and rheumatic. In his late fifties, the landlord is dressed in a check soft-collared shirt and tie, over which he wears a V-neck jumper and on top of that a quilted gilet in hunting green with square, buttoned pockets. He looks somewhere between a country squire and a gamekeeper.