by Oliver Balch
Picking up my pint, I steal a quick glance over to the table of drinkers. Tony, who owns the holiday cottages we rented, is the only one among the five I recognise. He gestures for me to join them. ‘Pull yourself up a chair, man. You don’t want to go standing there all night.’
Still nervous, I edge towards him, the sight of my approach promoting the conversation around the table to halt abruptly. I hope the smile on my face appears congenial.
‘Evening,’ I venture.
‘Ev’ning,’ everyone replies, their tone if not unfriendly exactly, then cautious and perhaps even tinged with an edge of suspicion.
Tony and the other two men in the chairs shuffle round to allow me space. Gingerly, I put my pint on the table and take a seat.
Their muted reaction does not surprise me. This is Tony’s Wednesday-night drinking group. It is made up of men he has known for years, in a place they consider their own.
Such groups evolve organically over time. They are born from common bonds of friendship and trust, of mutual interests and shared experiences. For a novice such as myself, initiation is far from straightforward. I need my own Reverend Venables, someone who will open the door for me and vouch for my credentials. I was banking on Tony filling this role. A hobby farmer with a permanent limp, he’s the owner of the cabin we rented and the very first person I met on moving to the area.
‘This is Ollie,’ runs Tony’s laconic introduction. ‘Him and his missus stopped at our place for a while, in one of the cabins, like.’
I smile. They nod. Feeling the weight of their collective gaze, I study the back of my hand and pick up my glass. I take a sip and put it down again. I return to looking at my hand, all the while silently willing someone to say something, anything, wishing that I could merge into my seat, that I could sit among them invisibly.
Then, for the briefest of moments, I wonder if I haven’t made a mistake. It hadn’t occurred to me until this very second that everything might not turn out well. Tony had mentioned to drop in if I happened to be passing, but in an off-the-cuff kind of way. What if they didn’t really want me there? Even with Tony’s fragile endorsement, I am still intruding. And no one likes an intruder.
I start thinking I might have been better off choosing another pub. The Boat in Whitney, say. Or the Roast Ox in Painscastle. Both are village pubs, both relatively close and popular with locals. Maybe I’d have been less of an outsider there. Mixing in among the crowd a little, taking my time to find my feet, getting myself established. Yet this is where Tony drinks, and Tony is my unwitting sponsor, so the Rhydspence it has to be. I determine to stick it out and make the most of it.
The Clyro sections of the Diary offer little by way of advice on how to act in such situations, for Kilvert is already ensconced in the community by the time we meet him. This is a shame, as we are not so different in personality, I suspect. In the company of others, I always feel more comfortable on the edge looking in, rather than at the centre holding court. Kilvert’s writing leaves a similar impression. He listens more than he speaks, watches more than participates.
All the same, Kilvert clearly enjoys socialising, although his opportunities to do so tend to be concentrated around either the soirées of his aristocratic hosts or communal events linked to the church. Comfortable turf, in other words. His interactions with his village parishioners, in contrast, are predominately private and pastoral. In his day, it probably couldn’t have been any other way.
As for frequenting the pub, Victorian social mores would have made it out of the question. Not that Kilvert was the puritanical sort. ‘Hot coppers, too much wine last night and an ill temper this morning,’ reads one confessional diary entry.
Nor should his dog collar suppose a naivety about the ways of the world. Listening from afar to a wedding party at the New Inn, he observes how the girls squealed ‘as if they were being kissed or tickled and not against their will’. Most weekends, meanwhile, he’d watch from his window as Clyro’s heavy drinkers stumbled into the street from the Baskerville Arms, ‘drunk, cursing, muttering, maundering and vomiting’.
Kilvert definitely had a gregarious and fun-loving spirit, although the social strictures of Victorian society meant he kept this mostly between himself and the pages of his diary. We’re offered a rare glimpse of his lighter side during a birthday party that he organises for the schoolmaster’s young daughter, Boosie. Feasting on buttered buns and mugs of tea, the birthday girl and her friends giggle as Kilvert recounts stories about wolves and Sowar horsemen and joins them in games of bagatelle and fiery snap-dragon.
At the end of the party, after the children have played with his tabby cat and marvelled at a lock from a lion’s mane that Kilvert acquired during a visit to Clifton Zoological Gardens, he is left alone and happy, thinking to himself how pleasant was the company of these ‘little gentle-women’.
I suspect retelling a children’s story or suggesting a party game might, in my current circumstances, be an ill-advised method of inculcating myself into Tony’s drinking group. Instead, I remain silent, and take another sip of my Otter, which, as the publican promised, tastes good.
*
A classic timber-framed coaching inn from the late fourteenth century, the Rhydspence is a delightful muddle of warped beams and slanting windows, of wobbly chimney stacks and lime-washed walls.
Among its various remarkable features, my personal favourite is the single-room Tudor extension, which wobbles on stilts directly above the main entrance door and which looks so off-kilter that you expect it to topple into the gutter at any minute.
Fortunately, someone later on had the good sense to construct a much more conventional extension at the pub’s northward end, whose solid brick bulk provides a stabilising anchor onto which the louche and liver-pickled inn can now cling for balance.
Set up on a lawned bank, a matter of yards into England, the border pub is attractively situated at the base of a steep grassy pitch that leads directly into the hills. Scattered houses surround it, although these quickly thin out as the gradient steepens and the sheep pasture descends.
In front lies the expansive Wye valley in all her silvery, flat-bellied glory. A mile or so up the road is an old toll bridge. A mechanised gate permits motorists safe passage in exchange for eighty pence.
The main trunk road between Brecon and Hereford passes at the bottom of the pub garden. It’s the same road that a few miles further on bisects Clyro so neatly. The road earns the briefest of mentions from Kilvert, who happens to be passing one time when he spots a ‘deadly sick’ man being carried to the roadside from the pub.
Another time, he writes about a flash flood that sweeps down the valley, ripping turnips from the ground and reducing the roadways to their rock base while leaving a muddy deposit four inches thick on the Rhydspence’s floor.
Inside, the pub’s virtues become less immediately obvious. The thick oak entrance door opens into a carpeted hallway with a staircase in front and toilets to the left. To the right lies the main bar area, which opens into a smaller adjoining saloon bar at the far end.
Beyond the lavatories to the left, meanwhile, is a large restaurant lounge and a connecting breakfast room. Upstairs, a rickety hallway leads the way to seven guest rooms, all of them sizeable and most with a view of the river.
The decor is that of a traditional rural pub: landscape prints in un-fancy frames on the wall, black-and-white photographs above the fireplace, a crooked constellation of bronze pots hanging from the ceiling, a stuffed pike in a glass-fronted box.
Little has altered over the years, which the regulars probably view as a virtue rather than a drawback. As they do the absence of a television, pool table, dartboard, juke box or anything else that might disturb a peaceful pint.
The bar itself is relatively small, about the size of an old farmhouse larder. It is split into two serving areas, with a main counter to greet customers as they arrive and a hatch into the overspill bar next door. The bar counter measures the length
of a park bench and has a hinged section at one end to enable the landlord to get in and out.
Behind the counter, the bar is clean and well-stocked for its size. In addition to the Otter and Bass there’s a lager on tap and two choices of cider – one sweet, the other dry. An assortment of upturned spirit bottles lines the wall, their necks tied tight with bow-tie optics. Above, peering down from the low ceiling, is row upon row of glass tankards, a crowded colony of crystalline bats hanging on their screw-hook perches.
There are nibbles as well. Kettle Chips bunched on a shelf just beside the bar counter. Packs of peanuts dangling from a cardboard sheet. A few ageing bags of pork scratchings.
Only one thing is missing: customers.
In truth, the pub has been quiet for years. Tougher drink-driving laws have hit it hard. So too has the so-called ‘off-trade’ market: the bulk-buying muscle of the supermarkets and their multipack deals mean that pubs can no longer hope to compete on price. Hence the general move to hot meals, pub quizzes, music nights, televised sport, anything that will pull in the punters.
The Rhydspence appears strangely adrift from this trend. Its restaurant is never full, its chef underemployed. Its single concession to modern entertainment is a portable CD player. The plug-in machine plays the part of resident drunk, propping up the end of the bar and repeating itself ad nauseam. It starts with some early Presley, moves on to a touch of Chubby Checker, Al Green, Etta James, then a tribute to Buddy Holly maybe, some Sinatra perhaps, before returning to more Presley, and so it goes on, playing and replaying endlessly in the background.
It wasn’t always this way. For centuries, the inn was a popular stopover point on the Black Ox Trail, the legendary drovers’ route from the valleys of Wales to the markets of England. Even after the railways came and the drovers swapped their walking boots for cattle trucks, the Rhydspence remained noisy with revellers, as Kilvert himself bore witness when walking past one May Day at midnight.
Back at the table, Tony breaks the silence with a brief round of introductions.
‘So, this is Les …’ Tony says, pointing with his pint glass to a tall man in a thin yellow jumper across the table from him.
‘Hello,’ I say, as warmly as I know how.
The man tips his glass. ‘How d’you do?’
‘… and this is Peter.’
‘Hello,’ I repeat to the man immediately beside me, my eye drawn to his mop of carefully brushed white hair.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says, his vowels redolent with the privilege of a very particular English upbringing.
‘And this here is Geoff …’ The man on the bench with the rugby-player’s physique gives me a warm smile and half-raises his glass. ‘… and Mike.’ His smaller companion echoes my ‘hello’ back to me.
‘Mike and Geoff both live in Clyro,’ Tony explains. ‘Up on Begwyns Bluff.’ As well as being neighbours, they are also brothers-in-law, a fact that Tony doesn’t think to explain and that would take me a month or more to realise.
Geoff follows up on Tony’s invitation by asking where I live and how I’m finding the village and telling me that if I need anything then to be sure to ask. I like him immediately. Then Mike mentions all the building work on my house and asks which builder I got to do the job and says, ‘Oh, aye, the Greenow boy,’ when I tell him who it is, and then assures me that I’m in good hands there.
The subject of my house renovations occupies the conversation for the next five minutes or so. I mention the huge cost of redirecting the drains to the main sewage system and they offer me their sympathies.
Between the five of them, they cobble together a chronology of the house’s owners since the war, recalling with particular affection the old school nurse who used to live there when it was still two separate cottages.
The property theme continues. Mike has heard that a plot of land is coming up for sale close to Tony’s farm, prompting Geoff to ask about the auction date, to which Tony says that it’ll happen ‘as soon as someone’s daft enough to pay nine grand an acre’, causing everyone around the table to laugh.
I watch gratefully as the group’s focus moves away from me and back onto one another. Soon, the conversation has returned to its natural patter. Who might buy the farmland? Tony isn’t interested, he says. Enough of a headache managing the fifty acres he already has. Les asks whose place adjoins the land. There’s Carol opposite at Corner Cottage, Tony says. Then Angela and Ian on the one side. All along the bottom is Theo Leighton.
‘Apart from my two fields, all the rest of it, right from Pent-y-cae down that block, except for a small bit that Angela’s got, it’s all Theo’s,’ continues Tony. ‘Except for Jean’s got one or two fields opposite her house. And Cwm-Yr-Eithin bungalow’s got a couple of fields. But otherwise, all that block is part of Llwyngwilliam.’
And then some confusion breaks out. Is it Dol-y-caddy that’s on the market or the land down at the Dol-y-cannau turn? From how Tony is telling it, it sounds to Mike as if he’s referring to the first, but his understanding had been that it was the second that was up for sale.
None of it makes any sense to me. Not just the thread of the conversation, which I lost at Corner Cottage, but even the basic dynamics of the evening, like whether the men buy drinks individually or in rounds, or when they arrive, or how they get home.
Yet here I am, with a seat around the table, which for now seems achievement enough. So I sit back and listen, the conversation unfolding around me, me biding my time, not rocking the boat, hoping my silence will admit me to the Rhydspence community.
‘So you turn right towards Crowthers’ Pool, as if you’re coming from Clyro. Right, you with me?’ We all watch as Tony draws an imaginary map on the table with his fingers. ‘Now if you’re going towards Cwm-Yr-Eithin, it’s on your right from the second gateway. Tump Hill, it is …’
He prods the surface, leaving a thumbprint smudge.
*
My initiation apparently successful, I start going to the Rhydspence most Wednesdays. I generally arrive around nine o’clock after putting the kids to bed and having a bite to eat. Tony and the rest of the group are already there, pints on the table, almost as if they haven’t moved since the week before.
With time, the rhythm of the place begins to grow more familiar. The glowing of the fire, the tinny hum of the CD player, the soft talk of the men. Winter gives way to spring and then summer, but little inside the pub ever changes.
The landlord, whose name I learn is Paul, takes up model-making at one stage, the evidence resting at anchor on a table by the bar. A three-foot balsawood replica of an English galleon. HMS Victory, he informs us. Rigging, masts, deck, captain’s quarters, cannons, all cut to size and delicately glued in place.
We never order anything to eat. Someone might buy a packet of crisps, which they’ll spread open on the table and share. Paul recently tried advertising a cheap pie-and-gravy night to reinvigorate the restaurant, but it didn’t take off. Last month, he cut back the chef’s hours. He’s thinking he might have to lay off the kitchen staff altogether if things don’t pick up.
No one in the group drinks excessively. The men consume their beer as they conduct their conversation, methodically and without haste. Consequently, Paul often vacates the bar for long stretches at a time, sometimes settling into an armchair on the far side of the room with a small bowl of ice-cream and a glass of crème de menthe. Then his eyes will droop and he’ll be asleep. Other times, he heads outside for a smoke or to work on his wood carvings in the log shed. He spends months on a huge winged dragon, which he paints red and hangs at the bottom of the garden by the road. If someone wants a drink in Paul’s absence, they serve themselves and leave the money on the counter.
The months pass. Numbers fluctuate from week to week. Of the five, Les and Peter are the most consistent attendees, except for three weeks over Christmas when Les goes to Cyprus on holiday. Geoff and Tony miss the occasional week, usually because of work or family commitments. It’
s uncommon to see Tony during lambing, for example. Mike is the least regular, his attendance motivated in part by whether or not Geoff twists his arm to come.
Wednesday nights are not exclusively the reserve of the drinking group. Occasionally, a bed-and-breakfast guest might pop in for a nightcap, although Paul’s bookings mostly fall on weekends. One time, a group of Dutch off-roaders holed themselves up in the bar next door and drank triple whiskies all night. Paul, for once, seemed happy.
Every now and then Jean, who lives up the pitch with the one or two fields, calls in for a half of cider, although she hasn’t done so for months now. A farmer from the neighbouring parish of Brilley once came down with his family, but they sat by themselves in a corner and never returned.
Another infrequent visitor is Tom the Otter, who lives in a storybook cottage right at the top of the hill behind the pub. He specialises in surveying bats, newts and other endangered species after people submit planning applications. It’s a profession that wins him plenty of fans among the wildlife but few among his neighbours.
For a short time, a retired Londoner called John used to stop by too. He lived in a rambling house up near the Begwyns and as a young man had spent time in South America, which we talked about at length. Tragically, he died. In a flash flood, of all things.
The drinking group does have two loose affiliates. One is Kiron, a man of unidentifiable age and limited wardrobe. He owns the filling station in Whitney, which has a zero-frills convenience store and a forecourt cluttered with beat-up cars for sale.
Kiron was born in Tanzania, grew up in India and emigrated as a young man to the UK, where he made a home for himself in Luton.
Hindu, dark-skinned and a non-drinker, Kiron is something of an enigma in the Marches. As the story goes, he saw the petrol station advertised, liked the price and bought it in an online auction. Only it wasn’t Witney in Oxfordshire as he thought, but Whitney-on-Wye in Herefordshire. I’ve no idea if the story is true, although it’s plausible as Kiron neither reads nor writes.