by Oliver Balch
He generally arrives at the pub just before ten o’clock, once he has closed up the shop and eaten his dinner. He orders a Coca-Cola for himself (no ice) and insists on buying everyone else a drink. He pays from a plastic money-bag bulging with pound coins that he pulls from the pocket of his scruffy coat. He comes because he knows Tony and likes Paul, and because his wife is still in Luton.
The group’s other affiliate member is Clive, an assured and affable man who is as local as Kiron is not. The son of a keen racehorse breeder, he grew up at Clyro Court Farm, opposite where the village primary school now is. As a younger man, he had a spell as a jockey until he injured his neck in a bad fall at Worcester races and had to give it up. Today, he plays golf instead. Past retirement age, Clive still turns up to work every day at the haulage firm he owns. His blue-and-yellow lorries regularly trundle through Clyro on the way to his depot across the river in Llanigon.
Over time, I slowly get to know the members of the core group. My closest connection continues to be with Tony, who has a dry sense of humour and a reputation as something of a wheeler-dealer. Outside the confines of Wednesday nights, I sometimes go along with him to a farm sale or to the livestock market in Hereford. One time he drove me into the Radnorshire hills to show me where the salmon come to spawn up the River Edw. I think he sees a need to educate me, as though I were a slightly witless child or an orphan bereft of parental instruction. In matters agricultural and rural he’s not far off, and I gratefully take on board whatever he has to share.
An inherent kindness lies beneath Tony’s transfer of knowledge, which I appreciate as much as the information itself. He has helped me out more than once. Such as the time my tyre burst and he arranged for his neighbour to come and fix it for me. Or when I ended up in a ditch on the Begwyns after sliding on the ice and he drove across the hill to pull me out.
As for the others, my initial affection for Geoff proves well placed. He has that soft, gentle nature sometimes common to bear-like men, coupled with a wonderful belly laugh. If anyone is going to ask me how my week’s been or what I’ve been up to, it’s generally Geoff. Mike strikes me as a practical, level-headed man, the kind of person who is good on a committee or handy with a drill. He’s friendly enough, but I sense he harbours doubts about me that he’s reluctant to relinquish.
Les is the liveliest and the most loquacious of the group. Blessed with a quick wit and a comic’s timing, he has us all leaning in to listen to his stories, the vast majority of which derive from family life growing up on a hill farm in Brilley and carousing in the local pubs as a young adult. If a tale doesn’t feature Les playing quoits or tickling trout, then it invariably sees him causing mischief at a summer fete or staying out late at a village dance.
The veneer of rustic naivety to Les’s storytelling is a narrator’s ploy to some extent, a theatrical device to give extra punch to the climax of his tales, which typically arrive wrapped in mild illegality or abject drunkenness, such as the time he picked up a ten-bob fine from Doctor Jack the Magistrate after Gastor the Gamekeeper caught him shooting his pheasants (‘Fair dues, it was two o’clock in the morning’), or when he volunteered one year at the Young Farmers’ dance and dropped a skinhead at the door with a single punch.
Peter is the only one not born and bred in the area, and he’s also the hardest to read. He’ll chip in with his opinions from time to time, so I know he thinks immigration is perilous and that rising sea levels are ‘complete poppycock’, but otherwise he keeps his cards close to his chest. One evening, when the men started reminiscing about various misdemeanours from their youth, he leaned over and whispered quietly in my ear, ‘Lucky they don’t know anything about us, eh?’ as though this gap in the group’s knowledge was a huge positive, a protective shield between us and them. Yet I had reached precisely the opposite conclusion. From where I was sitting, on the edge looking for a way in, I could only view this lack of a shared past as a lamentable chasm. Here we both were, Peter and I, facing an historic void that no amount of time or information would ever truly fill.
Peter isn’t the only one reluctant to air the details of his private life. References to the men’s wives or children are almost always fleeting and rarely elaborated upon. Talk of health matters or private finances are equally taboo. Sex, similarly. Work is about as personal as the conversation gets, and then it’s generally little more than an anecdote about a colleague or a complaint about a client.
I piece bits together over time. I learn that they are all married, for example, although Peter no longer lives with his wife. All have children. Tony’s son, who does the occasional shift as a washer-upper in the pub kitchen, is the only one still at school. The remainder are either at university or have flown the nest. One of Les’s two student-age boys regularly wins cash playing computer games, which is a total marvel to his technology-averse father.
I never discover my companions’ exact ages, but all are over sixty, except for Tony, who is in his early fifties.
Les has a job at an engineering firm in Hay, where he’s been on the books for most of his adult life. Mike used to work as an electrician and Geoff at a plastics factory in Hereford, although both are now retired. Peter, it turns out, ran the Rhydspence for many years and is now renting the place to Paul. There’s no great love lost between the pair, which, given that Paul still has eight years left on his lease, creates a slightly testy dynamic.
Other than Peter and Les, who live in the nearby villages of Whitney and Glasbury, respectively, we all live in Clyro parish. Most of Tony’s family still live locally too. His mother, who is in her late seventies, still keeps sheep on a farm two miles outside the village. His brother lives next door to her. Geoff’s family roots run deepest into Clyro soil. He’s an Anthony, a clan whose flaking gravestones spread here and there throughout the village graveyard.
The Anthonys crop up regularly in Kilvert’s diary, too. It was the curate’s descendants, in fact, who moved into the terraced houses that he so disliked (Geoff and his brother still own most of the row).
Several Anthony children gain specific mention. Gussena features among Boosie Evans’s birthday party guests, for instance, while an attack of rheumatic fever earns ‘poor young’ Harry a bedside visit from the diarist. On another occasion, Kilvert requests some strips of wood from their father Henry, the local wheelwright, which the curate manufactures into crosses and then gives to Mrs Evans to cover in moss so they glow bright green during the grave-dressing ceremony at Easter.
Although we all live relatively close, the group isn’t in the habit of dropping in on one another at home. Kiron once called by with some Easter eggs for my boys, and Clive kindly donated me some golf balls so I could practise my chipping, but on both occasions I was out and they left the gifts at the back door. They were probably relieved to have missed me. To step across our respective thresholds, it feels, would somehow breach the comforting distance created by the Rhydspence.
As a consequence, Tony is the pub’s only regular who’s actually been inside our house. We invited him for dinner when his wife was away in America. He came in an ironed shirt and brought some freshly picked field mushrooms.
Gifting foodstuffs represents a commonplace gesture of goodwill in the Marches. One memorable Wednesday, our numbers were augmented by the presence of two pheasants at the table, both neatly plucked and ready for the pot, the denuded birds a repayment by Tony for a favour Les had done him.
Just as the personal is kept at bay, so too is anything that might be interpreted as serious or controversial. Wednesdays are for relaxing and shooting the breeze, not re-righting the world. So religion, race, education, terrorism, global poverty, you name it, all are given a wide berth, in the main.
This never ceases to amaze Emma, who finds it inconceivable that we can sit for two or three hours and discuss nothing of substance.
This isn’t strictly the case, I tell her. There’s a lot of talk about farming, for instance. The cost of feed, the price of land, the
Single Farm Subsidy, the pencil-pushers in Brussels, the NFU, avian flu.
‘Bad week for cull ewes,’ Tony will say, as part of his habitual report on that week’s livestock market. Or, ‘Good trade on store lambs.’
Then someone else will shake their head and say how they can’t understand how these boys can pay twelve or thirteen hundred quid for store cattle and hope to make their investment back, to which Tony will say that there’s serious money about, and everyone will agree that the market’s owners are sitting tidy.
‘And what else?’ Emma will ask. Politics. We discuss politics too, I say. Politics with a small ‘p’, that is. Government policies are largely ignored, except for an occasional swipe at ‘stupid’ health-and-safety laws or ‘clueless’ environmental requirements.
International affairs are dealt with summarily too. ‘So, looks like it’s all kicking off in the Middle East again,’ someone might say, to which someone else will reply, ‘Aye,’ and another might mention boots on the ground or, more likely, bombing the lot of them.
In the same way, parliamentarians get short shrift, tarred as ‘power-hungry second homeowners’ who would no more know how to fix the deficit than they would a tractor tyre. Tony has a simple if somewhat blunt solution: go to Westminster and sack every other one of them. ‘There’s your bloomin’ deficit sorted, right there.’
Mostly, it’s local politics that occupies them. Petty bureaucrats in County Hall. Tinpot dictators on the Town Council. How did such-and-such a farmer get permission to put up a huge poultry shed? Why can’t Highways pull its finger out and stop cars cutting the corner by the bus stop in Clyro? These are the political concerns that matter to them.
Emma will raise a sceptical eyebrow. We also talk about property, I add, a rejoinder that merely sets her expression in place.
Which houses or farms have come on to the market, who might be looking to sell up, where house prices are at, these are perennial themes as well. Who owns what now, and who might come to own what in the future, carries great import for the group. The answers locate their fellow residents and, indirectly, they place the Rhydspence crew too.
It’s only after many months of going along on Wednesdays that this realisation hits me. And with it comes another insight that helps explain the limited purview of the group’s conversation: the men are, it gradually dawns on me, only cursorily concerned with the present. In the peace and quiet of the Rhydspence, it is not the here and now that counts. It’s the past.
Not the distant past of history books. Rather, it’s their past, the recent past, the past of yesteryear. This is what captures their imaginations and loosens their tongues. The past of Sunday best and rationed meat, of marching bands and top-of-the-milk, of trouser braces and May Day rides, of Old Knowles the Schoolmaster and his holly-stick cane.
This is how most evenings roll, with dusty memories dug up and dusted down, with former friendships remembered and regaled, with old rivalries relived and re-won. A mere nudge of the lock-gate and out from the sluices of their memories it floods. So Mike, say, will have been waiting for traffic at Crow Turn junction and will have got to wondering if there wasn’t once a cottage directly opposite, and Geoff will be darned if he can remember, and Tony will think there might have been because he remembers talk of a lorry driving into it, to which Geoff will recall a similar incident at the Baskerville Arms but not a cottage at Crow Turn, and finally Les will settle the matter by recalling not only the cottage but also the driver – ‘Dennis Burton, it was’ – behind the wheel of the lorry, and Mike will say, ‘Gert away,’ and Geoff will say, ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ and that will be that.
For me, there’s something mesmerising about this group retelling, the way the men skip between past and present, present and past. Magic lives in these gaps, I swear.
Because no one has a monopoly on the past, events gather pace and grow as they bounce between the men. The winter of ’62 provides just such a case, when the snows fell and fell and Les was shut up at home for six weeks solid and Geoff swore the snowdrifts were up to the roof and the sheep took to eating holly. Pigeons froze on the wires, Mike adds, while Tony remembers his father telling him about an old boy who slit his horses’ throats rather than witness them starve.
Part of the pleasure of Wednesdays comes in connecting people to other people, and other people to places, and places to other people. It’s as if the world outside the Rhydspence represents one giant community crossword book that waits for midweek for a few more clues to be solved.
Take the school minibus run, which Tony does because his brother owns a coach company and Tony can do with the extra money. He goes up to the Begwyns, past Rickettes’s place, he says in answer to someone’s question about his route. No sooner has he started than Les interrupts to ask if it’s the Wern he’s talking about, and Geoff starts tapping his temple and repeating ‘Now, what’s the name of the place?’ Williams, at Vrondee, chips in Les, apropos of nothing, while Geoff is getting there with Scavin, Salvin, Scalding, ‘Scalding Farm, that’s it.’
The conversation about the route continues in this vein, me cruising along on the cushion of the pub seat, silent, listening as Tony’s imaginary school bus driver passes Dai Stephens’s place with the new bungalows and some kids called Jones, and down the back lane to Llanstefan and then right at Ceri Owens’s, who is in a bad way with cancer (‘Hell of a good bloke, Ceri Owens’), and switches back to Glasbury when the weather is bad, before turning up via the waterworks and back down over the brook, where the floods can be a bugger but the fishing is good.
Eventually the minibus reaches the school gates and that week’s crossword is finished. Someone jokes they should join Tony one morning and see the route for themselves.
For now, everyone is content exactly where they are, comfortably ensconced close to the fire, in an empty ancient pub, beer within reach, and nothing but their memories and a softly snoring publican for company.
*
I find Geoff sitting alone nursing his pint. He drinks lager, with a splash of lemonade on top. No one ribs him for the lemonade. With a smaller man there might be some ribbing. Not with Geoff, though; he’s too big a man for that. And too kind. He wouldn’t know how to give it back.
Top-up? I ask. He’s good for now, he says. He tells me to pull up a chair and asks how I’m keeping. I don’t think he really understands what a freelance journalist does, but he listens politely when I describe my week and he nods from time to time and says it sounds like I’ve got plenty of work on and that’s certainly a good thing in times like these.
I enquire after Les, who is recuperating at home after a knee operation, and from what Geoff understands he’s doing fine. Mike can’t make it tonight because he’s got something else on. He doesn’t know about Peter or Tony.
Paul wanders in and, on seeing that it’s just Geoff and me, wanders out again. The dragon is long finished. He’s on to an owl now, I believe. And then Geoff gets talking. It’s the old stone cottage with the new double-glazed windows opposite the post office in Clyro that starts him off. He remembers when the house came up on the market, back in the 1960s it would have been. He was working for Bryan Jones at the time.
‘You know Ashbrook, the garage? Well, that used to be a dairy farm.’ It was his first job. An old woman called Davis used to work there and when she died Bryan tried to persuade Geoff to buy it. ‘Well, I hadn’t got, what, two bob.’
The house ended up being sold at auction in the Crown in Hay and made £350. ‘“You want to buy that place, boy,” Bryan said to me. And I said to ’im, “Well, I haven’t got no money.” And he said, “Well, I got some money. I can lend you some, no problem, if you want to buy it.” I swear to you, as sure as I’m sat on this seat here, that’s what he said.’
I smile, occasionally interjecting on a point of clarification or just to show I’m still listening, but otherwise only too happy to sit and listen to Geoff reminiscing.
‘Where my house is now – exactly where m
y house is – there used to be a big rock there. Come soaring right out the ground, it did. One of the first jobs I did when I started work was I ploughed that field. With an old Fordson Major tractor, a trailer plough hitched on the back. We edged from the top end right down to the road at the bottom. And there was this rock. And we used to sit on that rock and have our bait, you know. Cor, I tell you, what a view that was.’
I stop him to ask what ‘bait’ means. Food, he tells me. ‘Bait time, grub time.’ Slab of cheese, hunk of bread, an apple maybe. None of them had flasks back then, so they’d put their tea in a bottle and wrap the bottle in newspaper to keep it warm.
Post office field, they used to call it, he continues, picking up where he left off. Best field for miles around for catching rabbits. Old Tom, who used to milk the cows up there, would run a net right down the one side.
‘Then they used to get a line, a long line, and drive a peg in up the top corner. They’d walk down round with this line and pull all the rabbits out of the squats so they’d run into the net.’ Someone would then follow up behind with a wooden stick, sort of a truncheon shape, and knock the rabbits on the back of the head. ‘Dozens and dozens of them, like. Aye, there were rabbits about then. Kept the country alive.’
People turn their noses up a bit at rabbit nowadays, Geoff says, shaking his head, but there’s a good bit of meat to be had on a rabbit. ‘The saddle, two fat rolls of meat like that.’ He locks his fingers in a small circle to illustrate its dimensions.
As he does so, I notice he’s missing the top half of two fingers on his left hand. I want to ask what happened, but I don’t feel I can. Then I wonder if I’ll ever know Geoff well enough to ask, and it saddens me to think that perhaps I never will.
Keeping to his theme, he tells me how rabbit is best eaten roasted, although he wouldn’t criticise anyone for putting rabbit in a casserole. Then he asks me if I’ve ever eaten pigeon and when I say I haven’t he rolls his eyes and says how they used to eat a lot of roast pigeon when he was growing up.