by Oliver Balch
Elwyn Sheen, now there was a man who knew his pigeons. Used to shoot them as they came in to roost, up in Lloney Wood. ‘He’d feather one while he was waiting for some more to come in. Drop it into his pocket, like.’
Not for the first time, I find Geoff’s recollections dislodging fragments of Kilvert’s Diary and setting my imagination whirring: pictures of Pentwyn, a rambling old house up by the old post office field, for example, filled with swarms of flies on a summer’s day. Or of John Morgan, the ‘little Welshman’ from Cold Blow, pulling down the property’s old cider press, while Miss Bynon, the owner, peered out of her windows nursing fears about India’s ‘Musketoos’.
With Geoff’s talk of pigeons, it’s the reddened face of Gipsy Warnell, the poacher, who jumps most clearly to mind. The shouting, the angry words, the trousers so nearly torn. How different the Rhydspence is by comparison. Just the two of us, quietly nursing our pints, far from the fracas of that night in the New Inn.
Which in turn leads my thoughts to the drunken wild man, whom Kilvert describes stumbling out of the New Inn one breakfast time with a steeple-crowned hat on his head and waking the village with his droning bagpipes while the children danced to his tune as though he were a modern-day Pied Piper.
Geoff’s thoughts run away with him, back to a time when the land opposite Pottery Cottage was all open pasture and the tump his outdoor playground. There was a big gang of them when he was young, he tells me, a touch of wistfulness in his voice. ‘We were nine. The Harleys were eleven. The Griffithses, six.’ All holiday, they’d spend up on the tump, larking about, making dens, building tree houses. ‘Oh, we had these beautiful tree houses, we did.’ Geoff emits a throaty chuckle, his eyes dancing brightly in the light of the fire.
We talk late into the night; about his memories of the old school by my house; about Cae Mawr, and how his mother had come to work there for Lady Baskerville as a mere fourteen-year-old; and about Clyro Court, the big country house on the edge of the village, where Kilvert used to go for dinner and croquet games, and where Geoff’s grandfather, the estate manager, used to start the oil engine every night to bring light to the building, and where the beaters on shoot day would walk down through the wood and the guns below would blast the pheasants from the sky until the keeper’s cart creaked under their feathery weight.
Eventually, a beam of headlights through the window signals Geoff’s lift home and, downing the dregs of his beer, he reaches for his coat.
‘Been good talking,’ he tells me, patting me on the shoulder as he walks towards the door. ‘See you next week, then,’ he says, turning briefly before he steps out.
A few minutes later I’m behind the wheel as well, driving along the same stretch of road as Geoff back to Clyro. It’s half past ten and although the darkness has long since settled the night is clear and the moon bright. Arboreal giants, stretched thin by the moonlight, march beside me along the tarmac, while the mountaintops dance with troupes of shimmering stars. Having sat and listened to Geoff all night, I’m struck by how different everything already looks, how different it already feels.
Over the coming days, as I stare out over my garden or past the Texaco garage as I accompany the boys to school, I attempt to see the village through Geoff’s eyes. I try to picture the timber yard behind our back hedge, try to evoke the smell of the lime pit next to it. The practice serves to lengthen my perspective. Everything begins to take on a fraction more depth. Shadows appear. My vision becomes more layered. Try as I might, however, I can get only an inkling of the past; I can’t see it as Geoff sees it. Not as any of the Wednesday-night crew do. I struggle to envision people whom I’ve never met or see empty fields where houses now stand.
I look at the garage and I see the garage, not Bryan George’s milking parlour. To me, Begwyns Bluff is an amalgam of red bricks, tarmac and vertiginous lawns. There are no rabbits there, no protruding stone. Yet these things exist for Tony and his friends, exist in a material sense, which is what surely draws them back to the Rhydspence. It’s more than simple nostalgia, more than recollecting the ‘simple kindly primitive times’, as Old Morgan or Hannah Whitney were wont to do when Kilvert came calling. Wednesday nights provide them their opportunity to rearrange, to reconstruct, to almost resurrect what was but is no more, or what still is, yet is strangely altered.
This sense of rupture hit me powerfully during the summer. I’d joined the Kilvert Society on an annual pilgrimage they make over the hills from Newchurch to Llandewi Fach via Llanbedr. On the way, we cast stones to raise the bog above Pontvane Farm and stopped for readings from Kilvert and Housman, Eliot and Rossetti.
Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
I went with Seth, whose little legs kept pace with the pilgrims as far as lunch, which we ate under the ancient yews of Bryngwyn.
The day had commenced with Morning Prayer at St Mary’s church, where, daydreaming between the various hymns and readings, I found myself scanning the memorial plaques on the wall. My gaze eventually settled on the embossed epitaph of Major Samuel Beavan, from Ty’n-y-cwm, onetime home of the rector of Bryngwyn. He died in 1836, the tablet informs me, his remains then interred at Hereford Cathedral. ‘At his death,’ the inscription finishes, ‘Ty’n-y-cwm passed to strangers.’
‘Strangers’, two simple syllables that bring so much upset, such disorder. Past and future severed.
By piecing together the links between people and places, it feels as though the Wednesday drinkers are doing their bit to refasten what’s been loosened and patch what’s been torn. And the Rhydspence is the place to do it because it’s the one place that does not change. The one place that resists the need to move on, to reinvent itself, to redecorate, even. The men enter on a Wednesday knowing everything is more or less as it’s always been. ‘Always’ being relative, of course. ‘Always’ being as long as they can remember, which, for them, is as long as anything really matters.
None of the five is ever going to buy the pork scratchings. Yet to remove them would be to overlook their function. The group knows that the pork scratchings are there and available to buy should they ever choose to do so. That’s the point. Take away the pork scratchings and that possibility, that eventuality, disappears. So it is with the chairs, the fire, the patterned threadbare carpet, the songs on loop. They act as ballasts in a changing sea, a mooring line in a choppy tide.
This is what keeps them coming back, this is what anchors them to where they are and who they are and where they’re from. For me, in contrast, it holds no such associations. Would that it did.
*
It transpires that Paul is dying.
He tells me just as I’m leaving one evening, grabs me at the door as I’m putting on my coat. ‘The others know, so I just wanted you to hear it from me.’
He has pancreatic cancer, he explains. He’s going to Cheltenham oncological unit every morning for chemotherapy. The cancer they can cure, he hopes. ‘It’s the other two gonna kill me.’
The doctors have diagnosed him with the cerebral small-vessel disease and pernicious anaemia. His tone is matter-of-fact. Five years, the doctors tell him. ‘So I’m not sure what we’re doing yet … so, yeah … maybe eight years at best.’
I thank him for letting me know and tell him I’m terribly sorry to hear about it and to advise me if I can do anything, and then I leave. No one has ever told me that they’ve been diagnosed with an incurable disease before and I don’t know what to say or how to act. I think about his words as I climb into bed that night. I can’t sleep. I keep turning over what he must be going through, over and over.
Terrible, that’s all I can think. Terrible and terrifying.
For several days, I feel thrown. We don’t do personal, that’s how Wednesdays work. Life, however, operates differently. It has its own rules, rules that even time can’t bend.
The next Monday I drive over to the pub after dinner to see Paul and ask if there’s anything he needs. I have never been to the Rhydspence other than on Wednesday nights. Stepping over the oak-timber threshold, I’m hit by how deeply familiar and yet oddly alien it feels, as if I’ve been there before but at a different time, in a different life.
‘Hello?’ I call. Nothing. The room is empty, empty as only a public place can be, emptier than ever.
A few steps to my left, our table sits devoid of drinkers, its surface dishcloth-clean, the smudged rings of beer-glass bottoms wiped away. The CD player is switched to ‘Off’. There’s no Paul at the bar, no noise from the kitchen. Is this what happens when the latch is left off the hook and the world slips in?
‘Hello?’ Once more, nothing. Not a sound but for a whispering echo and the knowing presence of the old timber beams.
I stand there, in the middle of the room, unsettled, waiting, feeling ever more like a trespasser. To shake off the silence, I wander over to the fireplace and examine the pictures on the wall. In all the times I have been here, I realise that I have never thought to look at them before. Romantic landscapes abound. Turreted castles in heraldic pose, peasant cottages with Hobbit doorways, each scene green and mountainous and lit by moody skies.
The photographs I find more compelling. Set at head height, their black-and-white faces stare back at me from inside the frames, looking at me eye to eye, meeting my gaze. Each image is born of commemorative intent: friends out fishing on the Wye, a rugby team preparing to take the field, a troop of young conscripts heading off to France. I wonder what, if any, their connection is to this time-worn pub. No one lets on. They are silent to a man.
I return to the bench by the door, weighing up whether to stay or go. I’ll give it five minutes, I decide. I rest my feet on a stool and tilt my head back, fixing my gaze on the tobacco-stained ceiling above, tracing the edges of the porous discolourations, imagining the smoke-filled nights that went into its creation. My mind drifts to the drinkers who must once have sat on this self-same bench, puffing at their cigarettes, drinking from their personal tankards. The Rhydspence knows their names. Its floor recalls the pattern of their dancing. Its beams, the timbre of their voices.
‘’Allo there,’ says Paul, pushing through the door. ‘Y’ur all right, then?’
He rubs his hands together. He has been outside, working on his latest carving. It’s another Welsh dragon. ‘Coming out nicely, it is.’
‘Oh, hi, Paul,’ I say. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’
I stay until late, listening to him speak. He tells me about his past, his career ‘making machines that make machines’, his broken marriage, his new love, his search for a pub that would see him into retirement, and, finally, about the uncertainties now surrounding him. He rasps as he talks, his breathing more laboured than usual. He’s going to break his lease. No choice, really. ‘Take some time to think, reassess.’
Kiron has offered him the flat above his garage. He and his wife will stop there for a while; they’re not planning to head off anywhere immediately. We’ll see each other around, he’s sure.
And we do. I pop into the garage from time to time to see how he’s faring. I’d once mentioned in passing that I had a record player and he calls in with some old LPs that he thought the kids might like. One summer evening we go up to Hay Bluff to test out some model aeroplanes he has built. We prop up each plane in turn on an old advertising billboard from the Rhydspence, attach it to some elasticated rope tied to a gardening fork, and then let it go. He has built six in total and we record six near-immediate crashes.
*
I never saw Paul in the Rhydspence again. Peter couldn’t find anyone else to take it on, so he reluctantly stepped back behind the bar himself.
The clever money, Peter figured, was in the B&B trade. So the beer selection quickly slimmed and the kitchen closed. Then the pub tables went, replaced by two armchairs and a sofa.
The drinking group got the hint. Mike was the first to leave, bemoaning the quality of the beer. Then Geoff followed shortly after. Les stuck it out, but then fell ill and took to his bed. In his absence, Tony decided he’d give the Boat a go instead. And that was it. Suddenly, no more Wednesday nights.
Instead, I decide to wind back the clock. If Wednesday nights are all about looking back at what has gone, then Monday nights are about starting out with what’s to come.
Mondays are when friendships are struck and lifelong attachments made. Mondays are for learning life’s lessons and sharing its early triumphs.
Mondays are when the Young Farmers’ Club meets.
3
The Young Farmers
We came to the gate of the meadow where the rural festival was being held. A group of men whose clothes were splashed and dyed by the red wash were plunging sheep and lambs one by one into a long deep trough. The sheep … walked away across the meadow to join the flock, shaking the red wash in showers from their close-shorn fleeces.
Kilvert’s Diary, 26 July 1873
A leather halter fixes fast around the muzzle of the dappled brown heifer. She is panting heavily, gulping down great chestfuls of air. With each breath, her nostrils flare open like fireplace bellows and then deflate as she exhales.
The farmer, a grey-haired no-nonsense man who has reared cows all his life, stands with rope in hand. He looks her straight in the eye as two wide, frightened pools of incomprehension look back at him. He pats her neck and, leaning in towards her, says, ‘Come now, come now,’ and, ‘There’s a good girl,’ and, ‘Don’t be a dull bugger, now.’
All the while, Woko is standing at the rear of the four-year-old Hereford, his shoulders roughly at the same level as the animal’s backbone. His jockey-sized frame is well within her peripheral vision, a foreign body, untrusted, unwanted.
Skittish by nature, the heifer nervously shifts her weight. Half a tonne of meat and muscle rocks from hoof to hoof in an awkward swaying four-step. A prelude to her death dance; the cattle truck pulling up in the yard, the cows bundled into the back, the latch clanging shut, the engine rumbling into life.
The farmer tries to calm her. Her low-gear ruminant brain registers the tugging rope and his gentle protestations, but she keeps with her ungainly shuffle, instinct telling her that the man in mud-stained overalls is not her friend. In that respect alone, she is not as stupid as she looks.
Woko begins the stock-judging class by thanking the farmer for allowing the group to visit his farm. The old man tips his cap. ‘Ain’t no bother at all.’ The younger man continues with some introductory remarks, his broad Marcher accent as earthy as the oil-black peat on Twmpa Hill.
‘Right now, listen up. What we’ve got here is butcher’s beef. We’re looking for width here now and meat cover, right? What we want here is an even balanced animal, see. A good piece for you young ones to look at is the width down the top line on the beef.’
He points a finger over the cow’s flanks and then, stretching his arm out in front, traces the contour of her spine. The flat of his hand marks out a perfect horizontal in the air. I picture the animal hung out to dry on a washing line, each vertebra individually pegged and then pulled taut from shoulder-blade to tail stump.
At twenty-six, Woko is in the twilight year of his Young Farmers’ Club career. He joined the Llanigon club aged ten, already handy with an air gun and competent on a quad bike. An only child, he was born into a long line of farmers. Watkinses (‘Woko’ deriving from ‘Watkins’, his family name) have worked these valleys and hillside slopes for the last three or four centuries. Very possibly longer. There are no fewer than five different Watkinses listed as County Sheriff during the seventeenth century – one of whom, Thomas, heralded from right here in Llanigon parish.
The surname has deep local resonance. Kilvert ministered to several Watkinses in Clyro in the late nineteenth century. One, a certain John Watkins who lived at the Cwm, was reputed by his neighbours to be ‘roguish’ and given to ‘sha
ms’. The curate describes his condition as ‘abject, wretched [and] pitiable’ after one visit. There were Watkinses at Lower Cwmgwanon, too. The mother, a ‘poor mad creature’, had to be confined to an upstairs room for her own safety. Neither, I’m sure, bears close relation to Woko’s Llanigon branch.
Bruce Chatwin also found space for a Watkins in On the Black Hill, his fictional tale about twin-brother farmers local to the area. The depiction is less than flattering. Tom Watkins, or ‘Watkins the Coffin’, as Chatwin sometimes christens him, is cast as a callous, rough-mannered man who seldom dipped his sheep and whose antics created a constant headache for Amos Jones, the book’s early protagonist. (‘Get ye away, Amos Jones’ … Watkins shouted. ‘That land belongs to we.’)
Farming is what Woko does. It’s what his people do.
As might be expected, he dresses the part. Not in all the country get-up, as the gentry farmers do at their summer shows, in their waxed Barbour jackets and worsted-wool shirts. Woko’s uniform of choice is what he’s wearing now: jeans as mucky as a car mechanic’s, hard-toed working boots, a washed-out rugby shirt, a shapeless all-weather fleece and a rain-bleached baseball cap as ragged as an unshorn ewe.
As a look, it’s practical, not polished. But polished, as Woko would say, doesn’t get fence posts fixed or lambs to market. Practical does.
Woko talks little and labours hard, two habits inherited from his chapel-going ancestors. Windburn turns the thin, freckly skin stretched across his cheekbones a permanent blister-red. Rarely are his lips unchapped or his knuckles free of boxer’s bruises. Gleaming under every fingernail is a grimy crescent moon. Much like the battered mud-stained truck he drives, Woko looks beat-up and old beyond his years.
The assembled children are standing around the rear of the heifer in a wide semicircle, listening with varied attention as Woko descriptively dissects the animal in front of them. ‘You can see how square and wide this one’s back is, see? So that’s what you want to look for, like. And you want a wide shoulder and good fleshing over it, see?’