by Oliver Balch
He’d like to go for a week, he says. Eat in all the nicest places, go to a cool club, ‘do all those things I can’t do here’. It’s only fair to see how the other half lives, he thinks. ‘I mean, they come up to our country here, don’t they. Driving like tossers.’ Chris strenuously agrees.
Woko hasn’t been to London, either. It’s rare for him to go even to Cardiff. He has been abroad, though; to Texas, on an exchange trip organised by the Welsh branch of Young Farmers. They visited farms, mostly.
Having a farm to inherit makes the decision to go into agriculture easier. In that respect, Woko and Johnny are one up on the likes of Chris and Rhys, who will be earning minimum wage or close to it. Not that the two farmers’ sons collect a salary as such. ‘Asset rich, cash poor’ is how Johnny describes this lack of regular payment. Just as Woko does labouring, Johnny undertakes contracting work on neighbouring farms. It was this after-hours work that funded his Paris trip.
For farmers and farm labourers alike, working the land presents an uncertain future. Two generations ago, more than a dozen dairy farms dotted Llanigon parish. Today, there’s one: Phillip Price, at Tynllyne Farm. Farmers are encouraged to grow their herds, increase their landholding and buy in new machinery to become more competitive, but not all have the means to do so. All the extra debt and risk and stress are hardly attractions, either.
At the same time, alternative opportunities for young people from farming families are limited. The more ambitious often end up moving away, attracted to better employment prospects elsewhere. Those who stay hope to find work with a local employer, of whom, bar the council, there are few. Without good contacts, most school leavers are looking at a low-paid job stacking shelves at the Co-op or waiting on tables in a café.
If they can acquire the necessary training, some might land on a trade that will permit them to set out on their own. The boom in house-buying incomers, for example, means the local business directory is now brimming with plumbers and decorators, roofers and electricians.
Even if the labour market were buoyant, which it isn’t, young farmers still face the psychological and social challenges of cutting loose. Whatever farmers say to their children, however much they reassure them that their destiny is theirs to choose, for Woko and his ilk to become a policeman, say, or a teacher, is seen as opting out. Very possibly it means saying that the long line of Williamses at Penygenhill or Joneses at Llanthomas will be no more. For a young person, that’s no easy task.
Fortunately for Woko, farming is not only in his genes but it’s also what he loves best. He couldn’t imagine another path. Barring an unforeseen calamity, his father can rest assured that there will be a Watkins at Caenantmelyn Farm for at least one more generation.
*
From where Woko and I are standing, the sloping sheep fields of Llanigon follow the gentle contours of the valley bank down to the Wye below, whose twisting metallic-blue form slithers and snakes its way downstream to the dollhouse rooftops of Hay in the distance.
On the western edge of the town, right on the road junction up to Llanigon, a collection of white-roofed marquees glimmers brightly in a large rectangular field. The tented enclave signals the early preparations for Hay’s annual literary festival, a ten-day jamboree of books and literature that brings hordes of bibliophiles flocking to the town every spring.
Woko has fallen back into silence and so, in an effort to move the conversation on, I point down to the canvas blobs below and enquire if he’s planning to go to any events at this year’s festival.
The full programme has yet to be announced, but he doubts it. In the twenty-five years the festival has been running, he’s only ever been to one talk before.
‘Oh, right. Who was that, then?’
‘Adam Henson,’ he responds. I was expecting Bill Clinton or Stephen Fry. My surprise evidently registers on my face because Woko repeats the name again as though I didn’t catch it right the first time. ‘Adam Henson. You know, off Countryfile, like.’
I offer a muffled response, unsure if I should admit that I’ve hardly ever watched the BBC’s flagship rural television programme and consequently have no idea who Adam Henson is. A look of stupefaction lingers on his face. ‘It’s Adam’s Farm, right?’
It’s clearly inconceivable to him that I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about, so rather than confess as much and have his opinion of me sink even further, I enquire about what Adam Henson of Adam’s Farm had come to talk about.
‘He was doing a thing at the Royal Welsh. Brecknock was hosting it and he was down there, like. And you could have this dinner lunch thing then up at a farm, not far from here. We had a bit to do with organising it, like. With the lunch ticket, you got into a talk he was giving after at the festival about his book, see?’
‘So was it good?’ I ask.
‘It was all right.’
‘And did you buy his book?’
‘Mother bought the book for Dad, yeah.’ It’s on the bookshelf at home, he clarifies, although he’s fairly convinced that his father has never read it. ‘But it’s signed ’n’all.’
Woko hasn’t read Henson’s book either, despite being a massive fan of the Countryfile star. That doesn’t stop him filling me in length about Henson’s career as a presenter, writer, brewer, ‘big grain farmer too’. There’s even a beer brand named after him these days, he tells me. ‘He’s making hay while the sun shines, that’s for sure.’
Coming from someone so young, the saying sounds peculiarly old-fashioned, almost Kilvertian, in fact. It reminds me of stumbling on an obtuse word like ‘wittan’ or ‘Thirza’ or ‘asplenium’ in Kilvert’s diary. A lexicographical fugitive from a bygone age, snuck quietly into Woko’s phrase book, waiting for an opportune moment to relaunch itself on the world.
A piercing altercation on the pitch breaks off more talk of Adam Henson. Jill’s team is protesting that they still have one touch in hand. Laying down the law, Lauren requisitions the ball from a boy with gel-spiked hair and places it on the ground. A girl from Bronwyn’s team then steps up, rolls the ball backwards with the sole of her foot, and the game is back in play.
Aside from farming, I’m interested in what else Woko does with his time. Thoughts of Les spring to mind, with all his tales of youthful derring-do and narrow escapes. Here is Woko, supposedly in the midst of building his own story bank. What colourful episodes is he notching up beyond the farm gate?
I ask if he goes out much. He looks at me curiously. In the evenings, I clarify. Perhaps meet up with friends after work? Go to the pub maybe?
Not much, he says. The pub in Llanigon closed years ago. After club nights, they used to head down to the Three Horseshoes in Felindre, but it’s shut on a Monday nowadays. ‘If I go out anywhere during the week, it’s the Griffin in Llyswen, likely as not.’ The choice surprises me. Llyswen must be a fifteen-minute drive from where he lives. ‘It’s my missus’s local, really,’ he explains. ‘She lives just up the road.’
This brings us into new and frankly unexpected territory. Woko had never mentioned a girlfriend before and I’d rather assumed he was married to the farm. Not that I should be surprised. Most of the older contingent at Llanigon are or were once going out with each other.
In this rural borderland, the range of Cupid’s arrows stretches somewhat further than in the past, when the Young Farmers’ Club effectively doubled as a matchmaking service. Today, the sound of blaring car stereos can be heard along the country lanes as youngsters head out to the bars and clubs of Hereford and Brecon, or even to the bright lights of Cardiff if their parents and their wallets allow it.
Woko’s old stomping grounds fell a little closer to home, he tells me. In his late teens, a standard Saturday started in the rugby club bar after a match, then on to a local pub or two before ending up at the Wheatsheaf in Hay. ‘Hell of a place, the Wheatsheaf,’ he says, a look of youthful nostalgia passing over his face. Packed to the rafters. Bouncers on the door. ‘Hell of a place.’
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bsp; His mouth widens in a rare smile. From there, they’d catch a minibus to Clyro Court, where the old school gymnasium doubles as a nightclub at weekends. People came from all over, Woko recalls. Hereford, Kington, Bronllys, Talgarth, New Radnor, Brecon, Llyswen, you name it. A thousand people crammed in there on a Saturday, ‘easy, like’.
‘Sounds pretty crazy,’ I say.
‘It was crazy, all right.’ He grins to himself at the memory. ‘It used to be proper rough. There’d always be a massive punch-up. Full-on fighting, like. Them guys that came on the buses, they’d come just to look for a fight.’
The contrast between the genteel afternoons that Kilvert used to spend at the same venue, playing bowls on the lawn and admiring the ‘beautiful orchids, lilies, & co., which Herbert Baskerville brought back from the Cape’, seems extraordinary. That said, there’s a ring of familiarity to his description too, what with Les and the tales from his pugilistic youth.
For all the bucolic imagery of the Diary, acts of thuggery and violence periodically appear in its darker margins. Returning from his Christmas break in 1871, for example, Kilvert stops by to chat with Lewis, the local policeman, whose wife is suffering from ‘dreadful quinsy’ (a complication related to tonsillitis). The officer fills in the curate on the details of a ‘fearful fight’ on Boxing Day between Clyro and Hay, which most folk agree was the fault of both sides but for which responsibility was pinned squarely on the Clyro contingent.
The real fighting at Clyro Court disco nights hit its peak before Woko’s time, he admits. Scraps would still break out, but not with the same intensity or scale as before. He seems genuinely regretful to have missed out on the glory days.
‘Do you still go out in Hay much?’ I ask.
He doesn’t, he says. None of his friends do. ‘It’s not like it was.’ I ask him what’s changed. He shrugs, his mood suddenly melancholic and a touch defensive. ‘Just changed, s’pose.’ I push him gently for more specifics. Is it the people? The shops? The houses? ‘Bit of everything, I guess, like,’ he says, noncommittal.
Falling into silence, we watch the toing and froing of the game once more.
The children are tiring now. Rhys and Chris have long given up, returning to their ball-kicking on the touchline. With the exception of a few of the older lads, no one appears especially interested in the result.
‘Okay, next try wins,’ Lauren declares, giving renewed impetus to the match as the players see the prospect of imminent release.
‘About Hay and all, like,’ Woko suddenly says, returning to the theme. ‘It was mother’s birthday on the weekend, right. So we went down to the Three Tuns, now, right, for a meal. And the place was full, like. It was absolutely full. And I didn’t know one person in there.’
‘Really, no one at all?’
‘No, not one person, like,’ he insists.
He shakes his head, bemused by the strangeness of the experience.
‘And, hell, the whole of Hay was busy on the weekend, like. We walked down through town and the blooming Indian was all full. You could see them parked outside. And they were going in the Blue Boar. Hay looked real busy, like. Saturday night it was.’
Last Saturday was the first weekend of the Easter school holidays, a fact that I point out but which holds little interest for him. He’s not after an explanation for the town’s busyness. The essential point he wants me to understand is that Hay was busy, not why. And not busy as in Wheatsheaf busy, when he knew every face in the room. It was busy with strangers, with the faces of people ‘from off’ whom he didn’t recognise.
The experience must have been quite weird for him, I suggest. An invasion of sorts. He lights up at the observation. It was weird, he agrees. He mulls over the word ‘weird’ and then says it again, quieter, as if almost speaking to himself. ‘That’s exactly what it was: weird.’
There is no anger in his voice, more bewilderment at the strangeness of it all. A marked difference separates the two. ‘Weird’ is coming home as a student to find your parents have rented out your room. ‘Angry’ is wanting to punch the new lodger on the nose. I am pleased Woko is not angry.
‘And were they incomers, do you think?’ I ask in a tentative voice. ‘Or tourists?’
His answer feels desperately important to me. I long for it to be the latter. Every diner in the pub, every driver parked at the kerb, every drinker occupying a stool at the bar, I want them all to be tourists. It’s not that I don’t like tourists. They represent an essential economic asset for the town. But if it’s day-trippers and weekenders rather than incomers like me who are proving intrusive, then I can side with him. I can share his confusion, can offload my responsibility for arriving on his doorstep with my newcomer clansmen and bringing change.
‘Yeah, I guess a lot of them were from out of town,’ he says.
And there it is, as ambiguous an answer as it’s possible to give, neither one way nor the other. I can’t push him further. Biased though I am, I’m guessing most were tourists. As well as being a holiday weekend, the Three Tuns is popular with day-trippers and holidaymakers, what with its beer-battered fish, gastro refit and 4.0 rating on TripAdvisor.
Not that it really matters: incomer or tourist? Woko doesn’t much care either way. To his way of seeing things, the distinction is nebulous. Both are out-of-towners.
Disappointed, it’s now my turn to fall silent.
Anyway, the game is coming to a close. A dash down the wing by the tallest boy on Bronwyn’s team sees the ball grounded over the line at last. The whistle goes and, to the sound of Lauren’s call of ‘Try’, the victors punch the air and engage in bouncing bear-hugs.
Then the young recruits are ordered up to the basketball court and shepherded into a large circle. The court is up on top of the bank, just behind where Woko and I are standing. Our proximity to the action allows us no escape: we must take to the tarmac too.
I half-listen as Lauren explains the tenets of Fireball. It doesn’t take long as there’s only one basic rule: do not drop the ball. The penalty for doing so is to sprint around the outside of the circle while the other players pass the ball from hand to hand as quickly as possible. If the ball completes a lap before the runner, then he or she is out. That, in essence, is Fireball.
‘Any questions?’ There are no questions. Once again, Lauren’s whistle sounds. ‘Okay, let’s play.’
The game begins at a sufficiently pedestrian pace to permit Woko and I to continue talking. He embarks on a brief monologue about sheep sales. Woko tends to avoid the livestock market these days and sell direct to the St Merryn slaughterhouse in Merthyr. I ask how many lambs he’ll hope to shift this year. The question causes him to take a slow breath. Leaning his head to one side, he tells me it’s right difficult to say.
Then follows a detailed explanation of his breeding strategy and the prolificacy of putting Texel ram on Welsh Mule ewes. ‘You see, in an ideal world, all your ewes on the farm would have twins, see. You’ve got two teats, so you’d have two lambs …’
I find myself thinking back to Woko’s reaction to the crowd at the Three Tuns. His lack of anger puzzles me. I suspected his reaction to be more proprietary, as it would if hikers trespassed across his land and a rambler’s dog ran after his sheep. Yet his bemusement speaks of something else, of distance, of things lying outside his remit, of being beyond his control. Could it be, I wonder, that in some peculiar unexpected way, Woko fits the category of out-oftowner too?
The very notion seems outlandish. If being ‘born and bred’ means anything, surely it means ownership rights over your patch. Not just in terms of property deeds, which, in the case of Woko’s farm, will pass down to him as the only son in due time. There’s a more intrinsic, more elemental sense of ownership than that: the possession of a place’s sense of self, its mores, its customs, its way of being.
Everything about Woko speaks to that person. The way he talks, the way he dresses, the way he spends his time, the way he views newcomers, each shouts loud and clear
a deep and ingrained attachment to the place where he was born and schooled, the place where his opinions were formed and his character shaped. He is the undisputed owner of his world, no question, just as the Young Farmers’ Club’s current intake will one day come to own the same world too.
If Woko’s universe existed in a vacuum, such reasoning would hold true. Only it doesn’t, nor has it done for a good many years. Even in a rural parish such as Llanigon, along whose soft meadow footpaths Kilvert once ambled contentedly, waving at ‘cheery looking’ rustics as he went, other competing worlds now exist. Those of the schoolteachers and council workers on the cookie-cutter estate, the newmonied millionaire in Old Gwernyfed Hall (who, as it happens, also owns the Three Tuns), the retirees in their bungalows, the incomers in their barn conversions.
Many more such subworlds inhabit Hay, with its bookshops and its literary festival, its traders and its townspeople. For Kilvert a century and a half ago, a trip into town invariably entailed a visit to the post office or an appointment with the draper, a withdrawal from the savings bank or a trip to the doctor.
Farmers were part of that mix, of course. During Hay’s annual fair, the town would become ‘lively … with horses and sheep’, its streets filled with ploughboys hoping for a hire, but at night the roads would empty as the farming folk would head back into the hills. Such as the old man whom Kilvert watched drive eight small white pigs back to Llowes, the next village up from Clyro along the Glasbury road, muttering all the way that his dogs were being too tender with their charges.
In Kilvert’s time, the boundaries between these various worlds were kept more strictly than they are today. Now they mix and overlap constantly, in the market, on the street, at the bowls clubs, in the shops, down the pub. People flit between different groups, often with a foot in two or three at once. The retired smallholder who sings in the community choir, the incomer who sits on the Town Council, the shopkeeper who rides in the hunt.