by Oliver Balch
‘Any sweaty bits from round the neck … there you go, turn it in, so all the shoulder wool is showing … Tuck it in and he’s away once more. Looks like he’s done plenty of wool-rolling in his time this boy. That’s it, yup, not bad at all. You could play football with that.’
Placing the second rolled fleece beside the first, Gwilym rushes back to the platform and starts clearing the woolly scraps left by the shearer with a plastic brush. After throwing the debris into two separate black bins, one for clean wool, one for dirty, he thrusts a hand in the air and the commentator calls for the timer to stop the clock.
Gwilym smiles modestly as the crowd claps and he walks to the back of the tent where his father shakes his hand, beaming with parental pride.
*
That evening, I’m back at Great House Farm in Talgarth, this time without my boys.
Everything is ready for the Rally Dance. The barn has been cleared. Gone are the trestle tables and in their place is a raised stage on one side, all set up for a DJ and band. The other side is occupied by a fifty-foot-long bar, stocked with 13,000 pints of beer and cider.
Separating the two is a high metal fence, at one end of which there’s a narrow gap permitting access back and forth between the bar and the dance floor. Four beefy security guards check everyone in and out on the bar area. Access is conditional on showing the bouncers a fluorescent wristband, available only to those eighteen years old or over.
Having volunteered to help out for the night, I find myself assigned to the spirits bar, where I am kept occupied mixing Jägerbombs priced at £2.50 a pop. We sell hundreds.
Around midnight, our clientele begins to thin out or, in one or two cases, to fall over. I ask for a break. The music is pumping. The dance floor is heaving. Beyond the happy melee of dancers, however, off towards the back of the barn, I spot a scuffle breaking out. A young man with a scruffy beard and a barrel chest is throwing cartwheel punches.
I move closer to the action.
The aggressor hasn’t picked his adversary wisely. His opponent is not only bigger, but moderately more sober. ‘You want some? You want some?’ he is shouting at Scruffy Beard, dodging side to side on his toes, easily evading the other man’s flailing blows. ‘Come on, come get some, then.’
So Scruffy Beard does. He drops his shoulder and charges at the bigger man, locking his arms around his midriff and driving him backwards with short pumping steps into the crowd of onlookers that has quickly gathered around them. Losing their balance, the two collapse on the floor in a jumbled mess. Rally night now has a full-on fistfight on its hands. The crowd starts baying.
Then security arrives. Six of them. These are the real thugs, shaven-headed bricks of men, their skills learned in bar-room brawls just like this one. They make short weather of the fighting pair, pulling them apart and forcing them into a hammer-lock before marching them out of the barn.
I follow. So too does a blonde girl in a short skirt, who, until then, had been standing close to the shoulder of the attacker and screaming at him to stop. Both men are drunkenly protesting their innocence and cursing the other for starting the fight. The security staff pay no heed to either of them.
Once outside, the contracted heavies troop across the yard and fling the scrapping pair unceremoniously through the exit gate into the field beyond. Over the course of the day, with thousands of people coming and going, the grass has become boggy with mud. The two trip over straight into it.
The more sober of the two gets to his feet and, holding his hands up towards the security staff, insists that he doesn’t want any grief. Scruffy Beard obviously thinks otherwise. His trousers caked in mud, he scrambles up and charges once more at his rival.
‘Billy, no!’ his girlfriend wails, drunken tears splashing down her cheeks. ‘Billy! He’s not worth it, Billy!’
Bunched together at the gate, the security staff look on with relative indifference, even amusement. The mud-splattered car park isn’t under their jurisdiction. Then one of them, perhaps tempted by the smell of violence, breaks the line and wades in. This prompts Billy to do something he would never have done in the sober light of day, however incensed: he lashes out at the bone-head security man.
The result is only a brush on the arm, but it proves provocation enough. In a flash, two of the other security men rush out and Billy, his legs whipped from underneath him, is instantly back on the ground again. This time, there is no getting up. One of the men has a knee on his spine and is wrenching back his arm in a wrestling hold. Another is standing on one of his legs. Billy’s nose is bleeding and mud is dripping from his beard.
The police are called and a blaring siren soon comes into earshot followed by two flashing blue lights hurtling downhill through the parking field. The police car slithers to a halt a few feet from the action. Two coppers get out, bundle Scruffy Beard into the back seat and speed off as quickly as they came. Howling uncontrollably, Billy’s girlfriend collapses onto the shoulder of a friend and sobs.
The victor waves a sarcastic goodbye and is led off by friends to a St John Ambulance station to patch up a bleeding gash across his cheek. A nurse ushers him up the stairs and into the back of the temporary medical station. As he goes in, another young man comes out, a blackish purple bruise over one eye and his arm in a sling.
At around 1 a.m. the bar closes and I make my way back to my car, my feet sore from standing and my fingers sticky with spilled Jägerbomb. The fight turns out to be just the first of many. There’s more pouncing, arm-locking and frogmarching to be done by the heavy-handed security staff.
Meanwhile, minibuses queue at the top corner of the car park to take the ticket holders home. At one point, the passengers on the Brecon bus pile off and start laying into a small contingent of lads boarding the Talgarth bus opposite. Three more names join St John Ambulance’s list for first aid.
I catch only brief glimpses of Woko and the other Llanigon crew during the evening. The times I do spot them in the crowd, however, they all look to be enjoying themselves. Certainly the banter on Facebook the next day seems to suggest a good night was had. ‘Hellish tidy farm, impressive bar and a couple thousand Breconian swede kickers,’ Rhys posts. ‘Nail that and you’ve got yourself a very memorable night.’ By the end of the day, he has more than 200 ‘Likes’.
Between the old boys at the Rhydspence Inn and the young farmers at the Llanigon, I feel a growing familiarity with the farming community. I now understand better who it encompasses and how it is faring. I also realise that I will never belong in the way they do. I cannot. Farming is not in my blood, nor is it a way of life I am about to embrace. Possibly my children could make the leap. It would mean joining the YFC and working their way up through the ranks. Given that they won’t qualify for a number of years yet, I resolve to ask them nearer the time.
My kin, I suppose, are my fellow incomers. As a tribe, we are a mixed bunch, washed up on the banks of the Wye from all over. As well as Brits, I personally know at least four Americans, three Frenchmen, two Spaniards and one Hungarian currently residing in Hay. It is a mini League of Nations hidden away in the Welsh borders.
We are a loose agglomeration, a heterogeneous group. Yet many of us ‘from off’ are bound by similar motivations: a desire to start afresh, to reshape our lives somehow, to explore new horizons. Nowhere are the vistas more open than up in the hills. On the trail of one of Kilvert’s favourite walks, I set off up Cutter’s Pitch towards Little Mountain to meet a couple I’ve heard about with a majestic bus.
PART II
Incomers
4
The Majestic Bus
On the Little Mountain the gorse that glowed and flamed fiery gold down the edge of the hill contrasted sharp and splendid with the blue world of mountain and valley which it touched.
Kilvert’s Diary, 19 August 1870
Rob is kneeling on top of the bus, his arm lodged down the top of a chimney flue. An aluminium ladder rests on the lip of the roof, two or three feet away from
where he is crouched. These are the very last days of winter. A blanket of dewy mist hovers beneath the undercarriage. Birdsong cascades down from the trees. Jays, woodpeckers, blackbirds, all beckoning spring from its slumbers.
The ladder slips down a few inches, causing the smallest of scrapes to the paintwork of the static bus. A muffled curse tumbles down from above. I move from where I’m standing at the bus’s entrance and put a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder.
‘Thanks,’ shouts Rob. ‘Pass us the pole, could yer?’
I hand up a stretch of copper piping. He takes it and climbs gingerly to his feet. Edging towards the flue of the wood burner, he thrusts it down the open vent.
Today is changeover day at the Majestic Bus. With the latest round of guests due to arrive mid-afternoon, Rob is doing odd jobs. Layla, his wife, has already stripped the sheets and replaced them with fresh ones. The room has been swept and the surfaces wiped until they shine. It falls to Rob to light the fire so the bus is snug and cosy for later.
It may be marketed as ‘glamping’, but spending the night in an old bus on an empty hillside still marks a bold step for many of their paying guests. The nearest street light is four miles away, down the hill in Clyro. Neither the electricity nor the water is on the mains. There is no TV, no internet and no mobile signal.
Typically, it is stressed city folk who book in, enthralled by the idea of escaping their fast-paced lives for a spell in the country. We’ll immerse ourselves in nature, they tell themselves. Walk in the hills, read our books, sleep in, make love under the stars. It’ll be blissful. And so it is. ‘For most of ’em, anyway,’ Rob says, his Suffolk upbringing declaring itself loudly in his long drawn-out vowels.
Even so, arriving along the steep country back roads and lurching down the final stretch of rutted puddle-pitted track must set even hardened stomachs fluttering. It helps settle them in if the bus is warm when they arrive.
Rob is a relaxed, forty-something guy with a witty tongue and a ready laugh. His balding pate is closely cropped and habitually covered with a hat of some description. As a young man, he used to wear his hair long and I sense the middle-aged Rob has never quite come to terms with his follicles’ betrayal.
The ladder appears stable enough for now, so I leave him to his chimney sweeping and take a snoop around the site. The bus is located at the base of a sloping bank. Bedded into the turf are four squat tree-trunk stools that form a circular pattern around a sunken pit. Shards of blackened firewood rest on the pit’s ashen bed. Curiously, the funerary scene speaks of happy times. Marshmallows on twig pokers. Campfire songs. Woodsmoke smells. Whisky warmth.
Further up the bank, pressed close to a perimeter hedge that divides Rob and Layla’s one-acre plot from the farmer’s field beyond, a water tank sits stout and silent, its contents generously replenished by an underground spring.
I wander across to the bathroom, which is separated from the bus by thirty yards or so. It is housed in a square, timber-framed room built on to the back of a Dutch barn. Wooden boards, a foot wide and cedar-stained, line the floor. On the side nearest the door, a deep roll-top bath hugs the wall. A grey-muzzled cat with yellow eyes looks down from a sheet-steel advertising sign above. Pure Matured Virginia Cigarettes, it promises. Ten for six shillings.
In the far corner of the bathroom, two bookshelves are nailed to the wall above a wooden chest, which is furnished with four plump cushions so as to double as a bench. A pile of board games rests beside it. The books above are pressed close on the shelves, their authors – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Mitchell, Chris Cleave, Penelope Lively, Sadie Jones – a cut above the usual holiday home hand-me-downs. Each looks diligently read, faint tracks furrowing their spines.
In the opposite corner sits a dinky wood-burning stove awaiting a match. An enamel bucket is stationed beside it, the kind that once used to hang in apartment corridors stencilled with the words ‘FIRE’. Overflowing with firewood that begs to be burned, this one has clearly been appropriated by the other side.
Leaving the bathroom, I take a peek in the adjoining barn. The wall at the end facing the bus is clad in rusting corrugated iron, as is the long horizontal back wall closest to the bank of the hill. The other two walls are only partially enclosed, leaving space for the elements to enter.
The overspill of domestic life litters the floor: prams, furniture, a sledge, bats and balls, children’s bikes, an old sofa, an electric radiator. Guarding the entrance is a Buccaneer caravan, which sits on bricks in the doorway, its brown curtains pulled tight, waiting patiently for blue summer skies and an open road.
Mixed in among it all are the tools required to tame their patch of arcadia and keep the wilderness at bay: mowers, trimmers, spades, pitchforks, half-empty tins of paint, boxes of screws and nails, sheets of insulation, piles of plywood, a chainsaw, ladders, a can of petrol, large red gas canisters, firewood, a wheelbarrow, straw bales, a filing cabinet.
The one-time hay barn has become a vast outdoor cupboard. The suggestion of so much maintenance exhausts me. I step back outside. As I do, I hear a shout from the bus. Rob has finished on the roof. I walk back over and retake my position at the bottom of the ladder, as he throws the pole onto the grass and climbs down after it.
‘Bet that’s made a right ol’ mess,’ he says. ‘Amazing how much crap gets caught up them chimneys. Only cleaned the thing six months ago.’
Rob delivers the comments with typical good humour. He is not one for moaning. Nor does he begrudge the upkeep of the bus, which pays their way. They bought the plot eight years ago, emptying their savings account in the process. After the initial euphoria, the tedious reality of financial constraint sank in. Their initial plan had been to renovate an old stone barn that stands at the entrance to the property. It is in poor repair, but has planning permission.
The couple had bought and done up an old house before, a ramshackle sixteenth-century forge in a village just outside Ledbury. They purchased it close to the top of the market, against their bank manager’s advice. ‘A proper wreck it was,’ Rob says. They lived in a caravan in the garden for the first six months, then gradually occupied one room at a time as Rob pressed on with the renovations himself.
Money was perpetually tight, especially after Rob’s veg-delivery business collapsed in the wake of a supplier’s bankruptcy. With characteristic grit, Layla took herself off to college and, after two years of gruelling study and part-time work, she emerged as a qualified horticulturalist with her own small business.
After six years, the house was finally finished and they put it on the market almost immediately. It sold quickly, and for enough to give them what they had always dreamed of: a deposit for a rustic smallholding in the wilds.
Tilda was three months old when they took possession of their hillside plot, and two years later her sister Goldie came along. Layla gradually scaled back her gardening business so she could spend time with the kids, while Rob found work as a handyman building sheds, fixing guttering, laying decking and so forth.
With the arrival of Tilda, time and money both became tight once more, so they decided to temporarily shelve their renovation plans and buy a large caravan, a twin unit which they parked up the slope towards the top of their plot.
As the name suggests, the mobile home came in two halves, each measuring about thirty foot by ten. A farmer friend hauled both halves to the entrance gate with his tractor, where they promptly sank into the mud. And there they remained, a sulking old couple sitting back to back, until Rob laid his hands on a truck with a loading arm to lever them into place. In an act of heavy-handed marriage counselling, he then bolted the pair together. After adding a lick of paint and a new tin roof, the family moved in.
The spacious caravan has remained their home until today. Periodically it expands in width, filling out with the bulges of age. Tilda and Goldie have their own timber-framed lean-tos at the back. Rob recently put in a utility room beside the kitchen area so they no longer have to trek across to
the Dutch barn to load and unload the washing machine. Following the birth of another baby girl four months ago, Rob is now busy planning Meri’s nursery.
Two of the three girls had home births. Meri arrived so quickly that the midwife didn’t get there in time. Layla took it all in her stride, according to Rob’s version of events. ‘Cool as a cucumber, she was.’ A few days later he loaded up a picture of a tiny bundle of pink-nosed towelling on Facebook. ‘Just call me Dr Rob,’ his post read.
Kilvert records an extraordinary tale of his own about a home birth and a midwife. The story played out in a house called The Pant, a short way across the hill from Rob and Layla’s smallholding. The house exactly straddled the national border and the attending midwife insisted that the baby be born on English soil. The poor homeowner was consequently shunted into the eastern half of the cottage, where she ‘was delivered of the child standing’.
As for Meri’s nursery, Rob has it in mind to knock out the side wall in Goldie’s bedroom and build sideways into the bank of the hill. That would place the baby’s room beside the main bedroom, leaving Meri’s cot exactly a bed’s length from where she entered the world. It strikes me as a wonderful idea, full of life-encircling symmetry.
We step into the bus. Rob is careful to clean his shoes on the mat and wipe his hands on his trousers before entering. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, which form his perpetual base layer, a sartorial second skin.
Accessories appear from time to time. He has a thick bedraggled coat that gets an airing in deep winter. For a short spate last autumn, he took to wearing a hoodie with Majestic Bus branding emblazoned across it. The only other wardrobe constant is his sludge-brown deerstalker, which he wears in all weathers and always with the basset hound ears flopping down. He plays bass guitar in a band called the Cherryshoes and the faux-furred hat provides his signature look.