by Oliver Balch
Layla continues with the theme, describing in detail how her daughters are doing at school, the subjects they enjoy, the feedback from the teachers at parents’ evenings, the friendship dynamics in the classroom, the house rules they have about homework.
Education is clearly important to her. She wants her children to enjoy learning and she’s happy that they do. A picture of Tilda and Goldie with their fellow pupils at Gladestry Primary School adorns the front of a storage cupboard beside the main door. Three rows of identically attired little ones line up in the playground in front of a brick classroom. They all sport beaming smiles. Collectively, they would just about squeeze into a single class of a large inner-city primary.
In Layla’s case, she left school before her eighth birthday. Her parents were hippies, part of a wave of US-inspired counterculturalism that swept Britain in the late sixties and early seventies. They moved down to the Welsh Marches from London before Layla was born. They weren’t the only ones. A hotchpotch of other like-minded folk had begun to take up residence in the hills hereabouts as well. Bohemian, alternative types, all of them long-haired and slightly louche.
Her parents lived in a quasi-commune close to Hay Bluff at first, where commons rights ruled and magic mushrooms sprang. After a while, they separated themselves off, both from collective living and from one another. Her father took up residence in a variety of benders, barns and caravans dotted about the place, while her mother rented a succession of dilapidated cottages in the hills. Both lived on the dole, a habit they have proudly retained most of their nonworking lives.
The couple rejected conventional aspirations such as paid employment, house ownership and holidays by the sea as the corrupting artifices and duplicitous deceits of an oppressive economic hegemony. Ruses to keep the Establishment sitting pretty and the proletariat sitting quiet. All while the planet spirals into a nuclear-powered descent towards Armageddon and the next great extinction. More free love is what we need, they maintained. Not more power or ambition, and certainly not more ‘stuff’.
Formal schooling, with its bias towards rules and hierarchy, was a piece of this same puzzle. The instrumental piece, the foundation upon which all the system’s building blocks would rest. Generation after generation, packed off with their lunch boxes to be trained in conformity, compliance and consent.
Layla recalls her father always having run-ins with the teachers. After one particular row, he withdrew her and her brother from school completely. She can’t remember what the argument was about now. Something about her brother, most probably. He was dyslexic, but the condition went undetected and he was branded a trouble-maker instead. The two siblings never went back. They dropped out of the system and, the way Layla tells it, the system more or less dropped them in turn.
With no one to teach her, Layla read. Books, magazines, comics, whatever she could lay her hands on. She loved reading. Novels, most of all. In the pages of fiction, she discovered a manna that sank as protein shots into her soul, feeding her hopes, nourishing her dreams. In the characters of books, she also found friends. In their plot lines, solace. In their endings, succour. Books offered her escape, a wormhole to distant lands where dragons and princes roamed and cities stretched far into the sky.
What she relished most about books was their ability to fill the loneliness. She may have been free as a bird growing up, but it was a sense of solitude that marked her childhood most. She and her brother didn’t go into town much because the local kids would round on them and the shopkeepers would eye them suspiciously. Back in the early 1980s, to be a hippie in these parts was to be tagged a ‘druggie’ or a ‘drop-out’. Such labels applied to the offspring of hippies too. The sins of the fathers, etcetera.
For all its celebration of the alternative, Marcher tolerance for outsiders clearly had its limits. Despite his inclusive spirit, Kilvert was not immune to petty prejudices. He found tourists ‘noxious’, for example. Yet his real ire was saved for the Nonconformists. He was only too ready to hold Chapel folk responsible for stealing the bells from Llanigon’s parish church. When ‘some Barbarian’ cut down the beautiful silver birches on Little Mountain, he quickly fingered the probable culprit: ‘A dissenter no doubt – probably a Baptist.’
Such feelings are echoes of the Anglican establishment to which Kilvert belonged, and go a long way to explaining why his curacy overlapped with the fabled first voyage of Welsh Nonconformists to the New World. The 162 émigrés set off with three ministers aboard a tea clipper to Argentina, of all places, to the windswept plains of Patagonia, as remote a wilderness as they could ever hope to find.
In general, however, Kilvert’s reaction to outsiders was more one of curiosity than distrust or dislike. In rural Victorian society, where everyone had their place and new faces were few and far between, the sight of a stranger was first and foremost a novelty.
One sunny July day, the Diary describes Kilvert stumbling upon a man lolling in the long grass on Mouse Castle, a wooded hill on the Hay side of the river. A troupe of children with rosy flushed cheeks are frolicking around him, all of them ‘full of fun and larks as wild as hawks’. The man is wearing a velveteen jacket and the diarist struggles desperately to place him. The lithe, lissom youths, he decides, are like young antelope and fawns. So alien is the whole party to him that he concludes with characteristic romanticism that they must have fallen from the sky.
Layla’s father and his fellow hippies must have caused similar confusion on their arrival. Not that their social unorthodoxies were all so unusual. I recently spoke with an ex-hippie from the same era, who squatted for several months in a dilapidated mud-floored barn high up in the Black Mountains. She insisted that the living conditions among the hill farmers exceeded theirs for dirt and squalor.
Back then, electricity and running water had still to reach most outlying farms. The occupants of the neighbouring farmhouse – two bachelor brothers and their spinster sister – she described as living entirely on bread and jam and leaf tea. ‘We all smelled,’ the one-time hippy recalled. ‘That’s why they got on with us.’
Mutually dubious hygiene won’t be the bonding agent for everyone, but the experience of convivencia is impossible without establishing some form of common ground. In its absence, there is nowhere to meet, no way of meaningfully coexisting. Those who by dint of background or temperament are not naturally like-minded have to discover ways to at least get along, if not necessarily to agree. To live between a widow and a plumber, as per Updike, is all well and good, but not if your neighbours spend their days hurling insults over the garden fence.
For Rob and Layla, neighbourly relations aren’t a major concern. The farmer next door lives by himself and well out of earshot. Otherwise, they are more or less alone, marooned on the north side of their hill. Not that they’re antisocial. They count a wide network of friends across the area. Yet living on an isolated smallholding means being content with your own company. In that respect, they’re a tight unit, dependent on one another not only for when the boiler breaks or when the interminable winter cold feels never-ending.
‘How long is it you guys been together?’ I ask Layla.
The question is sparked by an unframed snap of their wedding that is stuck to the kitchen wall with Blu Tack. The image shows them on a sun-drenched lawn, the brickwork of a walled garden in the background. Blonde, petite and blushing with joy, Layla looks positively Pre-Raphaelite, a fair Rosamund in a white summer slip, flowers woven into her hair. Standing at her side is Rob, an arm around her waist and a grin from ear to ear.
Layla does some quick mental arithmetic on her fingers. Twenty-one years, she calculates. ‘Yeah, blimey, twenty-one years it’ll be now.’ Where did they meet? Rob was with his ‘travelling crew’ back then, she explains.
Leaving Meri on the floor, content in her freshly laundered white onesie, Rob picks himself up and approaches the table with his second-hand smartphone in his hand. He has just reconnected via Facebook with an old friend he hasn’t h
eard from for years and years, he says, and shows me a photo that his old acquaintance had sent through.
The blurred image reveals about fifteen people standing in front of a battered old bus. They look undernourished and impossibly young, their hair matted and their clothes bedraggled. Several are smoking roll-ups. One has a child on her hip. In the foreground, a dog is smelling another dog’s crotch. I remark how few of the men have beards. It was the early nineties then, Rob says, ‘not a very beardy time’.
‘Where’s it taken?’ I ask.
Down near Erwood, a village west of here on the banks of the Wye. They had pitched up in a lay-by beside the road for three or four months, he explains. Other than Wol, his new Facebook contact, he hasn’t been in touch with most of them since. Rob points to a fresh-faced young man in the front row. ‘Done lots of things, Wol has.’ Rob doesn’t embellish on what these might be.
‘That’s Muchie,’ he continues, indicating another face in the crowd. He sighs heavily. ‘He’s dead. Massive heart attack in Brighton. She’s dead too.’ He points to the woman third from left. ‘Remember her, Layels?’
Layla moves across from the kitchen to see the picture. She does, she says, although she hadn’t heard about her having died. Rob is hazy on the details. ‘Died in the public bogs in Glasgow, smack overdose.’ That’s what he heard. Although maybe she broke both her legs. ‘Something about her, anyway, something bad.’
Layla was sixteen when she hit the road with Rob. Her parents had no objections to her travelling the country at the height of the rave scene, living on the road with an older guy. In fact, her father helped them negotiate the purchase of their caravan.
A vintage Eccles, sixty-five pounds, bought off a bloke in Hay called Boot. I can see it from where I’m sitting now, parked at the top of the garden under an awning that Rob built especially for it.
‘Ah, blast, the lemon cake,’ Layla blurts out, suddenly remembering her baking.
Rob jumps up and rushes over to the oven. He removes the cake and inspects it closely. It’s a little burned but probably fine, he reckons. Layla gets up to check for herself. Then Meri starts crying and Layla returns to the sofa to feed her.
I mention to Rob that I’d be interested to see the rest of their plot. There’s a second bus parked up by the entrance, on a narrow patch of molehilled scrub between the driveway and the stone barn. Could he show me? ‘Happy to,’ he says, and we head outside.
A curved silver trim runs from the front of the bus to the back, starting just below the passenger windows before arcing in a graceful wave down toward the tailpipe. The bus is painted a faded cornflower blue below the trim and a diluted ox-blood red above. Both colours are flaking badly, the rust beneath breaking out like fungal spores. Several windows are broken and the skylights are missing. Just inside the main door there’s a hole in the wooden floor big enough for a small horse to fall through. The bus looks as though it’s been dredged up from the sea.
It’s a Thames Yeoman 1962, Rob tells me as we walk down from the house. He bought it from a guy in Bromyard. I ask if Rob had ever ridden in one during his traveller days. He almost did, he says. He had once tried to cadge a lift in one from North Yorkshire down towards Bristol. The owner couldn’t get the engine to start though, so Rob missed the opportunity. ‘Ended up hitching instead.’
On reaching the bus, Rob motions for me to ascend the steps. I enter ahead of him. ‘Watch where you tread,’ he shouts up. I quickly see why. Apart from the hole, the floor is covered with sharp fragments of fallen plaster and broken ply. Bare nails poke through the woodwork. Any exposed metal is barbed and brittle with reddish rust. A waft of mouldy damp carries through from the back, the aroma brushed forward by a cloud of buzzing houseflies.
Rob coughs apologetically. ‘So, as you see, there’s quite a lot of work to do.’
I look about me and agree. But then he’s done it before, I say. ‘It shouldn’t be too hard to make it ship-shape, right?’ I’m trying to sound upbeat.
He shrugs. ‘No, it shouldn’t,’ he agrees. Although it’s a big job. He starts pointing out the challenges. The relatively low ceiling, the curved sides, the undecided location. ‘It’s a big job,’ he repeats. Still, if they could turn it around, then they could potentially double their income. Once he’s paid off what they borrowed for the first project, that is.
‘How much was that, then?’ I ask.
‘’Bout ten grand,’ he says. ‘Not including the bus itself. That cost me – what did it cost now? – about seven hundred quid, I got it for.’
The idea of converting the Bedford into accommodation hadn’t initially occurred to Rob. He bought it on a whim after taking Tilda for a ride on a vintage locomotive. The smell of the train’s worn diesel engine took him back to his hobo fleet of dog-eared vehicles cranking into life, exhaust fumes rising in the cold morning air, leaving him with a hankering to get his hands on an old bus again. He’d use it as a family camper, he thought.
He doesn’t have any regrets though? I ask. Oh no, he says. And the rental business is doing okay? Sweet, he replies. ‘People seems to get a real kick out of the whole self-sufficient thing.’ When their guests come to leave, they frequently say they’re planning to put a wood-stove in their bathroom or start growing their own veg in future. This always tickles Rob and Layla, the idea that their way of life might be rubbing off on other people.
Of course, a fair number don’t ‘get it’, he admits. He couches the final phrase in crook-fingered quotation marks, as though he knows the ‘it’ is nothing more complex than a bus in a field with some minimal comforts. At the same time, he’s also aware that selling rustic minimalism to townie types requires dressing everything up with back-to-nature branding and vague promises of metaphysical renewal.
They have only ever had one instance of really negative feedback, Rob says, shaking his head in exasperation. ‘Bet you can’t guess who that was from?’ I can’t, but I take it to be a rhetorical question so await the answer.
‘Other travellers,’ he says. He’s right: I wouldn’t have guessed. A friend had posted about the Majestic Bus in a closed Facebook group called Bus Love. We got ripped to shreds, Rob says. Money-grabbing capitalists, they called him and Layla. Trading off their lifestyle. Ripping people off. ‘Proper trolling, it was.’ In retrospect, he finds it amusing, although it upset them both at the time.
The picture of Rob and Layla as totems of capitalism almost makes me laugh. The whole idea is totally absurd. Their stone barn lies in disrepair because they don’t have a penny to renovate it. Layla’s flowerbeds lie untended because she’s cancelled most of her gardening work to look after her baby. I love the home they’ve created for themselves, but, as Rob himself admits, it’s still ‘a glorified caravan’.
With Layla’s upbringing and Rob’s traveller experience, it could have been very different. They had an established crew, after all. A ready-made group of accordant companions, all of them carefree wanderers, kindred voyagers, not a stitch of responsibility or a fixed abode among them. Everyone around them ‘in their game’, as Updike would say.
Strange as it sounds, the vitriol they received from the Bus Love community shows how far they have come, how much they have travelled. The Marches are, in their own way, their Ipswich, MA. Most markedly for Rob, the former traveller from Suffolk. For Layla, it’s more complex. She grew up here. Yet the world she inhabited as a child is demonstrably different from the one she has created for herself since.
In the Marches, people place hippies into one of two broad categories: the ‘hardcore’ ones, who live in the hills and cut themselves off; and the ‘chequebook’ ones, who dread their hair but have a Mac laptop in their insulated yurt. Neither label fits Layla. She’s like one of old Hannah Whitney’s fairies, dancing freely to a tune all of her own.
*
We climb down from the bus and take a stroll through the garden. A small digger is parked across the driveway. It’s borrowed from a friend in preparation for the
earthremoval work required for the new nursery. A shipping container runs along the hedge by the access road, its contents hermetically sealed. Next to it is a trampoline with high netted sides, beside which is a polytunnel that, like the flowerbeds, is showing signs of recent neglect.
Moving back up the bank towards the house, we pass the veg patch. Tilda recently helped plant some spuds, Rob says, pointing to a section of freshly dug earth. He lists the other vegetables he plans to grow: broad beans, French beans, cabbages, courgettes, carrots, garlic. They don’t sell anything, he clarifies. ‘It’s all for us to scoff.’
Our tour is over. Before heading inside, I turn to take in the view one last time. I gaze out over the garden and the derelict barn, over the bramble bushes and hawthorn hedge, and out to the sheep-spotted fields and whale-shaped drumlins beyond. I soak it in, guarding the scene for future savour.
Rob sees me sizing up the vista and second-guesses what’s going through my mind: I’d like a piece of it for myself. My own Upper Tumble. We could sell Pottery Cottage, buy ourselves a field, go off-grid, let the children roam. He has seen it before. The dreamy glaze, the wistful longing, the sprinkles of stardust.
Hands thrust into his pockets, T-shirt hanging loose, Rob leans his elbows on the wooden railing that borders the porch deck and joins me looking out into the distance.
‘There aren’t many people like who live in places like this,’ he says, eyes staring fixedly ahead. ‘People come here and say it’s wonderful and all that, but they wouldn’t actually do it. It’s too …’ He breaks off, looking for the right word. ‘… too blooming hard.’
He recounts their first winter with Tilda as a baby, no proper heating, all of them sleeping curled up in a ball by the fire, ice on the windows. It was minus fifteen Celsius outside. He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. ‘There’s all sorts of stuff you don’t have living here.’