Under the Tump

by Oliver Balch

  The toast pops up.

  Chris extracts the two slices from the toaster, which he has rigged up to an extension cable underneath the table. The bread is hot and he juggles it from hand to hand until it’s cool enough to butter. This is the team breakfast, he informs me, reaching for a knife and a pot of jam. Hannah wanders over to tell him that the stall is more or less finished. A couple of pre-orders to make up and then they’ll be done.

  As they’re talking, a tall gentleman in a pink woollen hat walks in off the street. Chris strolls over and greets the man warmly. ‘Come for Mrs Griffiths’ order?’ he asks. ‘Aye,’ says the man. Chris reaches behind the stall for the food parcel, which is neatly arranged in a flat cardboard box, the kind with small holes for handles that apples and oranges come in. He passes it to the man, who exchanges it for two banknotes from his wallet. ‘Keeping busy?’ the gentleman asks. ‘Always busy, John,’ replies the butcher, ever chirpy. He hands him his change. ‘Got to keep busy,’ the man says, ‘that’s the way it is.’

  Regulars like John account for a good proportion of their trade, Chris tells me. He points to the vacuum-packed cuts of topside beef and pork tenderloin when I ask him what sells well. I look over to the severed animal parts wrapped in see-through tourniquets, the striated veins bulging against the polythene sheeting. It should be a hellish, morgue-like scene and yet it’s not, overfamiliarity having inured us to the sight of so much raw, eviscerated flesh. ‘People around here like a joint on a Sunday,’ Chris observes. I nod, wondering if the same would be true if we had to butcher it ourselves.

  Most folk usually pick up a few rashers of bacon too, he adds, his outstretched finger hovering over several deep rows of pinkish packets. Sausages, as well. All of them home-made. Pork and leek is today’s special, according to a small blackboard sign on top of a glass-fronted cabinet in the centre of the table. Beside it is a second board giving details of the day’s pie selection: steak and ale, steak and kidney, pork with jelly. The pies are mounted three high in tinfoil dishes along the cabinet’s bottom shelf. On a narrower shelf above are eight Zeppelin-like black-pudding rinds, cinched at either end.

  Tucked into the bottom corner of the cabinet, beside the pies, is a metal tray of faggots. ‘50p Each. 4 for £1.80’ says the hand-written sign fixed to the glass front. ‘OWN MADE’, it adds. I have never knowingly eaten a faggot, a regional foodstuff made from pig’s heart, belly fat and offal, all rolled into a ball and then coated in breadcrumbs. Pressed together in their tray, they could pass for scotch eggs. American tourists will frequently buy a faggot, Chris says. He’s not sure why, although he suspects it’s because the name amuses them.

  Talk of faggots reminds me of a story that I’d heard second-hand about the Falafel Fellow. Week in, week out, an old farmer gent used to go to his stall for his market day lunch. ‘Marvellous faggots, these,’ the elderly Welshman remarks one time, a mistake that the stallholder feels honour bound to correct, explaining that falafels are made from chickpeas and spices. The old farmer never came back. I repeat the story to Chris, who chuckles. He can well imagine it, he says.

  The three breakfasters turn out not to be the Butter Market’s only early arrival. At the other end of the building, I see that Lucretia the Octogenarian’s stall is also laid out. I wish the three luck for their day’s sales and head over to introduce myself.

  Lucretia is a petite woman with a sharp wit and a pencil-thin smile. Green highlights streak through her white bobbed hair. She could be Kilvert’s friend old Hannah Whitney, I ponder.

  I find her sitting patiently in a wheelchair, her legs tucked under the table and a thick blanket resting on her lap. She is accessorised entirely in green: so knitted green gloves, green brooch, green earrings, green neckerchief. Even her eyebrows are painted leek-green. Saving her from total meadowy monochrome is a collarless grey jacket with brocade strips around the buttons. She looks a card.

  The sprightly stallholder is flanked by two men; her husband Woody, sitting on her left, and Simeon, her eldest son, standing to her right. ‘Don’t mind him,’ Lucretia tells me, nudging her left elbow towards her spouse. ‘Dad’s got a bit forgetful,’ she says.

  Woody smiles out from beneath a black woolly hat. His kindly, narrow face is obscured from below by the zipped collar of a thick overcoat. This is also black. As are his oversized gloves. His absence of colour contrasts so strongly with his wife’s flamboyance that I wonder if it’s not deliberate. A final, public gesture of his adoration for the woman who lightens his life.

  Dad has had one or two previous ‘incidences’ on the drive over here, Simeon explains, a half-nod in the direction of his seated father. ‘So I’ve said enough is enough, and I drive Mother in now.’ In his mid-fifties, Simeon is a large, amicable man and evidently an obliging son. He dresses up on a Thursday, exchanging his usual farm clobber for a shirt and jacket.

  ‘He’s all right,’ Lucretia says, looking over lovingly to her partner of six decades. ‘But he’s not all right, if you know what I mean.’

  Woody’s dementia is not so advanced as to make him blind to the attention directed towards him. ‘I’ve got a story to tell you,’ he suddenly declares, his voice frail but perfectly clear. ‘When I qualified to represent Great Britain in the World Ploughing Competition in Austria …’ He peters out.

  I feel awkward, partly on account of Woody’s evident confusion, but mostly because of Lucretia, who is watching the man of her life and father of her four children slowly fade away in front of her.

  Turning to Woody, I ask how he fared at the competition. Did he win? ‘No, no,’ says Lucretia, replying on his behalf. ‘Seventh, you were.’ He doesn’t respond. Instead, he leans back a little further in his chair, folds his hands in his lap and stares out in front of him, a look of quiet contentment covering his face.

  I glance down at Lucretia’s array of produce. A cloth of pink and purple petals covers the tabletop, which bows under the weight of three days’ worth of baking. The result of her industry spills over the edges of shallow paper trays, from greengage fruit pies and jam tarts to gingerbreads and barra apple cakes.

  A sticker with ‘Lucretia’ written on the top and the image of a chocolate box cottage gives the name of the product and its basic ingredients. Self-raising flour, sugar, butter, eggs and water provide the base layer for almost everything. Treacle, mixed spices, fruits and milk provide a second, differentiating tier. The Welsh cakes, I note, contain ‘Sweet Snow’.

  The price also appears on the label, written in pen. A puff of smoke rises from the cottage chimney, suggesting cosiness and simple domesticity. A separate green rectangular sticker makes clear that ‘Own Free Range Eggs Are Used’ in the cakes. The eggs that survived the cake mix are sold by the half-dozen in cardboard egg boxes, row upon row of them.

  The market’s oldest vendor keeps a small semicircle of space free in front of her. This way everything she needs is within reach from her wheelchair. Her purple handbag, cash box, glasses case and spiral-bound notebook with customers’ orders. A list of names appears under the heading ‘eggs’. One is already crossed off. There are separate orders for a lemon and blackcurrant cake, and a sponge. ‘Dial-a-Ride’ is scribbled into the margin. Last week, she made fifteen fruit cakes for a customer who was arranging a charity event. She gave him a good price.

  ‘You stay up all night on Wednesday, don’t you, Mother?’ says Simeon, glancing at his mother with filial affection.

  Lucretia doesn’t drive, so it falls to ‘Sim’, as she calls him, to pick her up and drop her off. He leaves his home in Ross-on-Wye at around 4 a.m. and drives the twenty-five miles to the old family farm at Ty-Caradog in Michaelchurch Escley, where Rob pitched up with his traveller crew all those years ago. One of Simeon’s younger brothers farms there now.

  They are usually on the road again by half past five, the boot packed tight. Each and every Thursday, he says. Then, at nine o’clock on the dot, he takes his father to the Granary café for a full English break
fast. They set their clock by their arrival, the waitresses like to tell him. Father and son always leave just before the hour so as to avoid the traffic warden.

  I ask Lucretia how long she has been coming to the market. Her hearing is poor and she cranes forward in her wheelchair. Simeon repeats the question, louder this time. She can’t remember exactly, she replies. Too long, mocks her son. He’s pleased that she comes, really. It keeps her active. She used to be with the Women’s Institute, but for reasons undisclosed there was a falling out and she struck out on her own. She has a ‘system’, she explains to me. There’s a Rayburn and two other cookers in the kitchen, all of which are fired up when she’s in full flow.

  ‘I had a write-up in a book,’ she tells me. She grows suddenly coy. ‘Best Places to Go in …’ She pauses. ‘… in the World, it was.’ Her chapel-going instincts against immodesty jump in. ‘They’ve got to write about somebody, haven’t they?’ she says, almost by way of apology. She didn’t know anything about it until someone brought her the book. ‘“You must visit Lucretia’s stall. She’s an octogenarian” …’ Her voice trails off. She is not-so-secretly chuffed.

  Simeon fills the gap, explaining how for years his mother used to cook evening meals at home for paying guests. The family found her collapsed on the kitchen floor one morning, so they’ve made her go more slowly since then. The enterprise began with cream teas, which she announced via a sign at the farm gate.

  ‘Father’s comment at the time was, “You won’t make enough to pay for the sign, woman,”’ Simeon recalls. Lucretia smiles. Woody doesn’t react. Busloads used to come, says her son. Father would play the fiddle, and Mother the organ, ‘for a bit of entertainment’.

  The spirit of hospitality is deeply engrained in the hillside communities of the Marches. On his long walks and pastoral visits, Kilvert would often find himself waylaid by a generous farmer or friendly cottager. ‘I believe I might wander about these hills all my life,’ he reflected, ‘and never want a kindly welcome, a meal, or a seat by the fireside.’

  Together, mother and son recollect their more notable visitors. ‘Do you remember the three cathedral organists?’ he asks his mother. ‘What about that party from France?’ she responds. He raises her one, citing the visit from the Bulmer family, the cider-making dynasty from Brilley. ‘It’s the only time we’ve had three Rolls-Royces in the yard,’ he says with a child’s fascination. He even remembers the number plate on the lead car: C1DER.

  Adaš Dworski, the potter of Pottery Cottage, used to be a regular visitor as well. One night, he came with the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, Lucretia recalls, the man whose signature appeared on every banknote, from ten shillings upwards. ‘Of course, you won’t remember the ten-shilling note.’ I sadly don’t, I tell her, but I do know his son, Jasper Fforde, a best-selling novelist who lives just outside Clyro and who’s part of my small hiking group. ‘What a small world,’ Lucretia remarks, evidently pleased with the new footnote to their family lore.

  I imagine all the strangers who have sat in the front room of Ty-Caradog and can picture Kilvert among them, pleasantly ensconced as though it were the homely kitchen of Whitty’s Mill, with little Carrie on her jingling old harpsichord, the smell of Mrs Gore’s freshly baked bread wafting through the room, ‘so irregular and full of odd holes and corners, so cosy and comfy with its low ceiling, horse-hair couch [and] easy chair by the fire’.

  Not one to be outdone, Lucretia trumps her son with mention of Sir John and Lady Betjeman. The elderly farmer’s wife seems more taken with the Poet Laureate’s wife than the great man himself, leaping straight into a lengthy discussion about her death and how her ashes were thrown over the Himalayas from an aeroplane. ‘“Him-aaarh-ly-ers”, that’s how she pronounced it,’ says Lucretia, in mimicry of Lady Betjeman’s Raj-era diction. Her father used to be a Governor of India or something high up, she clarifies.

  Sir John Betjeman had a lady on the side, Simeon chips in. And another little child. Lucretia shushes him. She finds talk of other people’s moral shortcomings sullying and unedifying. Kilvert was of a similar mind. Although references to children born out of wedlock and even suicides pepper the Diary, they generally appear as part of a wider narrative and without judgement. Lucretia’s moral sensibilities are unfortunate for her eldest son, whose sense of humour is what the Victorian curate would have probably termed ‘colourful’.

  Later, out of earshot of his mother, Simeon tells me about the swingers’ scene in Ross. Everyone is playing with everyone down there, he assures me. ‘The cleaner walked in on them all.’ He pauses. ‘You know. At it.’ ‘At what?’ Lucretia wants to know, her hearing evidently sharper than she lets on. ‘Oh, nothing, Mother. You wouldn’t understand,’ he says, giving me a knowing wink.

  ‘They came to stay with us, and then they bought a cottage just near us. Right by the forestry land,’ Lucretia says, picking up the Betjeman story. The cottage didn’t have a bathroom at first, she adds, so the ennobled pair would come down to Ty-Caradog once a week for a hot bath.

  I enquire what caused the Betjemans to visit the area in the first place. As well as dinners, Lucretia used to offer bed and breakfast at home, she explains. Lady Betjeman spotted their advert in the Farm Holiday Book and wrote asking to make a reservation. They lived in Wantage in Oxfordshire, Lucretia recalls, impressed enough to have committed the fact to memory all these years. When Lucretia wrote back explaining that their farm was very humble, she received a letter saying ‘the humbler the better’.

  Simeon interrupts, reminding his mother how he had once made their famous guests a set of toasting forks. Does she remember? Shaped like a deck of cards, they were. She gives him an indulgent look.

  The subject then turns to Ian Fleming’s daughter, who lived near by, and to the tragic drowning of her husband and daughter. ‘Was it them who was buried on the farm?’ Simeon asks his mother after she finishes with the full tale. ‘No,’ she replies. ‘That was the next lot.’ Over the years, they have seen many people come and go, she reflects. ‘It’s difficult to keep track.’

  The remark provides the launch pad for mother and son to embark on a wider discussion about incomers. My ears prick up. Always moaning about something or other, Simeon says. About the boys having a ‘bit of a rip’ on their motorbikes or shooting cans with their air rifles. Or about the state of the footpaths. He views recreational walking as an imported, urbanite hobby. Footpaths originated as a means of travelling from A to B, he says. Not for rambling here and there.

  He has a point. Kilvert once meets a ‘humble cavalcade’ making their way up through the windy passes of the Black Mountains. The footsore group is led by an old basket maker, who has the reins to a mangy bay pony in one hand and the hand of his ‘stout rosy cheeked’ daughter in the other. An older, thinner daughter is bringing up the rear, holding a third chubby child on a donkey. Kilvert speaks with the basket maker and learns that he has another eight children at home and that he has walked all the way from Gloucestershire to ply his trade in Talgarth.

  On another occasion, the curate is out walking when he becomes mesmerised by a bank of heavy rain clouds that rolls across the valley and hides the mountaintops in a misty fog, before suddenly disappearing in a pillar of golden dark smoke. He watches as a single dazzling cloud lingers in the clear blue heavenly skies and the snowy peaks emerge, glittering so much that ‘no fuller on earth can white them’.

  Witnessing this wondrous spectacle unfold before him, he desperately wishes for someone to share it with but the only person around is a man on his carthorse, who appears entirely oblivious to the primrose light streaming in from the west and the cold grey tint creeping up in its wake, ‘quenching the rosy warmth which lingers still a few minutes on the summits’.

  Kilvert thinks to stop the man but suspects that he will think him mad, just as the basket man must have thought the sight of an adult man walking the mountain footpaths to no obvious end most bizarre. Not for the first time, I think back to t
he curious look of Tony’s wife when I turned up on her doorstep in my jogging gear.

  The oddity of rambling is the least of his worries, Simeon says, continuing with the theme of incomers. They try and ‘rule the place’, don’t they? That’s the main problem as he sees it. Well, go stir the fat somewhere else, is what he thinks. He has a good mind to buy a tank. ‘Then they’ll have to worry about keeping their cups of tea on the table.’ This time his mother doesn’t join in with his laughter.

  Lucretia is more moderate and empathetic in her sentiments. She doesn’t want to criticise and isn’t against people coming into the area. Some incomers contribute a great deal, she concedes. Why do they have to knock something down as soon as they arrive, though? This is something she simply can’t compute. Having modern ‘conveniences’ must be very important to them, she reasons. Of course, they think they are changing everything for the better. ‘Perhaps they are,’ she admits. ‘Still, the outcome is complete change.’

  Unsettled by the conclusion, she falls silent for a moment. When she finds her voice again, her tone is more placating. So many newcomers can be disorientating, she observes. People stop and ask where So-and-So lives, and half the time she doesn’t know.

  I assure her that all the locals I’ve met seem very friendly. The answer seems to satisfy her. Lucretia is a hill person, her whole life spent in the shadows of the Black Mountains. ‘We always say, the closer people are to the mountains, the friendlier they are.’ She amply proves her own point.

  In the hope of winning over a few credits for my incomer tribe, I cast my eye over the table for something to buy. I settle on some sugary cupcakes. ‘Six in a Bed’, the label reads. The name derives from a nursery rhyme Lucretia used to sing to her children when they were little, she explains.