Under the Tump

by Oliver Balch

  Simeon thinks it’s all very funny. He is grinning lewdly. So, for once, is Woody.

  *

  My attempts to locate Mr Bird at Hay’s livestock market are proving unsuccessful.

  None of the half-dozen old men sitting drinking tea around the plastic cafeteria table has heard of him. The two white-haired ladies serving hot drinks and bacon butties at the static hot-food stall can, they regret, offer no assistance either.

  The refectory area is positioned beside a semicircular pen which I take to be the show area for cattle sales. Access is via a narrow ginnel that runs off the high street, just beside Jones’s hardware store. The cramped passageway is easy to miss.

  I press on into the guts of Hay’s beleaguered livestock market, which is the shape of a large barn. Grey-tinged sunlight floods through the far end, which is open and which leads down to a yard. Two staggered rows of vertical steel girders run the length of the building, propping up the sloping tin roof. I imagined a sweet agricultural smell would pervade the place but it doesn’t. Instead it carries a clean, slightly caustic odour.

  Lining both sides of the enclosed market area are rows of twin-set pens. Only twelve are full this morning, putting the total number of ewes at no more than a hundred. The sheep occupy the bottom left-hand section, about eight or so to a pen.

  Out of the huddled mass of curly wool, the bald head of a ewe will occasionally poke up, her front hoofs perched on the back of a neighbour, swivelling her head a couple of times to get a lay of the land, the panic in her eyes increasing. Bleating, she then slips back into the throng, knowing her number is up, knowing all their numbers are up.

  A man in a flat cap and muddy overalls is standing by one of the pens, his foot on the lower rail, elbows resting on the top one as he leans in and sizes up the sheep with an expert eye. I ask if he knows Mr Bird. He doesn’t. I’d be best speaking with the auctioneer, he suggests. I enquire where I’d find him and he points to the exit where the light is streaming through. ‘Down the ramp there.’ I follow his directions.

  I find Rob Meadmore in a square wooden shed reminiscent of a cricket scorer’s hut. The shed has a large glassless window at the front, behind which Rob is seated on an office chair next to another man. The cricket analogy is apt, given how similar the auctioneer looks to an umpire, with his white lab coat and diagonal-striped tie. The only major anomaly is his wellington boots.

  ‘What can I help you with, young man?’ he asks, his manner breezy and personable, two qualities of all successful salespeople.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Bird,’ I say.

  His forehead scrunches. ‘Mr Bird,’ I repeat, explaining that he’s the father of a friend of mine. Farmed around Clyro for a long time? I hint. Often comes along on a Thursday?

  ‘Mr Bird,’ the bemused auctioneer says quizzically. ‘Now, are you sure you’ve got the right name?’

  Then it dawns on me. My friend Mary is a Bird by marriage. I rack my brains for her maiden name. ‘Price, sorry, not Bird. Mr Price,’ I say, correcting myself. Prices proliferate in the Marches, much like Williamses and Davises, Nichollses and Lloyds. Regrettably, I can’t recall his first name.

  ‘Clyro, you say?’ The auctioneer looks pensive. ‘Well, that’d have to be Mervyn Price, then. Used to farm up at Penlan?’ That’s the one, I tell him, thinking of Mary’s whitewashed farmhouse above the village. ‘He’s got a place over on the Cradoc side of Brecon now,’ Rob tells me. ‘Not sure if he has any land that way or not. His son David farms out Presteigne way.’ But, no, sorry, he hasn’t seen him yet today.

  A middle-aged farmer strides over from the parking area below the shed. ‘Hello, Rob,’ says the auctioneer, addressing his namesake. ‘You doing all right?’ The man, who is dressed in a green hoodie with the words ‘Erwood YFC’ printed on the back, shrugs his shoulders. ‘You tell me,’ he says. ‘How am I set to do today?’ The auctioneer assures him he’ll get the best price he can for him.

  ‘He farms between Hay and Builth, does Rob. One of them that took over from his dad, see,’ the auctioneer explains, as the farmer makes his way up to the pens. ‘He sells a bit in Builth, but I see him most weeks this time of year.’

  Another farmer approaches the shed door and commences a hushed discussion with Rob about a private matter. I turn to the second man in the shed, whose long face is matted with a grey and white peppery beard. He is wearing what look like fishing waders.

  He’s the grader, he tells me in a strong North Wales accent. I ask what a grader is and he patiently explains that it falls to him to assess the quality of the sheep and weigh them before they enter the market. Then he asks how much I weigh. I tell him that my fighting weight is seventy-three kilos. ‘A welterweight then,’ he replies, smiling.

  It turns out that the flat iron sheet that I took to be the floor is actually the grader’s scales. He presses a button in the shed and an electronic figure flashes up on a monitor above him. Seventy-eight kilos. My bag is heavy, I tell him. He laughs a deep, chortling laugh.

  ‘How many sheep do you typically get in?’ I ask, wondering if today’s showing up in the pens is typical.

  More than this, usually, he says. ‘We’re very quiet because the trade has gone down.’ He provides a string of reasons for the dip. A strong pound against the euro. Low consumer confidence post-recession. Trade restrictions against Russia. Greece. It’s simple economics, he notes. ‘Supply and demand.’

  Rob finishes his conversation and turns back to us. I ask what he expects the sheep to fetch today. Somewhere between seventy and seventy-five pounds for the best lambs, he says without hesitation. It was a tenner higher last week. ‘But this week, unfortunately, they’ve gone to where they’ve gone to.’

  He looks gloomy. Realistically, he needs about three times as much stock just to break even. Besides that, there’s only one buyer, he tells me, nodding towards a balding thickset man in a sleeveless black fleece top who is kicking his heels next to the nearby holding pens.

  Rob isn’t about to give in to despondency. Hay has two high-street butchers, he informs me, both of which take five or ten lambs a week off him. They always want the very best, so in his market report he’s able to say that he sold ‘such and such number of lambs at top dollar’.

  I take the opportunity to ask him what I’d planned to ask Mr Price, about the old days of the livestock market. Traditionally, the stalls that Andy spends his pre-dawn hours erecting would have played second fiddle to the real business of selling cows and sheep, geese and pigs.

  Rob takes a deep breath. ‘Way back, the farmers would have driven their sheep and cattle off the hills and sold them in Broad Street. Mind, that was a long time ago, decades back now.’

  I’d heard that everyone used to congregate in the town’s pubs after the business of the market was over and I enquire if the custom still persists. The auctioneer gives me a wistful look. I’d have to go back to the 1970s for that. Three or four times a year the farmers might get together to ‘have a bean’, as he puts it, but today most of the socialising is done in the market itself. ‘It’s more work running a farm these days,’ he reasons.

  Trade was certainly busier when he started out. Three thousand six hundred ewes they had one Thursday, he recalls. Many hill farmers have ‘gone out of sheep’, he adds, opting to rent out their land or turn it to the plough.

  ‘You remember Garlands, where the Owenses are now,’ he says, turning his head to the grader. ‘There would be two or three hundred lambs a week from there at one stage …’ He doesn’t continue the sentence.

  I take out my notebook and ask what other factors he feels influence the fluctuations in the market’s success. Seeing as I’m going to be writing it down, he says, he best give it some thought. He rubs his chin.

  Competition between markets is probably the biggest factor, he reckons. In Hay, they deal exclusively in ‘fat lambs’, while Hereford trades across the whole spectrum. ‘You can sell old cull ewes, ewes that are worn out, you can sell store
lambs, you can buy user lambs – “couples” they call them – you can sell fat lambs and all that,’ Rob says. Not that the prices are any higher, he insists, but he recognises that Hereford has become increasingly popular and that a ‘crowd draws a crowd’.

  Reminded of my conversation with Woko, I ask about selling direct to the slaughterhouse. Rob winces, his red complexion darkening a fraction. Hateful places, he spits. They offer a set price, so he understands why farmers go. To his mind, however, slaughterhouses strip the trade of its aesthetic and relational underpinnings. Farmers become mere ‘producers’. Livestock, ‘red meat’.

  Of course, the livestock market is ultimately about business too. People come to buy and sell, Rob concedes. Yet the social ambit in which these transactions occur is, in his opinion, almost as important as the transactions themselves. ‘I think it does farmers good to come out and talk about what’s going on,’ he says, and points up to the pens above where the old men from the cafeteria have now begun to congregate. ‘Even if all some of them do is grumble.’

  The auctioneer’s words strike a sudden chord with me. Ever since arriving in the Marches, I’ve been looking for a magic formula, a recipe for levering my way into the community and helping me feel as though I belong. What if the answer is easier than I thought? What if it has nothing to do with social networking or assimilation strategies, behavioural patterns or character types? What if it’s as straightforward as Rob suggests: the simple act of spending time in other people’s company, of talking and listening, of showing interest in one another’s lives?

  Rob casts an eye down to my notebook and recommends that I include the auctioneer’s enthusiasm among my reasons for the market’s ups and downs. When the auctioneer is young, he’s busy phoning everybody up and trade is consequently good. When he gets old and knackered, it all goes down and he gets a hundred sheep instead of a thousand.

  The example comes out sounding closer to the bone than he had perhaps intended. ‘We’re not knackered, are we?’ he half-jokes, looking to his colleague. The Welshman beside him merely grunts.

  Well, it’s been nice chatting, Rob says. But I’ll have to excuse him now. There’s some sheep need auctioning. He opens the shed door and walks towards the pens, his wellington boots padding silently on the concrete ramp.

  *

  Leaving the livestock market, I head up the narrow alleyway and emerge back onto the high street. It’s the mid-morning-coffee hour, and I find the three ladies jabbering away at their usual table. Through the partition doorway, first on the left. Their mugs of watery coffee are still hot.

  Ann is sitting at the far end, presiding. She has twisted the chair side-on to the table. Spanning the wall opposite her is a syrupy lakeside scene painted entirely in shades of purple. The picture is dominated by the image of a wooden pontoon, which stretches out across lilac waters towards a damson sunset.

  Against the wall is a set of stairs that heads down to a basement lavatory. The projection of the staircase matches that of the pontoon, only angling down rather than up. Their mirror imaging seems as though it might hold a meaning, although it beats me what it is.

  Ann’s repositioning of the chair sets her square-on to Pat and thus directly in line with her better ear. Next to Pat, at the other end of the table from Ann, sits Cynthia.

  Ann and Pat live on Castle Estate in Clyro, a hundred yards or so up from my house. Ann has a bungalow, and Pat a small flat. Both properties are owned by the council. Ann is on at them to come and clear a patch of overgrown scrub by the road, but so far to no avail.

  Cynthia is their friend from Llowes. She has maintenance worries too. Her lawn is in danger of falling into the brook at the end of her garden. Because she owns her house, it is her husband who is being badgered to sort it out. From the way she tells it, her petitions are falling on equally deaf ears.

  They welcome me as I come in, lifting up their coffee mugs as if they were tankards of beer. Pat makes room for me on the corner and I pull up a chair between her and Cynthia. My back, fortunately, is to the arresting melange of purple that is the dusk-lit lake.

  ‘You all right then, pet?’ Pat asks. She usually calls me ‘pet’.

  Then Ann insists on introducing me to Cynthia although we must have met half a dozen times already. Not only on market day for coffee: our paths crossed when Ann invited me to the indoor bowls night at Clyro village hall. We’ve also run into each other at the gates of school, where Cynthia’s grandson and my boys are classmates.

  Still, Ann likes to introduce me whenever she can. It gives her proprietary rights over me. I don’t mind this. In fact, she’s developed a set patter for her introduction. It starts with my name and the fact that we’re neighbours, which gives her the opportunity to say I live in Pottery Cottage.

  Because the house is on the Hay road, most people know it. Then she’ll say, ‘Ah, I can remember some good times we had in there,’ referring back to when her friends Ken and Eileen Hughes used to own the cottage thirty-something years ago. But she won’t go into details, she’ll say, for the sake of propriety. Her whole manner, however, invites the opposite.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course you’ve met,’ Ann says. ‘And how are we today?’ she then asks. ‘And those little boys of yours?’

  I assure both Pat and Ann that all is well on every front, and double check that I’m not interrupting them. I never am. At least, they never imply as much.

  The three are women of habit. Monday is bowls night (‘Seven-thirty, immediately after Emmerdale’). Tuesday, bingo. Wednesday, a day trip to Hereford. And Thursday is market day in Hay. Pat remembers it as a child. Cynthia too. Ann, in contrast, grew up going to the market in Builth. She’s a latecomer to Hay in that respect.

  The ladies meet at the back of Isis every week, between ten thirty and ten forty-five. ‘If I wasn’t there, they’d wonder where I am,’ says Ann. It’s one of her favourite phrases. Nor is it exclusive to the market. She trots it out before every bowls match, for example, and in the run-up to every farming-related funeral for ten square miles.

  The expression also crops up in reference to the local summer fairs, especially Erwood and Builth, although here the phrase is extended to ‘If I wasn’t there with my Welsh cakes, they’d wonder …’

  Isis is half shop, half café. It enjoys a prime spot along the main high street, located between an outdoor store and the old electricity board office (now a homeware shop). The retail part of Isis occupies the front section of the building and has two large windows looking out onto the pavement.

  Its shelves are sparsely stocked with quartz-like minerals, crystals, wood carvings, conches, beads and other paraphernalia of a loosely Eastern origin. Greetings cards, umbrellas and plastic helter-skelter tubes called ‘spiral spinners’ are also for sale. Two large, randomly situated sofas cover much of the floor space on one side of the shop. I presume these are an overflow from the café at the back, although they could just as easily be for sale.

  Ever since Islamic militants started wreaking havoc around the world, people have speculated if the café’s owners will change the name from Isis. So far, they haven’t. Perhaps they figure they were here first. Whatever, their determination pleases me, for it keeps alive a fantasy I entertain of the three retirees meeting every week to plot a caliphate in the Marches.

  Saying that, the café name’s murderous associations appear entirely lost on the ladies. When I first asked Pat about her Thursday coffee date, she couldn’t recall what the place was called. ‘Whatchamacallit,’ she’d said. The truth is, none of them have ever really paid much notice to the name above the door.

  ‘Barry Gibbons’ place, is what we all know it as,’ Pat had said.

  ‘Right,’ I’d replied hesitantly. ‘And, sorry, but who is Barry Gibbons?’

  She looked at me quizzically for a moment, then said, ‘Well, you know Chrissy Gibbons?’ The inference was that I should. I didn’t. ‘Well, he’s Chrissy’s nephew.’

  This piece of information
didn’t really help me progress any further. Pat guessed my confusion. ‘Chrissy … you know, from the butcher’s on the high street,’ she pressed. I knew the butcher’s, but thought it was run by Geraldine. I told Pat as much. It is now, she’d said, clarifying that Chrissy used to run it for years beforehand. Geraldine is Chrissy’s daughter. She took over from him.

  ‘Him?’ I ask. ‘Yes, Chrissy, Chris, you know,’ she said.

  ‘So Chrissy is retired?’ I’m confused.

  ‘Yes,’ Pat answered.

  ‘So he doesn’t work at the butcher’s?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not any more. He passed away not so long ago, in fact.’

  At that point, I gave up.

  We eventually nailed the café’s location by another route. ‘The place that sells them lovely stones,’ she explained. ‘You know, the one opposite the new greengrocer’s.’

  The greengrocer is called Stuart, a splendid English gent who dresses in lustrously coloured corduroy trousers and wears the handlebar moustache of a duke. After a decade or more trading in Hay, ‘new’ isn’t exactly a word I’d identify with him. Yet the elasticity of time is something I’m slowly learning from the ladies.

  I put myself in Pat’s shoes. She grew up buying her vegetables from Tony Pugh the Grocer, who also doubled as a fishmonger, collecting his daily produce from the morning train and storing it in his own ice house. Over the last half-century, she’s probably seen half a dozen shops come and go in what is now the greengrocer’s. On that timeline, Stuart quite reasonably qualifies as ‘new’.

  As for the café, the stones rather than the greengrocer’s proved the real giveaway. Even in a market town as independent and eclectic as Hay, the high street has space for only one charm seller.

  Chrissy’s nephew Barry is a thin, affable man with a ponytail. As often as not, he’s out smoking on the street rather than serving behind the counter. The ladies are fond of him and, as Thursday morning regulars, he gives them a client reduction. Whenever I join them, I qualify for the ‘ladies’ rate’ too.