Under the Tump

by Oliver Balch

  Of the three women, I know Ann best. Most weeks she’ll pop round for a cup of tea and a catch-up. She wears thick fleece garments and has a fondness for pink lipstick on special occasions.

  Born just before the outbreak of World War II, Ann grew up in the hills above Erwood. She moved down into the village itself aged ten when her father died and her mother had to give up the farm. Born ‘Wilkins’ (‘“Wilks”, some folk still call me’), she married a Jones. His first name was Derek.

  There’s another Derek Jones who lives just outside Clyro, as it happens. Ann and her husband used to rent some grazing land off him. ‘No relation, mind,’ she clarifies, preempting the question asked of every Jones across Wales.

  Ann and her husband spent most of their married life on a farm in Cwmbach, a small hamlet above Glasbury-on-Wye. With the holding came another name, ‘Ann the Cwm’. They rented the land from the council at an affordable rate and kept a mix of beef cows and sheep. Belgian Blues were always her favourite breed of heifer. ‘A beautiful animal is a Belgian Blue.’ As for ewes, they used to rear Texel crosses and Suffolk crosses, although she never took to sheep as she did to cows.

  She moved to Clyro twelve years ago. Her husband didn’t retire so much as slow down. They sold twenty-seven cows at auction, each of which went for about £700. ‘That wasn’t a bad price back then,’ she assures me. I do the maths. It strikes me as precious little from a life’s labours but, along with her state pension, it sees her through.

  None of her four children – three boys and a girl – has opted to follow her into farming. One of her boys is a scientist, researching cures for cancer. He lives near London.

  Another runs a pub in Carmarthen. The third is a builder in nearby Kington. Her daughter works for the outdoor store Mountain Warehouse, doing what exactly Ann isn’t sure. Marketing, she thinks. Anyway, her daughter gave her some rubber-soled shoes for Mothers’ Day. They match her lipstick. Ann is overjoyed with them.

  Alongside farming, Ann worked for the Milk Marketing Board for many years. She would visit dairy farms up and down the Wye valley, taking milk samples for quality-control and billing purposes. She’d always tarry a while, meaning few people had a better handle on everyday goings-on than Ann. Who was looking to sell some ground; whose kids were playing truant; whose marriage was on the rocks; who had a problem with the bottle and was knocking his wife about. She knew it all.

  Ann’s grapevine today is less salacious. Now, all the flings and fistfights are a generation or two removed. It’s So-and-So’s daughter who’s run off with Such-and-Such, or Someone’s grandson who’s taken up with You Know Who. For the ladies, the talk of the town now concentrates mostly on mutual ailments and pending funerals.

  Pat’s block of flats is immediately opposite Ann’s bungalow. She has one of the two bottom-floor apartments, which she shares with several dozen cats, one real, the others porcelain. The feline miniatures crowd the mantelpiece and sideboards in her living room. Pat lost her only son, Gareth, to alcoholism when he was in his thirties. He used to work ‘at the Rover’ in Solihull. Her husband found him dead on the bed, the TV remote in his hand.

  She has an enlarged passport photo of Gareth hanging on the wall in her front room. His ex-work colleagues sent it to her. The tragedy still takes a huge toll on her emotionally. Pat suffers from hip and back problems too, which cause her to waddle and stoop simultaneously. Lately, she’s taken to using a stick to keep her balance.

  Of the three, Pat is the only one who actually grew up in Hay. She moved here in 1948 when she was six years old. She was a war baby, she tells me with pride. She lived in her nan’s house, a two-bedroom terrace along Chancery Lane, close to where the town library now stands. Her mother, who divorced soon after Pat’s third birthday and was one of ten children, had grown up in the same house. The house was knocked down in the late sixties to make way for the library, the zinc roof of its outdoor privy still visible in the wall of the adjoining car park.

  Just after her nineteenth birthday, Pat went out for a night on the town with her mum. The pair went to the Mason’s Arms along the high street as they always did. It was there, on the front step, that she first clocked eyes on her Barry (not Barry Gibbons, a different Barry). He was down from Birmingham, visiting family. The two hit it off and married shortly afterwards.

  Her mum had chided her that she might meet the man of her dreams before they left the house that night. Pat puts great stock by the comment, as though ‘our Barry’ was predestined and her subsequent move to his home city was written in the stars. Over the years, her soft Marcher accent gave way to an unmistakable Brummie drawl. She calls me ‘bab’ as well as ‘pet’ and asks for ‘elbow of pork’ at the butcher’s rather than ‘belly of pork’.

  Pat worked as a cleaner in a factory for twenty-seven years. The company manufactured paraffin lamps, mostly, plus a few other household objects. They made her redundant at the age of sixty-one, the day after her summer holiday break. She was upset at the time, but it gave her an excuse to move back to Hay. She persuaded Barry that the country air would be better for them in retirement. So when Barry’s pension kicked in and the flat came up in Clyro, they took it. Things didn’t work out as Pat had hoped. Four years later, after a short illness, Barry died.

  The Mason’s Arms is long gone (it’s now a Spar), although the step is still there. I once happened on Pat standing right on the spot. She was leaning on her stick, looking blankly out at the street. Loaf of bread in hand, she seemed in no rush to move on. An expression of profound distance clouded her face, whether inspired by pleasure or pain I couldn’t tell. Both, very probably.

  A little before Barry passed away, Ann’s Derek died too. The two drew on each other in their grief. Together with Dot, a mutual friend from the village whose husband also died around the same time, they jokingly refer to themselves as the ‘Merry Widows of Clyro’. They attend the same social events, go on outings together and generally look out for one another.

  Pat doesn’t drive, so Ann ferries them both around. On market day, Ann will pick up Pat in her palatinate blue Toyota SUV and they’ll head into town together. They park in the main car park, where Ann nabs a disabled spot nearest the exit. Heart condition, she tells me when she sees me looking at her blue badge.

  From the car park, the two then make their way down to Isis to meet Cynthia. Sometimes Gwyneth, who used to run the petrol station in Clyro, joins them as well. She’s not here today, which leads to a minute or two’s speculation about where she is and how she’s faring.

  In her late sixties, Cynthia is noticeably younger than Pat and Ann. She’s the sparkiest too, quick to joke and poke fun, and even quicker to laugh. Ann and Cynthia used to work together at a nearby Outward Bound centre. Like Pat, they were both employed as cleaners. ‘Seventeen years and never a cross word between us,’ Ann likes to say. To which Cynthia always raises her eyebrows and smiles wanly.

  This morning, all the talk is of education. Powys Council has announced that it is to close the nearby secondary school in Three Cocks and move all the pupils to a new combined campus in Brecon. Cynthia thinks it’s a disgrace. They did the same with all the small village primary schools, she notes. The council puts them on warning, so the parents take their children out, then there aren’t enough children to keep the schools open.

  Pat used to go to Gwernyfed, the secondary school in question, she interjects. She went back just the other week for a car boot sale. In her day she remembers there being gardening and country dancing and pageants and all manner of sports on offer. ‘I said to Lizzy’s daughter. Do you do this? Do you do that? And she said no,’ Pat recounts. Gwernyfed used to have a farm when she was growing up, Cynthia recalls. And Clyro school had a milking parlour, Pat adds.

  The conversation oscillates back and forth over the next thirty minutes, flitting between affairs present and memories past, always localising the national, always personalising the local.

  Having exhausted the topic of education
(‘P. G. Davis was the headmaster,’ says Ann. ‘“Pig” we used to call him’), it moves onto the council’s plans to build a new community centre (Pat will believe it when she sees it), then to other new housing developments in the area and thence to the problems of affordable housing, pensions and the upcoming Budget, then to Ann overpaying the electricity people and getting a refund, followed by the price of petrol, Pat’s hospital trip and that poor boy from Brecon who died skiing, and to Tom Edwards’s funeral, until finally someone notes the time and Ann says they’d best be off and Barry Gibbons comes over to collect the empty mugs.

  We traipse out. The portended rain has arrived as a nasty, gusty drizzle. The ladies lift the hoods of their jackets. Cynthia says her farewells and scampers off, keen to complete her chores and get back home. Ann and Pat dawdle longer, discussing what they plan to do next and arranging when they’ll meet back at the car. Twelve thirty is the agreed time.

  Ann is heading in the direction of Memorial Square. I’m hungry and anxious to get to Bernie’s in the Cheese Market before she sells out, so I suggest strolling down with her.

  ‘Ta-ra then, pet,’ says Pat, who also has some jobs to do. I say goodbye and she steps gingerly off the pavement and waddles across the street, her stick tap-tap-tapping in time with the rain on our jacket hoods.

  Walking with Ann turns out to be a sociable experience. Within the first seventy yards, she has already exchanged greetings with three elderly acquaintances. Each time, she says hello, asks after their health, mentions the weather and then moves on. I’m also introduced. By the time we reach the market stalls in Memorial Square, we’re up to ten. At least twenty-five minutes have passed.

  I’m taken aback by how many people she knows and, after each interaction, I pester her to tell me more about them. She obliges my curiosity only too happily. So I learn, for example, that Trevor Price is also known as ‘Trevor the Lorries’, ‘because he used to drive all the stock lorries’. And that Peggy Smith used to run the post office in Glasbury. And that the mother of Ted Williams, who drives the Highway Maintenance truck parked by the bank, lives out by her childhood home in Erwood. And that Mrs Venables, who farmed up in the hills for years and years, has now moved to one of the almshouses in town, ‘and, oh, she loves it there’. And that Judith from Llanigon ‘parted company’ with her husband and that her ex-mother-in-law has a place in Clyro.

  A few are even related to her. So Annie, the blind lady sitting in a car whom Ann salutes by banging on the passenger door window, turns out to be her sister-in-law. The man beside Annie is Mervyn, her husband, whom people always used to mistake for Ann’s brother because they grew up on neighbouring farms. ‘Not as far as I know, he’s not,’ she tells me. And then there’s Jill, who has a shop in town and whose granddaughter, as she informs us at length, seems worryingly lackadaisical about her GCSE revision. Jill is Ann’s niece, the daughter of her now deceased sister, Barbara.

  Not all her encounters are so serendipitous. We pop into PSM, the outdoor store, for example, to say hello to the daughter-in-law of Hilda, who lives near to Ann on Castle Estate. Then we make a detour into St Michael’s Hospice charity shop to meet Lynn, who lives up on the Begwyns. Lynn always puts aside a small selection of beads and glass and other bits of broken jewellery for Ann’s Thursday afternoon art-and-craft group. Later, after we part, she’ll stop by at the Red Cross outlet as well, where Monica, an ex-neighbour when they were both recently married, occasionally volunteers.

  When we reach Memorial Square itself, Ann makes a beeline for Craig the Veg. She buys what she always buys, one pound’s worth of grapes and three bananas. ‘The usual, darling?’ the stallholder says as her turn in the queue comes round. He says the same every week and it tickles Ann enormously.

  Other than fruit, I ask what she purchases. Nothing, she tells me. Not even a little fish? I suggest. She’s ‘not a fish person’, she informs me, and then embarks on a long story about once being given a salmon by an angler and not having the least idea how to cook it.

  Cheese? Meat? Veg? I go through the other options available at the market. No, she says to each in turn. She does her weekly food shop at the Co-op. Why would she need to purchase anything at the market?

  It is then that it dawns on me. The contents of the market stalls are almost incidental to Ann’s Thursday trips. Traders could put what they liked on Andy’s tables and she’d still come. Japanese kimonos or children’s slippers, it wouldn’t matter.

  As Rob the Auctioneer rightly observed, a crowd draws a crowd. Well, Ann is that crowd. She’s a constituent member, a loyal affiliate. Hidden amid all the bustle, there are shoulders to bump against and conversations to be had. This refreshing of acquaintances, this catching up with friends, this is what keeps her coming back.

  For two hours on a Thursday morning, it’s not her alone in her bungalow. She’s part of something bigger, something to which she feels a connection, something that will wonder where she is if she doesn’t show.

  Ann’s list isn’t entirely empty. She has to go to the newsagent’s to pick up the Hereford Times for Sibyl and Dennis, who live in the next door bungalow to her. They’re too infirm to get about these days. And Angie, another neighbour, has asked her to pick up a pound of sausages and a pound of bacon from the butcher’s. Ann raises her eyebrows at the mention of this second request. Angie is a stick of a woman, she tells me. ‘Where’s she going to put it all?’

  Not everyone is like Ann. There’s plenty of buying done on market day too. Later on, I hang around the Cheese Market for the best part of an hour, chatting to Bernie after wolfing down the last of her moreish steak pasties.

  Despite the bad weather, which has grown progressively worse during the morning, trade is relatively brisk. By noon, all Bernie’s muffins and chorizo pizza slices and Caerphilly pies are sold out. In her hot pot, which bubbles on a camping stove, only a ladle or two of stew remains. Once that has gone, her lunchtime customers will be down to choosing from the last few salmon quiches, sausage rolls and goat’s cheese tarts.

  The pace at 100% Hay is slower. Joe absents himself at one stage, leaving Tree the Coffee Roaster to cover for him. But sales still tick along and, just before packing up, his day is salvaged by a young woman carrying a Bag for Life who clears him out of asparagus, beans and tomatoes. For good measure, she buys some spuds, onions, lemon grass and sweet peppers too. He’ll leave happy.

  Shopping and socialising are not mutually exclusive. Despite the weather, almost every customer stops to talk. One moment Bernie is advising a middle-aged lady about switching gas providers, the next she’s sharing cough remedies with an elderly gentleman.

  Joe, meanwhile, talks chilli types with the new chef at Kilvert’s Inn, a pub in the centre of town, then earnestly explains to a young mum why his sweetcorns won’t be ready for another month (‘We try not to buy anything in,’ he explains. ‘It’s all about seasonality, you see’).

  Below the Cheese Market, in Shepherd’s ice-cream parlour, the tables are full with groups of coffee drinkers. Several of his regulars place their orders first, Joe explains, then come back later once their coffee dates are done. Bernie is the same, advising one of her customers to text her if he’s busy and she’ll put a muffin aside for him.

  Ann never goes in the Cheese Market, so we go our separate ways at the entrance. Before we do, however, my eye catches a box of old LPs at the end of a table. The table is pushed up against the building’s outer wall, just beside the door to the upstairs holiday flat. It’s full of Tom’s spillover bric-a-brac and small-scale junk.

  I start flicking through the box, asking Ann if she recognises the artists. Connie Francis, Frankie Vaughan, Tammy Wynette, Max Bygraves, Jimmy Young, Eddie Arnold. She very much does, she says, and moves next to my shoulder to see the album covers for herself.

  I turn over the next record sleeve and a young Tom Jones stares back. She places a hand on her chest and pretends to swoon. It’s a compilation of the Welsh heart-throb’s greatest
hits. She’s got every single one of them, she tells me. ‘Thunderball’. ‘Delilah’. ‘Love Me Tonight’. On vinyl, and on CD.

  Five times she’s gone to see him live in concert. Five times! She holds up her palm, each finger purposefully outstretched. Five times! I ask what her favourite track is. Her answer zings back without a second thought. ‘Why, “Green, Green Grass of Home”, of course.’

  6

  The Festival Crowds

  Hay Flower Show, the first they have had, a very successful one. A nice large tent, the poles prettily wreathed with hop vine, and the flowers fruit and vegetables prettily arranged. There was an excursion train from Builth to Hay for the occasion. The town was hung with flags. The whole country was there.

  Kilvert’s Diary, 30 August 1870

  At the guide’s direction, our tour group skirts around the base of Hay Castle along a muddy path towards the ancient keep. Open to the air, the ruined tower stands four storeys high and is sprouting with Virginia creepers. Below the foliage, a spectral cloak of lichen green spreads across the structure’s mottled stone skin.

  Two old ladies are edging along in front of me. Both grasp the metal grille fencing that runs beside the narrow walkway as though fearful of being buffeted off the castle bank. They are wearing slip-on shoes with flat soles that gather a coating of wet butternut mud around the trim as they shuffle along. Ahead is a young couple with a child of seven or eight. Dressed in rain macs and sensible outdoor clothing, they stand in the drizzle as the old ladies approach. The father pulls a smartphone from his pocket and, with determined holiday cheer, says, ‘Smile’. His wife obliges. His daughter, on the other hand, scrunches her face into a ferret-like moue.