Under the Tump
Page 20
A menacing bank of cloud appears on the horizon. It rumbles in from the west, tracking the course of the Wye, bearing down on the chimney-pot hats of Hay. The young father looks over his daughter’s shoulder, staring forlornly at the middle distance and the long afternoon ahead.
Once we’re all assembled, the guide draws our attention to the arched gateway at the bottom of the keep. Two ancient timber doors guard the entrance, above which is a sluiced groove for the portcullis. As the guide begins a long explanation about dendrological tests and renovation plans, I turn to look at the town below. The stormy weather has lasted two days now. Ahead of this latest front, however, a speck of glacial blue has broken through, a lone and lovely tarn amid a mountain of cloud. I watch as a rare shaft of sunlight burnishes the sopping town, bouncing off the puddles and painting the rooftops with a joyous sheen.
The tour group moves off around the corner and I decide it’s time to slip away. The morning visit is almost up and my need for coffee is stronger than my desire to learn any more about carbon dating or battlement design.
Below the castle, next to the car park where the Thursday market is held, is a walled lawn. The furthest side runs along the main high street and has a small doorway opening out onto the pavement. On the castle-facing side of the wall are three or four open shelves cluttered with titles that the town’s second-hand booksellers can’t shift. Tatty textbooks predominate; redundant monographs such as Using Windows 98 and An Introduction to the Yugoslav Economy. Payment is via a rusty, red deposit box embedded in the wall. Today, however, the honesty bookshop is largely hidden by the colourful awnings of food stands and their chalked-up menu boards. The temporary fair looks inwards to a huddle of trestle tables and benches in the centre of the lawn.
It is late May and the annual Hay Festival of Literature and Arts is now in full flow. For weeks the town’s shopkeepers have been perfecting their window displays and dusting down their stock. Busy hands have been scrubbing floors and making calls. Suppliers delivering double orders. Shop assistants clocking overtime.
Well over 100,000 visitors will flood to the town over the ten days of the event. Pop-up bars pop up. The restaurants and pubs fill to overflowing. Even the Groucho Club gets in on the act, taking up residency in the castle’s Jacobean wing.
As the festival progresses, I’m slowly working my way through my envelope of event tickets. For weeks they have sat on my desk, brimming with advent promise. I opted for a mix of writers; some well known, some less so. With each torn stub I find the world looks a smidgen different, its possibilities a fraction broader than before.
As well as the ‘real business’ of talks and panel discussions, the festival is marked by dinners and after-parties, book launches and lunches. Night One, we’d been out at an exhibition opening. Night Two was a soirée hosted by a magazine editor. Last night, the Globe put on a live set.
Day Four and my energies are beginning to flag. My city self has grown sluggish, its ability to work hard and play hard dimmed. This surprises me slightly. As does my reaction to Hay’s sudden transformation, which oscillates between irrepressible excitement one minute and frustration the next.
Part of me is elated that the outside world has landed on our doorstep. For a brief window in late spring, everywhere I turn there are urbanites like me. People I sense I’ve seen before, folk I feel I might know.
Simultaneously, part of me recoils. Like Woko, I feel invaded. Some traitorous wretch has spilled word of our rural haven and now legions of out-of-towners have arrived, overrunning the place with their unmuddied cars and city manners.
Of the two emotions, I secretly relish the second more. It makes me feel as though I’ve crossed an invisible line, that I’m now vested enough in this place to get possessive about it, to become jealous about sharing it, even. It gives me a frisson of pleasure, this sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’, locals and outsiders. I have never felt it before.
Yet, at the same time, I realise these sentiments are neither pleasant nor uncomplicated. I was a visitor once, after all, content to treat the town as a mere backdrop to my own pleasure, a place that – for a weekend at least – wasn’t the city. Some will think me a visitor still, my invisible line an act of mistaken presumption.
I can’t ignore the pull I feel towards this invading army too. I may have tried to split off from them, to put myself at a distance, but they remain my tribe. The Rhydspence crowd simply avoid Hay for a fortnight, turn their backs on the whole rigmarole. I wish I could too. But I feel drawn in, a moth to a flame.
Emma suffers none of this angst. She simply throws herself into whatever social circle she finds. Local, outsider, humanoid, Martian, she doesn’t care, doesn’t even think about it. She can’t understand my interest in the question of belonging and not belonging. To her mind, it’s immaterial, inconsequential.
I wonder if Kilvert would agree. Intimately attached as he was to the Marches, his life encompassed a host of people and places beyond it too. He seemed to straddle this division without problem. So, as in 1875, during a May week like this one, he could spend time with his parents in Wiltshire, take in a show at London’s Haymarket Theatre, wander around the Belgian gallery at the International Exhibition and still be back in Clyro to celebrate Mrs Venables’s birthday with his parishioners and to check whether the bog beans below Gwernfydden were yet in flower.
It helped that Kilvert had a job specific to the locality. This gave him a very particular purpose for being here, not to mention a clear mandate for involving himself in community life. He also brought with him to the countryside an idealised pastoral aesthetic, his own private Wordsworthian wonderland. And naturally, as with all of us, he saw what he wanted to see. Sweet damp air. Cool fresh lanes. Mellow afternoon sunlight. Everything so ‘sweet and still and pure’, especially when compared to the ‘dust and crowd and racket of the town’.
Our expectations of a place inextricably impact our experience of it. The same is true of ‘community’, the physical appearance of which is coloured and ultimately captured by what we preconceive it to be. We try to build the communities of our imaginations and, once built, whether soundly or shoddily, we strive to see them as we first imagined them. Yet what if people come with different concepts of where they are and what they expect of it? I had come looking for the ‘knit’ of which Updike spoke. What binds people to one another and to this place? How do they weave together? What are their individual stitches and what is mine? These are the issues that interest me and thus the lens through which I see.
Others bring with them alternative motivations and therefore divergent viewpoints. For Emma, moving here is all about embracing the new: the making of discoveries, the kick-starting of projects, the striking up of friendships. Kilvert’s inclinations lay elsewhere again. The pages of his diary – indeed, the very idea of keeping one – reveal a deep thirst for beauty, and in beauty a quest for love, and, perhaps, in love a pursuit of the divine.
I ponder these thoughts as I make my way down a flight of flagstone steps towards the food stalls in search of coffee. If true in any measure, the need for fellow citizens to talk and listen to one another is more imperative than ever. How else can consensus emerge about what and whether community might be?
A wooden handrail accompanies the stairs. It’s damp and clammy to the touch. Simon and Garfunkel greet me as I descend. Fat Charlie the Archangel wants no part of this crazy love. A mini sound-system on the counter on the PommePomme Foods van lays bare his lyrical secret. Inside, a man with a pitch-black beard that matches his pitch-black spectacles is busy grating cheese.
Across at Parsnipship, beneath the chalkboard advert for bulgur wheat salad and beetroot bomblets, an irritable conversation is taking place. At issue is an empty gas cylinder. ‘I closed the valve, honest,’ says a man on the defensive. ‘You couldn’t have,’ a hostile, supervisory voice responds. The argument bats back and forth. ‘Ah, bugger,’ says one. ‘Just forget it,’ says the other. The stove won’t light.
The vegan pakoras and chickpea burgers remain uncooked.
The sight of a stainless-steel coffee machine, its silver cylinders steaming, sets me on a beeline to Love Patisseries. I pass the seasonally inspired flavours on offer at the Cothi Valley Ice-Cream stall without breaking stride. Welsh honey, stem ginger, vanilla and saffron flavours, all made with ‘100% goats’ milk’.
I make a fast choice from the options on the billboard menu. Americano, extra shot. No messing, straight hit. But the man behind the counter has his back to me. I cough politely but he’s blind to my presence.
Hunched over, the apron-clad proprietor is bludgeoning the rim of a wooden bin with a black-handled filter holder. Wads of wet coffee granules disappear into the bin, plummeting into the composted darkness, swallowed whole like fresh earth in an open grave. I watch him work, my impatience briefly quelled by the intensely deliberate approach he is taking to his labours. Eventually, he pulls a damp cloth from a rail and wipes away the few rogue grains that remain before returning the filter to the machine’s twist-grip care. He’s a man of method. Not one to be rushed. I respect this. He’ll attend to me at his own pace.
Love Patisseries’ coffee-making arm seems to occupy only a peripheral part of the business. Cramped on a table in one corner of the bunting-laced stall, the Fracino machine is dwarfed by rows of fluffy fruit-laden cakes and creamtopped pastries. Each sugary creation is dolled up as if in preparation for a beauty pageant. Apple and cinnamon strudel vying with the meringue for the Casual Wear crown. Chocolate, orange and cardamom cake pitted against her toffee, pear and hazelnut twin.
I weigh up buying a chocolate brownie, judging it to be just about within legitimate bounds for breakfast. Before I make my mind up, though, the man swivels round and looks in my direction. ‘Oh, hello there. What can I get you? Latte? Cappuccino?’
It’s Johnny, a cheerful Hay resident whom I’ve met at several social events around town. I feel embarrassed at not having recognised him. Thrown temporarily off balance, I ask for a latte with an extra shot. ‘No, no, sorry. Make it an Americano, please.’ He turns again and starts spooning the coffee into the recently cleaned filter holder.
‘I hadn’t realised you’d gone into the coffee business,’ I say.
Johnny and his wife, Catherine, own a successful bed and breakfast down by the main bridge into Hay. Both are popular townspeople: kind-hearted, community-spirited, quick to wave in the street. Johnny used to sit on the Town Council, while Catherine conducts the local community choir.
‘Yup, thought I’d give it a go,’ he replies, tapping his new machine with affection. ‘What’ve I got to lose?’
‘Too right. No, good on you,’ I say, admiring his sense of enterprise. ‘Did you just teach yourself or did you get someone to show you?’
He did a half-day course at Bournville College, he tells me. And then another half-day with Peter James, in Rosson-Wye. ‘A hands-on thing, you know.’ He picks up a bag of roasted coffee beans, the word ‘James’ printed across the front.
For a confessed novice, he is exhibiting remarkable confidence at the Fracino’s helm. Even so, the new machine sports a confusing array of gleaming buttons, knobs and gauges. ‘It must be a bit complicated, no?’
He shrugs and assures me it’s actually relatively straight-forward. It’s all about getting the right grade of coffee, he says, pointing to a sleek electronic measuring device on the sideboard. ‘Sixty millilitres in a double shot, expressed for twenty-five seconds.’ He presses a button and sets the coffee machine spluttering.
As he prepares my order, a woman in an expensive waterproof and spotted Joules wellies saunters up to the counter. She has a poodle on a lead. It, too, looks expensive. ‘Do you do decaf cappuccino?’ she asks in a cut-glass, Home Counties accent. He does. ‘Then I’ll have one, please.’
Her tone is prickly. It punctures all the goodwill from her ‘please’ and turns the entreaty into a demand. ‘With soya milk.’ The friendly B&B owner smiles and invites her to take a seat in the courtyard. ‘I’ll bring it over to you.’ She moves off with her dainty dog in the direction of a bench, no word of recognition or thanks.
He raises his eyes as she saunters off. City ways, the expression says. ‘I had a woman in yesterday. She asked if we had anything gluten-free. “We’ve got brownies,” I told her. And d’you know what she said? “Everyone’s got brownies,” and she stomped off.’ He chuckles.
A former city-dweller himself, Johnny knows the drill. He recognises that stress, that incessant rushing, that too-busy-to-talk glaze in the eyes. That’s partly why he moved here. For the change of pace, for the extra time. Time with his wife and two children, time for his hobbies, time to build friendships and construct a happy home. Time, the infinite gift so temporarily bestowed, to be snatched while you can.
He was based in the Birmingham area previously, in a job he liked but didn’t love. Catherine, too. Midway through middle age, they now wanted out. Each hankered for a life free of line managers and client meetings; a life in which phrases like ‘end-of-year appraisal’ and ‘company protocol’ held no sway.
So they bought a second-hand camper van. Every weekend for the best part of a year, they trundled down the M5 and made the winding crossing into Wales, where they reckoned their money would go further and their dreams might prosper. Up and down the Marches they drove in search of that perfect place. The derelict farmhouse on the south facing slope. The dilapidated barn ripe for renovation. The gable-ended longhouse with its own wood and well.
Ahead of the van, bouncing along the road, ran their imaginations. They saw their kids playing in the blackthorn thickets behind the house, a pair of untoggled scouts with permanently sun-freckled noses. Catherine would have a dapple-grey horse that would trot in contented circles around her purpose-built paddock. Johnny would be tending the veg patches, packing their larder shelves with homegrown produce that would nourish their souls.
Never did it rain in these vivid imaginings. Only sun or snow, a condensed climatic couplet. Nor did the bills for the bottled gas or veterinary visits ever put in an appearance. There were no pot-holed roads, no snowed-in driveways, no dial-up internet, no mice in the bedroom, no foxes at the chickens, no power cuts, no broken fences. Only cloudless skies and empty days.
Then, a three-storey, end-of-terrace town house in Hay popped up on the estate agent’s website. ‘Charmingly restored, views of the river, centrally located.’ It was exactly what they weren’t looking for, Johnny happily confesses. But it burst their bubble. The affordable price, the extra bedroom, the proximity of the school and the shops: it all made eminently more sense.
I think of Rob and Layla up on their smallholding, living out Johnny’s fantasy. Does he regret not doing it? He laughs. No, not once. Deep down, he’s a ‘people-person’, he now realises. The isolation of the hills would have sent him around the bend. When he had his fiftieth birthday a few years back, almost 200 people turned up. Everyone dancing, drinking, mixing among themselves. In truth, that’s more his scene.
He is still chuckling when a second customer approaches. She is younger and fresher-faced than the first, a small boy at her side. The child is clasping his mother’s hand. She’d like a latte, please. It’s her second already today, she tells him. ‘But who’s counting, hey?’ A glow of holidaymaker happiness infuses her manner. She’s pleased to be away. Away from where, Johnny asks. They’re from Hatfield, in Hertfordshire. Just off the A1.
She must be finding it quiet, Johnny says, his soft sarcasm hidden behind a good-humoured grin. Yes, she says. She thought it would be busier. She supposes it’s the rain. I smile at Johnny, who doesn’t disabuse her of the idea by telling her how much more sedate the town usually is. Instead he asks her if she’s enjoying the festival. It’s not the first time he’s asked the question, nor will it be the last. As with all successful local retailers, Johnny genuinely appears to enjoy small talk. He listens for her reply, twisting his head over his shoulder as he prepares my drink.
Her boy starts tugging at her arm, lured by the next door ice-cream van. ‘Okay, okay, Freddy,’ she says. The ice-cream man isn’t about to go anywhere. Johnny tells her not to worry. He’ll bring her drink over once it’s ready. She thanks him and walks off, the little boy pulling at her coat sleeve.
Johnny looks towards his first customer. She is sitting stiffly on the bench in the centre of the garden courtyard. Next year, he’d like to get some kind of awning for the seating area. ‘Give it a more Mediterranean feel, you know.’ He turns and twists the filter holder from its socket. A fine steam rises up from the damp pocket of freshly pressed beans as he holds it above the bin.
I move to go, holding my cup aloft in gratitude and wishing him well for his new venture. I’m not sure if he hears. The courtyard is already reverberating to the sound of hammering.
*
Turning left along Castle Street, I set off towards the tented festival site on the western edge of town, where I have a date with a newly published author.
Pedestrians fill the narrow pavement, persuading the more impatient to chance walking in the road. Parked outside the Swan hotel is a young man on a cucumber green bicycle rickshaw. It’s the best part of half a mile to the festival entrance and trade is busy. Payment is on a donation basis. ‘A foreigner, every time,’ he tells me, when I ask who his ideal customer is. ‘Brits are such misers.’ I continue walking.
Further down the street, just after the left turn heading up to Hay Bluff, where Castle Street merges into Brecon Road, Richard couldn’t disagree more. Sporting jeans and a grubby black T-shirt, he is standing behind a makeshift bar on the front lawn of the Masonic Lodge. His beard and hair are remarkable for achieving precisely the same degree of dishevelment.