by Oliver Balch
‘Can’t complain,’ the young brewer from Whitby tells me when I enquire how business is going. Books and booze, he sees them as a natural fit. I ask where he’s staying and he points to the floor behind the bar. ‘Someone has to watch the barrels,’ he says. Not that he sleeps much anyway. Last night, his final customers didn’t leave until about 3 a.m.
I’d been lured into his beer tent by his colleague, who is stationed on the pavement with a tray of taster cups. ‘American hops,’ he’d told me in a thick Yorkshire accent, inviting me to try the black IPA. Dry, peppery and caramel sweet, it tastes good. Inside, I find a clutch of others have come to the same conclusion, all of them with a lunchtime pint in their hands and the sheepish look of absentee husbands on their faces.
One of them, Martin, who has two days of stubble on his chin and a six-year-old son at his side, isn’t wasting any time. He tried the Platform 3 first (‘Sort of nutty taste, but goes down smoothly enough’) and is now nearing the bottom of a pint of Jet Black. We fall into conversation. His wife is currently at an event starring the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Last night they had both gone to see the comedian Marcus Brigstocke. Very funny. Have I been? He suggests I get tickets for one of the evening stand-up routines. They’ve been coming down to the festival for six years. ‘We always try and catch at least one comedian.’
He asks where I live and I explain that I’ve recently moved to the area. He looks momentarily wistful. ‘We love it here,’ he says. They stay in the same bed and breakfast every year. ‘Hay feels just like a village, don’t you think?’ I nod. He’d like to get into the hills or go canoeing next time. They’ve still not done anything like that.
He checks his watch. Fifteen minutes. He necks the remainder of the Jet Black and catches Richard’s eye. He’ll have another, ‘for the road’. The young brewer gladly takes his glass. ‘Saltwick Nab?’ Richard touches the respective tap handle with the flat of his hand. ‘It’s a best bitter. Four point …’ he twists the tap to read the label. ‘Yup, four point two per cent. Good malty kick to it.’
Martin evidently enjoys the ritual accompanying his beer: the choosing, the pouring, the admiring. He listens intently to the descriptions of the brewer-barman. The Saltwick Nab sounds like a fine idea, he says, and reaches into his pocket for cash. ‘Shame not to try them all, eh?’ His mood is jocular, the alcohol in the first two pints already seeping into his bloodstream.
I order a half for myself.
They’ve just been round the second-hand bookshops, Martin tells me. ‘Haven’t we, Nath?’ The boy is sitting on the floor, cross-legged, his nose in a comic-strip version of ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’. He loves that story, his father says. Found it in the first shop they went into. He didn’t see much point going into the others. ‘We can do that tomorrow, right, Nath?’
We drink in silence for a while. He looks down at his boy. They went to see the toll bridge yesterday, over the Wye, in Whitney. There’s a book about Walter, the friendly blue troll who lives under the bridge. His son loves that one too. The boy looks up at his father and grins.
‘You got kids?’ he asks me. Two, I tell him. Must be a wonderful place to bring them up, he says. It is, I tell him. ‘Yeah, it’s kind of old world, isn’t it? Hay, I mean,’ he replies. He looks momentarily pensive. It strikes him every time they come down: how tucked away it is, how much it feels like stepping back in time.
He loves the fact that the nearest big supermarket is twenty miles away, for instance. They’re from the Wirral. He has an ASDA, Sainsbury’s and LIDL more or less within walking distance of his house. ‘And the beer in all of them is terrible,’ he says, slapping his thigh and roaring with laughter.
It’s my turn to check my watch now. I hadn’t meant to stop so long. Wishing Martin and his bibliophilic offspring the best, I head back out onto the pavement.
Almost as soon as I step out of the beer tent, I bump into a couple from Clyro Primary School, their limbs laden with small offspring. They’ve just been to the ‘Make and Take’ tent. Had I been? Jimmy just loved it. The older boy gets his hair ruffled, an action that sends a swatting hand upwards. ‘Maa-umm.’ I explain that we’ve rented out part of the house for the week and that Seth and Bo are with their grandparents. ‘Where? How?’ the mother asks. There is envy in her voice. Or is it disapproval? I am a childless parent; fancy-free, beer on my breath, denying my kids a unique cultural experience.
She’s right, of course. The breadth of talent that finds its way to the Marches every May is truly remarkable. This year’s itinerary runs to nearly 500 events, with iconic US writer Toni Morrison topping the bill. Last year’s headliner was the Peruvian author and one-time presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa, fresh from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Behind them come the breakthrough first-time novelists, the rising star of Africa’s ‘new wave’ or an entrant in Granta’s latest ‘Best of …’ list: all of them dripping with talent and bravado, the literary world at their feet. Then there are the jobbing authors, churning out solid material year after year, working the festival circuit as they go with dogged charm and well-worked witticisms.
Finally, the crowd-pullers who make the economics of it all work: Martin’s comedians, for one. Plus the food writers, the children’s authors, the historians, the scientists, the biographers, the campaigning provocateurs, the sports stars, the sci-fi wonks, the columnists. A potpourri of publishing output, in short.
‘They’re back at the end of the week,’ I blurt out to the mother, in reference to Seth and Bo, and excuse myself speedily.
On the left of the road is an old churchyard, Hay’s fire station and the town’s sports fields, where the boys have tennis lessons and Saturday morning football club. Beyond are open fields, converted momentarily into overspill car parks. On the opposite side of the street, beyond Richard’s beer tent, are some almshouses and a home for the elderly, then a long row of semi-detached 1930s properties. Every other resident of Oakland Villas seems to be out on their front lawn, either rattling a charity tin or flogging cold drinks and foodstuffs.
Outside No. 4, a lady in a plastic poncho is standing under a temporary gazebo armed with a two-way radio. Her free hand is resting on a table laid out with jams, jigsaws, craft items, second-hand clothes and other charity knick-knacks. She’s raising money for Parkinson’s UK, a banner declares. Tea and cake are advertised as well. She too invites me to step in off the pavement.
‘What sort of cakes do you have?’ I ask, yet to commit but feeling my resolve weaken. Oh, all sorts, she says. ‘Come on through, now, why don’t you.’
I like the fact that the residents of No. 4 see the festival crowds as an opportunity to raise money for charity rather than to line their own pockets. Kilvert, who used to dispense blankets among Clyro’s poor, would have approved. So too would Updike, I imagine. What is charity if not a clear expression of loving your neighbour in the old sense?
Persuading people to donate is obviously the primary purpose of charity fund-raising, but philanthropic endeavours have a core secondary function too. They bring citizens together. Rarely does a week pass without an invitation to attend a concert or coffee morning for a good cause.
Such occasions strengthen communities. Not just because their focus is often local: a refit of the playground where the kids play and the young mums congregate, say, or a new minibus to help the elderly group get out and about. More fundamentally, they reinforce the ethos of communal living, reminding us that we are collective beings, born not to live behind high fences but in relationship with one another.
With such thoughts in mind (plus the promise of something sweet), I follow her outstretched arm down a narrow path towards the back of the house. The crackle of a radio sounds from around the corner. ‘Young man … cake … yes, right now.’
Waiting for me in the back garden are David and Val, a friendly retired couple decked out in matching aprons. Thick slices of coffee cake, banana bread and Victoria sponge look out inv
itingly from behind a glass casing. Lining up beside them are plates of bara brith and millionaire marble, homemade biscuits and the obligatory Welsh cakes. Lucretia has found her match.
I ask for a flapjack and then spot the price, a bargain at fifty pence each. ‘Make that two.’ He picks up the flapjacks with a pair of tongs and drops them into a paper bag. I hand him a pound coin.
The couple are pros. It is the cake stall’s tenth anniversary. Over the years, they’ve bought an urn, invested in some tables and chairs, developed a team of volunteer cakebakers. A few years back, David even landscaped the garden and extended the patio. I admire his handiwork, particularly the gurgling water feature.
A former accountant at the builders’ merchant in Hay, David is Hay born and bred, he tells me. So are Val and her sister out front, both of whom grew up in No. 7 Oakland Villas. ‘So she’s not travelled far,’ he says, repeating what must be an oft-repeated gag but one that lands a smile from his wife all the same.
We talk briefly about the festival. Does he go to many events? They’re busy on the stall much of the time, he says, although he tries to get along to at least a couple of things. The day before last, in fact, he went to a talk about the formation of the solar system. Despite falling briefly asleep in the middle, he enjoyed it thoroughly.
I’m fifteen minutes late for my meeting when I finally reach the festival site, which looks far bigger up close than it did from the Llanigon community hall. It feels like a university campus, only entirely under canvas. The entrance area, which is as large as a sports hall, gives way to a maze of walkways. Populating these carpeted corridors are restaurants, market stalls and pop-up shops, all of them full of festival-goers killing time and spending money.
I find Jim Saunders in the entrance corridor of the Green Room. He is sitting in a partitioned cubicle containing five or six chairs, next to a corpulent man at a desk. The man has a speakerphone strapped to his head and an extensive checklist with names and times in front of him. As well as writing, Jim works as a driver during the festival. The man with the phone is his boss, whose job it is to co-ordinate lifts to and from Hereford railway station.
On a good run, the cathedral city can be reached in half an hour. The local 39a bus, which avoids the main roads in favour of the pretty Lilliput hamlets of backcountry Herefordshire, through fields so green they look spray-painted, can easily take double that. It stops periodically to pick up a sixth-form college student or day-tripping pensioner, catching its breath for a moment before its wheezing engine carries it on its bumpy, bumbling way.
In Clyro, the Hereford bus passes just once a week. It leaves on a Wednesday, at 11 a.m. The Marches’ best defence against marauding Englishmen these days is not its castle mottes or ancient battlements. It’s the lousy public transport network.
I apologise to Jim for arriving late and he brushes away my tardiness. ‘Us drivers are used to waiting,’ he says, and suggests we go through to the lounge area of the Green Room. We pass a temporary office space, where the festival’s administrators tap away at keyboards. Among them I spot Peter Florence, the event’s charismatic director, sitting behind a desk. He is leafing through a newly published novel, a bulbous set of headphones strapped to his ears. He looks absorbed.
We enter a large, brightly lit room, with four or five sofas against two walls and a bank of round desks along a third. The far end is made from glass or perhaps a polymer equivalent. It has a door that opens into a small square section of field which is masquerading as a garden. The wall beside the desks has a doorway that leads to a private seating area, presumably for writers with immobilising stage-fright or novelists with enormous egos.
Jim’s book contains a collection of photographs and accompanying text along the theme of its title, Hay: Landscape, Literature and the Town of Books. The blurb on the back explains that he used to work as a field officer for the Offa’s Dyke Path. His wind-blasted complexion and slim physique suggest that he hasn’t hung up his walking boots.
As a boy, I’d done short sections of Offa’s Dyke with my father. Based on an eighth-century linear earthwork, the route runs from Prestatyn in north Denbighshire to Chepstow in south Monmouthshire. It constantly slips back and forth between England and Wales along its 177-mile journey, embodying the Marches’ own ambivalence towards national borders, a reflection of its wandering spirit that welcomes the lost and embraces the found. Remnants of the dyke are still visible today. Grass-capped and hunchbacked, they worm their way across hilltop ridges and clutch hold of valley slopes. It’s as if an ancient army of giant moles had once trundled past this way, whipped on by a crackpot cast of blind generals in a hapless quest for the sea.
We find a seat and Jim immediately excuses himself to get a coffee. He’s had a tiring morning, he says. It kicked off with an interview with BBC One Wales, then a local radio station had wanted to speak to him. The whole festival experience, it’s a ‘bit out of his comfort zone’, he tells me. The Women’s Institute, that’s his usual stage.
In his absence, I briskly survey the room. There are two types of writer: those who have not long finished their events, and those who are about to go on. The first are easily identifiable, looking relaxed and grasping white roses, the literary equivalent of a marathon runner’s medal. The second type is distinctly more fretful, either flustering over speech cards in a corner or sitting hunched around a table with their event chair.
Proud spouses, bored kids, event sponsors and other hangers-on also dot the room. Some are sitting on the table next to me. A suntanned young Californian with blond curly hair and a fitted leather jacket is holding court, recounting to three young women about how ‘way-out’ the city of Austin is. ‘Like, if you’re white in the hood at night, you can walk around no problem.’ It’s a good bet for real estate investment, he reckons. ‘Ripe for gentrification.’
On the other adjoining table, a grey-haired lady is telling her elderly companion about the recent trip she and her husband Howard took to Turkey. They went on a marvellous tour of the markets. The whole experience was, apparently, ‘a ball’.
Festival representatives make up the Green Room’s remaining cohort. Some are staffers, their status given away by their clothes. Floral shirts, casual jackets and skinny Chinos for the men. Patterned skirts, oversized lambswool jumpers and linen scarfs for the women. It’s the unofficial uniform of all reputable book festivals.
The remainder are interns, elvish models recruited direct from a fashion shoot with their translucent skin and languid limbs. I picture them as literature-loving undergraduates dreaming of a beatific life in a Bloomsbury garret, reading Yeats and penning verse. One is standing in the middle of the room holding a hardback book. She is slowly scanning the sofas and desks in the hope of identifying her assigned speaker from their back-cover photo. She stops beside my table. ‘Are you Henry Nicholls?’ Her tone, a mix of doubt and desperation. I’m not, I inform her with regret.
Jim returns with a frothy coffee and, at my request, offers a potted description of his book: the town’s history; brief biographies of some well-known residents; notable buildings; the surrounding landscape. If I’m interested, I should come to his presentation on Saturday morning. He has been assigned the 400-seat Oxford Moot tent. He’d welcome the support.
I say I’ll do my best and we move on to why he originally moved to the area. He was born and brought up in Slough, he begins. Not a propitious start. His parents were from rural Buckinghamshire, however, so tales of scrumping and unpasteurised milk had peppered his childhood. ‘I’ve always had this feeling that that was what real life was about.’ Which is why he eventually tired of waiting for Betjeman’s friendly bombs to fall and fled Slough’s bright canteens for the countryside.
He liked the idea of the Chilterns. As a boy, they would visit an uncle who used to manage a farm there, near Henley. Now, the whole area is awash with stockbrokers and City types, he says. Even if it weren’t prohibitively expensive, he wouldn’t fancy living there. With its
security gates and pristine Range Rovers, it’s not what he’d call ‘real countryside’ any more. The horny-handed sons of toil have long fled.
‘This is the real stuff,’ he says, waving a hand at a print of the Wye valley wrapped in sunshine that covers the wall behind us. Jim lives in the border town of Knighton, where he has found his own version of rural bliss, replete with apple orchards and spring water, peaty sod and hillside paths. ‘Plus I can afford it,’ he adds. ‘Just about.’
Returning to the book, I ask about his intended audience. He has clearly given the question some thought, and rattles off three categories of potential reader: local people, tourists to Hay and the festival crowd. He’s banking on the last lot, really. If he had a mission with the book – which he doesn’t, but if he did – it would be to encourage people to look beyond just the festival and the town. He snorts when I ask why he thinks this is necessary. From what he gleans from conversations with his passengers, most folk leave with a highly distorted view. Half don’t even know if the place is in England or Wales. The other half think it’s full of literary sophisticates all year round. It’s not Hay and its environs they see; instead, it’s the town’s abstract offspring, ‘Hay, the brand’, with its global franchise of affiliated festivals from Beirut and Dhaka to Cartagena and Xalapa.
His advice for them would be to spend a little more time here. Hire a cottage. Go for some walks. Potter about the place. ‘You probably have to be here when the festival isn’t on to see what it’s really like.’ I agree, but his counsel causes me a degree of trepidation: they might just stay.
I am thinking of Johnny’s customers and Martin in the beer tent. The area is gradually filling with people like them, folk who came here first because of the festival and then end up moving down on a full-time or semi-permanent basis. Does he ever worry that such an influx could change the character of the area?