by Oliver Balch
A fellow bookseller in town, this upstart rival is described as the driving force behind a referendum on Hay’s ongoing independence. The ballot aims to discover if residents believe the town should remain a sovereign state. An ancillary question bundled up within the popular vote asks whether Hay-on-Wye’s official postcode should be switched to the more dramatic ‘HOW1’.
‘The first bookshop opened in Hay in 1962,’ Mr Addyman (59), is quoted in the article as saying. ‘Since then, because of the work that our king Richard Booth did throughout the world promoting the international book economy, there are now somewhere in the region of 100 booktowns worldwide.’
Although this sounds flattering, I wonder if it may be another reason for the king’s ire. The concept of the ‘booktown’ is one that he holds very dear. It’s also one that he doesn’t want to lose his grip on. The International Organisation of Booktowns, of which he is both founder and president, recognises a mere seventeen bona fide booktowns. This privileged elite stretches from Sysmä in Finland to Paju in South Korea. Their number might drop, however. Wigtown in Scotland has entered an alliance with the regional tourist authority. The king does not approve.
I clock back into the king’s conversation. He is still on the theme of collusion, pointing out that public officials depend on journalists, just as journalists depend on public officials. Hay has ridden to power on this kind of mutual back-scratching, he insists. ‘And as for how they have treated the official attraction of the Welsh Tourist Board of the last thirty years …’
‘Sorry, Richard, but if I might interrupt ever so quickly,’ says a feisty, dark-haired woman at the far end of the table.
The king splutters to a stop, a look of bemusement crossing his face.
‘In your own time, of course, Richard, but we would like you to announce the results of the referendum,’ the woman adds.
A young man beside her, who has been writing furiously throughout the king’s talk, puts down his Moleskine notebook and picks up a camera. He is a new recruit, a fresher chronicler perhaps. He gets up from his chair and walks around the room, stationing himself directly opposite the king. He trains his lens and waits. A sense of suspense arises.
The lady reaches into her pocket and pulls out a folded scrap of paper. She passes it to the person beside her, who passes it on to the next person and so on until it reaches the middle of the table where the king is seated. Richard III unfolds it, squints and then hands it to the dean on his right. The light is too bad, the ageing monarch declares. He can’t make out what it says.
Clasping the paper between thumb and forefinger, the dean holds it with outstretched arms as though it were a parchment scroll. Pushing his glasses down his nose, he clears his throat and begins to read.
‘Total votes cast, five hundred and thirty.’
‘Can you speak up?’ someone at the back asks.
‘Total votes cast, five hundred and thirty,’ he repeats, no louder the second time but considerably gruffer. ‘“No” votes, forty-three.’ Enthusiastic applause. ‘“Yes” votes, four hundred and eighty-three.’ A spate of frenzied cheering and clapping of hands breaks out. ‘Spoiled, …’ he barks, but the number is lost to the din of celebrations. The young chronicler snaps his camera furiously.
Once the hubbub has calmed down a fraction, Pat, the king’s faithful secretary, a lady whose physical and moral qualities are in delightfully generous proportion, coughs loudly and recommends that the king be given the space to resume his lecture. The Sow’s Ear, it would seem, is already mid-manufacture.
After his successful performance at the polls, the king returns to where he left off, re-energised. Characteristically, however, it’s not exactly where he left off. ‘As I was saying,’ he starts, ‘I would like to see a return to burning certain books.’ He recommends starting with Trevor Fishlock’s Wales and the Welsh. ‘A typical Murdoch hack, creeping up to the Welsh Tourist Board.’
He’d also like to use this evening’s platform to discuss another subject that vexes him: Hay’s twinning with the town of Timbuktu in Mali. He has recently been reading Doris Lessing. ‘Now, Lessing, of course, is the originator of Rhodesian communism, which is very interesting because …’
A chair scrapes back noisily along the floor, causing everyone to look round. The king stops again. Then a man in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt stands up and, in an apologetic voice, excuses himself. ‘I must take my leave, My Liege. Thank you for a most amusing evening. It’s reminded me of working for you all those years ago. Just like the old days.’ He offers a blanket wave to the rest of us. ‘Adieu all.’
As he heads for the door, he passes the dark-haired woman, who reaches out her hand and touches him gently on the arm. In a soft voice, barely above a whisper, she bids him goodbye. ‘Adieu, sweet Prince.’
After the departure of Mr Addyman, the king appears to feel a need to reassert his authority. His mind turns to global matters. He has an introduction to the Polish foreign minister, we should know. He is also working on his links with the ‘UN person’ for the United States. The thing is, to get into the international world, one must first go through the international cocktail of America and then London, he asserts. ‘So I’m going to London.’
What exactly he plans to do there we never learn, however, because mention of the UK capital leads him off on a discussion about Persian bread. A large community of Iranians have settled near his flat in west London. ‘Who’s your bread person friend, Jon?’ The question is directed to a tall man with an angular face. ‘Phoebe?’ the man responds hesitantly. ‘Good, well, ask Phoebe what she feels about Persian bread,’ the king commands. Personally, the king thinks it’s wonderful.
Time is moving on. The evening is nearing an end and the dean would like to say a few words. ‘If I may.’ It is not a question.
Unlike the king, for whom evidence and argument are never more than unwittingly related, the dean builds up to a clear point. The university remains in its infancy. It has a crest in the form of a cartoon snail with a cinnamon-whirl shell. It also boasts its own motto, a saying lifted from Irish Fairy Tales (1920), which runs: We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered, we get wise, for a well-packed question carries its answer on its back as a snail carries its shell.
Yet the institution’s purpose and future course still remain very much open for debate. In the dean’s humble opinion, we would do well to avoid the grand theories spouted by the Orthodox Academy. These are mere chimeras anyway, efforts by professional scholars to shoehorn the world into neat categorisations.
What really interests him is the fate of those who don’t fit into these overarching schematics. What place do the likes of Ruth St Denis, the maverick dancer inspired by an advert for Egyptian Deities cigarettes, have in such restrictive, linear constructs? None, none whatsoever. Instead they’re forgotten, tossed aside, lost down what the dean calls the ‘rabbit-holes of history’. These misfits in the official canon, these cast-offs of academia, rescuing them would be a noble pursuit for a royal university, he thinks.
The room warms to the idea. Faculty members start nodding their assent. The idea of digging up historical mavericks from rabbit-holes appeals. The king is especially taken, no doubt picturing himself marching at the head of an expeditionary force, excavating dead eccentrics from the dustbins of academic research, the university’s very own White Rabbit.
The king, who suddenly looks very tired, salutes the dean and thanks him for his contribution. He heartily endorses his belief in nonsense and gives his blessing to the dean’s suggestion. ‘And sod everyone else, I say.’ He draws a triumphant breath and leans back in his chair.
‘Terrific,’ says Pat the Secretary. ‘So is that all agreed?’ The question is met with the sound of laughter and clinking glasses. Pat scribbles in her notebook. The motion, I’m supposing, is passed.
‘Now, shall we thank Richard for his talk?’ Pat suggests, putting her hands together first. We all join her in clapping. Demure
ly, Richard III downs the remainder of his pint.
The mood among the Faculty is happy and replete, as though we’ve worked our way through a gargantuan four-course meal, which in a way we have. We shall all leave knowing more than before about Welsh politics and Persian bread, modern dance and the price of a title. Yet the source of people’s satisfaction lies elsewhere. As now formally agreed, the university meets not to search out knowledge, but in the hope of meeting mock turtles and Cheshire cats, of hearing riddles about ravens and writing desks, of poking fun at the powerful and exalting the absurd.
And this we have done. We have feasted on folly. We have chased the snail. It is now time for bed and sleep. Hay’s wise old king retrieves his walking stick from the table, tightens his scarf around his neck and, with Pat on his arm, heads home to his Palace up the Dingle.
*
If Richard III is committed to establishing his own ivory tower in the heart of the Welsh Marches, then Rodney is focused on an even more revolutionary task: the drawing up of a Community Plan.
For all my talk of consensus-building and the search for common ground, communities are not manufactured from thin air. Of course, they are informed and nurtured by our constant interactions, by new arrivals and fresh ideas. Equally certainly, however, they build on what came before, on the bricks of the past that are carried forth into the present.
The problem is that the transfer of these pasts is imperfect. Some bricks are recut or replaced, while others are obscured by new facades. For those who moved here in the booktown boom years, the spirit of Boothian nonconformity remains their cornerstone. With every swanky new shop or unimaginative housing development, they lament its passing. For them, the university is a possible bastion, a last throw of the dice.
More recent incomers see things differently. Amused as they are by so much quirkiness, they stand one step removed. The sight of the town crier in his frilly ruff and knee-length stockings. The sound of the night-time wassailing in nearby apple orchards. These are the witty flourishes that adorn their move-to-the-Marches story, raising a smile when retold to others. It falls to them not to repeat what came before, but to reinvent and reinterpret for today. Hence a tapas bar in rural Wales, for instance. Or a fair-trade shop in an unfair world.
Older residents look on bemused, meanwhile. Their world has changed, but their mental maps of it very often have not. They knew Hay before its bookish craze. They can still see their family’s two-up, two-down where the library now stands. They’ll still slip a lucky coin to whoever buys their lambs or calves in the livestock market, even as the abattoir lorries rattle past in the street outside. In such a social cauldron, conflicts of opinion almost inevitably stir and stew. Putting to paper what the community stands for and where it’s heading requires some diplomacy, therefore, especially for an old Communist Party member like Rodney.
We meet in his house in a converted farm complex just outside Hay. Retired, yet still full of energy, Rodney sports a splendid white goatee-beard and an impish grin. He’s always pottering about the streets of Hay, invariably with a friendly word on his lips and a black beret on his head. Today, I find him in a woollen cardigan and moccasins. He serves me coffee from a cafetière and invites me through to the living room.
Creating a Community Plan is not a radical idea at all, he starts by telling me, his voice soft and deliberate. Towns and villages are doing it across the UK. To get theirs started, he has corralled various friends and acquaintances into a working group. Among them is Johnny from the coffee stall. Another is a retired business executive called Nick, who made it his business to get the town’s haphazard traffic system straightened out. The man has form, Rodney notes. In a spirit of unity, they have named themselves ‘Hay Together’. To get the ball rolling, they held some public meetings in an effort to canvass local viewpoints. It’s important that the town as a whole ‘owns’ the process from the outset, he explains.
Organisationally, the group is slowly taking shape. Rodney and his colleagues have managed to arrange use of a small space up at the castle for a peppercorn rent. The Chamber of Commerce, which has a small fund for community projects, has offered to cover payment. Powys County Council, on the other hand, has stepped in with the offer of a part-time community support co-ordinator.
Now, one year in, they’ve held plenty of meetings and drawn up plenty of action plans. The space by the castle is no longer the murky storage dump it once was, but a presentable office and meeting room. Across the cobbled passageway outside is a covered area with a pub-garden table and a huge map of Hay along a wall. But there’s still no sign of a Community Plan.
I ask Rodney what the hold-up is.
He takes a sip of his coffee and leans back in his armchair. He looks over my head, casting a wistful gaze above the wall of bookshelves to a narrow mezzanine floor. A railing stretches across the edge. Attached to its outside hangs a classic Claud Butler road bike. It is painted bright yellow. Diana, his partner, bought it as a present with the idea of him cycling into Hay. From the bike’s current position, I’m imagining that this hasn’t come to pass.
Exhaling deeply, he launches into a protracted explanation. It’s complicated, he starts. Part of it is the independent nature of the town. People are wary of collective undertakings. They want to be free, unencumbered, self-governing. The local citizenry is also bloody-minded, he adds. So those community groups that do get off the ground frequently end up splitting. ‘Why have one group when you can have two?’ goes a running joke about Hay’s voluntary sector organisations. Rodney has his own version of the same: ‘Too many chiefs and not enough Indians.’
There are other impediments besides. One in particular: town politics. Rodney takes another deep breath. To fully appreciate the difficulties of moving forward with the Community Plan, I need to understand its background. He offers me a timeline, charting it out with the edge of his hand along the arm of his chair.
It all started a few years back, when rumours began circulating about a supermarket moving into the town centre. People were aghast. It would rip the heart out of the high street, they warned. Local shops would close, traffic would increase and Hay would become another identikit town: monochrome, clone-like and dead.
Then the Town Council came out and confirmed not only that the rumours were true but that the supermarket plan had their full backing. Swaying their view was the developer’s promise to build a brand-new primary school and community centre. A proportion of the town saw this as a reasonable trade-off. Rodney viewed it as blackmail.
He elaborates at length, about how the deal contravened Powys Council’s own procurement deals, how it lacked any kind of audit trail and how conflicts of interest abounded. What irked him most of all was the way the whole idea had been cooked up without regard for the community’s opinion. ‘The whole thing stank.’
A vociferous opposition group quickly formed and Rodney threw himself into the fray. The anti-supermarket campaigners called themselves Plan B – a canny counterpoint to a public comment by a harassed County Council executive that there was ‘no plan B’. The package, as it was presented, was school-plus-supermarket or no school at all. So Plan B set about devising an alternative financing scheme. In the meantime, it set up a subcommittee called Hearts and Minds with the mission of raising awareness about the perils of opening the door to Big Retail.
It didn’t take long before the affair turned ‘rancorous’, Rodney admits. Within a fortnight, Plan B had to close its community Facebook page under a barrage of abuse. On the flip side, town councillors found themselves subject to a widespread whispering campaign about backhanders and ‘ransom strips’.
Soon, it was all-out combat. A protest group held a silent vigil at County Hall in Llandrindod. Another took its concerns to the Welsh Assembly. At the height of the conflict, a full-page article appeared in The Times. The newspaper’s readers were informed that Hay was ‘gearing up for civil war’.
Rodney grows vivacious at the retelling. A full-on Marx
ist, politics is his life’s passion. Not the pontificating, dinner-party kind, but banner-waving and picketing. Powerfully influenced by the social democratic ideals of post-war Britain, he joined the Communist Party in the 1960s and remained loyal until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A fierce anti-Thatcherite even before Thatcher, he worked intermittently as a university teacher for much of his career. His specialist interests are the built environment and the history of commodities. For a while, he became heavily involved in documentary-making for television as well. Inspired by the idea of ‘history from below’, he contributed to films on the everyday lives of British workers. Involvement in a communal housing project in Herefordshire kept him busy too, as did a sideline in political street theatre.
Looking back, he charts his career not by promotions but by protest movements: the anti-Vietnam War marches, the Women’s Lib struggle, the miners’ strike, the nascent Green movement.
‘I wrote a position paper about all the actors involved in the supermarket deal,’ he explains, returning to the subject at hand. ‘The baddies always have chinks, you see – that’s what my experience in grassroots campaigns has taught me. You can get people on your side, but first you have to understand who they are.’
At the start of the campaign, he called some old contacts for advice. One of his former students, now a leading light in civic mobilisation, laid out various campaign strategies that the supermarket’s opponents might consider. The counsel of a solicitor friend, meanwhile, was to threaten the County Council with judicial review. In the end, Plan B opted for a little of everything and eventually the whole deal was dropped.
Rodney emerged bruised but defiant. An anonymous post on a community blog had singled him out for criticism, claiming that daily deliveries from Waitrose were arriving at his house. ‘They said that’s why I was against the project.’ He laughs. He has hardly ever been into Waitrose, he insists. ‘I’ve been a member of the Co-op for forty years.’