Under the Tump (21 page)

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.’

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.

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.