Under the Tump (5 page)

The
Diary
sometimes carries a lament about low numbers in church. ‘Sadly few communicants,’ Kilvert wrote after one Holy Communion service. The Sunday in question happened to be his birthday, a factor that perhaps compounded his disappointment.

Even so, when he picked up his sermon notes and climbed into the pulpit, Kilvert could still probably reckon on a hundred faces or more looking back at him. All of them dressed in their Sunday best, all schooled in the liturgy, all suitably deferential to the young cleric in his flowing robes.

If Nonconformism dented the dominance of the established Church, then secularism today has almost flattened it. As with rural parish churches across the country, Clyro church counts on a faithful few to keep its doors open. Elderly folk mostly, drawn by faith and habit down the churchyard path and in through the chancel door.

One of Kilvert’s contemporaries developed a canny solution to the problem of falling audiences. The Reverend Jon Price, MA (Cantab), acquired the living over the hill at Llanbedr in 1859. The church was in a ‘ruinous state’ and had been without a vicar for almost a decade, an indication of its spiritual as well as geographic remoteness. There was no vicarage, so the new incumbent took to living in three bathing machines that he had delivered from Aberystwyth. When these accidentally burned down, he moved into a decrepit hut next door.

Kilvert paid a visit in July 1872, providing one of the
Diary
’s best known passages. On being welcomed inside, he took a seat in the ‘strangest interior’ he ever saw. The ‘foulness and wretchedness’ of the place left the visiting clergyman boggle-eyed. No grate by the fire. The table covered with crumbs and dirty cutlery, leftover meat and a ‘huggermugger confusion’ of discarded cups and saucers. Broken bricks and dust mixed with the cold peat ashes on the floor. ‘A faint ghastly sickly light’ stealing from the open chimney. Amazingly, the so-called ‘Solitary of Llanbedr’ would live amid this ‘wild confusion of litter and rubbish’ for another quarter of a century.

Today, Clyro’s vicar lives outside the parish and is responsible for not one but five churches. He is, to put it mildly, stretched. Once every couple of months he arranges a family service in the village that we try to attend in a show of solidarity. There’s no Sunday School, although once a quarter the church organises a child-focused ‘messy church’. Numbers differ, although the general marker for success is if the children outnumber the adult volunteers.

Over the decades, the village hall has gradually replaced the church as the nominal centre of communal life. No longer do the residents of Clyro gather for Advent communion or to lay flowers on the graves at Easter. If they can be persuaded out of their homes, it’s for the Chinese auction in aid of the hall’s upkeep or the annual Macmillan coffee morning.

I say ‘nominal’ because such occasions are sporadic and support for them variable. I scan the community bulletin board, which is encased behind glass in a wooden frame. No upcoming events in the hall are mentioned. There’s a notice about a history weekend at the end of the month across the
river in Hay. In England, on the other hand, Brilley village hall is putting on a play, while Clifford has a concert planned.

As I scan the other announcements, I wonder if I’m not looking for the wrong thing.

Community-wide events are rare, yet special interest groups abound. Take volleyball, which boasts a practice session in Three Cocks every Tuesday. Or T’ai chi classes in Cusop village hall. Choirs, Bible study, mums and tots, Pilates, table tennis, badminton, local history clubs, the University of the Third Age: all are there on tap for whoever wants to go.

Although it’s not advertised, Clyro village hall plays host to a life-drawing class on a Monday and a willow-weaving group on a Thursday, as well as providing a regular meeting space for the Community Council and resident groups such as the Women’s Institute.

My own introduction to the life of the hall came via the Monday-night bowls club, which I went along to at the invitation of my neighbour Ann, a buxom, chatty lady who lives on the estate opposite our cottage. The experience proved fun even though I was the youngest by about thirty years and by far the least expert.

With their photographs now taken, the members of the Kilvert Society reassemble and begin to move away from the church in a southerly direction. Ahead, at a distance of about 200 yards, lies the bypass. The passing cars are more audible now that we don’t have the houses on the main street as a buffer.

Three relatively modern detached houses occupy the left-hand side of the road, the last of which has a brace of shiny black solar panels on the roof. Dominating the opposite side of the road, meanwhile, is one of the largest properties in the village.

Built in a Regency style typical of the early nineteenth century, its two-storey bulk has dual roofs; one seemingly flat, the other shaped in a spiky ‘M’. The house is painted completely white, bar the eaves, window frames and masonry blocks along the building’s edge, which are black as creosote. Embedded into the garden wall is a rectangular slate on which the property’s name is etched in a gold calligraphic font: ‘The Old Vicarage’.

In this slightly grandiose abode lived Mr Venables, Kilvert’s boss. Widowed just before Kilvert’s arrival in Clyro, Venables was childless, although the household included five or six servants, so it was far from empty. Kilvert was a regular visitor, especially during the initial years of his curacy when ‘Dinner with Mr V’ and equivalent entries often appear in his diary.

On one memorable occasion, Venables tried to cure his youthful aide of ‘face ache’, a malady of which the diarist frequently complains and which medics now think was probably a severe localised migraine. Whatever Kilvert’s precise ailment, the effects of Mr V’s prescription of four full glasses of port were short-lived at best. All the next day, poor Kilvert suffered a ‘bursting raging splitting sick’ hangover.

The vicar proved a better counsellor and adviser than he did a physician. Kilvert clearly looked up to him as a dutiful son might his father. Mr Venables cut something of a patrician figure. Well intentioned but removed, he appeared to
get along with his new appointee well enough. ‘He seems to be a gentleman,’ the vicar wrote to his brother soon after Kilvert started in post. And, although he identifies him as ‘quite young’ (Kilvert was twenty-three at the time) and still awaiting formal ordination, he believed the task of finding a curate was firmly settled.

The letter contains a rare physical description of Clyro’s famous curate. As a writer, Kilvert had an uncanny gift of capturing people in a few well-chosen words. Etty Meredith Brown, with cheeks ‘the dusky bloom and flush of ripe pomegranate’; Mrs Stone of the ‘fierce eyes and teeth’; the ‘thin grey-bearded nutcracker face’ of old Hannah Whitney. It is one of the frustrations of his genre that the fêted diarist never turned the same skill on himself.

Venables’s account is precise, if less poetic. The new curate, he tells his brother, is ‘tall with a black beard and moustache’. Kilvert’s facial hair we know about because of the cameo role it plays in various scenes. Such as the time a bee stung him between the eyes, only then to buzz around in his beard in what Kilvert regretfully assumed was the insect’s ‘dying agony’. Or the occasion when he walked through a snowstorm that caused his whiskers to grow stiff with ice and his beard to freeze to his mackintosh.

Kilvert’s hair colour and physical size, meanwhile, are confirmed by the only known photograph of him. The image shows him seated in a chair looking square on to the camera, a book open in his lap. Dated to around 1875, the portrait shows him to have a good head of hair; thick, neatly cut and with the tiniest hint of a curl. The beard is long but orderly, as though recently trimmed. Although the picture is taken against an empty background, an indication of his height can been gleaned from the way in which his body
envelops the chair, the back of which ends well below his shoulder blades.

His precise features are difficult to make out from the surviving photograph; the nose is enviably well proportioned, the eyes slightly hooded beneath heavy brows, the forehead flat. Reading anything into his expression is impossible as it’s set firm for the camera. Even with no knowledge of his diary, however, it’s a face that looks generous and well-tempered.

Three years into his curacy, Mr Venables married a second time. This time his wife was twenty-five years younger than he, so far closer in age to Kilvert than the vicar himself. In as much as the social mores of the time would allow, the curate and the new Mrs Venables became good friends. The vicarage was no longer the lonely widower’s home it once was, however, and Mr Venables’s time for fireside chats was understandably diminished. Indeed, one popular theory has it that Kilvert started keeping a diary as an effort to replace his lost confidant.

As well as his employment, Kilvert had his boss to thank for his introduction into rural ‘society’. As a pleasant, university-educated clergyman, Kilvert may well have found his way into the country set anyway. Having Mr Venables, who wore a second hat as Chairman of Radnorshire Magistrates, verify his gentlemanly credentials certainly helped.

The Revd and Mrs Venables aside, it was possible to number the landed gentry in the immediate area on one hand. In Clyro itself there were the Baskervilles of Clyro Court and the Morrells of Cae Mawr, two houses whose drawing rooms and croquet lawns Kilvert visited frequently. Below the lip of the hill between Clyro and Hay lived the Crichtons of Wye
Cliff, while a couple of miles downstream on the banks of the Wye were the Hodgsons of Lower Cabalva.

Further afield were the Thomases from Llanthomas in Llanigon, whose daughter, Daisy, Kilvert was to fall head-over-heels in love with. Her father refused to countenance the match, however, marking one of the deepest sadnesses in Kilvert’s life and the subject of several particularly melancholic sections of the
Diary
. ‘The sun seemed to have gone out of the sky,’ his pen would confide.

Another family that moved within this inner circle of minor gentry was that of Archdeacon William Bevan, vicar of Hay for over fifty years. Throughout his incumbency, the long-serving cleric lived in the town’s castle, which was the property of his uncle, Sir Joseph Bailey, Baron Glanusk, a wealthy ironmaster.

A mishmash of Norman, Jacobean and Victorian styles, the building was as structurally dubious as it was architecturally unorthodox. By Bevan’s time, the outer walls and keep already lay in ruins. Much of what hadn’t collapsed would later burn down in two major fires. Today, the gutted remains of the embattled castle sit rather forlornly above the town, its gap-toothed turrets and fat-fingered chimney stacks silhouetted against the mountains behind.

Rarely does a week go by without Kilvert receiving an invitation to a dinner party or luncheon at one of the large houses in the district, although summer was when the social calendar really switched into gear. From July through to September, the pages of the
Diary
skip to the sound of fruit-filled wine cups clinking and silk dresses swirling, to jolly quadrilles and ‘flying fiddle bows’.

The lunar-eclipse party at Clifford Priory on a fine day in mid-July perfectly captures the mood of the season’s encounters. To reach the early afternoon event, Kilvert strolls several miles across the fields with friends, enjoying a pleasant conversation about Tennyson and Wordsworth as he walks.

On arrival, their host comes out to greet them and ushers them into the drawing room, where Kilvert finds ‘the usual set that one meets and knows so well’; the Dews, Thomases, Webbs, Wyatts, Bridges, Oswalds, Trumpers, ‘& co.’.

The party moves from the house to the lawn, where they have ‘great fun’ playing six simultaneous games of croquet and sending ‘balls flying in all directions’. High tea is served at seven thirty, with more than forty people sitting down to eat. The iced claret cup catches Kilvert’s eye, as do the ‘unlimited fruit’ and enormous strawberries.

Their stomachs full and their heads a little dizzy, the partygoers drifts back to the lawn to admire the eclipse. Some of the young men take turns racing up the slippery terrace bank, while the ladies walk around arm-in-arm like ‘tall white lilies’, their summer dresses looking ghostly pale in the twilit garden.

Two features of the account jump out at me, both small asides amid the jovialities. The first is the date: the party took place on a Tuesday.

In defence of the hosts, eclipses keep their own calendars. Unlike debutante balls or wedding parties, they cannot be booked for an August weekend. For the Crichtons and Thomases of this world, a Tuesday is as any other day; twenty-four hours to be filled with their artistic pursuits and charitable endeavours, with hobbies and house visits. Such was life for the Victorian rentier classes, a people who flaunted their free time and luxuriated in leisure.

Today, it is markedly different. The majority of us still work nine-to-five, five days a week. By necessity, employment and the constrictions of office hours govern our time. Prize them though we may, our social lives come second, a few precious hours snatched at the end of the working day or squeezed in at weekends between domestic chores and kids.

Everyone aspires to a ‘work–life balance’, but few achieve it. Even if you negotiate every Tuesday off, the chances of swanning around at a garden party remain slim because, unlike you, everyone else is still in the office working.

The exceptions, I suppose, are the retired and the unemployed. Around here, the former dominate. They are the early twenty-first century’s pastime generation. While many take a well-deserved rest to write that book, go on that trip, learn that instrument, a good number throw themselves into civic life. Sitting on committees, organising events, attending meetings, jollying people along. In many ways, the baby boomer demographic comprises the dynamos of contemporary community life.

Retirement’s leisured hours lie a long way off for me, if they ever come at all. The days of fat final salary pensions are over for most of us. Certainly for me. Downsizing and digging in, that’s about the sum of my long-term financial planning.