Under the Tump (20 page)

‘You all right then, pet?’ Pat asks. She usually calls me ‘pet’.

Then Ann insists on introducing me to Cynthia although we must have met half a dozen times already. Not only on market day for coffee: our paths crossed when Ann invited me to the indoor bowls night at Clyro village hall. We’ve also run into each other at the gates of school, where Cynthia’s grandson and my boys are classmates.

Still, Ann likes to introduce me whenever she can. It gives her proprietary rights over me. I don’t mind this. In fact, she’s developed a set patter for her introduction. It starts with my name and the fact that we’re neighbours, which gives her the opportunity to say I live in Pottery Cottage.

Because the house is on the Hay road, most people know it. Then she’ll say, ‘Ah, I can remember some good times we had in there,’ referring back to when her friends Ken and Eileen Hughes used to own the cottage thirty-something years ago. But she won’t go into details, she’ll say, for the
sake of propriety. Her whole manner, however, invites the opposite.

‘Oh, yes, of course you’ve met,’ Ann says. ‘And how are we today?’ she then asks. ‘And those little boys of yours?’

I assure both Pat and Ann that all is well on every front, and double check that I’m not interrupting them. I never am. At least, they never imply as much.

The three are women of habit. Monday is bowls night (‘Seven-thirty, immediately after
Emmerdale
’). Tuesday, bingo. Wednesday, a day trip to Hereford. And Thursday is market day in Hay. Pat remembers it as a child. Cynthia too. Ann, in contrast, grew up going to the market in Builth. She’s a latecomer to Hay in that respect.

The ladies meet at the back of Isis every week, between ten thirty and ten forty-five. ‘If I wasn’t there, they’d wonder where I am,’ says Ann. It’s one of her favourite phrases. Nor is it exclusive to the market. She trots it out before every bowls match, for example, and in the run-up to every farming-related funeral for ten square miles.

The expression also crops up in reference to the local summer fairs, especially Erwood and Builth, although here the phrase is extended to ‘If I wasn’t there
with my Welsh cakes,
they’d wonder …’

Isis is half shop, half café. It enjoys a prime spot along the main high street, located between an outdoor store and the old electricity board office (now a homeware shop). The retail part of Isis occupies the front section of the building and has two large windows looking out onto the pavement.

Its shelves are sparsely stocked with quartz-like minerals, crystals, wood carvings, conches, beads and other paraphernalia of a loosely Eastern origin. Greetings cards, umbrellas and plastic helter-skelter tubes called ‘spiral
spinners’ are also for sale. Two large, randomly situated sofas cover much of the floor space on one side of the shop. I presume these are an overflow from the café at the back, although they could just as easily be for sale.

Ever since Islamic militants started wreaking havoc around the world, people have speculated if the café’s owners will change the name from Isis. So far, they haven’t. Perhaps they figure they were here first. Whatever, their determination pleases me, for it keeps alive a fantasy I entertain of the three retirees meeting every week to plot a caliphate in the Marches.

Saying that, the café name’s murderous associations appear entirely lost on the ladies. When I first asked Pat about her Thursday coffee date, she couldn’t recall what the place was called. ‘Whatchamacallit,’ she’d said. The truth is, none of them have ever really paid much notice to the name above the door.

‘Barry Gibbons’ place, is what we all know it as,’ Pat had said.

‘Right,’ I’d replied hesitantly. ‘And, sorry, but who is Barry Gibbons?’

She looked at me quizzically for a moment, then said, ‘Well, you know Chrissy Gibbons?’ The inference was that I should. I didn’t. ‘Well, he’s Chrissy’s nephew.’

This piece of information didn’t really help me progress any further. Pat guessed my confusion. ‘Chrissy … you know, from the butcher’s on the high street,’ she pressed. I knew the butcher’s, but thought it was run by Geraldine. I told Pat as much. It is
now,
she’d said, clarifying that Chrissy used to run it for years beforehand. Geraldine is Chrissy’s daughter. She took over from him.

‘Him?’ I ask. ‘Yes, Chrissy, Chris, you know,’ she said.

‘So Chrissy is retired?’ I’m confused.

‘Yes,’ Pat answered.

‘So he doesn’t work at the butcher’s?’ I asked.

‘No, not any more. He passed away not so long ago, in fact.’

At that point, I gave up.

We eventually nailed the café’s location by another route. ‘The place that sells them lovely stones,’ she explained. ‘You know, the one opposite the new greengrocer’s.’

The greengrocer is called Stuart, a splendid English gent who dresses in lustrously coloured corduroy trousers and wears the handlebar moustache of a duke. After a decade or more trading in Hay, ‘new’ isn’t exactly a word I’d identify with him. Yet the elasticity of time is something I’m slowly learning from the ladies.

I put myself in Pat’s shoes. She grew up buying her vegetables from Tony Pugh the Grocer, who also doubled as a fishmonger, collecting his daily produce from the morning train and storing it in his own ice house. Over the last half-century, she’s probably seen half a dozen shops come and go in what is now the greengrocer’s. On that timeline, Stuart quite reasonably qualifies as ‘new’.

As for the café, the stones rather than the greengrocer’s proved the real giveaway. Even in a market town as independent and eclectic as Hay, the high street has space for only one charm seller.

Chrissy’s nephew Barry is a thin, affable man with a ponytail. As often as not, he’s out smoking on the street rather than serving behind the counter. The ladies are fond of him and, as Thursday morning regulars, he gives them a client reduction. Whenever I join them, I qualify for the ‘ladies’ rate’ too.

Of the three women, I know Ann best. Most weeks she’ll pop round for a cup of tea and a catch-up. She wears thick fleece garments and has a fondness for pink lipstick on special occasions.

Born just before the outbreak of World War II, Ann grew up in the hills above Erwood. She moved down into the village itself aged ten when her father died and her mother had to give up the farm. Born ‘Wilkins’ (‘“Wilks”, some folk still call me’), she married a Jones. His first name was Derek.

There’s another Derek Jones who lives just outside Clyro, as it happens. Ann and her husband used to rent some grazing land off him. ‘No relation, mind,’ she clarifies, preempting the question asked of every Jones across Wales.

Ann and her husband spent most of their married life on a farm in Cwmbach, a small hamlet above Glasbury-on-Wye. With the holding came another name, ‘Ann the Cwm’. They rented the land from the council at an affordable rate and kept a mix of beef cows and sheep. Belgian Blues were always her favourite breed of heifer. ‘A beautiful animal is a Belgian Blue.’ As for ewes, they used to rear Texel crosses and Suffolk crosses, although she never took to sheep as she did to cows.

She moved to Clyro twelve years ago. Her husband didn’t retire so much as slow down. They sold twenty-seven cows at auction, each of which went for about £700. ‘That wasn’t a bad price back then,’ she assures me. I do the maths. It strikes me as precious little from a life’s labours but, along with her state pension, it sees her through.

None of her four children – three boys and a girl – has opted to follow her into farming. One of her boys is a scientist, researching cures for cancer. He lives near London.

Another runs a pub in Carmarthen. The third is a builder in nearby Kington. Her daughter works for the outdoor store Mountain Warehouse, doing what exactly Ann isn’t sure. Marketing, she thinks. Anyway, her daughter gave her some rubber-soled shoes for Mothers’ Day. They match her lipstick. Ann is overjoyed with them.

Alongside farming, Ann worked for the Milk Marketing Board for many years. She would visit dairy farms up and down the Wye valley, taking milk samples for quality-control and billing purposes. She’d always tarry a while, meaning few people had a better handle on everyday goings-on than Ann. Who was looking to sell some ground; whose kids were playing truant; whose marriage was on the rocks; who had a problem with the bottle and was knocking his wife about. She knew it all.

Ann’s grapevine today is less salacious. Now, all the flings and fistfights are a generation or two removed. It’s So-and-So’s daughter who’s run off with Such-and-Such, or Someone’s grandson who’s taken up with You Know Who. For the ladies, the talk of the town now concentrates mostly on mutual ailments and pending funerals.

Pat’s block of flats is immediately opposite Ann’s bungalow. She has one of the two bottom-floor apartments, which she shares with several dozen cats, one real, the others porcelain. The feline miniatures crowd the mantelpiece and sideboards in her living room. Pat lost her only son, Gareth, to alcoholism when he was in his thirties. He used to work ‘at the Rover’ in Solihull. Her husband found him dead on the bed, the TV remote in his hand.

She has an enlarged passport photo of Gareth hanging on the wall in her front room. His ex-work colleagues sent it to her. The tragedy still takes a huge toll on her emotionally.
Pat suffers from hip and back problems too, which cause her to waddle and stoop simultaneously. Lately, she’s taken to using a stick to keep her balance.

Of the three, Pat is the only one who actually grew up in Hay. She moved here in 1948 when she was six years old. She was a war baby, she tells me with pride. She lived in her nan’s house, a two-bedroom terrace along Chancery Lane, close to where the town library now stands. Her mother, who divorced soon after Pat’s third birthday and was one of ten children, had grown up in the same house. The house was knocked down in the late sixties to make way for the library, the zinc roof of its outdoor privy still visible in the wall of the adjoining car park.

Just after her nineteenth birthday, Pat went out for a night on the town with her mum. The pair went to the Mason’s Arms along the high street as they always did. It was there, on the front step, that she first clocked eyes on her Barry (not Barry Gibbons, a different Barry). He was down from Birmingham, visiting family. The two hit it off and married shortly afterwards.

Her mum had chided her that she might meet the man of her dreams before they left the house that night. Pat puts great stock by the comment, as though ‘our Barry’ was predestined and her subsequent move to his home city was written in the stars. Over the years, her soft Marcher accent gave way to an unmistakable Brummie drawl. She calls me ‘bab’ as well as ‘pet’ and asks for ‘elbow of pork’ at the butcher’s rather than ‘belly of pork’.

Pat worked as a cleaner in a factory for twenty-seven years. The company manufactured paraffin lamps, mostly, plus a few other household objects. They made her redundant at the age of sixty-one, the day after her summer holiday
break. She was upset at the time, but it gave her an excuse to move back to Hay. She persuaded Barry that the country air would be better for them in retirement. So when Barry’s pension kicked in and the flat came up in Clyro, they took it. Things didn’t work out as Pat had hoped. Four years later, after a short illness, Barry died.

The Mason’s Arms is long gone (it’s now a Spar), although the step is still there. I once happened on Pat standing right on the spot. She was leaning on her stick, looking blankly out at the street. Loaf of bread in hand, she seemed in no rush to move on. An expression of profound distance clouded her face, whether inspired by pleasure or pain I couldn’t tell. Both, very probably.

A little before Barry passed away, Ann’s Derek died too. The two drew on each other in their grief. Together with Dot, a mutual friend from the village whose husband also died around the same time, they jokingly refer to themselves as the ‘Merry Widows of Clyro’. They attend the same social events, go on outings together and generally look out for one another.

Pat doesn’t drive, so Ann ferries them both around. On market day, Ann will pick up Pat in her palatinate blue Toyota SUV and they’ll head into town together. They park in the main car park, where Ann nabs a disabled spot nearest the exit. Heart condition, she tells me when she sees me looking at her blue badge.

From the car park, the two then make their way down to Isis to meet Cynthia. Sometimes Gwyneth, who used to run the petrol station in Clyro, joins them as well. She’s not here today, which leads to a minute or two’s speculation about where she is and how she’s faring.

In her late sixties, Cynthia is noticeably younger than Pat
and Ann. She’s the sparkiest too, quick to joke and poke fun, and even quicker to laugh. Ann and Cynthia used to work together at a nearby Outward Bound centre. Like Pat, they were both employed as cleaners. ‘Seventeen years and never a cross word between us,’ Ann likes to say. To which Cynthia always raises her eyebrows and smiles wanly.

This morning, all the talk is of education. Powys Council has announced that it is to close the nearby secondary school in Three Cocks and move all the pupils to a new combined campus in Brecon. Cynthia thinks it’s a disgrace. They did the same with all the small village primary schools, she notes. The council puts them on warning, so the parents take their children out, then there aren’t enough children to keep the schools open.

Pat used to go to Gwernyfed, the secondary school in question, she interjects. She went back just the other week for a car boot sale. In her day she remembers there being gardening and country dancing and pageants and all manner of sports on offer. ‘I said to Lizzy’s daughter. Do you do this? Do you do that? And she said no,’ Pat recounts. Gwernyfed used to have a farm when she was growing up, Cynthia recalls. And Clyro school had a milking parlour, Pat adds.

The conversation oscillates back and forth over the next thirty minutes, flitting between affairs present and memories past, always localising the national, always personalising the local.

Having exhausted the topic of education (‘P. G. Davis was the headmaster,’ says Ann. ‘“Pig” we used to call him’), it moves onto the council’s plans to build a new community centre (Pat will believe it when she sees it), then to other new housing developments in the area and thence to the
problems of affordable housing, pensions and the upcoming Budget, then to Ann overpaying the electricity people and getting a refund, followed by the price of petrol, Pat’s hospital trip and that poor boy from Brecon who died skiing, and to Tom Edwards’s funeral, until finally someone notes the time and Ann says they’d best be off and Barry Gibbons comes over to collect the empty mugs.