Under the Tump (23 page)

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?

‘It could, I suppose,’ Jim concedes. ‘You hear about the internet changing everything, with people able to live anywhere. If a lot of people from the south-east or Birmingham or wherever decide to move here, then it’ll inevitably change. You’ll see the house prices going up and a lot of the old buildings being renovated.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’ I ask, echoing the concerns Le Quesne first voiced about Clyro nearly half a century ago.

Jim is unsure. If they bring urban values into the countryside, then, no, that’s not good. A local friend who lives up in the Radnorshire hills recently told him how he no longer
liked Hay ‘because it was full of
Guardian
readers’. And he wasn’t meaning the weekly
Farmers’ Guardian
, Jim clarifies. I take his point.

Still, he doesn’t think the Marches are about to go the way of the Chilterns. It’s too far to realistically commute to London or other major cities. Indeed, its rural disconnectedness is what appeals to many newcomers. Nor do most want a Starbucks on the corner or a choice of department stores. These are what they’re fleeing, more often than not.

In his view, there is probably an ideal number of incomers. Too many and they begin to swamp the place. Hay, he thinks, is at a tipping point. I’d probably agree.

Saturday morning, bright and early, I’m back at the festival site sitting in the Oxford Moot. Jim is a confident public speaker, the experience of all those village-hall lectures to the Women’s Institute paying dividends. After an hour he closes his final slide, thanks the audience and is shepherded off towards the bookshop by an amicable intern.

Amid tables stacked high with books, their pristine pages untouched and inviting, a queue of fifteen has already formed. Jim is shown to one of the four signing desks, which are lined up like exam tables side by side. His sister and niece have come down from Huddersfield to lend their support. The latter snaps photos of him on her iPhone.

‘Could you sign it for Dorothy, please?’ the first lady in the queue asks, handing Jim a copy of his own book. He takes it from her and opens it to the title page. ‘She lives in America now. It’ll remind my nieces and nephews where they are from.’ Similar requests follow. One man’s family are all in Australia; another has a brother in South Africa.

The final couple in the queue present themselves as recent arrivals to the area. They live in Brilley. His presentation was
inspiring, they tell him, and explain how they recognised only a few of the places in his slideshow but their appetite is now whetted to discover more. He asks their names and writes his signature with a flourish. A photographer from the
Western Mail
passes just as Jim’s pen leaves the paper. ‘Just hold it there a second.’ Jim fixes a smile, his pen static. The camera clicks. ‘Rogues’ gallery’, his sister jibes with affection.

I arrive at Eighteen Rabbit’s new store as the white-haired painter-decorator is leaving. It’s forecast to rain tomorrow, he is telling Andrew, the shop’s co-owner. Brightening up the day after. He thinks it’s best they start inside. ‘Great stuff, man,’ Andrew says. ‘Seven thirty it is, then.’

The man slopes off, his footsteps falling silently down the empty street. It is Sunday evening and the other shops along Lion Street are shut except for the Chinese takeaway across the road. The bare strip lights of the oriental outlet emit an insipid yellowish light. A bored-looking staff member stands alone, drumming his fingers on the service counter, waiting for the phone to ring.

It’s a month or so since the festival finished and the flood of visitors began to recede. Over the final weekend, the sun emerged from the shadows and crowned everything in triumphant, life-giving light. The busyness of the streets already feels like a lifetime ago, however. Hay’s metamorphosis is short-lived. Almost as soon as the unsold books are bundled up and marked ‘returns’, the town brushes itself down and reverts to its habitual self.

As the painter had opened the door to step out, the high-pitched tinkle of a bronze bell attached to the hinge had
reverberated through the unfurnished room.

‘We’re going to have to get rid of that, I think, Andrew,’ Louise says to her husband, pointing a firm finger at the source of the noise.

The pair picked up the keys to the new premises about half an hour ago. A lease document rests on the sill of one of the two bay windows that face onto the street. ‘HM Land Registry’ the top of the page reads. Other than two vacuum cleaners, a stepladder and a pile of dust sheets thrown into the corner, the shop is more or less empty. Only a few odds and ends remain on the built-in shelving along one wall: a roll of duct tape, a fixed-line telephone, the Yellow Pages, a container for business cards and a small plastic sign saying
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