Under the Tump (26 page)

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. Demurely, 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 Marxist, 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.’

The experience left him, and other incomers, with a profoundly dim view of the local council. ‘They are entirely policy-less,’ he says. Compared with his subsequent comments,
the criticism sounds close to a compliment. Sexist, nepotistic, secretive, unaccountable: these are just some of the barbs he throws at them. ‘Even when I was battling with Lambeth in the 1970s against Tory cuts, the councillors were never that bad.’

The council is made up of a small clique of locals, in his view. They all know each other from old. Half are in business together or connected by marriage. Elections are largely uncontested. They co-opt their friends to join. They never think to explain their decisions to the public. ‘“Oh, well, it’s like that everywhere,” they argue. I say, “It’s like that in North Korea, mate.”’

To his credit, one of the councillors called a public meeting in the wake of the supermarket scrap. The idea, according to Rodney, was to heal some of the wounds caused by the conflict. This was back when the Conservatives were talking up their ‘Big Society’ policy. It was out of that meeting that the proposal for a Community Plan was born.

Rodney levers himself up out of his seat and walks across to a bookshelf by the fireplace. ‘You know who came up with the whole Big Society thing?’ he asks, and reaches for a slim volume from the shelf with the same title. I don’t. Jesse Norman, he tells me. The MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. He passes me the book and recommends I read it.
An Anatomy of the New Politics
, reads the subheading.

While he’s up, he searches for another book. He bought it the first time he visited Hay, back when the book festival was just starting out and long before he moved here permanently. ‘Now where is it?’ He can’t put a finger on it. Later that day, he sends me an email with the title and some blurb. It’s a four-volume set on the life of General Sir Charles Napier, who
fought against Napoleon in the Peninsular War and whose statue stands in Trafalgar Square. In the mid-1970s Rodney wrote a book about this popular London tourist spot.
Emblem of Empire
, it was subtitled. It sold well in the USSR.