Under the Tump (9 page)

Although we all live relatively close, the group isn’t in the habit of dropping in on one another at home. Kiron once called by with some Easter eggs for my boys, and Clive kindly donated me some golf balls so I could practise my chipping, but on both occasions I was out and they left the gifts at the back door. They were probably relieved to have missed me. To step across our respective thresholds, it feels, would somehow breach the comforting distance created by the Rhydspence.

As a consequence, Tony is the pub’s only regular who’s actually been inside our house. We invited him for dinner when his wife was away in America. He came in an ironed shirt and brought some freshly picked field mushrooms.

Gifting foodstuffs represents a commonplace gesture of goodwill in the Marches. One memorable Wednesday, our numbers were augmented by the presence of two pheasants at the table, both neatly plucked and ready for the pot, the denuded birds a repayment by Tony for a favour Les had done him.

Just as the personal is kept at bay, so too is anything that might be interpreted as serious or controversial. Wednesdays
are for relaxing and shooting the breeze, not re-righting the world. So religion, race, education, terrorism, global poverty, you name it, all are given a wide berth, in the main.

This never ceases to amaze Emma, who finds it inconceivable that we can sit for two or three hours and discuss nothing of substance.

This isn’t strictly the case, I tell her. There’s a lot of talk about farming, for instance. The cost of feed, the price of land, the Single Farm Subsidy, the pencil-pushers in Brussels, the NFU, avian flu.

‘Bad week for cull ewes,’ Tony will say, as part of his habitual report on that week’s livestock market. Or, ‘Good trade on store lambs.’

Then someone else will shake their head and say how they can’t understand how these boys can pay twelve or thirteen hundred quid for store cattle and hope to make their investment back, to which Tony will say that there’s serious money about, and everyone will agree that the market’s owners are sitting tidy.

‘And what else?’ Emma will ask. Politics. We discuss politics too, I say. Politics with a small ‘p’, that is. Government policies are largely ignored, except for an occasional swipe at ‘stupid’ health-and-safety laws or ‘clueless’ environmental requirements.

International affairs are dealt with summarily too. ‘So, looks like it’s all kicking off in the Middle East again,’ someone might say, to which someone else will reply, ‘Aye,’ and another might mention boots on the ground or, more likely, bombing the lot of them.

In the same way, parliamentarians get short shrift, tarred as ‘power-hungry second homeowners’ who would no more know how to fix the deficit than they would a tractor tyre.
Tony has a simple if somewhat blunt solution: go to Westminster and sack every other one of them. ‘There’s your bloomin’ deficit sorted, right there.’

Mostly, it’s local politics that occupies them. Petty bureaucrats in County Hall. Tinpot dictators on the Town Council. How did such-and-such a farmer get permission to put up a huge poultry shed? Why can’t Highways pull its finger out and stop cars cutting the corner by the bus stop in Clyro? These are the political concerns that matter to them.

Emma will raise a sceptical eyebrow. We also talk about property, I add, a rejoinder that merely sets her expression in place.

Which houses or farms have come on to the market, who might be looking to sell up, where house prices are at, these are perennial themes as well. Who owns what now, and who might come to own what in the future, carries great import for the group. The answers locate their fellow residents and, indirectly, they place the Rhydspence crew too.

It’s only after many months of going along on Wednesdays that this realisation hits me. And with it comes another insight that helps explain the limited purview of the group’s conversation: the men are, it gradually dawns on me, only cursorily concerned with the present. In the peace and quiet of the Rhydspence, it is not the here and now that counts. It’s the past.

Not the distant past of history books. Rather, it’s their past, the recent past, the past of yesteryear. This is what captures their imaginations and loosens their tongues. The past of Sunday best and rationed meat, of marching bands and top-of-the-milk, of trouser braces and May Day rides, of Old Knowles the Schoolmaster and his holly-stick cane.

This is how most evenings roll, with dusty memories dug
up and dusted down, with former friendships remembered and regaled, with old rivalries relived and re-won. A mere nudge of the lock-gate and out from the sluices of their memories it floods. So Mike, say, will have been waiting for traffic at Crow Turn junction and will have got to wondering if there wasn’t once a cottage directly opposite, and Geoff will be darned if he can remember, and Tony will think there might have been because he remembers talk of a lorry driving into it, to which Geoff will recall a similar incident at the Baskerville Arms but not a cottage at Crow Turn, and finally Les will settle the matter by recalling not only the cottage but also the driver – ‘Dennis Burton, it was’ – behind the wheel of the lorry, and Mike will say, ‘Gert away,’ and Geoff will say, ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ and that will be that.

For me, there’s something mesmerising about this group retelling, the way the men skip between past and present, present and past. Magic lives in these gaps, I swear.

Because no one has a monopoly on the past, events gather pace and grow as they bounce between the men. The winter of ’62 provides just such a case, when the snows fell and fell and Les was shut up at home for six weeks solid and Geoff swore the snowdrifts were up to the roof and the sheep took to eating holly. Pigeons froze on the wires, Mike adds, while Tony remembers his father telling him about an old boy who slit his horses’ throats rather than witness them starve.

Part of the pleasure of Wednesdays comes in connecting people to other people, and other people to places, and places to other people. It’s as if the world outside the Rhydspence represents one giant community crossword book that waits for midweek for a few more clues to be solved.

Take the school minibus run, which Tony does because his brother owns a coach company and Tony can do with
the extra money. He goes up to the Begwyns, past Rickettes’s place, he says in answer to someone’s question about his route. No sooner has he started than Les interrupts to ask if it’s the Wern he’s talking about, and Geoff starts tapping his temple and repeating ‘Now, what’s the name of the place?’ Williams, at Vrondee, chips in Les, apropos of nothing, while Geoff is getting there with Scavin, Salvin, Scalding, ‘
Scalding Farm
, that’s it.’

The conversation about the route continues in this vein, me cruising along on the cushion of the pub seat, silent, listening as Tony’s imaginary school bus driver passes Dai Stephens’s place with the new bungalows and some kids called Jones, and down the back lane to Llanstefan and then right at Ceri Owens’s, who is in a bad way with cancer (‘Hell of a good bloke, Ceri Owens’), and switches back to Glasbury when the weather is bad, before turning up via the waterworks and back down over the brook, where the floods can be a bugger but the fishing is good.

Eventually the minibus reaches the school gates and that week’s crossword is finished. Someone jokes they should join Tony one morning and see the route for themselves.

For now, everyone is content exactly where they are, comfortably ensconced close to the fire, in an empty ancient pub, beer within reach, and nothing but their memories and a softly snoring publican for company.

I find Geoff sitting alone nursing his pint. He drinks lager, with a splash of lemonade on top. No one ribs him for the lemonade. With a smaller man there might be some ribbing. Not with Geoff, though; he’s too big a man for that.
And too kind. He wouldn’t know how to give it back.

Top-up? I ask. He’s good for now, he says. He tells me to pull up a chair and asks how I’m keeping. I don’t think he really understands what a freelance journalist does, but he listens politely when I describe my week and he nods from time to time and says it sounds like I’ve got plenty of work on and that’s certainly a good thing in times like these.

I enquire after Les, who is recuperating at home after a knee operation, and from what Geoff understands he’s doing fine. Mike can’t make it tonight because he’s got something else on. He doesn’t know about Peter or Tony.

Paul wanders in and, on seeing that it’s just Geoff and me, wanders out again. The dragon is long finished. He’s on to an owl now, I believe. And then Geoff gets talking. It’s the old stone cottage with the new double-glazed windows opposite the post office in Clyro that starts him off. He remembers when the house came up on the market, back in the 1960s it would have been. He was working for Bryan Jones at the time.

‘You know Ashbrook, the garage? Well, that used to be a dairy farm.’ It was his first job. An old woman called Davis used to work there and when she died Bryan tried to persuade Geoff to buy it. ‘Well, I hadn’t got, what, two bob.’

The house ended up being sold at auction in the Crown in Hay and made £350. ‘“You want to buy that place, boy,” Bryan said to me. And I said to ’im, “Well, I haven’t got no money.” And he said, “Well, I got some money. I can lend you some, no problem, if you want to buy it.” I swear to you, as sure as I’m sat on this seat here, that’s what he said.’

I smile, occasionally interjecting on a point of clarification or just to show I’m still listening, but otherwise only too happy to sit and listen to Geoff reminiscing.

‘Where my house is now – exactly where my house is – there used to be a big rock there. Come soaring right out the ground, it did. One of the first jobs I did when I started work was I ploughed that field. With an old Fordson Major tractor, a trailer plough hitched on the back. We edged from the top end right down to the road at the bottom. And there was this rock. And we used to sit on that rock and have our bait, you know. Cor, I tell you, what a view that was.’

I stop him to ask what ‘bait’ means. Food, he tells me. ‘Bait time, grub time.’ Slab of cheese, hunk of bread, an apple maybe. None of them had flasks back then, so they’d put their tea in a bottle and wrap the bottle in newspaper to keep it warm.

Post office field, they used to call it, he continues, picking up where he left off. Best field for miles around for catching rabbits. Old Tom, who used to milk the cows up there, would run a net right down the one side.

‘Then they used to get a line, a long line, and drive a peg in up the top corner. They’d walk down round with this line and pull all the rabbits out of the squats so they’d run into the net.’ Someone would then follow up behind with a wooden stick, sort of a truncheon shape, and knock the rabbits on the back of the head. ‘Dozens and dozens of them, like. Aye, there were rabbits about then. Kept the country alive.’

People turn their noses up a bit at rabbit nowadays, Geoff says, shaking his head, but there’s a good bit of meat to be had on a rabbit. ‘The saddle, two fat rolls of meat like that.’ He locks his fingers in a small circle to illustrate its dimensions.

As he does so, I notice he’s missing the top half of two fingers on his left hand. I want to ask what happened, but I don’t feel I can. Then I wonder if I’ll ever know Geoff well
enough to ask, and it saddens me to think that perhaps I never will.

Keeping to his theme, he tells me how rabbit is best eaten roasted, although he wouldn’t criticise anyone for putting rabbit in a casserole. Then he asks me if I’ve ever eaten pigeon and when I say I haven’t he rolls his eyes and says how they used to eat a lot of roast pigeon when he was growing up.

Elwyn Sheen, now there was a man who knew his pigeons. Used to shoot them as they came in to roost, up in Lloney Wood. ‘He’d feather one while he was waiting for some more to come in. Drop it into his pocket, like.’

Not for the first time, I find Geoff’s recollections dislodging fragments of Kilvert’s
Diary
and setting my imagination whirring: pictures of Pentwyn, a rambling old house up by the old post office field, for example, filled with swarms of flies on a summer’s day. Or of John Morgan, the ‘little Welshman’ from Cold Blow, pulling down the property’s old cider press, while Miss Bynon, the owner, peered out of her windows nursing fears about India’s ‘Musketoos’.

With Geoff’s talk of pigeons, it’s the reddened face of Gipsy Warnell, the poacher, who jumps most clearly to mind. The shouting, the angry words, the trousers so nearly torn. How different the Rhydspence is by comparison. Just the two of us, quietly nursing our pints, far from the fracas of that night in the New Inn.

Which in turn leads my thoughts to the drunken wild man, whom Kilvert describes stumbling out of the New Inn one breakfast time with a steeple-crowned hat on his head and waking the village with his droning bagpipes while the children danced to his tune as though he were a modern-day Pied Piper.

Geoff’s thoughts run away with him, back to a time when the land opposite Pottery Cottage was all open pasture and the tump his outdoor playground. There was a big gang of them when he was young, he tells me, a touch of wistfulness in his voice. ‘We were nine. The Harleys were eleven. The Griffithses, six.’ All holiday, they’d spend up on the tump, larking about, making dens, building tree houses. ‘Oh, we had these beautiful tree houses, we did.’ Geoff emits a throaty chuckle, his eyes dancing brightly in the light of the fire.

We talk late into the night; about his memories of the old school by my house; about Cae Mawr, and how his mother had come to work there for Lady Baskerville as a mere fourteen-year-old; and about Clyro Court, the big country house on the edge of the village, where Kilvert used to go for dinner and croquet games, and where Geoff’s grandfather, the estate manager, used to start the oil engine every night to bring light to the building, and where the beaters on shoot day would walk down through the wood and the guns below would blast the pheasants from the sky until the keeper’s cart creaked under their feathery weight.

Eventually, a beam of headlights through the window signals Geoff’s lift home and, downing the dregs of his beer, he reaches for his coat.