Under the Tump (11 page)

The class stand transfixed, their laughter stuck in their throats. They have all seen cowpats before, these discus-shaped fly feasts with their squelchy innards and their deceptively encrusted lids. Yet their genesis, their bringing into being, their original manufacture: this is something altogether new. All that grazing, all that chewing, all that grinding, and then to suddenly splurge forth in such a gush. We are all slightly awed.

The heifer at last looks fully content. For a while, she remains still, her dancing done. The children’s full attention
is hers. She can taste their respect. She can sense their admiration. The farmer leads her away, grumbling quietly. ‘Come on, now, yer silly thing.’

Walking tall, she leaves the stage, a dainty tail-flick her curtain-call goodbye.

Touch rugby is on the agenda tonight. Spring is at last upon us and its gift of lighter evenings allows the children an escape from their winter’s internment in the village hall. Lauren is bravely occupying the position of referee. A pile of jumpers defines the corner flags and two teams of seven youngsters are charging up and down the grass playing field, although not always in the vicinity of the ball. A third team stands on the sideline, waiting its turn. They make a fickle crowd, shouting support for their friends one minute and then heckling them the next. Tries are infrequent.

Rhys and Chris, two of the nominal organisers, are practising drop-kicks at the side of the pitch. Irritated that she’s being left in charge as usual, Lauren suggests they might ‘actually like to join in’. The two young men, both local farmhands, leave their ball-kicking and reluctantly enter the game.

The pair soon set aside their hesitancy and throw themselves into the play. With one on either team, the tempo lifts. Ball in hand, Rhys speeds along the touchline, shouting over his shoulder for his teammates to ‘keep up, keep up’.

Next, Chris has control of the ball and is making great show of whether he should chip or make a pass. In the end, he does neither, dummying his marker and sliding through a tag-tackle before eventually laying the ball off
to a tough-looking kid who is racing along beside him.

For the best part of ten minutes the girls and boys are running and panting and shouting, until Lauren finally blows her whistle and calls full time. Two tries to two, it’s a diplomatic result.

‘Good effort, everyone,’ Lauren shouts from the centre spot. ‘Right, Billy’s team, take a break.’ Billy, a lanky boy of about eleven, leads his fellow players off the field.

‘Jill’s team,’ Lauren says loudly, signalling to the waiting side. ‘You’re up against Bronwyn’s team.’ The seven fresh replacements rush enthusiastically onto the pitch to shrieks of ‘champ-yyy-ons’ and ‘no-oo prisoners’ and other bellicose battle-cries.

‘So you know what the rules are,’ says Lauren. ‘Try by the posts. Six touches and it’s a turnover ball.’

Lauren is a member of the women’s team down at Gwernyfed Rugby Club, so she knows the drill. ‘And no kicking the ball, please,’ she confirms, to which a boy on Bronwyn’s team says it’s unfair and that they should be allowed to kick after the fifth touch. Lauren consents. ‘All right, kicking after the fifth tackle is okay. But not before. All of you got it? Okay, let’s play.’

She blows the starting whistle.

Just as the match gets under way, Woko walks out of the shadows from the car park. I’m standing by myself on a raised bank just back from the touchline. We catch one another’s eye and he wanders over. He’s been busy lambing and I’ve had work commitments, so it’s the first Monday night that I’ve seen him for a month or so.

‘You all right, then?’ he says.

‘Hey, Woko,’ I say, trying to sound cheerful. ‘All good, thanks, yeah. Lucky with the weather, eh?’

It’s an inane start, but I’m never quite sure what to talk to Woko about. I have learned a little about farming under Tony’s tutelage and from general conversation at the Rhydspence, yet my grasp remains pretty rudimentary. I take some solace from the fact that Kilvert, who was always happier chatting with farmers’ wives in their kitchens rather than with their husbands in the fields, appears to have little hands-on knowledge of agriculture either.

I sense Woko encounters a similar difficulty with me. As an incomer, I am a blank sheet: no background, no history, nothing for him to latch on to – a phantom, in effect. As a consequence, although he’s always civil, we’ve never talked much.

‘And you?’ I ask. ‘Done with lambing?’

‘Yup, all finished up.’

‘Go well?’

‘Yeah, not bad. Well as to be expected, s’pose.’

‘Still keeping busy though?’ He doesn’t reply. ‘Must always be busy on a farm, I guess,’ I say to fill the void.

‘Yup, plenty to do all right.’

We stand in silence, both watching the chaotic game unfold on the pitch.

‘One touch,’ Lauren calls out. ‘Two touches … no, Dylan, no pushing. Let him get up. Huw, on your feet now.’

As Lauren tries to bring some order to the match, Billy’s team is growing bored on the touchline. Two boys are practising kicking, only they lack the skill of the older organisers and one of the two miskicks badly, the ball slicing off the side of his boot and rolling up the bank towards us. Woko scoops it up and expertly spin-passes it back to them.

‘Play a bit of rugby then, do you?’ I say.

It’s an off-the-cuff observation rather than a pointed
question, but Woko replies with uncommon enthusiasm.

‘Sure, I played a bit in my time,’ he replies. ‘Used to play flanker, down at Gwernyfed. Played over at Builth a bit as well, me and my mates. There was a bunch of us. Several of them are playing for the seniors, whatever, down there, like, you know.’

I don’t know, but he waves a hand vaguely off to the right, over the humped outlines of the Radnorshire hills, which, as Chatwin describes them, recede ‘grey on grey towards the end of the world’. Or, in this case, as far as Builth Wells.

I ask when he stopped playing, keen to keep the conversation going now Woko was on something of a roll. ‘’Bout five years ago, s’pose,’ he replies. ‘Maybe a bit longer.’ He’d have been around twenty, he calculates.

Was he working on the farm then? He laughs ironically. ‘Started working as soon as I left school at sixteen,’ he tells me. ‘I went to college, like. Got my certificates and all.’ He complains how you need ‘tickets’ for everything nowadays. ‘For your health and safety and what not, like.’

Woko has always had odd jobs in addition to farming. One of his neighbours has a small building firm, so he often helps him out as a day-labourer. For now, he needs the extra cash. His father is still working and the farm, which is mixed beef and sheep, isn’t large enough to provide two full incomes. Woko is hoping that, as his old man approaches retirement, he’ll begin to take a more active role, make a few more decisions around the place. ‘Stepping up’ is how he describes it.

Johnny, the current Llanigon Young Farmers chairman, finds himself in a similar situation. Gangly, good-humoured and just turned twenty, he has been working the family
farm since his mid-teens as well. Part of him would love to have gone into acting or music, he confided to me once, before quickly dismissing the idea as a ‘pipe dream’. Where would he start? He’s never even met a jobbing actor or musician. Farming, in contrast, is there on his doorstep. The natural default.

Most of Johnny’s school friends came from farming backgrounds. ‘Joskins’, the other children would label them. None of them studied much, content for the most part just to achieve the minimum GCSEs for agricultural college. A-levels or university were never really on Johnny’s radar.

Opportunities to travel proved slim too. Because farm work rarely lets up and extra hands are expensive, Johnny’s family was not in the habit of taking holidays, not even a bucket-and-spade mini-break to Tenby. He’s only been abroad once in his life, he tells me a little sheepishly. That was to France, for four days with some mates. They took the boat. I ask if he’s ever been on an aeroplane. He shakes his head.

One Monday night, while the younger members were occupied preparing pumpkins for Halloween, I fall into conversation with Chris and Rhys, who are killing time in a side room in the village hall. Both grew up locally, they tell me. As with Johnny, Rhys went to agricultural college straight after school, while Chris did a brief apprenticeship in carpentry, which he didn’t like much so he took a job on a dairy farm instead.

The conversation turns to travel and Chris tells me about his various package holidays to Europe with his parents. He went on his first big trip by himself last November, to watch Formula 1 in Dubai. ‘Eating out is dead cheap,’ he enthused. ‘It’s all two for one out there.’

Rhys hasn’t taken too many holidays, but he has done a few stints labouring in Norway, at a slaughterhouse that his uncle manages. His best mate spends six months in New Zealand every year as part of a shearing gang. Johnny and his peers, they don’t backpack.

I ask if they have been to London, to which Chris says he has, once, and Rhys replies that he hasn’t but that he fully intends to soon. ‘Everyone is, like, “I’ve been to London, been to London.” And me, I’ve hardly left the ruddy village.’

He’d like to go for a week, he says. Eat in all the nicest places, go to a cool club, ‘do all those things I can’t do here’. It’s only fair to see how the other half lives, he thinks. ‘I mean, they come up to our country here, don’t they. Driving like tossers.’ Chris strenuously agrees.

Woko hasn’t been to London, either. It’s rare for him to go even to Cardiff. He has been abroad, though; to Texas, on an exchange trip organised by the Welsh branch of Young Farmers. They visited farms, mostly.

Having a farm to inherit makes the decision to go into agriculture easier. In that respect, Woko and Johnny are one up on the likes of Chris and Rhys, who will be earning minimum wage or close to it. Not that the two farmers’ sons collect a salary as such. ‘Asset rich, cash poor’ is how Johnny describes this lack of regular payment. Just as Woko does labouring, Johnny undertakes contracting work on neighbouring farms. It was this after-hours work that funded his Paris trip.

For farmers and farm labourers alike, working the land presents an uncertain future. Two generations ago, more than a dozen dairy farms dotted Llanigon parish. Today, there’s one: Phillip Price, at Tynllyne Farm. Farmers are
encouraged to grow their herds, increase their landholding and buy in new machinery to become more competitive, but not all have the means to do so. All the extra debt and risk and stress are hardly attractions, either.

At the same time, alternative opportunities for young people from farming families are limited. The more ambitious often end up moving away, attracted to better employment prospects elsewhere. Those who stay hope to find work with a local employer, of whom, bar the council, there are few. Without good contacts, most school leavers are looking at a low-paid job stacking shelves at the Co-op or waiting on tables in a café.

If they can acquire the necessary training, some might land on a trade that will permit them to set out on their own. The boom in house-buying incomers, for example, means the local business directory is now brimming with plumbers and decorators, roofers and electricians.

Even if the labour market were buoyant, which it isn’t, young farmers still face the psychological and social challenges of cutting loose. Whatever farmers say to their children, however much they reassure them that their destiny is theirs to choose, for Woko and his ilk to become a policeman, say, or a teacher, is seen as opting out. Very possibly it means saying that the long line of Williamses at Penygenhill or Joneses at Llanthomas will be no more. For a young person, that’s no easy task.

Fortunately for Woko, farming is not only in his genes but it’s also what he loves best. He couldn’t imagine another path. Barring an unforeseen calamity, his father can rest assured that there will be a Watkins at Caenantmelyn Farm for at least one more generation.

From where Woko and I are standing, the sloping sheep fields of Llanigon follow the gentle contours of the valley bank down to the Wye below, whose twisting metallic-blue form slithers and snakes its way downstream to the dollhouse rooftops of Hay in the distance.

On the western edge of the town, right on the road junction up to Llanigon, a collection of white-roofed marquees glimmers brightly in a large rectangular field. The tented enclave signals the early preparations for Hay’s annual literary festival, a ten-day jamboree of books and literature that brings hordes of bibliophiles flocking to the town every spring.

Woko has fallen back into silence and so, in an effort to move the conversation on, I point down to the canvas blobs below and enquire if he’s planning to go to any events at this year’s festival.

The full programme has yet to be announced, but he doubts it. In the twenty-five years the festival has been running, he’s only ever been to one talk before.

‘Oh, right. Who was that, then?’

‘Adam Henson,’ he responds. I was expecting Bill Clinton or Stephen Fry. My surprise evidently registers on my face because Woko repeats the name again as though I didn’t catch it right the first time. ‘Adam Henson. You know, off
Countryfile,
like.’

I offer a muffled response, unsure if I should admit that I’ve hardly ever watched the BBC’s flagship rural television programme and consequently have no idea who Adam Henson is. A look of stupefaction lingers on his face. ‘It’s
Adam
’s Farm, right?’

It’s clearly inconceivable to him that I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about, so rather than confess as much and have his opinion of me sink even further, I enquire about what Adam Henson of Adam’s Farm had come to talk about.

‘He was doing a thing at the Royal Welsh. Brecknock was hosting it and he was down there, like. And you could have this dinner lunch thing then up at a farm, not far from here. We had a bit to do with organising it, like. With the lunch ticket, you got into a talk he was giving after at the festival about his book, see?’

‘So was it good?’ I ask.