Under the Tump (17 page)

Of course, a fair number don’t ‘get it’, he admits. He couches the final phrase in crook-fingered quotation marks, as though he knows the ‘it’ is nothing more complex than a bus in a field with some minimal comforts. At the same time, he’s also aware that selling rustic minimalism to townie types requires dressing everything up with back-to-nature branding and vague promises of metaphysical renewal.

They have only ever had one instance of really negative feedback, Rob says, shaking his head in exasperation. ‘Bet
you can’t guess who that was from?’ I can’t, but I take it to be a rhetorical question so await the answer.

‘Other travellers,’ he says. He’s right: I wouldn’t have guessed. A friend had posted about the Majestic Bus in a closed Facebook group called Bus Love. We got ripped to shreds, Rob says. Money-grabbing capitalists, they called him and Layla. Trading off their lifestyle. Ripping people off. ‘Proper trolling, it was.’ In retrospect, he finds it amusing, although it upset them both at the time.

The picture of Rob and Layla as totems of capitalism almost makes me laugh. The whole idea is totally absurd. Their stone barn lies in disrepair because they don’t have a penny to renovate it. Layla’s flowerbeds lie untended because she’s cancelled most of her gardening work to look after her baby. I love the home they’ve created for themselves, but, as Rob himself admits, it’s still ‘a glorified caravan’.

With Layla’s upbringing and Rob’s traveller experience, it could have been very different. They had an established crew, after all. A ready-made group of accordant companions, all of them carefree wanderers, kindred voyagers, not a stitch of responsibility or a fixed abode among them. Everyone around them ‘in their game’, as Updike would say.

Strange as it sounds, the vitriol they received from the Bus Love community shows how far they have come, how much they have travelled. The Marches are, in their own way, their Ipswich, MA. Most markedly for Rob, the former traveller from Suffolk. For Layla, it’s more complex. She grew up here. Yet the world she inhabited as a child is demonstrably different from the one she has created for herself since.

In the Marches, people place hippies into one of two broad categories: the ‘hardcore’ ones, who live in the hills and cut themselves off; and the ‘chequebook’ ones, who dread their hair but have a Mac laptop in their insulated yurt. Neither label fits Layla. She’s like one of old Hannah Whitney’s fairies, dancing freely to a tune all of her own.

We climb down from the bus and take a stroll through the garden. A small digger is parked across the driveway. It’s borrowed from a friend in preparation for the earthremoval work required for the new nursery. A shipping container runs along the hedge by the access road, its contents hermetically sealed. Next to it is a trampoline with high netted sides, beside which is a polytunnel that, like the flowerbeds, is showing signs of recent neglect.

Moving back up the bank towards the house, we pass the veg patch. Tilda recently helped plant some spuds, Rob says, pointing to a section of freshly dug earth. He lists the other vegetables he plans to grow: broad beans, French beans, cabbages, courgettes, carrots, garlic. They don’t sell anything, he clarifies. ‘It’s all for us to scoff.’

Our tour is over. Before heading inside, I turn to take in the view one last time. I gaze out over the garden and the derelict barn, over the bramble bushes and hawthorn hedge, and out to the sheep-spotted fields and whale-shaped drumlins beyond. I soak it in, guarding the scene for future savour.

Rob sees me sizing up the vista and second-guesses what’s going through my mind: I’d like a piece of it for myself. My own Upper Tumble. We could sell Pottery Cottage, buy
ourselves a field, go off-grid, let the children roam. He has seen it before. The dreamy glaze, the wistful longing, the sprinkles of stardust.

Hands thrust into his pockets, T-shirt hanging loose, Rob leans his elbows on the wooden railing that borders the porch deck and joins me looking out into the distance.

‘There aren’t many people like who live in places like this,’ he says, eyes staring fixedly ahead. ‘People come here and say it’s wonderful and all that, but they wouldn’t actually do it. It’s too …’ He breaks off, looking for the right word. ‘… too blooming hard.’

He recounts their first winter with Tilda as a baby, no proper heating, all of them sleeping curled up in a ball by the fire, ice on the windows. It was minus fifteen Celsius outside. He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. ‘There’s all sorts of stuff you don’t have living here.’

Kicking off his wellies, he opens the door to the house and walks through to the kitchen, where he washes his hands and starts preparing a salad for lunch. I follow him in.

Layla is still on the sofa, Meri asleep in the crook of her arm. Putting down the baby, she wanders over to the kitchen to offer Rob a hand. He passes her some peppers and asks if she could chop them.

Conscious of her mother’s sudden absence, Meri stirs, letting out a doleful whine. Rob puts down the lettuce he’s holding and goes over to reassure her. The two trade gurgling noises for a while as he tries to coax her back to sleep.

I cross over to the kitchen and enquire if I can help. It’s fine, Layla says. She invites me to pour myself a glass of water and I stand by the kitchen unit. Meri has quietened and Rob moves off to check on the fire. He sees the log
basket is running low and tells Layla he’ll pop across to the barn to get some more wood. Picking up his faithful deerstalker, he opens the door and steps out.

I mention our conversation about the Bus Love incident to Layla. She rolls her eyes. It was pretty nasty at the time, she admits. She pauses, the chop-chop-chop of her knife on the board momentarily stilled. If I really want to know how she feels about it, she says, looking at me over her shoulder, then she’s more irritated by the whole thing than upset.

She resumes her chopping, slicing faster and harder now, her cheeks flushing salmon pink. For a minute or two it seems that’s her final word on the subject. The peppers cut, she brushes the thin strips along the board with the flat of the knife and into the salad bowl.

‘They are forever talking about loving others and being open to ideas,’ she then says, turning round to look at me straight. ‘But, honestly, if you were to ask me, I’d say it’s quite a negative and close-minded place they’re coming from.’

Rob comes back in, his arms laden with logs. He places them as quietly as he can in the basket so as not to wake Meri. I finish my glass of water as Layla moves the salad bowl to the sideboard of the Welsh dresser.

They have a friend coming for lunch, she tells me. Someone she knew when she was growing up. Layla gives me her back story, about how she had moved away for university, got married, built a life for herself in the West Midlands, and about how she had now decided to move back after her father’s death and how she had picked up a dream part-time job with the National Parks.

I reflect on how the area seems to draw people back, and Layla agrees. It’s to do with the landscape, she thinks. ‘You
know, the hills, the tumbledown cottages, just the beauty of the place really – when I moved away, that always stayed with me.’

Rob has sat down at the living-room table and is glancing through the old photo album that Layla brought through from the bedroom. He calls her over. ‘Remember her?’ He points a finger at the picture of a woman with spiked pink hair. ‘Wow,’ Layla gasps, turning towards the window to examine the image in the light. ‘Punk Annie. Now, that takes me back.’

For a moment they flick through the pages of the album together, Layla standing at Rob’s shoulder, both of them sighing and smiling and shouting out an occasional name, lost in their own joint memories.

Layla returns to the sideboard and starts hunting for the ingredients to make a salad dressing. The pictures have put her in mind of another draw to the area. The people around here, she says. ‘They’re another big reason I came back.’

I ask what she means, conscious that most of her old crowd moved on long ago. The mix of people living here, she says: it’s grown much wider. Before, it was basically farmers and hippies. Now, there are all sorts. Rob backs her up, pointing out that further along on their same hill live a photographer, a writer and an IT expert. ‘All of them incomers but pleasant enough.’

Their observations give me heart. My experiences at the Rhydspence and among the Young Farmers had exposed me to worlds I’d hitherto not known and ways of being I’d not previously encountered. Meeting Rob and Layla took me out of my bubble of personal experience once more.

Illuminating though these encounters were, they all left me perplexed as to where my place might lie. If I didn’t fit
into any of these camps, if I wasn’t ever to be embedded in the inner sanctum of the ‘local’, did that mean I’d be left stranded on the edge, my aspirations for an experience of community ‘knit’ dashed?

Not necessarily, Layla and Rob seemed to be suggesting. The Marches, as with almost anywhere else, is made up of an amalgamation of different subgroups. All have their own norms and nuances. Conforming excessively to one leaves you in danger of closing off avenues into others. It’s a form of belonging, but a very narrow one. The Bus Love syndrome, in other words.

I’m aware their lunch guest will be arriving any minute and it’s time I took my leave. I’ve brought my running kit with me and I ask Layla where I might get changed. She looks at me quizzically, just as the farmer’s wife did on our first day, and then points me to the bathroom.

A few minutes later, having thanked them profusely and wished them well with the new bus, I am jogging away down their rutted track. Soon their caravan house and majestic buses are behind me. I press on, bound for home, the silvestrian queen singing in my ear.

When I enter Clyro an hour or so later, the village feels like a hubbub of activity compared to the solitude of the hillside home. My run has given me space to think. Kilvert’s footsteps have so far taken me to a variety of contiguous, confined worlds. Do they ever meet, though, and what happens when they do?

To answer that, I realised I’d have to go to the miniature melting pot of ‘town’. And not just on any day. A Thursday, it would have to be. For the week’s fourth day is when the trumpets sound and the clans gather. Thursday is market day in Hay.

Both men are dressed in jeans, heavy shirts and hard-wearing construction gloves. Andy, a thickset Londoner with white stubble and a genial smile, has added a striped beanie to the uniform. From underneath the hat, wisps of grey emerge around his ears. He and his assistant look tired. Above their heads, the town’s clock tower is creeping towards 6 a.m.

They are midway through constructing a rectangular metallic frame. With brittle poles for legs and four plywood tabletops for a thorax, it resembles a gigantic stick insect. Only flatter, and with yellow rubber non-slip pads for feet.

The invertebrate market stall stands stationary on the junction between Lion Street and Broad Street. Propped up beside it on the tarmac is a red metallic road sign, the frame rusted and chipped. Two lines of white lettering run across the top. ‘Ffordd’, reads the first. ‘Ar Gau’, the second. A translated version appears beneath. Somehow the English words feel more perfunctory and considerably less polite: ‘Road Closed’.

As yet, there is no one to pay heed to the bilingual injunction but us. The town is still snoring. It’s too early for work, too early for morning dog-walking, too early for much other than soft-duvet sleep.

Somewhere in this Marcher Llareggub a friendless alarm clock has probably just begun to bleep or a kettle clicked into life, its steamy hiss waking the cat. The town’s dawn murmurings must be behind soundproofed walls, however, because here on the street all is quiet, the only noise an avian canticle from the telephone-wire choir overhead.

Andy takes another wooden tabletop from his stack, stored in a trailer hitched to an SUV. Each measures about five feet by three. Kaley usually sets up the weekly market with him, but he has hurt his back. Kaley’s replacement doesn’t say much, other than that he needs coffee and wants his bed. Andy, by contrast, is the talkative type. He worked Camden Market for many years, trading woollen Afghan socks, mostly. Now, he runs his own locally based marketgarden business as well as overseeing the Thursday market.

I ask how Hay compares to Camden. ‘Quiet,’ he says, and laughs. It’s not just Hay: all rural markets around here are struggling. He blames the supermarkets, especially now they offer home delivery. ‘Llandrindod market has, what, five or six stalls maybe, and Brecon and Builth are on their uppers.’ So, by comparison, he’d say Hay is in ‘pretty good shape considering’.

Andy sucks in his teeth when I ask about the forecast for the day. Rain scheduled, he says: showers early morning, gradually deteriorating. He prods at the heavy waxy covering that stretches tight across the roof of the stall. A good tarp will keep the rain off, he assures me. A cold wind is what market traders really hate. ‘It’s a right bitch, the wind, no mistake.’

We both look up at the insipid sky. A trickle of watery grey light is just breaking through the cloud cover. A feeling of foreboding pervades. Andy gives the metal frame a final shake to check that it’s secure and then claps his gloved hands together to brush off the dust. That’s them about done, he says. Then it’s back at four o’clock this afternoon to take it all down again. His assistant says his farewells and saunters off down the road. His bed, he reiterates, is calling.

Andy leans into the trailer and rearranges the remaining poles and tabletops. As he’s finishing up, he takes me through their setting-up routine. They always start in Memorial Square, he says, just below the castle. A stone cross to the veterans of the two world wars gives the tarmac square its official name, although most of the town’s residents refer to it by its everyday function: ‘the car park’.

He starts counting off the stallholders on his fingers. There’s Craig the Veg, who takes four tables. Chris and Nicky the Cheese, they take three. They’ve been coming every week for over thirty years. There’s the Fish Man too. He’s another long-timer. He parks up in his own van and sells directly out of that. So no need for a table. Same with Jason the Sock Man, who brings his own trestles with him. He has the spot right in the middle of the car park. Andy lists his inventory with an expert’s appraisal. Multipack work socks, walking socks, sports socks, kids’ socks, ladies’ socks, tights, stockings.

Then come the one-man bands. They just need a single-table stall each. The numbers fluctuate a little from week to week. Andy can generally bank on half-a-dozen regulars turning up. ‘Who would that be, then?’ I ask. So the Card Lady, the Florist, the Pot Plant People, the Jewellery Girl, the Bag Lady, Primrose Organic. He ticks them off one by
one. Some traders move on. Like the Burger Van Man who used to come here but found more trade in Hereford. Others chirp up and try their hand. Russ the Knife, for example. He’s new. He calls himself Russ the Knife, Andy explains, but he sells saucepans as well.

The only other mainstay in the car park is Tom’s Junk Van. They don’t set up for him because he comes in his own removals lorry. He parks up behind Chris the Veg, over in the far corner. His speciality is auction salvage, the assorted fruits of which spill out directly onto the tarmac: rickety chairs, wooden bedsteads, mirrors, picture frames, second-hand books, rusty gardening tools, metal stepladders, china vases, lamps and shades, bins and baskets, watering cans, bookends, bicycle racks. A marvellous medley of miscellanea.

Afterwards, Andy moves across to the Cheese and Butter Markets. The two structures are distinctive for being covered, permanent and close to 200 years old. The first abuts the car park, just behind the fishmonger’s van. Constructed on the site of the ancient Guildhall, it’s recently undergone a comprehensive restoration. A tableau of black-and-white photographic images along with accompanying text describes the market’s 800-year history, from the town’s beginnings as a fortified settlement to the steam-driven excitements of the Victorian era.

A private door to the side of the twin-arched entrance leads to a steep set of stairs and an old meeting room above. Once a manorial court, where farmers and market traders paid their taxes and fines, the Cheese Market has seen life as a theatre, a Masonic lodge and, in more recent times, a Catholic place of worship. The building’s revamp has led to its latest guise as a holiday flat, equipped with a king-size bed and matching turrets directly outside the window.

Alongside is the Butter Market, a stubby flat-roofed building whose stone-plinth support columns and open sides give it a Romanesque feel. The effect is enhanced by its semi-elevated setting, the consequence of one side being three or four feet lower than the other. A wide walkway lined with a small gallery of shops runs along the upper side. Beneath is a truncated road down the middle of which the townspeople wander at will, the bullying motorcar for once compelled to wait.

Andy tackles the Cheese Market first. It’s the smaller of the two, accommodating just four stallholders. Tree the Coffee Roaster and Tim the Jam occupy the left-hand side and request just one table each. Stretching along the rear arch, immediately opposite the entrance, is Joe of 100% Hay, an organic veg producer. He requires two tables. Then next to him, on the right-hand side, is Bernie the Baker, who takes two as well.

In the Butter Market, which is probably double the size of its neighbour, a food theme also predominates. Among the regulars are Kate the Bread, who does a popular line in Danish pastries and raisin whirls, and Chris George, a butcher whose family has been in the meat business since Kilvert’s day. Some of the other habitual stallholders include the French Patisserie Man (who is genuinely French), the Wool Woman, Lewis the Woodworker, the Parkinson People with their preserves and, last but not least, the lovely ladies of the Women’s Institute. Most require just one table, except for the butcher, who takes three.

The third and last section of the market runs up from where we’re standing beneath the clock tower at the opening of Lion Street’s wide estuary mouth. From here, the road curves up past Golesworthy’s outdoor store, then
narrows as it heads upstream past Richard Booth’s bookshop and Bartrum’s stationers, Hay Deli and the newsagent’s, before splitting off at Murder and Mayhem bookshop into divergent tributaries, all of them narrower still. The stalls run for only fifty yards or so before banking off up a steep alleyway towards the Cheese Market.

Occupying the largest pitch is the stick insect, whose tabular body is divvied up between Alex Gooch, Artisan Breadmaker, with his prize-winning sourdoughs, and two meat specialists, one selling ‘Hungarian Smoked Delicacies’, the other hogget and mutton. The remaining stalls line either side of the pavement. Russ the Knife, Avril the Flowers, Andrew CD, Julie the Soaps, Malcolm the Carpets and the Falafel Fellow, who, unlike the now-departed Burger Van Man, does a roaring lunchtime trade.

With all the stalls now ready, I ask Andy when the traders will start arriving. Not for at least an hour or more, he tells me. I’ll find Chris the Cheese setting up already, although Andy warns me off disturbing him. ‘He likes everything so-so, you know.’ Try the Butter Market, he suggests. ‘Chris George gets here plenty early.’

He taps the back of the trailer and climbs into his 4x4. ‘Rain,’ he repeats, peering up at the sky once more and sniffing the air. ‘Definitely, rain.’

Chris George is making toast. As the bread browns, he runs his eye over a sheet of paper on the tabletop with a list of customer orders. He calls this ‘multitasking’ and seems pleased at his capacity for time-management.

Every week Hannah and Sal, who manage the stall during
the day, arrive at 5.30 a.m. Chris meets them there, having driven over from Talgarth with the butcher’s van. The three unload the bulky produce onto the tables opposite their stall, then transfer each item across to its allotted place. The trestles split roughly into thirds: fruit and root vegetables on the right, meat in the centre, and greens on the left. Three supermarket aisles compressed into one.

When the customers start filing through, Chris heads back to Talgarth where his father, Bryan, is currently at the helm of W. J. George Butchers, the family firm. Bryan is seventysix years old and in no rush to give up his day job. Chris’s father took over from his own father, who retired at seventy-five, but only so he could throw himself into a second career breeding racehorses. ‘We don’t retire early, us lot,’ says Chris.

The ten employees at W. J. George know their meat. When Grandfather George took on the business from an uncle, Talgarth could count five butchers, three of whom had their own slaughterhouses. W. J. George is the only one to have kept with the tradition. It’s also the only one still in business. Whether it’s tunnel-boned lamb you’re after or pork shanks or thick-cut chops or slow-cooking chuck steak, then Talgarth’s old-school butcher’s is widely recognised as the place to go.

Dylan Jones, editor of
GQ
magazine, is a big fan of the meatery. The media sophisticate, who has a holiday house nearby, tells a funny tale about being eyeballed by men with meat cleavers after asking for ‘salt marsh lamb’. ‘What’s wrong with our grass-fed lamb?’ came the stony response. His newspaper piece about the incident appeared under the title, ‘Don’t mess with the man in the apron.’

Chris has ditched his butcher’s apron today in favour of a brown woollen jumper and red ski jacket. He’s cheerful
and chatty despite the early hour. He started at the market aged eighteen, he tells me. He’s now fifty-one. There was a long wait to get a pitch back in those days. The town was crammed, he says, pointing out through the Butter Market pillars to the surrounding streets.

The last time he actually manned the stall was during Hannah’s wedding. He forgets how long ago that was exactly, and shouts over to Hannah to ask. Almost a year, the younger woman responds from behind the stall where she’s stacking a pile of cucumbers into a precarious triangle. ‘Better than my first effort, then,’ he shoots back. He chuckles, as does she.

Rosy-cheeked and energetic, Hannah has a full-time job at the local estate agent, although she takes Thursdays off to work the market. I’m intrigued why she keeps up with it. Aren’t the early starts a killer? They are, she admits. Her feet ache by the end of the day, but working the market is something she has always enjoyed doing. It’s nice to get out of the office, she admits. ‘It’s really sociable, as well. That’s what I like the most.’

The toast pops up.

Chris extracts the two slices from the toaster, which he has rigged up to an extension cable underneath the table. The bread is hot and he juggles it from hand to hand until it’s cool enough to butter. This is the team breakfast, he informs me, reaching for a knife and a pot of jam. Hannah wanders over to tell him that the stall is more or less finished. A couple of pre-orders to make up and then they’ll be done.

As they’re talking, a tall gentleman in a pink woollen hat walks in off the street. Chris strolls over and greets the man warmly. ‘Come for Mrs Griffiths’ order?’ he asks. ‘Aye,’ says the man. Chris reaches behind the stall for the food parcel,
which is neatly arranged in a flat cardboard box, the kind with small holes for handles that apples and oranges come in. He passes it to the man, who exchanges it for two banknotes from his wallet. ‘Keeping busy?’ the gentleman asks. ‘Always busy, John,’ replies the butcher, ever chirpy. He hands him his change. ‘Got to keep busy,’ the man says, ‘that’s the way it is.’

Regulars like John account for a good proportion of their trade, Chris tells me. He points to the vacuum-packed cuts of topside beef and pork tenderloin when I ask him what sells well. I look over to the severed animal parts wrapped in see-through tourniquets, the striated veins bulging against the polythene sheeting. It should be a hellish, morgue-like scene and yet it’s not, overfamiliarity having inured us to the sight of so much raw, eviscerated flesh. ‘People around here like a joint on a Sunday,’ Chris observes. I nod, wondering if the same would be true if we had to butcher it ourselves.