Under the Tump (6 page)

I am not complaining. I had a well-paid job and I chose to give it up. In exchange, I have a working week that is mine to do with as I wish. Freelance journalism pays my bills and, in theory, leaves me time for my other passions. No waiting until retirement.

With this in mind, I decided to embark on a doctoral programme in Latin American studies shortly after we moved back to the UK. My idea was to keep a toe in a part of the
world that continues to fascinate me. The course is compelling but time-consuming, and I find myself at my desk more than my free-floating plans first envisioned.

On the upside, my daily commute is minimal. Emma delivered on her promise and had the tool shed in the garden converted for me. As a work space, it has everything I need; a phone line, internet (like most people, I am an exception to my own rule) and an electric heater for when the winter cold creeps under the door.

The furnishings are simple and functional, which suits me just fine. A few bookshelves along the walls. A filing cabinet in the corner. A large wooden table, complete with a view onto our vegetable patch and through to a wild flower garden that blooms into bright oranges and pinks in the summer.

Pleased as I am with how the shed has turned out, it will not help me integrate into community life. Indeed, its galvanised walls are positively prejudicial to such a quest. I cannot follow in Kilvert’s footsteps ensconced in my office chair.

So I set about cutting back my workload. I tell my editors that I’m no longer as available and ask my PhD supervisor if I can go part-time. Neither objects. Nor have the fears that all freelancers face when turning down work been realised: the world hasn’t fallen in. That said, neither has my invitation to a Tuesday afternoon garden party arrived yet. If and when it does, however, I shall be ready.

The second thing that catches my attention in Kilvert’s account of the eclipse party is a remark that he makes about his fellow guests. They are all very pleasant and friendly, he notes, before going on to say that they meet ‘almost like brothers and sisters’.

It’s the word ‘almost’ that brings me up short.

One of six siblings, Kilvert enjoyed a close relationship with his family. As the
Diary
reveals, he writes to all of them regularly and thinks of them often. Occasionally they visit him or he travels back to his parents’ home in Wiltshire. Most of the time they were absent, however, and it is out of this relational void that a sublimated desire for a surrogate family appears to grow. If true, it seems to me to be an entirely natural urge.

Finding a replacement for familial warmth among the local aristocracy was never realistic. Throughout the
Diary
, there’s a niggling feeling that Kilvert doesn’t quite belong. He speaks frequently and in affectionate terms about Mary Bevan, for instance, daughter of Archdeacon Bevan, yet her references to him in her own extensive diaries are scant and cursory.

In reality, Kilvert, a vicar’s son without a private income, was destined to be the nearly man: always the guest, not the host; forever the welcome visitor, never quite the full insider. Final proof of his almostness is seen in Mr Thomas’s rejection of the curate’s request to court his daughter Daisy. Kilvert’s prospects and position, he is led to understand, are unbefitting.

In many ways, the position of impecunious clergyman must have been a tricky one to hold in the Victorian period; too poor for the nobility, too removed for the masses, and very possibly too religious for many of the businessmen and professionals who made up the early ranks of the middle classes.

Kilvert’s closest ties appear to be with the laymen who shared his faith, such as Hope Morrell, the young, evangelically minded owner of Cae Mawr, or the clergymen who
shared his cloth, like Andrew Pope, the curate in Cusop, who suffered the embarrassment of having himself confirmed by the bishop in a case of mistaken identity that had the whole congregation tittering.

Pondering Kilvert’s exact place in society, I follow the tour group as it moves on from the Old Vicarage towards the bypass. Walking in twos, we stretch out in an elongated crocodile.

‘So are you new to the area?’ an elderly lady with grey curler-set hair asks me.

I tell her I am. She thinks it must be very exciting, ‘living where Kilvert once lived and that’. She once thought about moving here herself, in fact. Then – she waves her hand at the busy road and the estate houses opposite – she decided against it.

Up close, the village’s imperfections are hard to hide. The unsightly amalgam of old stone and new brick, of aged wood and uPVC. The sprawl of the garage workshop. The fluorescence of the Texaco garage with its luminous fuel prices. The sheer existence of the busy bypass and its surfeit of signage.

Observed from a short distance, however, Clyro is as picturesque a place as you could hope to find. Pointing down the bypass towards the Cutter’s Pitch end of the village, I tell her about a run I have recently discovered.

Just beyond the most recent of the two developments in ‘new Clyro’, there’s a stile half-hidden in the hedge. Go through there and it brings you out into an open meadow that brightens with buttercups in the spring. Below on the
left is the old mill pond where Kilvert would come looking for primroses in the hedge before Easter, and where he and the pub landlord once saw a white-bellied shrew darting and tumbling about in the reeds.

If you were to carry on up along a claggy path alongside a corn field, I explain, then over some sloping grazing land just above Tirmynach Farm, you’d eventually come out on the crest of a humpbacked hill.

‘Is that Boatside?’ she says, familiar with the surrounding geography from the
Diary
.

That’s right, I tell her. ‘Used to be a Roman camp up there as well,’ she adds. I’m not sure, I confess, although it would certainly make sense. Perched above the Wye valley flats with a horizon-stretching blaze of colour and countryside running north and south, the soldiers would certainly have had a commanding view.

The Wye is at its nearest to the east, huddled in the dip below two rippled fields of honeyed wheat and brilliant yellow rapeseed, its emerald-green waters rushing fast above the reeds. For sheer handsomeness, Wordsworth’s ‘wanderer through the woods’ is a match for any river in the British Isles.

Burrowed among the trees above its far bank stands Hay, a blue-grey patchwork of tiled rooftops amid a swathe of sylvan green. Poking above the tree canopy is the castle, a wonderfully hotchpotch emblem of the town’s borderland confusions. And then beyond, of course, the barren bouldery bulk of the Black Mountains. Implacably wild. Their beauty hard, unremitting, almost brutish in their bluntness.

Looking back west to Clyro, the view is altogether different. Softer, kinder, lusher. Scattered rooftops breathing trails of chimney smoke. Forested hillsides swooping down
together, backs arched in a springboard dive. The church tower cushioned by a tree-softened vale beneath an ocean of sky. Kilvert thought the village at its prettiest from this same spot too, its dingle sides shining with ‘gleams of green’ and the dotted houses washed by a ‘tender blue haze’.

I do my best to describe the scene to the lady, who tells me she can well imagine it. The Kilvert Society’s outings used to involve a fair amount of walking. ‘Not that you’d believe me to look at us now.’ Overhearing, an elderly lady beside her jabs her arm and the two women share a laugh. No, but seriously, she says, in their younger days they would follow Uncle Kilvert up into the hills. ‘Visit his old haunts, we would.’

I remark on Kilvert’s pastoral work around Clyro. ‘Villaging’ he called the practice. The 1871 census shows 130 families living in the parish, putting the total population at over 800. It amounts to almost the same today. The young curate would aim to get round every household once or twice a month, making for an impressive workload.

‘Villaging in the morning,’ he sometimes writes in his diary. Or elsewhere, ‘Been villaging all day.’ Sometimes he provides a fuller itinerary, such as this entry for late January in 1872:

It’s Kilvert’s memorable first-hand accounts of these visits that explain much of the
Diary
’s enduring appeal. Flesh-and-blood characters step off the pages, every one of them
deftly described, all of them bristling with life.

Such as ‘old Witcombe’, the deaf, helpless and nearly blind ninety-year-old, who leaned on the friendly curate and fondled his hand, ‘talking earnestly but incoherently and repeating himself almost every moment’.

Even those at life’s end gain vibrancy under Kilvert’s pen. Edward Evans with his ‘ceaseless moaning’ is one such luckless character. Catching him at death’s door, the curate’s eye is drawn to the ‘gaunt ghastly’ cat waiting at the end of his bed as though ready to ‘begin upon him’ the moment he breathes his last. Another bedside visitation was to the dying William Meredith, who lived beside the tump and whose eyes ‘rolled … wildly in the darkness’ as a fierce storm shook his old house and roared in the roof.

Of the dozens of villagers mentioned by name in the
Diary
, two stand out in Kilvert’s affections. Both are elderly, hospitable and God-fearing. John Morgan, an octogenarian soldier who saw action under Wellington in the Peninsular War, is one of the few residents ever to have left the village. Kilvert would often make his way up to the veteran’s modest cottage at Cwmbythog to listen to his stories, about whispered conversations with night sentries in France or scaring off marauding wolves with the flash of musket powder in Spain.

Hannah Whitney, she of the nutcracker face, was his other favourite. She lived alongside the stream by Ashbrook House, the water rushing in the gutter at her door. On sunny afternoons, she’d often sit on her front step, ‘cloaked and with her rusty black bonnet fiercely cocked and pointed, crown uppermost’, doing her knitting or just watching the world go by.

Even older than Mr Morgan, this elderly parishioner would turn her ‘withered grey face’ towards the attentive
curate and, with shining eyes, share ‘her reminiscences and tales of the dear old times, the simple kindly primitive times “in the Bryngwyn” nearly ninety years ago’.

It’s easy to picture Kilvert seated at her side, listening intently as she tells of the ghosts that once haunted ‘sheep cot pool’ just beneath Cold Blow or the fairies who were once said to dance at night to ‘sweet fiddles’ at Rhosgoch Mill.

Quaint and colourful as many of the
Diary
’s entries are, they are not without a hard edge. Beyond the gilded drawing rooms of the gentry, day-to-day life for most of Kilvert’s parishioners was one of abject poverty. Consider old Laver. ‘Shaggy and grey like a wild beast’, Kilvert struggled to say which was the more unkempt: the man himself, who was ‘swarming with lice’, or the ‘filthy den’ he called home. The dying Edward Evans was no better off, his ‘hovel bedroom’ in the attic ‘almost insupportable’ because of the ‘close horrid’ stench.

I mention to the lady the grim conditions that Kilvert encountered around the village. Clyro may have changed, but not altogether for the worse. She accepts the point, noting that the most precarious of the village’s housing stock would have been demolished long ago.

Talking of housing, she asks where I live. I point across the road to Pottery Cottage. ‘The white house,’ I explain. Looks old, she notes, and asks if it’s mentioned in the
Diary
. Not as far as I know, I have to admit. She gives me a pitying look.

Directly in front of the house, across the entrance road to Castle Estate from the tump, is an allotment. The lady comments on the triffid-like sunflowers that look out onto the road, their smiling paper-plate faces towering above the cabbages, carrots and runner beans behind.

They belong to my neighbour, Elwin, I explain. He regularly puts second-hand bikes and gardening equipment out on the main road, propping up a ‘for sale’ board beside them on the fence. Although they often take weeks to sell, no one ever thinks to steal them.

The archivist begins a patter about the former village school, which was decommissioned some time in the 1960s. From my shed window, I look out onto the square lavatory block at the back of the low-rise stone building, now renamed ‘Kilvert’s School’. This flat-roofed rear extension acts as the boundary line for the front part of our garden. Emma has attached two wooden trellises to the wall and is urging a combination of fig trees, rambling roses, sweet peas, vines, honeysuckle and a clematis to grow up it. I enjoy watching their progress from my office chair.

During Kilvert’s curacy, responsibility for instructing the children of the parish fell to Josiah Evans, a man of whom we learn little other than that his violin suffered from a broken string, In Kilvert’s opinion, the instrument had ‘something wrong with [all] the others’ too. As the school’s only master, the faceless Mr Evans was assigned a modest house next to the school, the back of which I can also see peering up over my garden hedge.

Never a parent himself, Kilvert was fond of children – overly fond, some modern readers might think. Reading the diaries today, some of the language he uses to describe the prettiest of his charges is certainly ‘florid’, let’s say.

Kilvert saves his most amatory ink for the ‘darling child’ Elizabeth Harris (‘Gipsy Lizzie’ to the diarist), whose drooping white eyelids and exquisite little mouth he finds of ‘indescribable’ and ‘unsullied’ loveliness. If that doesn’t raise eyebrows, then his confession to have walked six miles
to kiss the ‘sweet face’ of little Janet Vaughan may well do.

According to Kilvert’s biographer David Lockwood, this is the poetically minded diarist engaging in literary dramatisation. The language, he suggests, is ‘pure Pre-Raphaelite’, more an idealised benediction inspired by divine beauty than the sordid confessions of a clerical paedophile.