Under the Tump (7 page)

I am prone to give him the benefit of the doubt and I take it from the Kilvert Society’s general silence on the matter that they are too.

Whatever the case, Kilvert’s life was very much intertwined with that of the village school, although how much of the actual burden of teaching sat on the curate’s shoulders isn’t clear.

One occasion when he really did pull out all the stops was in the run-up to the government inspector’s visit in July 1871. For weeks, Kilvert had the whole school cramming intensively, turning up in person three times a day to ensure that no students were slacking.

On the big day, thirty-five of the school’s fifty-one ‘scholars’ turned up. The attendance rate brings to mind one of the
Diary
’s most poignant vignettes. That of little Mary Thomas sitting on the floor at home with a broken piece of slate and a stick of chalk ‘trying to think she was at school’. She was unable to attend school, Kilvert laments, because the ground was wet and her boots were full of holes.

In this context, he judged the turnout commendable. He cannot resist a tiny boast either, pointing out that Hay’s school was only able to drum up seven more pupils despite having twice the number of children on its books.

Once the students had sat their examination, Kilvert retired to his lodgings with Mr Shadrach Pryce, the inspector, who had been joined for the day by his wife. The curate
pressed various ‘substantial’ offerings of food and drink on them, but the couple contented themselves with a glass of wine and a biscuit each.

Whether it was Kilvert’s hospitality or the students’ scores that swung it we shall never know, but the next month the inspector delivered a ‘capital report’ from the Education Office. With it came a much welcomed grant for £36 10s.

At the mention of the cash, Ted the accountant whistles loudly. He wishes Powys Education Department was still as quick with its chequebook, he says.

He is a governor at the current primary school, he explains to the group. In response to a question about its location, he points towards the southern edge of the village.

‘Ysgol’ shouts a red-rimmed road sign along the pavement, ‘School’. Further along, another triangular sign depicts an elderly couple crossing, the taller of the two clutching a stick, while the second grabs at the other’s elbow. No explanatory text is provided, the inference being obvious. Further into Radnorshire, there are similar signs for sheep, though without sticks.

Government cuts mean a couple of smaller schools in the hills nearby have recently had to close. Class sizes at Clyro Primary have consequently swelled. Resources, however, have not. Bo and Seth are both pupils at the school, so I listen with interest as Ted describes ambitious plans laid out by the local education authority to build a new campus. Construction is set to begin in two years’ time. Ted’s manner suggests a healthy degree of scepticism. Similar promises have been made in the past, he notes.

Emma and I would welcome better facilities, of course, but the children seem happy enough. The ethos is inclusive
and the teachers attentive. Our two boys head off enthusiastically on their bikes in the morning and return tired but happy at the day’s end. Both appear to be making progress in the classroom and with friends in the playground. As parents, we couldn’t ask for much more.

If there’s one thing I could change, it would be the school’s homogeneity. Every morning, the entire student body gathers for assembly in the main hall. Scanning the hundred or so pupils, there’s not a single non-white face among them. Diversity is having freckles. It’s no good complaining. All the other village schools hereabouts are the same. They merely reflect the Marcher population as a whole, which, like its sheep, happens to be very white.

For parents of young children, the school gates are where many acquaintances are made and friendships struck. Typically, I accompany the boys in the morning and Emma shepherds them back in the afternoon. We live about 500 yards away, making us the closest household to the school. We’re also among the least punctual. With everyone rushing to get started with their days, morning interactions don’t often get beyond a quick ‘hi’ and ‘bye’. Pick-up, in contrast, is more relaxed. You find people, to steal a Kilvertian phrase, ‘in full chat’.

Keen to get into the hills soon after we arrived, I suggested to a couple of the dads at the gate that we should go for a hike. The tradition has stuck and every other month or so we pick a route in the mountains and head off together for the afternoon. The group includes an electrician, an insurance expert and a manager in the forestry department. Men ‘not in my game’, in other words. By Updike’s measure, I feel this is progress.

My attentions are drawn back to the old school. ‘We did
a penny reading there once,’ the lady says, pointing her forefinger across the street. Her voice is hushed as though their reading of poems and their singing of songs were in some way shameful.

John, who has rejoined us after a lengthy conversation with the retired vicar, overhears. Popularised by Charles Dickens, penny readings were first introduced to Clyro in Kilvert’s day, he clarifies for me. Mr Bevan in Hay was very keen on this chaste form of evening entertainment, which he thought a far more edifying alternative to the pub.

A report in the
Hereford Times
from February 1871 provides a brief description of one such event. Held in the ‘National School Room, Clyro’, the article records. The Reverend R. Lister Venables is cited as ‘kindly presiding’ over an audience of some 250 people.

Among the highlights was Mrs Partridge’s and Mrs Haines’ ‘rendering of
The Barber of Seville
’, which was judged to be ‘everything that could be desired’. The choir’s rendition of the part songs ‘Hail, Smiling Morn’ and ‘The Carnovale’, meanwhile, was singled out for the ‘capital precision’ of their execution. Both performances would have been repeated were strict rules not in place against encores.

I suppose the nearest equivalent of the penny readings today might be open mic night at the Globe in Hay. Pitched as an opportunity for amateur poets and musicians to test out their material, the evening tryout takes place on the first Tuesday of every month and attracts a small but faithful crowd.

Before the group wheels around and heads back to the church, there is one more landmark to see. Unfortunately, Cae Mawr, the seat of Kilvert’s friend and regular walking companion Hugo Morrell, resides behind a barricade of
Leyland cypresses that screens it almost completely from the bypass.

We walk up a tree-shaded driveway that runs off the main road just beyond the bus stop, our path lit by a luminescent strip of lichen running right up the middle. At an inhospitable set of mechanical gates, we stop. An oval blue plaque on the stone post declares that the invisible residence beyond belongs to the Historic Houses Association. Shame it’s not winter, John laments. We’d have been able to peer through the foliage.

The owners once arranged to put on a Victorian tea for the society, he recalls. Back in the late 1980s. They ate sandwiches with the crusts cut off and listened to Gilbert and Sullivan. Various pupils at Clyro Primary School performed readings. Each one was a descendant of a villager mentioned in the
Diary
. A generation on, John wonders aloud how many candidates there would be now. Not as many, I suggest. Regretfully, he agrees.

Arriving back on the bypass, I say my goodbyes. I had promised Emma I’d be home in time to take the boys swimming.

As I watch the elderly Kilvertians stroll back towards the churchyard, I realise my question about the curate’s place in the community remains unresolved.

Pinning him down to one single group certainly seems problematic. Kilvert spread himself widely. In contrast to the prevailing social prejudices of his day, he talked to anyone, anywhere. His ear always cocked, his eyes ever open, his diarist’s pen never far from hand.

His approach struck me as a sound one. But where to start? My thoughts turn to the faithful guardians of the diarist’s memory and their rendezvous in the pub.

‘What’ve we got?’ the landlord repeats back to me. ‘Bitter, you said. Well, there’s the Bass or there’s the Otter.’ He lays a hand on each pump. ‘Otter’s a good beer.’

‘I’ll try the Otter, then,’ I tell him, and wait as he pulls the pint.

The lounge bar is empty except for five men huddled around the circular table nearest the fire. Two of the drinkers are pressed shoulder to shoulder on a wooden bench. Positioned tight against the wall and with high sides at either end, the piece of furniture resembles a truncated church pew.

The bench is designed for two, yet one of the occupants is unusually large, which makes the arrangement look rather cramped. Neither man appears to mind. Truth be told, they look rather snug. The three others sit around the table opposite, the trio evenly spread at three points of the compass. Their chairs are of conventional pub design. Dark varnished
pine, thin cushions, a slatted semicircular back.

Five pint glasses line the table’s rim. They are filled to various depths and all within easy reach of their owners. In the grate beside them a gnarly log smoulders, its steady heat giving the room a tea-cosy warmth. The drinkers’ cheeks are ever so slightly aglow.

Around retirement age or a little younger, the men are entirely without haste. Sitting there, they seem cushioned against time. Periodically, one of them will push back his chair and head outside for a smoke or go to the gents. Otherwise, they remain stationary, as if cemented to their seats.

A sense of acute self-consciousness washes over me at having disturbed what feels like a private gathering. In a way, trying to settle into a new area marks a string of long awkward baptisms like this one. A succession of walking into unknown places, encounters with group after group of new faces.

So the first kids’ birthday party, for instance: parents already locked in their friendship huddles, jabbering away among themselves, me loitering by the cupcakes and jelly hoping for a stray smile or a welcoming word. Or the running club, which I joined a few months after arriving: heading off in the dark along routes I didn’t know, with people whose names I couldn’t remember, wondering if this was really something I wanted to do.

Unsure of the best step to take, I focus on the landlord and watch as the beer shoots from the swan-neck tap into the base of the empty pint glass. The liquid strikes the bottom in a puddle-brown swirl, muddying a little more with every pull of the landlord’s arm. The publican wheezes as he tugs the baton-shaped tap. As if in sympathy, the pump system wheezes along with him in a low-pitched, hydraulic
gurgle. To the sound of their gasping duet, the beer bubbles and pushes its way towards the brim. A sudsy cap layers the surface, a million pin-head eddies all awhirl in the froth.

‘There you go, young man,’ the landlord says, his accent unadulterated Derbyshire. He places the foamy-headed pint on the bar. ‘That’s two pounds eighty, please.’

I hand over a five-pound note and he steps across to the till, his movement stiff and rheumatic. In his late fifties, the landlord is dressed in a check soft-collared shirt and tie, over which he wears a V-neck jumper and on top of that a quilted gilet in hunting green with square, buttoned pockets. He looks somewhere between a country squire and a gamekeeper.

Picking up my pint, I steal a quick glance over to the table of drinkers. Tony, who owns the holiday cottages we rented, is the only one among the five I recognise. He gestures for me to join them. ‘Pull yourself up a chair, man. You don’t want to go standing there all night.’

Still nervous, I edge towards him, the sight of my approach promoting the conversation around the table to halt abruptly. I hope the smile on my face appears congenial.

‘Evening,’ I venture.

‘Ev’ning,’ everyone replies, their tone if not unfriendly exactly, then cautious and perhaps even tinged with an edge of suspicion.

Tony and the other two men in the chairs shuffle round to allow me space. Gingerly, I put my pint on the table and take a seat.

Their muted reaction does not surprise me. This is Tony’s Wednesday-night drinking group. It is made up of men he has known for years, in a place they consider their own.

Such groups evolve organically over time. They are born
from common bonds of friendship and trust, of mutual interests and shared experiences. For a novice such as myself, initiation is far from straightforward. I need my own Reverend Venables, someone who will open the door for me and vouch for my credentials. I was banking on Tony filling this role. A hobby farmer with a permanent limp, he’s the owner of the cabin we rented and the very first person I met on moving to the area.

‘This is Ollie,’ runs Tony’s laconic introduction. ‘Him and his missus stopped at our place for a while, in one of the cabins, like.’

I smile. They nod. Feeling the weight of their collective gaze, I study the back of my hand and pick up my glass. I take a sip and put it down again. I return to looking at my hand, all the while silently willing someone to say something, anything, wishing that I could merge into my seat, that I could sit among them invisibly.

Then, for the briefest of moments, I wonder if I haven’t made a mistake. It hadn’t occurred to me until this very second that everything might not turn out well. Tony had mentioned to drop in if I happened to be passing, but in an off-the-cuff kind of way. What if they didn’t really want me there? Even with Tony’s fragile endorsement, I am still intruding. And no one likes an intruder.

I start thinking I might have been better off choosing another pub. The Boat in Whitney, say. Or the Roast Ox in Painscastle. Both are village pubs, both relatively close and popular with locals. Maybe I’d have been less of an outsider there. Mixing in among the crowd a little, taking my time to find my feet, getting myself established. Yet this is where Tony drinks, and Tony is my unwitting sponsor, so the Rhydspence it has to be. I determine to stick it out and make the most of it.

The Clyro sections of the
Diary
offer little by way of advice on how to act in such situations, for Kilvert is already ensconced in the community by the time we meet him. This is a shame, as we are not so different in personality, I suspect. In the company of others, I always feel more comfortable on the edge looking in, rather than at the centre holding court. Kilvert’s writing leaves a similar impression. He listens more than he speaks, watches more than participates.

All the same, Kilvert clearly enjoys socialising, although his opportunities to do so tend to be concentrated around either the soirées of his aristocratic hosts or communal events linked to the church. Comfortable turf, in other words. His interactions with his village parishioners, in contrast, are predominately private and pastoral. In his day, it probably couldn’t have been any other way.

As for frequenting the pub, Victorian social mores would have made it out of the question. Not that Kilvert was the puritanical sort. ‘Hot coppers, too much wine last night and an ill temper this morning,’ reads one confessional diary entry.

Nor should his dog collar suppose a naivety about the ways of the world. Listening from afar to a wedding party at the New Inn, he observes how the girls squealed ‘as if they were being kissed or tickled and not against their will’. Most weekends, meanwhile, he’d watch from his window as Clyro’s heavy drinkers stumbled into the street from the Baskerville Arms, ‘drunk, cursing, muttering, maundering and vomiting’.

Kilvert definitely had a gregarious and fun-loving spirit, although the social strictures of Victorian society meant he kept this mostly between himself and the pages of his diary. We’re offered a rare glimpse of his lighter side during a
birthday party that he organises for the schoolmaster’s young daughter, Boosie. Feasting on buttered buns and mugs of tea, the birthday girl and her friends giggle as Kilvert recounts stories about wolves and Sowar horsemen and joins them in games of bagatelle and fiery snap-dragon.

At the end of the party, after the children have played with his tabby cat and marvelled at a lock from a lion’s mane that Kilvert acquired during a visit to Clifton Zoological Gardens, he is left alone and happy, thinking to himself how pleasant was the company of these ‘little gentle-women’.

I suspect retelling a children’s story or suggesting a party game might, in my current circumstances, be an ill-advised method of inculcating myself into Tony’s drinking group. Instead, I remain silent, and take another sip of my Otter, which, as the publican promised, tastes good.

A classic timber-framed coaching inn from the late fourteenth century, the Rhydspence is a delightful muddle of warped beams and slanting windows, of wobbly chimney stacks and lime-washed walls.

Among its various remarkable features, my personal favourite is the single-room Tudor extension, which wobbles on stilts directly above the main entrance door and which looks so off-kilter that you expect it to topple into the gutter at any minute.

Fortunately, someone later on had the good sense to construct a much more conventional extension at the pub’s northward end, whose solid brick bulk provides a stabilising anchor onto which the louche and liver-pickled inn can now cling for balance.

Set up on a lawned bank, a matter of yards into England, the border pub is attractively situated at the base of a steep grassy pitch that leads directly into the hills. Scattered houses surround it, although these quickly thin out as the gradient steepens and the sheep pasture descends.

In front lies the expansive Wye valley in all her silvery, flat-bellied glory. A mile or so up the road is an old toll bridge. A mechanised gate permits motorists safe passage in exchange for eighty pence.

The main trunk road between Brecon and Hereford passes at the bottom of the pub garden. It’s the same road that a few miles further on bisects Clyro so neatly. The road earns the briefest of mentions from Kilvert, who happens to be passing one time when he spots a ‘deadly sick’ man being carried to the roadside from the pub.

Another time, he writes about a flash flood that sweeps down the valley, ripping turnips from the ground and reducing the roadways to their rock base while leaving a muddy deposit four inches thick on the Rhydspence’s floor.

Inside, the pub’s virtues become less immediately obvious. The thick oak entrance door opens into a carpeted hallway with a staircase in front and toilets to the left. To the right lies the main bar area, which opens into a smaller adjoining saloon bar at the far end.

Beyond the lavatories to the left, meanwhile, is a large restaurant lounge and a connecting breakfast room. Upstairs, a rickety hallway leads the way to seven guest rooms, all of them sizeable and most with a view of the river.

The decor is that of a traditional rural pub: landscape prints in un-fancy frames on the wall, black-and-white photographs above the fireplace, a crooked constellation of
bronze pots hanging from the ceiling, a stuffed pike in a glass-fronted box.

Little has altered over the years, which the regulars probably view as a virtue rather than a drawback. As they do the absence of a television, pool table, dartboard, juke box or anything else that might disturb a peaceful pint.

The bar itself is relatively small, about the size of an old farmhouse larder. It is split into two serving areas, with a main counter to greet customers as they arrive and a hatch into the overspill bar next door. The bar counter measures the length of a park bench and has a hinged section at one end to enable the landlord to get in and out.

Behind the counter, the bar is clean and well-stocked for its size. In addition to the Otter and Bass there’s a lager on tap and two choices of cider – one sweet, the other dry. An assortment of upturned spirit bottles lines the wall, their necks tied tight with bow-tie optics. Above, peering down from the low ceiling, is row upon row of glass tankards, a crowded colony of crystalline bats hanging on their screw-hook perches.

There are nibbles as well. Kettle Chips bunched on a shelf just beside the bar counter. Packs of peanuts dangling from a cardboard sheet. A few ageing bags of pork scratchings.

Only one thing is missing: customers.

In truth, the pub has been quiet for years. Tougher drink-driving laws have hit it hard. So too has the so-called ‘off-trade’ market: the bulk-buying muscle of the supermarkets and their multipack deals mean that pubs can no longer hope to compete on price. Hence the general move to hot meals, pub quizzes, music nights, televised sport, anything that will pull in the punters.

The Rhydspence appears strangely adrift from this trend. Its restaurant is never full, its chef underemployed. Its single concession to modern entertainment is a portable CD player. The plug-in machine plays the part of resident drunk, propping up the end of the bar and repeating itself ad nauseam. It starts with some early Presley, moves on to a touch of Chubby Checker, Al Green, Etta James, then a tribute to Buddy Holly maybe, some Sinatra perhaps, before returning to more Presley, and so it goes on, playing and replaying endlessly in the background.

It wasn’t always this way. For centuries, the inn was a popular stopover point on the Black Ox Trail, the legendary drovers’ route from the valleys of Wales to the markets of England. Even after the railways came and the drovers swapped their walking boots for cattle trucks, the Rhydspence remained noisy with revellers, as Kilvert himself bore witness when walking past one May Day at midnight.

Back at the table, Tony breaks the silence with a brief round of introductions.

‘So, this is Les …’ Tony says, pointing with his pint glass to a tall man in a thin yellow jumper across the table from him.

‘Hello,’ I say, as warmly as I know how.

The man tips his glass. ‘How d’you do?’