Under the Tump (8 page)

‘… and this is Peter.’

‘Hello,’ I repeat to the man immediately beside me, my eye drawn to his mop of carefully brushed white hair.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says, his vowels redolent with the privilege of a very particular English upbringing.

‘And this here is Geoff …’ The man on the bench with the rugby-player’s physique gives me a warm smile and
half-raises his glass. ‘… and Mike.’ His smaller companion echoes my ‘hello’ back to me.

‘Mike and Geoff both live in Clyro,’ Tony explains. ‘Up on Begwyns Bluff.’ As well as being neighbours, they are also brothers-in-law, a fact that Tony doesn’t think to explain and that would take me a month or more to realise.

Geoff follows up on Tony’s invitation by asking where I live and how I’m finding the village and telling me that if I need anything then to be sure to ask. I like him immediately. Then Mike mentions all the building work on my house and asks which builder I got to do the job and says, ‘Oh, aye, the Greenow boy,’ when I tell him who it is, and then assures me that I’m in good hands there.

The subject of my house renovations occupies the conversation for the next five minutes or so. I mention the huge cost of redirecting the drains to the main sewage system and they offer me their sympathies.

Between the five of them, they cobble together a chronology of the house’s owners since the war, recalling with particular affection the old school nurse who used to live there when it was still two separate cottages.

The property theme continues. Mike has heard that a plot of land is coming up for sale close to Tony’s farm, prompting Geoff to ask about the auction date, to which Tony says that it’ll happen ‘as soon as someone’s daft enough to pay nine grand an acre’, causing everyone around the table to laugh.

I watch gratefully as the group’s focus moves away from me and back onto one another. Soon, the conversation has returned to its natural patter. Who might buy the farmland? Tony isn’t interested, he says. Enough of a headache managing the fifty acres he already has. Les asks whose
place adjoins the land. There’s Carol opposite at Corner Cottage, Tony says. Then Angela and Ian on the one side. All along the bottom is Theo Leighton.

‘Apart from my two fields, all the rest of it, right from Pent-y-cae down that block, except for a small bit that Angela’s got, it’s all Theo’s,’ continues Tony. ‘Except for Jean’s got one or two fields opposite her house. And Cwm-Yr-Eithin bungalow’s got a couple of fields. But otherwise, all that block is part of Llwyngwilliam.’

And then some confusion breaks out. Is it Dol-y-caddy that’s on the market or the land down at the Dol-y-cannau turn? From how Tony is telling it, it sounds to Mike as if he’s referring to the first, but his understanding had been that it was the second that was up for sale.

None of it makes any sense to me. Not just the thread of the conversation, which I lost at Corner Cottage, but even the basic dynamics of the evening, like whether the men buy drinks individually or in rounds, or when they arrive, or how they get home.

Yet here I am, with a seat around the table, which for now seems achievement enough. So I sit back and listen, the conversation unfolding around me, me biding my time, not rocking the boat, hoping my silence will admit me to the Rhydspence community.

‘So you turn right towards Crowthers’ Pool, as if you’re coming from Clyro. Right, you with me?’ We all watch as Tony draws an imaginary map on the table with his fingers. ‘Now if you’re going towards Cwm-Yr-Eithin, it’s on your right from the second gateway. Tump Hill, it is …’

He prods the surface, leaving a thumbprint smudge.

My initiation apparently successful, I start going to the Rhydspence most Wednesdays. I generally arrive around nine o’clock after putting the kids to bed and having a bite to eat. Tony and the rest of the group are already there, pints on the table, almost as if they haven’t moved since the week before.

With time, the rhythm of the place begins to grow more familiar. The glowing of the fire, the tinny hum of the CD player, the soft talk of the men. Winter gives way to spring and then summer, but little inside the pub ever changes.

The landlord, whose name I learn is Paul, takes up model-making at one stage, the evidence resting at anchor on a table by the bar. A three-foot balsawood replica of an English galleon. HMS
Victory
, he informs us. Rigging, masts, deck, captain’s quarters, cannons, all cut to size and delicately glued in place.

We never order anything to eat. Someone might buy a packet of crisps, which they’ll spread open on the table and share. Paul recently tried advertising a cheap pie-and-gravy night to reinvigorate the restaurant, but it didn’t take off. Last month, he cut back the chef’s hours. He’s thinking he might have to lay off the kitchen staff altogether if things don’t pick up.

No one in the group drinks excessively. The men consume their beer as they conduct their conversation, methodically and without haste. Consequently, Paul often vacates the bar for long stretches at a time, sometimes settling into an armchair on the far side of the room with a small bowl of ice-cream and a glass of crème de menthe. Then his eyes will droop and he’ll be asleep. Other times, he heads outside for a smoke or to work on his wood carvings in the log shed. He spends months on a huge winged dragon, which he paints red and hangs at the bottom of the garden by the
road. If someone wants a drink in Paul’s absence, they serve themselves and leave the money on the counter.

The months pass. Numbers fluctuate from week to week. Of the five, Les and Peter are the most consistent attendees, except for three weeks over Christmas when Les goes to Cyprus on holiday. Geoff and Tony miss the occasional week, usually because of work or family commitments. It’s uncommon to see Tony during lambing, for example. Mike is the least regular, his attendance motivated in part by whether or not Geoff twists his arm to come.

Wednesday nights are not exclusively the reserve of the drinking group. Occasionally, a bed-and-breakfast guest might pop in for a nightcap, although Paul’s bookings mostly fall on weekends. One time, a group of Dutch off-roaders holed themselves up in the bar next door and drank triple whiskies all night. Paul, for once, seemed happy.

Every now and then Jean, who lives up the pitch with the one or two fields, calls in for a half of cider, although she hasn’t done so for months now. A farmer from the neighbouring parish of Brilley once came down with his family, but they sat by themselves in a corner and never returned.

Another infrequent visitor is Tom the Otter, who lives in a storybook cottage right at the top of the hill behind the pub. He specialises in surveying bats, newts and other endangered species after people submit planning applications. It’s a profession that wins him plenty of fans among the wildlife but few among his neighbours.

For a short time, a retired Londoner called John used to stop by too. He lived in a rambling house up near the Begwyns and as a young man had spent time in South America, which we talked about at length. Tragically, he died. In a flash flood, of all things.

The drinking group does have two loose affiliates. One is Kiron, a man of unidentifiable age and limited wardrobe. He owns the filling station in Whitney, which has a zero-frills convenience store and a forecourt cluttered with beat-up cars for sale.

Kiron was born in Tanzania, grew up in India and emigrated as a young man to the UK, where he made a home for himself in Luton.

Hindu, dark-skinned and a non-drinker, Kiron is something of an enigma in the Marches. As the story goes, he saw the petrol station advertised, liked the price and bought it in an online auction. Only it wasn’t Witney in Oxfordshire as he thought, but Whitney-on-Wye in Herefordshire. I’ve no idea if the story is true, although it’s plausible as Kiron neither reads nor writes.

He generally arrives at the pub just before ten o’clock, once he has closed up the shop and eaten his dinner. He orders a Coca-Cola for himself (no ice) and insists on buying everyone else a drink. He pays from a plastic money-bag bulging with pound coins that he pulls from the pocket of his scruffy coat. He comes because he knows Tony and likes Paul, and because his wife is still in Luton.

The group’s other affiliate member is Clive, an assured and affable man who is as local as Kiron is not. The son of a keen racehorse breeder, he grew up at Clyro Court Farm, opposite where the village primary school now is. As a younger man, he had a spell as a jockey until he injured his neck in a bad fall at Worcester races and had to give it up. Today, he plays golf instead. Past retirement age, Clive still turns up to work every day at the haulage firm he owns. His blue-and-yellow lorries regularly trundle through Clyro on the way to his depot across the river in Llanigon.

Over time, I slowly get to know the members of the core group. My closest connection continues to be with Tony, who has a dry sense of humour and a reputation as something of a wheeler-dealer. Outside the confines of Wednesday nights, I sometimes go along with him to a farm sale or to the livestock market in Hereford. One time he drove me into the Radnorshire hills to show me where the salmon come to spawn up the River Edw. I think he sees a need to educate me, as though I were a slightly witless child or an orphan bereft of parental instruction. In matters agricultural and rural he’s not far off, and I gratefully take on board whatever he has to share.

An inherent kindness lies beneath Tony’s transfer of knowledge, which I appreciate as much as the information itself. He has helped me out more than once. Such as the time my tyre burst and he arranged for his neighbour to come and fix it for me. Or when I ended up in a ditch on the Begwyns after sliding on the ice and he drove across the hill to pull me out.

As for the others, my initial affection for Geoff proves well placed. He has that soft, gentle nature sometimes common to bear-like men, coupled with a wonderful belly laugh. If anyone is going to ask me how my week’s been or what I’ve been up to, it’s generally Geoff. Mike strikes me as a practical, level-headed man, the kind of person who is good on a committee or handy with a drill. He’s friendly enough, but I sense he harbours doubts about me that he’s reluctant to relinquish.

Les is the liveliest and the most loquacious of the group. Blessed with a quick wit and a comic’s timing, he has us all leaning in to listen to his stories, the vast majority of which derive from family life growing up on a hill farm in Brilley
and carousing in the local pubs as a young adult. If a tale doesn’t feature Les playing quoits or tickling trout, then it invariably sees him causing mischief at a summer fete or staying out late at a village dance.

The veneer of rustic naivety to Les’s storytelling is a narrator’s ploy to some extent, a theatrical device to give extra punch to the climax of his tales, which typically arrive wrapped in mild illegality or abject drunkenness, such as the time he picked up a ten-bob fine from Doctor Jack the Magistrate after Gastor the Gamekeeper caught him shooting his pheasants (‘Fair dues, it was two o’clock in the morning’), or when he volunteered one year at the Young Farmers’ dance and dropped a skinhead at the door with a single punch.

Peter is the only one not born and bred in the area, and he’s also the hardest to read. He’ll chip in with his opinions from time to time, so I know he thinks immigration is perilous and that rising sea levels are ‘complete poppycock’, but otherwise he keeps his cards close to his chest. One evening, when the men started reminiscing about various misdemeanours from their youth, he leaned over and whispered quietly in my ear, ‘Lucky they don’t know anything about us, eh?’ as though this gap in the group’s knowledge was a huge positive, a protective shield between us and them. Yet I had reached precisely the opposite conclusion. From where I was sitting, on the edge looking for a way in, I could only view this lack of a shared past as a lamentable chasm. Here we both were, Peter and I, facing an historic void that no amount of time or information would ever truly fill.

Peter isn’t the only one reluctant to air the details of his private life. References to the men’s wives or children are almost always fleeting and rarely elaborated upon. Talk of
health matters or private finances are equally taboo. Sex, similarly. Work is about as personal as the conversation gets, and then it’s generally little more than an anecdote about a colleague or a complaint about a client.

I piece bits together over time. I learn that they are all married, for example, although Peter no longer lives with his wife. All have children. Tony’s son, who does the occasional shift as a washer-upper in the pub kitchen, is the only one still at school. The remainder are either at university or have flown the nest. One of Les’s two student-age boys regularly wins cash playing computer games, which is a total marvel to his technology-averse father.

I never discover my companions’ exact ages, but all are over sixty, except for Tony, who is in his early fifties.

Les has a job at an engineering firm in Hay, where he’s been on the books for most of his adult life. Mike used to work as an electrician and Geoff at a plastics factory in Hereford, although both are now retired. Peter, it turns out, ran the Rhydspence for many years and is now renting the place to Paul. There’s no great love lost between the pair, which, given that Paul still has eight years left on his lease, creates a slightly testy dynamic.

Other than Peter and Les, who live in the nearby villages of Whitney and Glasbury, respectively, we all live in Clyro parish. Most of Tony’s family still live locally too. His mother, who is in her late seventies, still keeps sheep on a farm two miles outside the village. His brother lives next door to her. Geoff’s family roots run deepest into Clyro soil. He’s an Anthony, a clan whose flaking gravestones spread here and there throughout the village graveyard.

The Anthonys crop up regularly in Kilvert’s diary, too. It was the curate’s descendants, in fact, who moved into the
terraced houses that he so disliked (Geoff and his brother still own most of the row).

Several Anthony children gain specific mention. Gussena features among Boosie Evans’s birthday party guests, for instance, while an attack of rheumatic fever earns ‘poor young’ Harry a bedside visit from the diarist. On another occasion, Kilvert requests some strips of wood from their father Henry, the local wheelwright, which the curate manufactures into crosses and then gives to Mrs Evans to cover in moss so they glow bright green during the grave-dressing ceremony at Easter.