Under the Tump (30 page)

None of this our B&B guests would compute.
Where we live too
. I could visualise it through their eyes, as visitors, as people attached to their own place somewhere else. Hay’s market may not quite be as ‘nought’ to them, but it’s unlikely to be very much more.

Which is why I let it drop. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that I viewed it the way. It was only yesterday that I was Irvine.

We had arrived in Kilvert’s old stomping ground wondering if it was a place we could one day call home. I had
assumed this would be a decision of my own making. Was it somewhere that I liked? Did it suit my needs? Would its residents be people we could relate to? Would we find friends? In all these respects, we struck lucky. The boys are happy in school and now have an army of little buddies in the village. Emma is almost impossible to keep up with, always finding new projects to develop and new people to meet.

I love it too. My runs in the hills. My shed. The changing colours of the mountains. Sharing smiles in the street. The bookshops. The festival on our doorstep. Having our own king, a permanent Lord of Misrule. I even love the weather; gnarly and rain-soaked one minute, dazzling and cloudless the next.

What I hadn’t contemplated was the reverse. Would this place accept me? Would it allow me to call it home? As an adult, I have lived in plenty of places that have met my needs and desires. London, most obviously. Buenos Aires too. Yet none felt like home.

Cities can spurn you, turn on you, spit you out without a care. That wasn’t my issue though. Passing through was. Working, studying, playing, that’s what drew me. Not finding a home. My big-city experiences have all essentially been flings, one-night stands dragged out over years. Perhaps the cities guessed that. Accustomed to movers and takers, maybe they are wise to my type. I kept my true self hidden from them. What’s to say they didn’t do the same in return?

My objective in coming to the Marches was different. I came looking to put down roots. I expected to find Updike’s plumbers and widows. And find them I did, both literally and figuratively. Many have become good friends. I have not yet persuaded Pat into Booths’ café, but she had cake
and tea with us at home on Christmas Day. A wider network I know to wave to in the street and chat to at the school gates. Farmers, teachers, retirees, office workers, shop assistants, cleaners, taxi drivers, electricians. People, in short, not in my game.

Scrolling through my phone, I must be close to Dunbar’s magic 150. People I hadn’t met until a short while ago, but who I’d now feel comfortable calling up any time. And it’s reciprocal. People regularly pop in when they’re passing. Ann for a cup of tea, Rob to use our washing machine when his isn’t working, my neighbour David to give us surplus tomatoes from his greenhouse.

They’re a mix, too, of locals and incomers. On first moving here, I couldn’t have imagined it playing out like this. It felt like a ‘them’ and ‘us’ split. The Marches was their turf. We were the interlopers, building our bungalows and buying up their old barns. The consequent logic was simple: if I wanted to belong, I’d have to shed myself of my incomer skin and somehow take on becoming a ‘local’.

I never could, of course. Not in the strict sense of being ‘born and bred’. I could not rewind my infancy. The childhood memories of the drinkers at the Rhydspence could never be mine. I would never enjoy acquaintances of the same longevity as Geoff or Les.

This wouldn’t have surprised Kilvert, familiar with the Gospels as he was.
Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?
Yet genealogy is only one route to belonging somewhere. Nor, I’ve come to learn, is it even the most important. There are born-and-breds who forsake the Marches and make their home elsewhere. There are others who stay but never really fit; they’re either too snobby
or too solitary, too busy or too aloof. By the letter, both are local, but nothing more. And then there are others who arrive ‘from off’ and appear to assimilate fully. They become mainstays of the community. Treated as though they have belonged here forever. So how do they do it?

Time certainly helps. Some outsiders arrived aeons ago and never left. Over the decades, folk begin to forget where they came from or when. Marina is one of these, a local by dint of endurance. It is as if the landscape begins to absorb them, enveloping the person into its folds, binding them to itself.

We talk of ‘putting down roots’ as though the work is entirely of our own doing. Us cementing our place. Us anchoring ourselves in. Yet if the ground is stony or the earth is barren, such efforts will be in vain. If anyone is to stay and grow and weather the years, the place itself must welcome them, must nourish them, must allow them to flourish.

Kilvert hints at this, writing about how the hills ‘grow upon us’. It’s a figurative phrase, but I wonder if his intent isn’t partially literal. The hills subsuming him somehow, incorporating him into them. When circumstances eventually tear him away, the landscape stays with him. A physical adjunct almost, as real as a foot or an ear.

Years later, late one spring night in Wiltshire, he turns his mind back to the rolling hills of Radnorshire and the ‘never to be forgotten’ day when he walked alone from Clyro to Builth and first saw the Rocks of Aberedw.

He is back there as he writes, stealing glimpses as on the path to Bettws. The writer and poet Margiad Evans conveys the same in
A Country Dance
, her sublime inter-war novel about a love affair in the Marches. English-born Olwen Davies, Evans’s heroine, is being wooed by the Welsh-speaking Evan ap Evans. She insists he address her in her native tongue, to which he replies that having a Welsh mother makes her only half English. ‘No, not that even,’ he adds. ‘For you have lived in the mountains.’ Her surroundings have begun to wash off on her, her suitor is saying. They are getting under her skin, reshaping her identity.

By the same token, people can live for years in the Marches and remain permanent newcomers. Such folk usually keep to themselves. They buy a smallholding and throw their energies into breeding pedigree goats or growing champion marrows. If they socialise, they do so among a small self-enclosed circle of equally private individuals. Or, alternatively, they fill the house with people from elsewhere, importing friends from the city for a relaxing weekend in the country. From a community perspective, they are social hermits, ostracised at their own volition. If and when they leave, as the anthropologist Tamar Kohn observes about the blow-ins to an Inner Hebridean island, ‘people forget their names’. I am sure they don’t care a jot, but to my mind it sounds like a terrible indictment. Or a missed opportunity at the very least. There is another route to belonging, a simpler one by far. Now I see it, I spot it threading through Kilvert’s
Diary
from first page to last. It is there in the Jesse Norman book that Rodney gave me as well. Norman uses a technical term for it, ‘philic association’, a complicated way of describing the knit that grows out of
φιλία
, ancient Greek for ‘friendship’, ‘tie’, ‘affection’, ‘regard’.

Kilvert would have preferred Updike’s approach to saying exactly the same, the habit of loving and knowing your neighbour ‘in the old, old sense’. Kilvert genuinely cared for his flock, drawing alongside them in life’s troubles and celebrating with them in its joys. ‘A home to me for nearly eight years,’ he reflects during his last week. Its residents, ‘like brothers and sisters’.

Inevitably, not all saw it similarly. The young curate was of too low birth for some and too high birth for others. He himself didn’t see it that way, though. For Kilvert, everyone was his neighbour. ‘God bless and keep you all’ was his prayer on departing; local and incomer, farmer and townsperson, adult and child.

So it was that he could wave his handkerchief from the carriage window of his departing train at ‘all the old familiar friendly houses’; the Bridges at Pont Vaen, the Dykes at Cabalva, the Dews at Whitney Rectory. And so too, as he drove away from Clyro for the final time, ‘all the dear people were standing in their cottage doors waving their hands’.

Belonging was never the end point for Kilvert. He came primarily to serve, not to settle. Integrating into the community was, and is, only ever an outcome, the overspill of a caring ear, a kind word, a latch left off the hook.

Back in the pub, the match has finished. Against everyone’s expectations, a late try saw Wales eventually pip England to the post. No one can quite believe it. England are out; Wales march on. Walking over to the television, I stand with my back to the wall and take a photograph looking out into the room.

Des and Gareth are dancing on their chairs, ecstatic at the unexpected victory. The table of women is a blur of motion, all of them hugging and jumping at once. Tom and Finn are both holding their pints of beer high in the air. The English supporters, in contrast, are leaning forward, heads sunk into hands. Wan, defeated smiles paint the faces of Simon and Val. The rowdy Englishman is nowhere to be seen.

Danny slips off home after the final whistle, leaving Des to enjoy the moment. It is late by now and, after the initial euphoria has subsided, the pub soon begins to empty.

In a voice hoarse from shouting, Des tells me about his friend Mally. He used to say that the England versus Wales games were class war. Public-school types against valley boys. Des doesn’t see it that way. ‘For me, it’s just war.’ Laughing at himself, he slaps me on the back and asks what he can get me to drink. ‘Same again?’ I nod and thank him, grateful for the offer and for becoming part of the knit.

John Updike’s assertion that ‘it’s good to live between a widow and a plumber’ was foremost in my mind as I set out to write this book. It did not occur to me what it would be like for the widow or plumber to live beside me, a writer. So, to my fellow residents, a huge and heartfelt thanks for overlooking this oversight and so generously allowing me to share in your lives. Your contributions and kindnesses inform every page of this book, and beyond.

I am enormously indebted to those who took the time to read the manuscript at various stages and offer honest feedback: Maria Carreras, Nancy Durham, Jules North, Barry Pilton, Rebecca Spooner. Particular thanks to the ever-sympathetic Iain Finlayson.

This book would not have happened were it not for the support, patience and timely interventions of two very special people: my agent Georgina Capel and editor Walter Donohue. An enormous debt of gratitude to you both.

For their expertise at tightening text, illustrating covers and making maps, hats off to Trevor Horwood, Joe McLaren and Kevin Freeborn, respectively. At Faber & Faber, thanks to Eleanor Crow, John Grindod, Samantha Matthews and everyone else who worked behind the scenes.

This book has benefited from the practical and professional support of countless individuals, including: Fiona Balch, Emma Beynon, Roger and Dot Carswell, Patricia Daly, Jasper Fforde, Peter Florence, Andy Fryers, Steve
Greenow, Sally Gregg, Phil and Kath Keene, Sian Lazar, Ali McCowliff, Chris North, Laura Paddison, Alasdair Paine, Clare Purcell, Ben Rawlence, Owen Sheers, Richard Skinner, and my parents Douglas and Vanessa.

My understanding of Kilvert’s life and times was greatly enhanced by A. L. Le Quesne’s
After Kilvert
, Frederick Grice’s
Francis Kilvert and His World
, and David Lockwood’s
Francis Kilvert
. The online archive of the Kilvert Society’s biannual
Journal
also proved a source of unexpected scholarship and enduring entertainment.

To Emma, Seth and Bo, thanks, gracias, diolch yn fawr. I owe you everything.

Oliver Balch is a UK freelance journalist specialising in business and world affairs. His work has appeared in a wide range of international publications, including the
Guardian,
the
Financial Times, Condé Nast
Traveller
and the
Traveller.
His first book,
Viva South America!,
was shortlisted as ‘Book of the Year’ at the UK Travel Press Awards. His second book,
India Rising,
examined the emergence of the new India.

VIVA SOUTH AMERICA!

INDIA RISING