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 theterraced 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.
Although we all live relatively close, the group isn’t in the habit of dropping in on one another at home. Kiron once called by with some Easter eggs for my boys, and Clive kindly donated me some golf balls so I could practise my chipping, but on both occasions I was out and they left the gifts at the back door. They were probably relieved to have missed me. To step across our respective thresholds, it feels, would somehow breach the comforting distance created by the Rhydspence.
As a consequence, Tony is the pub’s only regular who’s actually been inside our house. We invited him for dinner when his wife was away in America. He came in an ironed shirt and brought some freshly picked field mushrooms.
Gifting foodstuffs represents a commonplace gesture of goodwill in the Marches. One memorable Wednesday, our numbers were augmented by the presence of two pheasants at the table, both neatly plucked and ready for the pot, the denuded birds a repayment by Tony for a favour Les had done him.
Just as the personal is kept at bay, so too is anything that might be interpreted as serious or controversial. Wednesdaysare for relaxing and shooting the breeze, not re-righting the world. So religion, race, education, terrorism, global poverty, you name it, all are given a wide berth, in the main.
This never ceases to amaze Emma, who finds it inconceivable that we can sit for two or three hours and discuss nothing of substance.
This isn’t strictly the case, I tell her. There’s a lot of talk about farming, for instance. The cost of feed, the price of land, the Single Farm Subsidy, the pencil-pushers in Brussels, the NFU, avian flu.
‘Bad week for cull ewes,’ Tony will say, as part of his habitual report on that week’s livestock market. Or, ‘Good trade on store lambs.’
Then someone else will shake their head and say how they can’t understand how these boys can pay twelve or thirteen hundred quid for store cattle and hope to make their investment back, to which Tony will say that there’s serious money about, and everyone will agree that the market’s owners are sitting tidy.
‘And what else?’ Emma will ask. Politics. We discuss politics too, I say. Politics with a small ‘p’, that is. Government policies are largely ignored, except for an occasional swipe at ‘stupid’ health-and-safety laws or ‘clueless’ environmental requirements.
International affairs are dealt with summarily too. ‘So, looks like it’s all kicking off in the Middle East again,’ someone might say, to which someone else will reply, ‘Aye,’ and another might mention boots on the ground or, more likely, bombing the lot of them.
In the same way, parliamentarians get short shrift, tarred as ‘power-hungry second homeowners’ who would no more know how to fix the deficit than they would a
The Anthonys crop up regularly in Kilvert’s diary, too. It was the curate’s descendants, in fact, who moved into theterraced 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.
Although we all live relatively close, the group isn’t in the habit of dropping in on one another at home. Kiron once called by with some Easter eggs for my boys, and Clive kindly donated me some golf balls so I could practise my chipping, but on both occasions I was out and they left the gifts at the back door. They were probably relieved to have missed me. To step across our respective thresholds, it feels, would somehow breach the comforting distance created by the Rhydspence.
As a consequence, Tony is the pub’s only regular who’s actually been inside our house. We invited him for dinner when his wife was away in America. He came in an ironed shirt and brought some freshly picked field mushrooms.
Gifting foodstuffs represents a commonplace gesture of goodwill in the Marches. One memorable Wednesday, our numbers were augmented by the presence of two pheasants at the table, both neatly plucked and ready for the pot, the denuded birds a repayment by Tony for a favour Les had done him.
Just as the personal is kept at bay, so too is anything that might be interpreted as serious or controversial. Wednesdaysare for relaxing and shooting the breeze, not re-righting the world. So religion, race, education, terrorism, global poverty, you name it, all are given a wide berth, in the main.
This never ceases to amaze Emma, who finds it inconceivable that we can sit for two or three hours and discuss nothing of substance.
This isn’t strictly the case, I tell her. There’s a lot of talk about farming, for instance. The cost of feed, the price of land, the Single Farm Subsidy, the pencil-pushers in Brussels, the NFU, avian flu.
‘Bad week for cull ewes,’ Tony will say, as part of his habitual report on that week’s livestock market. Or, ‘Good trade on store lambs.’
Then someone else will shake their head and say how they can’t understand how these boys can pay twelve or thirteen hundred quid for store cattle and hope to make their investment back, to which Tony will say that there’s serious money about, and everyone will agree that the market’s owners are sitting tidy.
‘And what else?’ Emma will ask. Politics. We discuss politics too, I say. Politics with a small ‘p’, that is. Government policies are largely ignored, except for an occasional swipe at ‘stupid’ health-and-safety laws or ‘clueless’ environmental requirements.
International affairs are dealt with summarily too. ‘So, looks like it’s all kicking off in the Middle East again,’ someone might say, to which someone else will reply, ‘Aye,’ and another might mention boots on the ground or, more likely, bombing the lot of them.
In the same way, parliamentarians get short shrift, tarred as ‘power-hungry second homeowners’ who would no more know how to fix the deficit than they would a
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