Letter from Hanmer

Julie Brominicks 

Between the church, the mere and the shop. Between Cymru and England. Between now and then and then, amen, that’s where the bus drops me. I was here once, for the interment of my Dad’s great friend Ernie Heath’s ashes, on a day when rain poured into the mere and down our smiling faces, Ernie having always made merry. The village, as we all emerged slowly from lockdown, yes the village had seemed like a dream.

As it was then is now. Sandstone, timber-frame, lavender. Tractors; little else on the road. Women in the shop in floral frocks. Bin-men in the shop buying milk. There’s one, vaping on the bench, regarding the shining mere. “But it get’s a chop to it!” people say. Hanmer is still a dream.

What am I doing here? One minute juggling summer with contemplation of a mountain, the next agreeing to contribute something to a Glyndŵr event and something else to an RS Thomas-inspired anthology without knowing enough about either.

Legends

Enter Hanmer, where Glyndŵr married Margaret Hanmer of this parish in which RS Thomas, centuries later, served as curate. Soldier leader prince. Pacifist poet priest. Legendary men united by English education, fierce cymreictod, conviction and Hanmer. That’s why I’m here.

First the church. It smells of wood and spice. The twelfth-century building in which Owain Glyndŵr and Margaret Hanmer married in about 1383 was razed in the War of the Roses. I stand where they made their vows. The door creaks open and a woman bustles in. “We’ve gone sparse on the flowers because they’re expensive” she says, leaving orders of service for her daughter’s wedding later. A wedding this afternoon!

Olive arrives with an armful of music and opens the door with her foot, oh she’s used to it, she’s been organist here fifty years. The next church was destroyed by fire in 1889 when the bells crashed to the ground “and the vicar went through the window with some stuff from the safe, or so the story goes” says Olive.

She shows me the vestry into which I have already crept, looking for RS Thomas. He was curate three miles north in the daughter church at Tallarn Green when he arrived in 1940 with his new bride, successful artist Mildred Eldridge, but would have known these old cassocks, foxed mirrors, maybe. First thing I read about him was that he threw his hoover out for being noisy, and here is a hoover. “Oh but you need it when the men have been ringing the bells” says Olive. Anyhow, I’m pleased to see a bevy of dustpans and brushes behind the curtains. “They say if he had his hair bryl-creamed flat you were in trouble but he was ever so good with the children” says Olive.

Borders

Olive says the Hanmers are still very involved with the village. Lady Hanmer is church warden. They own a lot of property but can’t get anyone to take on the butchers. Hanmer is bewilderingly, enchantingly quaint. Do I believe in Hanmer? This church on a hill by a lake? This flower-bedecked Post-Office shop? “We say it’s like Heartbeat here” laughs Lauren, steadying the ladder so her mother Helen can water the hanging baskets. “And at seven o’clock the swans are around. We had one try to get in the shop we had to get a big blanket to herd it out.”

On the shop shelves, Jones o Gymru and Two Farmers’ (from Herefordshire) crisps. Border country. There’s a double-sided ‘borders’ lectern in the church that takes Welsh and English bibles and in The Hanmer Arms they’re discussing lager, Coors v Wrexham. “You do get people speaking Welsh here, my daughter for one” says manager Andy. “Freaks me out with me being from Wigan, when she starts singing in Welsh. There was more people
speaking Welsh in one place last week than I’ve ever seen in me life. They were here for the eisteddfod.”

This is Maelor, where Wrecsam County Borough Council bulges into Shropshire and Cheshire. Between-lands. Not-quite-real lands. Like a fold in a book, in a map, in which fairies may have gone missing. Liminal; all these meres and mosses make it so. Hanmer Mere is one of several, the rest are mostly in Shropshire; Cole Mere, Crose Mere, White Mere and so on, and Whixhall Moss, Bettisfield Moss, Wem Moss and the rest, formed when the last glaciers melted. The deeper kettle basins became meres, the shallower ones over centuries, filled with plant matter that formed the mosses.

I walk around the mere to better see the village. Oak copses and ponds in yellow grazed swallow-swooped fields. How much would Glyndŵr and Thomas recognise? A shower douses the village. It mutes the summoning church bells and sends a speckled-wood butterfly to join me under an oak. Silence then, save for the sound of drizzle on leaves and the thud of an acorn landing.

Meres

The meres are not fed by rushing water but sustained by evaporation, rainfall and groundwater. I swim out with my pants on my head for a view of the church. Might they have done this, Owain and Margaret, Ronald and Mildred? Pushed off from a goose-shit morass, propelling whirligigs before them, eye-level with blue damselflies? The brief shower has done little to oxygenate the mere or irrigate the thirsty earth.

But now Hanmer glisters.

Humble and kind Ernie Heath, was a legend to those who knew him. Mere mention of his name made my Dad laugh in delight at his humour. He walked in the hills, drove patients to hospital, slept once or twice in the gutter (when he was young). I remember his wife Margaret, Practice Manager at Hanmer Surgery, waving from the gate.

I can see their grave now from under the lime tree between the church and shining glacial mere. The bell-ringers pause as the bride advances towards the church where a priest waits in white at the door, and I feel quite extraordinary, as if time is collapsing.