Letter from Y Gelli (Hay-on-Wye)

Julie Brominicks

It’s not Hay’s fault I tend to rock up in a heatwave. Bus-rattled, sweat prickled and stewed to a vicious lethargy. I’m rubbish in hot weather. Hay (Y Gelli) can be tetchy too. Not to say I haven’t had lovely hospitality here at the festival, the castle and from Jules at North Books (who’s why I’m here).

It’s when hiking through and heat-wrecked that me and the bourgeois border vibe haven’t clicked. My rucksack
gets in the way. Hay might not be the only town where drunk talk with a nasty tone has induced me to leave a bar, but it’s the only town it’s happened to me twice.

‘This time’ I think, then arrive in another heat slammer. Big drinkers here dress smart with a dash of ennui and argue savagely about what the inside of a Mars Bar is called.

“It’s nougat.”

“No it fucking isn’t.”

Minnows

But that was yesterday.

Afon Gwy (The Wye) cooled. My body transferred heat to her water and minnows nibbled my toes. I worried for her sludgy stones, but despite her sickness she swallowed the light, shone it back like a sprite.

I slept at Gypsy Farm Campsite. By morning a warm wind stirred the hedge. Still, I am grumpy under the bridge. Swifts scream but I’m hot and nothing opens till ten, no bin men to ask about breakfast, what kind of town is this? But then I find Angie’s.

“Have you been walking far my darling?” she stubs out her smoke, and busies inside and behind the counter with her Red Bull. She makes coffee with a kettle, has a smoker’s cough and I am – instantly – restored.

Craig swings by, holding a new pair of trainers. “What size feet are you Angie? I got these on e-bay but they’re too small.”

Viv has a farm up towards the mountain. Just cattle, rare breed stuff. His statements start with silence. “… I’m not sure about this mowing, it just grows back. I mow a path through to my door, that’s all.” Rob the builder wonders whether he applies the same principle to hoovering.

I ask if they think Hay is posh.

“I would say it’s a victim of its own success”

“It’s lost its soul. It’s no longer a little market town”.

“People come from London and what they fall in love with isn’t the reality. It’s like when people say they want the silvery oak look and I tell them it takes fifty years.”

“Even up where you are Ange, all these farms will be gone.”

Mind you, they all agree, they’re lucky. It’s good, overall. “And the gathering still happens three times a year.
How many of you are on horseback now, Viv?”

A silent reply as women bearing yoga mats cruise by. Then Angie jumps to her feet and whips tea towels off the cakes and sausage rolls, Rob drives away in a van and Viv in a Can-Am. Later I’m told he was a roadie for Bob Dylan.

“We don’t conform to anyone’s narrative here!” Angie beams.

Jackdaw shadows

Turns out Hay can be lovely. Rooks chacking. Swifts screaming. Waitresses smoking outside Oscars, “It was hot till 11pm” they say. Jackdaw shadows tumbling down the wall and Nan, wheeling a vintage chic distressed sideboard down the road.

Mae’r Gelli yw gwych, there being more Cymraeg than is at first apparent. Joyce from Castell-nedd buying meat from Denise (who’s learning Welsh by app) spoke it to her Nan as a child. “My father was from Ilfracombe so we didn’t use it in the house.”

Mari, Learning Manager at the castle does. “Dydd Sul, rydyn ni’n rhedeg gweithdai; we’ll be making puppets of
endangered species like curlews and dormice.” She says Haydn at Leaf Deli teaches classes, and when Welsh speakers meet on the street they use Welsh because some visitors don’t know they’re in Wales or anything about it.

As Mari and I are chatting, Richard Morris from the primary school arrives. “Cymraeg yw’r ail iaith yn yr ysgol,” he says, “ond mae’n rhywle i ddechrau”.

In Goosy Ganders, Simon, dipping into bags of beads and pins makes a chandelier string with tiny pliers. “There’s a diversity of shops here” he says. “But the thing about Hay is that everyone you meet is quite interesting.”

Too right.

Simon stayed after helping on the family farm when his uncle was attacked by a bull. Rachel, watering the castle shrubs, is the British chain-sawing champion. Remember Denise serving Joyce in the butchers? Well she’s a ‘natural bow woman’ who makes her own arrows. And Haydn, the Cymraeg-speaking chef from Caernarfon, reveals he used to be an opera singer.

Swifts scream and the warm wind blows. In fact it blows the petals off a rose outside the church, and ripples across Afon Gwy. Borne by the current, goosanders taking turns to sieve the water with their beaks resemble brown slippers.

In Angie’s, Pot-Wash Eva is taking a break while Merv rests on the hazel stick with oak handle he made before getting gout in his wrists.

Invitation

But North Books is why I’m here, Jules North (a former journalist) having kindly invited me to do an author stint as part of Independent Bookshop Week. Between customers she considers space for new stock, mostly by women writers, with Wales and the environment also being strong themes in her shop.

“I don’t want to be a feminist bookshop but men get a lot of exposure so I lean into women’s writing” she says. Her daughter Izzie bakes a cake; North Books too, being a place with big heart. “Local authors come in who can’t find a publisher or agent and I’m on their journey with them.”

It’s still freaking hot when I hurry for my bus. There go the swifts. Hot enough to corrupt a creature of shade. How easy it would have been to curdle! I have the good people of Hay (or Y Gelli) to thank that I didn’t.