‘Maybe not quite the audience he was expecting,’ Lol said. ‘Fixing it to coincide with shopping night in Hereford… bad move? Your night shoppers are the local working people. He’s just realising what he’s got here are mainly white settlers.’
‘Mmm.’
Merrily guessing that the house lights would come up at the end of the meeting on too many faces she wasn’t going to recognise. At one time, as parish priest, you’d try to connect with all the newcomers. But turning up on doorsteps in a dog collar these days would cause a few to feel pressurised, patronised or — worst of all — evangelised. The incomers from Off, this was. The ones who were not Lyndon Pierce’s people. The ones who really wanted to be living at least a century ago, as long they didn’t have to go to church.
Almost a majority now in Ledwardine, the weekenders and the white settlers. Many of them coming here to retire, but that didn’t mean what it used to — business people were quitting at forty-five, flogging the London terraced for a million-plus and downsizing to a farmhouse with four acres and outbuildings you could turn into holiday cottages. County Councillor Pierce pressed his palms into the table, leaning forward.
‘Even when I was a boy, look, this was a very different place. Rundown, bad roads, no facilities. Not exactly sawdust on the floor of the Black Swan, but you get the idea.’ He straightened up, shaking his gleaming head. ‘Drunkenness? Violence? Goodness me, people, they talk about binge drinking nowadays, but my grandfather could tell you stories would make your hair curl. Stories of hard times, brutal times. Low pay, poverty, disease…’
Pierce was still shaking his head sadly, Lol shaking his in incredulity, leaning into Merrily.
‘He’s talking bollocks, right? Just tell me he’s talking bollocks.’
‘He’s talking bollocks,’ Merrily said. ‘But it’s clever bollocks.’
Well, sure, times had changed for the better, in many ways. But also for the worse. Herefordshire, never a wealthy county — low wages, far more poverty than showed — was becoming increasingly unbalanced. This village wasn’t the best place to live any more if you weren’t loaded. No mains gas out here, only crippling oil bills. Local kids needed a forklift truck to reach the foot of the housing ladder.
‘Councillor Pierce.’ James Bull-Davies, chairing the meeting, had been fairly quiet so far; now he leaned forward in his high-backed chair, the caged lights purpling his bald patch. ‘For what it’s worth, my family’s been here since the fifteenth century at least. We all realise how deprived the place was in former times, but frankly… don’t see the relevance.’
Probably knowing he was on shaky ground, all the same. Too many of James’s ancestors had grown fat on the backs of deprived peasantry. Pierce didn’t look at him.
‘Give me a moment, Colonel. Even fifteen years ago, this community was dying. Some of you’ll remember how, after a long and bitter fight, we lost our primary school — didn’t have the population to support it.’
James Bull-Davies glared at Pierce. Colonel never went down well. Forced to leave the Army when his father died, to take over the failing family estate, James had shouldered his fate, stiffened his spine and shut the door on that room of his life. Colonel this, Colonel that… meaningless affectation.
Merrily saw the way Pierce was ignoring him. He had people out there to reach. His main advantage being that most of them wouldn’t have been here long enough to know about his agenda.
‘They say that when a village loses its school, it loses its life-force. But Ledwardine survived. Why? Because we learned our lesson. We learned that survival requires growth. Not standing still. Not preserving what we’ve got, like a museum, but carefully planned, considered expansion. Either you makes progress or you falls behind. You grows or you dies. Am I right?’
His eyes panning the dim room for support, passing over Merrily, who’d gone new-native tonight in the black velvet skirt, her cashmere sweater, the lovely terracotta silk scarf Lol had brought back from London.
Pierce had paused. It was clear that he was building up to something. ‘Any second now,’ Lol said, ‘he’s going to call us My Fellow Ledwardinians.’
Merrily smothered a smile behind her woollen glove. The smell of fresh wax wafted from the glistening coat folded on her knees. Lol had bought her that, too, her first actual non-fake Barbour, reproofed in the bathroom this morning with the rain oozing through the cracked putty around the window. She was wishing she’d kept it on now; the heating was, at best, sporadic in the village hall, circa 1964.
Was the heating functioning at all, in fact? Or had Pierce contrived to have it turned off to make the place seem even less, as he would put it, fit for purpose? Give him time and he’d be talking about a new leisure centre, part-funded by a National Lottery grant. Squash courts, pool, sunbeds.
‘So we grew,’ he was saying, ‘and we survived. But government criteria for what constitutes a viable community change all the time. Government get strapped for cash, they looks at what they can close. Think about that. Think what we got to lose.’
A rumble in the audience.
‘Think about the post offices,’ Pierce said. ‘You’ve seen how many of them’ve gone from other villages. And you’ve seen ours put out of its own building into a little cubicle, back of the Eight Till Late.’
Two rows in front, Shirley West sat up. Shirley was running the PO cubicle. Shirley who, as they came in, had peered at Merrily with disapproval — thought a priest should be wearing a cassock and dog collar for hanging washing on the line, mowing the lawn, putting out the bin sacks.
‘So how would you feel,’ Pierce said, ‘if even that was to be axed?’
‘Speaking as chairman of the Parish Council,’ James Bull-Davies said, ‘it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘Colonel, with all respect to the Parish Council, it would hardly be the first body on the consultation list.’
James stood up. We have a role, he’d told Merrily once. That role is to defend. But he looked worn suddenly. Stooping over the table as if the ancestral weight, the centuries of squirearchy, were finally becoming too much for his spine.
‘I… suggest we stop sidetracking, cut to the main issue.’
‘This is the main issue, Colonel.’ Pierce folded his arms. ‘Grow or die, like I say. Grow or die.’
Repeating it like he expected everyone to stand up and start chanting Grow or die, grow or die, grow or die!
And then, while he had the momentum, hitting them with the big one: what if the doctor’s surgery were to go, cosy Kent Asprey replaced by whoever was on duty at the time in some soulless community clinic maybe twelve miles away? Twelve miles to travel when you were sick. How about that, people?
Merrily detected a needle squeal from Edna Huws, sometimes church organist and last headmistress of Ledwardine Primary School, afflicted with a long-term blood-pressure problem.
It had started. Rising flames consuming Pierce’s kindling.
And it was raining again, which wouldn’t help. They didn’t have rain on GetaLife/welshborder, the relocation website all about convincing city-based would-be migrants that they could have a greener, saner way of life out here in the west. So appealing this time of year, when Ledwardine uncovered its sensory time-capsule: cobbles flushed amber, cold evenings softened by carols and woodsmoke, mulled wine from the Black Swan.
Lyndon Pierce looked up at the windows.