I finally saw the kite on Sunday – I have decided it’s the same one that has been popping up in the sky for Angela and Anne to gawp at each day, as we always see it around five miles out from Hay. Its silhouetted shape considerately soared above the car’s right side this time allowing me to see the wide wingspan and the forked tail. Apparently, they’re ten a penny in this neck of the woods but they’re a treat for us.
This day was forecast for a mixture of sunshine and showers and there was a light sprinkling as we walked into Hay Castle. Luckily, for the most part it is fully covered because an extensive restoration project was completed in 2022.
It’s not quite castle-like in the way Conwy is a castle. It looks more like a grand manor house. But a Norman Keep was built here in the twelfth century, supposedly in a day by Matilda, the formidable wife of William de Braose. He, himself was formidable, having his guests all killed at, at least one banquet he hosted. Matilda and one of their sons had their own gruesome ending: captured, imprisoned and starved to death by King John for refusing to pay more taxes. Their deaths were in part responsible for the Magna Carta.
The parts of the Keep that still exist are small but atmospheric and the main house had a couple of excellent exhibitions. One, for our very own April Ashley who was born in Liverpool but spent some of her retirement in Hay-on-Wye to escape tabloid attention. The other exhibition was about Hay’s self-proclaimed ‘King’ who had afforded the title of First Duchess onto April, while she resided there.
Richard Booth, one of the first booksellers in Hay, declared on April Fool’s Day 1977, that Hay-on-Wye was an independent kingdom, and that he was going it be its King. The publicity helped to bring more attention to the town, which was already becoming known for its many bookshops, and then finally, in 1988, the Hay Literary Festival was born, the brainchild of Peter Florence and his parents.
We spent the rest of our morning listening to live jazz and sampling some of the refreshments on the many stalls there were about, as we’d not booked any talks until the afternoon. I met up with my young cousin, Suraj, for a beer as he was also in Hay for a festival but not the literary one. How The Light Gets In is all about philosophy and previous speakers have included Noam Chomsky and Philip Pullman. I wonder if some writers nip over and do a second gig there while they’re in the neighbourhood.
It was only Anne who was going to the first talk, Caroline Lucas, MP for the Green Party. Apparently, she got a standing ovation when she walked onto the stage. I caught up with one of my fellow MA students, Kay, as she only lives an hour away and was coming to see Coco Mellors later.
I know nothing about Coco, but she had on some terrific golden trousers and boots when she was signing books later. I know because I was in the queue for Jeanette Winterson which was a parallel line in the main Hay bookshop. I wonder how the organisers decide whereabouts the author will sit to sign books. Diarmuid Hester’s table was quite near the front when we got our book from him. But both Coco and Jeanette had theirs near the back probably to accommodate longer queues. The line lengths were quite comparable which I was pleased about because I wasn’t quite ready to have our Ms Winterson smacked down by some young upstart.
Before we saw her talk though, we had a 4pm appointment with two people that I hadn’t a clue about. Taras Grescoe and Pen Vogler were talking about ‘Once and Future Food’; essentially how, despite our ability to bring food in from around the world, the variety of our food is narrower than was available to the first farmers in Neolithic times. It was a fascinating thing to listen to and both the speakers were eloquent and engaging, although their interviewer sounded like he’d just rocked up with no preparation and been handed a bunch of cue cards.
It’s been great fun to listen to people speak that I’ve had no knowledge about beforehand. I’m as silo’d up as the next person, and I know what I like. But spending an hour here and there, just listening to people speak on topics that I wouldn’t normally consider has been refreshing.
But our final speaker of the evening, Jeanette Winterson, is someone whose books I read avidly in my formative years. I can’t remember whether I’d heard of her before the TV series of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but I definitely dived into her books after seeing Charlotte Coleman’s character seduce a female member of her mother’s evangelical congregation.
This evening, Jeanette was talking about ghosts and read one of the stories from her new book, Night Side Of The River. Believe it or not, I don’t think I’d ever heard her speak before, so when she started off in a broad Lancashire accent, I had a double-take moment, but then realised that of course, the main protagonist from Oranges, Jess, is a fictionalised version of Jeanette herself, as shown by her nonfiction memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
We weren’t very good at the logistics of hitting a book-signing queue as we appeared to be right near the end. They closed the doors after us as it was getting dark and a bit breezy. Angela decided that she was going to ask to take a photo with her, and as she went first, the assistant just assumed that I’d want one too. I would have been too shy to ask myself but wasn’t going to look this gift horse in the mouth, so Anne and I stood either side of the very diminutive woman and smiled.
I was made up. And for me that was a fabulous finale of a fabulous weekend. There was one more talk that Anne and Angela went to the following morning, with a writer called Elizabeth Day – I’ve read her book ‘How to Fail’ but I was happy to pass on the talk and peruse the second-hand Oxfam book shop on the site instead.
Anne had an email this afternoon about our cottage for next year, which is now unavailable. I was a bit gutted as we’ll now have to find a place that we drive in every day from. But the place we stayed in this time was very nice, and we did get to see the kite on our trips (on the final morning it was a buzzard being dive-bombed by a crow). So, going a little further afield won’t be too bad.
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