Yesterday I took a brush and swept out the bit of the
side bay I have been using for storage since we moved, and gave the key back to
Tegwyn. It was a sad occasion because that barn has been such an
important part of my life for the last 10 years, and even has resonance before
that.
The Workshop
How I love efficient machinery.
As I eat I hold the phone in my left hand and read:
First I had to secure my new “Jawhorse”. This is a wonderful
device which uses a foot operated ratchet to tighten a set of vice jaws. The
piece is held in position in the jaws using both hands and locked with foot
pressure. By pushing up a latch the same foot pressure releases the piece. It’s
heavy and sturdy and can firmly hold long and heavy pieces up to a metre wide.
From then on it all went very smoothly. I had previously
taken the full size template to the site to make sure they would fit and were
the right size. Tegwyn used the loader on the back of his tractor to load
them onto Will’s big trailer and Will t hen used the digger to crane them into position. This is highly skilled work and Will is one of the best.
8 April 2010
Here are Jen
Lewis and Sally Gordon:
The barn as an entertainment venue began in 1997 when Dafydd
Iwan played there for the first time. My
involvement began in 2000 with the Cilycwm pageant. I played some improvised
sax in one of Sue Cornah’s pieces and helped Gethin Scourfield with the sound
desk. The pageant was the brain child of
Sue and Pete Cornah, recent arrivals who had done similar things in England. It
told the story of Cilycwm through song and dance, mostly written by the Cornahs
and performed by pretty much everyone in the village willing to get up on
stage.
Gethin at that time was running a TV and Film production
company from an office in Llandovery. Most of his work was with S4C and he was
spending so much time in Cardiff that eventually he moved there. He was to
return in grand style 10 years later.
The Small Nations Festival
We had
got to know Mair and Tegwyn Davies, so it made sense to pay them a visit in early
2003 when my plans to hold a mini festival at Felin Maestwynog had run up
against opposition from neighbours. No sooner had we secured their agreement than we
found that two prominent members of the local community, John “Gog” Williams
and Roger Hemmings had also asked to run a festival on the same site at the
same time. This was the Welsh language festival which later became “Gwyl Bro
Dinefwr – Dinefwr Neighbourhood Festival”. When both sides realised that our
aims were similar we held long discussions to see if we could combine the two
events, but in the end decided that the potential audiences were too different
and that we should co-operate as much as possible, keep them separate, but just
a week apart. Gwyl Bro Dinefwr 2012
The festival scene was still booming. I had a bit of capital so I felt I could risk
2 years of losses to get the Small Nations Festival established. The first year
was ambitious, with headliners Te Vaka from Polynesia and Pape & Cheikh
from Senegal, opera singer Byddug James, plus some 11 other acts, and a few
workshops and stalls. That year will always be remembered for the power cut. At
9.00pm on Saturday evening, the farm electricity supply burnt out. With no hope
of a PA or proper lighting, our compere, Rory Furlong, gathered all the
musicians together in the centre of the big barn where the main stage is set
up, and led a glorious lamp-lit acoustic jam session, which many of our
audience thought the best bit of the festival. There were less than 200 people
in the audience and I lost £2000.
Two years later there were nearly a thousand, I got my money back and the festival became
the biggest thing not only in my life but in Thelma’s too since she took on a
big administrative load. May and June were always times of great anxiety and
excitement. What animated Thelma about
it was not the music, but the fact that her family became so involved: it
became a big event in the year for them and many of their friends. My family
too were regular attenders together with friends.
The barn was never an easy venue. For a start the
acoustics were terrible and it often smelt of cowshit. We made the best of the
acoustics by getting a grant to buy some heavy black drapes which went all
round the walls and cut the echo considerably. Year by year we accumulated more
decorations and more skilled and talented people dedicated to making the old
concrete hulk look wonderful.
Much of this was shared with Menter Bro Dinefwr who
very early on took on the management of the Gwyl Bro Dinefwr from Roger and
John. I developed a close friendship with the two Owains who ran the Gwyl from
their office in Llandeilo. We shared many of the costs, and when the licensing
laws changed we shared the licence too. I went on a course to become a licence
holder and acted as Designated Premises Supervisor for both festivals.
For several years I set up camp in our demountable
camper, the “Shadow Cruiser”
and pretty much lived on site for much of the
week. As I was setting up camp I would hear Dave Preece and his crew
sound-checking the bass drum – imagine a tank firing its gun 4 beats to the
bar! I loved being one of a tiny minority of English in a wholly Welsh speaking
environment. Everybody was very friendly to me and never minded switching to
English when I couldn’t understand.
Over the years I became pretty knowledgeable about
Welsh language music and for years we would put one of the big WL acts in a
prominent position on the main stage. Sometimes they would play both festivals,
and enjoyed the contrasting audiences.
At the beginning backstage facilities were very
limited, but with John Gog’s big caravan “Y Ponderosa” and his two awnings the
shared facilities began to improve, and when Ruth Stevenson from Pontardawe
took over as stage manager the backstage area got more and more luxurious until
in the end it had its own kitchen, two caravans and a substantial covered
area. Some of the same people could be
found there both week-ends: John and Roger of course with Una and Vanessa; Kari
and Alwen, Me, occasionally Gaynor, and a few others. There were some memorable parties there; none more
so than the Kanda Bongo Man crew with their gorgeous dancing girls.
After a couple of years flying by the seat of our
pants we had to start complying with all the health and safety regulations and
that meant proper provisions for emergency lighting in the barn. Tegwyn paid
for a complete re-wiring job which the two festivals paid back in instalments
over the next few years. At the same time we decided to change the layout. The
barn was divided by a re-enforced concrete wall designed to contain many tons
of silage. Together with Menter Bro we decided to make an opening in the middle
of it and put the stage at the other end of the barn. This made it much easier
to move from the bar to the stage and generally made the whole thing safer and
easier.
One of the highlights of the whole 10 years was in
2005. Over the 10 year period we had on really hot year and one really wet year
but all the others were a mix of sun and rain. 05 was the hot year and we were
sold out. Our headline act that year was the Soothsayers, a Nigerian band from
London, and as the evening got hotter and sweatier we began to be concerned
that the barn would get too crowded. Although it could easily hold 1000, the
legal maximum capacity was 700, so a group of us started doing head counts and
estimating how many people were in there. As the Soothsayers began there was a
surge of people into the barn so we set up stewards at both the entrances to
the performance space and started a “one in one out” regime. There was plenty
of movement in and out so nobody minded having to wait a few minutes. That
really felt like success.
2007 was our mud year. It had been raining pretty
steadily for several weeks, but we were sold out and were expecting 80 camper
vans as well as hundreds of cars. We had managed to get some tracking for the
most critical areas and had opened up a new field just for the camper vans at
the back of the barn. I had ordered several trailer loads of wood-chip from the
fencing company nearby. No amount of preparation could have prepared us for the
Friday. It started raining at 8am and finished late in the evening. With
massive help from several of the local farmers we managed to get everybody in,
but we’d had to park cars all down the road. The field entrances were knee-deep
in mud as were all the pedestrian areas.
The next day the sun came out, people were mud
bathing, and the people of Llandovery were treated to the sight of hundreds of
mud covered punters buying up every pair of wellingtons available. There was a
crew from S4C recording interviews with anyone who could speak Welsh. The very
glam girl presenter turned up in normal clothes and had to do her interviews
wearing bin-bags on her feet.
That year marked a turning point. Many of the
festivals who had suffered with mud found they were punished the following year
with lower ticket sales. Even though our festival had gone off well and most
people really enjoyed it, ours numbers went down by 200 in 2008 and never
recovered. This was when I began the long process of retiring from the hot
seat.
The Workshop
In 2009 we began building our present house in
Cilycwm. We had decided to make part of it like an old barn or chapel with huge
oak trusses and oak rafters. The sensible course would have been to get a
specialist to make them, but I wanted to do as much as possible myself so asked
Tegwyn if I could hire one of the side bays to use as a workshop. This is my
diary of that extraordinary year:
24 July 2009
On Wednesday I had 6ks worth of oak timbers delivered. Most
of them are 250 x 200; some even bigger,
and there are 2 at 7 metres long. Joe and I managed to lift some of the small
ones – 2 m long – but the big ones are completely unmanageable by hand. I’ve decided
to put heavy duty wheels on two of my small benches and get Tegwyn to lift each
beam onto them with the tractor so that we can then trundle them into position
to be worked on. I’m still not sure how
we are going to cut curves in them, and am looking at the possibility of doing
a hire purchase deal on a big portable band saw. I would buy it if it didn’t
cost 3k.
10 September 09
Soon it will be cold here. Already my feet are cold and I
had to wear gloves on the bike coming in today. A thick beam of oak is my seat and I am reading a book about
Spain while I have my coffee break.
I am working on the last but one truss and am very satisfied
at the way I have solved all the technical problems. Even burning out my
circular saw was no disaster. I spent 2 hours researching a replacement and the
new one (Bosch) is a huge improvement.
25 October 09
I use the car more than I should to get to the workshop, but
quite often I take the (electric) bike, usually with the motor. We’ve had some
really good weather this autumn and as often as not my trips to work have been
like a travel video – the gentle pastoral landscape opening up to distant views
of the hills, golden in the low sun with patches of heather showing purple, a
kite flapping slowly across the route as if placed there for effect. It’s the
first time I’ve commuted to work since my 20s and the trip to the McGraw-Hill
office in Maidenhead. I have to admit I enjoy the car trip – I can enjoy
smoking in the car (and with a beer outside the pub, but nowhere else), and I
can use it as a place to eat my lunch and relax. This is one reason why
builders and other outdoor workers always have their van with them – it is an
extension of the home space. In fine weather the electric bike is great. It’s a
gentle climb up the Towy valley all the way to Cilycwm, but with the motor it’s
like having the wind behind you. I’ve
given up wearing a helmet on this trip – the risks are so small it’s better to
feel the wind in your hair.
4 November 2009
By a fascinating twist of fate the explosion of Information
Technology which has been led by the mobile phone industry has introduced
thousands, if not millions of people to the classics of English literature.
This is because of the development of e-books. It has been possible for a long
time to read books on a computer screen, but not many people find this a
comfortable way of reading, and it was not until specialist e-book readers were
developed in the last few years that the e-book publishing industry really
started to take off. The latest mobile phones with larger screens and better
definition now rival the clutch of hardware readers – Kindle, Sony Touch etc. I
was able to read e-books fairly easily on my Nokia Internet Tablet, but never
found it as enjoyable as a real book. The Omnia II however, and I’m not sure
quite why, is fun to read books on.
The next problem is how to find books you want to read. For
some reason new writing in e-book form is expensive to buy – a typical modern
novel will cost around £12-15. There are lots of unknown authors who sell their
books for a few pounds, but these are mostly the sort of thing that appeals to
that great distorter of all entertainment markets – Young American Men.
However, another great American initiative is the Gutenberg Project – hundreds
of volunteers set about turning pretty much anything that’s worth reading and
out of copyright into ebooks. There you can download free the works of all the
great authors.
For a year or so I have had a small collection on the Nokia
and occasionally read parts of them, but now I have adopted Stevenson’s Travels
with a Donkey as my coffee and lunch break reading when working at
Glangwenlais.
So I’m sitting on my log of oak in the barn. It’s cool and
damp and the light is only good when there is some sunshine. I have my standard
packed lunch: a sandwich made with almond butter and marmalade (upgraded from
the old peanut butter and marmalade) a piece of cheese, an apple or orange and
either one of my special high protein biscuits or peanuts and dates.
I’d forgotten what an engaging character Stephenson is. This
bit is from his description of Pont de Montvert, a lovely little town in the
Cevennes which Thelma and I visited on our honeymoon. Unfortunately for her it was surrounded by the wild country
which he describes and she said she would love to visit again if she could come
by helicopter and avoid all the mountain roads.
This passage particularly inspired me:
And there is a special
pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with all
outdoor creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have escaped out of the Bastille of civilisation, and are become, for the time being, a mere kindly
animal and a sheep of Nature’s flock.
When that hour came to
me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was standing by me half full of
water. I emptied it at a draught; and feeling broad awake after this internal
cold aspersion, sat upright to make a cigarette.The stars were clear, coloured,
and jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way.
All around me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By the
whiteness of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at
the length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward; but there was not another sound, save the
indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and
studying the colour of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it
showed a reddish grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black
between the stars.
I too have slept under the stars – even in frost. It was the
month before I went to university, a fine September and I determined to walk
the Berkshire to Wiltshire section of the Ridgeway. I had dad’s old canvas rucksack, a new down
sleeping bag and a plastic bivi bag. All around were the stubble fields of the
downs and the beech hangars in autumn colours. Columns of smoke rose from the
stubble fires – not banned until many years later. Then, as now, you seldom saw
people on the downs. The 2 or 3 long nights were boring but one evening I left
the kit up on the hill and went down to the pub in Shalbourne for a drink,
staggering back in the starlight and slept in frost.
Camping gear is much lighter now, but even then was it much
lighter than Stevenson’s great load. This is a picture of him in his huge
sheepskin and canvas sleeping bag (the first of its kind, at least in Europe.
Had the aussies already inveted the swag? http://www.mrswagman.com.au/introduction.shtml)
I’ve been working on making internal doors for the new
house. There are 10 of them in 3 different sizes, though all very similar.
After the excitement of working on the oak trusses it’s boring work, but I
don’t do long days, and it’s quite a good routine: out to Cilycwm either by car
or bike between 8 & 9; stop off at the site to discuss things with Neville;
on to Glangwenlais where I work until
soon after 12; half an hour for lunch and then work until I feel like stopping
– usually between 2 and 3. Occasionally
I go down to the site and have my lunch in the caravan, but if Neville and his
crew are working I usually stay away. He likes me to call in regularly, but has
never shown much enthusiasm for me helping on site.
17 Jan 2010
At last the thaw has come after a month of freezing weather.
It was heralded by another big snowfall – the warmer air pushing in from the
west came up against the cold air sitting over northern Europe. Yesterday was
the first day since before Christmas that I had taken my lunch to Glangwenlais.
The day before I had set up the new hot air blower and light; I swept up all
the shavings and tidied up - always a good way to start work.
So yesterday, Saturday, my job was to make some real
progress with making pegs to hold the trusses together. These have to be from
riven oak and are either 25mm thick or 18mm for the less structural elements.
To whittle the pegs, the jawhorse becomes a modern version
of the old shave horse, the ingenious bench used by wheelwrights and bodgers to
shape spindles. I first split them with
a hatchet and lump hammer, then fix one end in the shave horse and go to work
using a draw knife.
This is the first time I have used this ancient tool. It seems
clumsy at first with a lot less control than a spokshave. However, I soon
learnt that a drawknife is in its element when it is following the grain of the
wood – in effect splitting off shavings. Then it gains great delicacy and can
quickly reduce a rough square billet into a round peg which follows the
direction of the grain. If the grain curves a little so does the peg.
I was soon working at speed and getting warm. The atmosphere
in the barn is still far from pleasant with the warmer air condensing on the
cold timber and making everything damp. It was bliss to be able to sit on my
lump of timber with my feet held out in a stream of warm air from the blow
heater and with plenty of light from my new site lamp.
After a few hours of this I decided not to push myself too
hard and called it a day. I felt fine – a bit more pain from my bad right arm
than usual, but well pleased with my progress, and I felt confident that now I
was back at work, my sleeping problems would reduce. Ever since my arm got bad
– about 3 months ago – I’ve had difficulty with it getting painful at night,
and this has combined with frustration at the progress of the building work,
and my need to pee every couple of hours, has conspired to get me into a
pattern of disturbed nights. I’ve seldom slept without the influence of some
drug – sleeping pills, pain killers or alcohol. To avoid dependence I ring the
changes.
Three very important strands of my life are reaching
defining moments this week-end. It’s a real point of change: the last day of the shortest month, the last
winter month and the last full month of the coldest winter we’ve had for many
years. There is a lot to look forward to.
The three strands are these:
- My daughter Hannah completed the purchase of her cottage in Corsham last week and moves house tomorrow.
- Tickets for the Small Nations Festival 2010 go on sale on Monday
- Yesterday all 5 of my huge oak trusses were transported from the barn and winched into position onto the almost completed walls of Ty Jarman.
The last few weeks have not been happy. I was continually
worried about how we were going to assemble the trusses and get them into
position. Gareth favoured transporting them in pieces and assembling them on
site. He has done a lot of site carpentry and was worried about the huge
difficulty of handling them once they were assembled. I on the other hand would
be well outside my comfort zone doing carpentry in the cold and wet: I dreaded
it. Last week we got Will, the digger driver, on site and between us decided that
Gareth’s preferred option was just not feasible. I immediately went to work on
the assembly and soon worked out a way to winch the trusses upright once they
had been pegged. I did the first three on my own and Gareth joined me in a long
hard day on Thursday so that we could have them ready for Will to move
yesterday. Even then I had to work all morning on the last two and just got
them ready as Will and Tegwyn started to load at mid day.
I really like Gareth the carpenter. He’s one of those people
whose first instinct is to be pleasant – he wants to be liked, and this is his
biggest problem in dealing with customers: he hates saying a clear “no”. This has
given him a reputation for unreliability – “You never know when Gareth is going
to be there”. As long as I accept that
there is always going to be someone else with a claim on his time, I can get
good value from him. If he needs to look after one of his other clients I don’t
try to stop him. If I can manage without him even though he has offered to be
here I will tell him to go.
We’ve done a lot of work together. Sometimes, as with
antique restoring techniques, I am instructing him, but mostly I defer to his
experience and have learnt a great deal from him. Although he has never done
cabinet making, he is meticulously accurate and has great difficulty accepting
a less than perfectly neat solution. Although I did most of the work on the big
trusses, and there were still a few gaps in the end result, I could not have
got the end result as neat if he hadn’t taken charge of the final fitting. We
were working with an irregular material which was still moving. Presenting one
heavy and unwieldy part to another to see if it fits was in itself a major
operation. Doing this with strange compound angles was impossibly difficult,
and I think we can both be proud of the end result.
He has two children the same age as Megan and
Charlie (my grandchildren), but he is separated, and his working hours revolve around his times with the children. He gave me a lift in
yesterday and spent the whole journey fuming: “The arrangements work as long as I do everything!” When we got to the site I said –
“Well, we’ll have to leave that and think about woodwork
now.” His face lit up:
“Ah yes, my passion!”
8 April 2010
I’m sitting on a log out behind the barn having my lunch. Last
week it was snowing but this week high
pressure has moved in and we’re enjoying warm sunshine. I saw the first swallow
on the 6th by the iron bridge in Llandovery, and there are a few
around Cilycwm now.
This field has so many memories for me. Just over there by
the hedge is where I used to park the Shadow Cruiser (demountable camper) a day
or two before the Gwyl Bro Dinefwr so that I could do my job as Designated
Premises Supervisor for both festivals. I would listen to the Rees Sound boys
sound checking the Welsh language rock bands and think the kick drum on its own
sounded like heavy artillery firing. So often it has been wet and gloomy, but
when it is like today there is no better place – the hills almost glowing and
the kites circling above.
I would be back again on the Thursday before our festival as
the field filled up with stewards camping.
We would often go down to the pub on Thursday night and stagger back in
the dark. I’m so pleased it will be happening again this year.
Back to work. I’m trying to keep 3 jobs on the go – helping
Gareth building the roof at the site, building the big workshop doors here, and
now glueing up the windows which Ian Robins has made. He didn’t like the idea
of having all the parts aqua-vac treated so I said I would get that done and
glue them up so he would not be responsible for any twisting or shrinkage. The
treatment plant is at Jewsons in Swansea so I loaded all the parts on our
trailer (which they filled) and took them down there. I was confident there would
be no problems and indeed they came back scarcely damp.
(end of diary entry)
Pen Talar
Pen Talar
was S4C’s epic 9-part series that followed two young boys through half a
century. The director or producer or some such was Gethin Scourfield, the man I
had first met here in the barn during the pageant show in 2000. He realised the
barn would make an ideal base for the
film crew. The first I knew of it was when two attractive looking young people
came looking round the barn with Tegwyn while I was working on the oak. I asked
him what was going on and learnt that a complete mobile film crew was going to
take up residence here.
It was, I
think, August 09 when they arrived. Just outside my workshop was the mobile
kitchen and across the way was the canteen with seating for 40.
In the next
bay were the two huge wardrobe caravans.
In the first scenes, set in the 60s, the whole
village was asked to enrol as extras for one scene – an inauguration party for
the new Prince of Wales, young Charles.
I did not
apply and was working on the day they all turned up in their 60s gear. It was a
bit embarrassing trying to explain what I was doing.
Cars of the
right period were required for several scenes and these were hired from a
specialist supplier of period vehicles based way over in eastern England. A
mechanic camae with them and stayed the whole time they were being used. It
must have cost a fortune.
From the S4C
website -
“In 1962
sling-shots, go-karts and bazooka chewing-gum are the stuff of the lives of
Defi Lewis and his best friend Doug. A blissfully innocent, Arcadian childhood
in rural west Wales. That is, until they witnessed something that robbed them
of their innocence, on the same day the Western world lost its innocence, with
the assassination of JFK in Dallas, Texas. The series followed Defi and Doug
from that fateful November day, over half a century, through one of the most
turbulent eras of Welsh history, world history, and of course, their own lives.
A tale of paradise lost, for others of a paradise regained.”
I got to
know the two cooks quite well and took home a complete meal one day from
left-overs from their lunch. They tended to film until about 2 and then have
lunch – mid afternoon for me.
When it was
finished, Gethin arranged a viewing in the side bay for the village. Richard Harrington
introduced it and we watched the opening episode. It was an enticing
introduction to what turned out to be an excellent series. It seems quite
tragic to me that such fine (if a little melodramatic at times) drama should
not be available to a larger audience.
Storage
After the trusses were in place work in the barn tailed off,
but it was still full of stuff, and when we moved, at the height of the cold
weather in December 10, I asked Tegwyn if we could store our surplus belongings
there for a while. In all my dealings with Tegwyn he has never asked me for
money so I try to give him what I think is a fair price. Every few months I
would give him an envelope with cash in it and he seemed quite happy with that.
For the first year the pile of stuff hardly reduced. It
consisted of a large stack of timber, most of which was the result of changes
in the plan. There were several unopened packs of tongue and groove board
bought to make the workshop doors. It
soon became obvious that this would make them ridiculously heavy so I
substituted 6mm plywood with planted-on moulding which gave the appearance of
the old “plank and muntin” style of panel. The there were all the templates and
formers we had used to make the trusses and the window openings. There was one
complete oak beam which I sold on ebay plus some shorter offcuts which didn’t
sell. Added to all this was a whole heap
of stuff that was stored in the workshop an 28 Stone St.
2012 This year I
have steadily reduced the pile as the timber got used and more cupboards and
bookcases were built in the house. It was not until the shed was finished last
month (May) that I finally managed to find space for everything.
The Small Nations committee still has the marquee and lots
of other stuff stored there, but how long it can stay there I don’t know. There will be no Small Nations Festival this
year, and I doubt there will ever be another one.
This huge area of grey damp concrete looks sad now . The
Gwyl will still happen this year but the probability is that there will never
be another Small Nations Festival, and almost certainly nothing like Pen
Talar. The future existence of S4C is in
doubt and it seems highly unlikely that they will have the funds to do a major
series like that again.
It’s full of ghosts – all the wonderful performers; John Gog
in his kilt declaiming in Welsh; the Rees Sound men in black with their
mountains of sound gear; all the hangings and decorations; the highlanders in
their kilts getting heroically drunk; the huge bar with all the barrels behind it; all the Pen Talar extras wandering around in their 1970s clothes; the film canteen; the old cars; my workshop with the great oak beams on trolleys, and the crane and winches we
used to move them around; all the swallows nesting in the metal roof struts,
their cheerful twittering echoing round the space; and the dancing , dancing,
dancing...
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