A Cultural Digest

Five years ago my husband and I honeymooned in Europe. Before leaving the U.S., we researched our trip online and in books and asked friends and family what to do. There were lists, maps, plans, tips, dogeared pages, highlighted printouts, binder clips, folders, folders for folders. Once we’d crossed the pond, however, we decided to set aside a couple days in each city just to walk — along rivers, mostly. We would stroll, take long-cuts, slip down alleyways, generate meanders and tributaries and simply get lost. Losing oneself in Paris and London is pretty easy, and easier still in Wales, where one could map every toe-hold and still feel dislocated (part of it is the language, with names like Ystradgynlais and Llanfairfechan, another part might be how rural much of the country is).

hay castle bookshop, courtyard

After spending a few days in London, we took off for Hay-on-Wye, Wales (in Welsh the town name is Y Gelli Gandryll). Hay was recommended by a friend who’d spent several years studying in Cardiff and who had gone to Hay, aka “The Town of Books,” and found it “magical.” We traveled by late-afternoon train to Hereford, where we hired a taxi to take us the 20-some miles to our hotel in Clyro, a village in Powys, Wales. By the time we turned onto the winding road that led to the hotel, Baskerville Hall, the temperature had plummeted and the wind had picked up considerably. The cab barreled past ancient stone walls and horses grazing under huge, swaying trees. After enduring a dip in the road that catapulted my stomach into my throat, we pulled up in front of the dark stone mansion. We paid and thanked Clive of Hereford (the most gracious cab driver ever) and, luggage in hand, sprint-stumbled over a patch of gravel and through the front door, just as it began to rain.

The Hall was built in the early 1800s and it’s cavernous, with lofty ceilings and several spacious, deshabille-glam drawing, dining and music rooms downstairs, as well as a grand double-stairway that snakes up the center of the building. On the landing is a fireplace and seating area, over which a knight in armor stands sentry, of course, and, from there, another couple flights of stairs continue up to the third floor. The place is dominated by claret carpet, dark wood floors and paneling, Oriental rugs, pale yellow wallpaper and off-cream paint. The shadowy interior is occasionally illuminated by crystal chandeliers and partly shiny brass lamps.

baskerville hall hotel

road to baskerville hall

It all felt very haunted mansion, very Addams Family meets The Shining.

When we entered our third-floor room — which was huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows — the wind was whipping the ivory curtains into frenzied ghosts. The layout was romantic, with a bouquet of red flowers on the dressing table and a pale blue velvet loveseat across from a huge white marble fireplace. Behind a curtain off the main bedroom was a smaller room with a single bed, nightstand, lamp and a rocking chair. It was an ordinary room, more modern than the big bedroom, but gave off a slightly creepy vibe. The bathroom was swathed in red-yellow-and-blue-striped carpet that, in addition to covering the floor, also crept up to decorate about a foot of the outside of the bathtub.

The place was clean, but exhaled all 165 of its years.

lobby

After dropping our bags in the room, we returned to the front desk, which featured a coin-operated phone and many small dull pencils and blank slips of paper. On the wall behind the desk were hung a selection of old framed black-and-white photos of the property and news-clippings about the place from back in the day, including several pieces that made mention of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles novel. (Legend has it that Doyle was a friend of the original owner and would stay at the Hall often. Once, during a horse ride, he heard a rumor about hounds in the area that he used as a jumping-off place for the book, though he set the story elsewhere, reportedly at the request of his host.)

Eager to reach our final destination, Hay-on-Wye, still several miles away, we asked the desk clerk, a quiet hybrid of Lurch and Mark E. Smith, for taxi numbers. Lurch kindly offered to call the cab for us and went into an adjoining room to do so. Five minutes later he emerged from behind a closed door to tell us there were no taxis to be had. Determined to see Hay that night, I asked to use the coin-operated phone at the desk. Lurch assented and gave us the names and numbers of three taxi services. I dialed them all. The first couldn’t take the job as he was driving to Cardiff that night and wouldn’t be back until early morning. The second asked where we wanted to go and, after I told him, harumphed “No!” and hung up. Next I spoke to a harried-sounding woman who agreed to the job, though she wouldn’t be able to pick us up for an hour and a half.

Given the wait, we decided to dine in the Baskerville pub. We made our way through several musty hallways, past fox-huntscapes and flower-ridden still-lifes — and numerous doors hung with black and orange signs that read: PRIVATE. NO ENTRY — until finally we arrived at the place. I went up to the bar to ask for menus, and who should greet me but Lurch. We ordered pints of local ale and scanned the menus. Our choices were lamb, fish and chips or cheese sandwiches. Being vegetarians, we went for the fish and chips and cheese sandwich. The chef, who was dressed in a Harlequin outfit (who knows?), visited our table and asked if we might like to sample a locally made mustard cheese. We said yes, of course, and proceeded to make our way through two heavily watered down pints each before the food arrived — lots of crumbly cheese containing mustard grains on a large fluffy white roll that was buttered, accompanied by a recessive slice of tomato and wrinkle of lettuce. And fish and chips, of course, that was pretty standard. My husband drowned the chips in brown sauce and we ate.

The food wasn’t bad, but the scene was better. Behind us, inset in the wall, in a kind of terrarium, was something that looked like a small tumbleweed with blue plastic flowers stuck into it. Across the room from us, sitting at what might be called the grand table, near the fireplace, were two animated women in their 50s eating elaborate lamb dinners and polishing off what appeared to be their third bottle of wine. The women were doughy and rotund, with bright pink cheeks. One had shoulder-length blonde hair, the other identically styled dark hair. One had a Scottish accent, the other English. Two labrador retrievers — hounds of the Baskerville! — sat at their feet. The women spoke loudly and with great gusto about dog-training techniques. Half-way through my second pint I hatched a story that Lurch only pretended to call a taxi for us, when in fact his secret plan was to keep us trapped in Baskerville Hall all night, eating cheese, downing pints and learning stuff about dogs. This was also around the time I suggested we pay our bill and spy around the place, peek behind doors, check out back stairways, that kind of thing. Part of the reason I’d booked the place was the advertised indoor swimming pool, so we’d look for that too. After energetically wandering around for 20 minutes or so we found a door that was marked “pool.” Also on the door was a sign that said “CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.”

part of the town

Beerily, blurrily we trudged back to the lobby to await our taxi, which arrived just in time, along with a young Welsh woman, Julie, our driver, and a rather pale, antique man who was perched on the front seat next to her. Julie was warm and chatty and drove heart-palpitatingly fast over rain-slick hilly roads. Once in Hay, she asked where we’d like to be dropped off. Good question, I said. Where would you recommend? She let us out in front of what turned out to be the one place in town that was still open at that hour (it was 10PM), Kilvert’s Inn. We paid, tipped Julie well and she agreed to return to pick us up three hours hence. I poked around the inn, while my husband ate pie and drank tea in the pub. After awhile the rain subsided and out we went. The town was small and hilly, with winding streets, many alleyways, stone and brick walls, cobblestones, old streetlamps, sweet little (and some big) houses and shoppes, mostly closed, as it was after 11PM.

We wandered for a couple of hours in the light mist, pausing often to look up at the full moon. For the longest time we were the only people outside, as far as we could tell, and it was so quiet. After peering into a dozen or so foggy bookstore windows, we stumbled onto the castle, where Richard Booth lived and ran Castle Books: “On April 1, 1977, Richard Booth proclaimed Hay an ‘independent kingdom’ with himself as king Richard Cœur de Livre and his horse as Prime Minister.” (Wikipedia) In the ’70s, Booth encouraged people to move to Hay and open second-hand bookstores — and they did. Currently there are over 30 of them. And the Guardian sponsors a literary festival in town every May.

hay castle, partial

hay castle, courtyard books, partial

Booth’s castle is on a small hill and is surrounded, on street-level, by stone walls. But the door to the front courtyard was open and we walked through to see a huge lush green lawn ringed with bookcases creaking under the weight of hundreds of moist, yellowing volumes. It was mind-blowing, all these books in huge bookcases along a castle’s walls, grass underfoot and open to the sky. There was a harvest moon, the sky had cleared, and we could smell wet grass with a gorgeous undercurrent of book must. The main bookshop was up a long staircase and inside the castle. That we would save for tomorrow.

So by now or by, say, three paragraphs ago, you might have begun to wonder: Where exactly did the lost part happen. Exactly?

I guess I’d have to call it more of a pleasant sense of dislocation or series of dislocations. Because it’s true, we never really got lost in Wales. Whenever we went astray we consulted maps or asked people how to get back on the right path. (To our partial disappointment, the people we encountered in Hay spoke only English to us.) But in the bookstores, all those gorgeous psychogeographically bottomless bookstores — and especially in Castle Books — we became dislocated, decentered, we time-traveled between the stacks. And when I say stacks I mean mostly books — many old and beautiful books, many old and shabby books, some recent, some new. However I also mean postcards from the early 1900s, health pamphlets, ads for tinctures, elixirs, miracle gadgets, typed-by-hand mixology books bound between wood covers secured with leather shoelaces, penny dreadfuls, pulps, ancient medical texts, personal diaries, vintage sex comics, Russian tattoo-art books, almost anything you could imagine.

Given the depth and intensity of my responses to Hay, Town of Books, I am not altogether sure I’ve shaken loose those enchanting dislocations. In fact, I’m pretty certain some of those turnings dislodged a cell-block or two, set up shop in a remote corner of my brain and live there still.

Anyway, back to the past. After spending the night at Baskerville Hall, on a mattress that was apparently filled with cement, it was a relief when Julie picked us up early the next morning and drove back to Hay. We breakfasted at a cafe and hung out at the local library until the bookstores opened. We began with Richard Booth’s Bookshop (yep, same guy, different bookstore) where I picked up a little gem called Consult Me for All You Want to Know,* which contains a humiliation of riches. I am currently lost in this book and, by extension, in Hay, too. Maybe there is some kind of secret psychoactive mustard seed along the spine or between the pages.

*I will share entries from this book over the coming week–too good to keep to myself!