All the land’s a stage
Molly Watson
Dylan Thomas used to say that a day away from Wales was a day wasted. I share this feeling. But, sacrilegious though it is to suggest it, I think he might have felt less homesick if he had let out his cottage there to tourists.
Lending something one really minds about is an interesting test of character. Every time I wave a friend away bearing a favourite dress or a rare book I have to suppress the piece of me that wants to shout, ‘Stop! Sorry to be mean-spirited but the deal’s off. I know that you are going to break or lose or stretch or muddy or in some inexpressible way besmirch whatever precious item it is you are borrowing from me and I will never value and enjoy it quite as much ever again as a result.’ I then get a grip and remind myself that it is good friends, and not possessions, that are the irreplaceable commodity. But I’m clearly not someone temperamentally suited to letting others use my home — which makes it the more surprising that I now rent out my cottage in Wales to over 40 customers a year and get much more out of it than the rental income.
I saved and sweated and searched for over a decade before I bought my place in Talybonton-Usk. The pain was well worth it, though. It still gives me a warm glow to think that I own — I own! — the little white cottage beside the river in one of the most lively and popular villages in the Brecon Beacons. A brilliant local Post Office and no fewer than four pubs are in staggering distance from my doorstep and you can walk, ride, bike or canoe, or take the canal through the hills to the coast, and scarcely encounter a car the whole way.
After renovating and decorating the cottage (I knew I’d got the nesting bug in a bad way when I bought the sofa of my dreams instead of going on holiday), the last thing I felt like doing was sharing it. I used to think back to the lectures I endured at school when someone had done something particularly antisocial to the fabric of the boarding house. ‘Would you do something like this at home?’ we used to be asked — a tactic which I thought missed the key point that we’d graffitied the walls, wrecked the garden and set fire to the curtains precisely because we weren’t at home.
Even when a new job took me further from home for longer periods of time, the thought of strangers with the behavioural standards of my 14-year-old self lying in my lovely linen sheets and eating from my Cornish blue china held me back from renting it out. Until, that is, the summer I was seconded to Australia. The thought of the cottage standing empty and my garden wilting, untended and unwatered for months on end, made me tentatively take out a website listing and homepage.
The first reply to www.mollyscottage.co.uk demolished all my preconceptions about the holiday rental market. Far from trying to squeeze as many people as possible into my three bedrooms, the couple who emailed me from Bristol wanted a comfortable bolthole while their own house was overhauled. They liked the fact that the cottage was my home and were prepared to pay a premium for the comfortable bed, large-screen telly, lovely kitchen and internet connection that came as part of it. They paid £1,000 to spend two weeks there and when they left I found that they had not only watered the garden, but they had planted sweet peas and cleared a proper path down to the nearby trout pool to swim.
Apart from one deceptively mouse-like couple, who my neighbour and housekeeper Alaine discovered had been sick and spilt hot chocolate (at least we tell ourselves that’s what it was) all over their sheets, I have had only positive experiences with my guests. But the best and most unexpected part of letting the cottage out is that hearing my guests’ reports of their visits makes me feel much closer to Wales, and the thing I really hanker for — the Welsh.
The thing I love most about Wales is people’s refusal to do things by halves. The Welsh have such gusto that there is always something worth singing about, or fighting about, or at the very least, making a good story from. There seems to be a national knack for injecting drama and humour into the most workaday situations that Thomas himself and the characters of Under Milk Wood would approve of. And scarcely a week goes by without one of my guests relaying a titbit on to me.
My favourite report came from an Australian couple who rented the cottage during the Rugby World Cup. They wrote to tell me that the only thing that cheered them up after their own nation’s defeat was watching the final in a pub full of Welshmen dressed in Springbok shirts. When South Africa beat England, the celebrations were so joyful that one local went outside into the street, lay down in the pose of a sleeping policeman, and was duly run over.
The comments in my visitors’ book advise would-be joggers to avoid running around the lanes near the village because of the frequency with which passing drivers of all ages pull over to initiate elaborate role-plays, normally started by the offer of a lift or a query about where the fire is, which are designed to highlight the futility and absurdity of exercise.
Anthropomorphism is another tool put to good theatrical effect in Wales. When one guest had problems with her car and took it into a local garage, the mechanic took his time in deciding how to play the scene. He paced around the engine in silence, studied the oil gauge and eventually turned to her in the manner of a surgeon acknowledging that a particular battle for life on the operating table has been lost. Resting a hand on the bonnet, he shook his head and declared, ‘It’s over. You’ve cooked him.’ I now listen to the Welsh weather forecast each morning from London, and instead of feeling homesick I’m comforted by the knowledge that before long I will have a comic instalment of the climatic conditions and human dramas being played out in the hills a few hundred miles to the west. My favourite introduction to Wales was relayed to me by a family who took a taxi from Abergavenny station to the cottage during last spring’s heatwave. ‘God alive it’s hot, boys,’ their driver remarked as they lurched onto the road. ‘I’m bastard blistering in here all day. If I could take my skin off just to get some breeze over my guts I would.’ Hearing that, even secondhand, strikes me as not so much a waste as a jewel.
Previous page
