Over the Gospel Pass (1/5)

Speeding over Gospel Pass in his battered-up Fiat Punto, Nigel and I have just arrived back at the Grange with a bag of sloppy vegetable patthia, a couple of sweaty naans and a sag aloo to find Aunty Mary waiting for us.

Gospel Pass is the highest road pass in Wales, ribboning between the mountains of Twmpa to the west and Hay Bluff to the east. And for twenty minutes each way, it’s the only place with anything approaching a mobile signal.

Descending back into the belly of the Vale of Ewyas, over the darkening river Honddu and then climbing up its steep shoulder to the Grange, my phone, like the evening, falls dark. The pitching and wheeling of swifts has been replaced by the manic, right-angled scribble of bats.

Aunty Mary is sitting in the corner of the old Victorian kitchen packed in on every side with towers of National Geographics, torn-open envelopes and racks of dusty cassette tapes. I trip on one of their 7 cats stretched out in front of the Aga which is pumping out heat, even in July.

Aunty Mary is wearing a black polo neck, Celtic crucifix and a wide red ribbon in her hair which is long and brown. She is one of two surviving children of nine, raised in a monastery built by a monk called Father Ignatius who had no religious training or formal ordination. Though over 100 years dead, he is celebrated with a parade every August. He was very charismatic, Aunty Mary murmurs. I wonder whose Aunty she is as I dole out the curry and Nigel produces a brace of chilled Butty Bachs from the fridge. Aunty Mary’s one remaining sister, Jessica followed a Lithuanian called Stan who had a gold Jaguar to Adelaide in the fifties and never returned.

Until 1:30am, when Nigel drives up and out of the valley, and back over Gospel Pass into Hay-on-Wye, we hunker down in the kitchen and talk.

Something within me changes.

And something is remembered.