VT Coughtrey - Pant-y-Powsi

NOTES	We were already getting a bit edgy about the possibility that Camden council would discover that the flat was not occupied by the legal tenant, when a small incident greatly increased our fears. A woman came to the door and asked to see Barry. I explained that he had gone abroad and that it was unlikely he would ever return to the flat, even when he returned to Britain. She looked puzzled and asked who I was. I foolishly told her that I'd taken over the flat. She then asked to come in and look around, as she was from the Housing Department of the council and was doing a survey to see what modernization needed carrying out. She was young and informal, so it was unlikely that she would have reported us to the lettings officer, but we panicked.
Compendium had two bookshops, on opposite sides of Chalk Farm Road, in the middle of what was then still an important 'alternative lifestyle' area. One shop dealt with all things 'alternative' and 'mystical', the other, in great contrast, with all things to do with the revolutionary Left and anarchism. I remember someone describing their closure in 2000 as "the death of the last vestiges of the Counterculture in London". An exaggeration, perhaps?	Suddenly, it seemed very important to get out of there as fast as possible. I can't think why we didn't just sit tight and wait to see what they were going to do about it, if anything, but we started to think of all kinds of desperate ways out. The idea of a communal way of life had continued to hold some attraction for me ever since the Simonwell days (Chapter 48) and there was a famous 'alternative lifestyle' bookshop called Compendium Books just round the corner in Chalk Farm Road. They were selling a directory of communes, which had been the Bible of the commune movement in the 60s, but communes were already going a bit out of fashion by 1972. However, there were still a lot to choose from in this book. Of course, we had both had enough experience of alternative scenes to know that most so-called communes would be made up of people with whom it would be impossible to live for five minutes, especially with a baby. But one listing caught our attention. A young couple with two children, who sounded very sensible and businesslike, were renovating a farmhouse in mid-Wales, and wished to make a co-operative venture of it. The idea was to have a group of people there, living in a very simple way, who could survive entirely by making and selling craft products. We contacted them, exchanged letters, and I went to Wales to see what was on offer, leaving Angela behind with the baby. I went by train to Caersws, and the couple picked me up from there and drove me to the house.
	It was called Pant-y-Powsi, and was in a very isolated place a couple of miles from the hamlet of Talerddig, which was then in Montgomeryshire and is now in Powys. It stood in the middle of several acres of its own wild moorland and was semi-derelict. The couple, who shall be known here as Ken and Alice, had bought the near-ruin and the land for a few hundred pounds. Ken had already put a lot of very hard work into making the place habitable, but it had no electricity, as the electricity board was not prepared to bring a power line to such a remote location. The only source of water was a stream illicitly diverted from someone else's land, and the sanitation system was a home-made but efficient enough septic tank. Cooking was done on a wood-burning range and lighting was by Tilley lamps. A rather forlorn-looking goat provided milk.
	Of course, they wanted to know what we could contribute to the proposed commune. I said that I was a very experienced and keen gardener and could easily turn this patch of rushy, boggy hillside into a thriving kitchen garden, in which I could grow enough for all our needs and have some over to sell. Not knowing the first thing about horticulture, they didn't realize that this was a ridiculous suggestion for this location. I knew it, even though the truth about my gardening experience was that it was limited to that little patch of my own when I was a child, and to the allotment I had rented for a short time in Brighton. I also said that I had experimented a lot with home weaving techniques, and could make use of the abundant rush to weave rush mats to sell. It was true that I had recently bought a very small home loom on a whim, and had woven a few strips of material on it, but it was also true that I knew full well that the scipio communis growing there was not the sort of rush you made mats out of. Unfortunately, Ken and Alice, who were very naïve in some ways, were taken in and said we were welcome to join them.
	I returned to London the next day and presented an optimistic view of the place to Angela. It was agreed that we should move there as soon as possible. Ken quickly arranged for a friend with a van to take us and our possessions, now swollen by some of Barry's possessions, such as his record collection (we had belatedly become fans of Bob Dylan due to Barry's records). We had by now lost touch with Barry and there was obviously no point in leaving his stuff in the hope that he might return before the council closed in. However, we had to leave all the furniture, such as it was. I've no idea how long it would have been before the council discovered that the flat was unoccupied. Years later, when we met up with Barry again, we found out that he had never returned there.
	Well, it soon became apparent that life was not going to be easy at Pant-y-Powsi. The lack of electricity, gas and mains water was not a particular problem - in fact we quite enjoyed that aspect of the place. There was, however,a fundamental difference of outlook between us and them. Ken and Alice seemed to us to take an almost masochistic delight in hardship and hard work. Furthermore, they believed in applying some of this Spartan philosophy to the way they reared their children, aged three and eighteen months. Although it was now November, they thought it was a good idea to leave their children outside the house for much of the day, wearing what we considered to be very little clothing, considering the cold, damp conditions. They said it was essential to toughen children up in this way. We responded by putting Felix outside as well, but wrapped up to a ridiculous extent, just to make a statement. Similarly, the more contemptuous they became of our elaborate rituals for washing and sterilizing nappies and feeding bottles, the more care we took over it. In fact, the first argument we had with them was over this. They felt we were wasting far too much time on baby care and probably doing a lot of harm to the baby in the process.
	The general idea seemed to be that Angela was supposed to work mainly around the house with Alice and I was supposed to work outside, mending the long track to the house with rocks collected elsewhere, or making a start on reclaiming land to make the promised garden. In fact, I did a fair amount of both of these things, even though I knew it would take more expertise than I possessed to grow anything at all in that place. Angela, though, soon succumbed to the constant damp and had the worst illness of her life - a general respiratory infection that took her a long time to recover from completely. Of course, Ken and Alice were of the opinion that the way to shake it off was to be up and about and doing things, but Angela was certainly too ill to be out of bed at all for about a week.
	At Christmas, it was agreed that we could go and stay with my mother for a few days. I can remember nothing at all about that visit, but I suspect that whereas we couldn't wait to get away from Pant-y-Powsi, after a few days at my mother's we couldn't wait to get back.
	Soon after our return from Barnet, Ken and Alice decided that they needed our bedroom for the older child, and let us have an old caravan parked not far from the house. It was big, but even damper than the house. Paper, for example, became almost wet and couldn't be written on. Also, it was very difficult to keep matches dry enough to light the wood-burning stove that provided the heating.
	The task I most dreaded was milking the goat. She was very ill-tempered and had no desire to be milked at all. This was not altogether surprising, as it was so difficult to coax any milk out of her that her teats became sore and the milk even became tinged with blood occasionally. The other task I wasn't overly fond of was going out before dawn with a spade to trespass on neighbouring land, in order to divert the stream. Very often, possibly every day, the sheep farmer who owned the land would undo our diversion, leaving us to depend for water on what little we could store. The nefarious work of re-diverting it had to be done under cover of darkness, by the light of a dim torch, as the farmer was said to have a bit of a temper. When there was a heavy covering of snow or torrential rain the task was particularly difficult and unpleasant.
	Of course, we were all living entirely on Ken's salary as a teacher, and he naturally remembered my promise that I would make a lot of money selling rush mats. Therefore, I was expected to develop this craft at the same time as carrying out all my other duties (which included breadmaking and sawing and chopping logs for firewood). I managed to find a way of drying and weaving rush, and produced a few mats, but I couldn't see how they could have any commercial potential. It took a long time to weave one small mat on a hand loom, using rush with such short, narrow leaves. Oddly enough, Ken and Alice seemed quite pleased with the mats. Eventually, I got so fed up with the fiddly job that I smashed the loom in a rage. To my surprise, Alice and Ken seemed quite impressed by that.
	One night it was agreed that Angela and I could have a night out, so we walked the five miles or so to the nearest pub, in Llanbrynmair. Our entrance momentarily stopped all conversation. When it started up again we noticed that everyone was speaking Welsh. Extraordinary though it seems to me now, before we went to Pant-y-Powsi I had no idea that Welsh was still spoken as an everyday language over large areas of Wales. In fact an old woman who used to come to the house for tea now and again could speak very little English. Under different circumstances, such as having the time, having access to books and having a car to get to classes, I would certainly have made the effort to learn Welsh. As it happens, these days I'm fairly fluent in Welsh, but that has nothing to do with our stay at Pant-y-Powsi.
	Eventually I went on strike and wouldn't do anything. I don't remember that there was any particularly big row that brought this about. I think it was just the general feeling, certainly shared by Angela, that we were in a situation that was leading nowhere, despite the pressure on us to produce a certain quota of work every day. Furthermore, we felt we had no control over anything, as we had no income to contribute. There was a friendly enough meeting at which it was decided that the 'commune' was not working (I certainly wasn't) and that we should leave.
	In 2005 I discovered that Ken and Alice were still living in Powys (though not at Pant-y-Powsi) and had been running a highly successful manufacturing business for many years.