And so we leave the grand, sorrowful house of Chipping Norton, back down the long two-mile driveway, once owned by the Brass family; today the property of a man who also owns Alexandra Palace and three golf courses. (He has never had time to play a game of golf, our taxi driver tells us.) We pass the Quiet Woman antiques shop and it seems today is going to be a day when we ooh and aah going through places, but don’t have time to stop. Then just as we are about to drive out of Chipping Norton, the very unquiet women in the back of the bus spot a market and shout: “Stop!”
Everyone scatters around the market – local lardy bread for Carol Ann Duffy, and for me artichoke hearts and feta marinaded in dill. Ali has a kind face, slicing the feta slab almost lovingly. He’s from Afghanistan via Turkey. When I ask him if he’ll vote in or out – he says out. He’s been told it will be better for his children and knows nothing about politics. I tell him In will be better for them.
“You think so?” he shrugs. “Well maybe I’ll vote to stay then. I don’t know.”
But the man I buy my French loaf from at the bakery stand is a definite out and lists his reasons confidently. “It is not just about immigration,” he says, eyeing my skin colour. “It’s about being handed down decrees from Brussels when what do they know about us?”
The pub on the corner is called Bitter and Twisted.
Back in the bus, our musician John Sampson spots a sign to Adlestrop. He shouts out the name and tour manager Camilla Elworthy swings the bus back round so that we can actually do it, we can actually STOP at Adlestrop. We get off the bus and walk towards a bench that has Thomas’s poem carved into it.
It is like finding hallowed ground. Carol Ann goes and stands off by herself to take it all in. Imtiaz Dharker and Gillian Clarke and I sit down on the bench. We fall silent and listen to the birdsong. Yes, blackbirds, Gillian says, probably all blackbirds.
As we drive on, past the dog daisies and the poppies, I start to think it is a weirdly appropriate time to be travelling the country in these referendum days. From Falmouth to Bath, Oxford, Chipping Norton, Monmouth and today to Crickhowell, we seem to pick up the mood of the country as it changes from place to place, as the signs outside houses change from in to out, as the soil changes, and the long green grasses for grazing change, and the wheat and the fields and the buildings change, and the copper beech changes to Scottish pine. Our voices have now started to merge like the fields, ceding and giving way one to the other.
I see hope everywhere I look. A sign for Hopeswood bed and breakfast, then a sign for Long Hope a mile down the road. The names are ringing like great bells of hope, as one place shakes hands with another and leaves a little something of itself behind.
And so we arrive at Monmouth, the mouth of the river. Passing an allotment squatted on by a giant OUT sign, we imagine which vegetables would be in or out. Potatoes in but spuds out. Runner beans out, spring onions out. Lettuce leaf, says Imtiaz, out. Petit pois in. Jerusalem artichokes in. In beautiful old Monmouth, with its ancient square and cobbled streets, we walk to the Savoy, the oldest known theatre in Wales. Established in the 1860s, gutted in the 20s, it has been run a wonderful charity since 2010.
There are two guests at tonight’s gig: Jonathan Edwards stuns the audience with his brilliant poems from My Family and Other Superheroes. He opens with the very funny and beautiful The Voice in Which My Mother Read to Me. It is actually his mother’s birthday and she is in the audience. Aww.
By the end of the night some of our eyes are tear-stained. We just don’t know what this next day will bring, this day of changing or staying the same.
