Parker - On the Red Hill

Mike Parker is a writer and broadcaster. His books to date include Map Addict and the Rough Guide to Wales. He writes for publications including the Guardian and the Sunday Times, and presents on radio and television.

To Reg and George, Penny and David, with gratitude and love.

Men of my sort could take to the greenwood.

E. M. Forster, Maurice

The Powys registrar was visibly relieved that her first same-sex civil partnership ceremony had gone without a hitch. Well, you know what I always say? she trilled in our direction as the ink dried on the signatures. G-A-Y what does it stand for? Good As You. She carefully put down her regulation fountain pen and smiled beneficently at the four of us, seemingly expecting if not a round of applause for her generous liberalism, then at least a heartfelt thank you.

I glanced sideways at Reg. He might have just married the man he had been living with for nearly sixty years, but he still didnt want anyone, least of all a pen-pusher from the county council, calling him A Gay. His face had tightened into a polite grimace. Occasionally, hed get as far as saying the G-word, but even that was only ever whispered sotto voce, as if its velvet softness might still conceal the iron fist of bigotry that had so shaped his life. I once tried to explain to him why many of us were happy to rehabilitate the word queer. His eyes bulged alarmingly, and I didnt try again.

Municipal register offices are rarely the most appetising of environments, and Machynlleths is no exception. Wintry beams filtered through the muck crusting the solitary window, while a smell of musty cardboard hung heavy in the half-light. A suitably baleful atmosphere to register a death, perhaps, but woefully out of kilter for a birth or marriage let alone this great legal landmark.

Legislation allowing the first state recognition of same-sex relationships reached the statute books in December 2005. First to tie the knot were two men in Worthing, whod had the fortnight waiting period waived because one of them was terminally ill with cancer; he died the day after the ceremony. It took another two months for this brave new world to arrive in our small Welsh market town, which may well be something of a record. Fashions normally take at least a decade to reach us.

Emerging outside, we took some photographs and walked up the street to Preds house for a celebratory high tea. On the way, I nipped into the Co-op to buy a bottle of bubbly.

Champagne on a Thursday afternoon? said the girl on the till.

I explained the occasion.

Oh, those two old men, you mean? The ones who come in on market day?

I nodded.

Theyre lovely; always so tidy and polite. How beautiful that they can get married now. She looked as if she might cry. Oh, give them my love, and say congratulations.

Reg was quite the blushing bride, downing a glass of fizz and turning nougat pink as a result. George enjoyed himself in his usual polite and faintly detached way, with a keen eye, as always, on his wallet. His diary for the day:

Rang Mike re taking photos of Reg and I at ceremony. He has a Digital will bring. 1.45pm Prebb [sic] came in his car & took us to Mach solicitor by the clock and at 2.30 to have our GREAT moment CIVIC RIGHTS PARTNERSHIP. Wonderful gathering.

(Paid 47.00).

*

If the countryside appears at all in gay histories, it is usually only as a place to escape from, and as swiftly as possible. For many of us, this is a pattern that never fitted. Since childhood, the green places have called us the loudest, and although we did the urban thing to burst from the closet, the lure of the rural soon overwhelmed the anonymity of the city. It didnt even feel like a choice, but something intrinsic that would have been dangerous to resist, like the act of coming out itself.

So it was for George Walton and Reg Mickisch, an elegant couple of demobbed Londoners who fell in love in the post-war ruins and moved to Bournemouth. In 1972, just five years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, they upped sticks to the sticks: a tiny Welsh-speaking village in the hills of Montgomeryshire, mid Wales. They remained in the area until their deaths, five weeks apart, in 2011, aged ninety-four and eighty-four, respectively.

Although the search for the queer rural is more mainstream today, there was no well-grooved path to follow in 1972. They bought an old village pub near Machynlleth, and spent a year knocking it into shape as a guest house. According to their visitors book, the first guest, C. W. Brook (Mr), stayed in October 1973 and found that he enjoyed every moment with good company and excellent service. Three years later, they relocated to a more solitary property, and then returned to the original area in 1980, setting up the B&B in its third and final incarnation at Rhiw Goch, the Red Hill, an eighteenth-century farmhouse on a quiet lane with no immediate neighbours.

I understood the unconventional urge that had propelled them here, for my leap into the rural Welsh unknown had also been far from textbook. Sharing the same Worcestershire childhood horizon as poet A. E. Housman, I was equally bewitched by its blue remembered hills, the slumbering giants of the borderlands and the mountains beyond. I seized every opportunity to visit Wales, and ached to live there. In my twenties, I bagged a dream commission of writing the inaugural Rough Guide to Wales, spending months touring the country with a hire car, a tent and an insatiable itch. No mere job, this was deep research for a new life. That, though, seemed to depend on finding the man to share it with and he was proving highly elusive.

Tired in truth, bored of waiting for him, I jumped alone, aged thirty-three, with almost no work and just my dog Patsy for company. The moment I knew that it was happening came during a Snowdonia holiday in the first months of the new millennium: a switch quietly flicked in my head, and I was on my way. I rushed back to Birmingham, gave notice on my house, and began hunting for a place in the west. Though the budget stretched only as far as a granny flat a few miles north of Aberystwyth, a home so diminutive that Patsy and I had to take turns moving around it, nothing could dent my excitement at finally being a resident of rural Wales. From decision to relocation had taken eight weeks.

Even in that short time, I had acquaintances from all corners of my life lining up to tell me I was making a dreadful mistake. As a gobby gay Brummie, they said, the best I could hope for in Llan-nowhere was to be ignored and to die a lonely old queen. At worst, they thundered, Id be hanged like a hillbilly Mussolini from the nearest lamp post.