Hay author Bridget Ashton has kindly shared an extract from her new book ‘My Mother and the Curate’ for some Valentine’s weekend reading.

Extract begins:

Kilvert’s Valentine experience

Reverend Francis Kilvert, the curate of Clyro in 1870, was enamoured by the pretty ladies of Hay and surrounding villages. It isn’t surprising. There were four daughters of Hay vicar Reverend William Bevan: Ellen, Alice Catherine, Mary Louisa and Frances Emily, and they lived at Hay Castle. There were more lovely girls at Llanthomas, Mary Elizabeth, Grace Catherine, Charlotte Alice, Edith Burnham and Frances Eleanor, the daughters of Reverend Thomas. Kilvert visited all of them regularly. Three days before Valentine’s Day, he wrote in his diary: “Bought four Valentines at Horden’s shop in Hay after searching through a tumbled heap for a long time.” We may wonder which young ladies were the happy recipients. On 14 February, he received one himself. “A pretty flower Valentine from Incognito, but from the neighbourhood evidently as the Hay post mark was the only one.”

He didn’t know who had sent it, and thus neither will we.

In contrast, Mrs Ashton the struggling young mother of six in 1950s Hay didn’t even mention Valentine’s Day in her diary. Her birthday was the day before, 13 February: “Bridget and Helen gave me a nice card and Bridget gave me sixpence with which I bought a nice pencil." On Valentine’s Day itself, at the end of a hard day’s housework, she wrote: “The children in bed in good order, then had a good tidy-round, baked white bread, cleaned shoes, then settled down to a nice evening by the fire.”

The simplicity of the language, the “tumbled heap”, the “sixpence with which I bought a nice pencil”, ring with innocence in our more consumerist times. The words remind us that loving gestures were appreciated then as now.

My Mother and the Curate, the new hardback book written by Bridget Ashton, is filled with anecdotes of daily life like this in and around Hay, in 1870 and 1953. It includes pictures of many of the lovely young ladies. The book is available for a special price of £18 including free postage, from [email protected], to Brecon and Radnor Express readers. It is also available at local bookshops.