A Thousand Laurie Lees Read online

  ‘As a writer Laurie Lee was the disengaged onlooker who understood how his presence altered a place or a situation.’

  The Independent, 1997

  ‘Are you writing?’ he asked me.

  ‘A little,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a summer class in a few weeks.’

  ‘Ah, writing classes,’ said Laurie, and he raised his eyebrows and smiled. ‘Do you need them when you’ve got all this?’

  He gestured to the party, the valley, the world at large, his drink slopping a little, like late winter sunlight over the edge of his glass.

  To the memory of Frances Horovitz, 1938–83, and Laurie Lee, 1914–97

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The Apple’s Rounded World

  2 Katy

  3 Three Points of the Diamond

  4 Religion, Sex and Chickens

  5 Beat

  6 You’ll Be Kissed Again

  7 Midsummer Morning Log Jam

  8 Changing the Record

  9 Are You Writing?

  10 The Real Rosie?

  11 Party Time

  12 Making Music

  13 Cannabis with Rosie

  14 Not Available

  15 Burials

  16 Beginnings

  17 The Buddha of Swift’s Hill

  18 Notting Hill in Wellies

  19 Coming Home

  20 The Spring is Sprung

  21 Tramadol with Rosie

  22 Coda

  Plates

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to The Society of Authors for the support provided by a Society of Authors’ Authors’ Foundation grant (www.societyofauthors.org).

  The writing of this book would not have been possible without the generosity of Jacqueline Kroft, who let me stay at her house to write the first section of the book, and of the Painswick Quakers for giving me access to their exquisite Meeting House, where I was able to write several more chapters. I am also grateful to the Greenshop in Bisley and to my editor, Shaun Barrington, for their patience and understanding. Thanks also to Karen Walker for her careful, considered and helpful readings of the manuscript and to my father, Michael Horovitz, for his contributions to the fluidity of text and memory. Thanks also to Jane Percival for the use of her painting and to Patricia Hopf, whose book The Turbulent History of a Cotswold Valley (Nonsuch, 2006) was an invaluable resource during the writing of this book. Thanks are also due to Andrew Wood for showing me the photograph of Diana Lodge, and to Jessie Ann Matthew for allowing me to use it at such short notice.

  I would particularly like to thank Jo Sanders for her illustrations and Dan Brown for his photographs, which have made this book such a joy to look at, as well as Mark Anderson, who provided the title of this book many years ago.

  Thanks are also due to Joe and Imogen Reeve, Anne Garcin and Nik Bragg, Rick Vick, Alex Jamieson, Brian and Carole Oosthuysen, Francoise Pinteaux-Jones, Isa Clee-Cadman and Gavin McClafferty and Anne and Ian Mackintosh, who looked after me when I broke my arms ten days after signing the contract to write this book and whose generosity allowed me the space and time to rethink it as I mended.

  ‘An Owl Breaks the Silence’ was originally published in John Papworth’s Fourth World Review (1989) and then in Grandchildren of Albion (New Departures, 1992). ‘Earth Song’ first appeared in Earth Ascending (Stride, 1996). ‘Burials’ and ‘At This Time’ first appeared in Oral (Sceptre, 1999). A version of ‘Roots’ first appeared in issue 1 of Bare Fiction magazine (2013).

  ‘Burials’ and ‘Cheese Kisses’ are published in Adam Horovitz’s collection Turning (2011), and reprinted with the permission of Headland Publications.

  Extracts from Frances Horovitz’s poetry appear courtesy of Bloodaxe Books, taken from Frances Horovitz, Collected Poems: New Edition (Bloodaxe Books, 2011).

  Quotes from Laurie Lee’s poetry are taken from his Selected Poems (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1983) and are reproduced with the permission of his estate.

  The quote attributed to John Papworth is taken from Frances Horovitz, Poet: A Symposium, edited by Father Brocard Sewell (Aylesford Press, 1987).

  The quote attributed to Laurie Lee regarding the development of the Slad Valley is taken from Laurie Lee: The Well-Loved Stranger by Valerie Grove (Viking Penguin, 1999).

  The extract from Midsummer Morning Jog Log by Michael Horovitz is used courtesy of Five Seasons Press.

  Introduction

  The Night of a Thousand Laurie Lees

  Into the quiet of the valley the drunken cyclists came roaring, dressed all in white, veering across the road like baffled owls, tearing up the stillness of the May twilight, disturbing bats in their feeding dance and drowning out the last low hum of fleeing insects. Singing and shouting they came, all dressed as Laurie Lee, fedoras jammed on their heads, tilting at the Woolpack pub as if it were a squat stone windmill. In their pockets were books, any books they could lay their hands on. The Observer Book of Dogs, something by Barbara Cartland. It didn’t matter so long as it was a book.

  The pub was humming gently along as it always did in the early evening on the outskirts of the tourist season; a few locals propped at the bar chewing their way through Uley ale or Old Rosie cider which, if it wasn’t drunk quickly enough, tended to simmer in the barrel until it became a sort of explosive West Country Calvados that tore at taste buds and brain cells and, later on, the sides of cars taken home by incautious drivers. Dave the landlord was more than likely stooped by the battered till as usual, barking with laughter at the bawdy jokes that swim gasping for reaction through any bar where everyone knows everyone else.

  The Woolpack was a delightfully battered and quasi-homely place in 1998, a year after Laurie Lee died. A simple kitchen lurked behind the stairs to the apartment above, ready to catch the tourists if they were exhausted from long walks through the steep valley, or to feed the hungry natives if they were desperate to escape their own kitchens.

  Downstairs, through the dark cellar where a lonely fruit machine lingered dolefully amongst bashed and aged firkins of ale, there was a pool table for the younger generation to hang out at, sucking slowly at thin roll-ups and making a couple of pints last the whole night. Sometimes, if the pub was quiet and they were very quick, enterprising couples would hang out on the table half in their clothes, keeping a weather ear open for the creak of the door, the heavy footsteps of someone coming down to change the lines.

  It was a place where nothing much happened, other than the usual mythologising, the arguments about football, politics or the price of eggs or the occasional lonely old man in his cups who blew beer froth through his beard as he clumsily entreated the latest pretty young pot girl to come home with him. He usually went home happy if the expected ‘No!’ came with a gentle smile. No one left in the pub had ever quite achieved Laurie’s sly, twinkling charm, although many tried to reincarnate it.

  On The Night of a Thousand Laurie Lees, however, a little anarchy and devilment was coming back, careering down the road from Miserden, from Frank Mansell’s old pub The Carpenter’s Arms where the drinking had begun in earnest, carried on battered bicycles and powered by laughter and beer.

  Imagine, if you will, the bikes being steered through a long line of cars parked on the road; the concerned lights blinking sleepily on in the old schoolhouse as riders curse and topple and laugh at the clumsiness of their arrival. The machines being parked hugger-mugger against the solid metal fence, there to prevent drunks from falling into the beer garden. The wheels tangled with pedals, feet and brambles. One bicycle narrowly avoiding the steep careen down the steps to the outside lavatory – slippery, uneven slabs
that have cricked the backs of many an unwary drinker over the years.

  Silence in the pub as a football chant (‘Laurie LEE Laurie LEE Laurie LEE-EE!’) goes up outside, building in rounds before it blows in through the door followed by a number of men dressed as Laurie and thrusting books into the faces of the bewildered drinkers. ‘Signed books available!’ barks one of the Lauries, scribbling in The Observer Book of Dogs and putting it down amidst the pints on the nearest table. ‘Drinks available.’

  More Lauries enter, all signing books, adjusting their hats and husking out requests for beer, their tongues parched with the effort of song and cycling. The bar fills, bodies pressed against each other in a scrum for drink. The locals are crowded into pockets of confusion, subsumed by Lauries. Laughter and song swell like a bubble, bursting from the window behind the bar that overlooks Swift’s Hill, the woodland Laurie bought years ago with the profits from Cider with Rosie, and sinks down the hill to Laurie’s house where his widow and daughter, Kathy and Jessy, are remembering Laurie with a gathering of friends, marking the first anniversary of his death.

  They are drawn up the hill from their quieter memories by the chanting, the echo of Laurie’s name bouncing off the bruised old stone of the cottages. Over the car park they come, stepping carefully on the erratic stairs past the lavatory and in through the Woolpack’s door. The painted packhorse sign swings in the breeze, its creak obliterated. The valley feels empty. All life is gathered in the pub, anarchic and beery.

  The many arms of Laurie open in welcome as Kathy enters the pub. Books are dropped and drinks passed around, charged and recharged. Laurie suddenly seems alive and well and living on in the valley’s dreaming, in the mouths and minds of everyone who lives there or passes through, bound into the landscape like a white clad Jack-in-the-Green.

  The Slad Valley has been bound in, farmed and fenced by literature for as long as I can remember, one of a few Southern English rural idylls to have survived semi-intact into the twenty-first century without succumbing entirely to the deathly creep of empty commuterism.

  The quiet boundaries of Laurie Lee’s Edwardian upbringing, through which news or the occasional deserter from distant wars crept furtive and wary, have gone. Broadband has opened wider than the sky the horizons of this small, glacier-cut valley, fringed though it still is by an endless quiff of deciduous trees.

  It is a place of quiet mystery in its deepest recesses, with the contentment of a blurry feudal ease at its surface, into which the wider world bounds irregularly like a large, alarming dog only to be rebuffed – or, better still, absorbed with a game of fetch-the-stick. Landowners and workers rub shoulders in the valley’s heart: the pub. Even modern celebrities, whose notoriously unwieldy egos can easily destabilise any community into which they move, are moving to the outlying villages and country houses and being subsumed by Slad.

  Slad is place that exists curiously out of time, like the sort of fantastical land I read about as a child (when I wasn’t chasing off into the valley after butterflies, or looking for sheep skulls and badger setts) where dimensions in time and space would interlock. The tattered remnants of rural hierarchy coexist with patchy mobile signal, sleek celebrity alongside scuff-booted workman, artist alongside merchant banker. The past intrudes on the present. Even the sort of idyllic hippy upbringing I had in a thumb offshoot of the valley to which my parents moved in 1971, out beyond the farmhouse racing stables, still exists in places, free from creeping urban paranoia, streetlights and the imperative of labour to the exclusion of dreaming.

  1

  The Apple’s Rounded World

  Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:

  juice-green of July rain,

  the black polestar of flowers, the rind

  mapped with its crimson stain.

  From ‘Apples’ by Laurie Lee

  Things are changing. A year lost to sorrow recedes into the distance and I am cleaning up and clearing out the house in which I grew up. A time of stepping back and moving on. There is a great deal of work to be done sifting and sorting papers; my father’s archive needs taming and ordering, as does mine. There is such a lot of it, much-layered with dust in the further reaches of the attic. Dust and the early history of the counterculture; books and memories spider-webbed in glass.

  On the one clear day of the Jubilee bank holiday, I have come with friends to the house. They are gardening. The garden needs as much ordering as the archive – it is a church of little light under the steepling trees.

  I dive into the wealth of papers and begin to clear some space. The long day passes in dust clouds, which dance like long-lost faces on the edge of daylight. My father has returned to London when suddenly, in amongst a pile of addled, raddled and mouse-ridden jiffy bags, I discover a cache of handwritten manuscripts of my mother’s poetry, only one of which the mice had got to: a poem of hers about a Peruvian flute carved from human bone – it too had been shaved down to the essentials – and a collection of photographs. Of us. Of the family, all my life ago.

  In the photos, I too am shaved down to the essence of existence – I must be three months old. These are the photos taken when we moved to the cottage, out of London to this branching out of the valley at the heart of Cider with Rosie country. The house, heavy in the here and now with jasmine, boxed in by privet and yew and beech, also looks bare and young and clean.

  My parents too; they hold their bodies like saplings, my mother sharp and fluid as a willow, my father a little more knotted, with a beard as tenacious as ivy. The land is bare; an apple tree, a few distant saplings; light. The black and white prints are bleached with age; only a few figures stand out in dark relief.

  I am caked in dust, encased in a skin of the past, sat at the top of the narrow curve of attic stairwell, my tea going cold. In the distance I hear chainsaws and laughter, the noise of change. I get up and go downstairs. In the front room, the new curtains are drawn. I walk to the front door and find myself surrounded by light, lifted out of dusty reflection of the past and into its daylight.

  One small section of the garden has travelled backwards, has been shaved down to that earlier state. Photographs and present day have merged in palimpsest. The yew trees lour above us, yet this is still a small, bare but fruitful Eden – the earth is dark and rich with neglect, the brutal, invasive stems of nettle and mint are tamed. The apple tree has been cut down. New knowledge needs planting out.

  Memories are hardy as seeds; you plant them young and watch them grow in unexpected directions, germinating and cross-pollinating until a full-grown plant shadows everything you remember. Nothing ever grows into quite the shapes you expect or hope for.

  As I grow older, remembering my mother in the valley in which I grew up, lost in the intense heat of the summers that book-ended gloriously cold, brief winters where snow piled up on the narrow, walled lane twice as high as myself, the memories of her creep through me like ivy through a dry-stone wall. They clutch at and change my perception, and the landscape becomes darker.

  I am too young, perhaps, to remember arriving in the valley, or to see Slad over the tops of saplings and through close-cropped fields of cattle and sheep through anything other than the photographer’s faded lens, but I remember the sensation of belonging that rippled through me as I waded in bright red boots through the ford in the stream, heading up to the badger sett at the edge of Catswood, or as I basked beneath the Roman bridge playing high-pitched troll to any passing gruff two-legged goat.

  The valley was my mother’s then, and I’d have defended it and her with all the animal instinct and animosity a three-year-old can rustle up; would have waded to the Octopus Tree downstream from Snows Farm, in whose flailing roots I nestled as if holding some sort of fort against the threat of invasion, would have baaed and mooed and waved my sticks (which dreamt of being weapons) at passing livestock or at wasps until, laughing, my mother picked me up, clutched me to her shiny black quilted walking coat and hauled me home through the young, narrow woods which g
rew up through jaw-line husks of dry-stone walls, as the dark came down and intermittent lights flicked on one by one in dark corners of the valley.

  The valley was my playpen; bound in by walls and fences, I was safe to run and, as I grew, run further within the square mile or so of Slad Valley that was mine, that idyllic Venn confusion point where the parishes of Painswick and Bisley meet; it was never certain to the outside world where it was exactly that one lived.

  When I answered the phone aged three or four, running determinedly towards the new technology, as all children do when presented with alluring adult toys, I remember speaking into the receiver, in the clear tones I had learned from my mother, that this was Painswick, followed by the four-digit number that was ours alone. Or almost ours alone, because I also remember the way that sometimes, mysteriously, other voices would appear on the party line, incomprehensibly not there to talk to me. I would listen, intrigued, and pipe up with question and complaint until my mother came to restore my peace (and theirs) and take the telephone away.

  The apple tree that is now gone, seasoning slowly for the fire in this suddenly forested garden, is the first thing I truly remember of early childhood, outside my yellow bedroom speckled with stars and the intense universe of my mother’s arms. It was my grotto, that apple tree, my small church hung with laundry, mirrors, fruit. It bore apples that burst still in my mouth like dreams. It fruited year round until I was five, I’m certain of that.

  The photos from the attic are stuck into collages like eyes gummed up with sleep. There are photos of me, my large head curtained in a wisp of gold that Rumpelstiltskin might have spun, lurching up the slight slope beneath the apple boughs and wearing a smile whose cherubic nature is sullied slightly by a smear of mud, or the pulp of fruit – the process of peeling these pictures apart makes it hard to be sure. Photos of my mother, smiling through elderflower; of my father, laughing, gnomic, bearded as Pan; of lovers, family, friends. All of us play second fiddle to the valley in these photos, poor players in a stage of its growth, a small harmonious chorus to its relentless song.