A Thousand Laurie Lees Read online

  It was music that brought us here, the alluring song of the countryside that called so many of the beatnik and hippy generation away from the cities. Certainly, the strident operatics of London were too much for my mother to bear. She had grown up in ‘shabby’ wartime Walthamstow and run to the edges of Epping Forest to erect altars to Pan as a teenager, urgent to escape the suburban confines of her parents’ aspirations and the depredations of rationing. My father, ‘incorrigibly urban’ according to Robert Graves, dreamed the same dream (at least for a while) and found a cottage, advertised in the Evening Standard as ‘going for a song’.

  For two poets of the hopeful 1960s bound up in the music of language and at least one of them keening to escape the high towers of London, this was enough – a song was pretty much all they could afford. Yet it was the song that bought them and brought them; this was a valley they had visited before, had known in walks and dreams and trips of all varieties, getting out of London in the comedown years of the 1960s to befriend and stay with the artist Diana Lodge at Trillgate, calling on John Papworth, the founder of Resurgence, in Elcombe and, completing a wonky and arbitrary geographical and artistic triangle that became a rough-cut diamond when we moved in to our mullion-windowed cottage, Laurie Lee, whom my father had met in London around jazz and poetry gigs and at the Chelsea Arts Club and bohemian parties around the capital.

  The valley was alive with musics: the curdling, piercing soprano scream of vixens, the angry punkish bark of jays, the wind dragging its endless fugue in green through the trees. It infiltrated everything, penetrating the stone walls of our cottage as if they were paper, leading words in a new dance. It seemed as if my parents had stepped into some sweet-scented Arcadia built out of Blake’s Songs of Innocence.

  No Arcadia is complete without people. At the end of our garden, which comprised a quarter-acre stretch partitioned into sunlight and a hill of trees and watched over by the triple-eyed mullion arches that gave the cottage its name, lived Bill, ancient to my young eyes, though he can’t have been more than twenty. He was living in the old chapel in the very early days of my life and I remember him striding across the garden in heavy boots, a big friendly presence with a cat called Bilbo stalking the long grasses and nettles behind him, wary of our cat, Arwen, so called because she had a small white evening star on her pitch black chest, like the Evenstar in The Lord of the Rings.

  When my father was away, which was often in those early days, in London or America for readings, Bill was there to help with house repairs, or to flirt, or both. I remember my mother leaping from the bath to pull down the yellow and orange floral blind when she realised that Bill was climbing the ladder to fix the flat roof; her half-angry, half-amused expression at the wolf whistles that her sudden and brief display of nakedness elicited as she slid back into the bath.

  CHEESE KISSES

  In a bright kitchen the colour of custard

  the black cat’s curling out of a yawn

  on the long pine table,

  spread for the beginnings of a meal.

  The oven is hot and creaking.

  She turns to it, dons her striped blue and grey apron.

  Hair hides her face as she bends to check the baking,

  all but her eyes, which laugh at me.

  A knock at the door. Come in, she calls.

  Bill swings in smiling

  the muck of gardens on his boots

  She turns, rests against the cooker, greets him warmly.

  He still away? asks Bill. A nod, hair bobbing, and a smile.

  I watch in silence as the game begins.

  Too young to call it flirting,

  all I know is that I’ve been sidelined.

  I watch, jealous, tease the cat.

  There is fire suddenly –

  her apron strings have caught

  on the hob. My mother’s backside is on fire.

  Bill swings her round, slaps.

  The fire goes out. There is silence in the kitchen,

  but for my laughter, asking for the trick

  to be worked again.

  Bill leaves quickly.

  Out of the oven

  come cheese kisses

  which melt in my mouth only.

  I soon realised, jealously, that my opinion was not just a child’s natural, bonded opinion of his mother. Other men than Bill came visiting when she was alone with me in the valley. Some came hopeful, bearing gifts. Ossie, the photographer who brought the black cat down from London when I was one year old, adored her and named the cat for her symbolically, I’m certain, after Arwen, the elf princess from Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings who waited in Rivendell for her beloved to rule before she could marry him. A dream, like many dreams that came to nothing in the waking world. I just liked the sound of the name – Arwen. A good word to roll on the tongue as you’re learning to speak.

  I held them all at bay as best I could aged two and three and four, demanding and receiving attention in equal measure, being taken for walks in the valley and learning the names of the flowers and the birds. My mother held many of them at bay just as earnestly, walking the valley in the quiet evening light, working in local schools or shooting off to record poetry for the BBC but always waiting for my father to conquer America or London, or wherever he was setting out his poetic stall that week, and come home to the valley. All I wanted from my father then was for him to be my first and best gruff billy goat as I lurked beneath the Roman bridge watching a sliver of summer sun slash through the water like laughter.

  Books and songs and poetry were as important as landscape, as vital as breath. Freed from working on the land, I was taught to linger in it and take in every detail that I could. Farming was dying out, becoming broad and intensively agricultural in far-flung flatter lands than this, lands that didn’t fold up like a fist – the fields below us were good for little but Melsome’s cows and Captain George’s sheep, which breached their fences with alarming regularity and came ambling through our gardens in a flurry of dung and hunger, looking for the choicest morsels the garden had to offer, flattening the tomatoes my father had raised, knocking over the towers of tyres in which we grew potatoes.

  I was taught to delve into the landscape aesthetically rather than physically, so I learned to float into the names of flowers, lost in the beauty of cowslip and campion, dead nettle and Michaelmas daisy, beech tree and ash, but not much of immediate practical value was hard-pressed upon me. The valley was a palimpsest of imagination, of the living and the dead, and was accessible only through thought.

  Occasional visitors would take us deeper into the landscape’s confidence. John Cage came to visit us in the valley when I was very young and took us hunting after mushrooms, picking carefully through the clustering white skulls of fungus until he found something worth eating, which he brought back and cooked with what my father described as an intense care that produced four leathery fragments on a plate. I am fairly certain I refused to eat my share.

  I was more interested in the sights and sounds of the valley, in imitating the birds and exclaiming excitedly about the pigs up at the sty attached to Sydenhams farm which my father held me up to see.

  Mostly I remember walking in the harsh, exquisite summer light through the contrast between abbey-corseted lanes and fields that shimmered green as chameleons then vanished in a blaze of white. Nothing in between, no glum-clouded afternoons where all the greens of tree and field feel formulaic and even the campion fades from vibrant reddish pink to blackboard chalk simulacrum. Every morning was rosy in our little corner of the Slad Valley, and apples were abundant as dew.

  Now the apple tree is gone, but for a bolt of knuckled wood that sinks into the landscape like Excalibur into a mossy stone. The soft lilacs of dwarf cyclamen are buried under scrub and all the Lords-and-Ladies have slithered off with their stems like sticky microphones to parties and pastures new. I am alone in the valley, with only words and memories to sustain me, and the echo of a song that hugs the tree line like
a hunting owl.

  2

  Katy

  It was a wrench to leave behind birdsong, imagination, the gurgling lilt of water and my mother’s undivided attentions and be a part of the wider world, but that was the price of growing older and surer of myself. Despite stubborn wailings and interminable attempts to make my mother stay in the valley with me, I was sent to nursery in Stroud whilst she worked as a supply teacher.

  I did not take well to that separation. Nursery is built now only of vague memories: of parading on stage uncomfortably with a pillow stuffed up my jumper for some Christmas show whilst other, equally half-willing children teetered in and out of tune and half-learned lines; of refusing to sleep when the teacher insisted, wriggling on the floor as others napped or twitched, longing for butterflies and stickleback in the stream, not plastic cars and competition for attention. Of the few friends I made there, all but a couple of faces are now lost to time and indifference.

  I learned, slowly, to separate the simple desires of valley life, where destiny was mine to play with and where I was part of everything, from the need to engage in less ecstatic realities. The valley was not mine alone for very long, anyway; I soon learned that there were other people who mattered just as much to the expanding landscape. Jean and Alan Lloyd lived above us in St Benedicts, a cottage originally as small as ours that had grown under Alan’s craftsmanship into a long and eccentric house that would not look out of place on the Swiss Alps, were it not for the run of Cotswold stone that peeked out from behind the wooden cladding he had used to extended it. They produced a child, Katy, within a year of my appearance in the valley, a late arrival inspired, I’m told, by me.

  By the time Katy could walk and talk, she had taken possession of the valley quite as much as I had, and had taken a leading role in my experience of it. The valley became ours largely because she said it must be so, because she insisted upon it with a stamp of her foot and a shriek if she was not listened to.

  I was an only child, in need of the hurried urgency of sibling rivalry that she had learned from her two brothers, both ten or more years older than her, who teased and tortured and played mercilessly with her, daring her to take charge. She couldn’t, so she took charge of me instead, leading our games with a shrill, amused insistence and a competitive streak that baffled and excited me to greater daring than my previously solitary existence had allowed.

  Under Katy’s tutelage, living in the valley became a delirious adventure. ‘This is our house now,’ cried Katy, pointing to a briar shrub where, in autumn, the best blackberries grew. The door was a tangle of branches and nettles. Tread hard enough and it would open – and we opened it often, only letting in Jake, the Lloyd’s cheerful dog, whose eyesight was failing but who could find us every time with a snuffling devotion and who could not always be dissuaded from following us and becoming a damply affectionate part of our games. In the fields below my parents’ cottage we could be ourselves, away from Jules and Jamie, who would only pin us to the sofa with enormous cushions and make us watch Crossroads, or refuse to switch over to Doctor Who, or accuse us with all seriousness of believing we were ‘the bee’s knees’ if we let them near us. All we wanted was to be ourselves, free in a valley that no longer claimed them, because they were charging off with catapults or bows and arrows (which we secretly and desperately coveted) and friends, attempting to reclaim the valley or step over it into the mysterious outer reaches of a more grown-up life. Occasionally we would hear them shotgun-blasting their way through the woodland, taking potshots at pigeons and the occasional road sign or blaring through the green lanes on motorbikes, ignoring the bluebells and the wild garlic and roaring off in search of who knew what.

  In those high summer moments of holiday and freedom, we barely noticed the parents who were never too far from us as we set off arguing, competing and adventuring, hand in hand, never quite sure who was in the lead yet never straying too far from home. We were always near enough to be heard if trouble came, though apart from a scraped knee or a nettle sting or a coat of mud from playing too hard amongst the exposed roots of trees by the stream, it never did.

  We were deeply connected, in and out of each other’s houses and always astonished if something prevented us from seeing each other. Once, when I was away on a day trip with my mother, leaving my father behind in the attic, writing, Katy came calling for me. When no answer could be got from knocking on the door, she was heard to yell though the letterbox, demanding I come out. She ‘knew’ I was in there, my father said, and was stridently determined to extract me whether I wanted to come out or not.

  Bisley Bluecoat School was different, a separation I learned to enjoy, especially after Katy arrived there too, the year after me. I primped and paraded the learning I wallowed in at home at every opportunity, a bookish boy who outstripped his teaching aids and was reading the last book in the Peter and Jane series three years before he was supposed to, showing off for the teachers.

  Mrs Lawty was my first teacher, but all I can remember of her now is the satisfied smile on her face when I showed her, with a swollen-headed excess of pride, my first wonky attempts at joined-up writing, not long after I had graduated to Mrs Swale’s class. That, and the deep feeling of outrage at the news of her death, locked with my schoolmates inside the Terrapin classroom, as her body was carried to the graveyard that bordered the school in a procession we all wanted to be part of, though we did not know quite why.

  School was activity and excitement, though of a more egalitarian sort than I was used to. Football in the tarmac yard, or cricket, at which the tomboyish Kim Mills excelled, leaping to catch the ball above the wickets, rising high into the air, a determined grin on her face framed by a shock of black hair – the astonishment of the boys was vocal and intense. The shock of seeing Jamie Gibbons beaten by the Head in front of the whole school with a slipper for some affront I didn’t understand or care about, the sort of punishment that was only ever dished out in the Beano or the Dandy and that just didn’t happen at home.

  I learned to adore people other than my mother at Bisley Bluecoats, too; a pretty young girl called Jane Millin caught my fancy aged seven and I was so enamoured of her that I named my pet mouse Jane in her honour. That fancy was brought to a crushing end when, at my eighth birthday party, Skanda Huggins told everyone who would listen exactly why I had a mouse called Jane, a wicked glint in his eye. I remember walking around the house distraught, the chill of betrayal cold as an owl’s shadow hovering over me as the party spirit shivered and was stilled inside me.

  That autumn, my father left the mouse house outside overnight, and Jane died in a sudden frost, as dead to me as I was to Jane Millin.

  Getting to school was another adventure; with both parents working from home or away there was no regular bell to leave the house. It was up to me to move once I was out of the house and I was a dreamy child quite prepared to get lost in the hedgerows, watching the rabbits flit across the road in an angry, bobbing flash of white.

  No matter that I was supposed to meet Katy at her house and walk up the hill with her to meet Doug, local postman and school-day cabbie, revving his homely chariot at the top of the steep hill at quarter to nine dead on – I still remembered the first day of school, the wrench of leaving the valley’s apron strings and my mother behind to slip through the kissing gate into the beehive swarm of school; I trod ever so slowly up the hill.

  Too easily distracted by springtime primroses or the venous scrabble of winter trees against the sky, I was always beaten to the taxi by Katy and only dragged out of my reveries by the hollow echo of a hooting car and Doug’s amused and irritated cry of ‘come on lightning’.

  Katy, a small blonde avalanche rumbling with discontent in the back seat, would scowl at me, poke me in the ribs and roundly insult me for being a slowcoach all the way to school; a daily routine of dominance that we had invariably forgotten by first break. Unlike Rowena, the other passenger whom the car picked up first from Througham; she took it into
her heart and head to maintain an antipathetic attitude towards my endless dreamy lateness that lingered far beyond playtime, unbroken but for the one time my school photos didn’t come out and I was dragged from my maudlin state by her arm around my shoulder, hugging gently and shocking away the onset of tears.

  When the snows came, so did adventure. The long crawl out of the valley to school – or work for my mother – often assisted by Norman Williams’ tractor from Stancombe Farm, left us with choices. Being a village school, Bisley Bluecoats was open to all except the furthest flung, those who could not or would not escape their rural confines. Unless the snows cut the power off entirely, caved in the school’s ceiling or simply came in a vengeful whirlwind and carried all the teachers away, we were expected to be there to learn, or understand at least that huddling together to keep warm was a fairly sure method of survival.

  Sometimes the drifts swarmed higher than my head in a bid to shut us in – the lightning fork junction at the top of the hill where Doug the cab-driving postman would pick up Katy and, eventually, myself for school once drifted to six feet and didn’t melt for weeks. We badgered our parents daily to be taken there to slide and climb and revel in the mountainous nature of the snow and it meant so much that to this day I’d still believe that Katy and I ventured up there every time entirely on our own, had she not in her possession parent-taken photos to prove otherwise.

  My mother, on these snowy days, would pull out all the stops, bank up the fire and enter into a domestic frenzy in a bid to keep warm. The old house was tricky to heat – at least until the two-and-a-half-foot deep walls had soaked in enough warmth to begin radiating it back into the room. Once that had happened it felt like summer in the front room and springtime in the kitchen. The upstairs could feel like winter if we weren’t careful with the night storage, but a tightly clutched hot-water bottle and a dash for bed was all the sport I needed to keep warm at night – sleep was only a rugby tackle away.