A Thousand Laurie Lees Read online

  The house was soundtracked by ‘Baby Love’ or Peruvian flute music to keep us moving, whatever the weather. I can still smell the landscape around Slad when I hear certain records, wherever I am: Charlie Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady evokes the stark and autumnal birdland we found walking in the woods, a dark mulch hiding bright wintry flashes of mushroom and sheep skull, the subtly shifting shadow towers of tree and a horn-scatter of pigeons; The Supremes’ burst of morning sunshine – a spring day, bright as primroses; the haunting stream-song of La Flute Indienne cutting through a sticky summer; the all-encompassing Abbey Road, any time of year, anywhere, like the sun cutting through cloud, me with a nickel toffee hammer clutched in my hand, beating time to ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ in the front room by the fire, or staring out of the bathroom window wondering which fast-flitting bird or deft squirrel darting along the low-slung yew might suddenly turn my way and put Sunday on the phone to Monday and Tuesday on the phone to me.

  The house was all movement in winter days: the gentle shift of curtains when the draught excluder was out of place at the door and the fire was sucking in the cold, like an old man with a pipe, to stoke itself; the chatter from upstairs of my father’s typewriter, his papers banked up around him like a frozen tidal wave of words, a staccato rhythm simmering under the music, following and dictating in the fire’s percussion; me dancing in the wake of my mother as she shuffled through the routines of cooking, her mind on me, on other things, part of it quite somewhere else.

  If it was too cold or bleak to go out walking, she would bend to the boredom and isolation of the winter by learning new things to make – the progress of the cheese soufflé she taught herself is deeply imprinted on me, starting out as a gooey but edible volcanic mess (edible, at least, if you are a devoted son who knows too well the effects of belt-tightening, even if you do not understand the causes) and eventually becoming an impossibly light, balloon-like explosion of taste that one had to be ready for when the oven door opened. We were invariably ready, my father and I, like a couple of greedy chicks opening their mouths wider than their bodies and clamouring for more, more, more.

  These were only the inward, tiny winter adventures – my father would be away in London reading poetry, and sometimes my mother would have to cast off her domestic feathers and rise out of the snow to travel to Bristol to perform for the BBC. Suddenly the quiet domesticity of the valley would vanish and all would change, would become flowers. One memorable day, having scrambled through the snow to our car, parked far away at the top of the hills where the snow lay lighter, my mother paused at Stancombe’s grass triangle junction, now a muddy white, and stared down the snow-bound fields marked out in kanji like a series of haiku.

  ‘I’m going to be late,’ she said, eyeing the slippery and barely troubled road. ‘Or you are.’ She looked at me, a half-smile on her mouth, guessing my answer before her question.

  ‘Do you want to come to Bristol with me, or would you rather go to school?’

  Out of the snow, out of school, off into the city. I remember watching her, silently, through the studio glass, bristling with the sense of a landscape in her voice as she recorded poetry for radio, the seed of a realisation that it mattered to listen, to take in the cadences of one’s surroundings as much as the voices of the people, growing in my ear.

  3

  Three Points of the Diamond

  I lived, then, in a small, enclosed galaxy, caught partly out of time between two villages, with few facilities but the ones we built for ourselves or the ones some long-evaporated glacier had gouged and melted into the valley millennia ago.

  Electricity was a fairly new phenomenon in the valley – the mullioned cottage in which we lived, capped with a caul of yew, had only been wired up and connected to the water mains twenty or so years before we moved in. We were often travelling out, to Bisley, to Stroud and beyond, out of the enclosed sphere of the valley and into other worlds. We travelled less often to Slad, however; Slad was us and other at the same time, a smoke signal puff of civilization at the end of the valley. We could see it clearly from our garden, it was a mere two-mile stroll from our door, but the village always seemed far away.

  It was due to the lack of a road in that direction, and the lack of a shop in Slad, the latter a change wrought in the wake of electricity and cars taking trade to larger villages and towns. Walking was for pleasure and escape; without the rattling, coughing second-hand car my mother had learned to drive whilst pregnant with me, we would have felt almost entirely divorced from the wider world.

  We would strike out in Slad’s direction often enough to visit Diana Lodge, the painter friend of my mother’s, who was the first point on the erratic diamond of people who we knew in this valley before we came ourselves. Her house, Trillgate, was halfway to Slad and we would walk a quarter of a mile or more through mud and cowslips, avoiding horses and the occasional bull the farmer had forgotten to fence away from the footpath (which had once been the main road between Slad and Bisley) before we hit the tarmac, but we rarely walked on into the village itself.

  Diana kept a caravan up in the Black Mountains, at Capel-y-ffin, just around the corner from the old monastery where Eric Gill had lived and worked, and where Gill’s granddaughter and her family, the Davieses, still lived. My mother had met Diana there, visiting the old monastery with her mentor (and later my godfather) Father Brocard Sewell, a friend of Gill’s in his youth. She became one of my mother’s dearest friends.

  A game and eccentric woman – she seemed to me to be built out of milk and mountains and to be as old and wise as the hills, though she was the same age as my grandmother – Diana had lived an extraordinarily full life. She married the poet Oliver W.F. Lodge in 1932, having initially answered his advertisement for a nude model, and had previously posed for Eric Gill and danced with the high-kicking Tiller Girls.

  Diana and Oliver travelled, to Canada and the United States, gathering up a whorl of friends such as Lynn Chadwick and his first wife, the Canadian poet Ann Secord, who also found their way back to the area of Gloucestershire where Oliver had settled with his first wife, before her death, on the estate near Painswick of Detmar Blow, the Ruskin acolyte.

  After Oliver’s death, and after teetering on the verge of becoming a nun when her relationship with Leopold Kohr broke up, Diana embedded herself in Trillgate and into the landscape of Slad, becoming so much part of it that it seemed to me that she had never been anywhere else, despite painting the Black Mountains as well as the Slad Valley in an astonishing array of watercolours that captured the exactitudes of the landscape in a faintly surreal technicolour palate, and which she exhibited and sold in aid of charity until the end of her life.

  Like her watercolours, Trillgate existed in a little bubble of faded Cotswold grandeur; a set of semi-modern kitchen units tacked on to the heart of an old, old house that ran you in circles if you walked through it and felt brave enough to walk through Diana’s spartan bedroom and back down the worn stone semi-spiral of stairs that wound around the chimney stack. Kitchen and bedroom were very likely all there had been of the house once, and they were all that mattered of the house – as a child I ran through the chilly bedrooms and freezing drawing room, only stopping to hide in a tipped-up basket of an armchair next to the unlit fireplace, ready to leap out on unwary passers-by, or simply staring at the hugger-mugger collection of Diana’s paintings, which filled the vast dining table and the nooks and crannies around it, but I did not linger in these rooms.

  As with any good house, the only room that mattered when the garden was not available was the kitchen; its deep fireplace which housed a wood-burning stove and a defunct bread oven, its long wooden table with a high-backed pew running down the pantry wall that seated ten or fed forty if there were parties in the garden. The pantry itself was a thing of wonder, a walk-in cornucopia, lined with jar upon jar of preserves and foodstuffs that beggared the modest imaginings of a child raised in a small house that was always stocked
but never replete.

  Diana was a generous and warm woman – she welcomed and engaged with children as much as with adults, and my earliest memories of her are at Easter, when the garden became alive with hungry children engaged in her annual Easter egg hunt. We rushed back and forth amongst the exquisitely wild borders and through the small orchard hunting chocolate, as she stood by and laughed and encouraged us to look harder.

  Diana was an intensely devout Catholic, having converted a few years before, but the only clue was in the subtle crucifix she wore and the quietly placed iconography in the kitchen – religion was never pronounced, never interfered with the joy and adventures of children, who ran roughshod and happy through the gardens as if they were theirs entirely to command, some little adjunct of Eden. The house itself was ‘an act of worship in colour – [it] communicates joy similar to a Fra Angelico painting,’ my mother wrote in a letter in 1969.

  A sense of bohemia lingered like incense in Trillgate, more so when Diana’s children and grandchildren came to visit. The eldest, Tom, brought over from Canada not only his three boys, Tom Jr., Lionel and Brodie, but a whiff of rock and roll glamour still clinging from his time on Radio Caroline, the pirate station of which he’d been the controller in the sixties. His brother Colin figured more in my life; a puckish man with a bright, jutting beard and a playful, quixotic demeanour, whose barking laugh chased us children wherever we ran throughout the house and garden.

  His children, Owen and Caitlin, were regular visitors, up from Bristol. They came with a sharp, new manner, like a change in the air; the smell of the city on their breath. Owen played particularly hard, with a snap in his eye and a ready push that led to trouble and fun. Outside Diana’s studio, a precarious log cabin built to be hidden just beyond the garden, I remember suddenly fighting back; inspired perhaps by Katy’s years of more metaphorical pushing, I carried Owen over the edge of the veranda where he disappeared in an avalanche of nettle, bramble and boy, yelling and rolling down the hill to the fortuitous fence at the edge of the field. I remember the horror and the guilt of his fall, the way he slipped and rolled, the terror in the adults’ eyes. I also remember the way Owen, bruised and scratched, got up laughing and groaning, and how nothing more was ever (nor ever needed to be) said.

  It was a house of small, precise details hidden amongst the jumble of a bigger life: the Catholic icons stood out on the wall despite, or perhaps because of, their careful amalgamation into the general architectures of daily life. In the same way, Diana’s intensively curated spirit filled her conversation, shaped by art and religion, by encounters with the great, the good and the not-so-good of the literary and artistic world, and by her piercing gentleness of thought and heart. By the full moon’s light you could leave her house and walk deep into a Samuel Palmer painting as much because her conversation led you there as because the landscape around Slad was, and in places remains, akin to his visionary pastoral world.

  The other direction in which we struck out was over the valley, down a scramble of path and over a ford in the stream before rising up and becoming suddenly enveloped by the trees of Keensgrove Wood. From there we followed the green lane through the skirts of Catswood, round through Redding Wood and out into the lane at the top of Elcombe to Rose Cottage. The woodland never seemed to cease, but there was a noticeable change along the mile or more that we walked – there was little traffic other than wild animals in the woods excepting the occasional stray sheep (or its remains, buried under bramble or wild garlic) and the occasional horse hoof-print, but the woods changed in their management.

  Keensgrove was close and dark and low. The trees jostled for light and it was from here that the foxes and owls sounded most. Catswood opened out a little, made room for sweeping hides of bluebells or wild garlic enclosing the muscle and sinew of the hill, whilst Redding Wood opened out still further, its canopy sweeping up to the height of a cathedral before contracting suddenly into a narrow stretch of lane running parallel to the road; here, for many years, carefully hidden at the edge of the wood stood a red-and-black gypsy caravan that would have seemed gaudy had it been housed anywhere else. On closer inspection, it was as exquisite as a gingerbread house, with hooks for lanterns curving like talons over the steps and faded decorations by the door and on the panels at its side.

  Brought up on Rupert annuals and the raggle-taggle gypsies-oh, I walked past this caravan half-expecting the name Rollo to be called and some apple-cheeked boy wearing a spotted scarf on his head to run up the lane to the caravan carrying a bundle of sticks or towing an unwilling and immeasurably large horse. I was always disappointed. Instead, beyond the tree line, there was Rose Cottage, a long house facing west and denied the sun by Swift’s Hill, where there were different pleasures to be found; the next point on the rough-cut diamond of people and places we knew.

  Rose Cottage was owned by John Papworth, who founded Resurgence magazine with Sir Herbert Read, E.F. Schumacher and Leopold Kohr (Diana Lodge’s long-term partner after Oliver Lodge had died). Visiting there was often a strange experience, as John was a fierce and satirical man with all the fire of a preacher and the anarchic leanings of someone who had parted company with communism and the Labour party because of their authoritarian streak. He came across, in hindsight, as a peculiar, slightly alarming but more often than not delightful mix of John le Mesurier, Tony Benn and the Ancient Mariner.

  Anyone and everyone who crossed his path was liable to be quizzed relentlessly by John, or at least by John’s eyebrows, which seemed to be able to carry on conversations of their own, arching like a crow’s wings up his forehead. He was a terror, a delight and a tease to children, prone to giving vent to opinions that confounded many of them, not least myself, and bringing religion into the conversation at unexpected angles. He would often look at me sternly and announce that ‘Adam was a gardener!’ fixing me, as an eagle might a rabbit, with an eye glowering out from beneath one arched eyebrow before quickly bounding off on another, possibly related but considerably less alarming, topic.

  Given that my only attempts at gardening tended to amount to little more than chasing my father down our long, narrow garden with a hosepipe through stacked tyre potato beds and picking the apple mint and lemon balm that grew like weeds outside our front door, I took a little fright at this pronouncement at first, sure that he had seen something or knew something that I didn’t. Whether that was the case or not, the fright wore off with repetition (anyway, I was going to be a fireman, or an acrobat – never a gardener).

  The final point on the diamond was Laurie Lee, whom we visited less often, more often than not in his lesser-known drinking haunt, The Star, which as far as I can tell was used for quieter conversations, conversations that scratched under the surface of his public persona, a place no tourist knew or dared to enter.

  The Woolpack was always for public Laurie, impish and amusing Laurie who knew very well the wider impact of Cider with Rosie, for the Laurie who would encounter tourists and tease them. One encounter outside the Woolpack ran as follows:1 a tourist, most probably American and certainly immensely swayed by Laurie’s description of village life, so much so as to believe it took place millennia ago in a lost world more akin to Tolkien’s Shire than the actual reality, stumbled down, awed, to the Woolpack’s door out of the steep and tree-lined churchyard set into the bank opposite the pub. Puffed out and tired from a search around the precarious gravestones, which permanently teeter on the edge of falling like an old boxer’s teeth, the tourist stopped a smartly dressed older gentleman in a white fedora, who was making his way home from the pub, and asked: ‘Excuse me, could you tell me where Laurie Lee is buried?’

  Laurie looked at the tourist wryly and, in warmly arch tones, announced: ‘I don’t know about up there, but if you come in to the pub later you’ll find him buried in a pint.’

  My first memories of Laurie are not of him buried in a pint, however, but of him buried in conversation. I’m not suggesting that pints weren’t involved, just th
at all that I remember from these meetings of poets at The Star was the way the drive up to the pub, now a private house halfway between Slad and the Vatch, rose from the road in an elegant tarmacadam sweep; how the trees obscured the valley from sight; how bird and sunlight created an erratic and ever-changing shadow play of sheet music; how intensely my parents, my mother in particular, talked with Laurie about poetry and landscape and the valley we all shared; and how little I would interrupt, caught between the dark and attractive sense-scape of the pub, the conversation and the sun reaching back to ruffle the scalp of Swift’s Hill.

  From a very early age I had a sense of Laurie being buried in this valley, alive and breathing yet thoroughly rooted in, a spirit of mischief and nature and place. Not that I would have put it like that then, but that is the sensation that has grown out of every childhood encounter with him, and as often as he might shoot off to London dressed in his public suit there was no doubt that something of him always lingered here.

  The sense that, locally, a pint was raised to Laurie’s success only to be followed by the occasional sour whiskey chaser to ‘too-much-success-for-a-local-boy-done-a-bit-too-good-and-he-knew-it’ has only confirmed this. I was part of the new breed of incomers whose arrival brought continual changes to the valley, changes that have slowly set it ever further apart from the supposed halcyon of Cider with Rosie. As an outsider, granted access but still only looking in as from a distance, my roots set raw and loose in Slad soil, I grew up celebrating Laurie’s vision of a distant land that still crumbled gently underfoot.