A Thousand Laurie Lees (10 page)

I was hurried into bed, huddled up the stairs in my father’s arms, and listened enthralled and terrified as my mother’s fury vented itself downstairs when she came home. It was carefully modulated, her anger, as was everything she did, as precise and quietly explosive as her movements. (This was a woman who would buy a Mars bar, divide it into five slivers and keep them in the fridge, eating one piece a day at most over the course of a week – and who would pick daintily at the immaculately prepared and considered food she cooked as if it were a meal in a play or a film, which you were only supposed to pretend to eat).

My father matched her with his more expansive, discursive and diversionary modes, running little rivulets of counter-argument in the defence of my health past her, trying to wear down the barricades of the Stanislavskian fourth wall she had built around her outrage. She simmered like an Ibsen heroine. He danced his tongue around the argument like an angry Puck.

Living in the valley again after four years away was a strange experience, without my mother or any families or children my age there to temper it and tame it. The valley had existed in me as a state of perfection, a place where everything was right with the world, which blurred with the roseate tinge of half-forgotten allegiances and love. It was far less rewarding to explore alone, back in the reality of it – the dry stone walls seemed less sure of themselves, more careworn and mossy with inattention, the homes-from-home that Katy and I had built in tangled copses were small and run down, empty of the fantastically mundane lives that she and I had created in them for ourselves.

The valley was a place of importance to my father, too. A giddy nostalgia possessed us both, for the time we’d spent with chickens and the attempted smallholding dreams of food for free, basking in my mother’s presence from 1971 to 1979, all interruptions and absences forgotten or set aside.

He remembered me as that child, however, happy and piping down the valleys wild, unburdened by any sorrow greater than the shock of finding a large dead rabbit in the kitchen (brought in proudly by Arwen, her best Queen of Sheba purr rattling in her throat) not long after I’d finished reading
Watership Down
and was still lost in the heady afterglow of rabbit sympathy. I had come back a teenager, mourning the loss of that happiness, the loss of my mother, hormones rasping slowly into gear under the buzzing throttle-roar of grief like a low-flying jet. Inevitably, as it would with any father and son left to their own devices even under the easiest of circumstances, it led to conflict; on-running disagreements that coloured the times when all was otherwise well. Memories, pleasant and otherwise, spilled over into the present too often, exposed it to unflattering scrutiny. We warred over the fact that I was growing up.

Whilst I had been in Sunderland, living with my mother and Roger, my father had engaged with the valley as best he could, unable to be there all that often, what with earning a living in London and the personal disconnectedness of the cottage. The happiness he had so enjoyed living there with my mother and I meant that returning there, apart from the expense of travel and upkeep, was another source of sorrowing at our having left. During one of his longer absences during the heavy winter of 1981, the pipes had burst because he had forgotten to switch off the water on his previous sojourn, and when the thaw came, the water attempted to reclaim the house. Arwen, who was too much a cat of the valley to be torn away to Sunderland with us, survived as best she could, becoming a little more feral – when my father was away, she was fed by the Hopfs. My father felt the perhaps inevitably depressing void of both my and my mother’s absence from the cottage and the valley intensely. Both of us had become so deeply entwined there that reflections of the decade-long occupations of our bodies and spirits were always palpable.

He had come back most often in the spring, in the height of summer and in the early gold of autumn, the valley being an unrelenting place to live in alone in winter, and would spend time in the valley writing and jogging down the lane to Driftcombe by way of exercise. He often jogged off wearing the dark green eyeshade that deepened the greens of the abbey of trees and which he was rarely un-shaded by when the sun came cantering over the hill when I was young. That eyeshade pursues my memories of him throughout the valley everywhere they go, and occasionally it pursues me out of the valley. As a child it was a source of fascination and embarrassment, an item of clothing that made him stand out and be noticed. Sometimes I would try wearing it, sat on a high-backed chair in his attic pretending to type, only for the elastic to slip around my neck making the eyeshade fall to my chest like a bib.

I rarely tried it on after he went swimming in Stroud pool with Katy Lloyd and me. My father entered the pool shortly after Katy and I had leapt in and had started splashing about. There was a sudden ripple of laughter; we looked around and there at the edge of the pool stood my father, in a shower cap bunched up like a squid on his head and held in place by his eyeshade, his heavy spectacles perched on his nose and sporting a pair of voluminous and (happily) far from revealing underpants in place of trunks. People had noticed and were laughing and pointing. Katy and I, appalled, swam as far in the other direction as we could manage, wishing ourselves invisible. It was no use; he submerged himself in the pool, calling joyfully to us, and came swimming in our direction, the eyeshade jutting out of the water like a lopsided shark’s fin. We fled, cannoning around the pool until at last, exhausted, it was time to escape into the changing rooms. I cannot, even now, swim in Stroud pool without the hot flush of childish shame clutching at my throat.

Taking exercise with my father was often embarrassing. He would wave me goodbye from the bottom of the lane by doing would-be star jumps, and singing loudly whenever I left in a car as I waved from the rear window – fascinated or horrified depending upon who was in the car with me. As a teenager I would clam up, ashamed of his gusto, and rapidly stop playing if anyone walked past whilst we were engaged in the eccentric game of ‘hand tennis’ we invented. This was a cross between tennis and volleyball, which involved our batting a huge yellow foam ball across the privet hedges and dry stone walls we claimed as nets. Yet the exercise he took alone in the valley, in the long emptiness when my mother and I were gone, was far from embarrassing. Without us there he noticed the things we had noticed together in a greater detail than he had before, collecting them in his head as he jogged up and down the valley and piecing together a 670-line poem of such rural intensity as might dispel Robert Graves’ assertion that he was ‘incorrigibly urban’, a
Midsummer Morning Jog Log
:

… apparition I must seem, leaping blind and deaf

to the fleet-winged early warning

notes of my advent

relayed from the lanesides

all over the valley

– so brutishly revelling

in my refracted halo, vicarious godhead

of being

– The First up

        and out – ha!

jigging and bopping

with ludicrously heavy-booted feet

to avoid the upsurge here

of a sun-spatted puddle,

there the liquidation

of an innocent slug or snail …

Coming back to live with him as
Midsummer Morning Jog Log
was being finished, I relished his renewed and vigorous interest in the valley. I followed him on jogs down to Driftcombe, followed in turn by Arwen at a discreet distance, both of us a little too wary to galumph as vigorously as him. I took photos for him, some of which were sent to the book’s illustrator, Peter Blake, deep in his ruralist phase – the five-barred gate in the book is drawn from a picture I took. Yet although my father and I romped and roamed together through the valley’s summer effulgence for a while, running and dreaming and laughing, the creeping grief that had been building in me finally struck home.

My father was the youngest of ten refugee children brought over from Germany in 1937, escaping the Nazis at the last minute, thanks in part to my Grandfather’s connections with the banking family Rothschild, for whom he was working as a lawyer. Raised almost as much by his four sisters and nanny as by his mother, he was ill conditioned to cope with day-to-day necessities such as cooking. Many of the meals we ate together in the house were prepared by me from the small stock of recipes my mother had taught me when we were living on Hadrian’s Wall with Roger in the winters of 1981 and 1982.

This only changed when Inge came to visit, a stylish and beautiful woman my father had met two years after my mother and I left for Sunderland. She was German, and Jewish, and had come to London in the 1960s only a few years after she had discovered that she had survived the war not knowing that her mother was Jewish, nor anything of the constant danger she was in as a child in Nazi Germany.

She worked for Lufthansa and as a translator for Vidal Sassoon, and was a gentle, harmonious presence in the house whenever she came to stay, and not just because I was relieved of cooking duty when she was there (though a sticker I made and stuck to the wall above the archaic stove stating that ‘Inge is a fab cook’ was an indication of how relieved I really was). She also taught me how to iron and made me dance with her to Ken Colyer’s New Orleans jazz around the front room, trying hard as I could to imitate her sprightly, delicate hops; she did all she could to be a motherly influence on my life.

She, too, attempted to stem the tide of papers that flowed through my father’s attic room, but they spread unstoppably regardless, leaking down through the floorboards into the kitchen, where an erratic and rusty old filing cabinet now occupied one corner of the room, making it harder to seat guests round the kitchen table. The stair-cupboard, which had once been an airy little space, its shelves filled with tools for the garden, useful bits of string, scissors, a sewing kit, Wellingtons, fuses, light bulbs and boxes of emergency candles left over from the three-day week, now groaned with paperwork crushed in to leave room for just a few rusting and wood-wormed garden tools.

The garden was fast becoming jungle, barring us in with ‘barricades of weeds revolutionary–/weeds upon weeds in abundancy swirling/and thrusting their spears in brazen pride …’
1
We fought back with rusty scythes and bill-hooks, and with the inadequate strimmer that trembled like a cornered rabbit whenever we introduced it to brambles or to the relentless nettles that shot up everywhere and were too far gone for soup. Tears filled our eyes for the neat rows of vegetables long gone, whose ‘seedpacket pennanted rows’ flickered in the mind’s eye like some great medieval pageant ground shrunk down by time, rubbed away by the slow, shadow-hungry creep of the trees.

It was home, and it felt almost as though my mother was there, whispering in the trees when the wind picked up, or sending a wren waltzing in through my bedroom window when I was thinking of her: it settled for a moment on the side of my desk, cocked its head, lifted its tail and flew out again, a flash of powdery brown as its wings spread out, like a sharply angled cartoon version of her favourite floppy hat. But without allies to fall back on living near at hand, and without a car to escape in, the house was too close a cage for us both. We rubbed each other raw.

Note

1
  From
Midsummer Morning Jog Log
.

8

Changing the Record

G
rief is rarely a permanent fog of affliction, rolling up the valleys of the brain and refusing to leave, and I had the sudden yellow flare of winter jasmine up the cold cottage wall on an otherwise bleak late winter morning to help salve the mists of sorrow and self-pity that coursed through me; the usual teenage hormonal aggravations simmering alongside the loss of my mother and the fact that none of my friends lived nearer than four miles away.

The sun ran in yolky rivulets through the horizon at sunset. In summer rain I sat out under the yew boughs, watching the rain shift like a modest bride up to the valley’s head, the spring’s ravenous mouth. I cycled to school often, since a 6 a.m. wake-up call to catch the 8.30 a.m. bus was rarely easy to achieve, spent too long marvelling at the rhythms of ploughing, going slow to argue with sheep in the orchard on the side of the road before Sydenhams Farm or peering over the wall into the old pig sty. At two I would call out ‘Big pig kippit’ to them as they slept – as my father insisted on telling visitors, including the attractive young women who came to do occasional secretarial work for him and whose attentions, in some cases, I would have far rather had been focused on what I considered to be my more adult charms.