A Thousand Laurie Lees (13 page)

I walked back to Rosie’s cottage last year, in the high spring, as leaf-green clouds began to burst from the bud in the deciduous wood and the rough lane vanished in an atomic haze of growth that had been retarded by a long winter and April frosts. I had not been back for years; Rosie had died whilst I was at college and after my return I had moved into Stroud, had not thought of the depths of the valley, eager to move on and make a life of my own.

What I saw was painful, a stab in the heart of the valley. After Rosie died, the cottage had been left to disintegrate; the last barely changed house in the valley, the one remaining place that had functioned as all these houses had functioned one hundred years ago, was a shell. The slate roof had been lifted off for money and the innards of the house were rotting away, its windows boarded up to hide the desecration. The steep little path to the house, which cut up and down the two sides of the valley, had been crucified by a scar of a lane that had been torn through it to allow easy access for hunters in their four wheel drives, whose raised shooting hides infested the field across from the cottage, where an oak tree shimmered in the late afternoon sun.

It had weathered in, the cottage, on its way to becoming a lost monument like the jawline houses I had played in as a child, nature working its way through it in a toothy enthusiasm of bramble and nettle, the neat patterns of Rosie’s garden just visible under their unencumbered growth. The brutal new track had taken on a look of smug permanence that would have fooled anyone walking past it for the first time, but which to me still screamed through the field like a newly opened wound.

I climbed into the house through the broken door, hoping for some sign of survival, but all trace of Rosie was gone. The neat kitchen I remembered was hollow and bird-stained, stove-less and kettle-free, no comfort left. The stairs at the centre of the house would not take my weight; they creaked like a dying animal.

I left, a rush of sorrow tight in my chest, not looking back as I walked up the slippery path and away through the wood to the more familiar emptiness of home.

11

Party Time

A
s schooldays cycled to a slow, autumnal end, my father spent more time away, working and travelling at weekends. I began to draw friends out by bicycle convoy into the solicitous quiet and freedom of the valley, for parties, for company, for the sake of keeping the house and the valley alive. The house was distant enough from family for there to be no frowning and lectures about smoking or beer or whatever other excess of friendly impairment we could lay our hands on (at least until my father came home and threw his hands up in horror), and for the gang of awkward, clever friends gathered around me to feel free enough to be themselves; they came out there readily, with music and homebrew and everyone carrying something that could be made into food. Free of censure, we drew ourselves inward, fought to make the world that was opening up around us seem safe and small and fun, for a little while.

I bought a moped, purportedly for carrying me ever more swiftly to school but mostly used for winding my way sedately in and out of trouble. A cranky old Honda 50cc, it refused to carry me up the hill out of the valley unless both of my legs were sticking out over the footrests, wading the bike up the hill. I looked, as one unkind observer put it, like a bandy-legged ostrich woefully failing to hurry up. For all its lack of power, it did allow me to pull bicycles up the short, sharp hill heading out of Stroud, reducing the journey time of the convoy by five or more minutes and adding a shiver of danger to the evening. The moped struggled and whined at the extra weight and the bicycles wobbled dangerously as the cyclists clung on to the bar behind the moped seat.

Once we reached the cottage, usually late in the evening on a Saturday, we baked bread and made stew – the contents of visitors’ pockets almost always turned up flour and yeast plus a couple of potatoes, carrots, leeks, broccoli – anything that could be thrown in a large pan and cooked with lentils. If the season were right, there’d be nettle heads thrown in as well.

Gaius Moore, the de facto leader of our troupe of friends, was deeply involved in the art of home brewing, and often brought beer and yeast. He also expected that we do something practical, bringing order to evenings that could have quickly and easily degenerated (and sometimes did, regardless) had there not been someone saying: ‘Let’s bake bread!’ And so we boys spilled ourselves drunkenly into the minuscule hours of Sunday mornings, a solid base of rustic foodstuffs well-made and swiftly eaten, loaded afterwards with drink, argument and humour, plus the first murmurings of a fully realised artistic streak amongst our small group.

There was Gaius, or Giz as he was more often known, sharp-witted and satirical, a slyly amused glimmer in his eye, who could often be found dipping into my father’s Drambuie in attempted secrecy (which he’d replace and immediately drink again the next time he came out to the valley) when he wasn’t calling the next tune on the stereo, demanding with a zealot’s grin that Three Card Brag be played or writing sharp, satirical poems. Legzee was almost always found scratching obsessively at the sketchbook he’d bound in leather, which he kept in a handmade leather pouch on his belt. He would get ever more garrulous as the evening wore on and the beer took command and would take to cornering people with long and excited guided tours of his increasingly eccentric and deliriously perverse drawings.

Joe, aggravatingly handsome in waif-thin proto-James Bond mode and yet charmingly uncertain of himself as a teenager, was either drawing or launching into painfully funny improvised satires of friends, enemies, situations – he left us gasping for air, laughing in the smoke-filled cottage, and sometimes a little stung by the unconscious, improvised barbs that occasionally emerged like first wasps from a prodded nest. Euan, by turns taciturn and outrageously blunt, could be relied upon to try things if he was dared to do so. One night someone challenged him to eat a huge clove of garlic in one go – he did, and then yelled like a steam whistle as he let loose the glass in his hand. Euan didn’t seem to have moved his arm but the glass, a tough, dimpled half pint tankard, flew across the kitchen and exploded by the window. ‘NEVER let me do that a
gain
!’ he said. Everest, a later arrival to the troupe, could usually be found strumming a guitar or pointing a video camera, and was sometimes overwhelmed with a slightly dictatorial take on his own natural ebullience. Matthew Chadwick, genially avuncular even as a teenager, was excited enough by the arcana of science and craft to carry even the gang’s most self-consciously arty moods along in his wake.

These parties ceased when I was twenty-one, after a night of mayhem to which it seemed that half of Stroud had come, riding motorbikes across gardens and terrorising the wildlife and not-so-wildlife of the valley. A few of us had set up an artful little system of lights and sound under the canopy of yew, checked that easily excited neighbours were informed or away, made invites with maps, given them out to people we trusted not to share them in the pub, half of whom promptly shared them in the pub. A mellow evening with about forty people turned into a party of one hundred by about 11pm. Cars were littered all over the approach to the valley, motorbikes roared across gardens and tore up precious flowerbeds. Stronger drugs than any of us had anticipated found their way into hands and drinks and mouths, often unnoticed until later, when the night beasts, fields and party people took a distinctly peculiar turn and started to unexpectedly change colour, float above the ground and melt in and out of vision as if they were being animated to the designs of Rothko, Dali and Chagall in trinity. I slipped into unconsciousness in the garden and woke early in bed, uncertain how I’d got there.

In the daze of next morning, with strangers in the front room concocting hash-pipes out of my root vegetable and tinfoil supply behind closed curtains (sat, appropriately, under my father’s wall of books by and about the Beat generation), I wandered the house astonished. I was brought sharply and swiftly out of hangover by the arrival of the police, who had been called by a neighbour up in The Scrubs, alarmed enough by the sight of Euan’s orange VW Camper Van parked in one of the fields to jump to the conclusion that travellers were invading the valley.

I was standing in the garden contemplating the weakly flashing lights that Matthew Chadwick had erected in the trees when two policemen stepped through the debris, appearing deeply self-satisfied; a look that, combined on both their faces, said: ‘we’ve found ourselves squatters and an illegal rave to liven up this dull Sunday morning.’

‘Been having a party, have we?’ one of them asked me, sardonically.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Got a bit out of hand, did it?’

‘Yes, rather,’ I said, looking apologetically at the empty cans of beer salting the garden, the motorbikes, the crushed flowers. ‘I didn’t expect so many people to turn up.’

‘And how long have you been living here?’

‘All my life,’ I replied, deeply thankful that the curtains were closed in the front room.

The policeman drew a disappointed breath and asked my name. I told him.

‘You’ll excuse us while we confirm this with your neighbours,’ he said.

They didn’t return.

The real trouble with parties at the cottage was that they rarely included women – except for Kate Lloyd (who had long since let go the affectionate ‘y’ at the end of her name), Melissa Shaw, Jenny Haigh and a few others, who were either too much like sisters or were too close to us in age to be interested in anything but friendship, the sort of girls who would dismiss one’s clumsy overtures with a sharp bark of laughter, a friendly, unresponsive smile and another drink.

Valley and village were both distressingly free of eligible, interested girls – the only ones I knew of were my age and seeing older men, or were older than me. I became painfully aware that, in every direction for a couple of miles, there was no opportunity to forget myself in the arms of someone else, that the houses seemed to be increasingly occupied by retirees and weekenders.

So we banded together and made sure there were parties that women would come to out in the quiet, comforting embrace of Slad, often in the quarry at the side of Swift’s Hill, the limestone grassland nature reserve opposite the Woolpack, which is framed to perfection by the pub’s windows. We kept absolutely rigidly to the quarry, avoiding the orchids, knapweed and cowslips that fed hosts of butterflies further up the hill. We would secretively haul small sound systems up the slope into the quarry’s accidental rococo amphitheatre, light cautious fires and wait, having carefully, carefully put the word out to all the people we could think of who would not in turn invite everyone from the pubs of Stroud and risk a clampdown on these gatherings.

This was the closest we came to post-harvest parties; agriculture had moved on, leaving the valley in its wake. Wheat went down to the whirring tug of the combine harvester and there were too few sheep on the land to require the farmer to ask for help with the shearing. We revelled in it anyway, our weekday schooling and part-time jobs seeming as good an excuse as any to get out into the landscape and celebrate it, and ourselves.

12

Making Music

T
he Slad Valley at night, away from the cautious hubbub of the Woolpack, is a place of surprise and discomfort. Lit only by the moon or, on a cloudier night, the faint orange glow of Stroud, it is all too easy to quickly leave the comforting proximity of houses and people one knows at least a little and be in dark lanes that end suddenly and which are sound-tracked by explosive night birds, the belligerent rush of hunting badgers and other unnamed, unseen animals whose tracks are obscured but whose breath feels all too close as one stumbles homewards. It is easy to give in to terror, even in a quiet little pocket of Gloucestershire.

Returning to the valley between bouts of university, attempting to settle back in to a quiet life with few neighbours, away from the town, on my own and with nearly all the friends I had acquired at school gone on to cities and lives away from the quietude of country living, I remember panic setting in all too easily once I’d passed Captain George’s manorial farmhouse, halfway home from the Woolpack and loaded with beer, aged twenty or so, careering through the cavernous lanes with a badly sung song repeating under my breath to stave off panic. I have ruined too many favourite tunes for myself thanks to a cloth ear and a skinful of panic; the cottage I grew up in, which had been such a haven as a child, feeling far, far away, out into woods encumbered with sallow ghosts and night beasts.

This fear was not helped by a man I met several times on the lanes in twilight, dressed in shabby clothes, whistling more tunelessly than even I could manage in my fear, and wielding a scythe. The first time I passed him, I squeaked a nervous hello, which was met with a grunt and a hard stare. It felt malevolent, and I lived in terror of him and prayed each time I walked home that he would not be on the lane down to Snows Farm. No one I asked knew who he was. Some even suggested I’d seen a ghost of some long-dead worker walking endlessly home.