A Thousand Laurie Lees (15 page)

I got to know sheep a little better than I had bargained for that summer morning in David Murray’s field. Crammed with them into a maze-like pen, forcing them through a series of gates leading to a concrete vat, which had been dug into the field and was awash with organophosphates, every detail of them was exposed: the greasy roughness of their wool, hung with dirt and faeces; the horrified, concentrated fury in their eyes. The sheep smelled of shit and fear close up, and battered against me as I tried to ease them towards the vat, wriggling in my arms and bleating angrily as they sank into the murky chemical bath.

The summer sun beat down on me like a fist and the acrid stench of sheep and dip clawed at my nostrils. David, used to his beasts and their maniacal refusal to submit, called encouragement to me and cheerful insults to them. I was quite startled by the way the sheep tried to climb up me like large, aggressive beetles, pummelling their hooves against my chest, their mad eyes staring horrified into mine. The beauty of the Sheepscombe Valley and the heat of the sun were forgotten; all I wanted was to get the job done and get out.

I became clumsy with exhaustion as the day wore on, unused to the intensity and physicality of the work of hefting sheep into the dip. Finally, one animal caught me off balance, barging into my legs to get away. I was knocked sideways, plunged one leg into the rancid vat of chemicals before I could right myself. Unprotected, organophosphates soaked straight through my jeans, sousing my leg. I swore copiously and vowed not to work with sheep again. We finished the day’s work. Within six months, as a consequence of this exposure and my erratic approach to healthy living, I had succumbed to pneumonia, numerous calamitous losses of balance resulting in deep cuts to my arms, and a blood clot in my dip-soaked leg.

The motorbike had other uses. One summer party up at the Murray’s, before the dipping incident, it was brought out and used to race around the unsown outskirts of a field of hay, bike helmets forgotten. David only issued one stern warning: ‘Don’t ride into the hay.’ Various people took the bike out, riding around the field two at a time. I took advantage of my ownership and offered rides to the girls, whether or not their boyfriends were clamouring to take the bike for a spin. The third time round the field, carrying one pretty, dark-haired girl on the back, the bike skidded and she and I fell, laughing, to the floor, buried in the field’s golden fringe.

Laughter slowed to longer consideration of one another, but the moment was shattered when her boyfriend came charging through the centre of the field, insisting that it was his turn on the bike, effectively ending all such games by flattening a diagonal stripe through the hay.

The motorbike was the last thing keeping me in the valley, a bridge between the slow rustic life and the very-faint-but-still-compelling ‘urban’ throb of Stroud. London had never been an option – exciting to visit and instantly overwhelming, I could not stay more than a week without craving the ability to vanish into the woods, to separate myself from people. On the motorbike, I felt connected. I could get in and out of town in fifteen minutes; I was free to visit friends.

One friend lived in the heart of Slad, in a small house on the way home from the Woolpack with a caravan in the back garden. I had stayed in that caravan often, too out of it to walk the two miles home. This was either thanks to the extraordinary strength of the beer at the Woolpack (Pigs Ear and Old Spot from Uley Brewery – two beers that will creep up on you in a dark country lane and knock all sense from you a good half-hour after you’ve finished drinking, the taste of malt and hops lingering on your tongue like a kiss), or because my friend, ‘John’, grew skunk weed in vast quantities in the spare room of his tiny cottage.

In any small community without work, ways of alleviating boredom will always be sought, and this was my generation’s – no cider behind the hay bales for us; we had cannabis with Rosie and what few hay bales were still left in the fields floated by in hallucinatory parade. Skunk creeps into your bloodstream carrying explosives, lifts the roof from your skull, breathes fire in your lungs and spins a bondage rope of speechless wonder and terror around your tongue. It made it difficult to commune with one’s intended Rosie when inhaling it, made me master of the foolish amorous giggle, the laugh that thrives without words but thinks it speaks volumes. It once convinced me that a university friend of Kate Lloyd’s whom I had tried and failed to woo was in psychic communication with me across the valley. It made a liability of the best of us.

It certainly made motorbiking dangerous. Always careful not to drink and drive, I was less than cautious with skunk and found myself incautiously drifting across the road numerous times as I attempted to head home from John’s, giddy with the excitement of speed. One night I only pulled myself together as I was slowed by the scrape of wall on footrest. I had risen onto the pavement and was drifting into the low dry-stone wall that separated the road from the hill down to the stream that cuts through Slad. I would have plummeted headlong into an uncaring field of sheep had I not braked and turned.

The night the motorbike’s headlight failed, I was halfway down the road to Stroud. Stopping to assess my options, I was profoundly glad to be in a landscape that had cradled me almost from birth. I had just enough light to see by; there was a bright summer moon, nearly full, pouting at the lip of the hill, spilling a milk-silver sheen on the road. I had just begun to head cautiously home when a police car passed me in the other direction. Brain pickled, a sudden surge of panic rising in my chest and riding a bike that wasn’t roadworthy, I heard them slow and turn. I revved the bike hard and roared off, keeping what little light that still emanated from the headlight tight on the road’s white lines, listening intently to the siren rising and closing like the opening of a punk record over the pounding rhythm of my heart. I careered off to the left at the Vatch, squealing round the sharp corner and down into the twisting lanes that led to Swift’s Hill, Elcombe and, eventually, home.

I had a good head start, but the police were persistent. They had to slow down on the lanes and could not track my exact whereabouts easily, but they kept up a close pursuit on the single lane, following hard behind as I wove through looming hedgerows and rattled over the cattle grid below Swift’s Hill, slowing a little to be sure I’d hit it at the right angle and wasn’t going to suddenly pitch forward into the road, skidding on grit patches in the centre of the lane as I braked. I could feel the police continually catching up like an itch in my spine, and revved up the hill to Elcombe, suddenly realising in a flush of relief how I might be able to get away. This was a game of owl and mouse, and I needed to do as mice do, to freeze and hide.

Dipping down from Swift’s Hill and revving up to the top of Elcombe, round the Y curve of the valley, looking over my shoulder and catching glimpses of Slad’s tiny specks of orange and white, I came to John Papworth’s old house, Rose Cottage (owned at the time by the painter Oliver Heywood). Perched at the edge of the woods and below the long, steep and winding hill up to Catswood, it was the perfect place to vanish. I had known it for so long. I shot into the woods along the green lane that opened by the cottage, travelling as far along it as I dared, with little light now to see by as trees began to curve in and crop out the moon. Fifty yards in, I skidded to a halt in a patch of cow parsley, killed the engine and what remained of the lights.

I threw myself to the floor, panting and trembling with adrenaline, counting on the police to assume that I had continued up the hill, which I could have done easily without them seeing any trace of me through the dense woodland. Within a minute I saw their lights flickering blue through the trees, the sirens bouncing waspish from the hill as they pelted nearer, shot by, slowed for the extended S bend and kept on going. I waited a few minutes and began to pick myself back up again, celebrating my good fortune. I was too quick to celebrate – just as I was mounting the bike and raising my foot to the kick-start, ready to take the long way home through Stroud, there was the sound of a car coming down the hill.

I paused, peered through the woods to the bare tarmac knuckle of the hill. The car slowed and drew to a halt outside Rose Cottage. Doors opened and two voices cut through the night.

‘D’you think he went into the woods?’ said one.

‘Could be,’ said the other. ‘He seemed to know this lane well enough and it looked like a trail bike.’

‘Worth taking a look?’

‘No, he’ll probably be vanished into Stroud by now.’

A torch flashed through the undergrowth, some yards from where I stood, frozen between terror and relief that my motorbike was entirely black (apart from a white skull and crossbones on the front, which I instinctively covered with my hands). Eventually the policemen gave up, got into their car and drove off slowly down the lane. They seemed to take hours leaving. My heart skittered like an insect caught under glass, until finally I worked up the courage to kick down and jolt the bike to life again, trembling slowly up the lane to home, adrenaline and sweat cold on my back, remembering my mother’s ‘strange reluctance to enter within doors’.

The bike didn’t last much longer; without work I couldn’t afford its upkeep or insurance. I took it off the road and sold it for far less than I’d paid, packed up my books and clothes and left the valley for Stroud, away from isolation, constant effort and the pervasive, hazy memories of childhood ease.

14

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I
n memory, cherished by dream, a landscape of any stripe stays the same as it was when you last lived in its depths, romanticised by longing, by the desire to return. Leaving the cottage, I was almost immediately consumed by that longing, but only returned out of necessity, to switch the heating on and off with the seasons or to collect my father’s post when he was away too long.

As a child, the valley had seemed mine in its oracular completeness. As an adult, outside the swaddling fields, I began to discover that many other people felt the same and, more importantly, how deeply they felt that connection with Slad and its surroundings. I read
Cider with Rosie
for the first time in my mid-twenties, having reasoned unreasonably as a teenager that I had no need to do so. I knew the stories, didn’t I? They had passed into local legend. I’d lived that life, hadn’t I? As a child and a teenager I had grown up at the bosom of that book, surely.

I was wrong, of course; Laurie Lee’s experience of a life long gone, at the edge of the modern age when cars were no more than a distant rumble, when only the rich could afford to sit in the road and dreamily mutter ‘Poop poop’ in the manner of Mr Toad, was far removed from mine. Laurie’s countryside was filled with people piled up on top of one another, in small houses where children shared rooms, pressed into four walls, crushed together and rarely leaving the square mile they lived in, living more often than not without concentrated thought of anywhere else, except occasionally, in the abstracted form of newspapers or the more concrete, un-publishable forms of news brought through by wandering escapees from other lives.

I realise how free I was, how liberated and how lonely, in that little cottage with only the valley and an occasional friend to play with; how I had built the valley around me as less of a cocoon, more as an invisible shell that I could take with me whenever I left. What I didn’t quite realise was how likely it was to change. Looking at photographs of the valley as it was one hundred and more years ago, the places I knew as dense woodland were treeless, the cottages stark against the hill. Even in my short childhood it was changing rapidly, as the recently installed lines of power and communication opened up the valley to the world. Nature gets on with things almost unnoticed, especially if all that you are concentrating on is yourself.

In the first year or so away from the valley, it was easy – constant access to a social calendar revolving around the pubs I worked in, the cafés I frequented and the poetry gigs I sought out further afield made for what seemed like a busy life. In the mid 1990s, however, Slad came under threat from housing development and I developed a series of nightmares about the valley; cinematic, hyper-realistic dreams that recur to this day in which every corner of the landscape is bricked over and all that is left of the old valley is the Woolpack, with a big neon sign over it flashing the words ‘Laurie Lee drank here’ into the night.