A Thousand Laurie Lees (17 page)

B
URIALS

I remember you telling me

of a burial years ago in Elcombe woods

up at the high point, the stony point

where local workmen

chewing their cud of cider

refused to work.

They told the husband that his wife

would get no further down

than three feet, you said,

although the grave was eventually dug.

You seemed astonished,

questioned the sanctity of such an act

siding in Protestant horror

with the old rogues buried in their pints

who mix and match their myths to suit the night.

You closed off when I told you I had dug the grave

with the family of the deceased two years before,

had stood, at six foot four, shoulder deep

in consecrated earth,

carving out a fragment of the hill.

It was as if I disappointed you,

gave you a truth you did not need

intruding on your tale with pick and spade.

All stories tell truths. I know that now.

Unwritten memories and bodies

subside like pit villages

but they leave small spaces

where poppies and dandelions grow

amongst resurgent grass.

All burials are beginnings.

By 1998 all three of the points on the asymmetrical diamond of connection that had brought my parents to the edge of Slad had gone. Laurie had been feted and celebrated after his death quite as much as he had been before – the valley held on to him as firmly and lovingly as he had held onto it in all the years he had spent in Spain and London. Diana Lodge died peacefully the following year and was honoured with a funeral parade through Stroud before being buried at Prinknash Abbey.

I too had left, though I had not travelled far. My father spent more and more time in London. Our cottage stood empty too much of the time, inhabited only by the gentle, faded presence of my mother as we remembered her and my father’s cornucopia of fading papers and unmoved books. Like a castle in a fairytale, the cottage began to be buried by its surroundings, a sleeping beauty lingering deep within the encompassing thorns.

16

Beginnings

I
magine again, if you will, bicycles being steered through a long, ungainly line of cars parked on the road; the concerned lights blinking sleepily on in the old schoolhouse as the bicycle riders on The Night of a Thousand Laurie Lees cruise and curse, topple and laugh at the clumsiness of their arrival. Imagine their bicycles parked hugger-mugger against the solid metal fence, placed there to keep drunkards from falling into the beer garden, wheels tangled with pedals, feet and brambles.

Without Laurie there, feeling his way through the valley and dishing out advice, flirtation and impish misdirection to passers-by in equal measure, without his spirited public persona coalescing constantly into the foreground, Slad changed. Money came dancing in; house prices soared. It became a place of aspiration and excitement. Strange things were afoot in the valley, as if one thousand Laurie Lees really had come stumbling through the valley signing any book they had to hand and had cast a spell on the landscape.

It was difficult at times to spot these changes – at one point, a young man moved to the village, claiming he was an antique dealer. He lived in a grand house, part of the Squire’s old estate, at the bottom of the hill on Steanbridge Lane, with his partner and her small daughter. Nobody really paid them much mind – they seemed together, enough part of the new landscape of Slad to be left alone. They were antique dealers and hadn’t antique dealers been plying their trade round here for years? They paid their rent. They seemed likeable enough, though he was off travelling with work and she was often flaked out. Visiting friends in the converted stables next door, all I could see was that the daughter was lonely and rather more attached to my friends than might be considered usual, these days at least, but which seemed to me not to be too unusual for village life.

My friends used to take the daughter in and look after her, concerned that she wasn’t getting enough attention. They’d tell her stories and get her painting. They’d take her for walks along the lane, past the lake where someone had drowned herself eighty years before and which I had found to my horror to be full of medicinal leeches when I went fishing there with Katy Lloyd as a child. I came out of the lake white-faced and trembling, my bamboo fishing net blurring in my hand, with at least five leeches attached to my limbs. Alan Lloyd whipped out a cigarette, lit it and burned them until they shrivelled and fell from my skin like bloodied scabs. I stood there wide-eyed with shock, Katy laughing at me, sluiced with pondweed and water.

A couple of months after the antique dealer moved in, a policewoman moved into the other converted stable and things began to get a little weird. The antique dealer and his partner became elusive, the daughter visited my friends more often and an atmosphere of tension descended on the quiet little cluster of houses. Within a few weeks the dealer was under arrest, having been found to be dealing in things far less bulky and far more lucrative than antiques, and to be carrying a decidedly new sawn off shotgun to assist him in doing business.

Drugs weren’t new to the village of course; a large section of Slad’s teenagers knew my house not because they knew me as such but because, when cattle were still being kept on the fields below me, the finest psilocybin-laced fungi in the area grew there. Pale-eyed foraging teenagers, kneeling on hassocks of grass in the marshier areas of pat-strewn turf, could be easily startled come autumn if one merely shouted hello to them across the field. Like foxes they would blink and scatter, coming back to the good picking grounds when danger had passed.

Drugs are an easy means of escape in a small village (where borders are wide and horizons distant if you don’t have the money to reach them) but they are difficult to support as a cottage industry. My friend ‘John’, sole carer for his small son, grew too ambitious and filled his spare bedroom with hydroponics to grow cannabis, row upon row of fat resinous green fists bursting from stems, because he was unable to find work that kept the wolf from the door and allowed his son to be looked after. He grew lonely, and the circle of friends he allowed into his secret world of ridiculously lucrative lamp-lit fecundity bloated to unsafe proportions. There were far too many of us coming in to play guitar or computer games, talk, argue and laugh the night away or amble down to the Woolpack to nurse a pint and play pool in the chilly cellar.

It was the talk of Slad for a few days when the police came raiding, taking away lights and plants: ‘Did
you
know what was going on?’ ‘How long has he been doing
that
for d’you think?’ ‘What will happen to the little boy?’ Someone had snitched, and John lost everything except his son and his freedom. Eviction from Slad was punishment enough.

As the village changed, so too did the pub. Rough-hewn and un-modernised, it was a place of safety for many characters and genial reprobates. Big-bearded Martin, who when he was not drinking worked with pigs, was the soul of the pub, part of the fixtures and fittings. I would see him every time I went in, a pint of cider clamped in one hand and a roll up permanently peering out from beneath his moustache. He would sit at the end of the bar, under the till, immovable as stone, a canny look in his eye and a smoker’s laugh on his lips. He was taken by mouth cancer eventually, the roll ups and the cider boiling on his tongue for years in lethal combination, but was such a well-loved presence that a portrait of him still hangs laughing over his old seat. So rumour has it, Laurie would invite him and others back to his house after hours and feed them whiskey in exchange for helping him sign books. Pub culture always brews such rumours.

It seemed that, as soon as my father and I were absent more often than not from our quiet corner of the Slad Valley, new life began to creep back into the valley. Mrs Bevan’s excitingly derelict little cottage was repaired and extended by her granddaughter Sally Rees who, with her husband Neil, turned the haunted-seeming little cave of Cotswold stone which had hidden a horde of cats into a palace made of the same materials as the original house – it would have looked as if it had been there for centuries when they finished, were the stone not so clean and bright.

After them came the McCroddans, occupying the old Lloyd house, Hugh Padgham having moved over the valley into the heart of Slad. Both households started families and the valley became almost as lively a place as it had been when I was a child. I visited occasionally, to make sure the house was as up together as an empty house can be, to see that the water was off in the winter and the heating was on at a gentle quiver to stop it degrading and being buried completely.

I took girlfriends out there, keen to show them that this was the root of me, to inculcate them in the myths of my youth. The first woman I took, Callie, looked at it and me with sad, hard eyes, not really wanting to know it seems to me now. We lay instead in a cloud of birdsong and cowslips in the field above the Roman bridge, dancing round the edges of sex like bees after nectar, alighting delicately in different places. Not far distant enough from the path, we were interrupted by walkers. They laughed at us, shouted ribald greetings as they passed.

The supposedly Roman bridge had apparently been hacked down to size a century before by two old ladies up at Snows Farm who objected to carriages coming past them on the way to Bisley, and objected to the way the drivers peered over the wall and invaded their privacy. Without the bridge, trade through the valley died out – it had once housed a pub and many more houses and there had even been a brothel on the hill above the Dillay – and we were left to birdsong and the wolf-whistling of walkers.

As time went on and the house stood emptier and sadder, I stopped taking girlfriends and went less and less myself, unable to bear it. The house faded, became more and more a mausoleum to my mother, the wild of the valley choking out the sound of Blake’s innocent pipes that we had played in the valley in my youth. Only birds and insects piped down the valley in anything but memory.