A Thousand Laurie Lees (18 page)

17

The Buddha of Swift's Hill

M
ecca for butterflies feeding on upright bromegrass and violets, the nectar of black knapweed; livid with rare musk and frog orchids, alongside their hardier companions; occasional home of sacred cows, munching down the grass to let these rare plants grow. Swift's Hill: home of walkers and love-makers, gentle parties and solstice gatherings, high enough to see all the way west to Wales, the broad bosom of the Black Mountains misty over the Severn's glittering steel. Swift's Hill, the high mountain of Slad, where the gods settle and discuss the doings of the day.

One morning a thirty-foot Buddha appeared on Swift's Hill, out of nowhere, perched in clear view of the road and framed to perfection in the Woolpack's window behind the bar. It appeared from a distance to have grown up out of the hill, birthed from the delicate genitalia of an orchid perhaps. It sat there smiling, seraphic, offering benefaction and content. It shocked passers-by, this strange manifestation, brought wagging tongues together in happy disharmony in the pub, invigorated newspapers. No one could be certain where it had come from. Theories spread like dandelion seeds, blowing up and down the valley and eager to take root.

I cycled up to the hill with friends, determined to see it for myself before it vanished again, or was removed. We climbed the hill, puffing up past the Vatch and dumping our bikes in the parking space at its foot. Above us, the Buddha loomed genially, shut-eyed and enormous in a crook of the hill. We scrambled up to it, gasping irreverently for breath on the steeper sections, slipping forward and grasping handfuls of turf to steady the climb, trying not to disturb the plant life too much in our eagerness to see.

Close to, the Buddha sported dark lines at regular intervals up his body. It was clear suddenly that he came in sections, and must usually lurk elsewhere, in chunks, easily stored and out of sight unless required for sudden manifestations and celebrations. It was not immediately clear what his presence was celebrating that day, so we admired him a little longer and went freewheeling back to the pub to listen to the speculations, the laughter and the discontent.

A litany of opinions roiled around the pub: ‘It's amazing! I love it.' ‘It's rude is what it is. That's a nature reserve. It could be doing untold damage.' ‘I think it's lush.' ‘What would Laurie Lee think?' ‘Who cares?' ‘Laurie would have loved it. I love it.' ‘It's stupid. Who's got that sort of time to waste?'

Hours were wasted with the thrill of the Buddha of Swift's Hill, whether it was approved of or not. It brought the local papers running, ever eager for something new and strange to write about, caught in the permanent trap of an endless small community slow news day. Myths sprang from the tongues of locals, all of us ready to expound on whimsical theories through a filter of alcohol. I told anyone who would listen (and not too many did, given that they had theories of their own) that it had belonged to Laurie Lee and that he had asked friends to erect it as a constant reminder that the valley was a sacred space.

It was fanciful, but then the valley allowed for flights of fancy, encouraged them and let them grow if they were strong enough. It does not seem far-fetched at all that there might be some presiding spirit looking out from under its green skin. ‘As sure as God's in Gloucestershire,' the saying goes. That may be true, but in Slad the closest one gets to gods are people who have imprinted themselves on the landscape, hardy presences born of toil or art that shift and change, decay and are revived.

One can see the bones of them in the crooked walls of Cotswold stone that line the roads in ever fainter procession out of Slad, absorbed by fence lines and scrabbling hedgerows, dark wet moss coating them for their last winters as they fail to be repaired. The past is a book laid out in pages of divided fields, should one care to read them; a book that becomes harder to read as people cull its pages for other books, cut them up and sample them. Words and actions thread through the valley like teased wool, binding the past and present together, inseparable. Standing astride both ancient and modern eras is Laurie, and the memory of him, bound up in the valley, preserving and preserved by it, too much a human being to ever risk becoming a god.

After three days the Buddha vanished, leaving a sudden vacuum for other myths and gossip to rush towards and fill. No lasting mark was left by its absence; people quickly forget novelty when there is the day-to-day beauty of life in the summer abundance of Slad to take its place. It is easy to forget when there are long grasses to lie in whilst the sun shines, a beer garden to occupy as the last light of evening falls in a halo on Swift's Hill.

The image of the Buddha still lingers in my eye, though; as does the knowledge that somewhere, not far away, a man with an impish smile guards its sections undercover in his garden, laughing still at the reactions to his prank.

18

Notting Hill in Wellies

A
s all things change, so too the Woolpack changed. Dave, the genial crumpled landlord, purveyor of fine beers and quick food, decided it was time to sell. The village became overnight a riot of panicked whispers and morbid speculations as to who might take his place. The village’s breath shortened as its alcohol-laced heart skipped a few beats. Who could replace Dave and his convivial, old-fashioned set-up? The pub had stocked papers and sent teenagers out on paper rounds on his watch and was always a gently welcoming place, unless it was the height of tourist season and was painfully full of walkers.

What if it were taken over by a pub chain and became the sort of bland everypub that had begun to infest the towns and villages of Britain, where everything from the beer to the beer mats was exactly the same and music and food was piped at the customer at a level just low enough to irritate? Worse, what if it were to close and leave the village with only a road packed with cars rushing through, no one finding a need or having a reason to stop?

Turmoil and angst flooded the fields and would have surely caused the stream to burst its banks had Dan Chadwick not stepped in and bought it. Youngest son of the sculptor Lynn, who had come to Gloucestershire after meeting Diana and Oliver Lodge, Dan was the perfect person to take on the pub. He was part of the imagined landscape of Slad, an artist in his own right living over the hill at Lypiatt Park and sweeping down for a drink at the Woolpack on a regular basis. He knew the locals. The locals knew him. The pub loved him and he loved the pub.

Dan’s intervention was a velvet revolution for the Woolpack. Everything changed and nothing did. It was retrofitted to look older than it was, craftsmen rolling in to make brand new ancient benches and canny little shelves where bottles from Laurie Lee’s beer collection would sit. There had always been a tatty and immovable little display promoting Laurie’s books in the pub; now there were a number of subtle points scattered about the place ingraining his memory into the newly worn weave of its wood. The cellar was closed off and transformed into a kitchen. The old kitchen was opened into a bar area. Everything was smartened up and faded. It became the sort of pub one might imagine walking into if one were thirsty after a backward jaunt in a time machine.

All that the new-look old-style Woolpack lacked was a daily coat of sawdust on the floor and barrels on the bar, but there was no use for that sort of décor in a pub determined to sell food. The locals and drinkers were collected in the bar area as they always had been, grunting with pleasure as they stood in front of the open fire and steamed, but the rest of the pub was opened up for reservations, for attracting diners into the welcoming bosom of Slad.

All of a sudden, it went from a small village pub that served community and summertime tourists to a roaring success, constantly busy and attracting carloads of people. Dan’s arty London crowd came roaring into the village and the posh set, the younger generations of the sort that Laurie had courted and counted as friends when in London, came tumbling down by train after them. People like Damien Hirst, Joe Strummer and Alex James were in and out of the pub and attracted a curious crowd who tagged along in their wake, hoping to be surprised.

Hirst was the most noticeable there, revelling in the much reported and now abandoned alcohol-fuelled phase of his public life. Not a gentlemanly man in his cups, he was known to preside over nights of anarchy in the pub, seeing whom he could persuade to play his drunken games or cow into dancing attendance. He was a decadent sprite in these moods, an argument on legs bundling through the pub demanding that people pay him attention, funny and caustic and disruptive.

I encountered him twice in the pub; the first time, I was introduced to him and he was not in the mood to be introduced. He barely acknowledged my presence. The second time was more combative. I had been in the pub for a while, watching the evening get ever more out of hand, drinking and concocting plans with friends. I got up to go to the bar, when a bespectacled figure appeared at my side.

‘You’re going to the bar!’ said the figure, breathing alcohol fumes in my face. ‘Get me a drink!’

I turned around. It was Hirst, looking at me intently.

‘Get your own,’ I said.

‘I want a drink, you –’

‘Well you know where the bar is!’ I snapped, heat rising in my face. I walked off.

‘I want a f***ing drink,’ he yelled. I looked back. He was stopping someone else, and there seemed to be something of a performer’s gait in the way he shuffled up to him, angry and amused at once. I didn’t stop to see if he got his way. I left the pub, impatient, when the beer garden turned into a skittering host of people with mobile phone antennae sticking from their ears all apparently working for Hirst.

Celebrities, ill-behaved or otherwise, brought hangers-on, and wealthy types from London. That combination brought journalists, eager to discover what was going on in a quiet little valley, and they brought hastily assembled comparisons that ignored the valley’s history. Slad was ‘Notting Hill in Wellies’ they decided, trumpeting it in the gossip and lifestyle section of the newspapers, with smiling photos of beautiful people gadding in the countryside. If
Cider with Rosie
was mentioned, it was in passing. The locals rebelled, started a counter-revolution, complaining that the village was becoming too busy and noisy, too fashionable, fearing that the publicity would lead to the sort of shift in population that Notting Hill itself had seen when the wealthy moved in and priced the black community out. They fretted, fulminated and worried that the pub was not serving the community as it had been hoped it would. They won. The Woolpack settled back into tranquillity and Slad breathed deeply, safe in the knowledge that no interloping celebrity or fashion would steal the limelight from its favourite son.

19

Coming Home

[These verses] speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and kinship.

Laurie Lee, in a note introducing his
Selected Poems
.

I
spent eighteen years living outside the valley, carrying the memory of it locked into the shell of my skull, informed by the haphazard spirit of it: the sound of water crazing its way under the Roman bridge; the incessant hunting of the owls at the edge of dusk, hooting at the window like angry ghosts; the hush of rain in yew branches. I yearned for the qualified silence of it all, for the freedom from car-blare and late night homebound pub-stumbler shouting at lampposts. I longed for the noises I might add to that hiss of life: the delicate roar of steam from the kettle; the creak of metal as the fire takes hold in the wood-burning stove; the croak of a boot in mud, crossing the cattle-bound stream on the way to the Woolpack.

The house had became a portal for papers and whispers, mice and the creeping damp of silence; the sort of place that walkers considered lost, that required only shutters and a caved-in roof to become as derelict as Rosie Bannen’s cottage. I often heard them, on my occasional visits, discussing our cottage in loud voices from the path, braying what a shame that it was ‘abandoned and probably haunted’. I took perverse pleasure in coming face-to-face with them in the window as they peered in, pouncing up from my chair with a brusque ‘Hallo’ and watching as they reeled away startled, back to the path and the walk, hoping their hearts were pounding. A practical joke born of guilt.