A Thousand Laurie Lees (19 page)

How, then, to negotiate a return? Both my father and I had felt the call of the early years there ripping at our mouths like steel hooks, reeling us in, pulling us up too often into the sharp, hard-to-breathe air of maudlin nostalgia. It was difficult to go back – the paperwork drowning-pool was full of little currents and eddies that slowed its clearing, and my mother’s presence felt constrained by our inability to clear it. All but a few of our human ties to Slad had gone. What remained was art, literature and the landscape itself. It sprawled out before me like a tangled map of loss.

A house is only as alive as the people who live in it, and we populated ours with paper and a rising aura of damp. We wrote about it, abstracted it, pushed the valley from its intrinsic reality and into an unsustainable utopian space. The more we quested after it, the farther away it seemed. It became a literary conceit, a bone of contention sticking out of the landscape at an awkward angle, rarely dealt with on a daily basis but never forgotten.

Then, one winter morning, I received a telephone call from Mrs Hopf, still living next door.

‘There’s someone in your house, Adam. He says he knows you. He’s threatening to squat,’ she said.

I ran to the pub to raise a posse, and found three friends ready to go and see off squatters – Legzee, Rhidian and Celine. We bundled into Rhidian’s car, pumped up and ready for a confrontation. I held the front door keys rattling in my hand as we bombed out to the cottage in the early evening. Even before we got there, I felt a rising swell of elation – at last the cottage needed protecting. We were a ragtag bunch of defenders, but it seemed appropriate that Legzee was there, perhaps more than a little tipsy, having taken a few drinks after work, but all the same geared up to help. Arriving at the green tin garage, we spilled like fish from the net of the car, puffed down the path to the garden, checking and inspecting everything as we went, talking the language of disconcerted bravado. The adrenaline in my veins ran sharp. We got to the house and banged on the door: ‘Are you in there, Al?’ I called.

But the squatter had gone. He had taken his chances on a well-known empty house, but had not counted on the eagle eyes of neighbours who had come and quizzed him through the door and taken his number. He had begun to dismantle the lock and left it by the door, but after my father’s follow-up call had offered to introduce the police into the equation, he had apparently fled. The only thing ‘Al’ left me other than a door to mend was the leverage I needed to move back in.

The cottage had survived eighteen years without a break-in (apart from Everest, climbing in through the kitchen window for a glass of water after a long walk on a hot day at almost the exact time two other friends were arriving to stay at the cottage for the weekend) and now I had all the impetus I needed to go back, to work on sorting it out and reclaiming it as a functional home.

Not so idyllic, living in a damp, cold house that’s been standing empty but for mice and papers for eighteen years. I moved the bulk of my books and belongings back in the summer, and began the dusty and initially euphoric process of sifting through papers and making space to live, but did not move back in until the winter of 2012–13, bringing cats with me. As soon as I moved back in, the house and the valley began to take their revenge for long years of abandonment.

Winter set in with a vengeance, the worst I had endured since childhood, and I discovered that the chimney was blocked and the wood-burning stove had been rendered inoperable by time and alterations. It had been connected to the water supply when I was a child, but this had been disconnected three years before. So I all but froze through the long winter that lasted until April, unable to sit still long enough to write or think, bleeding money out of radiators and huddled into a sleeping bag with cats and hot water bottles pressed hard against my chest.

In 1985, when the snow had fallen so thick that the electricity failed, it had taken my father and me three hours to climb the hill out of the valley and seek refuge with the farmer. Cold and disheartened, we slogged up the path that runs past Driftcombe, falling into deep, treacherous drifts, slithering and unnerved. This time, I had no escape routes. The world pressed cold at the windowpanes and snow-cold night patterned the inner eyelids of the house with frost. I stayed for the cats, determined to reclaim the landscape or let it reclaim me.

The cats, a friend’s beloved pair of tortoiseshell sisters, which she could no longer keep, were constantly harassed by next door’s aggressively territorial black tomcat, who woke me night after night wailing and growling in the attic. He sprayed for dominance and terrorised the two nervous intruders I had brought to his turf until they fled – Frieda to who knows where, Freya to the chicken farm at the top of the hill, where she made herself at home beneath the roosts and drove the owners to distraction.

Poorly spayed, Freya took to marching from door to door around the cat-owning houses at the edge of Bisley parading herself for toms. Unable to reproduce but undergoing the fiercest of urges, she rubbed against garage doors, invaded houses, terrorised chickens, startled horses and upset the neighbourhood entirely with her frustrated sexuality. I caught her and repatriated her twice, tempting her with food from beneath the hay at the chicken farm the first time, only to be bitten savagely for my trouble. The second time, a man whose cat’s food she’d been stealing cornered her in his house and locked the cat flap before calling me to come and carry her away. Freya treated the kitchen like an assault course until finally I cornered and calmed her, wearing toughened gardening gloves and a grimace. Two times I took her back and each time she ran straight off again, intimidated by the neighbour’s cat, the damp, the cold.

Alone in the house, I left the cat flap open for weeks, putting down food in the hope that they’d return. The only visitor I had was next-door’s cat, sour faced and frightened, eating greedily from the peace offerings I’d left. Come May, the cat flap was blocked, though every time I hear a cat’s yowl in the garden now I rush to the window, hoping that either Frieda or Freya has returned.

In the snow, I rediscovered community via the generosity of neighbours who’d pick me up if they passed me slouching up the hill on foot, unable to cycle through the ice, who would listen and forgive if I pounded on their doors after a long walk home through blinding snow, suddenly uncertain if there were any people left alive in a world so consumed by soft bee-sized fists of falling ice.

It had not always been so welcoming. One set of neighbours, who bought the Old Chapel as a fixer upper, I only ever spoke with once on the phone after I discovered that their plans for extending the house reached ten feet into our garden. The officious husband called me out of the blue, aggressively justifying his plans after I’d spent an afternoon marching incredulous up and down the garden as Mrs Hopf explained them to me. These hellish neighbours were also prone, I discovered later, to come out and yell the riot act at walkers taking the public footpath past their house, Several members of the Lloyd family were caught in the blast of their ire and responded in kind, insisting furiously and derisively that they had been walking here all of their lives.

Combative and colonial to the last, the new owners had also bought some of the field below the house, which included the spring that had served the community until plumbing was installed in the 1950s. They denied all comers access to the spring and were attempting to have the land reassigned from agricultural to domestic use but, mercifully, left after a flurry of complaints to the planning department, which were so voluminous and came from so many quarters of Slad and Bisley that the people who moved to the house in their wake were apprehensive in case the valley turned out to be filled with a den of Gorgons who would go out of their way to make their lives miserable. The Mohammeds, however, were kind, and open, and were welcomed with open arms (though their black tomcat is still no friend of mine).

The valley under snow was less than welcoming. I explored where I could, sliding down paths that had been worn into perilous ruts by trail bikes, investigating walls that had in places all but vanished, their stones taken away and repurposed or simply cast down onto the path like Jericho’s walls under the relentless biting music of the frost. The walkers’ path to Slad down past the Roman bridge was blocked by an uncut tree that required a loose limbo dance to navigate past.

The field surrounding the Roman bridge was churned to mud and regularly blocked by a couple of cows who stood and stared at me with steely bewilderment, refusing to move. I read them poetry, or, if I was feeling cruel, sang. Sometimes it drove them off. Certainly it worked better than reason, to which frustration occasionally led me, keen to get to the pub and explaining this in irate detail to gawping bovines. Mostly, of course, loud noises worked, or climbing the stile in the hope that the cows would move. Even if the cows could be negotiated, the sucking soup of mud and effluent to which they churned the ground could take your boot off in an instant, as if your foot were merely a shucked pea. It made the first pint at the Woolpack feel like even more of a reward.

20

The Spring is Sprung

Bold with the longing of Spring went he

Into the danger he could not see.

From ‘Spring Fox’ by Frank Mansell

T
he sun always returns. Snows melt and relentless mud thickens into springy turf. Bitter pills of hail soften into warm rain, which hangs like spun glass in a glaze of light on tree branch and mossy stone, spider’s web and eyelash. Winter is a state of mind as much as a season. Tree branches stretch their furled spears to the sun, which wait to become leaf, just as people reach out into the landscapes that surround them, struggle to be a part of them, and of each other, with the tender encouragement of spring.

Catkins hang like lambs’ tails from birch and hornbeam; fatheaded snowdrops mooch in mutinous clusters, defying frost; daffodils poke their green stems skyward. Eventually coltsfoot and primrose cluster at the path’s edge and an explosion of yellow welcomes in the longer days.

The thrush’s tinder throat strikes up,

The sparrow chips hot sparks

From flinty tongue, and all the sky

Showers with electric larks.
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Night becomes a reward, a slow simmering promise of tomorrow’s sunlight kissed against the tree line in streaks of red and orange every evening. The stream sings a slower song as rains recede and children laugh as they run into the gardens, their high voices clattering through the treetops as the birds puff themselves up and begin their mating rituals.

I wake often to deer in the garden, settled in like hounds under the boughs of trees where the rain won’t reach them as they sleep, or peering through my door, inquisitive and easily startled. They bolt into the fields if I move too fast. In the absence of my cats, the trees are alive with tits and finches, small bolts of gold and blue shimmering through the evergreen yew after dizzy clouds of insects. The house is alive with insect life. A wasps’ nest in the roof pours its skirmish-ready troops outwards if the sun is hot, or buzzing confused and lazy inwards if all the sun can do is heat the panes of glass. Opening windows, I startle hosts of ladybirds out of slumber; watch as they fleck the landscape red and black before vanishing into the vastness of the day.