A Thousand Laurie Lees (20 page)

Exploring the fields below the house comes as a shock. I remember picking my way through sheep and cattle, the occasional horse. Now they sit un-grazed, too remote to be worth fencing, the walls built during cloth trade plenty falling away like broken teeth. Old Captain George who farmed them has retired and they have become ragged, as if a giant tramp has lain down under his coat on them and passed into permanent sleep. They are treacherous; all that is left of the close-cropped turf I ran down as a child is a sheer path worn flat by walkers; the rest is tussock and sapling. The old ford that led to the badger’s sett has grown over and been replaced with a polite and slippery wooden bridge, all stones removed. It feels too safe to walk this plank; I miss the shift of the stones beneath my feet; the feeling of risk; the push of the water taking away any sensation of control. In wellingtons, I wade across instead, up to the edge of the wood to look across at the decorous acres of the racing stables where Captain George’s son breeds winners and keeps the land tamed to prevent the horses turning their delicate ankles, frustrated that his land beyond the line of sight of tourists has become so ragged and unkempt that it risks turning to woodland and cutting off all line of sight to Slad.

Out of the woodwork the people came; I saw them as I passed the pub, walking into Stroud on the long route that allows for beer stops and conversation. Old faces, familiar and welcoming, clutching roll-ups and beer on the bench next to the road, hailing me as I walked past. New faces too, occupying old houses; my old friend Joe’s sister-in-law Hester now lives in the house in which Laurie Lee grew up. She and her partner have been clearing, and planting snowdrops on, the steep bank down from the road that Annie Lee struggled up, perpetually late, to get the bus to town. They have been taming the garden with dry-stone walls and vegetables, keeping the essence of the house intact whilst keeping it habitable and free of floods.

Visiting, I could almost smell the food that Annie cooked on the stove a century before; the large fireplace was still nearly as it would have been then, stove blazing; the cellar was stacked with sustenance and felt cool as an autumn breeze. The attic bedroom that Laurie and his siblings had occupied felt changeless but for the modern furniture, occupied by children who bounced down the stairs to smile questioningly at me and vie noisily for their parents’ attention as we chattered over mugs of tea.

I found myself, that spring, at a medieval feast in the farmstead on Knapp Lane below Swift’s Hill, a feast followed by a showing of Pasolini’s vulgar and ridiculous
Canterbury Tales
. I had walked through the woods to get there, high on wild garlic and the shuttering late May light rushing through the trees, down through Elcombe, laid out like random jawbones on an ossuary hill, and passing below Swift’s Hill as birds flicked over it in insect frenzy, down into a gathering of people sitting at trestle tables, a hog roast by the barn. The farmyard was grassed over, and the barns were filled with chairs.

Laurie would have felt quite at home there, I suspected: the wine was being served by exquisite young women sporting diaphanous smiles, a preternatural gaiety shivering in their eyes; MPs rubbed shoulders with artists, farmers and country socialites; a duo played ancient, hypnotic folk music on droning, eccentric instruments, which cut through the chatter at exquisitely inappropriate moments; a jester gambolled through the crowd, dressed in black, performing aggravating slapstick and asking gnomic questions. Faces quickly began to glaze over with horror whenever he approached. Laurie would have put on his public face and held court, waving his white fedora in benediction and welcoming one and all to his valley, even the jester.

I was not so easy in the hot sun. I ate and drank, watched the film all the way through and turned at the end to find that I was almost the last person left, the only one not sober enough to care that Pasolini had traduced one of the great works of early English literature. I staggered from the barn the film had been show in, a high-raftered and draughty shell of Cotswold stone filled with theatre seats, and looked around. The beautiful serving girls were writing fire words on the night sky with sticks they lit in a brazier. I joined them, quietly drunken admiration fused with the need to play, to write, to create the valley anew out of darkness and fire. Eventually, I stumbled home through the woods, weaving through the night like one of those blazing sticks. I felt immortal, a perfect part of the valley, as alive as it was possible to feel when stumbling across motorbike tyre ruts, falling elated into pockets of wild garlic and finally crashing down the steep path from Keensgrove wood to the stream and home.

I woke in the front room the next morning giddy with hangover, birdsong hammering in my head. My clothes were stained green and black and stank of mud and night and garlic. I sat in the garden with a pen, under a tent of yew, and began to write.

As spring uncoiled into summer, I bought an electric bicycle, a new concession to modernity and the need to escape the confines of the valley to find work and food. A job came next, at the shop behind the garage that had delicately rejected me twenty years before, and the contract for a book.

I celebrated by cycling far and fast, sweeping through the lanes like Icarus, hell-bent on sunshine and freedom. Then, after the second day of work at the shop, cycling home late, driven faster by hunger, assuming, like Annie Lee, that there would be something or someone to catch me should I be unable to stop, I turned a corner and met an unexpected car. I hit the brakes and only the tarmac was there to catch me.

Note

1
  From ‘Edge of Day’ by Laurie Lee.

21

Tramadol with Rosie

A
summer lost to two broken arms and three broken ribs, unable to write or cook or even wash without a severe amount of pain (after a week I had to be hosed down by my ex-girlfriend as she would not stand for me rapidly becoming riper than a blue cheese left to melt in Tupperware under a scalding sun). I was ripped away from the valley, taken in by friends, barely able to send a short text message on my mobile phone let alone write. I simmered and sweated as the summer turned into perfect walking weather and watched my opportunity to bask in all that the Slad Valley had to offer vanish under a blanket of pain relief. Doped up on Tramadol, I could barely even read and found myself gummed to the teat of the television most days, my delicately generous array of hosts doing their best to offer me comfort as I struggled to settle or find sleep.

The accident allowed me time to think, though, especially as I mended; to think about the valley and how I had come to spend my life entwined in a vision of it that was real and unreal at the same time. I was forced to re-evaluate, to scrumple up my impractical poet’s eye and consider a practical life more carefully. It was not enough to live there high on paper and aesthetics, admiring the mob of crows belting after buzzards or the soft breathy song of the wood pigeon. I had let the landscape rule me. That had to change, become a process of reconciliation, co-habitation.

I realised also how integral Laurie Lee had been to my understanding of the valley, his writing and his brief but vital instructions running like a stream through my fields of thought. My father told me over the phone that I had, as a very small child, been entered into a poetry competition run by Goldenlay eggs, judged by Laurie, who had been delighted when it turned out I had won. Each time I met him, he had nudged me or bribed me towards poetry. Patterns of seed scattering came clear through the haze of opiates, the pounding rush of suffocated pain. He had, in his quiet way, helped me keep a sense of place rooted in my chest.

Looking back, I saw that at every turn he had been standing at the head of the Slad Valley like an overseer, laughing in the hot sun and encouraging others on. He even took some of the profits of
Cider with Rosie
and invested them back into the landscape, buying woodland to walk in, which has only just been sold by his estate to the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. The Trust started a campaign amongst their members to raise the funds to buy the land and keep it in perpetuity as an area of natural diversity; the response was overwhelming because of Laurie and
Cider with Rosie
. It was heartening to hear that sections of the valley were going back to a form of common land, to be cared for and admired for generations to come.

Part-mended, I arrived back in the valley in September, with a clearer vision of what needed to be done to make the house viable but without the energy to do it. I threw myself into work, creaking up the hill to the shop three days a week, exhausted from slowly weaning myself off the painkillers and afraid to tackle the bicycle, which had survived the accident undamaged but for a buckled wheel. It had had a soft landing, flipping me over and landing heavy on my ribs two months before.

I pushed hard, but still relied on friendship and goodwill to survive: Charly, a friend from work, cleaned the cottage chimney and loaned me a new stove whilst my wood burner went in for repair; I found a good-humoured tree surgeon by the name of Chris in the pub, who was willing to come and take back the overhanging fringe of yew. I watched as he swung up into the trees, his gangling ground-gait slipping away as the rope took him upwards with the saw into the fluid routines of work. My ex-girlfriend and her new partner brought free-cycled kitchen units and fitted them whilst I made tea, cheerfully insulting me for allowing my naturally untidy streak to become so amplified by such a poor excuse as broken bones. It was healing to watch the house get patched up and mended. I began to feel the mending affect my own physical condition, especially as I could now sit and read in the front room at night without the sensation of damp slithering like an invasion of slugs through my bones.