A Thousand Laurie Lees (3 page)

No Arcadia is complete without people. At the end of our garden, which comprised a quarter-acre stretch partitioned into sunlight and a hill of trees and watched over by the triple-eyed mullion arches that gave the cottage its name, lived Bill, ancient to my young eyes, though he can't have been more than twenty. He was living in the old chapel in the very early days of my life and I remember him striding across the garden in heavy boots, a big friendly presence with a cat called Bilbo stalking the long grasses and nettles behind him, wary of our cat, Arwen, so called because she had a small white evening star on her pitch black chest, like the Evenstar in
The Lord of the Rings
.

When my father was away, which was often in those early days, in London or America for readings, Bill was there to help with house repairs, or to flirt, or both. I remember my mother leaping from the bath to pull down the yellow and orange floral blind when she realised that Bill was climbing the ladder to fix the flat roof; her half-angry, half-amused expression at the wolf whistles that her sudden and brief display of nakedness elicited as she slid back into the bath.

C
HEESE
K
ISSES

In a bright kitchen the colour of custard

the black cat's curling out of a yawn

on the long pine table,

spread for the beginnings of a meal.

The oven is hot and creaking.

She turns to it, dons her striped blue and grey apron.

Hair hides her face as she bends to check the baking,

all but her eyes, which laugh at me.

A knock at the door.
Come in
, she calls.

Bill swings in smiling

the muck of gardens on his boots

She turns, rests against the cooker, greets him warmly.

He still away?
asks Bill. A nod, hair bobbing, and a smile.

I watch in silence as the game begins.

Too young to call it flirting,

all I know is that I've been sidelined.

I watch, jealous, tease the cat.

There is fire suddenly –

her apron strings have caught

on the hob. My mother's backside is on fire.

Bill swings her round, slaps.

The fire goes out. There is silence in the kitchen,

but for my laughter, asking for the trick

to be worked again.

Bill leaves quickly.

Out of the oven

come cheese kisses

which melt in my mouth only.

I soon realised, jealously, that my opinion was not just a child's natural, bonded opinion of his mother. Other men than Bill came visiting when she was alone with me in the valley. Some came hopeful, bearing gifts. Ossie, the photographer who brought the black cat down from London when I was one year old, adored her and named the cat for her symbolically, I'm certain, after Arwen, the elf princess from Tolkein's
The Lord of the Rings
who waited in Rivendell for her beloved to rule before she could marry him. A dream, like many dreams that came to nothing in the waking world. I just liked the sound of the name – Arwen. A good word to roll on the tongue as you're learning to speak.

I held them all at bay as best I could aged two and three and four, demanding and receiving attention in equal measure, being taken for walks in the valley and learning the names of the flowers and the birds. My mother held many of them at bay just as earnestly, walking the valley in the quiet evening light, working in local schools or shooting off to record poetry for the BBC but always waiting for my father to conquer America or London, or wherever he was setting out his poetic stall that week, and come home to the valley. All I wanted from my father then was for him to be my first and best gruff billy goat as I lurked beneath the Roman bridge watching a sliver of summer sun slash through the water like laughter.

Books and songs and poetry were as important as landscape, as vital as breath. Freed from working on the land, I was taught to linger in it and take in every detail that I could. Farming was dying out, becoming broad and intensively agricultural
in far-flung flatter lands than this, lands that didn't fold up like a fist – the fields below us were good for little but Melsome's cows and Captain George's sheep, which breached their fences with alarming regularity and came ambling through our gardens in a flurry of dung and hunger, looking for the choicest morsels the garden had to offer, flattening the tomatoes my father had raised, knocking over the towers of tyres in which we grew potatoes.

I was taught to delve into the landscape aesthetically rather than physically, so I learned to float into the names of flowers, lost in the beauty of cowslip and campion, dead nettle and Michaelmas daisy, beech tree and ash, but not much of immediate practical value was hard-pressed upon me. The valley was a palimpsest of imagination, of the living and the dead, and was accessible only through thought.

Occasional visitors would take us deeper into the landscape's confidence. John Cage came to visit us in the valley when I was very young and took us hunting after mushrooms, picking carefully through the clustering white skulls of fungus until he found something worth eating, which he brought back and cooked with what my father described as an intense care that produced four leathery fragments on a plate. I am fairly certain I refused to eat my share.

I was more interested in the sights and sounds of the valley, in imitating the birds and exclaiming excitedly about the pigs up at the sty attached to Sydenhams farm which my father held me up to see.

Mostly I remember walking in the harsh, exquisite summer light through the contrast between abbey-corseted lanes and fields that shimmered green as chameleons then vanished in a blaze of white. Nothing in between, no glum-clouded afternoons where all the greens of tree and field feel formulaic and even the campion fades from vibrant reddish pink to blackboard chalk simulacrum. Every morning was rosy in our little corner of the Slad Valley, and apples were abundant as dew.

Now the apple tree is gone, but for a bolt of knuckled wood that sinks into the landscape like Excalibur into a mossy stone. The soft lilacs of dwarf cyclamen are buried under scrub and all the Lords-and-Ladies have slithered off with their stems like sticky microphones to parties and pastures new. I am alone in the valley, with only words and memories to sustain me, and the echo of a song that hugs the tree line like a hunting owl.

2

Katy

I
t was a wrench to leave behind birdsong, imagination, the gurgling lilt of water and my mother’s undivided attentions and be a part of the wider world, but that was the price of growing older and surer of myself. Despite stubborn wailings and interminable attempts to make my mother stay in the valley with me, I was sent to nursery in Stroud whilst she worked as a supply teacher.

I did not take well to that separation. Nursery is built now only of vague memories: of parading on stage uncomfortably with a pillow stuffed up my jumper for some Christmas show whilst other, equally half-willing children teetered in and out of tune and half-learned lines; of refusing to sleep when the teacher insisted, wriggling on the floor as others napped or twitched, longing for butterflies and stickleback in the stream, not plastic cars and competition for attention. Of the few friends I made there, all but a couple of faces are now lost to time and indifference.

I learned, slowly, to separate the simple desires of valley life, where destiny was mine to play with and where I was part of everything, from the need to engage in less ecstatic realities. The valley was not mine alone for very long, anyway; I soon learned that there were other people who mattered just as much to the expanding landscape. Jean and Alan Lloyd lived above us in St Benedicts, a cottage originally as small as ours that had grown under Alan’s craftsmanship into a long and eccentric house that would not look out of place on the Swiss Alps, were it not for the run of Cotswold stone that peeked out from behind the wooden cladding he had used to extended it. They produced a child, Katy, within a year of my appearance in the valley, a late arrival inspired, I’m told, by me.

By the time Katy could walk and talk, she had taken possession of the valley quite as much as I had, and had taken a leading role in my experience of it. The valley became ours largely because she said it must be so, because she insisted upon it with a stamp of her foot and a shriek if she was not listened to.

I was an only child, in need of the hurried urgency of sibling rivalry that she had learned from her two brothers, both ten or more years older than her, who teased and tortured and played mercilessly with her, daring her to take charge. She couldn’t, so she took charge of me instead, leading our games with a shrill, amused insistence and a competitive streak that baffled and excited me to greater daring than my previously solitary existence had allowed.

Under Katy’s tutelage, living in the valley became a delirious adventure. ‘This is our house now,’ cried Katy, pointing to a briar shrub where, in autumn, the best blackberries grew. The door was a tangle of branches and nettles. Tread hard enough and it would open – and we opened it often, only letting in Jake, the Lloyd’s cheerful dog, whose eyesight was failing but who could find us every time with a snuffling devotion and who could not always be dissuaded from following us and becoming a damply affectionate part of our games. In the fields below my parents’ cottage we could be ourselves, away from Jules and Jamie, who would only pin us to the sofa with enormous cushions and make us watch
Crossroads
, or refuse to switch over to
Doctor Who
, or accuse us with all seriousness of believing we were ‘the bee’s knees’ if we let them near us. All we wanted was to be ourselves, free in a valley that no longer claimed them, because they were charging off with catapults or bows and arrows (which we secretly and desperately coveted) and friends, attempting to reclaim the valley or step over it into the mysterious outer reaches of a more grown-up life. Occasionally we would hear them shotgun-blasting their way through the woodland, taking potshots at pigeons and the occasional road sign or blaring through the green lanes on motorbikes, ignoring the bluebells and the wild garlic and roaring off in search of who knew what.

In those high summer moments of holiday and freedom, we barely noticed the parents who were never too far from us as we set off arguing, competing and adventuring, hand in hand, never quite sure who was in the lead yet never straying too far from home. We were always near enough to be heard if trouble came, though apart from a scraped knee or a nettle sting or a coat of mud from playing too hard amongst the exposed roots of trees by the stream, it never did.

We were deeply connected, in and out of each other’s houses and always astonished if something prevented us from seeing each other. Once, when I was away on a day trip with my mother, leaving my father behind in the attic, writing, Katy came calling for me. When no answer could be got from knocking on the door, she was heard to yell though the letterbox, demanding I come out. She ‘knew’ I was in there, my father said, and was stridently determined to extract me whether I wanted to come out or not.

Bisley Bluecoat School was different, a separation I learned to enjoy, especially after Katy arrived there too, the year after me. I primped and paraded the learning I wallowed in at home at every opportunity, a bookish boy who outstripped his teaching aids and was reading the last book in the
Peter and Jane
series three years before he was supposed to, showing off for the teachers.

Mrs Lawty was my first teacher, but all I can remember of her now is the satisfied smile on her face when I showed her, with a swollen-headed excess of pride, my first wonky attempts at joined-up writing, not long after I had graduated to Mrs Swale’s class. That, and the deep feeling of outrage at the news of her death, locked with my schoolmates inside the Terrapin classroom, as her body was carried to the graveyard that bordered the school in a procession we all wanted to be part of, though we did not know quite why.

School was activity and excitement, though of a more egalitarian sort than I was used to. Football in the tarmac yard, or cricket, at which the tomboyish Kim Mills excelled, leaping to catch the ball above the wickets, rising high into the air, a determined grin on her face framed by a shock of black hair – the astonishment of the boys was vocal and intense. The shock of seeing Jamie Gibbons beaten by the Head in front of the whole school with a slipper for some affront I didn’t understand or care about, the sort of punishment that was only ever dished out in the Beano or the Dandy and that just didn’t happen at home.