A Thousand Laurie Lees (5 page)

As with any good house, the only room that mattered when the garden was not available was the kitchen; its deep fireplace which housed a wood-burning stove and a defunct bread oven, its long wooden table with a high-backed pew running down the pantry wall that seated ten or fed forty if there were parties in the garden. The pantry itself was a thing of wonder, a walk-in cornucopia, lined with jar upon jar of preserves and foodstuffs that beggared the modest imaginings of a child raised in a small house that was always stocked but never replete.

Diana was a generous and warm woman – she welcomed and engaged with children as much as with adults, and my earliest memories of her are at Easter, when the garden became alive with hungry children engaged in her annual Easter egg hunt. We rushed back and forth amongst the exquisitely wild borders and through the small orchard hunting chocolate, as she stood by and laughed and encouraged us to look harder.

Diana was an intensely devout Catholic, having converted a few years before, but the only clue was in the subtle crucifix she wore and the quietly placed iconography in the kitchen – religion was never pronounced, never interfered with the joy and adventures of children, who ran roughshod and happy through the gardens as if they were theirs entirely to command, some little adjunct of Eden. The house itself was ‘an act of worship in colour – [it] communicates joy similar to a Fra Angelico painting,’ my mother wrote in a letter in 1969.

A sense of bohemia lingered like incense in Trillgate, more so when Diana’s children and grandchildren came to visit. The eldest, Tom, brought over from Canada not only his three boys, Tom Jr., Lionel and Brodie, but a whiff of rock and roll glamour still clinging from his time on Radio Caroline, the pirate station of which he’d been the controller in the sixties. His brother Colin figured more in my life; a puckish man with a bright, jutting beard and a playful, quixotic demeanour, whose barking laugh chased us children wherever we ran throughout the house and garden.

His children, Owen and Caitlin, were regular visitors, up from Bristol. They came with a sharp, new manner, like a change in the air; the smell of the city on their breath. Owen played particularly hard, with a snap in his eye and a ready push that led to trouble and fun. Outside Diana’s studio, a precarious log cabin built to be hidden just beyond the garden, I remember suddenly fighting back; inspired perhaps by Katy’s years of more metaphorical pushing, I carried Owen over the edge of the veranda where he disappeared in an avalanche of nettle, bramble and boy, yelling and rolling down the hill to the fortuitous fence at the edge of the field. I remember the horror and the guilt of his fall, the way he slipped and rolled, the terror in the adults’ eyes. I also remember the way Owen, bruised and scratched, got up laughing and groaning, and how nothing more was ever (nor ever needed to be) said.

It was a house of small, precise details hidden amongst the jumble of a bigger life: the Catholic icons stood out on the wall despite, or perhaps because of, their careful amalgamation into the general architectures of daily life. In the same way, Diana’s intensively curated spirit filled her conversation, shaped by art and religion, by encounters with the great, the good and the not-so-good of the literary and artistic world, and by her piercing gentleness of thought and heart. By the full moon’s light you could leave her house and walk deep into a Samuel Palmer painting as much because her conversation led you there as because the landscape around Slad was, and in places remains, akin to his visionary pastoral world.

The other direction in which we struck out was over the valley, down a scramble of path and over a ford in the stream before rising up and becoming suddenly enveloped by the trees of Keensgrove Wood. From there we followed the green lane through the skirts of Catswood, round through Redding Wood and out into the lane at the top of Elcombe to Rose Cottage. The woodland never seemed to cease, but there was a noticeable change along the mile or more that we walked – there was little traffic other than wild animals in the woods excepting the occasional stray sheep (or its remains, buried under bramble or wild garlic) and the occasional horse hoof-print, but the woods changed in their management.

Keensgrove was close and dark and low. The trees jostled for light and it was from here that the foxes and owls sounded most. Catswood opened out a little, made room for sweeping hides of bluebells or wild garlic enclosing the muscle and sinew of the hill, whilst Redding Wood opened out still further, its canopy sweeping up to the height of a cathedral before contracting suddenly into a narrow stretch of lane running parallel to the road; here, for many years, carefully hidden at the edge of the wood stood a red-and-black gypsy caravan that would have seemed gaudy had it been housed anywhere else. On closer inspection, it was as exquisite as a gingerbread house, with hooks for lanterns curving like talons over the steps and faded decorations by the door and on the panels at its side.

Brought up on Rupert annuals and the raggle-taggle gypsies-oh, I walked past this caravan half-expecting the name Rollo to be called and some apple-cheeked boy wearing a spotted scarf on his head to run up the lane to the caravan carrying a bundle of sticks or towing an unwilling and immeasurably large horse. I was always disappointed. Instead, beyond the tree line, there was Rose Cottage, a long house facing west and denied the sun by Swift’s Hill, where there were different pleasures to be found; the next point on the rough-cut diamond of people and places we knew.

Rose Cottage was owned by John Papworth, who founded
Resurgence
magazine with Sir Herbert Read, E.F. Schumacher and Leopold Kohr (Diana Lodge’s long-term partner after Oliver Lodge had died). Visiting there was often a strange experience, as John was a fierce and satirical man with all the fire of a preacher and the anarchic leanings of someone who had parted company with communism and the Labour party because of their authoritarian streak. He came across, in hindsight, as a peculiar, slightly alarming but more often than not delightful mix of John le Mesurier, Tony Benn and the Ancient Mariner.

Anyone and everyone who crossed his path was liable to be quizzed relentlessly by John, or at least by John’s eyebrows, which seemed to be able to carry on conversations of their own, arching like a crow’s wings up his forehead. He was a terror, a delight and a tease to children, prone to giving vent to opinions that confounded many of them, not least myself, and bringing religion into the conversation at unexpected angles. He would often look at me sternly and announce that ‘Adam was a gardener!’ fixing me, as an eagle might a rabbit, with an eye glowering out from beneath one arched eyebrow before quickly bounding off on another, possibly related but considerably less alarming, topic.

Given that my only attempts at gardening tended to amount to little more than chasing my father down our long, narrow garden with a hosepipe through stacked tyre potato beds and picking the apple mint and lemon balm that grew like weeds outside our front door, I took a little fright at this pronouncement at first, sure that he had seen something or knew something that I didn’t. Whether that was the case or not, the fright wore off with repetition (anyway, I was going to be a fireman, or an acrobat – never a gardener).

The final point on the diamond was Laurie Lee, whom we visited less often, more often than not in his lesser-known drinking haunt, The Star, which as far as I can tell was used for quieter conversations, conversations that scratched under the surface of his public persona, a place no tourist knew or dared to enter.

The Woolpack was always for public Laurie, impish and amusing Laurie who knew very well the wider impact of
Cider with Rosie
, for the Laurie who would encounter tourists and tease them. One encounter outside the Woolpack ran as follows:
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a tourist, most probably American and certainly immensely swayed by Laurie’s description of village life, so much so as to believe it took place millennia ago in a lost world more akin to Tolkien’s Shire than the actual reality, stumbled down, awed, to the Woolpack’s door out of the steep and tree-lined churchyard set into the bank opposite the pub. Puffed out and tired from a search around the precarious gravestones, which permanently teeter on the edge of falling like an old boxer’s teeth, the tourist stopped a smartly dressed older gentleman in a white fedora, who was making his way home from the pub, and asked: ‘Excuse me, could you tell me where Laurie Lee is buried?’

Laurie looked at the tourist wryly and, in warmly arch tones, announced: ‘I don’t know about up there, but if you come in to the pub later you’ll find him buried in a pint.’

My first memories of Laurie are not of him buried in a pint, however, but of him buried in conversation. I’m not suggesting that pints weren’t involved, just that all that I remember from these meetings of poets at The Star was the way the drive up to the pub, now a private house halfway between Slad and the Vatch, rose from the road in an elegant tarmacadam sweep; how the trees obscured the valley from sight; how bird and sunlight created an erratic and ever-changing shadow play of sheet music; how intensely my parents, my mother in particular, talked with Laurie about poetry and landscape and the valley we all shared; and how little I would interrupt, caught between the dark and attractive sense-scape of the pub, the conversation and the sun reaching back to ruffle the scalp of Swift’s Hill.

From a very early age I had a sense of Laurie being buried in this valley, alive and breathing yet thoroughly rooted in, a spirit of mischief and nature and place. Not that I would have put it like that then, but that is the sensation that has grown out of every childhood encounter with him, and as often as he might shoot off to London dressed in his public suit there was no doubt that something of him always lingered here.

The sense that, locally, a pint was raised to Laurie’s success only to be followed by the occasional sour whiskey chaser to ‘too-much-success-for-a-local-boy-done-a-bit-too-good-and-he-knew-it’ has only confirmed this. I was part of the new breed of incomers whose arrival brought continual changes to the valley, changes that have slowly set it ever further apart from the supposed halcyon of
Cider with Rosie
. As an outsider, granted access but still only looking in as from a distance, my roots set raw and loose in Slad soil, I grew up celebrating Laurie’s vision of a distant land that still crumbled gently underfoot.

Note

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  This is the version that has done the rounds since Laurie’s death. His original telling of it involved two schoolgirls and came in a clean and a bawdy version. Like all good stories, the telling of it has mutated bit by bit over the years.

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Religion, Sex and Chickens

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eligion grows with shallow roots in valleys like Slad, where children can run off into the woods and make their own churches. It’s the adults that keep it going, keep on trying to throw more mulch in to deepen it in their children and settle the roots.

We maintained a regard for all the morbid fascinations of funerals and the darker, stranger dealings of Genesis, but Katy and I had little time for the formal expressions of it, however much our parents may or may not have wanted us to learn to love Sunday School. Certainly we fought for parts in the school Nativity – I was always the narrator and I seem to recall that Katy was a reluctant shepherd with ambitions at Mary – but when it came to the Sunday morning agonies, we accepted with bad grace.

Fortunately, our agonies were brought to an abrupt end – the last time I can remember going to Sunday School, we were dropped off by the gate that led through the schoolyard to Bisley church and waved to as we stomped like churls across the tarmac yard. Arriving at the church I tried the door. It would not open. Katy knocked. There was no answer. We knocked a couple more times before one of us (Katy, I suspect) decided that we should check if parents were still there. They weren’t.

Nothing happened in the churchyard. It was a hazy spring morning and we knew that flowers were opening in the valley, the tree line was beginning to obscure the sky with green. We would rather have been there. Yet here we were, stuck in a shrouded churchyard on our own with nobody coming. There was no Sunday School that day.