A Thousand Laurie Lees (7 page)

Even so, my father would add devilment to the occasion, keeping ham in the house even though he knew that his mother was coming. He would stand with his back to the kitchen sink, slipping morsels of dead pig into his mouth secretly. He only stopped when I asked ‘Why are you eating dead pig?’ in a loud voice, unaware of the religious implications and only concerned for the poor pig, whose compatriot I stared at over the wall whenever we passed Sydenhams Farm. I am sure there was suppressed laughter from some of the family, and a mildly disappointed look in my Grandmother’s kind eyes. I remember that look because it was such a rare occurrence on her face; normally all she projected was love and the comfort of knowing that, despite being born away from her faith, I was her grandson. There was a certain pleasure, too, in the fact that, because I was vegetarian, I was kosher by default.

We kept a brood of bantams for a few years, in a haphazard run built halfway down the garden, which we shifted once or twice to keep the earth scratched clean of weeds, before we sold them on. My father, out of the attic and in puckish, bucolic mood, would dance past them singing their names in a chorus of increasingly jazzy melodic lunacy and scattering feed through the chicken wire before he went to tend the vegetables farther down the garden.

They were a capricious lot, these birds, forever fighting for dominance in the small run and eager to escape and loiter through the vegetable patch we shared with the Hortons, daring the local foxes into action. A couple at least were lost to the fox, slicing his way under the wire at night and causing havoc, but not before they had made their mark on me.

We got them when I was six, and all I could dream about was chickens – Arwen got some respite from my attentions for a while. Aged three I had driven off her son, Baggins, thanks to my tender ministrations to his tail. I remember poor Baggins levitating round the kitchen in his desperation to escape me, knocking pots from the shelves and yowling. He was last seen, wild eyed, disappearing into the throng of feral cats round Mrs Bevan’s derelict cottage from where, my mother was certain, half his seed had come. I was kinder to Arwen – my mother made sure of that, leaning in to tell me, gently but firmly, when I went too far – and by the time the bantams came along, my desire to interact with animals was tempered with a measure of restraint.

Restraint was no dam for fascination, however, and every morning I went hunting through the roosts for eggs, carefully unlatching and pulling back the flaps on the side of the hut and watching as the outraged bantam shuffled away from her warm straw onto the shit-streaked walkway, a feisty bicker dying slowly in her throat. When she had retreated far enough, in went my fingers with a lover’s delicacy, sifting the straw for the warm, speckled oval, which I then reverently deposited in my mother’s apron pocket. Every day came new rewards for my delicacy until, on my seventh birthday, we found seven perfect eggs, all of them different, slipped them out of the straw in trembling fingers, as warm in my hand as if they were alive. Better than cakes or candles; a feast, a miracle. The valley and the chickens loved me.

That sensation of reciprocated love lasted until Christmas, when my cousin Zoë came to stay. Zoë was not a vegetarian and my Aunt Olive, packing her off for Christmas to her bohemian, vegetarian sister’s house, could not envisage that she’d survive the festivities without the requisite roast, so in a Tupperware came a chicken ready-roasted for the feasting.

It was a huge amount of chicken – far more than Zoë could eat and bigger even than the eyes and stomach of my father, who happily and regularly put cooked meats from Stroud and London delis into the fridge, emitting loud yumming sounds when he took them out again. Christmas passed, as Christmas usually does, in a haze of food and music and games and laughter, but at the end a large part of the chicken carcass remained. We didn’t know what to do with it, and didn’t want to waste it, but all the neighbours were either away or replete.

So, ceremoniously and without consideration for the consequences, we marched the chicken corpse down the garden to the bantam run and threw it into the wire coop. There was an explosion in the hen run; bantams came booming from the hatch in a storm cloud of feather, battling to get to the new arrival. Oozo, the scruffiest and most determined of our hens, a black and white speckled tartar who didn’t so much rule the roost as run it with a neo-fascist efficiency, doling out pecks and beatings to any hen fool enough to stand in her way, pounced upon the corpse. She lifted it up with a mad little gleam in her eye, waving it about triumphantly. And then all hell broke loose. Anarchy reigned in the chicken coop. Oozo’s supremacy fell to pieces as all the other hens bombarded her for a share of her cannibal prize.

We watched, a sense of horror smothering us like mist, astonished at the frenzy, as feathers were torn out and blood was drawn as they fought each other for a taste of flesh; at how, within minutes, the chicken corpse had been reduced nearly to bone, split apart and quartered around the coop by hens pecking out a manic rhythm and clucking at each other in fury if their personal circles of attrition were invaded as they hacked the last scrap from their distant kin.

I wasn’t quite so keen on eggs or chickens after that.

5

Beat

L
ike many writers, my mother collected her ideas whilst walking, often on the edge of night, in a state of concentrated thoughtfulness and forgetfulness, striking out into the woods, on her own or with friends.

The valley was sometimes a cage around which she prowled. We had moved there because she did not want to bring me up in the city she had hated, had wanted a place of peace and escape, somewhere to retreat to away from the urban bubble and toil. My father, however, was still deeply embroiled in London, and was there regularly, leaving us alone in the woods, in the dark. Though he was, of course, attempting to ‘bring home the bacon’, the tight nuclear unit that she had envisaged was stressed and strained by his long tours and engagements. She kept house in the meantime, travelled to Bristol or London for readings and recordings for the BBC when she could, filling up the low times between engagements with supply work in local schools, waiting for the times of plenty when my father returned.

She instinctively, intellectually slipped the bars of the cage on these walks out into the half-light of the valley, looking for the bones of its myths and histories whilst I was looked after by Jean and Alan Lloyd or the Hortons, playing with Katy and Jessie or reading books, knowing nothing of her loneliness yet only too glad to see her when she returned. Isolation, as for many poets, was a necessity for her pen and spirit, and she took full advantage of it, though after a while it could chafe and burn.

What ghosts or gods she found slipping through mud on the dark path through Keensgrove Woods only her poems can tell and they are often potently elusive. Poems such as ‘Letter to be sent by air’ however, written to my father on a trip to America, are at least in part an expression of her occasional sense of dislocation and loss within the valley, for all that ‘… the child shouts at the sky/declares its portents’.

sometimes my head is a lightness

filled with dry grass

I spread into the sky

over seas and wide forests

to find you

how you are torn out of me

a cry not my own splits the wind

I am streaming with air

where are your limbs in this whiteness?

in the night intervals

as speech to the tongue

I am near to you

as blood to the earth

I conjure you home

To me the valley was consumed with light, as I was with her. When my father was there too, the house and the trees and the whole valley full of birds and creatures sang to the tune of their voices. Yet it is her voice that I remember most clearly from childhood, which comes back to me decades later, long before her face. As John Papworth put it:

… that voice – gentle, faintly husky, full of warmth and friendliness, and roseate with the most exquisitely delicate articulation and modulation … It sometimes seemed to me her very soul was in her voice, even when she conversed on mundane things.

She once read to me from her poetry in her Cotswold cottage and some of the lines, coupled with the luminously distinctive sound of her voice, echoed within and uplifted me for days; but I noticed that at public readings she had that same capacity quietly to rivet an audience and to transmute its attention into a silent sense of almost Elysian ecstasy.

As a young boy, almost all I ever craved in the quiet moments when I was not running through the valley, convinced that I was in charge of its light and growth and of the direction the earth span, was that voice, that attention, the ecstatic calmness that it instilled in me, whether she was reading me stories, or poems, or encouraging me to do the same.

I would walk in her wake in deep attachment, a jealous little copper-headed blur of admiration. When she directed the mummers play one Christmas (the worthies of Bisley revelling in the fact that they had a RADA-trained actress to bring the show back to life) I, although playing the Doctor, learned every part by heart because, though I really wanted to be Saint George, I was ready to do anything for the show and wanted to impress upon my mother that there was nothing that I could not do. I remember dancing on the sidelines, waiting my turn to speak, in the cold main street of Bisley, outside the old gaol, my back to its heavy, barred and lidless eyes, breathing out Saint George’s lines in clouds of shivering steam.

I learned poetry by rote with her as well (not because she insisted, but because it was natural to do so) and learned to listen to the cadences and rhymes of the poetry she rehearsed for shows she toured with Robert Gittings celebrating Hardy and Keats, listening out with an eager ear for new sounds and meanings. Often the valley answered us back, reinforcing poetry that was being read aloud with interpolations of its own.

Charles Causley was a particular favourite of mine – his collection of poems for children,
Figgie Hobbin
, was stuffed with memorable characters such as Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth-Toast and vicars who didn’t recognise their own daughters, all of whom were dressed in the most delicate mnemonics of rhythm and rhyme.

One Causely poem that particularly stuck in my head, and delighted me enough to wake my parents one Sunday morning, leaping on their bed and demanding they listen to me read, was ‘I Saw a Jolly Hunter’, a bouncingly gleeful poem about a hunter out after a hare. The Jolly Hunter shoots himself dead by accident whilst the Jolly Hare gets away; the perfect poem for a vengeful seven-year-old vegetarian who instinctively requires the animal to survive at the expense of the hunter.

I launched into the poem as my parents blearily sat up in bed, enunciating every word in punctilious imitation of my mother and, at the exact moment I read the line
Bang! went the jolly gun
, a shotgun gave its retort deep in the woods, echoing through the closing lines of the poem:

Hunter jolly dead

Jolly hare got clean away.

Jolly good I said.

‘Jolly good!’ said my father, bounding up from under the covers in naked refugee sympathy for the escaping underdog, meat eater though he was.

‘The valley’s listening,’ said my mother.

Later, quietly, I hoped that it had not been listening too hard and consumed one of the Lloyds as they stalked through the woods for pigeons with their shotguns.

Those early, unshorn days of my childhood were as perfect as my mother could make them. Free of London, she threw her all into writing, teaching and keeping me occupied. We were just about comfortable – poets tend to swing through life on the breadline, leaping occasionally up into the baker’s window when a commission or a reading comes in – but much time and money was put into the paperwork that surged like a sea through the attic, letters and poems and paintings for my father’s endless un-commercial but extraordinarily richly textured countercultural magazines. My mother battled continually to stem the tide of paperwork at the attic stairs.