Note
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1 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.
4
Religion, Sex and Chickens
Religion 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.
Irritated, we amused ourselves, chattering away with our backs against the cool grey gravestones or climbing on the tombs. We didn’t stray far, certain that at some point someone would come, either the Sunday School or parents or both. Nobody passed by – only the cautious buzzing of insects and the distant rush of the village wells was audible under our voices.
Somebody must have seen us there, playing quietly, and recognised us, called the valley in the hope that someone would be home. They must have got the party line because it was our neighbour John Horton who came to take us away.
John and Judy Horton had taken over the Old Chapel at the end of our garden in 1975, bringing with them a sense of wildness and other-worldliness that moved the chapel farther away from its roots. Instead of religious musical murmurings emanating from the chapel, the air on a Saturday night was filled with smoke-fuelled, husky versions of Bob Dylan songs. To this day I find it impossible to listen to Street Legal without thinking of the Hortons and their visiting friends, who all seemed to have wildly improbable and exciting names like Spike, wailing and strumming away at the songs. I remain firmly of the opinion that their stripped back versions were better than the actual album. They were a joyously anarchic family to be around.
Judy, a wiry Australian woman, was gloriously impatient with my tendency to wail louder after an accident if I knew my mother was on her way and immensely brusque with me when I reacted in very vocal horror to the fish head soup she was cooking (my mother had had a Linda McCartney moment in the mid-1960s having seen lambs playing in a field and vowed never to eat meat again – I was as a consequence brought up vegetarian, putting me immediately at odds with the country children at school), dismissing my objections with a pithy put-down and a sharp reminder that it wasn’t for me.
John, who had rebuilt the chapel whilst they lived at Driftcombe, the big, grand, cold place at the other end of the valley, I remember as an altogether more laid-back individual (unless the car broke down – I recall being pulled in hasty panic to the Midland Bank building in Cheltenham as John’s car erupted in smoke by the side of the road) who led the games that inevitably started with Jessie and Luke, their two children.
Luke was too young to figure much in my valley life, except as an inevitable wailing presence, but Jessie, a year or so younger than Katy, became an integral part of the gang that Katy and I had formed in the absence of other gangs. Jessie was anarchy personified as a four- and five-year-old – climbing up to the tree house in the yew beside Katy’s house, in which both girls were already roosting, I said something that clearly annoyed them both. ‘Stop him coming up here,’ cried Katy. Jessie hoisted up her skirt and peed on me. I jumped and ran, too surprised to even complain.
We were perpetually in and out of each other’s houses from then on, the three of us, a small community re-naturing the way the valley and its contents worked. We explored down the lane to Mrs Bevan’s old cottage, thrilling at its quietness and emptiness and to the stories of a family of wild cats that had once been her brood; walked past it to Driftcombe to climb an easy, slanting yew. Driftcombe, at the end of the valley, was owned by Duncan Smith and let to holidaymakers in the summer and to six-monthly tenants in the winter. It was so near the point of the valley, beneath steep hills, that even though it was south-facing it got next to no sun at midwinter. Unlike Mrs Bevan’s strange little derelict house, which seemed to be merely empty, a place fraught with everyday dangers in which we refrained from playing, Driftcombe was reputedly haunted. We did not go near on our own except in daylight, as visitors when people were about, with parents.
Not going near the house was one thing, but its pond was far enough away to investigate, rife as it was with water boatmen, skating in aerobic languor across the water’s tensile surface, and dragonflies diving through supine willow branches. Unlike the stream at the other end of the valley, it was ideal to push wooden boats out on, and all weary sailors come summer liked gooseberries fresh from the prickly bush a couple of yards away.
Above the looming shadow of Driftcombe, up into the rough, untended woodland, we found shells of houses to investigate, the skeletal debris of a valley that had once been much more heavily populated, which had boasted its own pub and the main road from Slad to Bisley cutting up through it. We knew nothing of this then, making house in the toothy remains of others’ homes one hundred and more years after they had gone, walking in their footsteps and never knowing that we were more like ghosts than any spirit, imagined or otherwise, that haunted the big house below us.
As we grew older, the presence of neighbours became more pronounced; the Wildes moved into the cottage in the middle of our terrace and took what had been an incoherent grassy space beyond their front door and tamed it to patio in direct contravention of their surname. At first they were there rarely, as work was underway. In their absence, Katy and I colonised their patio for more formal games. One favourite was King of the Castle, which involved shouting at each other and waving sticks while swaying precariously on the high, sharp wall that offered a pleasingly sheer drop into a little hedged-off suntrap ten feet below and headily close access to a spot which the local adders had chosen as a basking point as soon as the stones were laid.
Another was Grandmother’s Footsteps, in which my father – already an excellent and much-practised Billy Goat Gruff down at the stream – excelled as the wolf.
‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ we called, creeping slowly up behind him.
‘12.15 and 32 seconds,’ he replied. We crept a little closer.
‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ we yelled again in ragged chorus.
‘LUNCHTIME!’
We froze unsteadily as he span around, revealing a wicked glint in his eye, his beard exploding into view like a dust-storm cloud in negative, black and brown, red-streaked and wolfish.
‘I can see your washing-tub face quivering,’ he growled, pointing at Katy.
Katy, entirely unable to resist a taunt, and especially that one, set her face to a frown and her shoulders forward.
‘I have NOT got a washing-tub face,’ she said, sourly.
‘You moved!’ I said, exultant.
‘So did you,’
she said, in a huff of high-pitched exasperation.
‘You’re both lunch,’ yelled my father and chased us home.
They were anything but wild, the Wildes; a pleasant enough urbanite couple with enough money to take a weekend cottage in the country. They were endlessly fascinating to me, and to my friends, not because they were particularly approachable or fun for a child to be around, but because they would bring out a jar of sweets if they saw children passing and hand them out in genial fashion, as if bribing their way in to the local scenery.
Because I lived next door, I was best placed to profit from this generosity. With a careful eye for their exits into the daylight I wandered past with a winning smile every time I saw an opportunity. Then one weekend Skanda Huggins came to stay, and was offered a sweet as well. Prone, in tandem, to conjuring up very reasonable-seeming sorts of mischief (in our eyes at least), Skanda and I immediately started planning a campaign of extraction that would, we were certain, have made any military leader proud. We staked out the Wilde’s patio and whenever the doorway twitched, came sweeping past in the flush of some instantly invented and entirely see-through ‘game’, designed to carry us past their door as they came out and guarantee us sweets – mints and penny chews, strawberry bonbons, anything sugary that would last a while without going off in a damp old Cotswold stone weekend cottage.
They cottoned on to our routine quite quickly and laughed at us, assuming it was little more than a passing phase. They were childless. They had no idea of the tenacious hold that sugar had on the minds of children who are afforded ten pence to spend on sweets in the village store every Saturday, but only if they’re very good. Even in 1978, ten pence didn’t go particularly far, when there was the lure of Space Dust and Spangles and Mars Bars and Blackjacks and so much more – the kilner jar full of sweets we knew to be lurking on the shelf in their front room, and which surely by now had our names engraved upon it, was too much temptation. So, when Skanda came again, we upped the stakes.
We were children. We didn’t think beyond the rush of sugar in our blood. We didn’t understand completely that they came down to the valley for peace and quiet, to escape the giddy rush of London. Anyway, the valley was mine, and by extension Skanda’s, because he was with me and together we were impish and trouble – boys, in other words. Even Katy wouldn’t always get a look in when Skanda was around.
Derek and Margaret Wilde tolerated our second campaign, but their suburban veneer wore a little thin by the end of the weekend, as they didn’t get more than a few minutes peace to themselves outside. At the third campaign, a few weeks later, they retired indoors for much of the weekend. We could hear them moving around inside, through the thin skin of brick that separated the two houses. Eventually there was a measure of silence.
‘They’ve gone outside,’ said Skanda, excited.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ said I.
‘What are you going to have?’ said Skanda, pulling on his boots.
‘I think I’d like a blackjack,’ I replied, wrestling with my jumper. ‘What about you?’
We didn’t wait for what Skanda wanted, but barked a brief goodbye to my mother in the kitchen and ran next door. Nobody was in the garden. We looked, puzzled. We’d been too quick for them to have strayed too far away from their house.
‘Is their car still there?’ I said.
We ran up to the lane. Their car was still there, perched inside a green tin garage, built in a gaudy and poor attempt to blend with its surroundings. We ran back to the house.
‘Why don’t we knock?’ said Skanda.
‘Yes, let’s,’ I said.
We knocked. There was no answer. We knocked again, louder, then stood back on the patio staring up at the small windows above us; still no reply. We knocked a third time, as loud as both our small pairs of fists could manage. There was an eruption in the sky, like a badger falling through the branches of a tree, and harsh language muffled by Cotswold stone.
A moment later the front door opened, and Derek stood there, half-dressed, his appearance finally torn away from ‘smart Londoner come to the country’ and living up gloriously to his surname.
‘What the hell do you want?’ he roared.
We blanched.
‘We … we wondered if we could have a … sweet?’ I murmured, looking to Skanda for support.
‘Um …’ said Skanda.
‘Go home and don’t come asking for any f***ing sweets any f***ing more,’ roared Derek. ‘We would like some f***ing peace and quiet.’
We fled, clattering like pigeons through the gate and stood, shaking, in the kitchen. I think my mother laughed. She may have offered us Tigger Juice, a concoction of her own invention blending milk, spice and honey. She certainly didn’t offer us any support once she’d worked out what we’d interrupted.
I remember family visits as exotic visitations. My mother’s sister Olive came most often, with her husband Alan and their children Graham and Zoë. Pleasingly conventional, thoroughly English, they were no less exotic for all that, since they did not live close by. The arrival of my father’s family was eye-openingly strange, however; a collection of Jews from all over the world trooping down the path looking decidedly different: Aunt Judy, with hair almost as red as mine, over from Israel with Aunt Gustel; Aunt Elise from Paris with her half-Vietnamese children Daniel and Olivia; Aunt Selma and Uncle Alfred over from California with their daughters Wendy and Roberta; cousins David and Miriam from London; and at the head of the line my Grandmother, Rosi, a tiny, calm and beautiful woman as compact and lined as a walnut, wearing a blue headscarf and a seraphic smile.
The valley came alive with a multitude of accents and new ideas, religious imperatives outweighed by familial bond. These visits were quite a breakthrough. My father, the rebellious youngest, had ‘married out’ of a very orthodox family and ‘run off’ to be a poet to considerable disapproval (my Aunt Elise had also ‘married out’ – a rebel figure in the family since childhood, she had encouraged my father in his upheavals against the conventional regimentations of Orthodox Judaism). Only after I was born did my Grandmother relent, and come to visit us. The pull of grandchildren is at least as powerful as prayer. The house was made spick and span and as kosher as it was possible for goyim to manage, my mother being at pains to make the religious as welcome as those who cared little for the faith.
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.
A Thousand Laurie Lees Page 4
