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
Like 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.
The front door welcomed one into a cosy little corridor lined with books and coats and boots and binoculars. The kitchen, to the left, was a cork-tiled haven – a narrow, yellow-walled galley filled with flowers and bits of pottery she had carefully accrued, plus a long pine table that filled one end of the room and looked out into the sunset, westwards to Slad through a pair of Liberty print curtains that drew together like a tangle of flowers. Arwen would lurk behind them, staring in at us with one green eye, the other hidden by Liberty.
The front room was all bare stone and books, shelves of them covering the thin brick wall dividing the houses as a feeble but beautiful insulation against travelling sound. She sourced everything carefully and locally – the rocking chairs in which I careered dangerously were from local makers, the hard green utilitarian carpet that left indentations in my knees if I knelt too long on it was from a shop in Stroud, there were rough-hewn benches and a painting of flowers she’d made when she was seventeen. In amongst this she placed the treasures she found in the woods. A sheep skull she’d found and written about took pride of place on the mantelpiece, alongside a delicate glass vase that was as violently yellow as a varnished egg yolk.
Upstairs, a cool, clean bathroom, a separate lavatory and two bedrooms. Mine was narrow and yellow and covered with posters of Breughel and of lions and unicorns dancing attendance to medieval ladies in wimples. Luminous stars glowed between the black beams at night. My parents’ room was green, with a map of the valley on one wall and a fool asleep on a hill opposite. The floorboards were painted black. Above this, the attic, in which one could sometimes find a box of crisps, a television or my father, if the tides were right, chattering away at the typewriter one-fingered, a green eyeshade of the sort worn by newsmen and card-sharps in films from the 1940s propped on his brow.
There was always a sense of shifting in the attic, the papers ebbing and flowing around the big Buddha chair from which I watched television on rare occasions. It was my father’s place, his rickety sanctuary, where he sometimes hid if visitors came. At night he would work on the kitchen table, but always before breakfast the papers were hurried upstairs and locked back behind my mother’s barrier of clean.
‘I hear you call my head a bin/where children dip their buckets in,’ my father would sing to her when she was down, bringing up a bubble of laughter in her throat. I envied his ability to make her laugh and tried to emulate it. She encouraged more seriousness in me, steered me towards careful writing, reading and speaking aloud.
In her lonelier periods in the valley, when my father was away, she took me walking, learning the names of flowers and the birds. I sucked in the knowledge, writing little poems about sheep in the fields and red campion and autumn. In ‘Poem of Absence’, she wrote:
to be alone for a month is good
I follow the bright fish of memory
falling deeper into myself
to the endless present
the child’s cry is my only clock
Yet the years wore on and my father’s absences became longer – sometimes I found him at Stroud station, suddenly beardless after a long trip around North America and didn’t recognise him. I hid behind my mother’s legs, shy and scared.
I sit in the woods at dusk
listening for the sound of your singing
there are letters from a thousand miles
you wrote a week ago
like leaves from an autumn tree
they fall on the mat
it was your voice woke me
and the absent touch of your hand
Absence stilled her, made her harder to reach. She would range out into the night on longer walks and take holidays to Cornwall with me only. Men would come to the valley, bringing parcels of adoration that she would not open, or at least not when I was there. I remember some of them vividly, the flash of their hopeful faces bright in the window, the way they were delicately attendant to my needs, solicitous and courtly and absolutely not welcome because they were distractions from my real business of living.
I only remember a couple of these interlopers and admirers fondly. Oswald Jones, a balding Welsh photographer, one of her dearest friends, who loved her deeply and took ceaseless photos of her (all of which she archly dismissed as awful), used to snarl at, satirise and tease me till I was his devoted friend. ‘Old Oz’ she called him, keeping him carefully, delicately at arm’s length. We had a little wooden begging bowl with a face on its handle that looked like Ossie, which my mother used for raisins, perhaps as a jest at his fondness for alcohol. I remember the quietly mortified look on his face when I gleefully told him it was called the Ossie bowl.
Then there was Roger Garfitt, a lithe and cautious poet in his mid thirties who came one day in March 1980 for a visit that lasted a fortnight and made a huge impression on me. In part it was the fact that he looked like Dick Turpin, as played by Richard O’Sullivan on the TV on Saturday afternoons – the only thing that was guaranteed to keep me indoors and which infested my imagination in numerous games around the valley and was reported as outright fact in my Monday morning news book at school. I remember arguing with Katy that she had to be Turpin’s partner, Swiftnick, because she had the right colour hair. She was having none of it. Both of us wanted to be Turpin.
Roger was an exotic curiosity, parked on the divan downstairs every morning for two weeks. To my mind, he wrested any claim I might have had on being Dick Turpin, and was exciting company for it. I went to school content that there was something new and interesting to come home to, blissfully unaware that my mother was not keeping Roger at arm’s length as soon as I had marched up the hill to the cheerful yell of ‘Come on lightning’.
It was not just the fact that he resembled the heavily romanticised TV Turpin, who in imagination had accompanied me through every nook and cranny of the valley, upsetting imaginary apple carts and buckling bucket-loads of swash to every tree. As much as anything it was my mother’s excitement rubbing off on me, an emotion that had been lacking in her for more than a year.
Before long we were heading off to visit her oldest friend Jane Percival with him whilst my father was away on another American tour. It came as only a small surprise to me when my mother and I packed ourselves into a bright orange Peugeot and left the valley for Sunderland, to live with him.
It had been a long time coming, not that I knew it in my territorial, devotional state of being, certain that I was the only thing that mattered to her. My father was away too often, of necessity most of the time, earning money, but also finding distraction in the wider world. Though he devoted vast and eccentric energies to the maintenance of the life we shared, he was fundamentally more urban than my mother, who had always been less temperamentally attuned to the streets of cities and the hustle and bustle of arts communities and literary worlds.
The valley was a place of haven for him, of peace and familial contentment, when he was there. But my mother, whether in her country camouflage of black padded coat and a broad rimmed floppy hat or peering through elderflowers with a wry, seductive grin on her face, her stark outer beauty softened by childbirth and need, still found it hard to be so often in the valley without him. A fragility crept in more often under her upturned smile, beneath the faintly medieval clothes she wore, her tapestry of greens, blacks, browns and muted blues, past the tiny bouquets of flowers she plucked from wood and hedgerow to adorn the kitchen table. The dreams of food for free, her son brought up away from
pollution and the screech of competition, the search for contentment out of the hubbub of the city, had come at a cost; a partial disquiet of the soul. Intact, our family operated in a fizzing whorl of joy; with just a few neighbours and myself for company, solitude was sometimes difficult for her to bear.
In the book she wrote during the ten years we lived there, Water Over Stone, a marked sorrow and a noticeable edge of fear creeps into her writing, inevitable perhaps after entry into her middle years and the death of her father, with whom she had had a difficult relationship. In ‘Walking in Autumn’, dedicated to Diana Lodge, with whom she shared much in common excepting Diana’s ability to be wholly solitary, at once at one with the landscape and apart from it, she writes about the walk to Elcombe along the green lanes through Keensgrove wood, about how darkness falls and the walkers experience a sudden onrush of fear:
We hurry without reason
stumbling over roots and stones.
A night creature lurches, cries out,
crashes through brambles.
Skin shrinks inside our clothes;
almost we run
falling through darkness to the wood’s end,
the gate into the sloping field.
Home is lights and woodsmoke, voices –
and, our breath caught, not trembling now,
a strange reluctance to enter within doors.
In hindsight this fragility, this fear to enter within doors seems to me to mark the point at which she needed to move on, to escape the quiet of the valley. She was sinking into the landscape rather, without someone to help her rise above it, to share its mysteries with, bone and water and stone becoming less a balm against the prescriptive rigours of day-to-day existence, supply teaching in schools, touring shows and recording for the BBC than it once had been.
A Thousand Laurie Lees Page 5
