My father, despite his itinerant lifestyle and his long absences from the valley, could not and would not let her go without a valiant effort to make her change her mind. Like Lord Lovelace in Charles Causley’s poem from Figgie Hobbin, he came charging back ‘… whistling bright as any bird/Upon an April tree’, bringing with him guests and entreaties and all the love that he could muster. His hopes were dashed.
Amongst these guests was Allen Ginsberg who, in the company of his partner Peter Orlovsky and the poet Tom Pickard, came to visit in 1979, a year before my mother and I left. They came on a wet November night, down the precarious hill to the cottage, bringing an exotic whiff of excitement in their wake.
A reading had been arranged in Stroud on Bonfire Night, behind Starters café where my parents would take me for a treat after shopping trips to town. (I can still feel the indignant thrill that shivered through me when my father snuck a can of Guinness out of his bag in Starters and filled up his glass, which had briefly contained cola before he tipped it away; the terror that we might be caught.) But before this came our gathering of poets in the woods, with my mother carefully cooking exquisite food, and peals of laughter at jokes that leapt over my head like proverbial cows orbiting the moon.
Ginsberg and Orlovksy were touring Britain at the time and our house was a natural stopping point – they had introduced my father to America and now it was our turn to introduce them to Gloucestershire. They got the best introduction possible to the wilds of the valley; the car that they had arrived in was not inclined to take kindly to treacherous conditions and the weather had turned, bringing sheets of rain and fallen leaves up the valleys from the Severn. The concrete road and its craftily steep hairpin bend were as slippery as a skating rink and, as we attempted to set off for Stroud, the car stuck fast on the hairpin, teetering on the edge of the tree line and threatening to descend into our house.
The Beat Generation’s arrival into Stroud was momentarily off the road, so all hands leapt out of the car, and leaned in to haul the machine back into action. It was always a hill for scaring people. The poet Harry Fainlight, a fey, gentle and eccentric poet who had read with my father and Ginsberg at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in 1965 and who was notorious for willing cars to stop if he did not want to go anywhere, effected a breakdown of our car on the same hill. Harry would come to visit us every so often in the early 1970s. My memories of him are distant, but entirely at odds with the sometimes violent extremes of his poetry. I recall a very soulful, gentle presence who would listen to me attentively, however slight and fantastical my verbal wanderings, and would adventure with me in words. The car started again with a growl and a gronk only after my mother had turned in her seat, looked Harry in the eye as he sat in the back of the car next to me, and told him, with delicate, tender command, that it had been lovely to see him but it was time to be moving on.
That hill also nearly took my life, aged six. My mother was going away to give a reading and I was to stay with the Lloyds. We drove up the hill in the new silver Renault, just past the bend and she parked outside the steps up to the Lloyds’ front door, putting the handbrake on as she handed my bag of things to Jean. I was procrastinating in the passenger seat.
‘Come on out of there, Adam,’ my mother called.
‘Come on Adam,’ yelled Katy, eager to take command, to play.
‘All right! I’m coming,’ I replied, stepping over to the driver’s seat and losing my balance as I negotiated my way past the steering wheel. I reached out and grabbed the first thing I could find to steady myself – the handbrake, set in the front and middle of the old-style Renault, to the left of the dashboard and down.
The handbrake moved, and so did the car; it slipped gently backwards down the hill, gathering pace. I threw myself to the floor, watching trees spin past above me, hearing nothing but roaring in my ears, clutching hard to the base of the passenger seat. My mother, my father, Jean and Katy stood above the steps down to the road, transfixed, I am told, quite unable to move or speak as the car disappeared into the woods, down the dirt track that had once been the main road to Slad. The car span and, fortunately for me, wedged between two trees – I was a hair’s breadth away from rolling down the hill.
Only then did anyone move. Katy screamed, I think. My mother came billowing down the hill, composure forgotten. She pulled me from the well of the car and hugged me tighter than I could bear, her breath heavy against my shaking chest, my hair wet with her tears.
I suspect the Lloyds were watching on again as Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Pickard and my father heaved in the wet to get the car started in 1979. A show was always there to be had when my father was involved, and I have good reason to know that they enjoyed many of them. Eventually, after much shouting, grunting and amused, verse-fuelled invective, the car was once again as road-worthy as it was ever likely to be and we were off.
Even now, decades later, I meet people who came to that reading behind Starters café, who tell me that they remember me reading poems with Allen Ginsberg and my parents on Bonfire Night, aged eight, a little orange-headed blur of composed enthusiasm. Looking back through the papers I have kept, I find continual evidence of my parents’ hand in encouraging me to write. The ‘Plastic Farmyard Poem’ my father cobbled together out of things I said aged three (‘I see a rainbow/in the radio/in the music/in the bed/– I hear ladies/singing/in my head’), which he then presented to me as a poem that I had written and he had edited. There was a poem about autumn, which I wrote alone and entered into a school competition. It didn’t win anything because, as one of the teachers told my mother, they suspected other pens than mine had had a hand in it. My eight-year-old redhead’s temper was incandescent over the injustice of that.
I learned from both my parents to listen to the rhythm of words. I learned an ear for poetry that most schools hammer out of one by insisting on ascribing meaning and discussing intent at a forge when such things should be rolled out slowly in calm pastures, over time. My father taught me to play with words, to bounce them ebulliently around the tongue, to find rhythm, to find the sense in nonsense and the nonsense in sense. My mother taught me about breath and silence, about stillness and how to pick music from a murmuring core of silence, about the colour of words, about looking and hearing and thinking and dreaming.
The poems I read with Ginsberg on Guy Fawkes Night, aged eight, were not very good – charming enough for a child, as pure as any child’s writing can be if they’re given the chance to be free – but the lessons that came with them stayed with me, as did the sounds of the valley. These have driven nearly everything I’ve written as an adult, much of which stems from a long conversation with my mother’s writing and with the places that were important to us; the only real communication I was able to go on having with her, since she died when I was twelve. Death and absence taught me how to begin to write.
6
You’ll Be Kissed Again
The valley was undergoing a multilateral evacuation in 1980. As low-flying jets from Fairford whizzed overhead, the free-thinking party of the 1970s crawled to an end as all the families that had come there began to move away and a procession of holidaymakers and weekenders moved on in.
The Hortons moved to Australia, leaving a blank at the end of the garden. The land had been open for years; our gardens were as one and the children ran between them endlessly, through rows of potatoes my father had grown after a potato blight and a rhubarb patch that remained persistent until new neighbours built a wall right through it and stopped the rhubarb dead.
I was immediately sad about that blank space – no more parties filled with small girls who found me endlessly fascinating and were prepared to show it. I wasn’t sure what to make of the attention, but I knew I’d miss it. I had come home along the garden one afternoon wet-faced and bewildered after visiting the Hortons. I think I must have been eight.
‘What’s the matter?’ my mother asked.
I didn’t know quite what to s
ay.
‘Nobody hurt you did they?’ she asked, crouching and cupping my face in her hand.
‘No,’ I said. ‘A girl wouldn’t stop kissing me.’
‘Wouldn’t stop?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Did you ask her to stop?’
‘No,’ I said, a little mulish. I think she may have laughed.
‘Didn’t you like being kissed?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know,’ I said. I can still remember the girl’s warm mouth pressed on mine as she sat on my lap, telling me I was funny and hugging my neck as I sat there contemplating the strangeness of it all. She was six, I think, and charmed by my white skin and my red hair. She liked my freckles too. She kept on kissing me and calling to others in the garden and talking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. Then a jet flew over, scratching its belly on the treetops and roaring like a wounded dragon. We flung ourselves to the floor and the kissing stopped, became crying. I remember Judy Horton flat on the floor and cursing, words I had only heard before from my mother in a towering rage. I ran home, wet-faced, frightened, not sure if it was the kissing or the plane that scared me most.
‘You’ll be kissed again,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not so strange.’
Some people, at least, were moving in to stay. Pat and Hans Hopf, whose sons John and Robert had been fast friends with Jules and Jamie Lloyd when they came at weekends, moved down to the valley permanently in 1979 in a cloud of sweet-smelling pipe smoke, taking up residence at the other end of our little terrace in a house they’d owned since 1963. I instantly, cheekily renamed them Hat and Pans, much to my father’s delight.
Hans was a stocky German, his pipe in constant motion between hand and mouth, a gruffly cheerful man whom I associate mostly with clouds of tobacco and pesticide, standing in his immaculate garden raising a hand in greeting and warning me off cycling too fast down the path past his front door, having seen me crash my first bike spectacularly outside it the first time I rode it, taking the skin from my knees. Pat was (and remains) quietly indomitable and kind.
Hans came prepared for the worst, with snow chains for his car, having seen winter’s obliteration howl through the valley many times, long before I was born. Sometimes, walking past their house now, I still smell the sweet tobacco smoke and hear him calling out his perennial, thickly accented cry of ‘Do not play ball on my land!’
What was strangest to me was that Katy was leaving too, Katy whose valley this was as much as mine, my sister in all but blood, who even now can see through me to the truth and call it without resentment (or too much, anyway) on my part. Katy, who when I got a stuffed fox in a dandyish red waistcoat for Christmas, had had to have a stuffed fox herself to avoid resentment and arguments and jealousies. Katy, who my cousin Zoë (two years older than myself) had accused of being ‘a bit too big for her boots’ as we walked down the steep slope, away from St Benedicts; Katy had tried to lead the way in every game and Zoë, also used to getting her own way, had led an uncomfortable revolt as I sat rigid on the fence. Katy, who had suffered my illnesses when I succumbed to them because her parents had sent her down to see me, making sure she got them out of the way. In bed with mumps and tonsillitis, I remember the frown haloed by her mop of unruly white blonde hair, her concern. A few weeks later, better, I remember her grumbling fury at me as I sat by her bed, eating the grapes I’d brought as consolation for the mumps she’d taken home.
Before the Lloyds left, midway through 1980, a few months before my mother and I, they moved into the dark old haunted house at the end of the valley. The snows had come and Katy was ill and bored. I packed up my collections of Beano and Dandy comics, dragged them down on the sledge for her to read. Taking them home a week later in the thaw, slush, shivering down from the naked rafters of the abbey of trees, destroyed every single one. I remember weeping with fury as Desperate Dan was mulched to pulp, the ink merging Jocks with Geordies whilst Chips melted into Bully Beef and Korky shrank away to nothing.
So much was changing, merging, having the colour washed from it. The valley was emptying itself, melting away, taking childhood with it.
7
Midsummer Morning Log Jam
In 1984, a year after my mother died, I came back to the Slad Valley in a blank state, against my mother’s dying wishes, much of my memory of childhood scrubbed away by grief. I came back to live with my father, who for four years I had seen only in school holidays and more often than not in London, dancing through a street party with him for the 1981 royal wedding or pestering him into taking me to an all-day showing of the Star Wars trilogy.
The only time I remember visiting him in the valley with my mother in those years away, living in Sunderland and Herefordshire, was when she drove me through Slad to the last clot of tarmac before the road ran out at Snows Farm, having called my father from the phone box next to the Woolpack to let him know we were near. Setting out again, she narrowly avoided hitting two boys playing football on Steanbridge Lane, at the top of the hill before the steep descent down to the drowning pool. I remember her cursing herself and at their carelessness, shaking as she drove on down the hill and fretting as we awaited my father by the house at the end of the road.
He arrived in a huff of lateness, upset that she had come that way instead of down the perilous road from Bisley and that she would not come into the house. For my sake, the argument was muted, saved for letters or past-my-bedtime phone calls – the last huge row of their separation I had witnessed was in the summer of 1980, over books. Aged nine, and long protected from such vicious and pointless disputes, I had withdrawn into the corner by the door, under a poster that stated ‘Anyone caught smoking on these premises will be hung by the toenails and pummelled into unconsciousness with an organic carrot’; a tourist token, decorated with cartoon Native Americana, from my father’s tours of California reading poetry to beatified literature students in Berkeley, UCLA, Stamford et al.
‘Stop it,’ I yelled at them as they sniped and squealed about which book belonged to whom. ‘You’re behaving like stupid, small CHILDREN!’
There had been arguments before, of course, and my mother could be fierce and satirical when the need arose, with either my father or myself. Her closest friend, Jane Percival, came to stay one night, out of the blue and through the rain, despairing of the strained relationship with her husband at their home in Somerset. She had driven up in the dark, in urgent need of the comforting shoulder of her friend. My mother tenderly invited her in and, sitting her by the wood-burning stove, fed her homemade cakes and tea. I was lying on the couch, off school for a couple of days with a slight cold. I waved to Jane, who started to speak and, as she did so, shakily lit a cigarette. My father came down the stairs, an ex-smoker of evangelical proportions, who had quit his twelve-year addictions to Players Mild, along with whatever forms of marijuana came his way, soon after we moved into the cottage, and never looked back.
I coughed a little as he opened the door. He turned to Jane and demanded she put the cigarette out.
‘Can’t you see you’re making him cough?’ he said, waving in my direction dramatically before sitting by me and cuddling my shoulders.
‘I’m alright,’ I said, trying to sit up, unheard as the row escalated and Jane was banished over the garden to stay with the Hortons, where, thanks to the regular incursions of strangely scented Saturday night smoke drifting over to our house almost as effectively as their renditions of Dylan, my mother knew she would be made welcome, smoker or not. My mother went with her, to make the arrangements, almost smoking herself as she reached the tipsytoploftical pinnacle of a towering rage.
I was hurried into bed, huddled up the stairs in my father’s arms, and listened enthralled and terrified as my mother’s fury vented itself downstairs when she came home. It was carefully modulated, her anger, as was everything she did, as precise and quietly explosive as her movements. (This was a woman who would buy a Mars bar, divide it into five slivers and keep them in th
e fridge, eating one piece a day at most over the course of a week – and who would pick daintily at the immaculately prepared and considered food she cooked as if it were a meal in a play or a film, which you were only supposed to pretend to eat).
My father matched her with his more expansive, discursive and diversionary modes, running little rivulets of counter-argument in the defence of my health past her, trying to wear down the barricades of the Stanislavskian fourth wall she had built around her outrage. She simmered like an Ibsen heroine. He danced his tongue around the argument like an angry Puck.
Living in the valley again after four years away was a strange experience, without my mother or any families or children my age there to temper it and tame it. The valley had existed in me as a state of perfection, a place where everything was right with the world, which blurred with the roseate tinge of half-forgotten allegiances and love. It was far less rewarding to explore alone, back in the reality of it – the dry stone walls seemed less sure of themselves, more careworn and mossy with inattention, the homes-from-home that Katy and I had built in tangled copses were small and run down, empty of the fantastically mundane lives that she and I had created in them for ourselves.
The valley was a place of importance to my father, too. A giddy nostalgia possessed us both, for the time we’d spent with chickens and the attempted smallholding dreams of food for free, basking in my mother’s presence from 1971 to 1979, all interruptions and absences forgotten or set aside.
He remembered me as that child, however, happy and piping down the valleys wild, unburdened by any sorrow greater than the shock of finding a large dead rabbit in the kitchen (brought in proudly by Arwen, her best Queen of Sheba purr rattling in her throat) not long after I’d finished reading Watership Down and was still lost in the heady afterglow of rabbit sympathy. I had come back a teenager, mourning the loss of that happiness, the loss of my mother, hormones rasping slowly into gear under the buzzing throttle-roar of grief like a low-flying jet. Inevitably, as it would with any father and son left to their own devices even under the easiest of circumstances, it led to conflict; on-running disagreements that coloured the times when all was otherwise well. Memories, pleasant and otherwise, spilled over into the present too often, exposed it to unflattering scrutiny. We warred over the fact that I was growing up.
A Thousand Laurie Lees Page 6
