Whilst I had been in Sunderland, living with my mother and Roger, my father had engaged with the valley as best he could, unable to be there all that often, what with earning a living in London and the personal disconnectedness of the cottage. The happiness he had so enjoyed living there with my mother and I meant that returning there, apart from the expense of travel and upkeep, was another source of sorrowing at our having left. During one of his longer absences during the heavy winter of 1981, the pipes had burst because he had forgotten to switch off the water on his previous sojourn, and when the thaw came, the water attempted to reclaim the house. Arwen, who was too much a cat of the valley to be torn away to Sunderland with us, survived as best she could, becoming a little more feral – when my father was away, she was fed by the Hopfs. My father felt the perhaps inevitably depressing void of both my and my mother’s absence from the cottage and the valley intensely. Both of us had become so deeply entwined there that reflections of the decade-long occupations of our bodies and spirits were always palpable.
He had come back most often in the spring, in the height of summer and in the early gold of autumn, the valley being an unrelenting place to live in alone in winter, and would spend time in the valley writing and jogging down the lane to Driftcombe by way of exercise. He often jogged off wearing the dark green eyeshade that deepened the greens of the abbey of trees and which he was rarely un-shaded by when the sun came cantering over the hill when I was young. That eyeshade pursues my memories of him throughout the valley everywhere they go, and occasionally it pursues me out of the valley. As a child it was a source of fascination and embarrassment, an item of clothing that made him stand out and be noticed. Sometimes I would try wearing it, sat on a high-backed chair in his attic pretending to type, only for the elastic to slip around my neck making the eyeshade fall to my chest like a bib.
I rarely tried it on after he went swimming in Stroud pool with Katy Lloyd and me. My father entered the pool shortly after Katy and I had leapt in and had started splashing about. There was a sudden ripple of laughter; we looked around and there at the edge of the pool stood my father, in a shower cap bunched up like a squid on his head and held in place by his eyeshade, his heavy spectacles perched on his nose and sporting a pair of voluminous and (happily) far from revealing underpants in place of trunks. People had noticed and were laughing and pointing. Katy and I, appalled, swam as far in the other direction as we could manage, wishing ourselves invisible. It was no use; he submerged himself in the pool, calling joyfully to us, and came swimming in our direction, the eyeshade jutting out of the water like a lopsided shark’s fin. We fled, cannoning around the pool until at last, exhausted, it was time to escape into the changing rooms. I cannot, even now, swim in Stroud pool without the hot flush of childish shame clutching at my throat.
Taking exercise with my father was often embarrassing. He would wave me goodbye from the bottom of the lane by doing would-be star jumps, and singing loudly whenever I left in a car as I waved from the rear window – fascinated or horrified depending upon who was in the car with me. As a teenager I would clam up, ashamed of his gusto, and rapidly stop playing if anyone walked past whilst we were engaged in the eccentric game of ‘hand tennis’ we invented. This was a cross between tennis and volleyball, which involved our batting a huge yellow foam ball across the privet hedges and dry stone walls we claimed as nets. Yet the exercise he took alone in the valley, in the long emptiness when my mother and I were gone, was far from embarrassing. Without us there he noticed the things we had noticed together in a greater detail than he had before, collecting them in his head as he jogged up and down the valley and piecing together a 670-line poem of such rural intensity as might dispel Robert Graves’ assertion that he was ‘incorrigibly urban’, a Midsummer Morning Jog Log:
… apparition I must seem, leaping blind and deaf
to the fleet-winged early warning
notes of my advent
relayed from the lanesides
all over the valley
– so brutishly revelling
in my refracted halo, vicarious godhead
of being
– The First up
and out – ha!
jigging and bopping
with ludicrously heavy-booted feet
to avoid the upsurge here
of a sun-spatted puddle,
there the liquidation
of an innocent slug or snail …
Coming back to live with him as Midsummer Morning Jog Log was being finished, I relished his renewed and vigorous interest in the valley. I followed him on jogs down to Driftcombe, followed in turn by Arwen at a discreet distance, both of us a little too wary to galumph as vigorously as him. I took photos for him, some of which were sent to the book’s illustrator, Peter Blake, deep in his ruralist phase – the five-barred gate in the book is drawn from a picture I took. Yet although my father and I romped and roamed together through the valley’s summer effulgence for a while, running and dreaming and laughing, the creeping grief that had been building in me finally struck home.
My father was the youngest of ten refugee children brought over from Germany in 1937, escaping the Nazis at the last minute, thanks in part to my Grandfather’s connections with the banking family Rothschild, for whom he was working as a lawyer. Raised almost as much by his four sisters and nanny as by his mother, he was ill conditioned to cope with day-to-day necessities such as cooking. Many of the meals we ate together in the house were prepared by me from the small stock of recipes my mother had taught me when we were living on Hadrian’s Wall with Roger in the winters of 1981 and 1982.
This only changed when Inge came to visit, a stylish and beautiful woman my father had met two years after my mother and I left for Sunderland. She was German, and Jewish, and had come to London in the 1960s only a few years after she had discovered that she had survived the war not knowing that her mother was Jewish, nor anything of the constant danger she was in as a child in Nazi Germany.
She worked for Lufthansa and as a translator for Vidal Sassoon, and was a gentle, harmonious presence in the house whenever she came to stay, and not just because I was relieved of cooking duty when she was there (though a sticker I made and stuck to the wall above the archaic stove stating that ‘Inge is a fab cook’ was an indication of how relieved I really was). She also taught me how to iron and made me dance with her to Ken Colyer’s New Orleans jazz around the front room, trying hard as I could to imitate her sprightly, delicate hops; she did all she could to be a motherly influence on my life.
She, too, attempted to stem the tide of papers that flowed through my father’s attic room, but they spread unstoppably regardless, leaking down through the floorboards into the kitchen, where an erratic and rusty old filing cabinet now occupied one corner of the room, making it harder to seat guests round the kitchen table. The stair-cupboard, which had once been an airy little space, its shelves filled with tools for the garden, useful bits of string, scissors, a sewing kit, Wellingtons, fuses, light bulbs and boxes of emergency candles left over from the three-day week, now groaned with paperwork crushed in to leave room for just a few rusting and wood-wormed garden tools.
The garden was fast becoming jungle, barring us in with ‘barricades of weeds revolutionary–/weeds upon weeds in abundancy swirling/and thrusting their spears in brazen pride …’1 We fought back with rusty scythes and bill-hooks, and with the inadequate strimmer that trembled like a cornered rabbit whenever we introduced it to brambles or to the relentless nettles that shot up everywhere and were too far gone for soup. Tears filled our eyes for the neat rows of vegetables long gone, whose ‘seedpacket pennanted rows’ flickered in the mind’s eye like some great medieval pageant ground shrunk down by time, rubbed away by the slow, shadow-hungry creep of the trees.
It was home, and it felt almost as though my mother was there, whispering in the trees when the wind picked up, or sending a wren waltzing in through my bedroom window when I was thinking of her: it settl
ed for a moment on the side of my desk, cocked its head, lifted its tail and flew out again, a flash of powdery brown as its wings spread out, like a sharply angled cartoon version of her favourite floppy hat. But without allies to fall back on living near at hand, and without a car to escape in, the house was too close a cage for us both. We rubbed each other raw.
Note
* * *
1 From Midsummer Morning Jog Log.
8
Changing the Record
Grief is rarely a permanent fog of affliction, rolling up the valleys of the brain and refusing to leave, and I had the sudden yellow flare of winter jasmine up the cold cottage wall on an otherwise bleak late winter morning to help salve the mists of sorrow and self-pity that coursed through me; the usual teenage hormonal aggravations simmering alongside the loss of my mother and the fact that none of my friends lived nearer than four miles away.
The sun ran in yolky rivulets through the horizon at sunset. In summer rain I sat out under the yew boughs, watching the rain shift like a modest bride up to the valley’s head, the spring’s ravenous mouth. I cycled to school often, since a 6 a.m. wake-up call to catch the 8.30 a.m. bus was rarely easy to achieve, spent too long marvelling at the rhythms of ploughing, going slow to argue with sheep in the orchard on the side of the road before Sydenhams Farm or peering over the wall into the old pig sty. At two I would call out ‘Big pig kippit’ to them as they slept – as my father insisted on telling visitors, including the attractive young women who came to do occasional secretarial work for him and whose attentions, in some cases, I would have far rather had been focused on what I considered to be my more adult charms.
School was a relief, once I had extracted myself from the local boys’ grammar school, too brutish and testosterone-fuelled a place for a thirteen-year-old still grieving the loss of his mother. Instead, I went to Archway, the mixed comprehensive with a radical staff, the school where my mother had taught eight years before. I was welcomed in by teachers who had known her well, but none of whom made that fact explicit for at least a couple of years, which helped the process of settling in no end.
More important, there were friends to be made, new confidantes as well as old allies. Skanda Huggins was there, a year below me in school years but the first person I called and told when I was accepted there. New friends were made – Mackie, Giz, Legzee, Joe, Matthew Chadwick and Mathew Shaw (with both of whom I’d hunted for Easter eggs at Diana Lodge’s house years before), plus Euan and many more. We bonded mostly over music, and my ability to concentrate slipped a gear thanks to late-night sessions of listening to John Peel on BBC Radio 1.
Music became as essential to me as breathing at about fourteen, as it has for huge numbers of British teenagers born post-Second World War. I ripped up the cottage with anything from Prince to Charlie Mingus, the Dead Kennedys to The The, raiding Woolworths and the Trading Post in Stroud with my pocket money after school, or ransacking my father’s record collection for something – anything – new, straining through the lyrics for inspiration and points of identification and jumping to the rhythms that Slad and the valley could not or would not provide.
My father, when lost in his attic with work, would hammer away at his typewriter in competition with the chattering bird we never accurately identified (although we suspected it might be a blackbird) and which we dubbed the typewriter bird as it seemed to want to talk back to his erratically speedy, one-finger typing from the nearest treetop. Often he would yell down the stairs for some peace, for the space to think clearly as I span records on the tired old blue and white Dansette, which allowed me to play singles at 16 or 78rpm, much to my amusement and my father’s regular annoyance.
Eventually the Dansette wore out and even my father, who was happy enough for me to be playing Mingus every so often, even if he noisily pretended to object to Prince or the post-punk and electronica I began to discover going cheap at car boot sales, decided we should get a new record player. The trouble was, as ever, that money was tight, so we looked in the local paper for weeks, eventually finding a cheap but cheerful looking player someone was advertising. We phoned and asked if we could come and try it. The sellers said yes, of course.
The next difficulty was how to get there. My father had never learned to drive; his only two attempts had nearly ended in disaster: first in Ireland when he had myopically come close to running the car into a couple of cows on a road trip visiting poets and second when my mother, in despair of being the only driver in the house had, in the early 1970s, tried to get him to drive out of the valley, up the steep hill that ran behind our house and round the hairpin bend that has terrified even the calmest of drivers who have come at it unwary over the years. That time, the car nearly tipped over the edge and back down the hill onto our house. My mother commanded him to never drive again.
This didn’t make it easy to live in the valley – getting to school in Stroud was a mission that involved waking at 6 a.m., with or before the dawn as a farm worker would have, and cycling two miles to the bus, which as I got older I invariably missed. Even getting post out was a trial and given that my father was sending out magazines on mail order, and could rarely spare the time away from his typewriter to walk over-burdened with post to the nearest tiny letterbox, neighbours had to be asked. A small community will willingly give help when help is needed, but favours need to be spread out. I remember my father checking the back of Alan Lloyd’s Land Rover for the letters he’d asked Alan to post, and which Alan often forgot, sometimes quite deliberately. Getting shopping back was an equally arduous task.
The Lloyds were long gone, however, and there were new residents in their long, strangely Alpine cottage. Hugh Padgham, with whom I was impressed because he talked music with me occasionally as if my tastes mattered, had moved in not long after I came back to the valley. I remember him at one of our first encounters being cheerfully derisive of the Madonna badge I was wearing. On looking closer, he told me that I at least had some good taste. I was also wearing a Sting badge, entirely unaware that Hugh had just produced the album the badge was promoting, and that he had produced The Police.
My father, wondering how to get to the house wherein the record player was waiting, had an epiphany. He picked up the phone.
‘Hi Hugh,’ he said. ‘May I ask a favour?’
A moment’s silence, then: ‘Well, we’ve found a second hand record player for sale and I was hoping we might be able to get a lift to test it out. Since you’re here this weekend, I hoped you might be able to take us, as you know quite a bit about record players.’
The conversation went on a little while, my father’s charm offensive picking up apace, until finally Hugh closed the dialogue with the suggestion that we find a record with which to test the player when we got there.
Hugh greeted us with what seems to me now to be a gently arch, friendly amusement at the top of the hill some hours later, and drove us off to see the record player. It wasn’t the most comfortable of rides for me. I was all too easily embarrassed by my father’s persuasions and felt discomfited by the idea that the producer of The Police was being dragged along to help us buy a cheap record player because he ‘knew about this sort of thing’.
Hugh, to be fair, seemed to let the whole thing breeze past him until we got to the house, where my father introduced him to the record player’s owner with all due pomp and I withered a little more. The owner got the record player started and I put on the record I had chosen to bring. It was Unknown Pleasure, by Joy Division, which I had found at a car boot sale the week before and was desperate to play.
‘What do you think?’ my father asked Hugh, referring to the record player.
‘It’s all right, if you like that sort of thing,’ said Hugh, referring to the album, which was just the sort of dark and monumentally, majestically tortured music favoured by a sixteen-year-old of melancholic disposition. Madonna and Sting were long gone from my affections by this time.
I said nothing, withering still mor
e. The album sounded fine, if a little thin on the cheap, tinny but fairly functional record player. We bought the machine. My music collection lived to shout down birdsong and my father’s attempts to work another day. I don’t recall that we ever asked a similar favour of Hugh again.
It was hard to get excited by music four miles out of the teenage social whirl of a small town, where there’s too often little else to do but listen to music in company and get mutually excited about it. I wasn’t particularly musical, and could not have busked round Spain as Laurie Lee had, having learned the violin as a child. Although Inge loaned me a trumpet and tried to help me learn it, I gave up because it was too awkward to take to school on the back of my bicycle. A trumpet needed accompaniment, the added textures of people and instruments, to get me excited by its sound. Laurie, with a violin, could make music purely for himself, or with others, as he pleased.
The big bands had also long since stopped coming to Stroud. The Beatles’ worst gig was in Stroud’s Subscription Rooms in the month they made it big, Paul McCartney has gone on record as saying (although several people’s favourite aunties were apparently walked home by Macca that night). U2 are notoriously supposed to have played to the proverbial three men and an asthmatic dog in the Marshall Rooms just before they became huge.
A Thousand Laurie Lees Page 7
