A Thousand Laurie Lees

by Adam Horovitz

  So it was fortunate that my father needed to go to London regularly for work and arranged for me to stay with friends dotted around the five valleys of Stroud; with the Mackintoshes, the Huggins family and with the Lloyds, who soon moved to the other end of the Slad Valley, into a bungalow that Alan began to do up, as he had done with many properties since they left the house above me in the valley in 1980. I found music any way I could.

  I had come back to the valley with a handful of memories and poems – by my parents, by Laurie Lee, Dylan Thomas and Charles Causley – locked in my head as the only reminders of childhood, ripe as just plucked plums on my tongue. With a gang of friends and places to stay, the valley’s people finally began to come to life around me again, a wider spectrum of people and influences to show me how much the place had changed. And then, suddenly, Laurie was there again, marking the way.

  9

  Are You Writing?

  Laurie seemed to appear over the horizon with surprising regularity after my return. First, we held a party in 1985 to celebrate birthdays and returns, and a party in the valley wasn’t quite a party without Laurie. The garden, rougher now than it had been when my mother was alive, and no longer given over to vegetables since my father was going too regularly to London for work to risk the expense of growing food and forgetting to water it and tend its stems against the constant hordes of slug and rabbit, badger and the occasional, tentative, greedy deer, became a rolling picnic table we had laid out in a panic, spreading our erratic party wares across the strimmed and hewn-down expanses of woodland undergrowth.

  Old friends were there in abundance; Diana Lodge stomped over the valley from Trillgate, the Lloyds came back down to the valley for the day, Jane Percival came with her daughters, and if she smoked while she was there it was far down the garden and out of scent, away from my father’s disapproving glare.

  Laurie’s arrival, with his wife Kathy, garrulous and dressed in white, caused the usual stir. Laurie announced his presence in our front room with a cheerful abandonment, filling the room with a personality as wide and welcoming and mischievous as his outstretched arms. I was on hand with a camera and caught him as he stretched out in greeting, his flies undone and a huge smile on his face.

  ‘Are you writing?’ he asked me later, once someone had pointed out his exposed underpants with a friendly laugh and the offer of a drink. He was perched on a stool, and I felt a little overawed.

  ‘A little,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a summer class with Gillian Clarke in a few weeks.’

  I pointed Gillian out, my mother’s close friend who had on instinct travelled up to London the day before she’d died to see her, thinking it might be the last chance she had. She had come down from Wales for the day to celebrate with us and also to make sure I was settling in acceptably with my father.

  ‘Ah, writing classes,’ said Laurie, and he raised his eyebrows and smiled. ‘Do you need them when you’ve got all this?’

  He gestured to the party, the valley, the world at large, his drink slopping a little, like late winter sunlight over the edge of his glass.

  I wanted to say that it was the class my mother had taught before she died, that it kept me focused, that it was a connection to her. Before any words could leave my lips, Laurie pressed his hand to my shoulder, smiled again and was gone for a refresher, to talk to others. I slipped back into the party and to other friends, looking to the valley with new eyes.

  I dug out Laurie’s poems again after this, exploring the recent edition of his Selected Poems I had found on my father’s shelves, looking for further clues to his meaning. In ‘The Abandoned Shade’ I found these lines:

  Season and landscape’s liturgy,

  badger and sneeze of rain,

  the bleat of bats, the bounce of rabbits

  bubbling under the hill:

  Each old and echo-salted tongue

  sings to my backward glance;

  but the voice of the boy, the boy I seek,

  within my mouth is dumb.

  So I made the valley my study, at the expense of school, even so far as to take my war with mathematics to a ritualistic extreme, carrying my hated maths homework book out into the woods and burning it with hysterical ceremony on a pyre, shouting a curse on all algebra into the slow dusk as moths came battering their way towards the flames. I sought out the voice of the boy I had been, a process that continues as surely as the stream runs under the bridge, as seasons shift and find new ways to express themselves.

  It paid off, this study of landscape, became, three years later, the first poem I wrote that marked for me the change up from the pretty poems of childish preoccupation and the bleak angst of teenage fear (although it combines elements of each). It was written on one of Gillian’s courses, but it looked back at the Slad Valley with a keener eye than I had managed before.

  AN OWL BREAKS THE SILENCE

  In the deepening contrast

  between night and day

  when an owl breaks the silence

  and the foxes bay

  when the chattering chaffinch

  lays down its tune

  and tissue moths

  flit past the moon

  when millions of fireflies

  wisp in the dusk

  and the butterfly’s cocoon

  is merely a husk

  when the badger is starting

  its nightly round

  and the rabbit is keeping

  its nose to the ground

  when snails creep out

  from under rocks

  and the chicken begins

  to forget the fox

  then the humans in offices

  will do something rash

  and when it snows

  will it snow ice or ash?

  Encounters with Laurie were relatively rare before I was old enough to drink in a pub; the Woolpack was too much a local’s place to get away with brazening a pint aged sixteen or seventeen – I had The Pelican in Stroud for that, part vice-den for the traveller community, part working man’s sinkhole, a pub that promised anarchy and table football and the chance to stare forlornly as the girls from school one fancied were being picked off one by one by older men. Or there were small off-licences selling Thunderbird, a toxic, chemical-addled perry which stripped brain cells, stomach lining and, if you were really lucky, inhibitions. No first long drink of golden fire, this. Never to be forgotten, perhaps, this acrid precursor of alcopops, which stung like factory smoke and clouded the eyes to reason. It made even the occasional quarter bottle of bad blended whisky taste like nectar. Never to be forgotten. Never, please god, to be tasted again.

  Once I reached pub age, however, I saw him every so often in the Woolpack, exchanging pleasantries with him and occasionally talking a little about poetry before moving on. Some of the most memorable encounters with him, however, tended to take place in the impersonal surroundings of Stroud railway station.

  Coming back from college, hauling a heavy backpack, I encountered Laurie several times at the beginning of his canter home from London and the Chelsea Arts Club literary high life through the pubs of Stroud: one at the Imperial, one at the Shunters and see where else might be reached before hitting the Woolpack and home, a rascally glint in his eye and Kathy next to him, making sure that nothing went wrong.

  Charming and just a little bit roguish, Laurie was always a pleasure to meet when gently in his cups; in these high and expansive times he was a purveyor of the finest, most convincing-sounding whoppers and shaggy dog stories to admiring passers-by, glancing over his glasses to see how much was being swallowed. He told people in all seriousness that the planning department was intending to raze Slad and build a motorway through the valley, much to the delight of those he pranked, and he constantly suggested to people that it would be inadvisable for them to get him to sign their copy of Cider with Rosie as it was the ‘rare, unsigned copies that made money nowadays’.

  Laurie was also known to take his new wireless landline
phone to the pub with him, his house being near enough down the hill to pick up a signal, and he would apparently hush his drinking buddies when calls came, in a most likely vain effort to conceal his whereabouts. He didn’t keep this impish attitude just for the pub, however; when a newspaper called his friend Val Hennessey to ask her to update his obituary, Laurie, who happened to be there when the call came, took enormous delight in trying to persuade her to let him write it with her and fabricate it utterly.

  Beneath this easy charm lay what seemed to me to be a seam of sadness, however. ‘It isn’t easy to write in the country,’ he told the New York Times in 1993, after A Moment of War came out. ‘Either it’s a nice day and you lie in the long grass, or people knock on your door and want you to go to the pub for a chat. And that’s that day gone.’

  It can’t be easy to follow up a success as widespread and all consuming as Cider with Rosie, either. I remember the Stroud launch of A Moment of War, in the echoing concrete cavern of the town’s starkly municipal leisure centre. The worthies and celebrants gathered in the high mezzanine corridor overlooking the game courts, their words confused and amplified by the architecture, Babel-bound in the baffling surroundings. There were a great many people there, but the building contrived to make it feel as though there were only ever ten or so people milling around and sipping wine, whilst Laurie sat with signing pen in hand at a table piled high with books looking a little forlorn, though he cheered up considerably when familiar faces came to chat.

  Whatever the reasons for the slow-down in his writing life, it didn’t stop him from appreciating and pushing others, and this is where my meetings with him became a joy.

  ‘Ah, Adam,’ he’d cry, Kathy smiling warmly at his side. ‘Are you writing?’

  I’d make my best excuses, saying I was keeping at it, working away, trying not to get too bogged down in student life to lose the impetus. Often I was not, and it showed.

  ‘Well you have to keep at it,’ he’d reply, with teasing seriousness, ‘or you’ll never escape the real jobs people expect you to do.’

  The second time we met this way, at Stroud railway station, he reached into his pocket and brought out a well-worn wallet.

  ‘Here, have a fiver,’ he said, pressing the note on me and leaning in conspiratorially as if Kathy shouldn’t hear and couldn’t know. ‘Go and get drunk and write some POETRY!’

  This was not an offer it would have been sensible to refuse, a fiver being quite enough to get drunk on in 1991. I took the money and the advice gladly and headed to the Pelican where all the prettiest women were likely to be drinking, ordered Uley ale and began to write.

  EARTH SONG

  Clouds skate over icy skies,

  their heavy bellies ready to burst.

  The embers of the sun splinter

  on distant, claw-like trees

  send shards of dank light

  tumbling into the valley.

  A mob of crows canters into the air

  to bully an adventurous owl.

  Bluetits pick at the last rotten apple

  on an unattended tree.

  As shadow swallows the garden

  I sit on a log and defy the night.

  A bat deftly manoeuvres

  through intricate webs of dew-laden pine.

  I close my eyes and call your name.

  It echoes around the valley,

  the sound undulating

  through trees and hills,

  building power

  until my cry is a mantra,

  chanted by the whole immediate world

  of night creatures, plants and spirits.

  I am swallowed whole

  by darkness and warmth.

  The valley breathes into me

  and softly I breathe out your name.

  The earth answers in song.

  I spin in air currents

  as the planet rocks me

  in its malleable paw,

  croons lullabies and lost odes

  in languages I almost understand.

  I whisper your name.

  The whisper does not vanish,

  but is borne on the wings of a butterfly

  into the singing storm.

  Sun bursts from my pores.

  In a fragile case of air I await your reply.

  10

  The Real Rosie?

  Walking out of the cottage and up the airy little path behind the Old Chapel (renamed Scrubs Bottom in a fit of typically British scatological humour) I learned to vanish into the woods to escape homework. I accessed the path by climbing a set of stairs, stairs my father had claimed when they were torn out of the Wilde’s cottage in the 1970s and had recycled into a sort of Jacob’s Ladder into the woods, a stairway to heaven straight out of A Matter of Life and Death, which he would sit on and speak out from like a Beat revolutionary addressing the startled pheasants.

  Avoidance of maths took me farther and farther off the beaten track until I rediscovered a small cottage in the heart of the wood, round the corner in the Dillay, that was as close to the style of the cottage I lived in as it had been one hundred years before. Timbercombe Cottage was the home of Rosie Bannen, a warmly welcoming woman of Irish extraction. She had lived in and around the valley since she was a girl, after her father had fled Ireland during the uprising in 1916.

  The house was remote – a track rolled down one side of the hill and up the other with no idea of where the road might be – and ran without electricity or water. A telephone had only been put in after Rosie suffered a heart attack. Walking past, one was greeted by barking and the more distant yowl of cats – Rosie had at least ten cats and an enthusiastic brood of King Charles Spaniels, which would merge into one multi-tongued beast and attempt to lick passers-by to death.

  Rosie was as welcoming as her spaniels, albeit in a more civilised manner. The first time I passed, on my own, she hailed me by name, welcoming me back to the valley and keeping me for twenty minutes or more talking about my mother and how she had babysat for me up in Snows Farm when I was a ‘tiny golden-haired boy’.

  I called by every so often after that for a couple of years (until teenage angst and longing turned me towards the town), intrigued by the rustic life she led in her compact little house, amazed by the clarity of the water she drew from the spring, and overwhelmed by spaniels. She would appear every time subsumed by creatures, sometimes appearing to float over her garden on a tidal wave of cats to offer tea, or perhaps something stronger if my father was there as well – her parsnip and elderflower wine. Her home-brewed valley vintages were good enough to help him overcome his fear of dogs.

  Rosie grew into the valley, kept alive by a constant war with the owners of her house, where she was a sitting tenant, and the generosity of friends and neighbours. The owners wanted her out and kept putting up sweetheart deals, demands and obstacles in an attempt to prise her from Timbercombe Cottage. According to Pat Hopf, the track to her house was often blocked so that coal could not be delivered and tractors were left running overnight in an attempt to unsettle her into leaving.

  Rosie was having none of it, though – she was a tenacious and hardy woman who thrived on the solitude and the surprise of visitors, walking up to Bisley, three miles away, to do her shopping and keeping shoes in the barn of Norman Williams’ farm (the same barn in which I parked my bicycle if I made it up the hill in time for the school bus) so she could change out of her boots if she wanted to head to Stroud dressed up properly for an excursion.

  It was considered certain in some circles that this was the Rosie of the cider, of the first promptings of lust that drove Laurie’s imaginings and made him sing hymns as he staggered back drunk, late from the haymaking. It seemed too appropriate for her not to be Rosie; time cast a delicate cloak of autumn leaves over Rosie Burdock’s shoulders until she became Rosie Bannen, the hale old lady who invited people into her cottage for a drink and regaled them with stories. Time and distance rendered her the likeliest candidate, because she lived
a life that was almost as absolutely preserved and quietly iconic as the book that made this valley famous.

  If she was, she would not be drawn on the matter – there have been many women ready to lay claim to the title, casting their eyes at willing audiences of tourists and journalists with as much slyness and glitter as they could muster. Rosie Burdock married a soldier. Rosie Bannen would surprise the unwary, assuming her roots to be slow and unwieldy as a beech, with tales of her travels in Turkey and beyond.

  It was hard, as a teenager, to imagine her face wrapped in a pulsating haze or her body flickering with lightning, but that was merely the passage of time at play, refining her hefty youthful vigour into a denser shape. The apple of her cheek may have perished, but her white hair curled like an elderflower on her brow and her face was as lined and wholesome as a scrubbed-clean parsnip.

  To me she was Rosie, the only Rosie the valley allowed, as strong as the cider they sold in the Woolpack, surrounded by cats and spaniels and myth, a ghost of a vanished time who offered me tea and memories the few times I saw her, and who laughed at the hardships placed in front of her as she stomped through the last years of her life in the valley, clinging on as tenaciously as a nettle to the steep banks of the Dillay and doing strategically astute battle with the Social Services, the landlords who wanted to oust her and the steady and increasingly perceptible relentlessness of change.

  It doesn’t matter, really, who the real Rosie was. An imagined Rosie Bannen, the years shaved from her, will always be the woman I think of as that hefty, terrifying girl tempting Laurie with cider as the haymaking goes on without them a hundred yards away and his brother Jack goes calling his name down the hill.