A couple of months after the antique dealer moved in, a policewoman moved into the other converted stable and things began to get a little weird. The antique dealer and his partner became elusive, the daughter visited my friends more often and an atmosphere of tension descended on the quiet little cluster of houses. Within a few weeks the dealer was under arrest, having been found to be dealing in things far less bulky and far more lucrative than antiques, and to be carrying a decidedly new sawn off shotgun to assist him in doing business.
Drugs weren’t new to the village of course; a large section of Slad’s teenagers knew my house not because they knew me as such but because, when cattle were still being kept on the fields below me, the finest psilocybin-laced fungi in the area grew there. Pale-eyed foraging teenagers, kneeling on hassocks of grass in the marshier areas of pat-strewn turf, could be easily startled come autumn if one merely shouted hello to them across the field. Like foxes they would blink and scatter, coming back to the good picking grounds when danger had passed.
Drugs are an easy means of escape in a small village (where borders are wide and horizons distant if you don’t have the money to reach them) but they are difficult to support as a cottage industry. My friend ‘John’, sole carer for his small son, grew too ambitious and filled his spare bedroom with hydroponics to grow cannabis, row upon row of fat resinous green fists bursting from stems, because he was unable to find work that kept the wolf from the door and allowed his son to be looked after. He grew lonely, and the circle of friends he allowed into his secret world of ridiculously lucrative lamp-lit fecundity bloated to unsafe proportions. There were far too many of us coming in to play guitar or computer games, talk, argue and laugh the night away or amble down to the Woolpack to nurse a pint and play pool in the chilly cellar.
It was the talk of Slad for a few days when the police came raiding, taking away lights and plants: ‘Did you know what was going on?’ ‘How long has he been doing that for d’you think?’ ‘What will happen to the little boy?’ Someone had snitched, and John lost everything except his son and his freedom. Eviction from Slad was punishment enough.
As the village changed, so too did the pub. Rough-hewn and un-modernised, it was a place of safety for many characters and genial reprobates. Big-bearded Martin, who when he was not drinking worked with pigs, was the soul of the pub, part of the fixtures and fittings. I would see him every time I went in, a pint of cider clamped in one hand and a roll up permanently peering out from beneath his moustache. He would sit at the end of the bar, under the till, immovable as stone, a canny look in his eye and a smoker’s laugh on his lips. He was taken by mouth cancer eventually, the roll ups and the cider boiling on his tongue for years in lethal combination, but was such a well-loved presence that a portrait of him still hangs laughing over his old seat. So rumour has it, Laurie would invite him and others back to his house after hours and feed them whiskey in exchange for helping him sign books. Pub culture always brews such rumours.
It seemed that, as soon as my father and I were absent more often than not from our quiet corner of the Slad Valley, new life began to creep back into the valley. Mrs Bevan’s excitingly derelict little cottage was repaired and extended by her granddaughter Sally Rees who, with her husband Neil, turned the haunted-seeming little cave of Cotswold stone which had hidden a horde of cats into a palace made of the same materials as the original house – it would have looked as if it had been there for centuries when they finished, were the stone not so clean and bright.
After them came the McCroddans, occupying the old Lloyd house, Hugh Padgham having moved over the valley into the heart of Slad. Both households started families and the valley became almost as lively a place as it had been when I was a child. I visited occasionally, to make sure the house was as up together as an empty house can be, to see that the water was off in the winter and the heating was on at a gentle quiver to stop it degrading and being buried completely.
I took girlfriends out there, keen to show them that this was the root of me, to inculcate them in the myths of my youth. The first woman I took, Callie, looked at it and me with sad, hard eyes, not really wanting to know it seems to me now. We lay instead in a cloud of birdsong and cowslips in the field above the Roman bridge, dancing round the edges of sex like bees after nectar, alighting delicately in different places. Not far distant enough from the path, we were interrupted by walkers. They laughed at us, shouted ribald greetings as they passed.
The supposedly Roman bridge had apparently been hacked down to size a century before by two old ladies up at Snows Farm who objected to carriages coming past them on the way to Bisley, and objected to the way the drivers peered over the wall and invaded their privacy. Without the bridge, trade through the valley died out – it had once housed a pub and many more houses and there had even been a brothel on the hill above the Dillay – and we were left to birdsong and the wolf-whistling of walkers.
As time went on and the house stood emptier and sadder, I stopped taking girlfriends and went less and less myself, unable to bear it. The house faded, became more and more a mausoleum to my mother, the wild of the valley choking out the sound of Blake’s innocent pipes that we had played in the valley in my youth. Only birds and insects piped down the valley in anything but memory.
17
The Buddha of Swift’s Hill
Mecca for butterflies feeding on upright bromegrass and violets, the nectar of black knapweed; livid with rare musk and frog orchids, alongside their hardier companions; occasional home of sacred cows, munching down the grass to let these rare plants grow. Swift’s Hill: home of walkers and love-makers, gentle parties and solstice gatherings, high enough to see all the way west to Wales, the broad bosom of the Black Mountains misty over the Severn’s glittering steel. Swift’s Hill, the high mountain of Slad, where the gods settle and discuss the doings of the day.
One morning a thirty-foot Buddha appeared on Swift’s Hill, out of nowhere, perched in clear view of the road and framed to perfection in the Woolpack’s window behind the bar. It appeared from a distance to have grown up out of the hill, birthed from the delicate genitalia of an orchid perhaps. It sat there smiling, seraphic, offering benefaction and content. It shocked passers-by, this strange manifestation, brought wagging tongues together in happy disharmony in the pub, invigorated newspapers. No one could be certain where it had come from. Theories spread like dandelion seeds, blowing up and down the valley and eager to take root.
I cycled up to the hill with friends, determined to see it for myself before it vanished again, or was removed. We climbed the hill, puffing up past the Vatch and dumping our bikes in the parking space at its foot. Above us, the Buddha loomed genially, shut-eyed and enormous in a crook of the hill. We scrambled up to it, gasping irreverently for breath on the steeper sections, slipping forward and grasping handfuls of turf to steady the climb, trying not to disturb the plant life too much in our eagerness to see.
Close to, the Buddha sported dark lines at regular intervals up his body. It was clear suddenly that he came in sections, and must usually lurk elsewhere, in chunks, easily stored and out of sight unless required for sudden manifestations and celebrations. It was not immediately clear what his presence was celebrating that day, so we admired him a little longer and went freewheeling back to the pub to listen to the speculations, the laughter and the discontent.
A litany of opinions roiled around the pub: ‘It’s amazing! I love it.’ ‘It’s rude is what it is. That’s a nature reserve. It could be doing untold damage.’ ‘I think it’s lush.’ ‘What would Laurie Lee think?’ ‘Who cares?’ ‘Laurie would have loved it. I love it.’ ‘It’s stupid. Who’s got that sort of time to waste?’
Hours were wasted with the thrill of the Buddha of Swift’s Hill, whether it was approved of or not. It brought the local papers running, ever eager for something new and strange to write about, caught in the permanent trap of an endless small community slow news day. Myths sprang from the tongues of locals, a
ll of us ready to expound on whimsical theories through a filter of alcohol. I told anyone who would listen (and not too many did, given that they had theories of their own) that it had belonged to Laurie Lee and that he had asked friends to erect it as a constant reminder that the valley was a sacred space.
It was fanciful, but then the valley allowed for flights of fancy, encouraged them and let them grow if they were strong enough. It does not seem far-fetched at all that there might be some presiding spirit looking out from under its green skin. ‘As sure as God’s in Gloucestershire,’ the saying goes. That may be true, but in Slad the closest one gets to gods are people who have imprinted themselves on the landscape, hardy presences born of toil or art that shift and change, decay and are revived.
One can see the bones of them in the crooked walls of Cotswold stone that line the roads in ever fainter procession out of Slad, absorbed by fence lines and scrabbling hedgerows, dark wet moss coating them for their last winters as they fail to be repaired. The past is a book laid out in pages of divided fields, should one care to read them; a book that becomes harder to read as people cull its pages for other books, cut them up and sample them. Words and actions thread through the valley like teased wool, binding the past and present together, inseparable. Standing astride both ancient and modern eras is Laurie, and the memory of him, bound up in the valley, preserving and preserved by it, too much a human being to ever risk becoming a god.
After three days the Buddha vanished, leaving a sudden vacuum for other myths and gossip to rush towards and fill. No lasting mark was left by its absence; people quickly forget novelty when there is the day-to-day beauty of life in the summer abundance of Slad to take its place. It is easy to forget when there are long grasses to lie in whilst the sun shines, a beer garden to occupy as the last light of evening falls in a halo on Swift’s Hill.
The image of the Buddha still lingers in my eye, though; as does the knowledge that somewhere, not far away, a man with an impish smile guards its sections undercover in his garden, laughing still at the reactions to his prank.
18
Notting Hill in Wellies
As all things change, so too the Woolpack changed. Dave, the genial crumpled landlord, purveyor of fine beers and quick food, decided it was time to sell. The village became overnight a riot of panicked whispers and morbid speculations as to who might take his place. The village’s breath shortened as its alcohol-laced heart skipped a few beats. Who could replace Dave and his convivial, old-fashioned set-up? The pub had stocked papers and sent teenagers out on paper rounds on his watch and was always a gently welcoming place, unless it was the height of tourist season and was painfully full of walkers.
What if it were taken over by a pub chain and became the sort of bland everypub that had begun to infest the towns and villages of Britain, where everything from the beer to the beer mats was exactly the same and music and food was piped at the customer at a level just low enough to irritate? Worse, what if it were to close and leave the village with only a road packed with cars rushing through, no one finding a need or having a reason to stop?
Turmoil and angst flooded the fields and would have surely caused the stream to burst its banks had Dan Chadwick not stepped in and bought it. Youngest son of the sculptor Lynn, who had come to Gloucestershire after meeting Diana and Oliver Lodge, Dan was the perfect person to take on the pub. He was part of the imagined landscape of Slad, an artist in his own right living over the hill at Lypiatt Park and sweeping down for a drink at the Woolpack on a regular basis. He knew the locals. The locals knew him. The pub loved him and he loved the pub.
Dan’s intervention was a velvet revolution for the Woolpack. Everything changed and nothing did. It was retrofitted to look older than it was, craftsmen rolling in to make brand new ancient benches and canny little shelves where bottles from Laurie Lee’s beer collection would sit. There had always been a tatty and immovable little display promoting Laurie’s books in the pub; now there were a number of subtle points scattered about the place ingraining his memory into the newly worn weave of its wood. The cellar was closed off and transformed into a kitchen. The old kitchen was opened into a bar area. Everything was smartened up and faded. It became the sort of pub one might imagine walking into if one were thirsty after a backward jaunt in a time machine.
All that the new-look old-style Woolpack lacked was a daily coat of sawdust on the floor and barrels on the bar, but there was no use for that sort of décor in a pub determined to sell food. The locals and drinkers were collected in the bar area as they always had been, grunting with pleasure as they stood in front of the open fire and steamed, but the rest of the pub was opened up for reservations, for attracting diners into the welcoming bosom of Slad.
All of a sudden, it went from a small village pub that served community and summertime tourists to a roaring success, constantly busy and attracting carloads of people. Dan’s arty London crowd came roaring into the village and the posh set, the younger generations of the sort that Laurie had courted and counted as friends when in London, came tumbling down by train after them. People like Damien Hirst, Joe Strummer and Alex James were in and out of the pub and attracted a curious crowd who tagged along in their wake, hoping to be surprised.
Hirst was the most noticeable there, revelling in the much reported and now abandoned alcohol-fuelled phase of his public life. Not a gentlemanly man in his cups, he was known to preside over nights of anarchy in the pub, seeing whom he could persuade to play his drunken games or cow into dancing attendance. He was a decadent sprite in these moods, an argument on legs bundling through the pub demanding that people pay him attention, funny and caustic and disruptive.
I encountered him twice in the pub; the first time, I was introduced to him and he was not in the mood to be introduced. He barely acknowledged my presence. The second time was more combative. I had been in the pub for a while, watching the evening get ever more out of hand, drinking and concocting plans with friends. I got up to go to the bar, when a bespectacled figure appeared at my side.
‘You’re going to the bar!’ said the figure, breathing alcohol fumes in my face. ‘Get me a drink!’
I turned around. It was Hirst, looking at me intently.
‘Get your own,’ I said.
‘I want a drink, you –’
‘Well you know where the bar is!’ I snapped, heat rising in my face. I walked off.
‘I want a f***ing drink,’ he yelled. I looked back. He was stopping someone else, and there seemed to be something of a performer’s gait in the way he shuffled up to him, angry and amused at once. I didn’t stop to see if he got his way. I left the pub, impatient, when the beer garden turned into a skittering host of people with mobile phone antennae sticking from their ears all apparently working for Hirst.
Celebrities, ill-behaved or otherwise, brought hangers-on, and wealthy types from London. That combination brought journalists, eager to discover what was going on in a quiet little valley, and they brought hastily assembled comparisons that ignored the valley’s history. Slad was ‘Notting Hill in Wellies’ they decided, trumpeting it in the gossip and lifestyle section of the newspapers, with smiling photos of beautiful people gadding in the countryside. If Cider with Rosie was mentioned, it was in passing. The locals rebelled, started a counter-revolution, complaining that the village was becoming too busy and noisy, too fashionable, fearing that the publicity would lead to the sort of shift in population that Notting Hill itself had seen when the wealthy moved in and priced the black community out. They fretted, fulminated and worried that the pub was not serving the community as it had been hoped it would. They won. The Woolpack settled back into tranquillity and Slad breathed deeply, safe in the knowledge that no interloping celebrity or fashion would steal the limelight from its favourite son.
19
Coming Home
[These verses] speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and kinship.
/> Laurie Lee, in a note introducing his Selected Poems.
I spent eighteen years living outside the valley, carrying the memory of it locked into the shell of my skull, informed by the haphazard spirit of it: the sound of water crazing its way under the Roman bridge; the incessant hunting of the owls at the edge of dusk, hooting at the window like angry ghosts; the hush of rain in yew branches. I yearned for the qualified silence of it all, for the freedom from car-blare and late night homebound pub-stumbler shouting at lampposts. I longed for the noises I might add to that hiss of life: the delicate roar of steam from the kettle; the creak of metal as the fire takes hold in the wood-burning stove; the croak of a boot in mud, crossing the cattle-bound stream on the way to the Woolpack.
The house had became a portal for papers and whispers, mice and the creeping damp of silence; the sort of place that walkers considered lost, that required only shutters and a caved-in roof to become as derelict as Rosie Bannen’s cottage. I often heard them, on my occasional visits, discussing our cottage in loud voices from the path, braying what a shame that it was ‘abandoned and probably haunted’. I took perverse pleasure in coming face-to-face with them in the window as they peered in, pouncing up from my chair with a brusque ‘Hallo’ and watching as they reeled away startled, back to the path and the walk, hoping their hearts were pounding. A practical joke born of guilt.
How, then, to negotiate a return? Both my father and I had felt the call of the early years there ripping at our mouths like steel hooks, reeling us in, pulling us up too often into the sharp, hard-to-breathe air of maudlin nostalgia. It was difficult to go back – the paperwork drowning-pool was full of little currents and eddies that slowed its clearing, and my mother’s presence felt constrained by our inability to clear it. All but a few of our human ties to Slad had gone. What remained was art, literature and the landscape itself. It sprawled out before me like a tangled map of loss.
A Thousand Laurie Lees Page 12
