A Thousand Laurie Lees

by Adam Horovitz

  A house is only as alive as the people who live in it, and we populated ours with paper and a rising aura of damp. We wrote about it, abstracted it, pushed the valley from its intrinsic reality and into an unsustainable utopian space. The more we quested after it, the farther away it seemed. It became a literary conceit, a bone of contention sticking out of the landscape at an awkward angle, rarely dealt with on a daily basis but never forgotten.

  Then, one winter morning, I received a telephone call from Mrs Hopf, still living next door.

  ‘There’s someone in your house, Adam. He says he knows you. He’s threatening to squat,’ she said.

  I ran to the pub to raise a posse, and found three friends ready to go and see off squatters – Legzee, Rhidian and Celine. We bundled into Rhidian’s car, pumped up and ready for a confrontation. I held the front door keys rattling in my hand as we bombed out to the cottage in the early evening. Even before we got there, I felt a rising swell of elation – at last the cottage needed protecting. We were a ragtag bunch of defenders, but it seemed appropriate that Legzee was there, perhaps more than a little tipsy, having taken a few drinks after work, but all the same geared up to help. Arriving at the green tin garage, we spilled like fish from the net of the car, puffed down the path to the garden, checking and inspecting everything as we went, talking the language of disconcerted bravado. The adrenaline in my veins ran sharp. We got to the house and banged on the door: ‘Are you in there, Al?’ I called.

  But the squatter had gone. He had taken his chances on a well-known empty house, but had not counted on the eagle eyes of neighbours who had come and quizzed him through the door and taken his number. He had begun to dismantle the lock and left it by the door, but after my father’s follow-up call had offered to introduce the police into the equation, he had apparently fled. The only thing ‘Al’ left me other than a door to mend was the leverage I needed to move back in.

  The cottage had survived eighteen years without a break-in (apart from Everest, climbing in through the kitchen window for a glass of water after a long walk on a hot day at almost the exact time two other friends were arriving to stay at the cottage for the weekend) and now I had all the impetus I needed to go back, to work on sorting it out and reclaiming it as a functional home.

  Not so idyllic, living in a damp, cold house that’s been standing empty but for mice and papers for eighteen years. I moved the bulk of my books and belongings back in the summer, and began the dusty and initially euphoric process of sifting through papers and making space to live, but did not move back in until the winter of 2012–13, bringing cats with me. As soon as I moved back in, the house and the valley began to take their revenge for long years of abandonment.

  Winter set in with a vengeance, the worst I had endured since childhood, and I discovered that the chimney was blocked and the wood-burning stove had been rendered inoperable by time and alterations. It had been connected to the water supply when I was a child, but this had been disconnected three years before. So I all but froze through the long winter that lasted until April, unable to sit still long enough to write or think, bleeding money out of radiators and huddled into a sleeping bag with cats and hot water bottles pressed hard against my chest.

  In 1985, when the snow had fallen so thick that the electricity failed, it had taken my father and me three hours to climb the hill out of the valley and seek refuge with the farmer. Cold and disheartened, we slogged up the path that runs past Driftcombe, falling into deep, treacherous drifts, slithering and unnerved. This time, I had no escape routes. The world pressed cold at the windowpanes and snow-cold night patterned the inner eyelids of the house with frost. I stayed for the cats, determined to reclaim the landscape or let it reclaim me.

  The cats, a friend’s beloved pair of tortoiseshell sisters, which she could no longer keep, were constantly harassed by next door’s aggressively territorial black tomcat, who woke me night after night wailing and growling in the attic. He sprayed for dominance and terrorised the two nervous intruders I had brought to his turf until they fled – Frieda to who knows where, Freya to the chicken farm at the top of the hill, where she made herself at home beneath the roosts and drove the owners to distraction.

  Poorly spayed, Freya took to marching from door to door around the cat-owning houses at the edge of Bisley parading herself for toms. Unable to reproduce but undergoing the fiercest of urges, she rubbed against garage doors, invaded houses, terrorised chickens, startled horses and upset the neighbourhood entirely with her frustrated sexuality. I caught her and repatriated her twice, tempting her with food from beneath the hay at the chicken farm the first time, only to be bitten savagely for my trouble. The second time, a man whose cat’s food she’d been stealing cornered her in his house and locked the cat flap before calling me to come and carry her away. Freya treated the kitchen like an assault course until finally I cornered and calmed her, wearing toughened gardening gloves and a grimace. Two times I took her back and each time she ran straight off again, intimidated by the neighbour’s cat, the damp, the cold.

  Alone in the house, I left the cat flap open for weeks, putting down food in the hope that they’d return. The only visitor I had was next-door’s cat, sour faced and frightened, eating greedily from the peace offerings I’d left. Come May, the cat flap was blocked, though every time I hear a cat’s yowl in the garden now I rush to the window, hoping that either Frieda or Freya has returned.

  In the snow, I rediscovered community via the generosity of neighbours who’d pick me up if they passed me slouching up the hill on foot, unable to cycle through the ice, who would listen and forgive if I pounded on their doors after a long walk home through blinding snow, suddenly uncertain if there were any people left alive in a world so consumed by soft bee-sized fists of falling ice.

  It had not always been so welcoming. One set of neighbours, who bought the Old Chapel as a fixer upper, I only ever spoke with once on the phone after I discovered that their plans for extending the house reached ten feet into our garden. The officious husband called me out of the blue, aggressively justifying his plans after I’d spent an afternoon marching incredulous up and down the garden as Mrs Hopf explained them to me. These hellish neighbours were also prone, I discovered later, to come out and yell the riot act at walkers taking the public footpath past their house, Several members of the Lloyd family were caught in the blast of their ire and responded in kind, insisting furiously and derisively that they had been walking here all of their lives.

  Combative and colonial to the last, the new owners had also bought some of the field below the house, which included the spring that had served the community until plumbing was installed in the 1950s. They denied all comers access to the spring and were attempting to have the land reassigned from agricultural to domestic use but, mercifully, left after a flurry of complaints to the planning department, which were so voluminous and came from so many quarters of Slad and Bisley that the people who moved to the house in their wake were apprehensive in case the valley turned out to be filled with a den of Gorgons who would go out of their way to make their lives miserable. The Mohammeds, however, were kind, and open, and were welcomed with open arms (though their black tomcat is still no friend of mine).

  The valley under snow was less than welcoming. I explored where I could, sliding down paths that had been worn into perilous ruts by trail bikes, investigating walls that had in places all but vanished, their stones taken away and repurposed or simply cast down onto the path like Jericho’s walls under the relentless biting music of the frost. The walkers’ path to Slad down past the Roman bridge was blocked by an uncut tree that required a loose limbo dance to navigate past.

  The field surrounding the Roman bridge was churned to mud and regularly blocked by a couple of cows who stood and stared at me with steely bewilderment, refusing to move. I read them poetry, or, if I was feeling cruel, sang. Sometimes it drove them off. Certainly it worked better than reason, to which frustration occasionally led me, keen to g
et to the pub and explaining this in irate detail to gawping bovines. Mostly, of course, loud noises worked, or climbing the stile in the hope that the cows would move. Even if the cows could be negotiated, the sucking soup of mud and effluent to which they churned the ground could take your boot off in an instant, as if your foot were merely a shucked pea. It made the first pint at the Woolpack feel like even more of a reward.

  20

  The Spring is Sprung

  Bold with the longing of Spring went he

  Into the danger he could not see.

  From ‘Spring Fox’ by Frank Mansell

  The sun always returns. Snows melt and relentless mud thickens into springy turf. Bitter pills of hail soften into warm rain, which hangs like spun glass in a glaze of light on tree branch and mossy stone, spider’s web and eyelash. Winter is a state of mind as much as a season. Tree branches stretch their furled spears to the sun, which wait to become leaf, just as people reach out into the landscapes that surround them, struggle to be a part of them, and of each other, with the tender encouragement of spring.

  Catkins hang like lambs’ tails from birch and hornbeam; fatheaded snowdrops mooch in mutinous clusters, defying frost; daffodils poke their green stems skyward. Eventually coltsfoot and primrose cluster at the path’s edge and an explosion of yellow welcomes in the longer days.

  The thrush’s tinder throat strikes up,

  The sparrow chips hot sparks

  From flinty tongue, and all the sky

  Showers with electric larks.1

  Night becomes a reward, a slow simmering promise of tomorrow’s sunlight kissed against the tree line in streaks of red and orange every evening. The stream sings a slower song as rains recede and children laugh as they run into the gardens, their high voices clattering through the treetops as the birds puff themselves up and begin their mating rituals.

  I wake often to deer in the garden, settled in like hounds under the boughs of trees where the rain won’t reach them as they sleep, or peering through my door, inquisitive and easily startled. They bolt into the fields if I move too fast. In the absence of my cats, the trees are alive with tits and finches, small bolts of gold and blue shimmering through the evergreen yew after dizzy clouds of insects. The house is alive with insect life. A wasps’ nest in the roof pours its skirmish-ready troops outwards if the sun is hot, or buzzing confused and lazy inwards if all the sun can do is heat the panes of glass. Opening windows, I startle hosts of ladybirds out of slumber; watch as they fleck the landscape red and black before vanishing into the vastness of the day.

  Exploring the fields below the house comes as a shock. I remember picking my way through sheep and cattle, the occasional horse. Now they sit un-grazed, too remote to be worth fencing, the walls built during cloth trade plenty falling away like broken teeth. Old Captain George who farmed them has retired and they have become ragged, as if a giant tramp has lain down under his coat on them and passed into permanent sleep. They are treacherous; all that is left of the close-cropped turf I ran down as a child is a sheer path worn flat by walkers; the rest is tussock and sapling. The old ford that led to the badger’s sett has grown over and been replaced with a polite and slippery wooden bridge, all stones removed. It feels too safe to walk this plank; I miss the shift of the stones beneath my feet; the feeling of risk; the push of the water taking away any sensation of control. In wellingtons, I wade across instead, up to the edge of the wood to look across at the decorous acres of the racing stables where Captain George’s son breeds winners and keeps the land tamed to prevent the horses turning their delicate ankles, frustrated that his land beyond the line of sight of tourists has become so ragged and unkempt that it risks turning to woodland and cutting off all line of sight to Slad.

  Out of the woodwork the people came; I saw them as I passed the pub, walking into Stroud on the long route that allows for beer stops and conversation. Old faces, familiar and welcoming, clutching roll-ups and beer on the bench next to the road, hailing me as I walked past. New faces too, occupying old houses; my old friend Joe’s sister-in-law Hester now lives in the house in which Laurie Lee grew up. She and her partner have been clearing, and planting snowdrops on, the steep bank down from the road that Annie Lee struggled up, perpetually late, to get the bus to town. They have been taming the garden with dry-stone walls and vegetables, keeping the essence of the house intact whilst keeping it habitable and free of floods.

  Visiting, I could almost smell the food that Annie cooked on the stove a century before; the large fireplace was still nearly as it would have been then, stove blazing; the cellar was stacked with sustenance and felt cool as an autumn breeze. The attic bedroom that Laurie and his siblings had occupied felt changeless but for the modern furniture, occupied by children who bounced down the stairs to smile questioningly at me and vie noisily for their parents’ attention as we chattered over mugs of tea.

  I found myself, that spring, at a medieval feast in the farmstead on Knapp Lane below Swift’s Hill, a feast followed by a showing of Pasolini’s vulgar and ridiculous Canterbury Tales. I had walked through the woods to get there, high on wild garlic and the shuttering late May light rushing through the trees, down through Elcombe, laid out like random jawbones on an ossuary hill, and passing below Swift’s Hill as birds flicked over it in insect frenzy, down into a gathering of people sitting at trestle tables, a hog roast by the barn. The farmyard was grassed over, and the barns were filled with chairs.

  Laurie would have felt quite at home there, I suspected: the wine was being served by exquisite young women sporting diaphanous smiles, a preternatural gaiety shivering in their eyes; MPs rubbed shoulders with artists, farmers and country socialites; a duo played ancient, hypnotic folk music on droning, eccentric instruments, which cut through the chatter at exquisitely inappropriate moments; a jester gambolled through the crowd, dressed in black, performing aggravating slapstick and asking gnomic questions. Faces quickly began to glaze over with horror whenever he approached. Laurie would have put on his public face and held court, waving his white fedora in benediction and welcoming one and all to his valley, even the jester.

  I was not so easy in the hot sun. I ate and drank, watched the film all the way through and turned at the end to find that I was almost the last person left, the only one not sober enough to care that Pasolini had traduced one of the great works of early English literature. I staggered from the barn the film had been show in, a high-raftered and draughty shell of Cotswold stone filled with theatre seats, and looked around. The beautiful serving girls were writing fire words on the night sky with sticks they lit in a brazier. I joined them, quietly drunken admiration fused with the need to play, to write, to create the valley anew out of darkness and fire. Eventually, I stumbled home through the woods, weaving through the night like one of those blazing sticks. I felt immortal, a perfect part of the valley, as alive as it was possible to feel when stumbling across motorbike tyre ruts, falling elated into pockets of wild garlic and finally crashing down the steep path from Keensgrove wood to the stream and home.

  I woke in the front room the next morning giddy with hangover, birdsong hammering in my head. My clothes were stained green and black and stank of mud and night and garlic. I sat in the garden with a pen, under a tent of yew, and began to write.

  As spring uncoiled into summer, I bought an electric bicycle, a new concession to modernity and the need to escape the confines of the valley to find work and food. A job came next, at the shop behind the garage that had delicately rejected me twenty years before, and the contract for a book.

  I celebrated by cycling far and fast, sweeping through the lanes like Icarus, hell-bent on sunshine and freedom. Then, after the second day of work at the shop, cycling home late, driven faster by hunger, assuming, like Annie Lee, that there would be something or someone to catch me should I be unable to stop, I turned a corner and met an unexpected car. I hit the brakes and only the tarmac was there to catch me.

  Note

  * * *
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  1 From ‘Edge of Day’ by Laurie Lee.

  21

  Tramadol with Rosie

  A summer lost to two broken arms and three broken ribs, unable to write or cook or even wash without a severe amount of pain (after a week I had to be hosed down by my ex-girlfriend as she would not stand for me rapidly becoming riper than a blue cheese left to melt in Tupperware under a scalding sun). I was ripped away from the valley, taken in by friends, barely able to send a short text message on my mobile phone let alone write. I simmered and sweated as the summer turned into perfect walking weather and watched my opportunity to bask in all that the Slad Valley had to offer vanish under a blanket of pain relief. Doped up on Tramadol, I could barely even read and found myself gummed to the teat of the television most days, my delicately generous array of hosts doing their best to offer me comfort as I struggled to settle or find sleep.

  The accident allowed me time to think, though, especially as I mended; to think about the valley and how I had come to spend my life entwined in a vision of it that was real and unreal at the same time. I was forced to re-evaluate, to scrumple up my impractical poet’s eye and consider a practical life more carefully. It was not enough to live there high on paper and aesthetics, admiring the mob of crows belting after buzzards or the soft breathy song of the wood pigeon. I had let the landscape rule me. That had to change, become a process of reconciliation, co-habitation.