by Laurie Lee
Playtime comes and we charge outdoors, releasing our steamed-up cries. Somebody punches a head. Somebody bloodies their knees. Boys cluster together like bees. ‘Let’s go round the back then, shall us, eh?’ To the dark narrow alley, rich with our mysteries, we make our clattering way. Over the wall is the girl’s own place, quite close, and we shout them greetings.
‘I ’eard you, Bill Timbrell! I ’eard what you said! You be careful, I’ll tell our teacher! ’
Flushed and refreshed, we stream back to our playground, whistling, indivisibly male.
‘D’you ’ear what I said then? Did you then, eh? I told ’em! They ’alf didn’t squeal! ’
We all double up; we can’t speak for laughing, we can’t laugh without hitting each other
Miss Wardley was patient, but we weren’t very bright. Our books showed a squalor of blots and scratches as though monkeys were being taught to write. We sang in sweet choirs, and drew like cavemen, but most other faculties escaped us. Apart from poetry, of course, which gave no trouble at all. I can remember Miss Wardley, -with hersqueaking chalk, scrawling the blackboard like a shopping list:
‘Write a poem-which must scan - on one or more of the following; A Kitten. Fairies. My Holidays. An Old Tinker. Charity. Sea Wrack…’ (‘What’s that, miss?’)
But it was easy in those days, one wrote a dozen an hour, one simply didn’t hesitate, just began at the beginning and worked steadily through the subjects, ticking them off with indefatigable rhymes.
Sometimes there was a beating, which nobody minded -except an occasional red-faced mother. Sometimes a man came and took out our teeth. (‘My mum says you ain’t to take out any double-’uns …’ ‘… Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen___’ ‘Is they all double-’uns?’ ‘Shut up, youlittle horror.’) Sometimes the Squire would pay us a visit, hand out prizes, and make a misty-eyed speech. Sometimes an Inspector arrived on a bicycle and counted our heads and departed. Meanwhile Miss Wardley moved jingling amongst us, instructing, appealing, despairing:
‘You’re a grub, Walter Kerry. You have the wits of a hen. You’re a great hulking lout of an oaf. You can just stay behind and do it over again. You can all stay behind, the lot of you.’
When lessons grew too tiresome, or too insoluble, we had our traditional ways of avoiding them.
‘Please, miss, I got to stay ’ome tomorrow, to ’elp with the washing - the pigs - me dad’s sick.’
‘I dunno, miss; you never learned us that.’
‘I ’ad me book stole, miss. Carry Burdock pinched it.’
‘Please, miss, I got a gurt ’eadache.’
Sometimes these worked, sometimes they didn’t. But once, when some tests hung over our heads, a group of us boys evaded them entirely by stinging our hands with horseflies. The task took all day, but the results were spectacular -our hands swelled like elephants’ trunks. ”Twas a swarm, please, miss. They set on us. We run, but they stung us awful.’ I remember how we groaned, and that we couldn’t hold our pens, but I don’t remember the pain.
At other times, of course, we forged notes from our mothers, or made ourselves sick with berries, or claimed to be relations of the corpse at funerals (the churchyard lay only next door). It was easy to start wailing when the hearse passed by, ‘It’s my auntie, miss - it’s my cousin Wilf-can I go miss, please miss, can I? ’ Many a lone coffin was followed to its.grave by a straggle of long-faced children, pinched, solemn, raggedly dressed, all strangers to the astonished bereaved.
So our school work was done - or where would we be today? We would be as we are; watching a loom or driving a tractor, and counting in images of fives and tens. This was as much as we seemed to need, and Miss Wardley did not add to the burden. What we learned in her care were the less formal truths - the names of flowers, the habits of birds, the intimacy of objects in being set to draw them, the treacherous innocence of boys, the sly charm of girls, the idiot’s soaring fancies, and the tongue-tied dunce’s informed authority when it came to talking about stoats. We were as merciless and cruel as most primitives are. But we learnt at that school the private nature of cruelty; and our inborn hatred for freaks and outcasts was tempered by meeting them daily.
There was Nick and Edna from up near the Cross, the children of that brother and sister - the boy was strong and the girl was beautiful, and it was not at school that we learned to condemn them. And there was the gipsy boy Rosso, who lived up the quarry where his tribe had encamped for the summer. He had a chocolate-smooth face and crisp black curls, and at first we cold-shouldered him. He was a real outsider (they ate snails, it was said) and his slant Indian eyesrepelled us. Then one day, out of hunger, he stole some sandwiches and was given the cane by Miss Wardley. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, that made him one of us.
We saw him run out of school, grizzling from the beating, and kneel down to tie up his boots. The shopkeeper’s wife, passing by at that moment, stopped to preach him a little sermon. ‘You didn’t have to steal, even if you was that hungry. Why didn’t you come to me? ’ The boy gave her a look, picked himself up, and ran off without a word. He knew, as we did, the answer to that one: we set our dogs on the gipsies here. As we walked back home to our cabbage dinners we were all of us filled with compassion. We pictured poor Rosso climbing back to his quarry, hungry to his miserable tents, with nothing but mud and puddles to sit in and the sour banks to scavenge for food. Gipsies no longer seemed either sinister or strange. No wonder they eat snails, we thought.
The narrow school was just a conveyor belt along which the short years drew us. We entered the door marked ‘Infants’, moved gradually to the other, and were then handed back to the world. Lucky, lucky point of time; our eyes were on it always. Meanwhile we had moved to grander desks, saw our juniors multiplying in number, Miss Wardley suddenly began to ask our advice and to spoil us as though we were dying. There was no more to be done, no more to be learned. We began to look round the schoolroom with nostalgia and impatience. During playtime in the road we walked about gravely, patronizing the younger creatures. No longer the trembling, white-faced battles, the flights, the buttering-up of bullies; just a punch here and there to show our authority, then a sober stroll with our peers.
At last Miss Wardley was wringing our hands, tender anddeferential. ‘Good-bye, old chaps, and jolly good luck! Don’t forget to come back and see me.’ She gave each one of us a coy sad glance. She knew that we never would.
THE KITCHEN
Our house and our life in it, is something of which I still constantly dream, helplessly bidden, night after night, to return to its tranquillity and nightmares: to the heavy shadows of its stone-walled rooms creviced between bank and yew trees, to its boarded ceilings and gaping mattresses, its blood-shot geranium windows, its smells of damp pepper and mushroom growths, its chaos, and rule of women.
We boys never knew any male authority. My father left us when I was three, and apart from some rare and fugitive visits he did not live with us again. He was a knowing, brisk, elusive man, the son and the grandson of sailors, but having himself no stomach for the sea he had determined to make good on land. In his miniature way he succeeded in this. He became, while still in his middle teens, a grocer’s assistant, a local church organist, an expert photographer, and a dandy. Certain portraits he took of himself at that time show a handsome though threadbare lad, tall and slender, and much addicted to gloves, high-collars, and courtly poses. He was clearly a cut above the average, in charms as well as ambition. By the age of twenty he had married the beautiful daughter of a local merchant, and she bore him eight children - of whom five survived - before dying herself still young. Then he married his housekeeper, who bore him four more, three surviving, of which I was one. At the time of this second marriage he was still a grocer’s assistant, and earning nineteen shillings a week. But his dearest wish was to become a Civil Servant, and he studied each night to this end. The First World War gave him the chance he wanted, and though properly distrustful of arms and
battle he instantly sacrificed both himself and his family, applied for a post inthe Army Pay Corps, went off to Greenwich in a bulletproof vest, and never permanently lived with us again.
He was a natural fixer, my father was, and things worked out pretty smoothly. He survived his clerk-stool war with a War Office pension (for nervous rash, I believe), then entered the Civil Service, as he had planned to do, and settled in London for good. Thus enabling my Mother to raise both his families, which she did out of love and pity, out of unreasoning loyalty and a fixed belief that he would one day return to her….
Meanwhile, we lived where he had left us; a relic of his provincial youth; a sprawling, cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him. He sent us money and we grew up without him; and I, for one, scarcely missed him. I was perfectly content in this world of women, muddleheaded though it might be, to be bullied and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed-up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots.
My three half-sisters shared much of Mother’s burden, and were the good fortune of our lives. Generous, indulgent, warm-blooded, and dotty, these girls were not hard to admire. They seemed wrapped as it were in a perpetual bloom, the glamour of their grown-up teens, and expressed for us boys all that women should be in beauty, style, and artifice.
For there was no doubt at all about their beauty, or the naturalness with which they wore it. Marjorie, the eldest, a blonde Aphrodite, appeared quite unconscious of the rarity of herself, moving always to measures of oblivious grace and wearing her beauty like a kind of sleep. She was tall, longhaired, and dreamily gentle, and her voice was low and slow.
I never knew her to lose her temper, or to claim any personal justice. But I knew her to weep, usually for others, quietly, with large blue tears. She was a natural mother, and skilled with her needle, making clothes for us all when needed. With her constant beauty and balanced nature she was the tranquil night-light of our fears, a steady flame reassuring always, whose very shadows seemed thrown for our comfort.
Dorothy, the next one, was a wispy imp, pretty and perilous as a firework. Compounded equally of curiosity and cheek, a spark and tinder for boys, her quick dark body seemed writ with warnings that her admirers did well to observe. ‘Not to be held in the hand,’ it said. ‘Light the touch-paper, but retire immediately.’ She was an active forager who lived on thrills, provoked adventure, and brought home gossip. Marjorie’s were the ears to which most of it came, making her pause in her sewing, open wide her eyes, and shake her head at each new revelation. ‘ You don’t mean it, Doth! He never No! …’ was all I seemed ever to hear.
Dorothy was as agile as a jungle cat, quick-limbed, entrancing, noisy. And she protected us boys with fire and spirit, and brought us treasures from the outside world. When I think of her now she is a coil of smoke, a giggling splutter, a reek of cordite. In repose she was also something else: a fairy-tale girl, blue as a plum, tender, and sentimental.
The youngest of the three was cool, quiet Phyllis, a tobacco-haired, fragile girl, who carried her good looks with an air of apology, being the junior and somewhat shadowed. Marjorie and Dorothy shared a natural intimacy, being closer together in age, so Phyllis was the odd one, an unclassified solitary, compelled to her own devices. This she endured with a modest simplicity, quick to admire and slow to complain. Her favourite chore was putting us boys to bed, when she emerged in a strange light of her own, revealing a devout almost old-fashioned watchfulness, and gravely singing us to sleep with hymns.
Sad Phyllis, lit by a summer night, her tangled hair aglow, quietly sitting beside our beds, hands folded, eyes far away, singing and singing of ‘Happy Eden’ alone with her care over us - how often to this did I drop into sleep, feel the warmth of its tide engulf me, steered by her young hoarsehymning voice and tuneless reveries…
These half-sisters I cherished; and apart from them I had two half-brothers also. Reggie, the first-born, lived apart with his grandmother; but young Harold, he lived with us. Harold was handsome, bony, and secretive, and he loved our absent father. He stood somewhat apart, laughed down his nose, and was unhappy more often than not. Though younger than the girls, he seemed a generation older, was clever with his hands, but lost.
My own true brothers were Jack and Tony, and we three came at the end of the line. We were of Dad’s second marriage, before he flew, and were born within the space of four years. Jack was the eldest, Tony the youngest, and myself the protected centre. Jack was the sharp one, bright as a knife, and was also my close companion. We played together, fought and ratted, built a private structure around us, shared the same bed till I finally left home, and lived off each other’s brains. Tony, the baby - strange and beautiful waif-was a brooding, imaginative solitary. Like Phyllis he suffered from being the odd one of three; worse still, he was the odd one of seven. He was always either running to keep up with the rest of us or sitting alone in the mud. His curious, crooked, suffering face had at times the radiance of a saint, at others the blank watchfulness of an insect. He could walk by himself or keep very still, get lost or appear at wrong moments. He drew like an artist, wouldn’t read or write, swallowed beads by the boxful, sang and danced, was quite without fear, had secret friends, and was prey to terrible nightmares. Tony was the one true visionary amongst us, the tiny hermit no one quite understood….
With our Mother, then, we made eight in that cottage and disposed of its three large floors. There was the huge white attic which ran the length of the house, where the girls slept on fat striped mattresses; an ancient, plaster-crumbling room whose sloping ceilings bulged like tent-cloths. The roof was so thin that rain and bats filtered through, and you could hear a bird land on the tiles. Mother and Tony shared a bedroom below; Jack, Harold, and I the other. But the house, since its building, had been so patched and parcelled that it was now almost impossible to get to one’s room without first passing through someone else’s. So each night saw a procession of pallid ghosts, sleepily seeking their beds, till the candle-snuffed darkness laid us out in rows, filed away in our allotted sheets, while snores and whistles shook the old house like a roundabout getting up steam.
But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared. Here we lived and fed in a family fug, not minding the little space, trod on each other like birds in a hole, elbowed our ways without spite, all talking at once or all silent at once, or crying against each other, but never I think feeling overcrowded, being as separate as notes in a scale.
That kitchen, worn by our boots and lives, was scruffy, warm, and low, whose fuss of furniture seemed never the same but was shuffled around each day. A black grate crackled with coal and beech-twigs; towels toasted on the guard; the mantel was littered with fine old china, horse brasses, and freak potatoes. On the floor were strips of muddy matting, the windows were choked with plants, the walls supported stopped clocks and calendars, and smoky fungus ran over the ceilings. There were also six tables of different sizes, some armchairs gapingly stuffed, boxes, stools, and unravelling baskets, books and papers on every chair, a sofa for cats, a harmonium for coats, and a piano for dust and photographs. These were the shapes of our kitchen landscape, the rocks of our submarine life, each object worn smooth by our constant nuzzling, or encrusted by lively barnacles, relics of birthdays and dead relations, wrecks of furniture long since foundered, all silted deep by Mother’s newspapers which the years piled round on the floor.
Waking up in the morning I saw squirrels in the yew trees nibbling at the moist red berries. Between the trees and the window hung a cloud of gold air composed of floating seeds and spiders. Farmers called to their cows on the other side of the valley and moorhens piped from the ponds. Brother Jack, as always, was the first to move, while I pulled on my boots in bed. We both stood at last on the bare-wood floor, scratching and saying our prayers. Too stiff
and manly to say them out loud, we stood back to back and muttered them, as if an audible plea should slip out by chance, one just burst into song to cover it.
Singing and whistling were useful face-savers, especially when confounded by argument. We used the trick readily, one might say monotonously, and this morning it was Jack who began it.
‘What’s the name of the king, then? ’ he said, groping for his trousers.
‘Albert.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s George.’
‘That’s what I said you, didn’t I? George.’
‘No you never. You don’t know. You’re feeble.’
‘Not so feeble as you be, any road.’
‘You’re balmy. You got brains of a bed-bug.’
‘Da-da-di-da-da.’
‘I said you’re brainless. You can’t even count.’ ‘Turrelee-turrelee. … Didn’t hear you.’
‘Yes you did then, blockhead. Fat and lazy. Big faa—‘
‘Dum-di-dah!.. . Can’t hear … Hey nonnie!…’
Well, that was all right; honours even, as usual. We broke the sleep from our eyes and dressed quickly.
Walking downstairs there was a smell of floorboards, of rags, sour lemons, old spices. The smoky kitchen was in its morning muddle, from which breakfast would presently emerge. Mother stirred the porridge in a soot-black pot. Tony was carving bread with a ruler, the girls in their mackintoshes were laying the table, and the cats were eating the butter. I cleaned some boots and pumped up some fresh water; Jack went for a jug of skimmed milk.
‘I’m all behind,’ Mother said to the fire. ‘This wretched coal’s all slack.’
