by Laurie Lee
Often, when working and not actually screaming, Mother kept up an interior monologue. Or she would absent-mindedly pick up your last remark and sing it back at you in doggerel. ‘Give me some tart,’ you might say, for instance. ‘ Give you some tart? Of course…. Give me some tart! O give me your heart! Give me your heart to keep! I’ll guard it well, my pretty Nell, As the shepherd doth guard his sheep, tar-la….’
Whenever there was a pause in the smashing of crockery, and Mother was in the mood, she would make up snap verses about local characters that could stab like a three-pronged fork:
Mrs OkEy
Makes me choky:
Hit her with a mallet! - croquet.
This was typical of their edge, economy, and freedom. Mrs Okey was our local post-mistress and an amiable, friendly woman; but my Mother would sacrifice anybody for a rhyme.
Mother, like Gran Trill, lived by no clocks, and unpunctuality was bred in her bones. She was particularly offhand where buses were concerned and missed more than she ever caught. In the free-going days when only carrier-carts ran to Stroud she would often hold them up for an hour, but when the motor-bus started she saw no difference and carried on in the same old way. Not till she heard its horn winding down from Sheepscombe did she ever begin to get ready. Then she would cram on her hat and fly round the kitchen with habitual cries and howls.
‘Where’s my gloves? Where’s my handbag? Damn and cuss - where’s my shoes? You can’t find a thing in this hole! Help me, you idiots - don’t just jangle and jarl - you’ll all make me miss it, I know. Scream! There it comes! — Laurie,run up and stop it. Tell ’em I won’t be a minute….’
So I’d tear up the bank, just in time as usual, while the packed bus steamed to a halt.
‘… Just coming, she says. Got to find her shoes. Won’t be a minute, she says….’
Misery for me; I stood there blushing; the driver honked his horn, while all the passengers leaned out of the windows and shook their umbrellas crossly.
‘Mother Lee again.Lost ’er shoes again. Come on, put a jerk in it there!’
Then sweet and gay from down the bank would come Mother’s placating voice.
‘I’m coming - yoo-hoo! Just mislaid my gloves. Wait a second! I’m coming, my dears.’
Puffing and smiling, hat crooked, scarf dangling, clutching her baskets and bags, she’d come hobbling at last through the stinging-nettles and climb hiccuping into her seat. . ..
When neither bus nor carrier-cart were running, Mother walked the four miles to the shops, trudging back home with her baskets of groceries and scattering packets of tea in the mud. When she tired of this, she’d borrow Dorothy’s bicycle, though she never quite mastered the machine. Happy enough when the thing was in motion, it was stopping and starting that puzzled her. She had to be launched on her way by running parties of villagers; and to stop she rode into a hedge. With the Stroud Co-op Stores, where she was a registered customer, she had come to a special arrangement. This depended for its success upon a quick ear and timing, and was a beautiful operation to watch. As she coasted downhill towards the shop’s main entrance she would let out one of her screams; an assistant, specially briefed, would tear through the shop, out the side door, and catch her in his arms. He had to be both young and nimble,for if he missed her she piled up by the police-station.
Our Mother was a buffoon, extravagant and romantic, and was never wholly taken seriously. Yet within her she nourished a delicacy of taste, a sensibility, a brightness of spirit, which though continuously bludgeoned by the cruelties of her luck remained uncrushed and unembittered to the end. Wherever she got it from, God knows — or how she managed to preserve it. But she loved this world and saw it fresh with hopes that never clouded. She was an artist, a light-giver, and an original, and she never for a moment knew it….
My first image of my Mother was of a beautiful woman, strong, bounteous, but with a gravity of breeding that was always visible beneath her nervous chatter. She became, in a few years, both bent and worn, her healthy opulence quickly gnawed away by her later trials and hungers. It is in this second stage that I remembered her best, for in this stage she remained the longest. I can see her prowling about the kitchen, dipping a rusk into a cup of tea, with hair loose-tangled, and shedding pins, clothes shapelessly humped around her, eyes peering sharply at some revelation of the light, crying Ah or Oh or There, talking of Tonks or reciting Tennyson and demanding my understanding.
With her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litters of unfinished scrapbooks, her taboos, superstitions, and prudishness, her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry, and her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe, she was a disorganized mass of unreconciled denials, a servant girl born to silk. Yet in spite of all this, she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty. Though she tortured our patience and exhausted our nerves, she was, all the time, building up around us, by the unconscious revelations of her loves, an interpretation of man and the natural world so unpretentious and easy that we neverrecognized it then, yet so true that we never forgot it.
Nothing now that I ever see that has the edge of gold around it - the change of a season, a jewelled bird in a bush, the eyes of orchids, water in the evening, a thistle, a picture, a poem - but my pleasure pays some brief duty to her. She tried me at times to the top of my bent. But I absorbed from birth, as now I know, the whole earth through her jaunty spirit.
Not until I left home did I ever live in a house where the rooms were clear and carpeted, where corners were visible and window-seats empty, and where it was possible to sit on a kitchen chair without first turning it up and shaking it. Our Mother was one of those obsessive collectors who spend all their time stuffing the crannies of their lives with a ballast of wayward objects. She collected anything that came to hand, she never threw anything away, every rag and button was carefully hoarded as though to lose it would imperil us all. Two decades of newspapers, yellow as shrouds, was the dead past she clung to, the years saved for my father, maybe something she wished to show him… . Other crackpot symbols also littered the house: chair-springs, boot-lasts, sheets of broken glass, corset-bones, picture-frames, fire-dogs, top-hats, chess-men, feathers, and statues without heads. Most of these came on the tides of unknowing, and remained as though left by a flood. But in one thing - old china - Mother was a deliberate collector, and in this had an expert’s eye.
Old china to Mother was gambling, the bottle, illicit love, all stirred up together; the sensuality of touch and the ornament of a taste she was born to but could never afford. She hunted old china for miles around, though she hadn’t the money to do so; haunted shops and sales with wistful passion, and by wheedling, guile, and occasional freaks of chance carried several fine pieces home.
Once, I remember, there was a big auction at Bisley, and Mother couldn’t sleep for the thought of its treasures.
‘It’s a splendid old place,’ she kept telling us. ‘The Delacourt family, you know. Very cultivated they were - or she was, at least. It would be a crime not to go and look.’ When the Sale-day arrived, Mother rose right early and dressed in her auction clothes. We had a cold scratch breakfast - she was too nervy to cook — then she edged herself out through the door.
‘I shall only be looking. I shan’t buy, of course. I just wanted to see their Spode….’
Guiltily she met our expressionless eyes, then trotted away through the rain.___
That evening, just as we were about to have tea, we heard her calling as she came down the bank.
‘Boys! Marge - Doth! I’m home! Come and see! ’ Mud-stained, flushed, and just a little shifty, she came hobbling through the gate.
‘Oh, you should have been there. Such china and glass. I never saw anything like it. Dealers, dealers all over the place - but I did ’em all in the eye. Look, isn’t it beautiful?I just had to get it…. and it only cost a few coppers.’
She pulled from her bag a b
one cup and saucer, paper-thin, exquisite, and priceless - except that the cup and its handle had parted company, and the saucer lay in two pieces.
‘Of course, I could get those bits riveted,’ said Mother, holding them up to the sky. The light on her face was as soft and delicate as the egg-shell chips in her hand.
At that moment two carters came staggering down the path with a huge packing-case on their shoulders.
‘Put it there,’ said Mother, and they dumped it in the yard, took their tip, and departed groaning.
‘Oh dear,’ she giggled, ‘I’d quite forgotten… . That went with the cup and saucer. I had to take it, it was all one lot. But I’m sure we’ll find it helpful.’
We broke open the crate with a blow from the chopper and gathered to inspect the contents. Inside was a ball-cock, a bundle of stair-rods, an aigrette, the head of a spade, some broken clay-pipes, a box full of sheep’s teeth, and a framed photograph of Leamington Baths….
In this way and others, we got some beautiful china, some of it even perfect. I remember a Sevres clock once, pink-crushed with angels, and a set of Crown Derby in gold, and some airy figures from Dresden or somewhere that were like pieces of bubble-blown sunlight. It was never quite clear how Mother came by them all, but she would stroke and dust them, smiling to herself, and place them in different lights; or just stop and gaze at them, broom in hand, and sigh and shake with pleasure. They were all to her as magic casements, some cracked, some gravelled with faults, but each opening out on that secret world she knew intuitively but could never visit. She couldn’t keep any of them long, however. She just had time to look them up in books, to absorb their shapes and histories, then guilt and necessity sent her off to Cheltenham to sell them back to the dealers. Sometimes - but rarely - she made a shilling or two profit, which eased her mind a little. But usually her cry was ‘ Oh, dear, I was foolish! I should really have asked them double….’
Mother’s father had a touch with horses; she had the same with flowers. She could grow them anywhere, at any time, and they seemed to live longer for her. She grew them with rough, almost slap-dash love, but her hands possessed such an understanding of their needs they seemed to turn to her like another sun. She could snatch a dry root from field or hedgerow, dab it into the garden, give it a shake -and almost immediately it flowered. One felt she could grow roses from a stick or chair-leg, so remarkable was this gift.
Our terraced strip of garden was Mother’s monument, and she worked it headstrong, without plan. She would never control or clear this ground, merely cherish whatever was there; and she was as impartial in her encouragement to all that grew as a spell of sweet sunny weather. She would force nothing, graft nothing, nor set things in rows; she welcomed self-seeders, let each have its head, and was the enemy of very few weeds. Consequently our garden was a sprouting jungle and never an inch was wasted. Syringa shot up, laburnum hung down, white roses smothered the apple tree, red flowering-currants (smelling sharply of foxes) spread entirely along one path; such a chaos of blossom as amazed the bees and bewildered the birds in the air. Potatoes and cabbages were planted at random among foxgloves, pansies, and pinks. Often some species would entirely capture the garden - forget-me-nots one year, hollyhocks the next, then a sheet of harvest poppies. Whatever it was, one let it grow. While Mother went creeping around the wilderness, pausing to tap some odd bloom on the head, as indulgent, gracious, amiable and inquisitive as a queen at an orphanage.
Our kitchen extended this outdoor profusion, for it was always crammed with bunches. In the green confines of that shadowy place, stockaded by leaves and flowers, the sun filtered dimly through the plant-screened windows, I often felt like an ant in a jungle overwhelmed by its opulent clusters. Almost anything that caught her wandering eye, Mother gathered and brought indoors. In bottles, teapots, dishes, and jugs, in anything old or beautiful, she’d put roses, beech-boughs, parsley, hellebore, garlic, cornstalks, and rhubarb. She also grew plants in whatever would hold them- saucepans, tea-caddies, or ash tins. Indeed, she once raised a fine crop of geraniums in a cast-iron water-softener. We boys had found it thrown away in a wood - but only she knew what use to give it.
Although there was only one man in my Mother’s life -if he could ever be said to have been in it — she often grew sentimental about her girlhood suitors and liked to tell of their vanquished attentions. The postman she rejected because of his wig, the butcher who bled from her scorn, the cowman she’d shoved into Sheepscombe brook to cool his troublesome fires - there seemed many a man up and down the valleys whose love she once had blasted. Sometimes, out walking, or trudging from Stroud with our heads to the blowing rain, some fat whiskered farmer or jobbing builder would go jingling past in his trap. Then Mother would turn and watch him go, and shake the rain from her hat. ‘You know, I could have married that man,’ she’d murmur; ‘if only I’d played my cards right….’
Mother’s romantic memories may not have all been reliable, for their character frequently changed. But of the stories she told us, about herself and others, the one of theBlacksmith and Toffee-Maker was true….
Once, she said, in the village of C—, there lived a lovelorn blacksmith. For years he had loved a local spinster, but he was shy, as most blacksmiths are. The spinster, who eked out a poor existence by boiling and selling toffee, was also lonely, in fact desperate for a husband, but too modest and proud to seek one. With the years the spinster’s desperation grew, as did the blacksmith’s speechless passion.
Then one day the spinster stole into the church and threw herself down on her knees. ‘ O Lord! ’ she prayed, ‘ please be mindful of me, and send me a man to marry! ’
Now the blacksmith by chance was up in the belfry, mending the old church clock. Every breathless word of the spinster’s entreaties rose clearly to where he was. When he heard her praying, ‘ Please send me a man! ’ he nearly fell off the roof with excitement. But he kept his head, tuned his voice to Jehovah’s, and boomed ‘Will a blacksmith do?’ ‘Ern a man’s better than nern, dear Lord!’ cried the spinster gratefully.
At which the blacksmith ran home, changed into his best, and caught the spinster on her way out of church. He proposed, and they married, and lived forever contented, and used his forge for boiling their toffee.
In trying to recapture the presence of my Mother I am pulling at broken strings. The years run back through the pattern of her confusions. Her flowers and songs, her unshaken fidelities, her attempts at order, her relapses into squalor, her near madness, her crying for light, her almost daily weeping for her dead child-daughter, her frisks and gaieties, her fits of screams, her love of man, her hysterical rages, her justice towards each of us children - all these rode my Mother and sat on her shoulders like a roosting of ravens and doves. Equally I remember her occasional blooming, when she became secretly beautiful and alone. And those summer nights - we boys in bed - when the green of the yew trees filled the quiet kitchen, and she would change into her silk, put on her bits of jewellery, and sit down to play the piano.
She did not play well; her rough fingers stumbled, they trembled to find the notes - yet she carried the music with little rushes of grace, half-faltering surges of feeling, that went rippling out through the kitchen windows like signals from a shuttered cage. Solitary, eyes closed, in her silks and secrets, tearing arpeggios from the yellow keys, yielding, through dusty but golden chords, to the peak of that private moment, it was clearly then, in the twilit tenderness she created, that the man should have returned to her.
I would lie awake in my still-light bedroom and hear the chime of the piano below, a ragged chord, a poignant pause, then a twinkling wagtail run. Brash yet melancholy, coarse yet wistful, it would rise in a jangling burst, then break and shiver as soft as water and lap round my listening head. She would play some waltzes, and of course ‘Killarney’; and sometimes I would hear her singing - a cool lone voice, uncertainly rising, addressed to her own reflection. They were sounds of peace, half-edged with sleep, ye
t disturbing, almost shamefully moving. I wanted to run to her then, and embrace her as she played. But somehow I never did.
As time went on, Mother grew less protesting. She had earned acquiescence and wore it gratefully. But as we children grew up, leaving home in turn, so her idiosyncrasies spread; her plant-pots and newspapers, muddles and scrapbooks extended further throughout the house. She read more now and never went to bed, merely slept upright in a chair. Her nights and days were no longer divided nor harassed by the wants of children. She would sleep for an hour, rise and scrub the floor, or go wooding in the middle of the night. Like Granny Trill, she began to ignore all time and to do what she would when she wished. Even so, whenever we returned for a visit, she was ready, fires burning, to greet us… .
I remember coming home in the middle of the war, arriving about two in the morning. And there she was, sitting up in her chair, reading a book with a magnifying glass. ‘Ah, son,’ she said - she didn’t know I was coming - ‘ come here, take a look at this….’ We examined the book, then I went up to bed and fell into an exhausted sleep. I was roused at some dark cold hour near dawn by Mother climbing the stairs. ‘I got you your dinner son,’ she said, and planked a great tray on the bed. Aching with sleep, I screwed my eyes open - veg soup, a big stew, and a pudding. The boy had come home and he had to have supper, and she had spent half the night preparing it. She sat on my bed and made me eat it all up — she didn’t know it was nearly morning.
