by Laurie Lee
So with the family gone, Mother lived as she wished, knowing she’d done what she could: happy to see us, content to be alone, sleeping, gardening, cutting out pictures, writing us letters about the birds, going for bus-rides, visiting friends, reading Ruskin or the lives of the saints. Slowly, snugly, she grew into her background, warm on her grassy bank, poking and peering among the flowery bushes, dishevelled and bright as they. Serenely unkempt were those final years, free from conflict, doubt, or dismay, while she reverted gently to a rustic simplicity as a moss-rose reverts to a wild one.
Then suddenly our absent father died - cranking his car in a Morden suburb. And with that, his death, which was also the death of hope, our Mother gave up her life. Their long separation had come to an end, and it was the coldness of that which killed her. She had raised his two families, faithfully and alone: had waited thirty-five years for his praise. And through all that time she had clung to one fantasy - that aged and broken, at last in need, he might one day return to her. His death killed that promise, and also ended her reason. The mellow tranquillity she had latterly grown forsook her then forever. She became frail, simple-minded, and returned to her youth, to that girlhood which had never known him. She never mentioned him again, but spoke to shades, saw visions, and then she died.
We buried her in the village, under the edge of the beechwood, not far from her four-year-old-daughter.
WINTER AND SUMMER
The seasons of my childhood seemed (of course) so violent, so intense and true to their nature, that they have become for me ever since a reference of perfection whenever such names are mentioned. They possessed us so completely they seemed to change our nationality; and when I look back to the valley it cannot be one place I see, but the village-winter or village-summer, both separate. It becomes increasingly easy in urban life to ignore their extreme humours, but in those days winter and summer dominated our every action, broke into our houses, conscripted our thoughts, ruled our games, and ordered our lives.
Winter was no more typical of our valley than summer, it was not even summer’s opposite; it was merely that other place. And somehow one never remembered the journey towards it; one arrived, and winter was here. The day came suddenly when all details were different and the village had to be rediscovered. One’s nose went dead so that it hurt to breathe, and there were jigsaws of frost on the window. The light filled the house with a green polar glow; while outside -in the invisible world - there was a strange hard silence, or a metallic creaking, a faint throbbing of twigs and wires.
The kitchen that morning would be full of steam, billowing from kettles and pots. The outside pump was frozen again, making a sound like broken crockery, so that the girls tore icicles from the eaves for water and we drank boiled ice in our tea.
‘It’s wicked,’ said Mother. ‘The poor, poor birds.’ And she flapped her arms with vigour.
She and the girls were wrapped in all they had, coats and scarves and mittens; some had the shivers and some drops on their noses, while poor little Phyllis sat rocking in a chair holding her chilblains like a handful of bees.
There was an iron-shod clatter down the garden path and the milkman pushed open the door. The milk in his pail was frozen solid. He had to break off lumps with a hammer.
‘It’s murder out,’ the milkman said. ‘ Crows worryin’ the sheep. Swans froze in the lake. An’ tits droppin’ dead in midair….’ He drank his tea while his eyebrows melted, slappedDorothy’s bottom, and left.
‘The poor, poor birds,’ Mother said again.
They were hopping around the windowsill, calling for bread and fats — robins, blackbirds, wood-peckers, jays, never seen together save now. We fed them for a while, amazed at their tameness, then put on our long wool mufflers.
‘Can we go out, Mother?’
‘Well, don’t catch cold. And remember to get some wood.’
First we found some old cocoa-tins, punched them with holes, then packed them with smouldering rags. If held in the hand and blown on occasionally they would keep hot for several hours. They were warmer than gloves, and smelt better too. In any case, we never wore gloves. So armed with these, and full of hot breakfast, we stepped out into the winter world.
It was a world of glass, sparkling and motionless. Vapours had frozen all over the trees and transformed them into confections of sugar. Everything was rigid, locked-up and sealed, and when we breathed the air it smelt like needles and stabbed our nostrils and made us sneeze.
Having sucked a few icicles, and kicked the water-butt -to hear its solid sound - and breathed through the frost on the window-pane, we ran up into the road. We hung around, waiting for something to happen. A dog trotted past like aghost in a cloud, panting his aura around him. The distant fields in the low weak sun were crumpled like oyster shells.
Presently some more boys came to join us, wrapped like Russians, with multi-coloured noses. We stood round in a group and just gasped at each other, waiting to get an idea. The thin ones were blue, with hunched up shoulders, hands deep in their pockets, shivering. The fat ones were rosy and blowing like whales; all of us had wet eyes. What should we do? We didn’t know. So the fat ones punched the thin ones, who doubled up, saying, ‘Sod you’.’ Then the thin ones punched the fat ones, who half-died coughing. Then we all jumped up and down for a bit, flapped our arms, and blew on our cocoa-tins.
‘What we goin’ to do, then, eh?’
We quietened down to think. A shuddering thin boy, with his lips drawn back, was eating the wind with his teeth. ‘ Giddy up,’ he said suddenly, and sprang into the air and began whipping himself, and whinnying. At that we all galloped away down the road, bucking and snorting, tugging invisible reins, and lashing away at our hindquarters.
Now the winter’s day was set in motion and we rode through its crystal kingdom. We examined the village for its freaks of frost, for anything we might use. We saw the frozen spring by the side of the road, huge like a swollen flower. Water-wagtails hovered above it, nonplussed at its silent hardness, and again and again they dropped down to drink, only to go sprawling in a tumble of feathers. We saw the stream in the valley, black and halted, a tarred path threading through the willows. We saw trees lopped-off by their burdens of ice, cow-tracks like pot-holes in rock, quiet lumps of sheep licking the spiky grass with their black and rotting tongues. The church clock had stopped and the weather-cock was frozen, so that both time and the winds were stilled; and nothing, we thought, could be more exciting than this; interference by a hand unknown, the winter’s No to routine and laws — sinister, awesome, welcome.
‘Let’s go an’ ’elp Farmer Wells,’ said a fat boy.
‘You can — I ain’t,’ said a thin one.
‘If you don’t, I’ll give thee a clip in the yer’ole.’
‘Gurt great bully.’
‘I ain’t.’
‘You be.’
So we went to the farm on the lip of the village, a farm built from a long-gone abbey. Wells, the farmer, had a young sick son more beautiful than a girl. He waved from his window as we trooped into the farmyard, and wouldn’t live to last out the winter. The farmyard muck was brown and hard, dusted with frost like a baked bread-pudding. From the sheds came the rattle of morning milking, chains and buckets, a cow’s deep sigh, stumbling hooves, and a steady munching.
‘Wan’ any ’elp, Mr Wells?’ we asked.
He crossed the yard with two buckets on a yoke; as usual he was dressed in dung. He was small and bald, but had long sweeping arms that seemed stretched from his heavy labours. ‘Well, come on,’ he said. ‘But no playing the goat….’ Inside the cowsheds it was warm and voluptuous, smelling sweetly of milky breath, of heaving hides, green dung, and udders, of steam and fermentations. We carried cut hay from the heart of the rick, packed tight as tobacco flake, with grass and wild flowers juicily fossilized within - a whole summer embalmed in our arms.
I took a bucket of milk to feed a calf. I opened its mouth like a hot wet orchid. It began to su
ck at my fingers, gurgling in its throat and raising its long-lashed eyes. The milk had been skimmed for making butter and the calf drank a bucket a day. We drank the same stuff at home sometimes; Mr W ells sold it for a penny a jug.
When we’d finished the feeding we got a handful of apples and a baked potato each. The apples were so cold they stung the teeth, but the potatoes were hot, with butter. We made, a dinner of this, then scuffled back to the village, where we ran into the bully Walt Kerry.
‘Wan’ a know summat?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Shan’t tell ya.’
He whistled a bit, and cleaned his ears. He gave out knowledge in very small parcels.
‘Well, if you wan’a know, I may’s well….’
We waited in a shivering lump.
‘Jones’s pond is bearing,’ he said at last. ‘I bin a-slidin’ on it all mornin’. Millions bin cornin’ wi ’orses an’ traps an’ skates an’ things an’ all.’
We tore away down the frosty lane, blood up and elbows well out.
‘Remember I told ya. An’ I got there fust. An’ I’ll be back when I’ve ’ad me tea! ’
We left him standing in the low pink sun, small as a cankered rose, spiky, thorny, a thing of dread, only to be encountered with shears.
We could hear the pond as we ran down the hill, the shouts that only water produces, the squeal of skates, the ring of the ice and its hollow heaving grumble. Then we saw it; black and flat as a tray, the skaters rolling round it like marbles. We broke into a shout and charged upon it and fell sprawling in all directions. This magic substance, with its deceptive gifts, was something I could never master. It put wings on my heels and gave me the motions of Mercury, then threw me down on my nose. Yet it chose its own darlings, never the ones you supposed, the dromedary louts of the schoolroom, who came skating past with one leg in the air, who twirled and simpered, and darted like swifts; and never fell once - not they.
I was one of the pedestrians, and we worked up a slide across the polished darkness. So smooth that to step on it was to glide away, while the valley slid past like oil. You could also lie prone and try to swim on the ice, kicking your arms and legs. And you saw deep down, while in that position, little bubbles like cold green stars, jagged ominous cracks, dead ribbons of lilies, drowned bulrushes loaded like rockets.
The frozen pond on such a winter’s evening was a very treadmill of pleasure. Time was uncounted; sensations almost sexual; we played ourselves into exhaustion. We ran and slid till we dripped with sweat; our scarves were pearled with our breath. The reeds and horse-tails at the pond’s edge smelt as pungent as old men’s fingers. Hanging branches of willow, manacled in the ice, bloomed like lilac in the setting sun. Then the frost moon rose through the charcoal trees and we knew that we’d played too long.
We had promised Mother we would fetch some wood. We had to get some each day in winter. Jack and I, hands in pockets, mooched silently up the lane; it was night now, and we were frightened. The beech wood was a cavern of moonlight and shadows, and we kept very close together.
The dead sticks on the ground were easily seen, glittering with the night’s new frost. As we ripped them from the earth, scabbed with soil and leaves, our hands began to bum w i 1 h the cold. The wood was silent and freezing hard, white and smelling of wolves. Such a night as lost hunters must have stared upon when first they wandered north into the. Ice Age. We thought of caves, warm skins and fires, grabbed our sticks, and tore off home.
Then there were ‘Where’ve-you-beens?’ ‘Never-minds’,‘ Oh-Dears’, and ‘Come-by-the-fire-you-look-half-dead’. First the long slow torment as our hands thawed out, a quiet agony of returning blood. Worse than toothache it was; I ‘..11 there sobbing, but gradually the pain wave passed. Then We had jugs of tea, hot toast and dripping; and later our sisters came.
‘It was murder in Stroud. I fell down twice - in the High Street — and tore my stockings. I’m sure I showed everything. It was terrible, Ma. And a horse went through Maypole’s window. And old Mr Fowler couldn’t get down the hill and had to sit on his bottom and slide. It’s freezing harder than ever now. We won’t none of us be able to budge tomorrow.’
They sat at their tea and went on talking about it in their sing-song disaster voices. And we boys were content to know the winter had come, total winter, the new occupation. …
Later, towards Christmas, there was heavy snow, which raised the roads to the top of the hedges. There were millions of tons of the lovely stuff, plastic, pure, all-purpose, which nobody owned, which one could carve or tunnel, eat, or just throw about. It covered the hills and cut off the villages, but nobody thought of rescues; for there was hay in the barns and flour in the kitchens, the women baked bread, the cattle were fed and sheltered - we’d been cut off before, after all.
The week before Christmas, when snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol-singing; and when I think back to those nights it is to the crunch of snow and to the lights of the lanterns on it. Carol-singing in my village was a special tithe for the boys, the girls had little to do with it. Like haymaking, blackberrying, stone-clearing, and wishing-people-a-happy-Easter, it was one of our seasonal perks.
By instinct we knew just when to begin it; a day too soon and we should have been unwelcome, a day too late and we should have received lean looks from people whose bounty was already exhausted. When the true moment came, exactly balanced, we recognized it and were ready.
So as soon as the wood had been stacked in the oven to dry for the morning fire, we put on our scarves and wentout through the streets, calling loudly between our hands, till the various boys who knew the signal ran out from their houses to join us.
One by one they came stumbling over the snow, swinging their lanterns around their heads, shouting and coughing horribly.
‘Coming carol-barking then?’
We were the Church Choir, so no answer was necessary. For a year we had praised the Lord out of key, and as a reward for this service - on top of the Outing - we now had the right to visit all the big houses, to sing our carols and collect our tribute.
To work them all in meant a five-mile foot journey over wild and generally snowed-up country. So the first thing we did was to plan our route; a formality, as the route never changed. All the same, we blew on our fingers and argued; and then we chose our Leader. This was not binding, for we all fancied ourselves as Leaders, and he who started the night in that position usually trailed home with a bloody nose.
Eight of us set out that night. There was Sixpence the Tanner, who had never sung in his life (he just worked his mouth in church); the brothers Horace and Boney, who were always fighting everybody and always getting the worst of it; Clergy Green, the preaching maniac; Walt the bully, and my two brothers. As we went down the lane other boys, from other villages, were already about the hills, bawling ‘ Kingwenslush ’, and shouting through keyholes ‘ Knock on the knocker! Ring at the Bell! Give us a penny for singing so well! ’ They weren’t an approved charity as we were, the Choir; but competition was in the air.
Our first call as usual was the house of the Squire, and we trouped nervously down his drive. For light we had candles in marmalade-jars suspended on loops of string, and they threw pale gleams on the towering snowdrifts that stood oneach side of the drive. A blizzard was blowing, but we were well wrapped up, with Army puttees on our legs, woollen hats on our heads, and several scarves around our ears.
As we approached the Big House across its white silent lawns, we too grew respectfully silent. The lake near by was stiff and black, the waterfall frozen and still. We arranged ourselves shuffling around the big front door, then knocked and announced the Choir.
A maid bore the tidings of our arrival away into the echoing distances of the house, and while we waited we cleared our throats noisily. Then she came back, and the door was left ajar for us, and we were bidden to begin. We brought no music, the carols were in our heads. ‘Let’s give ’em “Wild Shepherds ”,’
said Jack. We began in confusion, plunging into a wreckage of keys, of different words and tempo; but we gathered our strength; he who sang loudest took the rest of us with him, and the carol took shape if not sweetness.
This huge stone house, with its ivied walls, was always a mystery to us. What were those gables, those rooms and attics, those narrow windows veiled by the cedar trees. As we sang ‘ Wild Shepherds ’ we craned our necks, gaping into that lamplit hall which we had never entered; staring at the muskets and untenanted chairs, the great tapestries furred by dust - until suddenly, on the stairs, we saw the old Squire himself standing and listening with his head on one side.
He didn’t move until we’d finished; then slowly he tottered towards us, dropped two coins in our box with a trembling hand, scratched his name in the book we carried, gave us each a long look with his moist blind eyes, then turned away in silence.
As though released from a spell, we took a few sedate steps, then broke into a run for the gate. We didn’t stop tillwe were out of the grounds. Impatient, at last, to discover the extent of his bounty, we squatted by the cowsheds, held our lanterns over the b 00k, and saw that he had written ‘ Two Shillings ’. This was quite a good start. No one of any worth in the district would dare to give us less than the Squire.
So with money in the box, we pushed on up the valley, pouring scorn on each other’s performance. Confident now, we began to consider our quality and whether one carol was not better suited to us than another. Horace, Walt said, shouldn’t sing at all; his voice was beginning to break. Horace disputed this and there was a brief token battle — they fought as they walked, kicking up divots of snow, then they forgot it, and Horace still sang.
