by Laurie Lee
Then on our way home, at the end of the day, we were stopped by a woman’s screams. She stood by the roadside with a child in her arms, cringing from a threatening man. The tableau froze for us all to see; the wild-haired woman, the wailing child, the man with his arm upraised. Our charabancs came to a shuddering halt and we all started shouting at once. We leaned over the sides of our open wagons and berated the man for a scoundrel. Our men from their seats insulted him roundly, suggesting he leave the poor woman alone. But our Uncle Sid just folded his coat, climbed down from his cab without speaking, walked up to the bully, swung back his arm, and knocked the man straight through the hedge. Life to him was black and white and he had reacted to it simply. Scowling with pride, he returned to the wheel and drove us home a hero.
Uncle Sid differed in no way from all his other brothers in chivalry, temper, and drink. He could knock down a man or a glass of beer as readily and as neatly as they. But his job as a bus-driver (and his rheumatism) both increased — and obstructed — his thirst. The result exposed him to official censure, and it was here that the fates laid him low.
When he married my Aunt Alice, and became the father of two children, his job promised to anchor his wildness. But the law was against him and he soon got into scrapes. He was the best double-decker driver in Stroud, without doubt: even safer, more inspired when he drank. Everybody knew this — except the Bus Company. He began to get lectures, admonitions, stem warnings, and finally suspensions without pay.
When this last thing happenend, out of respect for Aunt Alice, he always committed suicide. Indeed he committed suicide more than any man I know, but always in the most reasonable manner. If he drowned himself, then the canal was dry: if he jumped down a well, so was that: and when he drank disinfectant there was always an antidote ready, clearly marked, to save everyone trouble. He reasoned, quite rightly, that Aunt Alice’s anger, on hearing of another suspension, would be swallowed up by her larger anxiety on finding him again near to death. And Auntie Alice never failed him in this, and forgave him each time he recovered.
The Bus Company were almost equally forgiving: they took him back again and again. Then one night, having brought his bus safely home, they found him fast asleep at the wheel, reeking of malt and stone-jar cider: and they gave him the sack for good.
We were sitting in the kitchen rather late that night, when a loud knock came at the door. A hollow voice called ‘Annie! Annie!’ and we knew that something had happened. Then the kitchen door crept slowly open and revealed three dark-clad figures. It was Auntie Alice and her two small daughters, each dressed in their Sunday best. They stood at the foot of the kitchen steps, silent as apparitions, and Auntie Alice’s face, with its huge drawn eyes, wore a mantle of tragic doom.
‘He’s done it this time,’ she intoned at last. ‘That’s what. I know he has.’
Her voice had a churchlike incantation which dropped crystals of ice down my back. She held the small pretty girls in a majestic embrace while they squirmed and sniffed and giggled.
‘He never came home. They must have given him the sack. Now he’s gone off to end it all.’
‘No, no,’ cried our Mother. ‘Come and sit down, my dear.’ And she drew her towards the fire.
Auntie Alice sat stiffly, like a Gothic image, still clutching her wriggling children.
‘Where else could I go, Annie? He’s gone down to Deadcombe. He always told me he would….’
She suddenly turned and seized Mother’s hands, her dark eyes rolling madly.
‘Annie! Annie! He’ll do himself in. Your boys — they just got to find him!…’
So Jack and I put on caps and coats and went out into the half-moon night. From so much emotion I felt lightheaded: I wanted to laugh or hide. Bur Jack was his cool, intrepid self, tight-lipped as a gunboat commander. We were men in a crisis, on secret mission, life and death seemed to hang on our hands. So we stuck close together and trudged up the valley, heading for Deadcombe Wood.
The wood was a waste of rotting silence, transformed by its mask of midnight: a fine rain was falling, wet ferns soaked our legs, leaves shuddered with owls and water. What were we supposed to do? we wondered. Why had we come, anyway? We beat up and down through the dripping trees, calling ‘Uncle!’ in chill, flat voices. What should we find? Perhaps nothing at all. Or worse, what we had come to seek…. But we remembered the women, waiting fearfully at home. Our duty, though dismal, was clear.
So we stumbled and splashed through invisible brooks, followed paths, skirted ominous shadows. We poked bits of stick into piles of old leaves, prodded foxholes, searched the length of the wood. There was nothing there but the fungoid darkness, nothing at all but our fear.
We were about to go home, and gladly enough, when suddenly we saw him. He was standing tiptoe under a great dead oak with his braces around his neck. The elastic noose, looped to the branch above him, made him bob up and down like a puppet. We approached the contorted figure with dread; we saw his baleful eye fixed on us.
Our Uncle Sid was in a terrible temper.
‘You’ve been a bloody long time! ’ he said.
Uncle Sid never drove any buses again but took a job as a gardener in Sheepscombe. All the uncles now, from their wilder beginnings, had resettled their roots near home - all, that is, save Insurance Fred, whom we lost through prosperity and distance. These men reflected many of Mother’s qualities, were foolish, fantastical, moody; but in spite of their follies they remained for me the true heroes of my early life. I think of them still in the image they gave me; they were bards and oracles each; like a ring of squat megaliths on some local hill, bruised by weather and scarred with old glories. They were the horsemen and brawlers of another age, and their lives spoke its long farewell. Spoke, too, of campaigns on desert marches, of Kruger’s cannon, and Flanders mud; of a world that still moved at the same pace as Caesar’s, and of that Empire greater than his - through which they had fought, sharp-eyed and anonymous, and seen the first outposts crumble. …
OUTINGS AND FESTIVALS
The year revolved around the village, the festivals round the year, the church round the festivals, the Squire round the church, and the village round the Squire. The Squire was our centre, a crumbling moot tree; and few indeed of our local celebrations could take place without his shade. On the greater occasions he let us loose in his gardens, on the smaller gave us buns and speeches; and at historic moments of national rejoicing - when kings were born, enemies vanquished, or the Conservatives won an election - he ransacked his boxrooms for fancy-dresses that we might rejoice in a proper manner.
The first big festival that I can remember was Peace Day in 1919. It was a day of magical transformations, of tears and dusty sunlight, of bands, processions, and buns by the cartload; and I was so young I thought it normal.. ..
We had all been provided with fancy-dress, and that seemed normal too. Apart from the Squire’s contribution Marjorie had been busy for weeks stitching up glories for ourselves and the neighbours. No makeshift, rag-bag cobbling either; Marjorie had worked as though for a wedding.
On the morning of the feast Poppy Green came to the house to try on her angel’s dress. She was five years old and about my size. She had russet curls like apple peelings, a polished pumpkin face, a fruity air of exploding puddings, and a perpetual cheeky squint. I loved her, she was like a portable sweet-shop. This morning I watched my sisters dress her. She was supposed to represent a spirit. They’d made her a short frilly frock, a tinfoil helmet, cardboard wings, and a wand with a star. When they’d clothed her they stood her up on the mantelpiece and had a good look ather. Then they went off awhile on some other business and left us alone together.
‘Fly!’ I commanded. ‘You got wings, ain’t you?’
Poppy squirmed and wiggled her shoulders.
I grew impatient and pushed her off the mantelpiece, and she fell with a howl into the fireplace. Looking down at her, smudged with coal and tears, her wand and wings all crumpled, I felt not
hing but rage and astonishment. She should have been fluttering round the room.
They sponged and soothed her, and Poppy trotted home, her bent wand clutched in her hand. Then shapes and phantoms began to run through the village, and we started to get ready ourselves. Marge appeared as Queen Elizabeth, with Phyllis her lady-in-waiting. Marjorie, who was sixteen and ather most beautiful, wore a gown of ermine, a brocaded bodice, and a black cap studded with pearls. She filled the kitchen with such a glow of grace that we just stood and gaped at her. It was the first time I had seen Queen Elizabeth, but this was no sharp-faced Tudor. Tender and proud in her majestic robes, she was the Queen of Heaven, risen from the dust, unrecognizable as Marge till she spoke, and her eyes shone down on us from her veils of ermine like emeralds laid in snow. Thirteen-year-old Phyllis, with finery of her own, skipped like a magpie around her, wearing a long chequered dress of black and white velvet, and a hat full of feathers and moths.
The rest of us, whom Marjorie had dressed, were the result of homespun inspirations. Dorothy, as ‘Night’, was perhaps the most arresting; an apparition of unearthly beauty, a flash of darkness, a strip of nocturnal sky, mysteriously cloaked in veils of black netting entangled with silver paper. A crescent moon lay across her breast, a comet across her brow, and her long dark curls fell in coils of midnight and were sprinkled with tinsel dust. I smelt frost when I saw her and heard a crackling of stars; familiar Dorothy had grown far and disturbing.
Brother Jack had refused to be dressed up at all, unless in some aspect of recognized valour. So they hung him in green, gave him a bow and arrow, and he called himself Robin Hood. Little Tony was dressed as a market-girl, curly-headed and pretty as love, bare-armed and bonneted, carrying a basket of flowers, but so proud we forgave him his frock.
As for me, a squat neck and solid carriage made the part I should play inevitable. I was John Bull - whoever he was -but I quickly surmised his importance. I remember the girls stuffing me into my clothes with many odd squeals and giggles. Gravely I offered an arm or leg, but remained dignified and aloof. Marjorie had assembled the ritual garments with her usual flair and cunning. I wore a top-hat and choker, a union-jack waistcoat, a frock-coat, and pillowcase breeches. But I’d been finished off hurriedly with gaiters of cardboard fastened loosely together with pins - a slovenly makeshift which offended my taste, and which I was never able to forgive.
This Peace Day I remember as a blur of colour, leading from fury to triumph. There was a procession with a band. I walked alone solemnly. Fantastic disguises surrounded me; every single person seemed covered with beards, false-noses, bootblack, and wigs. We had not marched far when my boots fell off, followed by my cardboard gaiters. As I stopped to find them, the procession swept over me. I sat down by the roadside and howled. I howled because I could hear the band disappearing, because I was John Bull and it should not have happened. I was picked up by a carriage, restored to the procession, then placed on a trolley and pulled. Cross-legged on the trolley, bare-footed and gaiter less, I rode like a prince through the village.
Dusty, sweating from its long route-march, the procession snaked round the houses. The old and infirm stood and cheered from the gutters; I nodded back from my trolley. At last we entered the cool beech wood through which theSquire’s drive twisted. The brass-band’s thunder bounced back from the boughs. Owls hooted and flapped away.
We came out of the wood into the Big House gardens, and the sun returned in strength. Doves and pigeons flew out of the cedars. The swans took off from the lake. On the steps of the Manor stood the wet-eyed Squire, already in tears at the sight of us. His mother, in a speech from a basket-chair, mentioned the glory of God, the Empire, us; and said we wasn’t to touch the flowers.
With the procession dispersed, I was tipped off the trolley, and I wandered away through the grounds. Flags and roses moved against the sky, bright figures among the bushes. Japanese girls and soot-faced savages grew strangely from banks of lilac. I saw Charlie Chaplin, Peter the Pieman, a collection of upright tigers, a wounded soldier about my age, and a bride on the arm of a monkey.
Later I was given a prize by the Squire and was photographed in a group by a rockery. I still have that picture, all sepia shadows, a leaf ripped from that summer day. Surrounded by girls in butter muslin, by druids and eastern kings, I am a figure rooted in unshakeable confidence, oval, substantial, and proud. About two feet high and two feet broad, my breeches like slack balloons, I stand, top-hatted, with a tilted face as severe as on a Roman coin. Others I recognize are gathered round me, all marked by that day’s white dust. Tony has lost his basket of flowers, Jack his bow and arrow. Poppy Green has had her wings torn off and is grasping a broken lily. She stands beside me, squinting fiercely, ruffled a bit by the heat, and the silver letters across her helmet - which I couldn’t read then - say PEACE.
Our village outings were both sacred and secular, and were also far between. One seldom, in those days, strayed beyond the parish boundaries, except for the annual ChoirOuting. In the meantime we had our own tribal wanderings, unsanctified though they were, when a sudden fine morning would send us forth in families for a day’s nutting or blackberrying. So up we’d go to the wilder end of the valley, to the bramble-entangled Scrubs, bearing baskets and buckets and flasks of cold tea, like a file of foraging Indians. Blackberries clustered against the sky, heavy and dark as thunder, which we plucked and gobbled, hour after hour, lips purple, hands stained to the wrists. Or later, mushrooms, appearing like manna, buttoning the shaggy grass, found in the mists of September mornings with the wet threads of spiders on them. They came in the night from nowhere, rootless, like a scattering of rubber balls. Their suckers clung to the roots of grass and broke off with a rubbery snap. The skin rubbed away like the bark of a birch tree, the flesh tasted of something unknown. … At other times there would be wild green damsons, tiny plums, black sloes, pink crab-apples -the free waste of the woods, an unpoliced bounty, which we’d carry back home in bucketfuls. Whether we used them for jam or jellies or pies, or just left them to rot, didn’t matter.
Then sometimes there’d be a whole day’s outing, perhaps to Sheepscombe to visit relations - a four-mile walk, which to our short legs seemed further, so that we needed all day to do it. We would start out early, with the sun just rising and the valley wrapped in mist. …
‘It’s going to be hot,’ says our Mother brightly, and usually she is right. We climb up slowly towards Bulls Cross, picking at the bushes for birds’-nests. Or we stop to dig holes or to swing on gates while Mother looks back at the view. ‘What a picture,’ she murmurs. ‘Green as green…. And those poppies, red as red.’ The mist drags the treetops, flies away in the sky, and there is suddenly blue air all round us.
Painswick sprawls white in the other valley, like the skeleton of a foundered mammoth. But active sounds of its working morning - carts and buzz-saws, shouts and hammering - come drifting in gusts towards us. The narrow lane that leads to Sheepscombe bends steeply away on our right. ‘Step out, young men! ’ our Mother says crisply. She begins to teach us a hymn; the kind that cries for some lost land of paradise, and goes well with a tambourine. I’ve not heard it before (nor ever since), but it entirely enshrines our outing - the remote, shaggy valley in which we find ourselves, the smell of hot straw on the air, dog-roses and distances, dust and spring waters, and the long day’s journey, by easy stages, to the sheep-folds of our wild relations.
They are waiting for us with warm ginger-beer, and a dinner of broad beans and bacon. Aunty Fan says, ‘Annie, come in out of the sun. You must be ready to drop.’ We go indoors and find our Uncle Charlie hacking at the bacon with a billhook. Young cousin Edie and her cautious brothers seem to be pondering whether to punch our heads. Our Gramp comes in from his cottage next door, dressed in mould-green corduroy suiting. We sit down and eat, and the cousins kick us under the table, from excitement rather than spite. Then we play with their ferrets, spit down their well, have a fight, and break down a wall. Lat
er we are called for and given a beating, then we climb up the tree by the earth closet. Edie climbs highest, till we bite her legs, then she hangs upside down and screams. It has been a full, far-flung, and satisfactory day; dusk falls, and we say good-bye.
Back down the lane in the thick hot darkness we walk drowsily, heavy with boots. Night odours come drifting from woods and gardens; sweet musks and sharp green acids. In the sky the fat stars bounce up and down, rhythmically, as we trudge along. Glowworms, brighter than lamps or candles, spike the fields with their lemon fires, while huge horned beetles stumble out of the dark and buzz blindly around our heads.
Then Painswick appears - a starfish of light dilating in a pool of distance. We hurry across the haunted common and come at last to the top of our valley. The village waterfall, still a mile away, lifts its cool, familiar murmur. We are nearing home, we are almost there: Mother starts to recite a poem. ‘I remember, I remember, the house where I was born …’ She says it right through, and I tag beside her watching the trees walk past in the sky….
The first Choir Outing we ever had was a jaunt in a farm-wagon to Gloucester. Only the tenors and basses and the treble boys were included in that particular treat. Later, with the coming of the horse-brake and charabanc, the whole village took part as well. With the help of the powerful new charabanc we even got out of the district altogether, rattling away to the ends of the earth, to Bristol or even further.
One year the Outing was to Weston-Super-Mare, and we had saved up for months to be worthy of it. We spent the night before preparing our linen, and the girls got up at dawn to make sandwiches. The first thing I did when I came down that morning was to go out and look at the weather. The sky was black, and Tony was behind the lavatory praying hard through his folded hands. When he saw that I’d seen him he began to scratch and whistle, but the whole thing was a very bad sign.
