by Laurie Lee
Elfin volk come over the hill!
Come und dance, just vere you vill!
Brink your pipes, und brink your flutes,
Brink your sveetly soundink notes!
Come avay-hay! Life is gay-hay!
Life - Is - Gay!
We thought this song soppy, but we never forgot it. From then on, whenever we saw the Baroness in the lanes we used to bawl the song at her through the hedges. But she would only stop, and cock her head, and smile dreamily to herself…
After these songs the night ended with slapstick; rough stuff about babies, chaps dressed as women, broad Gloucester exchanges between yokels and toffs, with the yokels coming off best. We ached with joy, and kicked at the chairs;but we knew the end was coming. The vicar got up, proposed a vote of thanks, and said oranges would be distributed at the gate. The National Anthem was romped through, we all began coughing, then streamed outdoors through the snow.
Back home our sisters discussed their performances till the tears dripped off their noses. But to us boys it was not over, till tomorrow; there was still one squeeze left in the lemon. Tomorrow, very early, we’d go back to the schoolroom, find the baskets of broken food - half-eaten buns, ham coated with cake-crumbs - and together we’d finish the lot.
FIRST BITE OF THE APPLE
So quiet was Jo always, so timorous yet eager to please, that she was the one I chose first. There were others, of course, louder and more bouncingly helpful, but it was Jo’s cool face, tidy brushed-back hair, thin body, and speechless grace which provided the secretive prettiness I needed. Unknowingly, therefore, she became the pathfinder, the slender taper I carried to the grottoes in whose shadows I now found myself wandering.
I used to seek her out on her way home from school, slyly separate her from the others, watch her brass bracelet dangling. Was I eleven or twelve? I don’t know - she was younger. She smiled easily at me from the gutter.
‘Where you going then, Jo?’
‘Nowhere special.’
‘Oh.’
It was all right so long as she didn’t move.
‘Let’s go down the bank then. Shall us? Eh?’
No answer, but no attempt to escape.
‘Down the bank. Like before. How about it, Jo?’
Still no answer, no sign or look. She didn’t even stop the turning of her bracelet, but she came down the bank all the same. Stepping toe-pointed over the ant-heaps, walking straight and near and silent, she showed no knowledge of what she was going for, only that she was going with me.
Close under the yews, in the heavy green evening, we sat ourselves solemnly down. The old red trees threw arches above us, making tunnels of rusty darkness. Jo, like a slip of yew, was motionless; she neither looked at me nor away. I leant on one elbow and tossed a stone into the trees, heard it skipping from branch to branch.
‘What shall we do then, Jo? ’ I asked.
She made no reply, as usual.
‘What d’you say, Jo?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Come on - you tell.’
‘No, you.’
The pronouncement had always to come from me. She waited to hear me say it. She waited, head still, staring straight before her, tugging gently at a root of weed.
‘Good morning, Mrs Jenkins!’ I said breezily. ‘What seems to be the trouble? ’
Without a blink or a word Jo lay down on the grass and gazed up at the red-berried yews, stretched herself subtly on her green crushed bed, and scratched her calf, and waited. The game was formal and grave in character, its ritual rigidly patterned. Silent as she lay, my hands moved as silently, and even the birds stopped singing.
Her body was pale and milk-green on the grass, like a birch-leaf lying in water, slightly curved like a leaf and veined and glowing, lit faintly from within its flesh. This was not Jo now but the revealed unknown, a labyrinth of naked stalks, stranger than flesh, smoother than candle-skins, like something thrown down from the moon. Time passed, and the cool limbs never moved, neither towards me nor yet away; she just turned a grass ring around her fingers and stared blindly away from my eyes. The sun fell slanting and struck the spear-tipped grass, lying tiger-stripes round her hollows, binding her body with crimson bars, and moving slow colours across her.
Night and home seemed far away. We were caught in the rooted trees. Knees wet with dew I pondered in silence all that Jo’s acquiescence taught me. She shivered slightly and stirred her hands. A blackbird screamed into a bush….
‘Well, that’ll be all, Mrs Jenkins,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back again tomorrow.’
I rose from my knees, mounted an invisible horse, and cantered away to supper. While Jo dressed quietly and dawdled home, alone among the separate trees.
Of course, they discovered us in the end; we must have thought we were invisible. ‘What about it, young lad? You and Jo - last night? Ho, yes! we seen you, arf! arf! ’ A couple of cowmen had stopped me in the road; I denied it, but I wasn’t surprised. Sooner or later one was always caught out, but the thing was as readily forgotten; very little in the village was either secret or shocking, we merely repeated ourselves. Such early sex-games were formal exercises, a hornless charging of calves; but we were certainly lucky to live in a village, the landscape abounded with natural instruction which we imitated as best we could; if anyone saw us they laughed their heads off - and there were no magistrates to define us obscene.
This advantage was shared by young and old, was something no town can know. We knew ourselves to be as corrupt as any other community of our size - as any London street, for instance. But there was no tale-bearing then or ringing up 999; transgressors were dealt with by local opinion, by silence, lampoons, or nicknames. What we were spared from seeing - because the village protected itself-were the crimes of our flesh written cold in a charge sheet, the shady arrest, the police-court autopsy, the headline of magistrate’s homilies.
As for us boys, it is certain that most of us, at some stage or other of our growth, would have been rounded up under present law, and quite a few shoved into reform school. Instead we emerged - culpable it’s true - but unclassified in criminal record. No wilder or milder than Battersea boys, we were less ensnared by by-laws. If caught in the act, we got a quick bashing; and the fist of the farmer we’d robbed of apples or eggs seemed more natural and just than any cold-mouthed copper adding one more statistic for the book.It is not crime that has increased, but its definition. The modem city, for youth, is a police-trap.
Our village was clearly no pagan paradise, neither were we conscious of showing tolerance. It was just the way of it. We certainly committed our share of statutory crime. Manslaughter, arson, robbery, rape cropped up regularly throughout the years. Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers. Drink, animality, and rustic boredom were responsible for most. The village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority. Sometimes our sinners were given hell, taunted, and pilloried, but their crimes were absorbed in the local scene and their punishment confined to the parish.
So when, in due time, I breathed the first faint musks of sex, my problem was not one of guilt or concealment but of simple revelation. That early exploration of Jo’s spread body was a solitary studying of maps. The signs upon her showed the way I should go, then she was folded and put away. Very soon I caught up with other travellers, all going in the same direction. They received me naturally, the boys and girls of my age, and together we entered the tricky wood. Daylight and an easy lack of shame illuminated our actions. Banks and brakes were our tiring-houses, and curiosity our first concern. We were awkward, convulsed, but never surreptitious, being protected by our long knowledge of each other. And we were all of that green age which could do no wrong, so unformed as yet and coldly innocent we did little more than mime the realities.
The girls played their part of invitation
and show, and were rather more assured than we were. They sensed they had come into their own at last. For suddenly they were not creatures to order about any more, not the makeshift boys they had been; they possessed, and they knew it, the clues to secrets more momentous than we could guess. They became slippery and difficult - but far from impossible. Shy, silent Jo scarcely counted now against the challenge of Rosie and Bet. Bet was brazen, Rosie provocative, and together they forced our paces. Bet was big for eleven and shabbily blonde, and her eyes were drowsy with insolence. ‘Gis a wine-gum,’ she’d say, ‘an I’ll show ya, if ya want.’ (For a wine-gum she would have stripped in church.) Rosie, on the other hand, more devious and sly, had sharp salts of wickedness on her, and she led me a dance round the barns and fowl-houses which often left me parched and trembling. What to do about either - Bet or Rosie - took a considerable time to discover.
Meanwhile, it was as though I had been dipped in hot oil, baked, dried, and hung throbbing on wires. Mysterious senses clicked into play overnight, possessed one in luxuriant order, and one’s body seemed tilted out of all recognition by shifts in its balance of power. It was the time when the thighs seemed to bum like dry grass, to cry for cool water and cucumbers, when the emotions swung drowsily between belly and hands, prickled, hungered, moulded the curves of the clouds; and when to lie face downwards in a summer field was to feel the earth’s thrust go through you. Brother Jack and I grew suddenly more active, always running or shinning up trees, working ourselves into lathers of exhaustion, whereas till then we’d been inclined to indolence. It was not that we didn’t know what was happening to us, we just didn’t know what to do with it. And I might have been shinning up trees to this day if it hadn’t been for Rosie Burdock….
The day Rosie Burdock decided to take me in hand was a motionless day of summer, creamy, hazy, and amber-coloured, with the beech trees standing in heavy sunlight as though clogged with wild wet honey. It was the time of haymaking, so when we came out of school Jack and I went to the farm to help.
The whirr of the mower met us across the stubble, rabbits jumped like firecrackers about the fields, and the hay smelt crisp and sweet. The farmer’s men were all hard at work, raking, turning, and loading .Tall, whiskered fellows forked the grass, their chests like bramble patches. The air swung with their forks and the swathes took wing and rose like eagles to the tops of the wagons. The farmer gave us a short fork each and we both pitched in with the rest….
I stumbled on Rosie behind a haycock, and she grinned up at me with the sly, glittering eyes of her mother. She wore her tartan frock and cheap brass necklace, and her bare legs were brown with hay-dust.
‘Get out a there,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
Rosie had grown and was hefty now, and I was terrified of her. In her cat-like eyes and curling mouth I saw unnatural wisdoms more threatening than anything I could imagine. The last time we’d met I’d hit her with a cabbage stump. She bore me no grudge, just grinned.
‘I got sommat to show ya.’
‘You push off,’ I said.
I felt dry and dripping, icy hot. Her eyes glinted, and I stood rooted. Her face was wrapped in a pulsating haze and her body seemed to flicker with lightning.
‘You thirsty?’ she said.
‘I ain’t, so there.’
‘You be,’ she said. ‘C’mon.’
So I stuck the fork into the ringing ground and followed her, like doom.
We went a long way, to the bottom of the field, where a wagon stood half-loaded. Festoons of untrimmed grass hung down like curtains all around it. We crawled underneath, between the wheels, into a herb-scented cave of darkness. Rosie scratched about, turned over a sack, and revealed a stone jar of cider.
‘It’s cider,’ she said. ‘You ain’t to drink it though. Not much of it, any rate.’
Huge and squat, the jar lay on the grass like an unexploded bomb. We lifted it up, unscrewed the stopper, and smelt the whiff of fermented apples. I held the jar to my mouth and rolled my eyes sideways, like a beast at a water-hole. ‘Go on,’ said Rosie. I took a deep breath….
Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie’s burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again….
I put down the jar with a gulp and a gasp. Then I turned to look at Rosie. She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was rich as a wild bee’s nest and her eyes were full of stings. I did not know what to do about her, nor did I know what not to do. She looked smooth and precious, a thing of unplumbable mysteries, and perilous as quicksand.
‘Rosie…’ I said, on my knees, and shaking.
She crawled with a rustle of grass towards me, quick and superbly assured. Her hand in mine was like a small wet flame which I could neither hold nor throw away. Then Rosie, with a remorseless, reedy strength, pulled me down from my tottering perch, pulled me down, down into her wide green smile and into the deep subaqueous grass.
Then I remember little, and that little, vaguely. Skin drums beat in my head. Rosie was close-up, salty, an invisible touch, too near to be seen or measured. And it seemed that the wagon under which we lay went floating away like a barge, out over the valley where we rocked unseen, swinging on motionless tides.
Then she took off her boots and stuffed them with flowers. She did the same with mine. Her parched voice crackled like flames in my ears. More fires were started. I drank more cider. Rosie told me outrageous fantasies. She liked me, she said, better than Walt, or Ken, Boney Harris, or even the curate. And I admitted to her, in a loud, rough voice, that she was even prettier than Betty Gleed. For a long time we sat with our mouths very close, breathing the same hot air. We kissed, once only, so dry and shy, it was like two leaves colliding in air.
At last the cuckoos stopped singing and slid into the woods. The mowers went home and left us. I heard Jack calling as he went down the lane, calling my name till I heard him no more. And still we lay in our wagon of grass tugging at each other’s hands, while her husky, perilous whisper drugged me and the cider beat gongs in my head….
Night came at last, and we crawled out from the wagon and stumbled together towards home. Bright dew and glowworms shone over the grass, and the heat of the day grew softer. I felt like a giant; I swung from the trees and plunged my arms into nettles just to show her. Whatever I did seemed valiant and easy. Rosie carried her boots, and smiled.
There was something about that evening which dilates the memory, even now. The long hills slavered like Chinese dragons, crimson in the setting sun. The shifting lane lassoed my feet and tried to trip me up. And the lake, as we passed it, rose hissing with waves and tried to drown us among its cannibal fish.
Perhaps I fell ill - though I don’t remember. But here I lost Rosie for good. I found myself wandering home alone, wet through, and possessed by miracles. I discovered extraordinary tricks of sight. I could make trees move and leapfrog each other, and turn bushes into roaring trains. I could lick up the stars like acid drops and fall flat on my face without pain. I felt magnificent, fateful, and for the first time in my life, invulnerable to the perils of night.
When at last I reached home, still dripping wet, I was bursting with power and pleasure. I sat on the chopping-block and sang ‘Fierce Raged the Tempest’ and several other hymns of that nature. I went on singing till long after supper-time, bawling alone in the dark. Then Harold and Jack came and frog-marched me to bed. I was never the same again….
A year or so later occurred the Brith Wood rape. If it could be said to have occurred. By now I was one of a green-homed gang who went bellowing round the lanes, scuffling, fighting, aimless and dangerous, confused by our strength and boredom. Of course something like this was bound to happen, and it happened on a Sunday.
We planned the rape a week before, up in the builder’s stable. The stable’s thick air of mouldy chaff, dry leather, and r
otting straw, its acid floors and unwashed darkness provided the atmosphere we needed. We met there regularly to play cards and scratch and whistle and talk about girls.
There were about half a dozen of us that morning, including Walt Kerry, Bill Shepherd, Sixpence the Tanner, Boney, and Clergy Green. The valley outside, seen through the open door, was crawling with April rain. We sat round on buckets sucking strips of harness. Then suddenly Bill Shepherd came out with it.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Listen. I got’n idea….’
He dropped his voice into a furry whisper and drew us into a circle.
‘You know that Lizzy Berkeley, don’t ya?’ he said. He was a fat-faced lad, powerful and shifty, with a perpetual caught-in-the-act look. ‘She’d do,’ he said. ‘She’s daft in the ’ead. She’d be all right, y’know.’
We thought about Lizzy and it was true enough; she was daft about religion. A short, plump girl of about sixteen, with large, blue-bottle eyes, she used to walk in Brith Wood with a handful of crayons writing texts on the trunks of the beech trees. Huge rainbow letters on the smooth green bark, saying ‘JESUS LOVES ME NOW.’
‘I seen ’er Sunday,’ said Walt, ‘an’ she was at it then.’
‘She’s always at it,’ said Boney.
‘Jerusalem!’ said Clergy in his pulpit voice.
‘Well, ’ow about it?’ said Bill.
We drew closer together, out of earshot of the horse. Bill rolled us in his round red eyes.
‘It’s like this, see. Blummin’-well simple.’ We listened and held our breath. ‘After church Sunday mornin’ we nips up to the wood. An’ when ’er comes back from chapel - we got ’er.’
We all breathed out. We saw it clearly. We saw her coming alone through the Sunday wood, chalk-coloured Lizzy, unsuspecting and holy, in the bundle of her clothes and body. We saw her come walking through her text-chalked trees, blindly, straight into our hands.
