A Thousand Laurie Lees (14 page)

Of course, the Woolpack was always good for ghost stories. The valley is full of them; they while away the winter, keep little histories and rivalries alive when told, retold and adapted in the safety of a warm bar that’s an easy step from home. When you are walking out through the valley alone, they suddenly become all too real in the misty lanes where trees lurch awkwardly at you out of nowhere, caught like giants in the quailing light of a feeble torch, and the mud sucks at your feet down by the perilously narrow Roman bridge.

The huge black dog with red eyes, harbinger of doom and any ailment one could care to invent, was the story that haunted me most. For the best part of a year I took that with me from pub to cottage, hypersensitive with beer and night time solitude. Then, one night, when the moon was a thumbnail sliver in the sky and my torch was flickering right on the edge of battery loss, I caught two flat red orbs in its beam as I stumbled down a steep field, almost home. The light caught a wet, cold spurt of breath rising on the air. There were eyes staring at me out of the dark. I sat down with a bump, convinced by the beer that my end had come, that I was going to be devoured in the dark of the valley just yards from where I had splashed and played as a child.

No prayer came, just panic; a mist of it rising out of me as I sweated on the damp hillside, my backside moist with dew. I sat there for twenty minutes perhaps, although it felt like hours, barely allowing myself to breathe. Finally the black dog of my paranoid imaginings let out a soft moo and ambled away to the stream to drink.

Travelling home became easier after that, terror slithering away into mere aloneness. Easier and yet harder at the same time, as the more I frequented the pub, the more I began to make friends in Slad and find excuses not to be alone.

University finished with, I moved back to the valley full time. All thought of Bisley was left behind (except as a place to collect my dole cheque). I had my sights set solely on Slad. I could not escape the pull of the village, largely thanks to the band two friends had started in college, born out of the extended jams that had spontaneously erupted at parties in houses in the far reaches of the Slad Valley or up on Swift’s Hill throughout our teenage years, whipped to a frenzy of eventual tunefulness by drink and quiet experimentation with other, more illicit substances.

Vashty, a name picked at random from the bible and then deliberately misspelled, formalised into an electronica outfit in Sheffield, where its main conspirators, Joe Reeve and Everest Wilson-Copp, were studying art. After college they moved back down to Slad and set up camp in Everest’s parents’ home, Stroud Slad Farm. The studio was first placed in Everest’s small and slope-roofed bedroom, charmingly and entirely dyslexically named ‘Cubey Holo’, before moving, as the music progressed and Everest’s parents saw commercial potential in it, into an outbuilding of the lovingly restored farm that became a soundproofed technological marvel, an exquisite home studio on two floors of an old grain barn.

As the call to music grew in intensity and the quality increased, Stroud Slad Farm became a central hub for inter-generational parties, bringing together disaffected youth with a creative streak, their hippified parents who had made reasonably good on the dreams of a more sustainable sort of wealth and who hadn’t quite caved in to the abject capitalist despair of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and all the age-groups in between. Everest’s parents had bought the farmhouse as a shell and set up a leather-working business in the grounds whilst they repaired it. It was an ideal moment; a small business blossoming in a valley that had lost its workforce, a valley which needed things to be happening in it again, which was desperate to escape the taint of retirees and commuters that had almost completely sucked the life out of other villages in the area.

The house they created was an exemplar of the sort of country living that wealthy urbanites aspire to now, the sort of home that has property-porn TV presenters salivating openly as they mutter ‘location, location, location’; an exquisite old farmhouse brought back from the brink of ruin and laid out in excellent, simple taste, every inch of the building lovingly used and restored. The kitchen was huge, powered by a blazing Aga, which Pauline, the tough little matriarch of the house, rested against constantly, holding court as a seemingly endless stream of zealously outgoing children raced past.

It would have seemed a very male-oriented house had it not been for Pauline, who could quash testosterone-frenzy with one steely glare. The seemingly endless streams of children were, at the core, five sons, of whom Everest was the eldest. Profoundly dyslexic, Everest had developed instead an ear for the textures of music that seemed almost preternatural; he would go into trances in the studio, sometimes assisted, sometimes not, listening with microscopic attention to things the rest of us could not hear. Joe was the melody man, able to tie lyrics into place with a killer tune.

They made a remarkable duo, locked away in their little studio concocting ever more complex music, occasionally inviting others in to work with them: I was often on duty in the first few years of the band as a co-lyricist; Everest’s brother David, who looked as if he could have been a Pre-Raphaelite model were it not for the inconvenient fact that he was male, came in to play guitar.

Architects and artists, musicians and farmers came through the doors as the music developed and became more widely known in the crucible of the five valleys of Stroud and I, unable after late nights writing lyrics to stumble the three miles home, would often crash on the sofa, sometimes for days, until asked very nicely and firmly to leave. It became a home away from the increasing isolation of home; the central hub of my Slad Valley, the meeting point between deep rural and urban living.

In Sheffield, Vashty had been producing cutting-edge electronica, utilising the sort of sounds that cropped up in Warp Records’ output and, later, in bands such as Underworld, but after returning to the Slad Valley, Vashty’s music shifted slowly towards a ruralist, psychedelic, electronically enhanced rock/pop sound, to which I added poetic lyrics in friendly competition with Joe, whose sense of how words could fit with music exceeded my own, and complemented by Everest, whose dyslexia attuned him far more to the sound of the words than the sense and who was a very useful sounding board for poetry as well. The band was completed by Ginny Murray, who had sung with Sailor (most famous for their kitsch hit ‘Girls Girls Girls’ in the late 1970s), who helped the band slip the leash of its gang-based beginnings and move towards something more elusive and refined.

The trouble was that the music was created in isolation. The songs were fuelled by cycle rides through the countryside and hallucinogenic encounters, technology and small moments of ecstatic wonder, sex and the lack of it, and longing. There was a lot of longing in the music of Vashty. Instead of gigging, the band took their music to parties and tested it out on the willing (and the unwilling, whose opinions were equally useful, if not always so welcome) if they had a stereo system that took cassettes. Joe and Everest bred a certain kind of cool, out of the rat race and high on countryside and isolation from the general run of things, on the beautiful smallness of Slad. It seemed there would be a natural rise, as music and lyrics and sound got better and better, but bands are like soufflé – alter the heat incautiously and everything collapses.

We had all lived too much on top of each other, which didn’t help; a small community made smaller by gang mentality. I was in and out of the same people’s houses too often for their and my comfort, though I was too lonely to admit that, especially as women began to swirl into the band members’ lives, like milk and honey stirred slowly into coffee. We lost ourselves in the countryside as the band created a sound that was different enough to be noticed, fuelled by the sort of outsider sounds that created Trip Hop. Moving away from the urban angst of Portishead and Tricky, Vashty were fusing a rural psychedelic epiphany with sharp lyrics, a cerebral take on rave culture and the sideways pomp of alternative 1980s-vintage pop. There was angst – there’s always some form of angst in good pop music, at its best when it is building into something that moves beyond.

It could have worked. They could so easily have grown into something spectacular, reaching up from the steep slopes of Slad to look at the world. The band was signed to a publishing contract by my old neighbour Hugh Padgham, a friend of Ginny’s through whom he had heard the music, but Vashty wasn’t really ready for the cut and thrust of commercial art. A certain amount of perspective was lost – an internalised expansion that forgot to take into account the clock’s need to work with other cogs if it was going to learn to chime.

At the time of signing the contract, I moved on – a part-time lyricist who wasn’t particularly musical wasn’t really needed in a professional outfit with a publishing deal, especially as their own lyric-writing had improved in leaps and bounds. I wanted more than anything to write poetry, to create my own word music, but I had also been put on my guard when arguments broke out about who had written what song. Worst of all, I found myself defending my right to a forlorn love lyric, written entirely on my own and for which there was no way I was going to cede any credit to Everest, who was suspecting, wrongly, that his role in the band was at risk.

Within a year Vashty was gone – another band that might have been (and should have been, listening back now to the tapes I’ve saved, divorced from nostalgia and with the appraising ear of someone who has listened extensively to a wide range of the music that came after) if only it had been set up as an equal partnership. Another cottage industry lost in a place that had been slowly and surely stripped of all such things; the band’s implosion drove me further from the valley, out into life and work, believing that I could not find creative satisfaction so closely locked to home.

13

Cannabis with Rosie

A
fter I came back from university and was a little more able to look after myself, my father came back less and less from London, taking up urbanity again with what seemed to me a small sigh of relief, though a green and pollen-scented cloud of fond nostalgia for the valley, and for the years of my paradisal childhood spent there together, under the watchful, loving eye of my mother, hangs unshifting and warm in his heart to this day.

I bought a motorbike, in a bid to survive and be free to travel, and roared around the five valleys of Stroud on it, singularly failing to find any work, whether through indifference or lack of skills. I still have, somewhere, a letter from the local garage telling me that I didn’t have what it took to be a garage attendant. Although they phrased it more delicately than that, it was enough to confound the dole office for a while.

I picked up moments of work; Ginny, who sang with Vashty, was married to a sheep farmer, David Murray. David had need of help with the dipping of sheep and I was called in. They lived in a barn on the edge of Sheepscombe and Painswick, which was being slowly converted for home living over at least a decade. When I first encountered the place, the bathroom was hidden behind a curtain and required careful negotiation at parties if one didn’t want to burst in on people unannounced.

Unprepared, but willing to throw myself at anything for money, I made my way up to the farm. All I really knew of sheep was that they looked like small, greasy clouds in a field from a distance and had strange and difficult eyes when you looked at them closely. The closest I had come to a sheep previously was when, as a child, I had been taking turns with Skanda to look out over the fields through new binoculars from my bedroom window. We spotted an unmoving sheep and went to investigate. Close to, it was clear that it was dead – the sheep’s corpse was alive with maggots, undulating through its exposed bones like dead grass in a high wind. We ran home, excited and horrified, carrying the stench in our teeth, and helped make the report to the farmer, our details breathy and tangled, spilling out disorderly into the phone.