A Thousand Laurie Lees (2 page)

The Slad Valley has been bound in, farmed and fenced by literature for as long as I can remember, one of a few Southern English rural idylls to have survived semi-intact into the twenty-first century without succumbing entirely to the deathly creep of empty commuterism.

The quiet boundaries of Laurie Lee’s Edwardian upbringing, through which news or the occasional deserter from distant wars crept furtive and wary, have gone. Broadband has opened wider than the sky the horizons of this small, glacier-cut valley, fringed though it still is by an endless quiff of deciduous trees.

It is a place of quiet mystery in its deepest recesses, with the contentment of a blurry feudal ease at its surface, into which the wider world bounds irregularly like a large, alarming dog only to be rebuffed – or, better still, absorbed with a game of fetch-the-stick. Landowners and workers rub shoulders in the valley’s heart: the pub. Even modern celebrities, whose notoriously unwieldy egos can easily destabilise any community into which they move, are moving to the outlying villages and country houses and being subsumed by Slad.

Slad is place that exists curiously out of time, like the sort of fantastical land I read about as a child (when I wasn’t chasing off into the valley after butterflies, or looking for sheep skulls and badger setts) where dimensions in time and space would interlock. The tattered remnants of rural hierarchy coexist with patchy mobile signal, sleek celebrity alongside scuff-booted workman, artist alongside merchant banker. The past intrudes on the present. Even the sort of idyllic hippy upbringing I had in a thumb offshoot of the valley to which my parents moved in 1971, out beyond the farmhouse racing stables, still exists in places, free from creeping urban paranoia, streetlights and the imperative of labour to the exclusion of dreaming.

1

The Apple's Rounded World

Behold the apples' rounded worlds:

juice-green of July rain,

the black polestar of flowers, the rind

mapped with its crimson stain.

From ‘Apples' by Laurie Lee

T
hings are changing. A year lost to sorrow recedes into the distance and I am cleaning up and clearing out the house in which I grew up. A time of stepping back and moving on. There is a great deal of work to be done sifting and sorting papers; my father's archive needs taming and ordering, as does mine. There is such a lot of it, much-layered with dust in the further reaches of the attic. Dust and the early history of the counterculture; books and memories spider-webbed in glass.

On the one clear day of the Jubilee bank holiday, I have come with friends to the house. They are gardening. The garden needs as much ordering as the archive – it is a church of little light under the steepling trees.

I dive into the wealth of papers and begin to clear some space. The long day passes in dust clouds, which dance like long-lost faces on the edge of daylight. My father has returned to London when suddenly, in amongst a pile of addled, raddled and mouse-ridden jiffy bags, I discover a cache of handwritten manuscripts of my mother's poetry, only one of which the mice had got to: a poem of hers about a Peruvian flute carved from human bone – it too had been shaved down to the essentials – and a collection of photographs. Of us. Of the family, all my life ago.

In the photos, I too am shaved down to the essence of existence – I must be three months old. These are the photos taken when we moved to the cottage, out of London to this branching out of the valley at the heart of
Cider with Rosie
country. The house, heavy in the here and now with jasmine, boxed in by privet and yew and beech, also looks bare and young and clean.

My parents too; they hold their bodies like saplings, my mother sharp and fluid as a willow, my father a little more knotted, with a beard as tenacious as ivy. The land is bare; an apple tree, a few distant saplings; light. The black and white prints are bleached with age; only a few figures stand out in dark relief.

I am caked in dust, encased in a skin of the past, sat at the top of the narrow curve of attic stairwell, my tea going cold. In the distance I hear chainsaws and laughter, the noise of change. I get up and go downstairs. In the front room, the new curtains are drawn. I walk to the front door and find myself surrounded by light, lifted out of dusty reflection of the past and into its daylight.

One small section of the garden has travelled backwards, has been shaved down to that earlier state. Photographs and present day have merged in palimpsest. The yew trees lour above us, yet this is still a small, bare but fruitful Eden – the earth is dark and rich with neglect, the brutal, invasive stems of nettle and mint are tamed. The apple tree has been cut down. New knowledge needs planting out.

Memories are hardy as seeds; you plant them young and watch them grow in unexpected directions, germinating and cross-pollinating until a full-grown plant shadows everything you remember. Nothing ever grows into quite the shapes you expect or hope for.

As I grow older, remembering my mother in the valley in which I grew up, lost in the intense heat of the summers that book-ended gloriously cold, brief winters where snow piled up on the narrow, walled lane twice as high as myself, the memories of her creep through me like ivy through a dry-stone wall. They clutch at and change my perception, and the landscape becomes darker.

I am too young, perhaps, to remember arriving in the valley, or to see Slad over the tops of saplings and through close-cropped fields of cattle and sheep through anything other than the photographer's faded lens, but I remember the sensation of belonging that rippled through me as I waded in bright red boots through the ford in the stream, heading up to the badger sett at the edge of Catswood, or as I basked beneath the Roman bridge playing high-pitched troll to any passing gruff two-legged goat.

The valley was my mother's then, and I'd have defended it and her with all the animal instinct and animosity a three-year-old can rustle up; would have waded to the Octopus Tree downstream from Snows Farm, in whose flailing roots I nestled as if holding some sort of fort against the threat of invasion, would have baaed and mooed and waved my sticks (which dreamt of being weapons) at passing livestock or at wasps until, laughing, my mother picked me up, clutched me to her shiny black quilted walking coat and hauled me home through the young, narrow woods which grew up through jaw-line husks of dry-stone walls, as the dark came down and intermittent lights flicked on one by one in dark corners of the valley.

The valley was my playpen; bound in by walls and fences, I was safe to run and, as I grew, run further within the square mile or so of Slad Valley that was mine, that idyllic Venn confusion point where the parishes of Painswick and Bisley meet; it was never certain to the outside world where it was exactly that one lived.

When I answered the phone aged three or four, running determinedly towards the new technology, as all children do when presented with alluring adult toys, I remember speaking into the receiver, in the clear tones I had learned from my mother, that this was Painswick, followed by the four-digit number that was ours alone. Or almost ours alone, because I also remember the way that sometimes, mysteriously, other voices would appear on the party line, incomprehensibly not there to talk to me. I would listen, intrigued, and pipe up with question and complaint until my mother came to restore my peace (and theirs) and take the telephone away.

The apple tree that is now gone, seasoning slowly for the fire in this suddenly forested garden, is the first thing I truly remember of early childhood, outside my yellow bedroom speckled with stars and the intense universe of my mother's arms. It was my grotto, that apple tree, my small church hung with laundry, mirrors, fruit. It bore apples that burst still in my mouth like dreams. It fruited year round until I was five, I'm certain of that.

The photos from the attic are stuck into collages like eyes gummed up with sleep. There are photos of me, my large head curtained in a wisp of gold that Rumpelstiltskin might have spun, lurching up the slight slope beneath the apple boughs and wearing a smile whose cherubic nature is sullied slightly by a smear of mud, or the pulp of fruit – the process of peeling these pictures apart makes it hard to be sure. Photos of my mother, smiling through elderflower; of my father, laughing, gnomic, bearded as Pan; of lovers, family, friends. All of us play second fiddle to the valley in these photos, poor players in a stage of its growth, a small harmonious chorus to its relentless song.

It was music that brought us here, the alluring song of the countryside that called so many of the beatnik and hippy generation away from the cities. Certainly, the strident operatics of London were too much for my mother to bear. She had grown up in ‘shabby' wartime Walthamstow and run to the edges of Epping Forest to erect altars to Pan as a teenager, urgent to escape the suburban confines of her parents' aspirations and the depredations of rationing. My father, ‘incorrigibly urban' according to Robert Graves, dreamed the same dream (at least for a while) and found a cottage, advertised in the
Evening Standard
as ‘going for a song'.

For two poets of the hopeful 1960s bound up in the music of language and at least one of them keening to escape the high towers of London, this was enough – a song was pretty much all they could afford. Yet it was the song that bought them and brought them; this was a valley they had visited before, had known in walks and dreams and trips of all varieties, getting out of London in the comedown years of the 1960s to befriend and stay with the artist Diana Lodge at Trillgate, calling on John Papworth, the founder of Resurgence, in Elcombe and, completing a wonky and arbitrary geographical and artistic triangle that became a rough-cut diamond when we moved in to our mullion-windowed cottage, Laurie Lee, whom my father had met in London around jazz and poetry gigs and at the Chelsea Arts Club and bohemian parties around the capital.

The valley was alive with musics: the curdling, piercing soprano scream of vixens, the angry punkish bark of jays, the wind dragging its endless fugue in green through the trees. It infiltrated everything, penetrating the stone walls of our cottage as if they were paper, leading words in a new dance. It seemed as if my parents had stepped into some sweet-scented Arcadia built out of Blake's
Songs of Innocence
.