A Thousand Laurie Lees (21 page)

Now I am reaching past childhood to a new understanding of the way life in a small valley works. I am getting used to seeing Neil Rees stalking the lanes with a rifle, keeping the squirrel population down, standing in roadside shadow-edge as I cycle home from work at dusk. Dogs bark in the distance and lights flicker on and off. Arriving at the house, the memory of my mother shivers like birdsong at the window. The stream crackles in the distance as I open the front door. ‘Birdsong and water bear away grief.’
1

My father comes back to the valley occasionally, bearing the city’s fire like a brand before him, even at seventy-eight. Sheep appear briefly in the fields opposite the house, surprising escapees from who knows which field. Like storm-blown clouds they vanish again the next day, taking clumps of overgrown grass away in their bellies. The jay screams through the wood, still laughing, perhaps, at my childhood conviction that it was a hoopoe. A pair of buzzards patrols the rim of trees. Pat Hopf still lives in the cottage at the other end of the terrace from me, keeping the garden clear with the help of her sons and offering gin and history whenever I call by. Friends come and go, old and new faces, some of them in tiny, mewling form. The world seems small and huge at once.

I am pleased to find that the rusted bicycle I pulled from the rotting garden shed and left parked in hewn yew branches has been secretly coveted by the teenager living up the hill in Katy’s old house. He calls by occasionally, talks about music. The bike is his now, under repair and soon to be ridden to school once more, after twenty-five years of neglect. His name is Laurie. It seems appropriate to pass this long-neglected wheeled frame of freedom on to him.

S
OLSTICE

The wood is cut and darkness sighs

its needle shower of yew-green light,

of brown stems in the ragged hedge.

Stars pucker on the cusp of sight

and, startling from the woodland’s edge,

the moon is an owl; its cries

changing the track of the sea.

The stream sings out in reverse,

a song of solidness, of creak,

as if water needed to rehearse

the change of seasons, or to speak

a human tongue in sympathy.

I hum the water’s song, the shallow

breath that shatters on the path

in footsteps, startling a deer,

then slide indoors to wood the hearth

and spark an answer to the fear

of winter; a flickering hallow

that scatters the long night’s shadow up the wall

and frees me, briefly, from the vixen’s numbing call.

Note

1
  From ‘Old Song’ by Frances Horovitz.

22

Coda

W
hen we are very young almost everything we say is poetry, of a kind. The words that form on our tongues are shaved down strips of meaning reduced to the bare essentials. We pick up and run with refrains learned from our surroundings, dadaists to the core, building intelligence out of the noises we do not fully understand, and our parents sing it back to us, delighted in our soundscapes of erupting understanding.

We imitate and accumulate, robbing the landscape of whatever is closest to us, be it bird song or tractor’s growl, car horn or television, song or silence. We make music and meaning of our surroundings until we are able to sculpt ourselves a grammar and communicate fully, in solid functionality – and beyond if we dare push ourselves that far.

I count myself indelibly fortunate to have grown up in the outer reaches of Slad, to have been surrounded by birdsong, the aching screech of the vixen, the brutish rustle of the badgers I watched at play with my mother, secreted upwind in the early evening at the edge of Catswood, opposite Snows Farm.

When I was a child the valley was perpetually alive with songs and sounds, and it was alive with poetry, instilled in me by both of my parents and by the valley itself. It still is, to a great extent. I grew up wired for the sound of language and how it interacted with nature, in a long, lyrical song of landscape that was started by Laurie Lee and which has kept on being sung in rounds, in one form or another, around and about the valley ever since. More and more people are taking it up as the urban world attempts to swallow our understanding of what it means to be alive.

All landscapes have their music, but Slad is fortunate to have had a singer as tender and profoundly understanding of its moods and temperaments and lyrical weather patterns as Laurie Lee. The villagers and the valley have responded in kind, by keeping his song alive, either in the hands of poets and artists or in the more prosaic actions of people determined to preserve whatever is left of the lost innocence and experiences that Laurie mourned in
Cider with Rosie
. And it is not only the village; the people of Stroud on the whole recognise how much this glacier-carved lung of land means to the area, and how much it would damage us all if it were swallowed alive brick by brick, as do the people his work has touched all over the world.

The rapacious road that runs through the village cannot be changed, and nor should it be. It is too late to save all but a few of the farm jobs that withered away after the Second World War. Yet even the people who own 4x4 cars that glisten like seals fresh from the surf, who leave halogen lights on outside their houses long into the night to torture moths and who snarl at walkers who trundle past their gates have bought into the song of Slad that Laurie started, have come here for an idyll, albeit one they sometimes seem a little less than willing to share, an idyll that is at once divorced from the world and a part of it.

Poetry has made a playground of the valley, be it Laurie’s, Frank Mansell’s or my family’s. It is no longer a place of dung and chickens in the yard, of dirty-faced boys running out of school to follow a coffin up into the church. Only the field above the racing stables still stinks of the past, where piles of dung-laden hay from the stable floors are dumped in the field at the entrance to Trillgate, steaming and reeking in the summer sun. The old boundaries are shifting and crumbling away. Old stone walls lie in ruin, like smashed jaws on the borders of the fields, consumed by a cancer of fences and badly maintained hedgerows. Trees jut from them at impossible angles. Roots thicker than legs ride them like horses. In the twenty-first century, the wealth of the valley is kept within doors more often than not.

It is impossible to keep cows or sheep in the farther-flung fields below the house I grew up in because no one will fence them, and they’re too steep for racing horses, so hassocks of grass grow rampant in the fields I ran through as a child, an impediment to walkers. The Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust owns some of them, and those are easier to access for walkers and visitors, for all that they are a protected haven for wildlife. The landscape of Slad is being recast as a place of ease, a new world to escape to from the city, and this necessarily means that the difficulties of the countryside are being gently erased. Muddy fords over the streams are replaced with wooden planks, taking some of the risk and joyful terror out of walking. No more mud to the knee for the incautious walker who doesn’t test the next stone they must step on.

Poetry and the impulses that drive all of creation are too often chased from us as we grow up, as the daily grind drags us farther and farther from our imaginative roots and imposes the grammar of necessity upon us. It is marvellous, then, to find places that still carry us back to the imitative shrilling of childhood, and a sense of ease, where people of all stripes still mingle and laugh and pull together regardless of their upbringing or relative wealth and, although the accents have shifted to the point that the local dialect is a welcome surprise rather than a common occurrence and many of the houses are occupied by bankers, artists or the retired, and although a certain sentimentalism about Slad hangs from the branches of memory, fat as a harvest moon, it remains just as important to remember the valley as it was, as it is to cherish it now: a place where gentle rural anarchy meets arch conservatism and thrives in the face of relentless urban progress.

Not for nothing did John Papworth and Leopold Kohr, two of the people who helped inspire E.F. Schumacher’s
Small is Beautiful
, live in or visit this valley. According to Schumacher: ‘Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatory of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness – where this applies.’ The virtues of smallness are most abundant in Slad. It is a community that relies on its smallness, even now when it is connected to the rest of the world and has long been separated from Laurie Lee’s childhood. It is that childhood, the mythic smallness of it and its lyrical retelling, that helps keep Slad and its thumb offshoots free of wanton development.

Even today, when building firms try and press through proposals for hundreds of houses on the outskirts of Stroud leading in to the Slad Valley, they find themselves forced by Laurie’s reputation into offering concessions such as creating wild spaces at the bottom of their developments. Protestors, invigorated by Laurie’s wry spirit, counter this by pointing down at the sprawling fields and saying: ‘We’ve got all the wild spaces we need! Let them be.’

Laurie’s vision was a quiet one, but it has remained persuasive to the point that he has become part of the landscape, a point of reference for people all over the world, even for people who have not read him. Schoolgirls and tourists will now find him buried in the valley rather than in a pint at the Woolpack, but only his body is buried between the church and the pub, and from there, only we look out at the valley. What matters of Laurie is buried in the landscape and in the people who live and work in the valley; a spark, a seed, a fragment of lyricism and light.

If Slad and the valleys that surround it can remain as a preservation point, where futurist meets deep ecologist and has a pint or three in the Woolpack with labourer, artist and celebrity, all determined to protect the landscape and community for its own sake, and for the sake of later generations, rather than because it matters just to them, then we will all be Laurie Lee in a small way, thousands of us, if only for a night, propping up the bar with a vision of Albion that can be translated to all the remaining wild spaces that are left to us, and that need to be maintained if we are to retain as a nation a sense of what our past is and what our future may be.

R
OOTS

For Kate Johnson

A last gauzed smile of winter

fades from the valley. Snowdrops

stoop like downtrodden ghosts

along the Hopf’s immaculate garden path.

The few adventurous daffodils that shivered

into hopeful bud twelve days ago, then froze,

creak through the last of March

like green, thawing icicles, releasing

a long preserved insect’s breath of sun.

I walk up the hill as I always did

towards your old house, lost

in the high, shrill calls of us as children,

when this valley was ours.

It dreamt us into being, I think; the rough-champed slope,

the stream, the pockets of woodland

that were our other homes, the brambling dens

which felt real as built stone in late spring sun.

All that has changed

though not for better or for worse.

There are no judgement calls

in nature. Only what is, and what will be.

You with your four children

called to the sea, the youngest’s white hair flying

as yours did when we ran the steep hill

down to the Roman bridge in outsized t-shirts,

hand in hand aged five and six.

I, alone now in the changed valley,

remembering half-blind Jake sliding down

the Horton’s hill, growling agreeably; your face

when you realised that you’d been sent

to catch my mumps and get it done with;

declaring aged seven that I’d marry you;

coughing at your wedding at just the wrong moment,

unable to stop and almost laughing at the memory

of an innocent declaration, which you’d shot down

with all the severity a six year old can muster.

New children live here now

and we are older almost than our parents were

back then. Like the valley, we have grown

beyond our recollections. Our lines of sight

have shifted; our paths are less steady, more defined.

Yet underneath it all, the roots of bramble and of beech

curl as they have always curled, intertwined,

arm in arm with this valley, like old friends

laughing at blown dandelion seeds, the dry stone passages of time.

Plates