A Thousand Laurie Lees (8 page)

The front door welcomed one into a cosy little corridor lined with books and coats and boots and binoculars. The kitchen, to the left, was a cork-tiled haven – a narrow, yellow-walled galley filled with flowers and bits of pottery she had carefully accrued, plus a long pine table that filled one end of the room and looked out into the sunset, westwards to Slad through a pair of Liberty print curtains that drew together like a tangle of flowers. Arwen would lurk behind them, staring in at us with one green eye, the other hidden by Liberty.

The front room was all bare stone and books, shelves of them covering the thin brick wall dividing the houses as a feeble but beautiful insulation against travelling sound. She sourced everything carefully and locally – the rocking chairs in which I careered dangerously were from local makers, the hard green utilitarian carpet that left indentations in my knees if I knelt too long on it was from a shop in Stroud, there were rough-hewn benches and a painting of flowers she’d made when she was seventeen. In amongst this she placed the treasures she found in the woods. A sheep skull she’d found and written about took pride of place on the mantelpiece, alongside a delicate glass vase that was as violently yellow as a varnished egg yolk.

Upstairs, a cool, clean bathroom, a separate lavatory and two bedrooms. Mine was narrow and yellow and covered with posters of Breughel and of lions and unicorns dancing attendance to medieval ladies in wimples. Luminous stars glowed between the black beams at night. My parents’ room was green, with a map of the valley on one wall and a fool asleep on a hill opposite. The floorboards were painted black. Above this, the attic, in which one could sometimes find a box of crisps, a television or my father, if the tides were right, chattering away at the typewriter one-fingered, a green eyeshade of the sort worn by newsmen and card-sharps in films from the 1940s propped on his brow.

There was always a sense of shifting in the attic, the papers ebbing and flowing around the big Buddha chair from which I watched television on rare occasions. It was my father’s place, his rickety sanctuary, where he sometimes hid if visitors came. At night he would work on the kitchen table, but always before breakfast the papers were hurried upstairs and locked back behind my mother’s barrier of clean.

‘I hear you call my head a bin/where children dip their buckets in,’ my father would sing to her when she was down, bringing up a bubble of laughter in her throat. I envied his ability to make her laugh and tried to emulate it. She encouraged more seriousness in me, steered me towards careful writing, reading and speaking aloud.

In her lonelier periods in the valley, when my father was away, she took me walking, learning the names of flowers and the birds. I sucked in the knowledge, writing little poems about sheep in the fields and red campion and autumn. In ‘Poem of Absence’, she wrote:

to be alone for a month is good

I follow the bright fish of memory

falling deeper into myself

to the endless present

the child’s cry is my only clock

Yet the years wore on and my father’s absences became longer – sometimes I found him at Stroud station, suddenly beardless after a long trip around North America and didn’t recognise him. I hid behind my mother’s legs, shy and scared.

I sit in the woods at dusk

listening for the sound of your singing

there are letters from a thousand miles

you wrote a week ago

like leaves from an autumn tree

they fall on the mat

it was your voice woke me

and the absent touch of your hand

Absence stilled her, made her harder to reach. She would range out into the night on longer walks and take holidays to Cornwall with me only. Men would come to the valley, bringing parcels of adoration that she would not open, or at least not when I was there. I remember some of them vividly, the flash of their hopeful faces bright in the window, the way they were delicately attendant to my needs, solicitous and courtly and absolutely not welcome because they were distractions from my real business of living.

I only remember a couple of these interlopers and admirers fondly. Oswald Jones, a balding Welsh photographer, one of her dearest friends, who loved her deeply and took ceaseless photos of her (all of which she archly dismissed as awful), used to snarl at, satirise and tease me till I was his devoted friend. ‘Old Oz’ she called him, keeping him carefully, delicately at arm’s length. We had a little wooden begging bowl with a face on its handle that looked like Ossie, which my mother used for raisins, perhaps as a jest at his fondness for alcohol. I remember the quietly mortified look on his face when I gleefully told him it was called the Ossie bowl.

Then there was Roger Garfitt, a lithe and cautious poet in his mid thirties who came one day in March 1980 for a visit that lasted a fortnight and made a huge impression on me. In part it was the fact that he looked like Dick Turpin, as played by Richard O’Sullivan on the TV on Saturday afternoons – the only thing that was guaranteed to keep me indoors and which infested my imagination in numerous games around the valley and was reported as outright fact in my Monday morning news book at school. I remember arguing with Katy that she had to be Turpin’s partner, Swiftnick, because she had the right colour hair. She was having none of it. Both of us wanted to be Turpin.

Roger was an exotic curiosity, parked on the divan downstairs every morning for two weeks. To my mind, he wrested any claim I might have had on being Dick Turpin, and was exciting company for it. I went to school content that there was something new and interesting to come home to, blissfully unaware that my mother was not keeping Roger at arm’s length as soon as I had marched up the hill to the cheerful yell of ‘Come on lightning’.

It was not just the fact that he resembled the heavily romanticised TV Turpin, who in imagination had accompanied me through every nook and cranny of the valley, upsetting imaginary apple carts and buckling bucket-loads of swash to every tree. As much as anything it was my mother’s excitement rubbing off on me, an emotion that had been lacking in her for more than a year.

Before long we were heading off to visit her oldest friend Jane Percival with him whilst my father was away on another American tour. It came as only a small surprise to me when my mother and I packed ourselves into a bright orange Peugeot and left the valley for Sunderland, to live with him.

It had been a long time coming, not that I knew it in my territorial, devotional state of being, certain that I was the only thing that mattered to her. My father was away too often, of necessity most of the time, earning money, but also finding distraction in the wider world. Though he devoted vast and eccentric energies to the maintenance of the life we shared, he was fundamentally more urban than my mother, who had always been less temperamentally attuned to the streets of cities and the hustle and bustle of arts communities and literary worlds.

The valley was a place of haven for him, of peace and familial contentment, when he was there. But my mother, whether in her country camouflage of black padded coat and a broad rimmed floppy hat or peering through elderflowers with a wry, seductive grin on her face, her stark outer beauty softened by childbirth and need, still found it hard to be so often in the valley without him. A fragility crept in more often under her upturned smile, beneath the faintly medieval clothes she wore, her tapestry of greens, blacks, browns and muted blues, past the tiny bouquets of flowers she plucked from wood and hedgerow to adorn the kitchen table. The dreams of food for free, her son brought up away from pollution and the screech of competition, the search for contentment out of the hubbub of the city, had come at a cost; a partial disquiet of the soul. Intact, our family operated in a fizzing whorl of joy; with just a few neighbours and myself for company, solitude was sometimes difficult for her to bear.

In the book she wrote during the ten years we lived there,
Water Over Stone
, a marked sorrow and a noticeable edge of fear creeps into her writing, inevitable perhaps after entry into her middle years and the death of her father, with whom she had had a difficult relationship. In ‘Walking in Autumn’, dedicated to Diana Lodge, with whom she shared much in common excepting Diana’s ability to be wholly solitary, at once at one with the landscape and apart from it, she writes about the walk to Elcombe along the green lanes through Keensgrove wood, about how darkness falls and the walkers experience a sudden onrush of fear:

We hurry without reason

stumbling over roots and stones.

A night creature lurches, cries out,

crashes through brambles.

Skin shrinks inside our clothes;

almost we run

falling through darkness to the wood’s end,

the gate into the sloping field.

Home is lights and woodsmoke, voices –

and, our breath caught, not trembling now,

a strange reluctance to enter within doors.

In hindsight this fragility, this fear to enter within doors seems to me to mark the point at which she needed to move on, to escape the quiet of the valley. She was sinking into the landscape rather, without someone to help her rise above it, to share its mysteries with, bone and water and stone becoming less a balm against the prescriptive rigours of day-to-day existence, supply teaching in schools, touring shows and recording for the BBC than it once had been.

My father, despite his itinerant lifestyle and his long absences from the valley, could not and would not let her go without a valiant effort to make her change her mind. Like Lord Lovelace in Charles Causley’s poem from
Figgie Hobbin
, he came charging back ‘… whistling bright as any bird/Upon an April tree’, bringing with him guests and entreaties and all the love that he could muster. His hopes were dashed.

Amongst these guests was Allen Ginsberg who, in the company of his partner Peter Orlovsky and the poet Tom Pickard, came to visit in 1979, a year before my mother and I left. They came on a wet November night, down the precarious hill to the cottage, bringing an exotic whiff of excitement in their wake.

A reading had been arranged in Stroud on Bonfire Night, behind Starters café where my parents would take me for a treat after shopping trips to town. (I can still feel the indignant thrill that shivered through me when my father snuck a can of Guinness out of his bag in Starters and filled up his glass, which had briefly contained cola before he tipped it away; the terror that we might be caught.) But before this came our gathering of poets in the woods, with my mother carefully cooking exquisite food, and peals of laughter at jokes that leapt over my head like proverbial cows orbiting the moon.

Ginsberg and Orlovksy were touring Britain at the time and our house was a natural stopping point – they had introduced my father to America and now it was our turn to introduce them to Gloucestershire. They got the best introduction possible to the wilds of the valley; the car that they had arrived in was not inclined to take kindly to treacherous conditions and the weather had turned, bringing sheets of rain and fallen leaves up the valleys from the Severn. The concrete road and its craftily steep hairpin bend were as slippery as a skating rink and, as we attempted to set off for Stroud, the car stuck fast on the hairpin, teetering on the edge of the tree line and threatening to descend into our house.

The Beat Generation’s arrival into Stroud was momentarily off the road, so all hands leapt out of the car, and leaned in to haul the machine back into action. It was always a hill for scaring people. The poet Harry Fainlight, a fey, gentle and eccentric poet who had read with my father and Ginsberg at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in 1965 and who was notorious for willing cars to stop if he did not want to go anywhere, effected a breakdown of our car on the same hill. Harry would come to visit us every so often in the early 1970s. My memories of him are distant, but entirely at odds with the sometimes violent extremes of his poetry. I recall a very soulful, gentle presence who would listen to me attentively, however slight and fantastical my verbal wanderings, and would adventure with me in words. The car started again with a growl and a gronk only after my mother had turned in her seat, looked Harry in the eye as he sat in the back of the car next to me, and told him, with delicate, tender command, that it had been lovely to see him but it was time to be moving on.

That hill also nearly took my life, aged six. My mother was going away to give a reading and I was to stay with the Lloyds. We drove up the hill in the new silver Renault, just past the bend and she parked outside the steps up to the Lloyds’ front door, putting the handbrake on as she handed my bag of things to Jean. I was procrastinating in the passenger seat.

‘Come on out of there, Adam,’ my mother called.

‘Come on Adam,’ yelled Katy, eager to take command, to play.

‘All right! I’m coming,’ I replied, stepping over to the driver’s seat and losing my balance as I negotiated my way past the steering wheel. I reached out and grabbed the first thing I could find to steady myself – the handbrake, set in the front and middle of the old-style Renault, to the left of the dashboard and down.

The handbrake moved, and so did the car; it slipped gently backwards down the hill, gathering pace. I threw myself to the floor, watching trees spin past above me, hearing nothing but roaring in my ears, clutching hard to the base of the passenger seat. My mother, my father, Jean and Katy stood above the steps down to the road, transfixed, I am told, quite unable to move or speak as the car disappeared into the woods, down the dirt track that had once been the main road to Slad. The car span and, fortunately for me, wedged between two trees – I was a hair’s breadth away from rolling down the hill.

Only then did anyone move. Katy screamed, I think. My mother came billowing down the hill, composure forgotten. She pulled me from the well of the car and hugged me tighter than I could bear, her breath heavy against my shaking chest, my hair wet with her tears.