A Thousand Laurie Lees (9 page)

I suspect the Lloyds were watching on again as Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Pickard and my father heaved in the wet to get the car started in 1979. A show was always there to be had when my father was involved, and I have good reason to know that they enjoyed many of them. Eventually, after much shouting, grunting and amused, verse-fuelled invective, the car was once again as road-worthy as it was ever likely to be and we were off.

Even now, decades later, I meet people who came to that reading behind Starters café, who tell me that they remember me reading poems with Allen Ginsberg and my parents on Bonfire Night, aged eight, a little orange-headed blur of composed enthusiasm. Looking back through the papers I have kept, I find continual evidence of my parents’ hand in encouraging me to write. The ‘Plastic Farmyard Poem’ my father cobbled together out of things I said aged three (‘I see a rainbow/in the radio/in the music/in the bed/– I hear ladies/singing/in my head’), which he then presented to me as a poem that I had written and he had edited. There was a poem about autumn, which I wrote alone and entered into a school competition. It didn’t win anything because, as one of the teachers told my mother, they suspected other pens than mine had had a hand in it. My eight-year-old redhead’s temper was incandescent over the injustice of that.

I learned from both my parents to listen to the rhythm of words. I learned an ear for poetry that most schools hammer out of one by insisting on ascribing meaning and discussing intent at a forge when such things should be rolled out slowly in calm pastures, over time. My father taught me to play with words, to bounce them ebulliently around the tongue, to find rhythm, to find the sense in nonsense and the nonsense in sense. My mother taught me about breath and silence, about stillness and how to pick music from a murmuring core of silence, about the colour of words, about looking and hearing and thinking and dreaming.

The poems I read with Ginsberg on Guy Fawkes Night, aged eight, were not very good – charming enough for a child, as pure as any child’s writing can be if they’re given the chance to be free – but the lessons that came with them stayed with me, as did the sounds of the valley. These have driven nearly everything I’ve written as an adult, much of which stems from a long conversation with my mother’s writing and with the places that were important to us; the only real communication I was able to go on having with her, since she died when I was twelve. Death and absence taught me how to begin to write.

6

You'll Be Kissed Again

T
he valley was undergoing a multilateral evacuation in 1980. As low-flying jets from Fairford whizzed overhead, the free-thinking party of the 1970s crawled to an end as all the families that had come there began to move away and a procession of holidaymakers and weekenders moved on in.

The Hortons moved to Australia, leaving a blank at the end of the garden. The land had been open for years; our gardens were as one and the children ran between them endlessly, through rows of potatoes my father had grown after a potato blight and a rhubarb patch that remained persistent until new neighbours built a wall right through it and stopped the rhubarb dead.

I was immediately sad about that blank space – no more parties filled with small girls who found me endlessly fascinating and were prepared to show it. I wasn't sure what to make of the attention, but I knew I'd miss it. I had come home along the garden one afternoon wet-faced and bewildered after visiting the Hortons. I think I must have been eight.

‘What's the matter?' my mother asked.

I didn't know quite what to say.

‘Nobody hurt you did they?' she asked, crouching and cupping my face in her hand.

‘No,' I said. ‘A girl wouldn't stop kissing me.'

‘Wouldn't stop?' she said.

‘No.'

‘Did you ask her to stop?'

‘No,' I said, a little mulish. I think she may have laughed.

‘Didn't you like being kissed?'

‘No. Yes. I don't know,' I said. I can still remember the girl's warm mouth pressed on mine as she sat on my lap, telling me I was funny and hugging my neck as I sat there contemplating the strangeness of it all. She was six, I think, and charmed by my white skin and my red hair. She liked my freckles too. She kept on kissing me and calling to others in the garden and talking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. Then a jet flew over, scratching its belly on the treetops and roaring like a wounded dragon. We flung ourselves to the floor and the kissing stopped, became crying. I remember Judy Horton flat on the floor and cursing, words I had only heard before from my mother in a towering rage. I ran home, wet-faced, frightened, not sure if it was the kissing or the plane that scared me most.

‘You'll be kissed again,' my mother said. ‘It's not so strange.'

Some people, at least, were moving in to stay. Pat and Hans Hopf, whose sons John and Robert had been fast friends with Jules and Jamie Lloyd when they came at weekends, moved down to the valley permanently in 1979 in a cloud of sweet-smelling pipe smoke, taking up residence at the other end of our little terrace in a house they'd owned since 1963. I instantly, cheekily renamed them Hat and Pans, much to my father's delight.

Hans was a stocky German, his pipe in constant motion between hand and mouth, a gruffly cheerful man whom I associate mostly with clouds of tobacco and pesticide, standing in his immaculate garden raising a hand in greeting and warning me off cycling too fast down the path past his front door, having seen me crash my first bike spectacularly outside it the first time I rode it, taking the skin from my knees. Pat was (and remains) quietly indomitable and kind.

Hans came prepared for the worst, with snow chains for his car, having seen winter's obliteration howl through the valley many times, long before I was born. Sometimes, walking past their house now, I still smell the sweet tobacco smoke and hear him calling out his perennial, thickly accented cry of ‘Do not play ball on my land!'

What was strangest to me was that Katy was leaving too, Katy whose valley this was as much as mine, my sister in all but blood, who even now can see through me to the truth and call it without resentment (or too much, anyway) on my part. Katy, who when I got a stuffed fox in a dandyish red waistcoat for Christmas, had had to have a stuffed fox herself to avoid resentment and arguments and jealousies. Katy, who my cousin Zoë (two years older than myself) had accused of being ‘a bit too big for her boots' as we walked down the steep slope, away from St Benedicts; Katy had tried to lead the way in every game and Zoë, also used to getting her own way, had led an uncomfortable revolt as I sat rigid on the fence. Katy, who had suffered my illnesses when I succumbed to them because her parents had sent her down to see me, making sure she got them out of the way. In bed with mumps and tonsillitis, I remember the frown haloed by her mop of unruly white blonde hair, her concern. A few weeks later, better, I remember her grumbling fury at me as I sat by her bed, eating the grapes I'd brought as consolation for the mumps she'd taken home.

Before the Lloyds left, midway through 1980, a few months before my mother and I, they moved into the dark old haunted house at the end of the valley. The snows had come and Katy was ill and bored. I packed up my collections of
Beano
and
Dandy
comics, dragged them down on the sledge for her to read. Taking them home a week later in the thaw, slush, shivering down from the naked rafters of the abbey of trees, destroyed every single one. I remember weeping with fury as Desperate Dan was mulched to pulp, the ink merging Jocks with Geordies whilst Chips melted into Bully Beef and Korky shrank away to nothing.

So much was changing, merging, having the colour washed from it. The valley was emptying itself, melting away, taking childhood with it.

7

Midsummer Morning Log Jam

I
n 1984, a year after my mother died, I came back to the Slad Valley in a blank state, against my mother’s dying wishes, much of my memory of childhood scrubbed away by grief. I came back to live with my father, who for four years I had seen only in school holidays and more often than not in London, dancing through a street party with him for the 1981 royal wedding or pestering him into taking me to an all-day showing of the Star Wars trilogy.

The only time I remember visiting him in the valley with my mother in those years away, living in Sunderland and Herefordshire, was when she drove me through Slad to the last clot of tarmac before the road ran out at Snows Farm, having called my father from the phone box next to the Woolpack to let him know we were near. Setting out again, she narrowly avoided hitting two boys playing football on Steanbridge Lane, at the top of the hill before the steep descent down to the drowning pool. I remember her cursing herself and at their carelessness, shaking as she drove on down the hill and fretting as we awaited my father by the house at the end of the road.

He arrived in a huff of lateness, upset that she had come that way instead of down the perilous road from Bisley and that she would not come into the house. For my sake, the argument was muted, saved for letters or past-my-bedtime phone calls – the last huge row of their separation I had witnessed was in the summer of 1980, over books. Aged nine, and long protected from such vicious and pointless disputes, I had withdrawn into the corner by the door, under a poster that stated ‘Anyone caught smoking on these premises will be hung by the toenails and pummelled into unconsciousness with an organic carrot’; a tourist token, decorated with cartoon Native Americana, from my father’s tours of California reading poetry to beatified literature students in Berkeley, UCLA, Stamford et al.

‘Stop it,’ I yelled at them as they sniped and squealed about which book belonged to whom. ‘You’re behaving like stupid, small CHILDREN!’

There had been arguments before, of course, and my mother could be fierce and satirical when the need arose, with either my father or myself. Her closest friend, Jane Percival, came to stay one night, out of the blue and through the rain, despairing of the strained relationship with her husband at their home in Somerset. She had driven up in the dark, in urgent need of the comforting shoulder of her friend. My mother tenderly invited her in and, sitting her by the wood-burning stove, fed her homemade cakes and tea. I was lying on the couch, off school for a couple of days with a slight cold. I waved to Jane, who started to speak and, as she did so, shakily lit a cigarette. My father came down the stairs, an ex-smoker of evangelical proportions, who had quit his twelve-year addictions to Players Mild, along with whatever forms of marijuana came his way, soon after we moved into the cottage, and never looked back.

I coughed a little as he opened the door. He turned to Jane and demanded she put the cigarette out.

‘Can’t you see you’re making him cough?’ he said, waving in my direction dramatically before sitting by me and cuddling my shoulders.

‘I’m alright,’ I said, trying to sit up, unheard as the row escalated and Jane was banished over the garden to stay with the Hortons, where, thanks to the regular incursions of strangely scented Saturday night smoke drifting over to our house almost as effectively as their renditions of Dylan, my mother knew she would be made welcome, smoker or not. My mother went with her, to make the arrangements, almost smoking herself as she reached the tipsytoploftical pinnacle of a towering rage.