Down in the Valley

by Laurie Lee

  Laurie Lee

  * * *

  Down in the Valley

  A Writer’s Landscape

  Edited by David Parker

  Contents

  1. The Village Pond

  2. Telling a Story

  3. The Church, Miserden

  4. Bulls Cross

  5. The Violin on the Wall

  6. The Village School

  7. The Woolpack

  8. Home

  9. Swift’s Hill

  Afterword by David Parker

  About the Authors

  Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War.

  Laurie Lee published four collections of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poems (1960). His other works include The Voyage of Magellan (1948), The Firstborn (1964), I Can’t Stay Long (1975), and Two Women (1983). He also wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography: Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991).

  David Parker was born in Stoke on Trent. He is a television programme maker and author. His work for television includes many films about aspects of life in twentieth-century Britain. He is the author of two books about Exmoor and is currently working on one about the Second World War and one about Britain’s steam railway revival. He lives in Bristol.

  For Wendy

  1

  The Village Pond

  This is our village pond, it’s on the edge of Slad, down at the bottom of the village. It was where we kids gathered for fun, games and secrecy.

  This was our kingdom, the centre of all our juvenile recreations: summer bathing, winter skating and general gathering together to experiment with the first pulsations of sensual enjoyments.

  We called it Squire Jones’s pond. The squire glorified in having this ancestral, almost feudal possession of this place but he never checked on us, and we could do whatever we wished. Since then it’s had some posts and fencing put up to keep people out but we don’t take any notice of them. These fences were put in by quite a nice man but the previous owner put up the sort of wire that went round it like the Berlin Wall and the villagers used to come down in the night with big wire cutters. So that didn’t endure for very long. It’s still a free gathering place. It’s inhabited by coots and moorhens and dabchicks.

  I don’t remember ever coming down and looking at a dabchick. But the coots were very close, bosom chums of mine. We used to spend many a happy hour together. These are the sort of things I remember and we still come down here. In the summer there are great flotations of pink lilies. They are a month behind this year. Aren’t we all! But they’ll be out by the end of June and they’re just like great stars of pink candle wax, floating on the water.

  It was at the village pond where almost everything happened in terms of games, village gossip, childish errors. It was a teeming little paradise of wildlife and very few people except we kids came here and I think we were tolerated by the wildlife because they, and the horses in the field, it was the only life they knew. They got used to us. In summer we’d swim, and in winter skate and fall through the ice, chase each other, steal the moorhens’ eggs, get attacked by the swans. And they are pretty difficult to cope with when you are a kid, because they have these huge wings and they would come like Concorde taking off. They’d come across us and bash into us and we used to scream and jump into the hedges.

  There was one macabre, dramatic occasion that took place at this pond. The milkman, Fred Bates, the young man bringing the milk up to our cottage, one morning was late. One of my sisters asked him:

  ‘What kept you, Fred Bates, what happened?’

  And he said, ‘I seen her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Miss Flynn.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ my sister asked.

  ‘Well, I was coming past the pond and there was what looked like a dead swan, I thought that’s a dead swan and went over and had a look at it, and it was Miss Flynn. She was looking up at me with her eyes wide open and her hair all loose. And there was not a stitch on her, and she was drowned. And I dropped me bucket and I ran up here.’

  And my sister said, ‘You’d better have a cup of tea.’

  ‘Well, I’ve had about five already.’

  Because he’d been telling the story all round the village. So he became a bit of a hero. But we came down here and the women were gathered around the pond; the village women who’d heard the story. They’d already taken her body away on a hurdle, and there was a sheen of milk still on the pond where Fred had dropped his churn. And I remember thinking as the women were chatting between themselves, ‘Miss Flynn, poor Miss Flynn, you wouldn’t think, I only saw her a couple of days ago, she was down in Stroud in the Home and Colonial and she said to me and I said good morning Miss Flynn and she said good morning like she often does …’

  And I thought, all this talk, is this what happens when you die? Do they say, I saw you in the Home and Colonial? Miss Flynn was a sort of Gabriel Rossetti heroine, a tragic young girl. I never understood what was behind it all but I do remember thinking – I was about eight at the time – that’s where Miss Flynn came down in the night, lay down in the pond and pulled the water over her head, and drowned.

  But I think that this place would appeal, I didn’t realize it then, it would appeal to all the Victorian painters with Ophelias. Everywhere you went there were Ophelias floating by, covered with wild flowers. And if it wasn’t Ophelia it was Edna or Bertha or possibly Rosie. And it all centred on this little pond. Though it’s not so little now. We’re better off for a village pond than many villages round here. Anyway, it’s a gathering place and I come back here continuously, to refresh myself.

  It isn’t a natural pond; it’s a millpond, built in order to run one of the mills across the road, across the lane here. There used to be about eight mills, all with banked-up ponds. The stream runs over there, to get enough head, enough power, to turn the mills’ wheels. At one end is a dam, it used to be built up. The stream which runs past the pond would have been dammed up to about six feet. This water in the pond would have been held in order to feed the mill, the cloth mill, which is just down the bank there, Steanbridge mill. The whole of this valley was a series of stepping stones of cloth mills, run off these streams, but you’ll find there were stockades and dams of water all along the valleys and this is one of the few left. The others were washed away in a great cloudburst, a flood, in about 1860. They were all just swept off the face of the earth, but this one still remains, thank goodness. It remains as a legacy. We were spared. Lloyds are still paying for it but how grateful we are for it, because there is nothing up in Slad village itself that is more liquified than The Woolpack inn.

  Sheep were grazed on the hills. They would be driven down to this stream and further up there’s a sheep wash where they used to have their fleece washed and disinfected. They were then sheared in the early part of the year; the wool taken from them would be put on mule trains that would go down the valley to the weaving mills of Stroud. The Stroud mills were famous for their military scarlet and for their green baize. So they were responsible for not only the snooker player Steve Davis’s great victories, because they made the green baize for the billiard tables, but some of the greatest defeats in British military history. When soldiers appeared in the Light Brigade they were all in this scar
let, as if saying to the enemy, ‘Look at me, I’m here.’ So the old Turks just mowed them down, alas. Very sad in those days, but they all wear Raglan coats now, that’s the new camouflage.

  Stroud was well known for its worsted. Many of the great houses round here and the gorgeous churches, going back to the sixteenth century, were built on the fortunes of the wool trade. And we haven’t given up entirely. We’ve got a showroom in Bond Street, of wool from Stroud. Something happened in these valleys that conspired to make it a perfect place for growing wool. There is a wonderful local breed of sheep, very fleecy. All the pubs round here are called The Woolpack, or The Fleece Inn, showing how important wool was to us. There was a thing for teasing the wool, working on the nap, the cloth. And these teazles were just growing in the hedgerows and they had little hooks on them, they didn’t grow anywhere else. They just grew for us, we were blessed on all sides.

  Below our place in Slad you’ll find sloping hills, terraced fields where they used to stretch the cloth to dry in the sun, and many of the old houses had little factories in the loft where the peasants used to gather and work for a penny a day. Squire Jones still has this great workshop. I don’t think his descendants make cloth any more but it’s all there and the way things are going, if we get into industrial trouble and need to pull our socks up, worsted socks, I think maybe some of the old mills will be regenerated. Let’s see how we get on with Europe. Anyway we are all ready to go in this valley. And all the way down, there were eighteen mills going down into Stroud, and beautiful they were too, beautifully built.

  There are five valleys leading to Stroud. They are like five fingers on a hand and Stroud will be in the middle. There’s Painswick, Slad, Chalford, and two others which shall be nameless because they are chapel and we’re church, so we don’t talk about them.fn1 They were all fed from streams which concentrated on Stroud. The stream was the motive power. The stream was what turned the machinery in the cloth mills and it was extremely valuable. As I say, we’re still here. When the nation calls we’re ready to go back to our old trade, which was the greatest in the West Country. I’m ready to tease anybody who wants to come round to be teased, lay them on one of the terraced slopes. Lay them out to tease them first, then lay them out to dry.

  My village, Slad, never had much history but there was one memorable moment that we still boast about a lot and that was when King Charles, in the Civil War, marched down from Bisley, which is two miles over the hill. He marched down this lane, up over Bulls Cross and into Painswick, where he stabled his horses in the church. That got him into a lot of local trouble. He went down into Gloucester, which was under siege; he went down to try and join up with some friends, some Cavaliers.

  He was defeated, kicked out and came back over the hill, over Bulls Cross where there are a lot of small ditches, and where – we like to pretend – they buried many of his defeated troops. And down at the bottom of the crossroads there used to be an oak tree, until quite recently, where he was supposed to have hidden. Anyway, there’s a myth going all over south-west England, ‘King Charles’s oak’, lots of places claim their oak was where the king hid. But if any oak was the real oak that Charles hid in, it was this one, across the lane.

  Just down here by the stream there used to be a gathering place for us kids from the village to come and play on summer evenings. This was where the sheep wash was: a stone bath, cut from stone, and a stone bridge.

  They used to bring the sheep down from the hills to be washed before they were sheared in the spring. Sheep bleating; it’s a lovely sound, even I can hear that. I can still remember the voices of kids in the village. ‘See you in the sheep wash, coming down the sheep wash, Laurie, coming down the sheep wash?’

  Can you imagine the excitement of the sheep wash? We couldn’t see properly. But what a bliss it was. The girls, the summer, paddling, pulling up their skirts, shrieks of laughter and all the innocence of wild water on naked skin, warmth. You must not be too free with your language, you just say to Kate, ‘Didn’t turn up then, what kept yer? You were supposed to be here at twelve!’ I said I’ll see you in the sheep wash on a summer’s day, midsummer’s day, and we’ll have a romp in the bubbling, turbulent waters. It’s about time I picked fluff off my shroud I think, climbed into my grave and pulled the wood over me, I’m getting carried away. It’s just public-bar reminiscences.

  This lane next to us is still passable just, but the banks of it are about twenty or thirty feet deep; it’s cut so deeply into the hill by the passage of traffic, footsteps, cartwheels, sheep, and they’ve dug down through the generations. I think it’s about a thousand years old. It leads up to Bisley and Bisley is one of the oldest towns on the Cotswolds. It’s where Jilly Cooper lives now. It’s a rotten place for writers round here, well it’s not rotten but they gather round here because at any moment they may have to shin up an oak tree; they’re always being chased around, being defeated by their publishers.

  Bisley is a beautiful stone village. It’s about a thousand feet high and the wind blows in from the, I nearly said urinals, the winds blow in from the Urals. It’s terribly cold and a local saying still is, ‘Where was yer born then? Born in Bisley was yer? Go and shut the bloody door.’

  There are two ways of travelling in these valleys. Either you went along the top from the local town, the old highways, literally high ways. The old roads ran along the tops of the hills to keep away from the marshes and the bogs and the streams. Then they’d cut a lane across, diagonally across the valley as this one was, diagonally across instead of going all the way round, across a little stone bridge and you’ll find a number of rectangular lanes that are alternatives to the high ways. There is the Bisley road from Stroud, which is right up on the top, and there is another one which comes out by Bulls Cross, which is the intersection of about five highways from Painswick and Stroud. This road was open until quite recently, but it would be very difficult to get up there now without doing in your car. There are fallen trees and rocks and abandoned cavaliers, cannon, armour: fossilized tears.

  This place is called Steanbridge and everybody said it was named after a squire, Stevens, ‘Steven’s Bridge’. But I know and my mother knew that’s just pomp, vanity. It’s Stone Bridge, because stone bridges were very unusual. You usually forded a stream. But this one was a stone bridge, a bridge made of stone, and therefore something to boast about. So I think the origin of Steanbridge is ‘stone bridge’ and I’m going to stick with that.

  On a Saturday morning, you’d hear the jackal cries of the boys and the shrieks of the girls being pursued over the common and down the lanes. It was all part of wildlife and nature. The kids don’t come out any more: they are watching bloody Neighbours on television I suspect.

  Now they are all locked up in their little rooms on computers and of course there aren’t as many children as there once were, there are motor cars instead. Whereas once the parents used to send their children out to play, now they come out and wash their cars.

  To me, the disappearing voices of children is one of the impoverishments of country life. They are fading, in their electronic prisons – but that’s a complaint that one falls into most easily, when you are a geriatric: saying how much better it was in the old days. Well actually, I’d like a computer myself, because I believe there are things you can do with a computer which we didn’t dare do in those days, such as certain fantasies that you can organize. Those pleasures have come too late. Can’t see, can’t even read the small print on the back of Private Eye any more, my eyes have gone.

  Up there is the field where I tumbled with Rosie and that is still the same. We used to meet, the community that is, for village recreations which would be held up in that wood and below the wood in that field. Swings in the trees, races and games up and down and then a tea in the village hut. Twelve teapots, polished and waiting for us with what we called ‘fly cake’, piles of fly cake. And this was a treat that would last.

  We only ate sweets once a week. One sweet that my sis
ter brought home. Not one every five minutes. Here I go again complaining about the young. I would relish just one day of life’s sensuous extravaganza that kids are allowed now to indulge in. I think by the time they are twelve or fifteen they are past it. They are exhausted. No wonder they want to relax in their room with their computer. They are probably writing their memoirs by the time they are eleven or twelve and saying, ‘If I had my time over again.’

  But this to me is a homeland to which I return. To which I have to return, and can’t imagine another life without being here. It’s old. It goes back to the Stone Age. There are Stone Age forts all along the top of the escarpment. There’s Haresfield, Painswick Beacon, there’s Crickley Hill up near Birdlip, where they found the old Bronze Age queen’s mirror which is now in the British Museum. We want it back, by the way. We want it in Stroud Museum. We have a call for that Bronze Age mirror, in perfect order, dug up near Birdlip. We understand about the Elgin Marbles, we want that Bronze Age mirror brought back, thank you very much. And the villages around: Camp, Bisley, Miserden, they all have these old burial grounds, where the Bronze Age chieftains were buried, and those tumps in the fields which you still see, untroubled, untouched still, are in a certain way inviolate, sacred. No farmer for centuries has touched them, they always plough round them, they don’t disturb them, they don’t disturb the sleeping giants.

  And this is one of the reasons, apart from its splendour, its beauty, in season and out, it’s one of the reasons that I feel I’ve inherited, just by being here, inherited this ancient, pre-Roman and pre-Iron Age, almost pre-Stone Age civilization. And I do my best to carry it on, with all its ravages and contentments; which are many.