Down in the Valley

by Laurie Lee

  I moved on later to grander things, out at Painswick. We had a larger band called The Painswick Orpheans, based on the Savoy Orpheans, and we used to play at the Institute there. We wore black ties and white shirts that only came down to one’s middle. It was a con actually. They were actually made of paper, or something very like that, if you can imagine; disposable dinner jackets, or dinner shirts, that’s what they were. But we reached a zenith of importance; we were the only ones providing dance music in the whole of the area. Boys and girls used to come on their bikes from miles around. We had a saxophone, trumpet, violin, piano, drums, though not a guitar, this was before guitars came sweeping in from Europe. And one or two radiantly attractive ‘groupies’. We’d made it, we had power. In all of our little area, there was no one to compete with us. We had the power that now follows the rock bands of today. We had it yesterday.

  Power, sexual power, that comes from leading a dance band. I tasted in those days such a sense of glory, of fame. Then the Beatles arrived and my life was finished. I had to take up classical music instead, which, seriously, has been the great consolation of my life. Jazz, I discovered Ellington when I was about twelve or thirteen, Duke Ellington and Satchmo, Fats Domino and the rest of them, I used to save up to buy their records and as you know, they were the great prophets of jazz, the classicists of jazz, ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘Creole Rhapsody’. My mother didn’t like that and made me go and play them out in the privy, that’s when I had a wind-up gramophone.

  Before then, not having a gramophone, when I was keen on learning and extending my knowledge of classical music, I used to buy from Stroud for about three shillings these little seven-inch records, Schubert and Brahms. But there was nowhere to play them. So I used to take them in a carrier bag and bicycle in the rain right up to Birdlip where I had friends, in order to put on this record, which they did not want me to play, but they were very kind. I’d play it and then bicycle all the way home.

  To think in those days music was such a unique treasure, and had to be suffered for. Now it’s everywhere around you, you can’t get away from it. Music is on the walls, on the floors, in the pubs, supermarkets. Music in those days was a sought-for experience. And I think it made it more appreciated.

  I first learned to play the violin as a young child at home. In the kitchen there was a violin hanging on the wall, it always intrigued me, this shape. I didn’t really know what it was to begin with, it was one of the first symbols of exotic interest. You had bed warmers in those days and you had pictures of the family hanging on the wall but this shape fascinated me. I asked my mother what it was and she said, ‘It belongs to your father.’ Well, dad had already left home, left us and gone, but it belonged to him. And she said, ‘You play it, it’s a musical instrument.’ So I got it down and we dusted it up and we got it into running order, and that’s when this chap used to come round giving lessons. Instead of buying the Czechoslovakian mass-produced one, I had this one. It was a copy of a ‘Strad’, it had a wonderful tone. I kept this first violin for years, I took it to Spain with me. It got crushed by a passing bull in Malaga. It was partly that, partly the heat, the heat melted the gum, but I like to say it was crushed by a passing bull who had a very bad ear for music.

  And I thought, I’ve come to the end now, I’m not going to be able to live. But just at that time I met a German student who’d fallen in love with a Spanish girl and they were going to run away together and they had to travel light. And he said:

  ‘Oh, by the way, do you want a violin? I’ve got one and I can’t be bothered with all this stuff. We’re going over the sierras tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘funny you should say that.’

  ‘Come round tonight and we’ll meet in the tavern and you can have it. I’ll be glad to get rid of it.’

  So I moved into that one and it was even better than my imitation Stradivarius. And that’s the one I’ve got now.

  And from then on when I got back to England I played seriously. But having no sense of coordination I can only play one note at a time. I can play the Women’s Institute recorder, no trouble at all, but I can’t play a piano because I can’t do with my left hand something that is separate from my right hand. But the violin was made for me. It’s portable and I can follow the line with my left hand on the strings and by this time I could read music, and I discovered other musicians, pianists, cellists, and we moved into this world of cosmic music, I’m going to be pompous now, but it is a world starting in Gloucestershire. I only realized when I got back here that this was a country of memorable composers: Elgar and Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams. I was going to say Rimsky-Korsakov but he was only here as a refugee briefly and he didn’t like the country, it wasn’t cold enough for him. But there was a local tradition for music and I moved on with great satisfaction.

  You can go anywhere in Ireland because there is a tradition of playing the violin, Irish reels and laments. They play on their own and you can go round the country on your own. That’s what I always hoped, that one day I might tour Ireland with my violin, because you don’t need any accompaniment and you are always welcome.

  These days I cannot play, I cannot see the strings, they are almost breaking up. I cannot play ‘Killarney’, there is too much jumping around, I can play ‘Early One Morning’. I can play ‘Abide With Me’.

  The only thing left now with my eyes going is music. I can’t read. Music is my constant companion, especially Beethoven, Bach. How lucky I am.

  My brother was older than me, he was what is known as a fixer. He was always getting out of things. He never ran errands, he always went and hid in the grass when mother was asking us to go and borrow a screw of tea from Miss Turk up the road, he’d never be visible. We got rid of him, we sent him to Australia. We had a collection and bought him a single ticket to Australia where I think he’s doing very well. I get a postcard with sheep from him occasionally.

  Mother got him a violin because he had to do what I was doing. He went to the classes later on, but there was only one bow, which came with his violin. Father’s violin didn’t have a bow. So I found in my school music teacher’s report, it says, ‘Lack of bow has spoilt his chances, but think he will do well.’ I used to go in there, brother Jack having the bow, and, may I say, little talent – Jack are you listening, I’m paying off some old scores now. He had the bow and the violin and I had the violin and no bow. So I had to spend weeks and weeks going through just left hand and just waving the right hand about.

  I learnt the violin in a class in a cottage up the road but here in this schoolroom, this lovely long room, is where I held my first public performance, which was a raging success. I was playing with Miss Eileen Brown. In the parish magazine I remember the headline:

  ‘Violin and piano duet with Miss Eileen Brown and young Laurie Lee.’

  And we were playing, well we hoped we were playing ‘The Poet and Peasant Overture’, but it wouldn’t stay on the music stand, it kept falling on the floor. So I hissed to her, ‘Give ’em “Danny Boy’’’, so as a back-up we played ‘Danny Boy’. We didn’t know how it was going to go, we weren’t very sure, then suddenly we got together and we played. We found, as it were, a meeting place halfway through the tune and it then flowed like honey and the whole audience, the old women, my mother, my sisters, they all began to sing in chorus with us. And that was it, because until then they’d just been fidgeting. But then they began to sing with us. But not only were they paying us this great compliment of accompanying us; we’d stirred this ancestral memory in them, but they were using their hymn-singing voices which was the great compliment. It showed how seriously they were taking it, tears running down their faces, down my mother’s face and Eileen’s mother’s face, running down my sisters’ faces too, sister Marge bless her. I like the thought it was emotion but, well it could have been, could have been. But I think they were tears of laughter.

  6

  The Village School

  This, my first school, was a school for
four-year-olds to twelve-year-olds. I remember the windows looking out onto the valley. We were half prisoners and also half special on a special platform, to be able to see the valley and everything that was happening.

  The far end of the room was just called ‘the infants’. The young four-year-olds, five-year-olds used to come in through a little door at the end, that was their entrance. The ‘big ’uns’ from seven or eight onwards used to come in through a door at the other end of the room, and they didn’t meet. And then you had this great occasion when you were filtered through from the infants to the other end of the room when you had to start a new system of education and behaviour. It was a great day. It was a great day. I think my brother Jack was the only one who didn’t go through the two stages because he was a genius you see. He used to flash away all day like a pin table and bully the teachers in that high bullying tone he had developed from quite early on.

  The walls were covered with maps the colour of tea. There was a wall of maps with all the colonial possessions marked in red and we used to sit there; we were very poor in those days, poor but uncomplaining, we lived on boiled and baked cabbage, the poorest of the poor. And we used to sit there and look at this world map and think, looking at these maps and thinking, we are the greatest in the world. We own all those pieces of red on that map, on that world map. The whole of Africa, the whole of India, all those islands across the Pacific. Then we’d look at each other as if we were centurions, as we were, politically, in those days. We were the Roman occupiers, except that we were the serfs, we didn’t know that, but we were.

  So I learnt that but particularly I’m grateful for being introduced to some of the old country songs, here in this room and some of the longer poems of Milton and Shakespeare which I wouldn’t have known otherwise. I wouldn’t have known them from the library, because I wouldn’t have known where to find them. So I have only the deepest gratitude for these various stepping stones of education.

  But to be set in this special valley was to learn both sides of the world. And this school, there would have been forty kids in it, from right up the end of the valley down to the Vatch,fn1 and that’s how we learned about our community and now, stumbling round Stroud, these gnomes, looking very like me, will come up and say, ‘Hello Laurie’, and I know he was at school with me. And we were at school here and we enjoyed that same privilege, hard times but invaluable, irrecoverable and never to be forgotten.

  In this room, in this village school, I learnt early poetry. There were two rather waspish teachers who didn’t think much of me, especially Miss Wardley, the headmistress. I used to go home to dinner, it was just up the road, I had baked cabbage or something and it’s still a habit of mine after lunch, or dinner as we called it, to drop into a heavy sleep, like an animal on safari. And she would come round with a ruler and poke me and say, ‘Wake up you, you with your little red eyes.’ And I thought, that’s no way to talk to a sensitive youth, but that’s how she is. Then I also had a steady sniff and she used to say, ‘Laurie Lee, will you please go outside and blow your nose and don’t come back in until you’re clear.’ And I used to go outside seething with rage, thinking, I’m really a prince, she doesn’t know that and one day, when I come into my throne, when I come into my kingdom, I’ll see to her. I won’t be too unkind, I’ll just lock her up for a few decades. Eventually when I had got that indignation off my chest I’d come back in and she’d say, with a freezing smile, ‘A little less beastly now I hope.’

  But on the other hand, Miss Wardley, who used to wear glass jewellery that would swing and tinkle as she walked, she introduced us to poetry and I know yards of poetry, thanks to her and her assistant teacher. What a wonderful age it is, to be in that age, not being bombarded by television, jukeboxes, or the wireless, to have it straight off the page at the age when you are at your most absorbing. I can to the point of boredom tell you the whole of ‘Il Penseroso’ by Milton, learned when I was about eight. Don’t encourage me because it goes on for about three pages. And some of the country songs like ‘Down in the Valley’ and ‘Early One Morning’, that still means this valley to me:

  Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,

  I heard a maiden sing in the valley below,

  Oh! don’t deceive me, oh never leave me,

  How could you use such a poor maiden so?

  I’ve carried that around as an amulet of conscience ever since I learnt it here, and anyone who says I have a casual attitude to women is lying in their feminist teeth.

  When I came back from mooning round the world, just after I had published Cider with Rosie, I came back to the village. My school, the village school, was still there – but the local council wanted to close it down and I wrote to the Minister of Education and said this is a community, this is where we began. This is where the children get to know both the valley and themselves. They don’t just get to know the inside of a bus. They’re here. And he reprieved it. A dastardly thing then happened and I’m not going to be … I’m going to be frank about this. It was a trick of outrageous insensitivity. The year, the month, that Aberfan school was destroyed by the coal tip that plunged down the hillside and buried Aberfan school and half its schoolchildren, the council wrote to all the parents in this district saying: ‘your village school is in imminent peril of destruction by landslide, we cannot guarantee that your children will be safe for more than two weeks’.

  This school is built on rock as are all the other houses up and down the valley, and we said, ‘It won’t be destroyed in two weeks, it won’t be destroyed in twenty years.’ But the parents had to believe what they heard. The council said that the surveyor had condemned it, but it was merely a way of closing the school. I thought then that it was an outrageously dirty trick and still do. And may the Gloucestershire County Education blush with shame if they hear me say it. I expect they have all gone now anyway.

  7

  The Woolpack

  ‘We’re not working out a soap opera, we’re living our own particular history.’

  The Woolpack’s my local. It’s a very old pub. It used to be, as its name suggests, a place where the pack horses from the hills, bringing the wool down to Stroud, to the Stroud mills, used to stop here for refreshment, the mules and other horses were also refreshed. Then, when the new road came in, The Woolpack, bless its heart, suddenly sprang in height so it’s now about four storeys when it used to be just a little hovel on the old road behind where we are sitting. But it is none the less elegant for that. It’s got great character as you can see.

  There were a number of other pubs around where those who were bringing the wool down, mule trains, would stop and have a refresher. So you get The Fleece, and The New Fleece, there’s a Woolpack in Stonehouse, there are two Fleeces in Stroud. And apart from those we’ve got a few royal pubs, which obliquely refer to the defeat of Charles I who got thumped in the siege of Gloucester and who went from Bisley down what we now call King Charles Lane. There’s a pub in Painswick called The Royal Oak. In a way, we named it after this defeated royal out of a kind of pity, an affectionate pity, I think. We’ve got a lot of retreating royals round here, up in the hills, at least four. I’d better mention no names or bang goes my knighthood. But they’re all retreating. We’re fond of them as long as they keep their place up the oak tree. Prince Charles, I’ll meet him in The Royal Oak in Painswick, if they’ll let him in.

  The Woolpack is on the old, lower lane running through Slad, on the lane where I have a cottage. This lower lane used to be the main road. It comes past the Elizabethan house called the Old House. In the Victorian period, about the mid-1800s, they built a new road from Stroud to Bulls Cross and up to Birdlip and that road was raised above the level of the old road. Now I swear, and most of the villagers agree with me, that The Woolpack was one floor lower, facing the old lane. When they put the new road in, quite obviously, for business, they raised it a floor or two to face the new road. But dear old Davidfn1 won’t have it, he says: ‘This is the oldest build
ing in Slad, you can just tap the walls and you’ll find it’s the old stone. It’s the original Woolpack.’ It’s not the original prices, but never mind, he’s welcome to his own opinion, but only just.

  Structurally, it looks such an odd building, like a skyscraper almost. It was a nice piece of re-design when the new road came through. And if you go up the new road now, you’ll find that the church and the village school are both built around 1830. Nothing is older than that. Go along the old lane and all the cottages are 1600. So I fear David and I have an argument so far as The Woolpack is concerned.

  The Woolpack hasn’t been changed much since then. The landlords who come here get transfixed with the atmosphere and they stay for life. I don’t suppose you’ll see the end of David now until he takes one of his boats and slides away on the immortal launch and goes seven times round the world in the wrong direction, and then he’ll turn up again. But at the moment this bar and the next bar are architecturally unchanged, and this is very rare for a village pub because they are usually got at by developers, by the brewers, by others. So we are very at home here. I remember it with such vividness because the central bar, where Martin is sitting – Martin’s the man with the beard looking like Karl Marx, a good lad – that was the scene of a famous occasion when I was a boy. Vincent, an ex-village lad, had broken two taboos. One taboo, he’d left the village, which you are not supposed to do as a young man, you stick with the village through thick and thin. He’d left the village and gone abroad, gone to New Zealand. But worse than that, he broke a second taboo. He came back, loaded with gold and boasting.