by Laurie Lee
dragging dropped ears of harvest
And such a day it is when time
piles up the hills like pumpkins,
and the streams run golden
When all men smell good,
and the cheeks of girls
are as baked bread to the mouth
As bread and bean flowers
the touch of their lips
and their white teeth sweeter than cucumbers.
Now you may say, it’s a pity the bus ride wasn’t further, giving you a chance to correct a few more of the verses. A bit slapdash but it’s still a poem I enjoy. I enjoy repeating it. In the old days it gave me a kind of feeling of joie de vivre.
I wrote ‘Moss Rose’ in memory of my mother. But I can’t remember it, I wrote it very briefly, very quickly, after she died, and I remember thinking of her, in terms I’d written about her in an early book of mine. She had this wonderful touch with flowers and I think it was largely a tribute to her, not only a memory but her touch in growing roses, moss roses, wild roses.
The BBC commissioned a number of poets to write poems which in some way reflected the bitterness of winter and the bitterness of the winter of war. And I couldn’t get started on this poem. I said I would do one, then I didn’t deliver anything and they enclosed a cheque and said when can we have the poem, the programme goes out on Friday. And on the Tuesday they rang up and asked if it was ready and I said yes. They said how long is it and I said it’s about that long. I hadn’t started it. Well we must have it on Thursday, so I said all right you’ll have it by then. So on Wednesday night I started and I spent the whole of the evening writing about robins, I just couldn’t get started. Then, about midnight, some lines came into my head about how bitter that winter was and the lines came in from nowhere, because before then I’d been messing about with these Woolworths images of Christmas cards.
It may not be a great poem but the lines were real and it goes:
Christmas Landscape
Tonight the wind gnaws
with teeth of glass,
the jackdaw shivers
in caged branches of iron,
the stars have talons.
There is hunger in the mouth
of vole and badger,
silver agonies of breath
in the nostril of the fox,
ice on the rabbit’s paw.
Tonight has no moon,
no food for the pilgrim;
the rose tree is bare
and the ground is bitter with stones.
And this poem goes on for about twelve verses, this is just the beginning. When I’d got down the first verses, I thought I’m on a track now, that’s the poem I wanted to write, so I put it away, got up before breakfast, finished it off and sent it to the BBC, and I’ve never changed it since. But I had to start it and I had to feel that the messages were coming through, that the images were floating in from Gloucestershire, and at that time I recognized them as true messages of the bitter winter of the war.
It was no good messing about with robins any more, I chopped up the robins and sent them to a bird fancier of mine. The power of ‘the jackdaw shivers in caged branches of iron’, ‘the stars have talons’, ‘there is hunger in the mouth of vole and badger’, ‘silver agonies of breath in the nostril of the fox’, ‘ice on the rabbit’s paw’.
I could go on, but that’s the church bell ringing and the pub opens at seven.
9
Swift’s Hill
I’m sitting at the foot of Swift’s Hill. It seems to command the whole of the valley from Stroud up to Bulls Cross. Swift’s Hill just stands here like a great ancestral hump. There are quarries here, partly limestone quarries, partly the old ragstone quarries. The old quarry man in Elcombe, I remember him well in a corner under the woods, he’d come to the quarries in the morning, he’d take out the stone and he built all the walls going down to Stroud. He was the last of the dry stone wall quarry men and this lovely old yellow stone comes from these quarries.
And behind me is Slad, my little village in the valley itself, it’s one of a family of valleys. There’s Sheepscombe, Painswick, Bisley, Chalford. They all have a kind of family likeness; same feel, same light, same trees, same families.
I think sometimes, I was brought up here, I was born here and I’m still living here, and I feel I know every detail of all this countryside around. And it’s not only the trees and the stones and the houses, it’s the people. They are all equally endemic, they are all rooted to this part. They are just as rooted to these parts as are the stones and the quarries and they have these family names like Swain, Partridge, Hogg, Webb, West, Lee, White, Fuller. A number of the names belong to the wool trade, Fuller for instance, Webb, Spinner. So when I think of this place it’s not only for its undying, rapturous beauty, it turns slowly to the seasons and becomes a different person, equally beautiful, from spring to winter. But the people are the same. They are rooted. They are the valley, they are the Cotswolds. They don’t move and they teach me their irreplaceability and I’ve learned that I don’t move either. I come back and here I stay.
I’ve long wanted to know how to describe this part. I’ve long wished to discover a way of describing this part and the sensation of living here and associating the valley with the people and with its community and with its history; its pre-Roman, its pre-Bronze Age, its Stone Age history, and I suppose in a way it’s been my life trying to filter through, in as simple a way as possible, a communication, a description, a condensation, a concentration of simple language, which can convey to others, not necessarily living in these parts, but living in other parts of Britain, what it’s like to live here and what it’s like to maintain this ancestral life. And a sense that I have of witnessing a moment in time which is reflected from the trees, from the quarried stone from the walls, from the houses, from the bleating animals who pass. The bleating sheep which you hear in the background who are passing on their ancestral fates, from one season to another.
I was sitting the other night in my garden, listening to the sheep, and I hope they’ll forgive my saying so but it’s the only time I’ve heard a sheep, a ewe, bleating with any kind of authority. Generally speaking they’re wimps but when they have their lambs in the spring they suddenly take on a different kind of voice. Which the Hoggs do and the Webbs do when they grow and marry, they take on this same kind of authority, and I think the animals and the birds and the people do reflect the uniqueness of this valley. The blackbirds in my garden and the blackbirds in the garden at the end of the lane, they go off to Africa, as I did when I went around the world once as a young man, but they always come back here, they come back to the same garden, to the same tree, the same wall, the same nest and they imitate their ancestral voices, and no wonder they sing with a Gloucestershire accent because that’s how they were raised.
When I went to London for the first time, people used to say:
‘Why do you talk in that extraordinary American accent?’
‘That’s not American, that’s Gloucestershire. We sailed from Bristol, we sailed from Plymouth, we were a West Country accent.’
‘Oh, is that it? I thought you were Irish!’
These are green pods of valleys, they have a family shape. If you were dropped down into one of these valleys you would not know which one you were in because they are so alike in their verdant greenness. They’re like pods. I was trying to describe it once to friends who didn’t know this part, and I said that living in our valley was like being broad beans in a pod, so snug and enclosed and protective. And these valleys are just like that, they have this protective, miniature closeness, which in some ways explains why a lot of people still living in the village have never been to London, never even been to Swindon.
I tried to describe this valley through the seasons and how it changed, its personality changed, its character changed, so that in spring and summer and autumn and winter it was a different place, a different country almost and we boys, as kids, we were all read
y to change our own attitude, our own games. It was either skating or it was snowballing or it was climbing trees, scragging apples. Whatever was true to that particular season was something we were ready to adapt ourselves to.
I remember walking through the village one very hard winter’s morning, the dogs going by wrapped in the vapour of their breath and the boys not knowing quite what to do, they themselves wrapped in moist scarves, choking and pink faced. One said, ‘What we goin’ do then, eh?’ Nobody knew what they were going to do and someone was flapping their arms and then another one, suddenly he took off and he began to whip himself with a stick. ‘Get up then.’ He’d found something to do and then we all got up and we all whipped ourselves with sticks and we all galloped through the town like Genghis Khan; like the great hordes from Tartar. And that was our game. The game slipped into this sense of winter. We galloped round the corner and down to the farm and then we galloped down to the pond, skimming across the ice and looking down at the bubbles of bullrushes and lilies waiting for summer to release them. I could never skate but all the idiots in the village seemed to be able to skate on one foot. They’d go sliding and gliding by and I’d always fall on my face and I thought, those drummondry louts, once you put them on ice they become Nureyev, they become star ballet dancers. Winter brought out that star quality.
But then in summer, summer was a time for playing the moon and the whole of the valley became our playground, and we’d run and run. We had a game called fox and hounds, and some of the lads would start off, we’d give them perhaps five or ten minutes and then we’d follow them. Starting in the village and running up through the valley galloping up through the woods. You were allowed to shout one thing: ‘Whistle or holla or we shall not follow.’ And they had to answer or we didn’t know where they were. ‘Whistle or holla or we shall not follow.’ And then you’d hear, right up the valley, some little disguised call showing where they were and we’d go after them. Those sort of games and the moon, running with the mad hares on the top of the hill.
And I’ve tried to remember and have often remembered the quality of those moonlit nights, which had a quality of such unmoving and immortal stillness and excitement, with a full moon hanging above Swift’s Hill. Rising tides in one’s brain of Slad and summer, which linger there even now. That was summer. Chaps going up through the street, saying to the ladies, ‘Hot enough for yer then?’ To be answered with a worn-out shriek. Dogs lying under rain butts, to get out of the heat. And we boys lying in the grass, listening to the loops of cuckoos going across the valley and not knowing what to do, having nothing to do. No ideas in our heads. Nothing moving except summer. This radiant luxury of stillness. There was nothing to do but summer.
Well having laid down and done nothing because there was nothing to do, summer, someone would say, ‘Well let’s go down the pond then.’ So we’d get up and go down the pond, and halfway down there was a little village shop on the corner by the old Elizabethan house, the big house, where we’d buy some sherbet dabs. That is what I remember as being an element of a summer’s day, to buy sherbet dabs with a liquorish tube in it. If you sucked it was all right but if you blew, the bag exploded and you choked in a sort of paroxysm of sherbet and people coughing all over the road.
Coming out of school, haymaking. We’d rush off to the farms and say, ‘Can we help?’ Anything to get out into the fields after a long day of timetables, I mean tables. And then going off, helping the men forking sheaves onto the wagons and then getting waylaid. It wasn’t as deliberate as all that. We didn’t go over there to be seduced, we went over there to be a man and to help the men with the haymaking. But there was always, well not always, a Rosie type in the grass, waiting to waylay one of we sturdy lads. That was their job, temptresses. Temptresses of summer, and this one stopped me. I wasn’t looking for trouble but I got it. She said:
‘I got somat to show ye then.’
I said, ‘You ain’t.’
‘I have. Come here.’
So I stuck my fork into the ringing ground and followed her like doom and we went down onto a wagon festooned with grasses and she beckoned me under the wagon where there lay a large stone jar. ‘It’s cider, you ain’t to drink it though, not much of it at any rate.’ So we unstopped it and I held it to my mouth. Never to be forgotten, that first long drink of golden fire. Wine of wild orchards. And of that valley and of that time and of Rosie’s burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten or ever tasted again.
That’s what haymaking meant to me, and that’s what cider meant to me. That’s why it got me into trouble. But it wasn’t haymaking. The step, the first half step, towards willing, half-willing seduction and it taught me a lesson, that women are stronger than men. The valley was education, the valley taught us everything, we didn’t have to go anywhere.
Then when I was seventeen I left the valley. But leaving is a thing that is normal with the young. They leave the home as they grow. The cottage is like a nest. They grow and they fill it and there are too many of them and then they go off to see the world, make their fortune. They have to do that. I think it is an instinctual movement, to go out, leave home and see the world, and then possibly send money orders back to your mum. When you’ve made it.
And I went off one summer’s morning and walked. I’d never seen the sea so I walked south to Southampton, then along the south coast and up into London and worked on a building site. I remember somebody saying, when anybody leaves home they always end up working on a building site, well I did. Then when that job was over I went to Spain for a year, with my violin. And that was one of the most carefree, happiest times of my life, discovering this almost medieval Spain which in many ways reminded me of home. It was all horse traffic in Spain, horses and mules, and I was leaving a village which was all horses and mules and chaps sitting round and gossiping at night, and that sort of community which I’d left still existed. So it was a natural thing to do I think. I went to about forty countries while I was away: the Middle East, Africa and to Mexico. But I knew that I would have to come back here.
As a child I used to think that all the world was like this valley. This is the world. Born and the eyes open, you immediately register what you see, and I registered this uniquely beautiful valley and I thought this is life, everything’s like this. And I didn’t realize until I’d gone to all these other countries that nothing is like this. When I came back I thought, no I don’t want to go again, I don’t want to move again, I’m here, I’m rooted, I’m back.
The graveyard is opposite The Woolpack. I have been fortunate to survive this long and to survive very difficult crises abroad but I’ve got back and now it’s all wrapped up. I drink in the pub and when I go, I will go across the road, or I’ll be taken across the road in a box and put in the churchyard. And it’s the comfort of peas in a pod again. I’m wrapped up in this little pod which is my home.
I’ve found a place halfway up the churchyard, which is near enough to the church to be aware of, in the spiritual sense, to be conscious of matins, Sunday morning, but also to be within reach of, in a temporal way, orgies on Saturday nights in The Woolpack. And alternating between the temporal and the spiritual is the way I wish to spend what eternity is left to me.
Afterword
This book has its origins in a series of conversations I recorded with Laurie Lee in and around Slad, his home village in the Cotswolds, in the spring and summer of 1994, Laurie’s eightieth year. The recordings were the raw material for a television documentary film I was making, a film that various people, including Laurie himself, told me it would be impossible to achieve.
My initial request to Laurie, by letter, went to him via his agent in March 1994. About two weeks later, I came home from work and, as usual, played messages on the answerphone. The greeting on the machine had been recorded by my younger son in his high-pitched, unbroken ten-year-old voice: ‘I’m sorry, but David, Joel and Louis can’t take your call at the moment, but if you leave a message we’ll get back to you as soon as p
ossible.’ Then, incredulously, I listened to the first message: ‘That’s a very nice answerphone message, if I may say so. Could you tell your daddy that Laurie Lee called him.’
Tentatively, I dialled the number he left. A voice answered in a soft, lilting Cotswold burr. It was Laurie Lee, talking to me! He said again how much he had liked the message on the answerphone, and asked me what I wanted of him. I told him pretty much what I had said to his agent. His tone was one of caution, but he suggested I drive out to meet him in his local pub, The Woolpack in Slad.
It was a bright, clear March day as I drove up the narrow lane from Stroud. It twisted and turned up the side of the valley and into the village. Laurie was sitting in his favourite spot in the bar of The Woolpack when I arrived, with half a pint of best and a whisky.
After we had talked for a while, I told him I wanted to make a half-hour film about him and the landscapes which had shaped his writing, such as the one I had just driven through: he was thoughtful, humorous and self-deprecating. In the end he said that he would help me as much as he could to make the film but that he did not want to be in it. Taken aback, I said that it would be impossible to make the film I had in mind if it did not include him, but he was adamant. By now we had finished our drinks.
‘Do you have a car?’ he asked. ‘Then come with me.’
We got into the car and spent a glorious afternoon driving to some of the places that had a special meaning for him and which had shaped his writing. He took me to the village pond in Slad, to Miserden, Swift’s Hill and Bulls Cross. In each place we got out of the car and he recounted a story associated with the place. I was mesmerized by his storytelling. I said that if I had had a camera I could have made the film there and then.