by Laurie Lee
‘What you think you’re doing? ’ my Mother shouted. ‘Poor boy, he’s gone,’ crooned the Negress. ‘Gone fled to the angels - thought I’d wash him for the box - just didn’t want to bother you, mum.’
‘You cruel wicked woman! Our Laurie ain’t dead - just look at his healthy colour.’
Mother plucked me from the table, wrapped me up in a blanket, and carried me back to my cot - cursing Mrs Moore for a snatcher of bodies and asking the Saints what they thought they were up to. Somehow, I lived - though it was a very near thing, a very near thing indeed. So easy to have succumbed to Mrs Moore’s cold sponge. Only Dorothy’s boredom saved me.
It was soon after this that my sister Frances died. She was a beautiful, fragile, dark-curled child, and my Mother’s only daughter. Though only four, she used to watch me like a nurse, sitting all day beside my cot and talking softly in a special language. Nobody noticed that she was dying herself, they were too much concerned with me. She died suddenly, silently, without complaint, in a chair in the corner of the room. An ignorant death which need never have happened - and I believe that she gave me her life.
But at least she was mourned. Not a day passed afterwards but that Mother shed some tears for her. Mother also grew jealous for the rest of us, more careful that we should survive. So I grew to be, not a pale wasting boy, but sickly in another way, switching regularly from a swaggering plumpness - a tough equality with other boys - to a monotonous return of grey-ghosted illness, hot and cold, ugly-featured and savage. When I was well I could hold my own; no one spared me, because I didn’t look delicate. But when I was ill, I just disappeared from the scene and remained out of sight for weeks. If it was summer when the fever caught me, I lay and sweated in my usual bed, never quite sure which of us was ill, me or the steaming weather. But in winter a fire was lit in the bedroom, and then I knew I was ill indeed. Wash-basins could freeze, icicles hang from the ornaments, our bedrooms remained normally unheated; but the lighting of a fire, especially in Mother’s room, meant that serious illness had come.
As soon as I recognized the returning face of my sickness- my hands light as feathers, a swaying in the head, and lungs full of pulsing thorns - the first thing I did was to recall my delusions and send messages to the anxious world. As I woke to the fever I thought of my subjects, and their concern always gave me comfort. Signals in morse, tapped out on the bed-rail, conveyed brief and austere intelligences. ‘He is ill.’ (I imagined the first alarm.) ‘He has told his Mother.’ (Some relief.) ‘He is fighting hard.’ (Massed prayers in the churches.) ‘He is worse.’ (Cries of doom in the streets.) There were times when I was almost moved to tears at the thought of my anxious people, the invisible multitudes up and down the land joined in grief at this threat to their King. How piteously they awaited each sombre bulletin, and how brave I was meanwhile. Certainly I took pains to give them something to be anxious about, but I also bid them be strong. ‘He wishes no special arrangements made. Only bands and tanks. A parade or two. And perhaps a three minutes’ silence.’
This would occupy my first morning, with the fever still fresh; but by nightfall I was usually raving. My limbs went first, splintering like logs, so that I seemed to grow dozens of arms. Then the bed no longer had limits to it and became a desert of hot wet sand. I began to talk to a second head laid on the pillow, my own head once removed; it never talked back, but just lay there grinning very coldly into my eyes. The walls of the bedroom were the next to go; they began to bulge and ripple and roar, to flap like pastry, melt like sugar, and run bleeding with hideous hues. Then out of the walls, and down from the ceiling, advanced a row of intangible smiles; easy, relaxed, in no way threatening at first, but going on far too long. Even a maniac’s smile will finally waver, but these just continued in silence, growing brighter, colder, and ever more humourless till the sick blood roared in my veins. They were Cheshire-cat smiles, with no face or outlines, and I could see the room clearly through them. But they hung above me like a stain on the air, a register of smiles in space, smiles without pity, smiles without love, smiling smiles of unsmiling smileness; not even smiles of strangers but smiles of no one, expanding in brilliant silence, persistent, knowing, going on and on — till I was screaming and beating the bed-rails.
At my scream all the walls shook down like a thunderclap and everything was normal again. The kitchen door opened, feet thumped up the stairs, and the girls bustled into the room. ‘He’s been seeing them faces again,’ they whispered. ‘It’s all right!’ they bawled, ‘There, there! You won’t see any more. Have a nice jug of lemon.’ And they mopped me, and picked up the bedclothes. I lay back quietly while they fussed around; but what could I say to them? That I hadn’t seen faces - that I’d only seen smiles? I tried that, but it got me nowhere.
Later, as the red night closed upon me, I was only barely conscious. I heard myself singing, groaning, talking, and the sounds were like hands on my body. Blood boiled, flesh crept, teeth chattered and clenched, my knees came up to my mouth; I lay in an evil swamp of sweat which alternately steamed and froze me. My shirt was a kind of enveloping sky wetly wrapping my goosy skin, and across which, at intervals, hot winds from Africa and Arctic blizzards blew. All objects in the room became molten again, and the pictures repainted themselves; things ran about, changed shape, grew monstrous, or trailed off into limitless distances. The flame of the candle threw shadows like cloaks which made everything vanish in turn, or it drew itself up like an ivory saint, or giggled and collapsed in a ball. I heard voices that couldn’t control themselves, that either whispered just out of sound, or suddenly boomed some great echoing word, like ‘Shovel!’ or ‘Old-men’s-ears!’ Such a shout would rouse me with terrible echoes, as though a piano had just been kicked by a horse.
It was myself, no doubt, who spoke these words, and the monologue went on for hours. Sometimes I deliberately answered back, but mostly I lay and listened, watching while the room’s dark crevices began to smoke their ash-white nightmares… . Such a night of fever slowed everything down as though hot rugs had been stuffed in a clock. I went gliding away under the surface of sleep, like a porpoise in tropic seas, heard the dry house echoing through caves of water, followed caverns through acres of dreams, then emerged after fathoms and years of experience, of complex lives and deaths, to find that the moon on the window had not moved an inch, that the world was not a minute older.
Between this sleeping and waking I lived ten generations and grew weak on my long careers, but when I surfaced at last from its endless delirium the real world seemed suddenly dear. While I slept it had been washed of fever and sweetened, and now wrapped me like a bell of glass. For a while, refreshed, I heard its faintest sounds: streams running, trees stirring, birds folding their wings, a hill-sheep’s cough, a far gate swinging, the breath of a horse in a field. Below me the kitchen made cosy murmurs, footsteps went up the road, a voice said Goodnight, a door creaked and closed - or a boy suddenly hollered, animal-clear in the dark, and was answered far off by another. I lay moved to stupidity by these precious sounds as though I’d just got back from the dead. Then the fever returned as it always did, the room began its whisper and dance, the burnt-down candle spat once and shuddered, and I saw its wick fold and go out… . Then darkness hit me, a corroding darkness, a darkness packed like a box, and a row of black lanterns swung down from the ceiling and floated towards me, smiling. And once more I was hammering the bed-rails in terror, screaming loudly for sisters and light.
Such bouts of delirium were familiar visitations, and my family had long grown used to them. Jack would inquire if I needed to groan quite so much, while Tony examined me with sly speculation; but for the most part I was treated like a dog with distemper and left to mend in my own good time. The fevers were dramatic, sudden, and soaring, but they burnt themselves out very quickly. There would follow a period of easy convalescence, during which I lived on milk custards and rusks; then I’d begin to feel bored, I’d get up and go out, start a fight, and my sickn
ess was closed. Apart from the deliriums, which puzzled and confused me, I never felt really ill; and in spite of the whispers of scarred lungs and T.B., it never occurred to me I might die.
Then one night, while sweating through another attack, which seemed no different from any of the others, I was given a shock which affected me with an almost voluptuous awe. As usual my fever had flared up sharply, and I was tossing in its accustomed fires, when I woke up, clear-headed, somewhere in the middle of the night, to find the whole family round my bed. Seven pairs of eyes stared in dread surmise, not at me but at something in me. Mother stood helplessly wringing her hands, and the girls, were silently weeping. Even Harold, who could usually shrug off emotion, looked pale and strained in the candlelight.
I was surprised by their silence and the look in their eyes, a mixture of fear and mourning. What had suddenly brought them in the dark of the night to stand blubbing like this around me? I felt warm, and comfortable, completely relaxed, and amused as though somehow I’d fooled them. Then they all started whispering, around me, about me, across me, but never directly to me.
‘He’s never been like this before,’ said one. ‘Hark at his awful rattle.’
‘He never had that ghastly colour, either.’
‘It’s cruel — the poor little mite.’
‘Such a gay little chap he was, boo-hoo.’
‘There, there, Phyl; don’t you fret.’
‘D’you think the vicar would come at this hour?’
‘Someone better run and fetch him.’
‘We’d better knock up Jack Halliday, too. He could bike down and fetch the doctor.’
‘We’ll have to sit up, Ma. His breathing’s horrible.’
‘Perhaps we should wire his dad….’
Perfectly conscious, I heard all this, and was tempted to join in myself. But their strangeness of tone compelled my silence, some peculiar threat in their manner, and a kind of fearful reverence in their eyes and voices as though they saw in me shades of the tomb. It was then that I knew I was very ill; not by pain, for my body felt normal. Silently the girls began to prepare for their vigil, wrapping their shawls around them. ‘You go get some rest, Ma - we’ll call you later.’ They disposed themselves solemnly round the bed, folded their hands in their laps, and sat watching my face with their hollow eyes for the first signs of fatal change. Held by the silence of those waiting figures, in that icy mid-hour of the night, it came to me then, for the first time in my life, that it was possible I might die.
I remember no more of that sombre occasion, I think I just fell asleep - my eyelids closing on a shroud of sisters which might well have been my last sight on earth. When I woke next morning to their surprise, the crisis was apparently over. And save for that midnight visitation, and for the subsequent behaviour of the village, I would never have known my danger.
I remained in Mother’s bedroom for many weeks, and a wood-fire burned all day. Schoolfriends, as though on a pilgrimage, came in their best clothes to bring me flowers. Girls sent me hen’s-eggs pencilled with kisses; boys brought me their broken toys. Even my schoolteacher (whose heart was of stone) brought me a bagful of sweets and nuts. Finally Jack, unable to keep the secret any longer, told me I’d been prayed for in church, just before the collections, twice, on successive Sundays. My cup was full, I felt immortal; very few had survived that honour.
This time my convalescence was even more indulgent. I lived on Bovril and dry sponge-cakes. I was daily embalmed with camphorated oils and hot-poulticed with Thermogene. Lying swathed in these pungent and peppery vapours, I played through my hours and days, my bed piled high with beads and comics, pressed flowers, old cartridges, jack-knives, sparking-plugs, locusts, and several stuffed linnets.
I took every advantage of my spoiled condition and acted simple when things got tough. Particularly when it came to taking my medicine, a hell-draught of unspeakable vileness.
It was my sisters’ job to get this down, and they would woo me with outstretched spoon.
‘Now come on, laddie — One! Two! Three!…’
‘You can clean out the jam-pot after…
‘We’ll peg up your nose. You won’t taste it at all.’
I crossed my eyes and looked vacant.
‘Be a good boy. Just this once. Come on.’
‘Archie says No,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Archie,’ I said, ‘does not want the dose. Archie does not like the dose. And Archie will not have the dose. Says Archie.’
‘Who’s Archie?’ they whispered, shaking their heads at each other. They usually left me then.
After fever my body and head felt light, like a piece of dew-damp vegetable. The illness had emptied me so completely now I seemed bereft of substance. Being so long in that sunless, fever-spent room, I was filled with extraordinary translations. I felt white and blood-drained, empty of organs, transparent to colour and sound, while there passed through my flesh the lights of the window, the dust-changing air, the fire’s bright hooks, and the smooth lapping tongues of the candle. Heat, reflection, whispers, shadows, played around me as though I was glass. I seemed to be bodiless, printed flat on the sheets, insubstantial as a net in water. What gross human wastes, dull jellies, slack salts I had been purged of I could not say; but my senses were now tuned to such an excruciating awareness that they vibrated to every move of the world, to every shift and subsidence both outdoors and in, as though I were renewing my entire geography.
When I woke in the mornings, damp with weakness, the daylight was milk of paradise; it came through the windows in beaming tides, in currents of green and blue, bearing debris of bird-song, petals, voices, and the running oils of the sky. Its light washed the room of night and nightmare and showed me the normal day, so that waking was amoment of gratitude that savages must have felt. The bedroom objects removed their witch-masks and appeared almost sheepishly ordinary. The boarded walls shone with grains arid knots; the mirror recorded facts; the pictures framed in the morning’s gold, restored me their familiar faces. I sighed and stretched like a washed-up sailor who feels the earth safe beneath him, wild seas wiped away, green leaves around, deliverance miraculously gained.
So each morning at dawn I lay in a trance of thanks. I sniffed the room and smelt its feathers, the water in the wash-jug, the dust in the corners, kind odours of glass and paper, the dry stones facing the windowsills, bees bruising the geranium leaves, the pine in the pencil beside my bed, the dead candle, and the fire in the matchstick. But I also sensed, without needing to look, the state of the early day: the direction of the wind, how the trees were blowing, that there were cows in the fields or not, whether the garden gate was open or shut, whether the hens had yet been fed, the weight of the clouds in the invisible sky, and the exact temperature of the air. As I lay in my bed I could sense the whole valley by the surfaces of my skin, the turn of the hour, the set of the year, the weather, and the life to come. A kind of pantheist grandeur made me one with the village, so that I felt part of its destination; and washed of my fever, ice-cold but alive, it seemed I would never lose it again….
Then Mother would come carolling upstairs with my breakfast, bright as a wind-blown lark.
‘I’ve boiled you an egg, and made you a nice cup of cocoa. And cut you some lovely thin bread and butter.’
The fresh boiled egg tasted of sun-warmed manna, the cocoa frothed and steamed, and the bread and butter - cut invalid fashion — was so thin you could see the plate through it. I gobbled it down, looking weak and sorry, while Mother straightened the bed, gave me my pencil and drawing-book, my beads and toys, and chattered of treats to come.
‘I’m going to walk into Stroud and buy you a paint-box. And maybe some liquorice allsorts. All kinds of people have been asking about you. Even Miss Cohen! - just fancy that.’
Mother sat on the bed and looked at me proudly. All was love and I could do no wrong. When I got up I would not have to chop any firewood, and nobody would be cross for a month. Oh
, the fatal weakness that engaged me then, to be always and forever ill….
Pneumonia was the thing for which I was best known, and I made a big drama out of it. But it was not by any means my only weapon; I collected minor diseases also, including, in the space of a few short years, bouts of shingles, chicken-pox, mumps, measles, ring-worm, adenoids, nose-bleed, nits, ear-ache, stomach-ache, wobbles, bends, scarlet-fever, and catarrhal deafness.
Then finally, as though to round the lot off, I suffered concussion of the brain. I was knocked down by a bicycle one pitch-dark night and lay for two days unconscious. By the time I came to, all battered and scabbed, one of my sisters was in love with the bicyclist - a handsome young stranger from Sheepscombe way who had also knocked down my Mother.
But my boyhood career of shocks and fevers confirmed one thing at least: had I been delicate I would surely have died, but there was no doubt about my toughness. Those were the days, as I have already said, when children faded quickly, when there was little to be done, should the lungs be affected, but to burn coal-tar and pray. In those cold valley cottages, with their dripping walls, damp beds, and oozing floors, a child could sicken and die in a year, and it was usually the strongest who went. I was not strong; I was simply tough, self-inoculated by all the plagues. But sometimes, when I stop to think about it, I feel it must have been a very close call.
Strangely enough it was not illness, but the accident, which I believe most profoundly marked me. That blow in the night, which gave me concussion, scarred me, I think, for ever - put a stain of darkness upon my brow and opened a sinister door in my brain, a door through which I am regularly visited by messengers whose words just escape me, by glimpses of worlds I can never quite grasp, by grief, exultation, and panic….
THE UNCLES