by Laurie Lee
She was rigid, intent, with the locket in her hands, and I had an immediate intimation that something was going to happen.
‘Don’t ’ee speak or move in the sun,’ she said. ‘Don’t drink or breathe. ’Arken only. Things be what they seem.’
All her body seemed wrapped about the locket. The roots of her limbs and fingers all led to it; her eyes burned upon it. There was a long pause. Then all of a sudden, distantly and dryly, the silver grill buzzed with a tiny noise. The woman’s face went still and blind. With dreamy fingers she broke open the fragile cage and shook something out into the palm of her hand. It was a black horned beetle, quivering with rapid soundless wings. The woman put down her mouth to the throbbing insect; and whether it was the wine or a touch of the sun I cannot say, but as she crouched in that golden posture she seemed to me to be made of glass, a figure of fierce and formal beauty lit by some ghostly interior fire. Her hair webbed her shoulders like a dazzle of sun, and the beetle, in the nest of her hand, whirred softly against her lips. Then she raised her eyes and looked through me, listening intently.
‘Don’t move, feller,’ she breathed. ‘ ’E’s the sign an’ the best of ’em all. Don’t move, but ’arken!’
I listened, and there was not a sound to be heard. Not a bird in the trees, not a breath of wind in the stifling July woods. Even the bubbling pools and springs seemed to have died among their stones. Then – hardly noticeable at first – there rose a strange light moaning on the air, a trembling chord, far, faint and sweet – the throb of the harp in the tree. And almost immediately it was followed by stumbling footsteps in the wood, the solid tread of some heavy animal advancing towards us through the tangled nettles. I sat motionless, watching the woman. A shadow fell across her rapt, enchanted face. I spun round and saw a white bullock, with black horns, standing in the doorway.
My tongue went dry and my thumbs pricked, and as I turned to look into the woman’s eyes I smelt wet crows, midnight and burning. And I knew I was with a witch.
First Love
It wasn’t the discovery of sex, when I was a boy, that affected my life so much as the first occasion that I met it head on …
I don’t think I ever discovered sex, it seemed to be always there – a vague pink streak running back through the landscape as far as I can remember. This was probably due to my English country upbringing, where life was open as a cucumber-frame, and sex a constant force, like the national grid, occasionally boosted by thundery weather. There were the free, unpackaged animals and birds, constantly proving their tireless urges, all coolly encouraged and pandered to as one of the parish’s more profitable drives. My childhood was cluttered with fumbling bees, loaded udders, and swelling fruit, with bellowing livestock, hypnotized hens, and bulls being led by the nose. Sex, in the country, was like grain in the wood, self-renewing as the daily paper, never obsessive, nor crowding the attention, but always going on if you cared to look for it.
On top of all this, I had three beautiful sisters who were my guardians from the cradle. They were about ten years my seniors, their graceful presence in the house a daily reminder of the delicate difference. Plump, pink, with fuzzy arms and cheeks, each one was flavour-packed, huge, rounded worlds to touch and play with, smoothly warm the whole year long.
My sisters by no means took the mystery out of sex but at least they cleared the mind, being free with my clothes as sisters are, having to bathe me on Saturday nights, and towelling me down with occasional exclamations of praise, always encouraging to a growing boy …
So the twisted shock of a sudden sex-dawning was not a problem I was asked to bear. My moment, after years of lazily inspecting the pitch, came when I was suddenly called on to play.
I couldn’t have been more than fifteen at the time – I remember I had just left school. Our small Cotswold village was crammed with boys of my age, all coming to a head together – loose rangey lads, overgrown like weeds, top-heavy and multi-branched. We all seemed to steam or give off fumes like a furnace, heated more than we were wont to be heated, and, as there were few cars or motor-bikes to talk about, we were free to concentrate on sex.
Sex, and our questionable success at it, was the only status we sought, though virginity at that age, in spite of our boasted loss of it, was honoured more in the evasion than in the breach. So we squatted together in our rain-dark shed, painting the walls with our gaudy lies, playing competitive fantasies one against the other until we believed ourselves veterans.
Then one evening, walking home from such a gathering, I lost its cosy half-world forever. In a field near the vicarage, in a moment of terror and truth, I was confronted by a whole live girl. She stood in the grass, supposedly unaware, twitching her eyes like a grazing animal, indolently angling her flanks to the hunter, and closely watching me sideways.
I recognized her as a girl from a neighbouring village, a girl called Ellie, whom I’d known since a child. But she’d never directly looked at me before, and so I’d never really seen her. Seeing her now, brushing the grass with her hand, I was suddenly stung by brutish ambition. I thought of carrying this trophy back to the shed, laying it warm and real on the stones. I thought of the lads crowding round in a sudden miracle of silence. I also thought of Arnold.
Arnold was my closest friend at the time, and we used each other as whetstones. He was a year older than I; a thin, shifty lad who seemed specially constructed for scuttling down holes. We had competed together since we were infants and sucked the blood of each other’s jealousies. Arnold must see this, I thought to myself. He wouldn’t believe it otherwise.
‘Seen any snakes?’ asked Ellie. I made no reply, but strode past her, mournfully whistling. I was wearing my brother’s plus-fours and woollen stockings and the grass bounced off my legs like blow-darts.
The next day I steered Arnold up to the vicarage fields, and sure enough she was there again. But this time she was draped across the top of the stile so that there was no way of getting past her. She lay sprawled across it, her knees to her chin, a langorous and weighty road-block.
‘Oo’s ’er?’ muttered Arnold, pulling up fast.
‘I dunno,’ I said, on needles.
‘Some Bisley bird. Let’s clip ’er earhole.’
‘OK. Let’s clip ’er earhole.’
Large, beautiful, with Spanish hair and eyes, skin tight with flesh as an apple, Ellie slipped from the stile and faced us boldly, smiling a slow, fat smile. I watched her closely as her eyes moved over us, heavy-lidded as a sleepy owl.
Her lazy gaze finally rested on Arnold. It was an excruciating moment of doubt. ‘Push off, you,’ she murmured. Arnold didn’t argue; he gave a thin dry cough and went.
I was alone with the girl in a smell of warm rain, feeling handsome, jaunty, and chosen. Ellie stood thigh-deep in the glittering grass like a half-submerged tropic idol.
‘Lift us up on that wall, come on,’ she said. ‘I’m dead scared of things in the grass.’
My hands sank deep into her armpits and she rose in the air like a bird. I wouldn’t have believed it, or that I could do it, it was like lifting a healthy eagle.
The flat stone wall, backed by a twisted beech, seemed wider than any bed. We lay cradled together in its dusty silence looking down at the running grass.
‘Ow’s yer cousin?’ said Ellie. ‘We’ve ’ad some laughs. ’Er an’ me. We thought we’d choke.’ One side of my body was hot against her, the other was creeping cold. ‘Ooh! – I’m falling.’ She turned and held me – and I sank into a smell of doughnuts.
Holding this girl was advanced stuff indeed. She was sixteen and worked in the cake shop. She was more grown-up than any girl I’d yet touched – the others had only been children. Suddenly I was enveloped in her great bare arms; the raciness went out of the encounter, her chatter quietened to almost maternal whispers, became little sounds of content and comfort.
I forgot the cowshed and the cowshed boys. Ellie was a revolution – a brimming generosity heaving with uncertainties and rounder than
all my imaginings. So silent now, her wordless lips to my ear, her warm breadth turned towards me, she became not an adventure but a solemn need. Even Arnold went out of my mind …
The June twilight came down and we disentangled our hair. The wall narrowed as we drew apart. Ellie’s crumpled blue dress had moss in the folds like crevices filled with birds’ nests.
‘Look what I got,’ she said, fishing behind the wall. She produced a bag full of crusty doughnuts. ‘We won’t need no supper. I get ’em from work. I live on ’em practically.’ She gave me one and sank her teeth into another. ‘You’re a boy all right,’ she said. ‘You got a nerve.’ She took another deep bite, and her teeth came out red with jam.
I couldn’t forget Ellie after that, and there were vivid dreams at night, when her great brown body and crusty roundness became half girl and half groceries. My sleep knew the touch of gritty sugar on the lips and the crisp skin fresh from the bakery, enclosing who knew what stores of sweet dough, of what light dabs of jam hidden deep …
I began to meet Ellie at frequent intervals, though I looked for her all the time. Perhaps a week would go by without seeing her, then she would suddenly pop up in the lane. ‘Ah, there’s my boy,’ she’d say with a gurgle, and lead me away through the nettles. In the nests we made among the hedges, or in the quarries above the Severn, we lay innocently enough for hours together, eating each other or eating cakes.
I was oblivious now to the normal world and remote from its small affairs. Occasionally we were shadowed by some cowshed boys, but they might just as well have been sheep. Once or twice I saw Arnold watching us sharply through a hedge, but I felt neither pity nor anger …
Then one evening Ellie leaned from her moving bus and called she had something to tell me. As soon as we met, on our frontier between villages, I could see that something was up. She’d done her hair a new way, in great piled-up coils, and her smile was bulging with secrets.
She said her mum and dad had gone away for a week and left her in charge of the house. To prove it, she opened the neck of her dress and produced a door key, large as a trowel. It was going to be lovely; she’d move down from the attic and sleep in the big brass bed. She’d be all by herself, just her and the cat. So I’d best not go near her, had I?
For the next couple of days I was quiet with decision, though I shook whenever I thought about it. What I had to do seemed so inevitable that I felt almost noble, like being called to war. But I took my time; I was older now, I thought I’d better not act like a savage. When the third night came, remote and still, I knew it must be the one. With the family in bed, I stole out of the house and lifted my bicycle over the gate.
I rode up the hill, through waves of warm moonlight, and crossed the common between our villages. I took long deep breaths, feeling heavy with destiny, going proud and melancholy to my task, wondering all the time, with salt on my tongue, whether I’d be changed when I returned this way, and thinking of the dark locked house at the end of my journey, with its enclosed and waiting girl.
Ellie’s place stood alone at the edge of the village, a little way down a cart-track. It was silent, lampless, heavily loaded with moonlight and as pretty as one could wish. I buried my bicycle in a growth of nettles and crept, sweating, into the garden. I didn’t pause for a moment to wonder what I was up to, every act seemed ordained by legend. I saw the open window above my head and started climbing the spout towards it. A roosting bird scurried out of a gutter, but I climbed boldly, alarming nature. What would happen when I leapt light-footed into the room and confronted the sleeping girl? Would she gasp with pleasure and open her arms, cry for mercy, or lose her reason?
I reached the window, and a wave of warm air, scented with Ellie, flowed out to greet me. I straddled the sill, wriggled my way through the casement, avoided a flowerpot, and I was in.
As my feet touched the floor I saw the moonlit bed and the white breathing weight of the girl. Her bare sleeping arms were like shining rivers, her nightdress like drifts of ice, and her long dark locks, coiled loose on the pillow, were deep canyons carving the Alps. She was more beautiful and mysterious than ever I’d seen her, achingly remote and magic, all cockiness left me – I wanted to kneel to her then, first to be dazzled, and then to love.
A floorboard creaked. Ellie sighed and stirred, then dreamily turned towards me.
‘Oh, no!’ she gurgled. ‘Not you again, really! Arnold, you bad bad boy …’
An Obstinate Exile
One bright June morning, when I was nineteen, I packed all I had on my back, left my native village, and walked up to London looking for gold and glory. That was some while ago, and I’ve been here on and off ever since. And I shall probably stay here for the rest of my life. Yet in spite of all that I still can’t think of myself as a Londoner, nor ever will, nor ever want to.
For years I have lived in the flats, rooms and garrets of this city, the drawers in the human filing-cabinets that stand in blank rows down the streets of Kensington and Notting Hill. Yet when I talk of my home I still think of that damp green valley near Stroud where I was brought up. The boys I went to school with have long since grown and fattened, got married and gone bald, and they would probably have to give me a very long look before they recognized me if I turned up there again. But that is my home, and the image of it the day I left it is still more real to me than the long years in this crowded capital city.
Now why does one become an exile in the first place? And if one does, why be obstinate about it? Furthermore, if one is forced to be as disloyal about the place of one’s adoption as I am going to be about London, why not simply go back away home?
Well, there are a lot of answers. I wasn’t the first lad to run away to London. They’ve been doing it for generations, and their motives are usually ascribed to economic compulsions. But young men don’t leave a lush creamy village life like mine solely for economic reasons. They do it to confound their elders, to show off, to prove their free will, and to win honours of the outside world – and they do it with the image always in their minds of returning one day, in the cool of the evening, to lay their trophies at the villagers’ feet and watch the old boys gasp.
This ambition always goes awry, of course, because city honours are not village honours. Like certain wines, they do not travel; carry them back to the village and you find they are dust in your hands.
For village honours are still severely local. They include life-long success on the local dart-board, sharp wits in the cattle market, skill at growing whopping but useless vegetable marrows, weight-lifting, spitting, ringing bells, trapping foxes, cheating at draughts, winning at whist-drives or working one’s way up to be postman or gravedigger.
Outside things don’t count – and why should they? Take a train home, go to the pub, hand round cigarettes and remark that you’ve just been made Chief Inspector of Inkwells at the Ministry of Boil and Trouble, and what reaction do you get? They stick your cigarettes behind their ears, and then there’s a silence, and then they say: ‘Ah, but d’you ’ear about young Jim Hogg then? ’E’s done well for isself, too. Caught three dozen rabbits last week in the vicarage grounds, an’ sold back a dozen to the vicar. ’E’s a lad. Har, har.’
No, when you leave your village as a young man you leave it for good. There’s no going back at all. Unless, of course, you go and make a fortune in Australia, and then you might return as a sort of false Squire, and you’d have to spend the rest of your life standing everybody drinks and apologising.
I’ve said all this to explain why I’m an exile, why, having come to London, I have to stay here. I’m cut off from the country now in everything except heart. I’ve forgotten the tricks and trades of the village, and my hands have grown soft.
But I can’t get used to London, or accept it, or make a home of it. My gorge rises at the weight and size and muddle of it, sterilising the ground from horizon to horizon. We seem to have forgotten that cities could once be beautiful; cities like Siena, like jewels in a landscap
e, like small glittering islands of carved stone lapped round by cornfields with wild flowers growing up their walls. In those days there was a balanced proportion between city and country; the shepherd on the hill was visible from the market square, the draper could stroll out into the fields on a summer evening and cool his feet in a brook. Just try and stroll out through the wilds of the Great West Road of an evening and see where you get to.
No, I’ve heard much about the spell and enchantment of London. I only wish it would work on me. Dr Johnson had a real affection for the place; so had Gay. But their London was a roaring, compact little city where everybody knew everybody else and there were country fields as close in as Kensington and Chelsea. But my London is gross, top-heavy, out of focus, and out of scale.
Of course, there is one great virtue in size; and of course, London is the greatest show on earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together at one place. Here, in a day, you can see the world. Stand at the entrance to a main-line railway station, during rush-hour, and you see every possible human species scurrying past. One becomes amazed and transported by the multiplicity of the human face, by its infinite differences, by its almost prismatic graduations from ugliness to beauty, evil to good.
And you can’t get this concentrated view anywhere but London. The sad, noisy clamour of life lived at close quarters; lovers in doorways, children in backstreets, singing on bus-tops on Saturday nights, whelk stalls, fish shops, cinemas, fairs, chimneys on fire, and the warmth in the winter streets generated by a million fires and a million bodies – it is this mass gregariousness, this feeling that one is at a non-stop party, that I like best of all.
Yet even this makes me long more for home. For this very gregariousness whets the appetite to know more of the human story, and in the country personal histories are everybody’s property, but in London, Man is the most secret animal on earth.
Yes, everything I see in this city, even those things that give me greatest pleasure, I view always in terms of comparison with their country equivalents. When I look at the great Thames, I do not see the river god that rules the Port of London; I see a body of water, thick, brown, reechy, coated with tar and feathers, and I think only of the springs near my home where the young Thames rises, clear as bubbled glass from a bank of moss.