by Tom Fort
By a very curious coincidence, Laurie Lee’s only child with his wife Kathy was born on the same day as his granddaughter – whose mother had been the result of a pre-war love affair. For many years Jessy Lee was led by her father to believe that this earlier daughter was no more than a cousin. Jessy portrays her father as having been both controlling and alarmingly volatile. She attributes these traits to his epilepsy, although it is surely likely that they were also related to what Robert McCrum described as ‘the agony of having nothing more to say’.
*
‘Summer, June summer, with the green back on earth and the whole world unlocked and seething . . . with cuckoos and pigeons hollowing the woods since daylight and the chipping of tits in the pear-blossom . . .’
Slad’s setting is as beguiling as Laurie Lee’s prose. It was June summer when I cycled over from Gloucester, cutting through the edge of Painswick up a steep, dark lane to meet the Slad road at Bull’s Cross. I took a bridle path along the top of Frith Wood, which Lee called The Brith, a great swathe of beech sweeping down the north-west slope of the valley enclosing the little Slad Brook. I had pale beech trunks to my left, sunlit foliage above, ungrazed meadows thick with buttercups to my right. At the end of the wood a steep, rutted drovers’ track took me down to Slad’s war memorial, recording the names of the forty or so of the village’s fallen – most of them from the Gloucestershires, but some from other regiments, the Devons, the Worcestershires, the Northumberland Fusiliers.
The village reveals itself bit by bit. It is squeezed against the east side of a ridge which has Painswick and Pitchcombe on its far side, both hidden well away. The lane into it from the war memorial ducks down, then twists capriciously, one arm going off to Steanbridge Farm and the pond where Miss Flynn drowned, the other turning back to the main part of the village. The dwellings are at all heights and angles, wherever a space and level ground permit. There is no scheme, no centre; randomness is the guiding principle. Walking along one or other of the crooked lanes, you find yourself looking into a bedroom on one side, or even on to a roof. Then, around the corner, walls of grey stone leap above you. The stone is handsome enough but the houses tend to be tall and thin, as if starved of nourishment at some point in their growth. The one substantial residence, Steanbridge House – where the squire dropped two coins into the carol singers’ box – is so discreetly hidden away that a view of its roof and a glimpse of its ivy-clad front is all that can be obtained from the public highways.
Slad has no obvious beating heart. It once had a village hall, or village room, but that fell down and no one bothered with another. The school where Laurie and his chums larked around became a private house long ago. There was a shop once, but not for many years. The lie of the land was inimical to providing a cricket ground or football field, so Slad never had a sports club. It is too small to have its own parish council, so it comes under the wing of Painswick Parish Council, which has plenty of Painswick matters to attend to and gives it little attention. The village noticeboard – a good barometer of vitality – was silent about Slad. The Painswick Arts and Crafts Market, the Painswick Youth Centre, the Painswick Midsummer Ball were all advertised, as was the Stroud Dog Walking Service. But mention of Slad was restricted to a faded card for ‘Cathy’s Cushions . . . made in Slad.’
So it has its church and its pub, looking at each other across the road to Stroud. The church jogs along as do other churches in other Gloucestershire villages. But the Woolpack is not as other pubs. It stands straight and narrow at the side of the main road, and from the lower road behind appears improbably tall. It has been a pub, and therefore a key component of village life, for a very long time. In the 1980s Whitbread, which owned it, tried to close it and turn it into a private house, but there was uproar locally and in the end they sold it as a going concern to David Tarrant, who extended it inside and ran it successfully until the late 1990s. His decision to retire brought back the cloud of uncertainty, until it was announced that it had been bought by one of its more exotic regulars, the artist Dan Chadwick – owner of Lypiatt Park in neighbouring Bisley, a part-medieval, part-Tudor, part-Victorian Gothic mansion bought by his father, the sculptor Lynn Chadwick.
There is an amusing account of the Chadwick takeover in a book by another son of a more famous father, Adam Horovitz – whose parents, the poets Michael and Frances Horovitz, came to live in Slad in the 1970s. Eccentrically entitled A Thousand Laurie Lees, the book is a highly coloured and charged account of an only child’s sometimes painful progress from boyhood through adolescence to young manhood in the valley where the presence of Laurie Lee could be felt at every turn. Dan Chadwick, Horovitz wrote, was perfect for the Woolpack. He instigated ‘a velvet revolution . . . everything changed and nothing did . . . brand new ancient benches appeared . . . everything was smartened up and faded . . . all the new-look, old-style Woolpack lacked was a daily coat of sawdust on the floor and barrels in the bar.’
According to Horovitz’s well-spiced account, the locals became concentrated in one bar while the rest of the pub was given over to food and Chadwick’s mates. Trade boomed as ‘Dan’s arty London crowd came roaring into the village.’ Prominent among them was Damien Hirst – ‘not gentlemanly in his cups’, Horovitz reports. The partying and frolicking of Hirst and other celebrities drew media attention, and Slad was dubbed ‘Notting Hill in wellies’. The locals, feeling they were being elbowed out, became restive. Chadwick took heed and – again according to Horovitz – ‘the Woolpack settled back into tranquillity and Slad breathed deeply.’
I own to having been to the Woolpack a few times over the years, always with pleasure. One of my brothers, a considerable foodie, lives at Uley which is the other side of Stroud, and when I am down that way we usually meet at the Woolpack. The food is always interesting and sometimes first-rate, the Uley bitter is reliably decent and the place has a good, warm, homely feel about it. Locals and visitors may not mix but they coexist amiably enough. And who are the locals now, anyway? The time when Slad was populated by Slad-born-and-bred is almost as remote as that of the Annual Choir Outing to Weston-super-Mare chronicled in Cider with Rosie. They are all incomers now; the only question is when they came.
However, I did meet one who was almost pure Slad in the churchyard. She was keeping some gravestones spick-and-span: her mother’s, her father’s, her husband’s. She had lived for sixty-three years in the village, then moved away towards Stroud because her husband’s health was poor and they needed to be closer to the hospital and the doctors. Of course she had known Laurie Lee; they had had a good few sessions in the old Imperial Hotel in Stroud, always with a sore head afterwards. She missed Slad terribly, she said. ‘It was my home – still is, really.’ I wondered why she didn’t come back now her husband was dead and didn’t need the hospital any more, but maybe she couldn’t face the upheaval.
The opinion I consulted was divided on the question of whether Slad functioned as a community or not. The bloke married to the landlady at my B&B – both fairly recent migrants from Bisley – was sceptical. Steve the parish councillor said there were things going on – the village picnic, the panto every couple of years, a ceilidh at the Woolpack. Everyone agreed that without the pub whatever little there was would be nothing at all. It sounded precarious to me.
After supper at the Woolpack I had a magical walk as the light faded and the colours darkened. I followed the lane down to the pond where Miss Flynn met her end, which was clasped by trees and very still and sombre. I took the path over the brook, pausing on the footbridge to marvel at how this thin trickle could ever have flowed vigorously enough to power one mill wheel, let alone the ten said to have been turning at the height of the cloth trade. The path cuts across the top of the field where Rosie took young Laurie under the waggon and initiated him in the pleasures of cider and the flesh; it is almost impossible to walk anywhere in this landscape without straying into the pages of the book.
I came out on to the lane below Elcombe, a mi
nute huddle of old cottages pressed into the side of a wooded slope. Looking down over the wall by the road I saw the top of a white head below me. The body attached to the head was working on a richly filled fruit-and-vegetable garden, sturdily netted against the deer that maraud unimpeded in these parts. I complimented him on his brassicas and berries and we fell to talking about varieties of apple and gooseberry and the rapacious ways of pigeons towards purple-sprouting broccoli and some other of the burning issues that preoccupy and vex us fruit-and-veg types.
I walked along the bottom of the mound of Swift’s Hill, bounded on one side by Laurie Lee Wood (one really cannot escape the man); then through The Vatch, which is the bottom end of Slad and is – if the truth be told – somewhat smarter and classier. The lights were burning bright in the Woolpack as I came back up the main road, but the deep, steep woods and the steep fields that shape the valley had merged into the darkness of the night sky. It felt like a place of enchantment on a June night. How else could it be?
*
‘The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village,’ Lee wrote towards the end of Cider with Rosie. ‘I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ of life.’
One of the odd things about the book – which I read for the first time while I was in Slad – is how little Lee reveals of that life, the real, hard, day-to-day working life. His father was absent, living in London with another woman and paying infrequent visits which his children dreaded and which evidently caused their mother infinite distress. Not surprisingly, Lee disdained his father. The household was overwhelmingly female in composition – Lee had three elder sisters as well as his mother, and as the younger son, and delicate in health, he tended to be petted and spoiled and indulged, and there was no working man to set an example.
Perhaps as a result, Lee had no interest in the world of men, which at that time meant labour. His depiction of the day in the fields which ended with him in Rosie’s arms is lush and poetic and gives no idea at all of what else was going on – ‘a motionless day of summer, creamy, hazy and amber-coloured . . . it was the time of hay-making . . . the whirr of the mower met us across the stubble, rabbits jumped like firecrackers . . . the farmer’s men were all hard at work, raking, turning and loading . . .’
These farmer’s men were, presumably, Slad men. But Lee has nothing to say about them as individuals, or the struggle they and their families would have been engaged in. He has no insights into the economy of the village, how it worked, nor any keen interest in its history beyond the shared store of old superstitions and folk tales. His focus is on himself – an essential in the best autobiography – and on his family. Although they were hard up, and he makes much of that condition, they were distinct from the rest of the village because their survival did not depend on anyone in the family working. They were kept by the absent, despised father, so the ever-present nagging need that shaped the lives of other families – to pay the rent, to feed the mouths – was unknown to the young Laurie Lee.
Hence his sense of the enchantment of the place was not darkened by exposure to its harsher side. He was not really curious about what went on in the village, except insofar as it affected him or his mother or his siblings. The other villagers – his school mates, girls, Miss Flynn, the squire – leap on to his stage, are vividly introduced, play their appointed part in the prank, adventure, tragedy or farce of the moment, then vanish. The portrait of the feud between Granny Trill and Granny Wallon – who lived one above the other in the same house as the Lees – is typical. They are presented, unforgettably, as an all-female Punch-and-Judy show, their antagonism no more than a comic turn. Their other dimensions – as human beings, which they must have had – are ignored. With Lee, the show is what matters.
In the final chapter he attempts a rapid impression of the changing world he was leaving – ‘a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, or waiting on weather and growth . . . that is what we were born to.’ But he was not born to it, and he cannot manufacture a close interest in it. Instead he leaps away: ‘Yet right to the end . . . the old life seemed as lusty as ever. The church, for instance, had never seemed more powerful . . .’ This cannot have been true, but it gives Lee a cue for sketches of the congregation – ‘square-rumped farmers and ploughmen in chokers, old gardeners and poultry-keepers’; Miss Bagnall the Sunday School teacher polishing her nose.
It is the beauty of Lee’s language that creates the magic of Cider with Rosie. His way with words, like the violinist he was improvising an air, plays on the beauty of the landscape, and on the place in it of an unusually self-absorbed boy reaching towards manhood. His trick was to convince almost everyone that he had left an incomparable picture of a village, a Gloucestershire village. But the picture is of himself.
*
Looking south-west from the top of Swift’s Hill you can see the outskirts of Stroud thrusting like tongues into the green countryside. The Slad Brook runs along the top of a wedge of meadows between two of these tongues of newish housing. With that perspective, I – as an outsider, but aware of the intense pressure for more housing around Stroud – was surprised that the meadows had not been built over. But I was not reckoning on the enduring influence of Cider with Rosie.
A similar miscalculation was made by the development company Gladman – previously encountered at Foxton in Cambridgeshire – who identified the wedge of green, known as Baxter’s Fields, as fruit ripe for the plucking. Gladman boast on their website that they are the most successful strategic land promoter in the UK, winning planning permission for more than 90 per cent of the sites taken on. With Stroud District Council they pursued their tested strategy of trying to bully the authority into submission. ‘Gladman are passionate about winning’, they proclaim. But with Baxter’s Fields they lost. The council turned them down. They went to appeal as they invariably do, but the inspector – persuaded by a well-organised and passionate local campaign under the banner Save The Slad Valley – ruled against them on the grounds that, even though Baxter’s Fields were well away from Slad, they still formed part of the context of the landscape celebrated by Laurie Lee, and that this made them worth more than the housing.
Gladman did not give up, not at once. They announced that they would seek to overturn the inspector’s decision at the High Court. But almost on the eve of the hearing, they backed down. It would be pleasant to think that one of their barristers at last got down to reading Cider with Rosie and woke up to the realisation that the company slogan – We Promote | You Prosper – was no match for the power of the poet’s pen, even a poet dead for almost twenty years.
15
ABANDONED
Chopwell, Tyne and Wear
As a very small boy I and one of my elder brothers were taken by Sheila, our nanny, to stay with her parents in the mining village of Newbottle on the Durham coalfield. Her father was a miner and they lived in one of the back-to-back terraced cottages characteristic of the colliery settlements. It must have been around the time of the closure of Newbottle Colliery in 1956; a few years later, Sheila’s mother and father and younger brother Ralph all came to live with us in Berkshire. Her father’s health was by then shattered by bronchitis and smoking and he died a few years later, but her mother stayed with us for many years as our cook. That is how our very small part of the world was ordered then.
I remember nothing of the mine or the miners. But I do remember being astonished by the physical closeness of the life in the village. Everyone seemed to be living on top of each other, and there was no space and precious little privacy. The streets were full of noisy children playing football and larking about. Washing hung from lines in every backyard, and women chatted over the walls between the yards. There were two highlights of my stay: the first when I choked on the yolk of a hard-boiled egg and Sheila swung me upside down and shook me until the obstruction shot out; the second having a bath in a tin tub in front
of the fire, which I considered much more fun than the familiar and conventional washing experience I had to endure at home.
Chopwell mining village from the air, 1930
That remained the sum of my experience of a mining village until I visited Chopwell, on the western fringe of that same coalfield, in September 2015. By then tin tubs (actually zinc) and coal mining had both been relegated to the annals of history, along with a great deal else that had made this part of England so distinctive and important.
As I pedalled over the bridge across the River Derwent at the bottom of the valley below Chopwell, I was prepared for a display of coal-mining clichés: spoil heaps, sooty chimneys, rusting machinery, disused train track and the like. But apart from the upper section of a pit wheel placed across from Chopwell’s Community Centre with a plaque commemorating the colliery, there was no obvious sign that there had ever been a mine here. The sites where the shafts were sunk are covered in woodland, and the paraphernalia of extraction – lifting gear, warehousing, drying ovens, chimneys and the rest – has been swept away as if it had never been.
The setting struck me as improbably rural. To the east is Chopwell Wood, ancient woodland now managed as a conifer plantation; to the west Milkwellburn Wood, mainly oak and ash with alder and willow along the stream. To the north the land rises to a great ridge as the once industrial landscape gives way to one of fields and copses dotted with isolated farmhouses. Further north still is the valley of the Tyne, one of whose main tributaries, the Derwent, runs along the wooded valley below Chopwell, a long necklace of pools and riffles alive with trout and grayling.