by Laurie Lee
Taking the air in my teeth I feel the old excitement, the raw echoes of an ancestral world, crammed with bull-headed mammoths and tusk-toothed tigers, of flint spears and boasting in caves. Today is the winter as it always was, and when it wasn’t it was not remembered. Forgotten, now, are the small freaks of weather, the offbeat heatwaves and wet-warm Decembers that have cropped up now and then in the past. Winter was always like this since the beginning of winters, since the first man learned to sneeze.
Pushing the cold before me like a sheet of tin, I set off up the Christmas road. I have a new thorn stick with a silver band round it and new gloves with an itchy price tag. Before the New Year I shall no doubt lose the lot. But it doesn’t matter, they were made for this day.
It is a morning for heroes and exhilarating exile, a time to shock the blood back to life, while I go stamping frost-footed along pathways of iron, over grass that is sharp as wire, past cottages hollowed out like Hallowe’en turnips all seething with lights and steam.
‘Same to you, Miss Kirk!’ An old lady totters by, bent double like a tyre round a dartboard. Ancient spirit of the season, she is distributing tea to the peasants, which she has done for the last fifty years. She doesn’t have to worry where all the peasants have got to; we all admit to being her peasants today.
I climb up the valley, breathing hard the sharp air which prickles the nostrils and turns to vapour. To be walking today is to be followed everywhere by private auras of pearly cloud. The wandering cows are exhaling too – pale balloons of unheard conversation. The ploughed fields below me have crusts like bread pudding, delicately sugared with twinkling frost. The distant pastures are slivered, crumpled and bare. Even the light they reflect seems frozen.
Where was this valley last summer? It was not here then. Winter and summer are different places. This beech wood, for instance, so empty now, no more than a fissure of cracks in the sky – where is the huge lazy heaving of those June-thick leaves, reeking of sap and the damp roots of orchids, rustling with foxes and screaming with jays and crammed to the clouds with pigeons? The wood, for the moment, is but the scaffold of summer. It stands stripped to the bruising cold. A dark bird or two sit along the bare branches. None of them move. They might be caged.
Approaching the pond at last I notice a sweet smell of ice – or perhaps it is the only memory of it. We could certainly smell ice when we were boys; even in bed, before getting up. One sniff of the air at the moment of waking and one knew whether the pond was frozen, knew the quality of the ice, whether it was rough or smooth, and even (I swear) its thickness.
This morning it is a plate of dark-green glass, wind-polished and engraved with reeds. An astonished swan walks slowly around it, testing the ice for a hole to sit in, then unable to find one it rises up on its webs and flogs the air with its puzzled wings.
Like the wood, the pond is under a spell, silent as a loaded gun, its explosions of moorhens, coots and lilies held in check for a suspended moment. I look through the ice and see tiny bubbles of air bright as lights in a Christmas tree. I see lily leaves, too, frozen solid in bunches. I wonder what the fish are doing …
‘Come on Eff!’ croaks a voice. ‘It’s froze! Didn’t I tell ya?’ Two kids have arrived. Tommy Bint and his sister, wrapped in scarves and hot for the ice. They jump up and down and caramels shower from their pockets like nuts from a hazel tree.
‘Ain’t you goin’ on, mister?’ Course I’m going on. I test the ice as delicately as the swan. It buckles and groans like an old attic floor but we’ve soon got a good slide going. All is as it was – the hollow ring of our boots, the panting run and the swooning glide, the brief oiled passage across the face of winter, the magic anarchy of pleasure for nothing.
After an hour we stop, our faces pink as crab apples, a feeling of wings still about our heels. ‘Got to get home to dinner. Yummy-yum,’ says Tom. ‘Baked spuds and a gurt great goose.’ ‘And fritters,’ says his sister. ‘And plum puddin’ and custard and nobble minces and brizzle nuts and … and …’ ‘You’ll be sick.’ ‘I’ll be sick.’ She goes joyously through the motions. Then they trot off like two rubber balls.
I climb back to the village sliding on frozen puddles. They are like holes of sky in the road. A sudden blackbird alarmed skids out of a bush chipping chains of sharp cries behind him. A true note of winter, like an axe on a tree, a barking dog or a daylight owl – each pure and solitary in the pause of silence from which the past and the future hang.
It has now turned noon and the day slides slowly from the roofs of the sloping village. It freezes harder than ivory; one can almost see it in the air, as though the light was being stretched on nails. A clear cold radiance hangs over the landscape and a crow crosses it on creaking wings. The rich earth, with all its seeds and humming fields and courtships, is now closed and bound in white vellum. Only one colour remains, today’s single promise, pricked in red over the ashen world – seen in a flitting robin, some rosehips on a bush, the sun hanging low by the wood, and through the flushed cottage windows the berries of the holly and the russet faces of the feasting children.
It is good to have been walking on such a day, feeling the stove of one’s body alive, to be walking in winter on the ground of one’s birth, and good to be walking home. The table’s laid when I get there. The women are taking off their aprons. It is also good to arrive in time.
My Country Childhood
As Gloucestershire boys, the games and rituals we played seemed to run through the natural order of the seasons. Most games we played for our amusement only; rituals were traditional and sometimes earned us pocket money. At the start of the year we had ‘first footing’ – crossing a neighbour’s threshold early in the morning and wishing them ‘Good Luck and Happy New Year!’ It was always best if you were the first to call; even better if you had black hair. A ‘dark stranger’, for some reason, was considered to be symbol of good fortune; those of us with fair hair carried a lump of coal.
With the New Year past came the time of inexhaustible pleasures with the wintry landscapes wrapped up in snow and ice. The generosity of snow always seemed unbounded – you could eat it, drink it, throw it about, make caves or tunnels in it, cut it into slabs, build steps or walls or houses. Country snow always seemed clean and white as paper, so that you could read things in it, track birds, badgers or even foxes, and the big hobnailed boots of your friends. As long as the hard winter lasted, our games were many – playing the xylophone on icicles hanging from the roofs, or licking the same like lollipops; and best of all, if the ice was strong enough, working up a slide across the village pond which, when perfectly polished, was a magic carpet that bore us in an effortless dream through the landscape.
Next, while the frosts still held and the roads were not yet turned to mud, came the time for whipping tops up and down the village – wooden rainbow tops, painted in bright reds and greens. The whips were simple lengths of string or long strips of leather stolen from our sisters’ tall lace-up boots. The top was set in the dust, its point screwed in the ground, then whipped sharply so that it flew high through the air. If whipped properly it would settle and spin like a hummingbird, rocking and quivering gently. To keep it alive you ran and whipped it again, and then it would rise singing, and spin even faster, and might strike sparks from the stony road when it landed. On the other hand, it could also sky through a window, or get caught in the whiplash and snap back and give you a bonk on the head.
Later, before the general thaw began, came the time for the bowling of hoops; and these made sparks too when driven along the road, because our hoops were made of iron. I am talking of the days when our roads weren’t tarred but were surfaced with little stones and flints. Our iron hoops could strike up brilliant streams of sparks if sent at the proper angles across the stones. They could also be instruments of danger if they got out of control, and could cut open the knee to the bone. But we boys thought no less of them for that and were proud of them for their speed and power. The girls, on the
other hand, were only allowed light hoops of cane, which we boys, of course, thought silly.
Many of our games were played in the middle of the roads, which, since there was no traffic in those days – except for an occasional horse and cart, or an old man with a wheelbarrow, were considered a perfectly safe place to be. Here, squatting on our knees in a circle, we played ‘knucklebones’ or ‘five-stones’, a game older than Shakespeare, a game of manual dexterity, almost a feat of juggling, fiercely competitive and with many extended variations.
Traditional ‘knucklebones’ was played with the knuckles of pigs’ feet, but as we, for the most part, were too poor to eat meat, we played with little stones instead. The game consisted of tossing the stones in the air, catching them on the back of the hand, manipulating some on the ground while still keeping at least one in the air, grabbing, scrapping and catching until the game was over. The mysteries of ‘knucklebones’ are too complex to explain fully, unless you happened to be born into them. They require a nimbleness, a sleight-of-hand sufficient to dazzle the eye; and the girls – it must be admitted – were better at it than we were. (But so they were at hopscotch – a game older than the Pyramids).
Summer games were slower but no less carious than others – snail-racing, an indolent pastime; ‘French cricket’, played along pathways using legs as stumps; warfare with grass-seeds catapulted from the bent looped stem; fishing for tiddlers; and ‘fox-and-hounds’ in the moonlight.
Then with each autumn came ‘conkers’ – a classic battle of determination and nerve – with the shiny brown chestnuts hanging on strings and then brutally bashed against each other in turn. Four things could happen in this encounter. Either the striker missed his opponent altogether, or the strings got entangled and caused an awkward pause, or both conkers colliding smashed each other to pieces, or one or other of them emerged victorious. The veteran survivor of many battles took on the value of the conkers he’d vanquished, so that you’d get a ‘two-er’, a ‘twelve-er’, even a ‘forty-er’, according to your various successes. I saw a ‘fifty-er’ once, a sharp-edged little nut looking grey and hard as a stone. I thought it to be deathless or an invincible destroyer – but some said it had been baked in an oven.
In autumn, too, was the time that we made bows and arrows – perhaps a tribute to the hunting season. Our bows were made of light springy willow, and our arrows cut from a hazel bush, straight peeled and sharpened at the end. If properly strung and used with average skill it was astonishing how powerful these bows and arrows could be, light and far-ranging as those of Persian cavalry or the mounted warriors of the Tartars. At the day’s end, I remember, we’d often stand in the blue gloom of the valley and shoot an arrow vertically into the sky, and watch it climb, climb, till it caught the light of the setting sun, and hang there for a moment, gold and illuminated, before turning to plunge back into the evening’s shadow. I always think that slender arrow, hanging in the sun’s last glow, was the magic symbol of the Fall of the year. Then winter and Christmas would be on us once more, with snowballing and carol-singing, skating and wassailing, and the returning cycle of the seasons, with its ritual games, would begin all over again.
The Lying in State
A cold east wind blows over the roofs of Westminster. The sky is raw and blind. Every flag points westward, a single leaf on a stalk, as if frozen, ready to fall.
Through the comfortless morning treads a mile-long queue, shuffling forward on icy feet, old men and children dressed for naked weather as though approaching some ancient megalith.
Every resounding event seems to be followed by silence, as history catches its breath. So it is this morning in this great bare hall – a silence like a fall of snow, holding the city and the world in a moment of profound reflection, reducing all men to a levelled pause.
The thunder of oratory, the clash of deeds, the head-on collisions of nations, the many thousands of words already spoken about this man, are now halted inside this chamber.
It is a vaulted barn, roofed by Sussex timber, amber-shadowed by its few dim lamps. The harvest is done and the barn seems empty, save for the husk of this mighty seed.
And this, for the moment, is the centre of the world, which no dictator or king could command, a core of sombre radiation and reverberating silence expanding in waves to engage the thoughts of millions.
Those who have waited so long stumble in from the streets, blinking the cold from their snow-flecked eyes. The confrontation is sudden, almost unprepared; the legend too near to be properly focused. Strangely hurried, heads straight, each one files past the coffin in a gentle fluster of emotion. But the scene is lit up as by a flash of dark lightning, instantaneous, never to be forgotten.
He lies on his catafalque, lifted on steps of purple, in a hall built by kings for kings, his coffin wrapped in a flag like a wave of water as if already seaborne for some distant haven.
In this brief and majestic flash of recognition, all men see what their hearts bring with them, just as in life they saw in this kaleidoscope of a man something all of them knew they could be.
For on that shadowed catafalque rests the print of a spirit who when alive seemed to be all things living – who was lover, soldier, artist, wit, master of language and prince of the will, who took fate by the heels and the scruff of the neck and shook it roughly into shape and order, defying its betrayals, indifference and threats, commanding its obedience by obstinacy and bluff, outstaring its mask of disaster till it yielded to victory and danced to the tune he wanted.
This was a man who knew what was possible in men, could touch their nerves with fingers of sulphur, stinging them briefly alive into postures of glory, of sacrifice, suffering and triumph.
It is not sorrow to leave him. For nothing has been lost. This is the shut book of a life completed. A legend to be laid away among those ancestral ghosts who stand guard over a perplexing future.
The winter day darkens. The thousands still come, snow-footed down carpets of silence. The streams divide softly, passing on each side of the bier like water flowing around a rock. Each stream for a moment thins to a single person, alone in his private homage. It seems sufficient to have been here; few glance at the coffin, but gaze ahead as they walk to the exit. Only at the great west door do they pause to look back, their damp eyes sparked by candles – a gesture of almost desperate farewell snatched from the pressure of time, of history, and the crowds behind them. Outside in the winds the other thousands are waiting, their faces pinched and patient. Each one in his turn comes like another candle to the hall. Not since the war has there been such a shared emotion.
Born Survivor
I love the world and all its trivialities, the little domestic details, the post box on the corner, the wet gutters, the leaves, the buses, the sunset.
Sometimes youngsters say: ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ I didn’t ask to be born either. But I’m glad I was.
Because I wrote a book which is often down for GCE in schools, children think I’m dead. Not long ago a girl came up to me when I was sitting outside the village pub and said: ‘Excuse me, sir, can you tell me where Laurie Lee is buried?’
When the time comes I shall be buried in the village churchyard. That’s where my mother is buried. I share my mother’s passionate attachment to this world and all its imperfections.
Knowing that an unbaptized child would be buried in unhallowed ground among the old jam jars, my mother sent for the vicar the day I was born and he christened me that afternoon from a teacup. It was several years before I was officially christened in the church. I could walk by then, made free with the holy water and cheeked the vicar.
Some ancestral toughness, I believe, saw me through that first day. I remained seriously ill for months, never moved, nor cried, just lay where my mother put me, staring at the ceiling, scarcely breathing, in a motionless swoon.
For a year I lay there, prone to many invasions, enough to mop up an orphanage. I had diphtheria, whooping cough, pleurisy, pneumonia,
congestion of the lungs … I collected minor diseases throughout my childhood – chickenpox, mumps, measles, adenoids, ringworm, nosebleeds, nits, earache, stomach ache, the wobbles, the bends, scarlet fever, catarrhal deafness. I had little red eyes I was so poorly and a steady sniff. The village schoolmistress used to say to me: ‘Go outside and sit on the wall and give your nose a good blow.’
I used illness as a weapon. I’d wake in the morning and say I couldn’t go to school because I’d got the wobbles, couldn’t walk – and in the afternoon be as fresh as a daisy. Yet I could be a great walker when I was a boy – three miles to school and three miles back. Sometimes I’d get a stitch. There was one cure for that. You put your foot up on a milestone and kissed your knee. It always worked.
I have never had a chance to talk about my health before. Nobody wants to hear about your illnesses. All they’re interested in is your holiday snaps.
When I was young I had an operation for my sinus at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. There I was recovering from this rather nasty operation with headache, toothache, earache; I was in agony. Yet when friends rang to inquire how I was they were told I was comfortable. I had never been so uncomfortable in my life. I felt rather like a man who was kicked by a horse whose condition was described as stable.
I went back to St Thomas’s Hospital once with a hangover. I was only passing by and wanted a couple of aspirins. But they said I’d have to stay in for observation, wheeled me into a room and said ‘I’m terribly sorry but you’ve got a thrombosis of the leg.’ And I had two operations.
I have had a terror of medical authority – doctors, dentists, hospitals, medical opinions – since childhood. I always think: Please don’t let me fall into their hands. Let me be born at home, stay at home, die at home.