by Laurie Lee
The village stands on a hill beside an Iron Age camp built over three thousand years ago. The original settlers, they say, came from the eastern Mediterranean – and clearly their children are still here today. For looking at the old photographs of the dance, showing the various local families dressed in their country suits of holiday – Mrs Gardner and Mrs Cook, in their Victorian poke bonnets, kicking up their heels behind their prancing husbands – I have often wondered at the mystery they were celebrating, whether it might be older than the camp itself, whether perhaps these neighbours of mine were continuing the step of a dance first learned by their ancestors in the labyrinth of the Minotaur.
The Needle dance was peculiar to that village, as though its people were a cut-off tribe. But just across the valley, on the hilltop opposite, they observed a quite different custom. Here, at Easter, they elected a Mock Mayor for themselves, again a strictly local affair, which took place with that mixture of horseplay and pomp which often marks the grave of a once sacred rite. The elected Mayor was usually of humble origins, perhaps a well-muscled carter or blacksmith – a substitute – who knows? – for the mock king of the ancients, the tribal corn god or fertility hero. In the old days, of course, the village would have cut his throat, and scattered his blood to renew the crops. Over the centuries, however, they had grown less rough with their hero, and carried him about in an old chair instead. First, the Mayor was enthroned at the edge of the horsepond and treated with homespun reverence, decorated with flowers and surrounded by psalm-singing villagers, while he splashed their faces with water. Then he was borne through the village to the music of fife and drum playing ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes!’, ending with a slap-up feast at the local tavern – called significantly The Rising Sun.
This was, after all, in the country at least, the true time of the year’s beginning, with the new-sprung green, the return of the sun, the yeast of the Easter rising. Nothing else in the year was so important as this, dramatically balanced between fear and hope, recalling the need in the countryman for a recourse to ancient magic, propitiation, and, at last, rejoicings. Around my Gloucestershire hills this was the common theme, scattered with variations throughout the villages. Then, with Easter gone, came the First of May, and perhaps the greatest Feast of them all.
The month of May in England, so long awaited, is the flower-studded crown of spring, the final raising of the curtain on all we’d been promised, the shimmering threshold to the mansions of summer. Everything, suddenly, begins to happen at once; the woods are brilliant as new-washed salads, mornings are clear as water, skies soft as wool, and nature gives a loud green shout of abundance.
‘Going a-Maying, then?’ we used to ask each other. We’d walk through the fields at dawn, taking great gulps of the milky air, and counting the flowers in the grass. It was spring, they said, when a barefooted maid could tread on seven daisies at once. Our sisters soon proved it, ripping off shoes and stockings; then scrubbed their cheeks in the dawn-wet grasses – that cheap and traditional beautifier of spring, said to endow one with eternal youth.
May the First was for May-walking, for choosing the May King and Queen, and for the setting up of those ribboned maypoles (condemned by Cromwell’s Puritans as ‘those stinking idols, round which they do leap and daunce, like heathens’). It was also the occasion for gathering flowers and branches and for bearing them home in triumph: bluebells, buttercups, buckets of cowslips for wine, wood sorrel, cranesbill, cuckoo-flowers; scented shaves of wild fruit-blossom coated with drunken moths, crab apple, cherry and sloe – anything, that is, except the ashen bloom of the blackthorn, which meant death to the head of the house.
Once upon a time nobody worked on May Day, it was the year’s great holiday from labour, when man straightened his back from his crouched servitude to the soil, his wife left her cave-like hovel, and all stepped forth to join with their neighbours as temporary princes of the earth. In fields golden with dandelions and buzzing with larks, this was their one short day without care, dedicated to ceremonies reflecting those pre-Christian rites that came to England with the first handful of seed-corn.
May Day was the time, particularly in my part of the country, when the people went to the hills, to the sheep-bitten ridges of ancient turf among the encampments and tombs of their ancestors. Here almost everyone came early to see the May sun rise, as though to meet it halfway in welcome, and then to spend the free day as their fathers had, in a semi-pagan rough-and-tumble. The hills were their altars, lifted close to the sky, away from the valley’s shadows and mud, or were stages raised up to the face of the sun to witness a thousand different kinds of pageantry.
There was the hill, near Gloucester, where the young men of the parish used to fight a battle between winter and summer, ending always in victory for the boys in green, crying: ‘We have brought the summer home!’ On another hill, nearby, the village turned out in strength to slay a mock dragon – ‘the flyin’ addard of darkness’ – which came out of the river with horrible groans, and was said to be Welsh in origin. Elsewhere there would be cheese-rolling, foot-racing, wrestling, and the lifting of giant stones. The May games on the hilltops were a kind of village Olympics, out of which the year’s new heroes were made.
One of the most famous of these was probably the Cooper’s Hill Wake, held a few miles from where I was born – a gathering of immense antiquity, combining a radiance of ritual with galumphing country frolics. It began at dawn when the Master of Ceremonies appeared alone on the summit of the hill, a shining figure of light, dressed in a white linen smock and adorned with ribbons of all colours of the rainbow. He must have looked like Lucifer, son of the morning, standing on the hilltop in the early sun, his staff raised high to announce the start of the games, a wreath of flowers about his head.
The games were old and rugged, and so were the prizes; the programme would be nailed to a tree: ‘2 cheeses to be run for. Some herrings to be dipped for. 1 plain cake to be jumped in a bag for. A belt to be wrestled for. Sets of ribbons to be danced for. A bladder of snuff to be chattered for by old wimmen …’ After which there’d be dancing to the fiddle of Gypsy Jack and to the tambourine of his black-haired wife, several hours of hard drinking, with men ‘grinning through horse-collars’, ending with bare-fisted fights down the hillside.
Spring in England, today, may be less robust, with the motor car replacing the maypole. And many of these village ceremonies, unbroken for three thousand years, may at last be fading out. But not all of them, by any means, for some are still kept alive in the games of the country children. Children are the original primitives, the conservative wards of tradition, who act out our racial memories. (It could also be that society, grown doubtful of magic, but unable to ignore it completely, still uses its children as a kind of wry-faced insurance against the possible wrath of the gods.)
In any case, it was the children, when I was a boy, to whom the spring rituals most clearly belonged. It was we who went May-walking, kept the superstitions, turned telephone poles into maypoles, decorated chosen little girls with drooping daisies, and climbed the hilltops to wrestle for prizes. In some of these actions we were encouraged by our elders – those who once would have taken part – the village priest and grown-ups, who stood aside and watched us, like tourists observing the natives.
Just as today, I, too, watch the children of my village intent on their ancient games, and feel the flicker of that original magic, the shafts of light that once raced through my bones, see in the running boys the white harts of the forest, in their combats the defeat of winter, and in some small grubby girl, with her sheaf of limp wild flowers, smiling Flora returned to earth.
For the long English spring, rising to its peak of May, is still a conquering power in our lives. In spite of rubber, concrete and insulations of asphalt, we are not cut off from it yet. Its revolution each year transforms the face of our world, changes the sky, shakes our very roots. Its fragile intensity is one of the miracles of the land, rocking us again with di
squiet and rapture, thawing out for a while even the frozen heart, and warming its pulse to the beat of poetry.
A Place on Earth
Most of the gardeners in my village have powerful ankles, even legs of different lengths, for the place lies scattered down the slope of a valley and many of its gardens are steep as roofs. But there are just a few, belonging to the older cottages, that are somewhat more fortunate, having been levelled and terraced in distant days when time and labour were cheap.
My cottage belongs to this luckier group and has one of the flattest gardens in the valley – long, rectangular, almost austerely simple, bounded neatly by limestone walls.
I came to the cottage in early autumn. The previous owner, an indestructible old lady who had been impatiently waiting to die, had grown bored with waiting and suddenly gone off to the seaside leaving all she possessed behind. She sold me everything – the cottage, its furniture, her family photographs, Bibles and texts, cupboards of hand-sewn linen and a shed full of worm-eaten spades.
The cottage itself was still a going concern, still warm as it were from her presence. But not so the garden; this was a ruined blank, a chaos of antique vegetables – huge crumbling cabbages, onions and spinach knotted into a Bolivian hell.
The whole of the garden appeared to have been planted some ten years earlier in a moment of hungry panic, but either the alarm had subsided or the old lady gone off her greens, for the crops had never been gathered. The self-seeded spinach was like elephant grass, the onions tall as street-lamps, and the monstrous cabbage seemed to be shot through with shrapnel, yet immortal, like something from Mars.
It was virgin territory, profuse and disordered, the best foundation for building a garden; no previous design to inhibit one’s schemes, no extravaganzas one might feel forced to correct. It could also be said that I was as virgin as the garden, so our potentialities were equal, for though I’d lived in this village for the first twenty years of my life, I’d never gardened before. At our other cottage my mother was the gardener; a dominating impresario, who ordered the earth to bloom with a royal wave of her hand.
Exploiting that early example I now set to work to clear this matted rectangle. I began by burning the arbour and all the vegetables – and the village coughed for days. Then I dug the whole area to a depth undisturbed for perhaps several generations. Bushels of broken clay pipes were turned up by my spade, china dolls’ legs, teapots, knucklebones, old coins and cutlery, pots and pans, silver shoe buckles, shattered goblets … It was slow, entertaining, head-down sort of work, reaching back to the roots of Genesis, each turn of the spade releasing syllables of the past and the loamy smell of a long-stored fertility.
Finally I was left with a space of lumpy earth, divided down the middle with a box-hedged path – walled, geometrical, and with a gentle, monotonous slope.
After pondering some time what I should do with it I decided to enclose it further, for though walled, it was particularly exposed to the village, which overhung it like a kind of grandstand. All day jolly voices called out from the banks above, confirming one’s every action. ‘Doing a bit of digging, then?’ ‘Taking it easy, I see.’ ‘Tea in the garden? Some folks is lucky.’ That bankside wall presented no problem, so I began to raise it up, first with quick-clambering roses, rocketing sunflowers and eight-foot hollyhocks.
Next I planned to relieve the monotony of the ground by breaking and varying its levels: raising the borders near the cottage, laying irregular lawns, and planting trees. The cottage faces the length of the garden and stands low on ancient foundations.
From the ground floor, at first, the view was short and rough: merely a close-up of the dripping vegetables. In their place I raised an extended flower-bed, tilted towards the ground-floor windows, with a path driving through it like a railway cutting along which a more distant prospect was visible.
These borders I terraced with dry-stone walls, using stones from a local quarry. They are the perfect framework for a Cotswold garden, their fossilized surfaces full of warm reflections, on which clinging plants and grasses seem to find a second nourishment and glow even brighter when seen against them.
In laying the croquet lawn I was both Crusoe and Friday, forced to employ my own wits and sinews. The old vegetable patch had to be levelled and rolled, but I possessed neither roller nor wheelbarrow. So I used instead the bottom drawer of a cupboard, with a harness tied to the handles. This could be filled up with earth at the top of the slope and then dragged down and emptied at the bottom, and being heavily loaded, served as both roller and wheelbarrow – a device which might have pleased the Egyptians.
Having next scattered the grass-seed, I watched the birds arrive, which they did in storms of hunger. Freelance bird-scarers, of course, were also short in the district, so the only answer was to build one of my own. I tied some noisy tin plates to a zigzagging clothes-line and led the end through my study window. With the rope tied to my desk I could give it an occasional jerk without interrupting my work – a long-distance tug which rattled the plates in the garden and kept the birds’ nerves on edge.
Once the lawn was established I found that it swept the eye to an anticlimax at the end of the garden – the rhubarb patch, the broken wall, and the neighbours’ flying washing. I screened this by planting some Michaelmas daisies, another clump of eight-foot sunflowers, a trellis of Sander’s White roses, and a Clematis montana trained up a strategic clothes-post. To these I added an old stone urn (a relic of a local manor) designed to stand like a bowl of perpetual fire, full of geraniums, against the tropical rhubarb.
The next stage in the break-up of the comparative severity of the garden was to scatter small trees around, so I began with a trailing willow, a white lilac and a cherry, and a peach set against a wall. The planting was a ritual, accompanied by stomping feet and the pouring of wine on the roots. (I had no wine for the willow, so used salad oil instead, from which the tree has only just recovered.)
Having set the garden in motion, started the roses to ramble, and given the borders their first year’s bulbs, I then tackled the front of the cottage – a square of old limestone fretted with four small mullioned windows. At first it was bare, save for an ancient climber that had withered to a cat-like claw. This I nervously pruned, then added an Albertine by the porch, a white clematis on the other side, stuck in a shoot of wild honeysuckle under one of the windows and put a wisteria by the southern corner.
This done, I sat back to watch the slow green fire lick its way up the side of the house, to smother the porch and blot out the windows as traditionally it was supposed to do.
That was three years ago; but even a cottage garden they say needs seven before its roots are happy. Even so, I feel mine to be settled, having already taken its future shape. The face of the cottage is already half-embowered, a shaggy banner of tangled creepers. This is the high green altar, while the rest of the auditorium is walled by pink and white roses, climbing up pillars or spread on trelliswork, and over-topped, here and there, by the sunflowers.
These walls, with the cottage, form the four enclosures, between which the garden gently riots. There are now two lawns, at slightly different levels, patches of calm among the flowers.
These are chosen from memories of other cottage gardens, before the seed catalogue introduced its other excesses – the hybrid freaks and other Latinized fancies, neon-hued or mottled like ulcers. Early snowdrops, violets, crocuses and tulips are followed by equally simple though rampant colonies – pansies, snapdragons, sweet williams and petunias.
Later still, at the very height of summer, the creeping ground-fire of the nasturtium takes over, pouring its molten tendrils into every crack and crevice, licking up drainpipes, posts and walls, even climbing the stems of the standing roses and lying hotly among their blooms.
I prefer this vigorous and native anarchy to a more careful regimentation, that which sets things in rows, at graduated heights, like bored children at a school inspection. I wish for no hothouse exoti
cs, no brisk changes of display brought from the nursery every second week. The pansies, snapdragons, petunias and nasturtiums continue to flower from May till October, are a constant presence, a slow-mounting tide, an impression of eternal summer.
Apart from these and the roses, I have taken up some of the space on the grass by setting flower-tubs around on benches, which stand high and can be moved about at will, altering vistas or masking blank corners. A lofty tub of geraniums, in the right position, can be a Lucifer of morning, catching the early sun above the long low shadows and lighting the day’s first fires.
I must think of my garden without delusion; there really is not very much to it. Confined, it cannot hope to be a landscape but at best a pillared and roofless temple. It is new and small, but its face is formed and begins to look beautiful to me; a kind of beauty that is sometimes difficult to share – like showing the neighbours one’s holiday snaps. Yet that homegrown rose, though only a rose to others, remains for oneself a miracle of personal godhead.
And there are the other private and indestructible pleasures which one can only know alone the continuous mornings, going out before breakfast to examine each plant for minute advances; the flattery of the bees visiting one’s own sown flower; the bird resting in one’s planted tree; and the hours bent down, working over the garden’s face, close-up, at child-level once again.
Such a simple obsession may be the refuge of one’s years, the desire to keep a finger in time, a brief hand in creation, to play a minor god, or even to come to terms with death. I only know that small as my garden is I again have a living root, that even for me something can come to perfection; that I still have a place on earth.