Village Christmas

by Laurie Lee

‘That milk-’orse I ’ad; ’e used to like music. Martial music particular. A dismal beast, but if ’e ’eard a band playing ’e’d step out like a warrior.’

  ‘Funny, that. Like this Bedford of mine. I likes to sing when I’m driving. Well, that engine changes tune just when I wan’ it to – he can follow anything.’

  Father Doon’s soot-black face had changed with the beer, washed clean round the lips.

  ‘I’m back stokin’, y’know. It’s no good, I just love it. Can’t keep away from it somehow.’

  ‘The Stokers of ’Ell they call ’em,’ said the son. ‘You should see the togs they wear. Top ’ats with the lids bobbin’ up and down, odd boots, a slipper, a clog. The fire draws the nails right out of their uppers, true as I’m standing ’ere.’

  ‘I must of read ’undreds and thousands of books down there. Ain’t much to do between stoking. I was readin’ one night, young Gerry was with me. He was starin’ around, all nervous. Suddenly he says, “What’s that, dad?” I could see ’is eyes poppin’ out. I says, “Them’s the spirits of the dead what ’ave died on the job. Just keep quiet, an’ don’t say nothin’.” There’s this boiler, see, up the end of the passage, and drifts of steam come dancing along. Then the draught might change, and the steam hangs still, ’alf up in the air, a-watchin’ you.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Gerry, ‘and wi’ a gurt cowl on top. Horrible, an’ that’s the truth.’

  ‘There’s hundreds of crickets runnin’ up an’ down them boilers. An’ rats – but I don’t pay attention. One night young Gerry brought me down me supper and started shootin’ the crickets with a pistol. He was still a-shootin’ of ’em at four o’clock in the mornin’. Had to walk back to Whiteshill on his own.’

  ‘Whiteshill were a shade different then,’ said Gerry. ‘We ’ad it all sewed up. Any outside chaps come a-courtin’ our girls ’ad to pay us a gallon of beer. None of the police never came near us. Dad once threw a chap down the quarry.’

  Father Doon displayed his battered right fist with its swollen, coagulated muscles.

  ‘Them’s the marks of ’is teeth. He were beatin’ my pal. Course they’ve shut a lot of the pubs.’

  ‘I was born in a pub and got married in jail. Now come on the lot of you!’

  Men bowed, bowed down, and put on their cycle-clips. Pockets were loaded with bottles …

  (It was early one morning at the break of the day,

  The cocks were a-crowing, the Farmer did say:

  ‘Come rise my good fellows, come rise with a will,

  Your horses want something their bellies to fill …’)

  ‘See you tomorrow then. Shan’t change, of course. Though it ain’t that I ’aven’t got it.’

  (Then seven o’clock comes and to breakfast we meet

  Of pork, bread and mutton so merrily eat,

  With a piece in our pocket away then we go,

  We’re all jolly fellows that follow the plough …)

  ‘Can’t get no sleep. It’s them damn mice a-gnawing.’

  ‘Give ’em Rodine – that’ll croak ’em.’

  (Our master come to us and this he did say:

  ‘What have you been doing all this long day?

  You’ve not ploughed your acre I swear and I vow

  You’re damn idle fellows that follow the plough …’)

  ‘Come on, Bert – put a sock in it.’

  Mr Moss and Mr Hawkes followed their dogs through the door. The valley was dark outside.

  ‘Listen,’ said Mr Silver. ‘Listen what I goin’ to say … I’ll give you a half-crown to take me ’ome …’

  The Last Ten Years

  A decade in the country can slip down the gullet with the deceptive smoothness of an oyster. Yet the last ten years have marked rural life more than anything done to it for centuries.

  Ten years ago my home village in the Cotswolds was very much like it had been in my childhood.

  In 1954 we had a noisy village school (doubling as a village hall), a busy communal life, a noticeable absence of motor cars and a mildly dazed vicar-in-residence. On late spring evenings, while the men forked their gardens, their wives trumpeted ‘Jerusalem’ from the schoolroom. There were regular dances for the young (to ominous cries of ‘yeah! yeah! yeah!’), whist drives and occasional ‘socials’.

  Then, almost stealthily, the changes began. The school was closed, and by the same stroke we lost our village hall. The playtime voices were stilled, the dances and meetings stopped and the school auctioned off as a desirable property. So the children lost, as did the rest of us, our village centre, and all were driven back upon less-shared diversions.

  The once free-ranging children are now ferried to the town schools in the mornings then back in their sealed buses to family television in the evening. Footpaths grow over where folk have the lack of will to tread, and with the death of the rabbit, jungles sprawl on the commons. The great beechwoods and fields, once immemorially open to all, are slowly being boarded and barbed-wired by the farmer.

  As for the farmer himself – suddenly he realizes that he is one of the lords of life. With new machinery and techniques, he commands his worlds, buys up his neighbours, burns his stubble and hedges, batteries his hens, concentrates his pigs and yields the once sacred act of harvesting to the travelling ‘contractor’.

  Money, mobility, the city-financier’s slide-rule, the bulldozer, changes of habit and faith, the big battalions of the brewery and the motor car industries – all these in the last decade have redesigned the landscape and country life. Many village pubs have been closed and most of the survivors degutted and relined with false beams and Costa Brava ironwork. Most local breweries have disappeared together with their happily multi-flavoured beers, to be replaced by the gaseous hiss of keg bitter which now blankets the lands.

  Some things have not changed, have even taken on stronger emphases and value: the care of gardens, wine-making and gossip, the annual rain-drenched fête and flower show. Though most elm trees, alas, are dead or dying, there is still that incomparable light falling on the pastoral scene, streams jumping with fish, woods full of unpackaged birds and at night the soft pad of the badger.

  Chelsea Bun

  When my mother sensed that the time had come for me to leave home, she suggested, halfway between a giggle and a sigh, that I might do worse than go and live in Chelsea. She was a country girl, had never strayed far from her roots, but to her, a great reader of romantic novelettes, Chelsea was a place of high-tone fantasy, of bearded genius, swooning beauties, and garlanded studios overhanging the river.

  I’d only thought of Chelsea as a football team and a currant bun, but I took Mother at her word, believing I was carrying out some secret instruction, and when I set out to see the world I settled in Chelsea towards the end of the war, and have lived here, on and off, ever since.

  I began with a bedsit in Markham Square, the top-floor window commanding a history of time. My friend and landlord was the Keeper of the Public Records Office, a cultured and careful man, who, in order to save fuel, went to bed at sundown and read Proust by the light of a saucerful of glow-worms sent up from the country in jam jars.

  Chelsea, then, had no cars, few people, and vast emptying skies enlivened only by steam from Battersea Power Station. The King’s Road had curled old ladies selling needles and thread, workmen’s cafés serving kipper-teas for a shilling; upside-down butcher’s shops, with meat hanging under the counter; and dairies with china eggs and cardboard cows decorating otherwise empty shelves.

  I don’t suppose Chelsea differed, in this regard, from anywhere else at the time, but it had that distinguishing presence my mother’s instinct had promised, and Markham Square certainly was a compact little enclave of oddities, a fringe gathering of painters, poets and muses.

  Halfway through the morning I’d see Dylan Thomas, like a plump, furry little mole, pop up from his basement opposite and go padding off to the pub. If we met in the street we didn’t speak, but nodded. I was teetotal in t
hose days, and certain lines were drawn. Two doors to my left lived the incomparable James Cameron, and we used to play the violin and guitar together. Not well; but those were days of no discos and little public entertainment, and sometimes we hired an old pony-trap and toured the streets in a selfless attempt to enrapture the populace.

  Further up, Elizabeth Smart, her face emblazoned with light, mothered the happy brood of George Barker’s children; while across the square, issuing nervously from some mysterious recess of his own, the poet Paul Potts, a tall, stooping figure, stumbled his way to the shops. He caused me no offence, but thinking there were too many poets around, I took a shot at him one day with an airgun. The pellet hit him in the foot, he leapt in the air, turned round and berated some innocent old woman behind him, and left immediately for the Hebrides.

  In Markham Square I saw the last days of the war, with German bombers dropping cascades of coloured lights, Chelsea never looking more beautiful, all-night parties in Victorian coal-holes, and sunken cheeks in the morning. Chelsea grew increasingly deserted. One bright August evening I stood in the middle of the King’s Road and shot an arrow from The Markham Arms to the old Town Hall. It bounced unhindered up the empty street. Only a stray dog stepped out of the way.

  My quiver empty, my arrows spent, I moved into Edna O’Brien’s house in Carlyle Square – though unhappily our habitation did not coincide. It was the late forties, early fifties. The last all clear had sounded. People returned to their abandoned houses. Chelsea took a long deep breath and prepared for pleasure, and began to put on paint like a debutante. Women shrugged off their square-rigged shoulders and military suits and became beribboned and cuddly again. A bachelor then, I was occasionally visited by girls in loose Hungarian blouses. While from downstairs in the basement one heard slaps, shrieks of laughter, and the padding of bare feet on the floorboards. Sex had never seemed more carefree or funnier.

  From the winter grey of war, Chelsea was turning its expectant face towards that pleasure dome it so hoped to become. But in those early fifties, before the Conrans and the Quants had slapped down their manorial rights on the place, there still remained remnants of that elegant village Mother had imagined Chelsea to be – T. S. Eliot, in clerical hat and dark mackintosh, pushing John Hayward round the streets in his wheelchair, Eliot slightly bent and listening to Hayward’s incessant chatter as though eloquence was the vehicle’s chief propellant. Then Sir Alfred Munnings, in hacking jacket and jodhpurs, striking the railings with his riding crop; Epstein hurrying from his studio showered in sky-blue clay; Edith Sitwell walking in reverie … Her brother, Sir Osbert, lived a few doors away, a man of deceptively livid appearance, even when some children and I, one bonfire night, put a flaming rocket through his first-floor window and burnt a hole in his Elizabethan arras.

  All gone now, that lot. Even the long-legged schoolgirl who used to deliver my newspapers on rollerskates and was later to marry a lord. I married too, and moved to Elm Park Gardens, several streets away.

  This three-sided square of kipper-coloured houses was stuffed then with the families from the bombed East End. The last time, perhaps, for such a select Chelsea garden to ring with the jungle-cries of the scab-kneed poor. No ‘Simons’, ‘Samanthas’ or ‘Clarissas’, yet, but ‘Sids’ and ‘Berts’ and ‘Brendas’. The boys, scrub-haired and nutty-headed, sons of the coastal marauders of western Europe, having drifted upriver on tides of generations; and their sisters, sharp-eyed, squinting, sly and seductive: ‘You a hundred yet, Mr Lee?’

  All day the boys played cricket in the road, and the girls chalked square games as old as Byzantium. Or stood on their heads in the garden in squealing rows of stalky thighs and blooming knickers.

  Mid-fifties, pre-television, perhaps never again in Chelsea would families live out of doors on summer evenings, children playing, mothers gossiping on doorsteps, chewing hard-peas and shrieking with laughter, babies rocking, dogs barking, cats slinking, pigeons panicking, while short bantam husbands, settling their caps and mufflers, trotted away down to their pubs.

  Among this rollicking community I was privileged to rent a small flat in a house owned by the Chelsea Housing Improvement Society, a discreet little charity devoted to preserving the past and to which my slender cultural pretensions endowed me. Next door a young painter, of some renown and promise, lived with a wife of whom he was coldly and clinically jealous. He kept her locked up in the basement, and took her out twice a day to the gardens, and told her to run up and down. This done, he took her home and locked her up again. She turned out to be a better painter than he was.

  Before the coming of the sterilized wine bars and the brewer’s boardroom of extravaganzas, Chelsea offered a treasury of little rusticated pubs – The Potter, The Markham Arms, The Eight Bells, The Cadogan, The Roebuck, The Man in the Moon, and Finch’s. The Eight Bells had Trog with his band of Trad Jazz upstairs, but otherwise into the sixties most of our pubs had scrubbed institutional tables and benches, with Battersea mums and dads drinking their twinkling stout in happy silence and swinging their short legs a foot from the floor.

  Towards the mid-sixties the tribal cries of the East End kids were silenced, they and their families swept up into the council’s new filing boxes down World’s End way. We were not to hear their lively calls again. The dumb, parked motor car began to occupy their chalked games and scuffed playgrounds, and with them a new breed of money.

  In Chelsea, especially, money and the inchoate days of returning peace created a space to be filled with pantomime, plumage, sensation, invention and show. There was a more opulent tribalism now which, reacting against the uniformity of war, rejected, then reflected, in increasingly extreme forms, more frenetic group uniformities.

  Teds, skinheads, boys in braces and bovver boots, Mods and Rockers, a pretty fluttering of miniskirted girls, Twiggy models like boys, a sweep of Samanthas in pantaloons from the hunting shires, then more lately the grotesqueries of Punk. Chelsea Punk, where it was fathered, suggested revolution, and at the beginning perhaps it was; but now it seems to conform to its own diktat as regimentally as all the others. At first one could but applaud these cartoons of protest – the secret zips and leg-straps, pierced ears and noses, electrified hair and hints of self-flagellation.

  Punk – commercialized and domesticated – is now just another fragment of Chelsea graffiti for which we can still feel some declining affection. But at least it let in the girls, so they could walk hand in hand with their men, each stamped black as Lucifer in their chains.

  We’d seen all this expanding, in spurts of ebullience, from their drab, end-of-the-war beginnings to their kaleidoscopic present, from the day when Quentin Crisp first stepped through pools of fastidious disapproval along pavements now blocked by his unremarked imitations.

  Over the years we’ve watched Chelsea emerge from its quiet, cultured chrysalis to the diamond-dotted butterfly it has now become. It has passed through its stages of transformation, from greenery-yallery to Reject-Habitatory, meat pie and mash to Pizza Express, from beans with everything to jeans with everything, second-hand bookshops replaced by little-rich-girl boutiques customarily named ‘Ibiza’ or ‘Shangri-La’.

  Chelsea is rich now, one of the prime oil-gushers of London, its fame and fantasies lubricated worldwide by fashion-sheets, films and the jet plane. The old pubs have been deloused, degutted, carpeted and tinselled, their names the only remnant of what they once were, like the names of old towns since violated.

  Almost permanently scaffolded, Chelsea still has some handsome old houses whose value increases three times a day – inhabited by handsome couples, tall, tanned and double colour-spread, with permanently scaffolded marriages.

  A place still almost completely unchanged since its founding, by Whistler and friends a century ago, is the Chelsea Arts Club towards the north end of Old Church Street. A small door in a plain wall opens into something only Chelsea could offer, a charming little house of taste and antiquity – reading-rooms, billiard-
rooms, bedrooms and dining-rooms all hanging with excellent pictures of the founding time. And beyond that all a walled garden past belief: trees, lawns, fountains and a resident tortoise.

  When I first joined the Arts Club, in the late 1940s, membership was almost entirely confined to artists, their models and mistresses, their varnishers, picture-framers and agents. It was leisured and usually half-empty. Now the Arts Club has suddenly become The Place To Be, and almost any evening you’ll see a coloured crowd pouring through the small plain door like bees drawn into a hole – dark-suited workers, bright striped drones, royal-jelly-fed beauty queens. The past and the present are preserved in the Club, from white-whiskered artists to sugar-fringed models.

  Meanwhile, up and down Old Church Street wander the tourists, maps in hand like Minoan clay tablets, asking: ‘Vich vay, pliss – the Chelsea Road, yes? The King’s Road, pliss?’

  I love Chelsea – after all, it’s my second home – but for all its slick shops and restaurants, licensed to print T-shirts and money, it has largely become a parody of what it imagined itself to be, a place to which people travel great distances to find themselves taking photographs of each other, an arena almost entirely filled with spectators.

  The Shining Severn

  When I was a child, so young that I hardly knew what water was, I remember lying on my belly on a Cotswold hill, surrounded by grasshoppers and cardinal butterflies, and gazing through the long grass at the Gloucester plain below. The plain had a great shining piece of sky in it, a curving, glittering sheet of sky above which blue mountains rose like the landscape of heaven.

  I was lying on a hill above Stroud, and this is the view I saw, and the curving piece of sky I was looking at was the shining river of the west – the Severn.

  The Severn is the second largest river in Britain. It curves in a great shining loop through five western counties, and for ages has been the frontier river separating the hill tribes of Wales from the successive invaders of England. Let us go down to the hills of Wales, to the fountainhead of this river, and follow its course to the sea.