Village Christmas

by Laurie Lee

  Ill fed and ill armed, many of these young men died, the survivors returned home to ignominy. There were no medals from this war, no listing of the fallen among the names of ‘our glorious dead’. But to me this seems to have been the last time that the young had a cause they could believe in and could fight from the heart. In spite of their belief, they were defeated – and in their defeat the thirties perished. The world war followed as night the day, and no teenager has since recovered from it.

  As-You-Were-Only-Better

  They remember me best as I went away, more than a quarter of a century ago. I left as a turnip-faced grinning oaf, and returned last year, a bag-eyed poet, having in the meantime written a book about them. ‘Better mind what you say. He’ll put you in writing. Done it before. His poor old mother …’

  Of course one should never have gone in the first place. It is never really forgiven you. And to revisit one’s roots calls from an upside-down posture which too often proves that the plant is broken.

  After twenty-five years I find the main changes in me and in the villagers’ view of me, but the village itself has come through the revolutions of that time with fewer abrasions than I would have expected.

  The place is called Slad and lies some two miles from Stroud in a bent and secretive valley. The valley is steep, and usually running with rain, and some say you can’t sleep, in really typical weather, for the noise of snails crawling under low bridges. There used to be cloth mills along the valley bottom, sturdy and prosperous places, but they were all washed away in a great night storm in the early nineteenth century.

  I lived in this village until I was twenty and till then knew no other world. I remember it as a place of long steamy silences, punctuated by the sounds of water, by horses’ hooves and mowing machines, sleepy pigeons and mooning cows. Of the thirty-odd families living in the straggling cottages, some worked on the farms, some at the mills in Stroud, but most were in service to the Squire. Wages were small, and families large, and there was a tendency to live off the land – wild fruit was bottled, blackberries gathered, pigs kept, fowls raised, rabbits hunted, pigeons trapped, and flowery wines home-brewed in abundance. There was also an intense and vivid communal life, much preferred to outside allurements, with choir-outings, concerts, harvest festivals, feasts, penny-dances and junkets galore. The neighbouring villages were thought to be full of savages and we beat them if they came our way; Stroud was the market, but shark-infested; in any case transport was poor. For the most part we stayed in our tight green valley, as snug as beans in a pod.

  How is it now? Visually it’s changed very little, maybe a bit better scrubbed round the lintels, but the village still lies in its tree-crammed corner folded deep in the valley’s cool. People move about more, most have some kind of car, and will visit the neighbouring villages with impunity. But the long steamy silences can still recur, when everybody seems to have taken cover like moles. There are fewer children, but much better dressed, and fewer, if any, rabbits, and the stretches of common where they once both swarmed are now overgrown with brambles. Living is tidier, more genteel, more opulent; the pet dog has replaced the pig, the wild plum and apple are left to rot on the bough, the fat blackberry gluts the hedgerow ungathered. With the fading Church and the decayed Big House much of the old communal life has gone.

  Certain traditional evils have also gone with it – the damp and the cold, poverty, malnutrition, epidemics and early death. Better farming, better shops, better jobs and more money have brought the best changes of all. There is less hunger now, less sheer animal drudgery, people have time to straighten their backs.

  Until recently the village lived by oil lamps and wood fires, and cottage windows glowed warm in the dark. Now electricity has come, with its crazy cat’s cradle of pylons, and the place is bright as a surgeon’s knife. One must approve of this; one can also regret; much has been gained but something lost – the shadows in the corner which fed the poetry of children, and a certain thousand-year-old self-sufficiency (for instance, when lightning cut the current the other morning many cottagers couldn’t even make a cup of tea).

  Electricity and piped water are common boons now, but the villagers have been busy with other improvements. These are the details of change, invisible from a distance, but part of the modern purge. Broken-down old cottages have been stiffened with concrete, roofs rain-proofed for the first time in centuries. The family car has condemned many an ivy-clad wicket gate (together with the grandmother it used to prop up) in favour of jazzy contraptions – metal tubing smart enough for an aerodrome.

  Cottage interiors, too, are getting a vigorous clean-up, as though they were relics of a past best forgotten. Old kitchen ranges, once shrines of the family, are being bricked up like mad relations, heirloom furniture replaced by bird-leg contemporary, velvet curtains by surgical plastic, family photographs and daguerreotypes thrown out and burnt in place of china Bambis and celluloid ducks. Some are even taking the bare Cotswold wall, which perhaps had shamed their kitchen for years, covering it with plaster and hanging it with wallpaper made from coloured photographs of a bare Cotswold wall. This quaint improvement, becoming increasingly popular, is known as the Wall Game or As-You-Were-Only-Better.

  Yet in spite of flashier pleasures, and a reasonable restlessness, and the insistent moving-in of the world, the village remains essentially a village, separate as it ever was. A definite though invisible frontier surrounds it and those outside are not quite of God’s choosing. The village and its lore are still the world’s centre, the beginning and the end of truth, and everything that comes from outside is rung on the local stones before its genuineness can even be considered. Those who thought that the television and wireless might obliterate identities will find the local accent unaffected. Children speak it as well as their elders, and it remains untainted save for formal occasions.

  Things I Wish I’d Known at Eighteen

  If only I had known that those strange, complicated, romantical, remote, magic and mysterious creatures who dominated my waking and sleeping were quite simple and uncomplex after all. Girls! They sustained me in a state of anguish and of torment when I was an office boy in Stroud, new-washed as wool and wet behind the ears, waiting to walk out and walk away one midsummer morning.

  I remember Edna down the road saying: ‘But Laurie, I don’t know what you’re making all the fuss about. Take me down from this pedestal. I’m really quite ordinary.’ Touching remark – she was quite right, of course.

  And I remember cycling thirty miles to Worcester to sit all night in the rain shriving my soul outside a girl’s window with a bag of plums. I was enchanted by her Irish beauty. The bag got wet. The plums fell out. And she married a garage man in the end.

  ‘I dreamt of you one April night … when the moon in silv’ry splendour dight … hung poised in a realm of clouds. And all around her, her courtiers in a crowd – the stars – were gathered …’ I wrote this pushing the bike up Painswick Hill. ‘And as I dreamt, you came … floating across the broad pale flame of the Milky Way … to where I lay …’ Oh it goes on! I think that’s enough. I never put it on paper. You wrote in your head then.

  But it was a fruitful ignorance in one sense. Her glow, her unattainability, were the source of all my endeavours at the time. And who knows, without such practice I might not have got into Pseuds Corner in Private Eye.

  There are many other things. I could play the fiddle rather well, but longed to play the piano. I wish I’d learned another language. It would have broadened my reading. Though at that time I did most of my reading at bookshop shelves – several pages a day till I got through the entire stock. You see I only earned 10s a week. Five went to my mother. A shilling for a meat tea on Saturdays – looking for girls of course – and I spent 1s 3d on an ounce of very fine tobacco that had to last the week.

  I wish I could have whistled when I was eighteen – whistled properly. I wish I’d learned to swim. I still can’t tie my shoelaces – I have to wear slip-on sh
oes. I wish I’d learned to run downstairs using both legs. I only use the left leg and fetch the right along. It would be nice to be like those young executives coming out of government offices in films – trip-trip-trip down the steps. My co-ordination is still frightful.

  Similarly, I can’t use the telephone. I didn’t actually speak on the phone till I was seventeen. I had to report a fault on the office line. When the girl said, ‘Hello – can I help you?’ I blushed and hung up speechless. I still find it inhibiting.

  Another regret – perhaps it’s common – I wish I’d been aware quite what a fool one makes of oneself at that age. You have this blind belief that you’ve discovered sex, truth, idealism, the sharpness of questioning the world, rebellion. You don’t realize that you are repeating the questing and rebellion of every generation and you say, ‘God – those old ones seem to have no idea how we feel.’

  Well, they have a very good idea. The old have felt it all, and suffered, and been heroes at the barricade, and have got over it. The young don’t know that the old are merely them. If they humiliate the old they humiliate themselves. It is necessary to question at eighteen and to put up all those ideals to be shot down again – so long as they don’t think they were the first to have them.

  Oh, the blankness at that age … the prejudices … you know … about the villains of this world. Or the ones you thought were villains. It’s marvellous to believe you are the white knight and that those are the black dragons coming over the hill to destroy all that is good. Later you discover that there are no clearly divided goods and evils. The more I’ve lived the more I’ve realized that even the best of us are capable of cruelty if we think it’s in a good cause. Even the worst have gentleness occasionally. People on the whole are better than you think. There is no black and white – just a pathetic greyness in which everyone is trying to find solutions.

  I wish I’d known at eighteen just how my mother felt. I gave her a lot of silence in my teens … didn’t talk to her enough … didn’t listen at the time when the others had gone away and I was the only boy in her life. Possibly there were times when she wished to tell me about her state of health or about the cruelties of luck that dogged her. I tried to catch up later on when it was too late for comfort. I wish I’d had the confidence and optimism to know that she would never want.

  In those days our world was bounded by those hilltops. Our frontier was three miles away and we seldom crossed it. It’s just as well I did walk out. Otherwise I would have been so embraced by this voluptuous countryside that I would have gained no experience of life whatever.

  When I even doubted my capacity to make contact with the other sex – unaware that I would become a rather successful, rather tubby man of middle age – if only I could have been reassured by some fairy godmother – or Madame – that with my little pencil I would be able to feed and clothe these two great glowing engines of health.

  It would have made life easier if I had been told: ‘Relax, boy … relax! You’re going to make it. You’re going to marry one of the most beautiful women in western Europe. You’re going to have this lovely daughter.’

  Chelsea Towards the End of the Last War

  This is not an anecdote but a memoir of a place and a time – empty Chelsea toward the end of the last war.

  I was shaving one morning when the mirror before me suddenly cracked from side to side, at the same time there was a clap of thunder and the sound of some huge roaring vehicle withdrawing in the sky. It was summer, 1944, and the grounds of Chelsea Royal Hospital had that morning been hit by a German rocket. There were no warnings for they had arrived faster than sound and you heard the bomb explosion first and then the bomber going away.

  There was something especially macabre and symbolic about the rockets on London that summer; the tension had gone out of the air raids, there was no waiting now, and people arrived before you knew they were coming.

  I lodged in a house in a square just off the King’s Road – a quiet residence where the landlord and his wife had often gone to bed when I came home from work at nine o’clock in the evening. The girl who rented the room next door overslept regularly and would go to work naked in the morning, just wearing a mackintosh and carrying a basket of clothes so that she could get dressed later on in the train.

  Chelsea was seedy, calm and semi-rustic at that time, with the charm of old paint and large undusted houses. Many had been deserted by their owners and were the haunt of cats and lovers, drunken soldiers on leave, and sometimes all three together.

  Chromium, Coca-Cola and cannabis had not yet touched King’s Road; in many ways it resembled a provincial high street of last century, full of tea shops, greengrocers and family butchers, though the butchers’ windows showed only cardboard cut-outs of sheep. There were also shops selling glass jewellery, billycans, striped utility suits, and sealed jars of chopped carrots and rhubarb.

  There were really not many people about at that time: a number of old activists, war artists and camouflage painters, the widows of artists and vivid ex-models, squeezing out their monthly bottle of gin.

  It was the fag end of the war, a quiet conspiratorial time with no secret lives; we were all in it, and by now we knew most things about each other – we shared and stuffed ourselves on them. There was also that all-pervasive sense of eroticism that goes with the boredom of war, that freewheeling fantasizing that goes with displaced persons who are displaced through no fault of their own. The girls and women fell upon the few men with an urgent and hungry disdain. They tidied the rooms of the bachelors and cooked for them. They took our shirts home at weekends and washed them.

  For a treat I used to take my girls to the café across the road from The Markham Arms, a long crowded old room of pews and rusty tea cooked in a sort of steam turbine at the end of the room. One ate squares of burnt toast tasting of oil-fired lino, and the scented jam was poured from a bottle. Their bubble and squeak had the bulk and leafy interest of the Gutenberg Bible. Their kippers were the best I’ve ever known. Was that the last genuine eating house in Chelsea, I wonder, before the whole place began to fall to pizzas? The Pheasantry was another restaurant, but slightly better class, where you could dine for five shillings.

  Imagine Chelsea as it was, with no parked cars in the street. The long mellow vista of terrace houses with their pavements running smooth and uncluttered, and the streets wider and clear to the eye as they were designed to be. The quiet of the country seemed to occupy the area at that time. The square gardens ran slowly and disordered through their seasons without the help of municipal workers.

  After sundown there were no lights in streets or houses and the primeval darkness came back to London, a darkness which cleared the sky of its raw, neon-flecked glow and returned the sight of stars and the moon to the city. Flower-seeds blew in and thrived on the bombsites and owls sang in the midnight blue. It was a time of strange peace that the war had given.

  The Queen’s Elm

  It is 274 paces from my doorstep, slightly more if the wind blows from the east – a huge blank-faced corner building whose dart-playing public bar is entered from the Fulham Road and its saloon bar from the more classy Old Church Street. Its small swinging sign shows a crowned Queen Elizabeth standing alone in a pasture beside a diseased-looking elm tree.

  A natural site for a pub; one has stood here for more than three hundred years, though its association with the Virgin Elizabeth and an elm is arguable. A Chelsea vicar, writing on local history, records that Her Majesty and ‘her host’, on their way to visit Lord Burleigh of Brompton Hall, took shelter under the elm during a downpour. ‘Let this henceforth be called “The Queen’s Tree”,’ Elizabeth is quoted as quothing – which one can’t help suspecting, under the circumstances, to be a dubiously pompous remark.

  Nevertheless, it is known that a tavern called ‘The Queen’s Tree’ stood on this spot in 1667, dominating the crossroads (one running from the river to Hyde Park, the other from the City to Fulham Village) and refreshing t
he travellers stopping at the tollgates. This humble hostelry probably disappeared with the rubbing out of the tollgates. The present Queen’s Elm, in all its non-committal grandeur, was built in 1914, just in time for our present licensing scramble.

  ‘The Elms’, as it is so often fondly but incorrectly referred to in poems, novels, confessions, dry exile, deathbed reminiscences or moments of what-shall-we-do? ennui, has been my London local for over twenty years. First, because it was the nearest pub in any direction from where I lived; and later, in 1958, when Sean Treacy put his grip on it, because it became the kind of place I should even go several more paces out of my way to reach.

  The inexplicable, often inexcusable, but inimitable Treacy served his apprenticeship at nearby Finch’s, and when he took over The Elms he was still the thin pale western Irishman we had known up the road, with his flair for collecting dedicated drinkers around him, the distinguished, the notorious, the nameless. With his move from the other place he trailed a number of these customers with him, who at first dithered between their two difficult loyalties, but later became the hard core of Sean’s new establishment. And the thin white lad prospered. And The Elms filled up. And over the years Sean plumped out his feathers, purpled, toughened, mixed his drink and friends with astonishing results, and developed that instantly recognizable though slightly bellicose magnetism which now makes him like no other landlord in London. He is a ruthless professional, but drinks on the customers’ side of the bar, scrupulously standing his round. He also has another priceless quality of his trade. He never forgets a face, a name, an anecdote, or a bounced cheque.