by Laurie Lee
Following that critical challenge to the continuity of the Berkeleys, William reverted to their tactics of lying low. England was still embroiled in the Wars of the Roses. After the murder of the Princes in the Tower and the accession of Richard III, William sweetened the new monarch with a bribe of thirty-five manors; indeed, he went further and hedged his bets by bribing the Yorkists and Lancastrians simultaneously – ‘ayding the one wth men, the other with money, neither of both with his person’. This wily neutrality ensured for William a certain peace, but he was robbed and blackmailed by each of the warring factions every time one or the other of them got the upper hand.
William, twelfth Lord of Berkeley, from having been the victor of Nibley Green, ended by becoming the ‘Waste-all’ of his huge estates. He had no children, so he entailed to Henry VII all the family’s possessions in return for certain privileges and protections. So from his death in 1492, till the death of Henry’s eventual successor, Edward VI, in 1553, the Berkeley heirs were dispossessed of their castle and lands and forced to wander in exile about the country.
Smythe paints a touching picture of William’s surviving brother, Sir Maurice, who fought to the end of his life – by seeking out flaws in deeds of entailments and conveyances – to repair some of the havoc the ‘Waste-all’ had caused. ‘With a milk white head,’ wrote Smythe, ‘in his irksome old age of 70. years, in Winter Terms and frosty seasons, with a buckerom bagg stuffed with lawe cases, in early mornings and late evenings walking with his eldest son between the fower Inns of Court and Westmter Hall, following his law suites in his own old person …’
Berkeley prospered again with the succession of Maurice’s son, who inherited forty manors won back by his father’s litigations. Henry VIII also created him Baron of Berkeley, by writ, and then capriciously appointed him Lieutenant of Calais – probably just to get rid of him while Henry enjoyed Berkeley’s magnificent hunting. The ‘Lieutenant’ died suddenly in Calais, and was succeeded by his brother, Sir Thomas, who had been knighted on Flodden Field and then forgotten, and had been spending his life as a threadbare Cotswold shepherd, ‘without the expectation of inheritance’.
These were the quiet years of rebuilding the estates, when the Berkeleys kept themselves out of sight again. Perhaps one of the last, and most notable, involvements of the castle with history came during the Civil War. Part of the life of Berkeley’s long-lived George, nicknamed ‘The Harmless’, coincided with this uneasy time; and when there appeared to be any danger of his having to take sides, he developed a quick interest in foreign travel. He was caught at home, however, during a critical campaign in the west, when Cromwell’s forces suddenly laid siege to the castle. They had already knocked a great hole in one of the walls, when George came to a rapid understanding with the enemy. No heroics – just his promise that if they did no more damage he would swear on oath not to repair the hole. The Parliamentary forces peacefully occupied the castle, and then left quietly after the fall of Bristol. Over three hundred years later the hole is still in the wall – a visible token of the Berkeley’s word.
George the ‘Harmless’, the ‘Affable’, the ‘Peaceful’, also loved life, ease and culture. He was a patron of Robert Burton, who dedicated to him (rather incongruously) The Anatomy of Melancholy. George’s son, also George, helped in the restoration of King Charles II, and was created Viscount Dursley and Earl of Berkeley. Though Royalists, and living in a whirlpool of violent events in which many great names of England went under, the two Berkeley Georges seem to have emerged with characteristically little damage – indeed, with a certain increase in honours and material profit.
Since the Restoration, the castle may be said to have played no profound part in the country’s history – except for the fact of its indestructible presence on the banks of the Severn.
But going back over 850 years to Robert Fitzhardinge, much can be picked out from the lives of the succeeding Lords of Berkeley in terms of dash, cunning, endurance, courage, sense of camouflage, and occasional scandal. From the very first, the family were vulnerable to the whims of kings, but they survived every kind of treachery. In medieval days, when a knight held his castle and land by mortgaging his life to his lord, the Berkeleys, though dispossessed at various times almost to the status of herdsmen, always seemed to find the golden key to recovery. Some lost their lives in their monarch’s service – another Maurice, for instance, ‘a young lusty knight’, died from wounds received on the field at Poitiers – but generally they had little ambition for martial glory – nor yet for courtly favours or political power – preferring to be left to enjoy their life as country ‘squires’, to the care of their lands and buildings, their horses and hounds.
My Day
My most vivid dream is the last of the night’s – anarchic, voluptuous and loaded with sensual rewards. Yet this morning, as on many another, I am brutally torn from the midst of its heady swoons by the screaming roar of the first 6 a.m. jet plane nosing lugubriously towards Heathrow. Strange how easily we accept that a couple of dozen Dutch and Belgian businessmen, briefcases snapped on some tiny ambitions, are now given this godlike power to murder a million Londoners’ sleep as the machine screams its arrival over the roofs of the city.
The night’s end has been decapitated and I am left with a raw, bleeding hour which not even sunrise can honestly cure. Gibbering anxieties press close, looting the ruins. I repel them, given time, and gather strength. But never to return to those grottoes of cosy lusts which the dawn aircraft so blunderingly shattered.
I grope for the bedside transistor. Commercial radio tells me that an articulated lorry has ‘jackknifed’, blocking both ‘carriageways’, and that there is a four-mile ‘tailback’ in both directions. Most mornings in my sheets I hear snippets of some such liturgy – a broken-down van holding up a thousand cars impotently idling on their luxurious Gulf juices. Announced like the weather, or an Act of God. No complaints, unless British Rail is involved.
7 a.m. The light freshens. The plane trees harden in the square. Morning music starts on BBC3 – the tingling antiseptic earwash of Telemann and Scarlatti – and I come awake at last and am healed. Perhaps one of the most civilized ways to be awakened, this. Or by the breathing touch of cat’s fur, or a child’s fat lips, or the soft, scented fingers of a student nurse from Adelaide.
I make myself some tea and notice again how rankly different it tastes from my weekend Cotswold brew – though the stuff comes from the same branded packet. London tea tastes of metal, the Cotswolds’ of beechnuts, the Welsh of a kind of soapy Coke. As I drink my tea I focus wet eyes on my room. Once large, white and clear, I notice how steadily and remorselessly it is becoming walled-in by books, unframed pictures, packets of other people’s poems, unarranged antique glasses, oil lamps, chests, broken chairs, crucifixes of straw and wood, magazines, boots, spools of recording tape, bits of sculpture and jars full of swizzle-sticks.
Every morning I notice some new piece of jetsam crowding me in. I remember the days when I could carry all I owned in my two hands. I decide I really must get this stuff sorted out. I know I never will.
As I dress, I hear the BBC concert change to a thick symphonic slab of Schumann. Indigestible as beef at this hour of the day. The orchestra plays it with a kind of cowed exasperation. Every phrase is repeated like hiccoughs.
Almost all my clothes are in this room, scattered around on tables, screens and chairs. Some suits have lain undisturbed for months. I choose from the top of the pile, and switch from Schumann to chatty BBC4. A voice says: ‘The time is coming up to ’aff pass tate. The weather in the west will be foggy ’n’ hilarious.’
I shave, peering at the pallid face, vulnerable, lopsided, reversed. In it I see the recognizable shade of my father, whose relationship I denied as a boy, and whose mirrored ghost returns each day at this time to haunt me.
Now my daughter, ready for school, thunders in to say goodbye. Clear eyes, tangled hair, cheeks cool as a sliced apple. She bites my lip, punc
hes me hard in the stomach, asks for 10p, then leaves with a lusty shout.
Next a breakfast egg with the post – the latter so different now. No longer the hopes of sudden glories and decorations, gold from unknown admirers, stumbling declarations of love. This morning brings four identical Time/Life circulars, a political pamphlet, a poetry magazine, an invitation to lecture at Huddersfield (sorry, no fee) and a letter from a schoolgirl saying she is doing a project on my autobiography and will I please write and tell her all about my childhood?
It is time now to enter my locked cell, my workroom, the slope-roofed attic looking across to Battersea. The place is small, snug, disorganized and squalid, with a leaking roof, four kinds of peeling wallpaper, a sagging bookcase, cardboard boxes full of wine and papers, first editions signed by friends long dead, or departed to academic stratospheres, continental magazines, pin-ups and worse. This room is encargoed with defeated poems, old manuscripts, beginnings and ends but no middles, but also the rusty medallions of once bright lecheries and loves, photographs, drawings, Krapp’s last tapes, cupboard drawers fluttering with letters exhaling the heated breath of girls whom marriage has now chastely cooled or plumped into Titian matrons. Little in this loaded room is ever thrown away. There are no visitors. I am its lone curator.
I cross the littered floor to my desk and sit down. Above my head a green bloom of damp is growing. I blow some Lots Road coal dust off a pile of unanswered letters – which is growing too – and prepare to face the unknown. I hover, unable to say what may emerge this morning from my head’s hollow ringing shell. The large desk, of course, is almost invisible under more papers, wine-glasses, boxes of rubber bands, coloured pencils and pens, keys, foreign coins, jugs of scissors, rulers and cigars. This, the freshest point of the hidden day, brings to me a moment of excitement and panic. I find a pencil, and draw some paper towards me. The not quite impossible may be about the happen.
The telephone rings: ‘Mr Lee? You won’t know me, I’m afraid, but I wonder if I could drop by and have a chat?’ Then it’s my accountant, expecting some figures. But I’ve only just sent them. Well, there’s a new lot due already. Oh, all right then. I turn back the virgin page and begin to scrabble through my accounts.
Noon: and a luncheon appointment with a young research girl from television. What does she expect of me, I wonder? Will my new safari suit help at all? I put it on. I look like the cad in the old Tarzan films – the one who always ends up in the crocodile’s mouth.
I have a top-floor flat; I run down five flights of stairs and head for King’s Road for a taxi; passing Old Church Street (once I had a top flat there, too); also Carlyle Square (and an attic there). I remember yet another attic off the Earl’s Court Road, and another, more luxurious, in Tavistock Square. I like the tops of buses, too; and often as a boy I used to climb trees to get away from my family. I wonder why. Pretty obvious really, I suppose.
No taxis in King’s Road; it is suffering from a traffic coronary. There is a gentle purring of engines, but nothing moves. I walk towards Sloane Square. The usual exotics crowd the pavements and drift towards me in the stale Kuwait-laden air; fragile, granny-dressed girls, with frail, waxen faces; tough, livid-lipped thirty-year-old teenagers; Shaft-dudes with narrow hips and hats as wide as their shoulders; and chiffon-bloused models showing the last navels of summer. How poised, dotty and jungle-bred they look. They are tall and cool, and walk with a secretive tribal remoteness. I love their style, idiot fineries and confident sexuality. But in private, I wonder, do they weep, stutter, and write pleading little notes to each other?
I walk through them. They see nothing but themselves – not even the stalled traffic – and I remember the King’s Road when I first came here. Little greengrocers, shoe-menders, old tobacco-brown pubs, workmen’s cafés with kipper-teas for ninepence.
The luncheon is in a Charlotte Street restaurant. It is soft and plush underfoot. The greying Italian waiters have an immaculate air of patronizing politeness mixed with subdued mourning which immediately puts one in one’s place. My hostess arrived only two minutes late. She is attractive, charming, with strong eyes and bright, casually ordered hair. The occasion is to be the basis of a literary interview, and the girl flatters me at first as the unknown quantity I still am, takes notes when I speak, asks reverent questions, nods wisely. Gradually, as the meal progresses and she gets to know me better, she develops that faintly distraught and empty look as of one who would rather be anywhere else but here – say with someone much younger or much older, more dashing or more solemn. Finally she puts things right for herself by asking: ‘Tell me, do people often say how much you look like Angus Wilson?’ Danny Kaye, yes, I think, but never the Old Master. But I say nothing, believing that her asking the question has brought back sense to her meal.
Returning to the flat, I find two telephone messages waiting, both from daily newspapers. What is my favourite recipe? And do I have sexual fantasies? So much easier in the country; they don’t ask you, they just do it.
It is teatime. My daughter rushes in from school and slams me again in the stomach. Her face is flushed, hair wilder, eyes excited and absent-looking. She is in love with Christopher Lee, Count Dracula. I say he is a distant cousin of mine. She bites me lightly on the neck.
Sending her off to do her homework, I set about writing some letters, something I am increasingly loath to do. I can never understand such giants as Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, Shaw, who topped off their ten thousand words a day with several dozen sparkling letters. I find it takes me half an hour to compose a message to arrange a gas meter reading. There seem like such an infinite number of ways of saying: ‘Tuesday morning; 9.30.’
I must prepare to go out again. I am invited to a small, early party in a publisher’s north London back garden. I like to have music while I am changing. There is a Haydn quartet which I find a particularly buoyant sound to go out to. But I put on the wrong tape – spring birdsong recorded from my cottage window over fourteen years ago – blackbirds, cockerels, distant cuckoos, cows, the milkman crunching down the path. All exhalations of that distant life and all of them now dead. No motor cars, buzz saws, juggernauts or planes; just the sound of that quivering, twittering valley, of aimless, unedited time. Hardy could have heard it in all its bountiful boredom. There’s nowhere in England you could record it now.
The party is an open-air, walled-in salad of literati and girlfriends; leaves, faces and voices shadowed by an advancing storm. The dapper publisher wears a bright Malaysian gown, a Midland novelist has a black Russian blouse buttoned up to his white buttoned face. The guest of honour is rouged, excited, charming, red-haired and nearly ninety years old. Blank glasses of Spanish wine dot the garden tables like drying thunder-drops. The flash of cameras alternates with lightning. ‘What are you writing now?’ ‘You can’t want for a penny or two.’ ‘Doing a rewrite, like slicing a stranded whale.’ It begins to rain. I share a garden shed with a girl in a light green dress, but it seems that the shed is also the bar. I am asked to leave. I dash for the nearest pub.
Next to the top of a bus there is no creative solitude like that of a pub where one is not known. I approach the bar. The landlord, reading the evening paper, says, ‘Well?’ and lowers his head again. The starched barmaid, looking over my shoulders, shoves me my drink, takes my pound, and offers my change to a neighbour. Bliss. I sit in a corner and take out my notebook. The limbo of all possible poetry. Crush of strangers, clang of cash registers, mutter of Irish obscenities, all distance and protect me from care or invasion. Phrases and images begin to tick and flicker and run. I fetch another anonymous drink. Then in this supreme privacy of boozy clamour I write effortlessly till closing time.
I walk home and climb the sooty five flights to my flat. It is midnight and I am ready for bed. I have six hours of radiant, supple and nubile dreams before the Dutch businessmen return screaming overhead.
Notes on Marriage
I come from a generation, a class, a habit of behaviours,
in which those who married married for life. Like swans and crows and other uncomplicated animals, consorts once chosen reckoned to stay together always. Among the farmers, farm-labourers and millworkers I grew up with, marriage was not only the inevitable climax to youth, it was also its most solemn occasion, never entered into lightly, often saved up through long years of courtship, because once entered into there was no way out, for divorce in those days was simply unthinkable.
Those lifelong marriages were not without shocks, alarms and desperate entrapments in their early years, but as there was no escape they often improved with age, after the turmoil of raising a family was done. Then would come the quiet running-down into cool retirement, the brief chirruping together like crickets, ending with whist drives, flower shows, mystery coach tours to the seaside, and in visiting the graves of friends.
Marriages of that kind – and they were in the majority – were not imposed by moral judgments, nor by the Church, but by the lasting realities of survival. Marriage was the only way to safeguard an uncertain future: it set up a shelter and brought home the food, bred the children and warmed up the mute dark hours. And in a society that suspected anyone who walked alone, marriage was the first claim for protection by the herd.
Such was the pattern of wedlock which surrounded me when I was a boy, but through history and throughout the world, the huge importance of marriage has overshadowed everything else except birth and death. It is probably the most powerful of human instincts, stronger than love or lust, or the desire to make war or money, or even the simple search for security. Because marriage can exist independently of all these passions, yet all are imbedded in it.
Marriage by capture, by dynasty, by family arrangement or broker, or by the casual choice of love – rituals differ but the urge is the same. Marriage by capture must be the oldest and still most popular gambit, which we continue to venerate in old churchyards by the throwing of rice, and by the tying of horseshoes and boots to the back of the getaway car – a symbol of the bride’s jealous and pursuing kinsmen.