by Laurie Lee
With the dynastic marriage, so close and sacred were its bonds that only the wedding of brother and sister could hold Ancient Egypt together; while often through the centuries the enlargement of kingdoms and empires was due as much to careful marriage as to outright war.
As for the family-arranged marriage, working either way, by bride-price or by the bride-to-be’s dowry, the girl who costs twenty cows is surely that much more cherished, as is she who brings some wealth to her husband, and nothing is thought more likely to keep the marriage bed warm and secure, at least so the theory goes.
Last and most tenuous is marriage for love, which seems strangely to be an invention of the more temperate societies – that reckless taking on of another’s life, based on little more than a sudden leap of the heart, a sweep of young limbs, or a glance of the eyes. Here one embarks on a journey with no cargo on board, no maps, and only perishable food.
Throughout the long and complex business of marriage, marrying for love appears to have been a comparatively recent idea. But romantic as we are, or wish to be, it is clear that there are huge dangers in this whimsical habit. From a traditionally arranged marriage love can often grow; marry at love’s peak and where do you go but down? Very often it is the last love that lasts the longest, the first that gets early frosted.
Social changes, it is said, don’t just happen gradually but in sudden lurches, forward or sideways. The last dozen years, especially in the richer countries of the west, have seen a spontaneous loosening of the marriage ties. The spread of social security, super-gadgetry, processed food and the pill have released a generation from domestic bondage. Sexual relationships now are relaxed and easy and can be slipped in and out of like sleeping-bags. In the past the country peasant required the labour of wife and children to work in his fields and survive. The city peasant of today, nourished on canned food and canned music, needs little else in order to live.
Fidelity, in my youth, was largely a question of bad roads and poor bus services – the crack-up began when we began to move about. Now mobility and overcrowding offer so many alternative choices and proliferation of loves that faithfulness to one person almost suggests dim-wittedness. Societies, classes, races, even religions, have begun to mix, overlap and soak into each other in a way unknown since the days of the Romans.
The birth of modern polygamy had at first a somewhat formal announcement: ‘He for the fifth time, she for the third.’ A marriage ceremony is no longer necessary when changing one’s partner, a line in a gossip column is sacrament enough.
Could one of the reasons that persuades so many to turn away from marriage be that so little remains constant in hope or faith in the future? Is it also an inevitable reaction against legal vows and promises, the wish to share an equality of choice and consent? Certainly there are a multitude of couples living together whose very lack of marriage bonds seems to bind them more strongly.
But brave and easy as these experiments in life-sharing may be, who knows what has been gained or lost? I believe that those who break, even courageously, the ancient laws can still bring down inexplicable disasters upon themselves. The wrath of old gods outraged, with names no longer known or remembered, tears at the fragile happiness of lovers. Most accusing of all are the children, to whom all experiment means disorder, and who are crippled when the family frame is broken. The children, wide-eyed and silent, close to the voice of the gods, they know the laws and they watch and judge. They are also the sacrificial victims of their parents’ follies, and every marriage cold-bloodedly, or even light-heartedly, ruined, marks the child with a wound that bleeds for life.
Bernard Shaw once defined marriage as something combining the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Although he could have said the same of landlord and pub, marriage of course is more than that. It is the capsule in which one travels some two-thirds of one’s life, and which, when stuck to, gives the family a strength and logic no other social arrangement can offer. In spite of our recent juggling with the rules, it is the truth we come back to, the axis on which we balance ourselves, the only cure for that dark curse of sterility and solitude to which man is naturally born.
But to my mind a successful marriage, in spite of its scars and disorders, is an experience timeless as rolling day into night, a state of being where one is free to float among the other’s familiar silences, to engage occasionally in the stimulation of combat, but most of all the peace of living with someone who has become one’s native country, whose perfect climate is unknown till one leaves it.
End of a Long Summer
In the streets and squares of London now, and in the chill blue misty parks, they are sweeping up the leaves of one of the longest, lushest summers in London’s memory. The weather, of course, is one of Britain’s oldest tribulations, and one of our oldest jokes. But this year has been no joking matter. Every dream and nostalgia of what the ideal impossible season might be has this time been amply fulfilled, and London has been blessed with a miraculous succession of bright hot days which has set everyone grinning stupidly at each other as though they could just not believe it.
London’s usual summer is sweet and piercing short, a thing as temporary as young love. Five days of successive sunshine would call forth front-page headlines in the newspapers, and amazement on all sides. But five or six days were usually the limit. Then the skies would darken and the harsh rains fall, and we would all put on our mackintoshes and feel normal again.
But not so this year. This year has been unbelievable, historic, something to write poems about. Not just five days of it, this time, but five times five and double that again. Morning after morning we have woken up to see a bright and steady sunshine gilding the streets of this ordinarily grey city. Day after day we have watched a tropical sun climb from the smoky horizons of unclouded blue. Evening after evening we have been able to walk in the warm amber light of perfect summer sunsets and to feel a mysterious assurance that the next day would be as good.
It has all meant a great difference to us in this city. For one thing, life has been able to come out much more into the open. Schoolchildren have been able to run half-naked in the parks, their chubby bodies turning brown as country apples. After work, during the long soft evenings, we were able to lean from wide-open windows and to get to know our neighbours – often for the first time in our lives. Café tables with brightly chequered cloths – a most un-English sight – began to appear on the broader pavements of Chelsea, Kensington and the Edgware Road, where lovers could sit in the golden air, drinking sweet coffee and gazing at the unfamiliar sky. Even that most conservative of characters, the British workman, often forsook the shadowy interior of his pub to drink his black beer in the open street.
Yes, it has been a poem of a summer: ice cream was never creamier nor more desirable, the pigeons never fatter nor drowsier, the policemen in their tight blue suits never more breathless. A voluptuous enchantment seemed suddenly to encompass puritan London and it opened like a rose. Suddenly everyone began painting their houses. Rooftops and window-ledges dripped with flowers. Gorgeously designed coffee houses, full of parrots, monkeys and exotic plants, began to spring up in every street. And shopgirls in vivid cotton dresses seemed to spawn like butterflies on the pavements, each one more beautiful than the last. Indeed, this summer has brought something like a visual revolution to London life, and London, during the past three months, has seemed at times almost like a Mediterranean city.
But London cannot be, nor would ever wish to be, anything but itself. It has taken this happy weather to its heart, felt the better for it, and translated it into a fresher pattern of its own enjoyment. A mixture of old and new is what is most typical of modern London, and one of the symbols or focal points of this contemporary spirit can be found on the south bank of its busy river, in the new Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park. I want to tell you about this place, because it seems to me to embody something that is significant to the light side of London life.
Batte
rsea Park Gardens were born some four years ago as part of the great 1951 Exhibition, and nothing quite like it has ever happened in London before. In conception this pleasure ground is revolutionary, a thing of delicate and exotic fancy, with echoes of Kubla Khan and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though planned as a temporary residence, it has already become one of London’s summer institutions, and this year it has come especially into its own.
Sensual, lyrical and quite unashamedly devoted to pleasure, each year, now, it re-opens with the spring, lies free for us all throughout the summer, and, with the falling of leaves, is locked away until the following spring. And so, because I wished to say goodbye to the summer we have had, in a place which I identify with London’s summer, I went to the Garden the other night, on the night of its annual closing. And a bright scene met my eyes.
The Garden with its flowers, fountains, pavilions and golden spires was enclosed in the ripe warm light of an autumn evening. The bridges leading across the river, and the river bank itself, were strung with lights like coloured fruit. Music whispered from the tops of painted turrets, and floodlit fountains turned languid jets of water against the sky. Here and there, on the tops of fretted columns, sculptured bamboo figures stood on tiptoe like dancers engraved in light. Mobile waxworks laughed shakily from among the trees. An avenue of small shops, gaily striped like the tents of Arabs, offered for sale all kinds of pretty merchandise. Nearby, in a red-bricked open-air theatre, a circus with ponies and painted clowns played to a gathering of enchanted children. In cages among the flowers were screaming parrots, peacocks, pheasants and birds of paradise. And at the far end of the Garden, bright and brassy beneath the smoking chimneys of Battersea Power Station, the Funfair awaited our pleasure with roundabouts, rifle ranges, coconut shies, sausage stalls, switchback railways and lighted wheels revolving in the sky.
It was the last night of summer, and the Funfair was a snare of light and excited voices. A bright-eyed crowd, light-footed with pleasure, was there in festive force. There were mothers with leaping children, proud fathers laden with prizes, sweet-faced shopgirls nibbling doughnuts, Indian students in vivid sarees, laughing Negroes, grave Chinese – all the multitudinous and varied elements of a typical London crowd, and all out to have a good time. Some were shooting bottles, throwing darts, playing skittles, firing arrows; others were screaming on swings and roundabouts or sedately eating plates of vinegary seafood.
So the gay night passed. Under a rusty moon on the banks of the liquid Thames, it was a fine end to our long summer. The children trundled homewards at last, dragging their footsteps, exhausted with pleasure. People drove singing away on buses. The lovers lingered awhile under the dying lights. Then the gates were finally closed, and winter officially began.
That winter must come, of course we know. But fortified by this splendid summer London, this year, is ready for it.
AUTUMN
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Harvest Festival
Last weekend, while on a visit from London, I struck gold in the Stroud valley. For chance, and the coincidence of time and weather, conspired together to show me the district at its autumn best. The sloping fields and crested beechwoods were bathed in a rich sunlight more radiant than the airs of Greece: apples and pears dropped like gifts into my hands, and the clear stone cottages shone like temples upon their hills and hollows.
Never had I seen a landscape more tender, more inexhaustible in its variety, more jewel-like in its reflections of sky, leaf, stone and water. Since leaving the district, more than twenty years ago, I have travelled through some forty countries, but I know now that the green crumpled valleys around Stroud are unique in their beauty of contour, intimacy, pastoral charm, and in the shining light that fills them.
My visit fell at a perfect time, and for two days I walked through the honey-coloured valleys, contrasting their September glories with my earlier recollections of them. And in spite of my incurable leaning towards nostalgic excess, the district had never seemed more beautiful than it did now, glowing with the ripeness of yet another harvest.
Then on the third day, which was Sunday morning, I suddenly heard hymn-singing from a church. As a boy, living in Slad village, harvest festival had always seemed to me to be the crown of the year, an occasion of richness and thanksgiving, when one felt closer to the mystery and benevolence of the earth than at any other time. So on this glittering, chrysanthemum-scented morning, I went eagerly into the church, seeking the ancient magic I remembered.
It was a good service, and had obviously been planned with devotion. But it differed somewhat from the harvest festivals I had attended in my village days. Some of the changes were even for the better. For instance, the choir was big, well rehearsed and sang excellently. And to the traditional benches of men and boys were now added rows of cap-and-gowned young girls joining their sweet but different presences to the once inviolate harmony of males. This, I felt, was an improvement: but they also sang hymns I’d never heard of, taken from the hymn-books of an edition much later than mine, and this left me in the cold. More significant still, the choir far outnumbered the congregation, which was composed of one old verger, a spruce young sidesman, a few mothers and children, but no obvious harvesters anywhere. But by modern standards this was not too serious, for I know many churches where the parson alone outnumbers both choir and congregation.
As for the decorations, they had been made with care and taste, but were somewhat restrained in quantity. A dozen tomatoes were arranged across the altar, and in front of it stood a loaf of bread and two handfuls of short-strawed wheat. In a corner lay a bunch of carrots, three onions and a pot of homemade jam. Elsewhere were jars of Michaelmas daisies, strings of red creepers, and a marrow.
‘The valleys stand so thick with corn that they do laugh and sing!’ sang the choir. Listening to these happy words, I thought this is true, so they do, and these gifts are their proper symbols. But looking around these handsome urban walls I could not help recalling, inevitably, Slad Church and the harvest festivals of my youth.
History and progress has changed the emphasis of our lives, and it is too late to complain. But how heavily and abundantly was our small church loaded then. The cream of the valley was used to decorate it. To pass through its door, those festivals ago, was like crawling into a cornucopia, a laden granary, a grotto of bright flowers. Its familiar walls seemed totally obscured by the gifts we had culled from our brimming fields and gardens. Four great stocks of wheat stood up before the altar, together with round ornamental loaves as big as cartwheels. The altar itself was piled with golden apples. Bunches of grapes, from the squire’s own vines, hung blue from the lips of the pulpit. The fat round pillars which divided the church wore skirts of barley and cowls of yellow flowers. In the deep window-ledges, matted with leaves and moss, sat mountains of pears and plums and gigantic marrows. And thick on the floor, wherever there was space, lay scrubbed and shining vegetables.
But perhaps the richest harvest of all was the congregation. Everybody from the valley was there, from shuffling greybeards to tottering babes. Farmers sat square in their hairy tweeds. Young cowmen choked in their tight cravats. There were mothers and maidens, dads and boys, spinsters, bachelors and cranky hermits – but all had come to give thanks for harvest, and almost all had some claim on the land. And as we sat in our pews, waiting for the service to begin, our eyes sought proudly the gifts we had brought, the pick of our year’s husbandry: and a mysterious excitement, as old as man’s sojourn on the earth, began to well up within us.
I remember one particular occasion which perfectly sums up this almost pagan feeling. I was sitting beside my brother Tony, who was then about three years old. It was the first harvest festival he had ever attended, but he’d heard much about it and his expectation was huge. The air was thick with the odours of fruit and flowers. The choir was fidgeting in the doorway, ready to start its procession. Tony gazed round the church with rapt and glistening eyes. Then, in a moment of utter si
lence, just before the organ cracked into its first hymn, he asked in a loud ecstatic voice: ‘Is there going to be drums, eh? Is there going to be drums?’ …
It was a natural question, innocent and true. For neither drums, nor cymbals, nor trumpets of brass would have seemed out of place in those days. As it was, we bawled out thanksgivings at the tops of our voices; and even when we had to sing, ‘all is safely gathered in’, knowing full well that one of Farmer Lusty’s fields was still rotting in the rain, this minor discrepancy didn’t seem important. What was important was the feeling of magic that we, living intimately with the earth, always experience when we joined to praise, once again, its everlasting bounty.
That was how it was. It is not so any more. But the ghosts of those old hymns sing through us still, though the bill of our gratitude must now be expressed in things other than wheaten sheaves. Meanwhile, the grassy combes and wooded crests of the Stroud valleys do not change, nor their rioting flowers, placid silences, nor the purple distances seen from their hills. And in spite of all the power and richness of modern life, it is here I most wish to be, where the landscape offers its endless festivals to the eye and to the spirit, perpetual harvests.
On Craftsmen
We are a starved society living in the midst of plenty. Our possessions are many, our serenities few.
If we look at objects fashioned by the hands of craftsmen, we instinctively recognize something we need, something we may almost have forgotten existed any more – something designed to keep us human. For the handmade object is one of the last visible defences of humanism left to us, and the craftsman ministers to our most basic spiritual needs.