Village Christmas

by Laurie Lee

  The materials he works in – wood, stone, clay, iron, living wools and natural hides – are still those divine materials of the earth for which there are many substitutes today, but no replacements. His products are the result not of the juddering steel press, die-stamp and reeking chemical synthesis of mass production, but of human skills and judgments which have filtered down into these pages, into this moment, through unbroken generations of eyes and hands.

  It is this we are in danger of losing forever – the virtue of the handmade object, whose making yields to no factory speed-up, but is the loving product of the master craftsman, of silence and slow time. In robbing man of the use of his hands, mechanization mutilates his spirit also.

  One of the most monstrous heresies of our time is that vandalism is permissible in advances in the name of that hideous and unholy trinity; speed, efficiency, economy! So the naked pylons straddle our beech woods, the crude entrails of the powerhouse erupt by the village church, and those ghastly palings of wire and concrete strangle ten thousand miles of our roads and fields. The use of such shabby materials may save shillings in upkeep, while meanwhile whole landscapes are permanently corrupted.

  It is in the face of such influence that these craft goods are so important. They are no cosy reminders of the past, but issue a revolutionary challenge to the mechanistic squalor in which we live.

  ‘Look at us,’ they say. ‘We are expensive; we took a long time to make. But we are beautiful, and will last for years. And there is not another one quite like us in the world, for we are made by hand.’

  Letter from Britain

  The evenings in London now are chill and mysterious. In the sky and streets there is a blue autumnal haze. The last flowers of summer have been cleared from the parks, and the Government window boxes in Whitehall smoulder with gold chrysanthemums. It is October; and as the first breath of winter begins to kindle the fires and boilers in a thousand shops, offices and public buildings, London settles down under its smoke to prepare for the coming cold.

  And London, with its lights, fires, smoke and multitudes, can be a cosy place in winter – much cosier than rainswept fields and dripping woods. And it’s not only man that finds it so. For this is the time of year when a strange visitation begins to occupy the heart of this great city – a comparatively recent visitation, but mysterious, wild and un-citylike.

  Any evening now, if you walk up from the Thames Bank into Trafalgar Square – that broad space of fountains where Nelson’s Column stands – you’ll hear, above the roar of the traffic, a rushing of wings and a bright high squealing of countless chattering tongues. They are sounds that will stop you in your tracks, and as you stare, amazed, at the buildings and the sky around you, you will see, not one, but tens of thousands of birds. For Trafalgar Square has become a gigantic roost of starlings – in fact, during the last few years it has become one of the biggest roosts in the country.

  Together with a million other city workers, I find strange food for thought in this nightly apparition. For though this district teems with human workers in the daytime, very few people sleep here at night. Night is the signal for a great migration; in a couple of hours buses and trains carry the whole million of us away to the suburbs, where our homes are; the shops and offices are locked, and the streets become empty. It is then that the practical starling takes over, coming in from the country, where he feeds, to occupy, each night, the roofs and walls and window-ledges of the buildings we have deserted.

  It might almost seem to be an ideal arrangement, designed to make the most of this small and crowded island. Except that the starlings consulted no one about it, and carry no baggage, pay no room-rent, and display, in fact, an easy-going anarchy that is the envy of all and the despair of the city cleaners.

  Starlings are a bright and cocky breed of bird, and their international relations are in very good order. Every year, great flocks from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, even the icy plains of Russia, slip smoothly across the frontiers and come to winter in Britain. They set up great roosting grounds in the countryside, but seldom visit the towns. It is the British breed, accustomed to the cosier sanctuaries of the place, who have taken to roosting here in London. And because they have so increased in numbers during the past few years, it’s not just the occasional treeful in the park that we see now, but buildings blackened with twittering throngs that even the most down-to-earth of city-dwellers must close his umbrella now and stare up at them and wonder.

  And it is with a peculiar mixture of wonderment, half-pleased, half-worried, that he views this gigantic occupation of his man-made buildings. It is as though the world of birds had suddenly broken loose from its remote and traditional settlements and decided to muscle in on man’s own territory. It brings to the Londoner the same feeling of uneasy excitement that he might get if a herd of Dartmoor ponies were to take over a block of flats, or if swarms of wasps suddenly began to leave their nests and settle in all the letter boxes in the town.

  In my case, so far as the starlings are concerned, something very like this seems to be happening here. The other night, instead of hurrying home as usual, I stayed for an hour to watch. Let me try to give you a picture of what I saw. As the sun went down from a pale-blue autumn sky, swift scurrying little flocks of birds began to come in from every point of the compass. I stood below Nelson’s Column, and they came in low over the roofs in tens, twenties and thirties, like handfuls of black pennies, like spots before the eyes. Then, because the evening was fine, or just for the fun of it, they began to join forces and circle above the Square; massing, dividing, merging again; climbing and swooping, but in such miraculous order, and in such numbers, that the eye was made dizzy with their rhythmic complications. They swept the sky like bursts of grapeshot, they bombarded Nelson’s statue with black confetti, they settled thick on rooftops, then blew away like dust. Londoners, homeward bound from work, missed their buses and almost got run over, standing to see the sky above them all veiled with birds like a storm that never broke. And still the birds massed and multiplied in the air; condensing, one moment, into a small black cloud, then spreading out into a vast floating web so tenuous at times it seemed to cover the whole sky.

  What I saw then, you can see every night. It is always the same. As darkness gathers, the flocks break up and drop down to their roosts. Then the face of the National Gallery, St Martin’s Church, Admiralty Arch, and all the shipping offices down Cockspur Street are suddenly veiled as though with antic Spanish lace. The slender scaffolding above Charing Cross Station is threaded as though with beads, and the trees in the Embankment Gardens sag with dark loads like fruit.

  It is then that their chatter starts, and the noise is terrific. The buildings squeal and twitter with it, and it rises steadily in excitement till the sound of the traffic is swamped. And, it has to be admitted, it is a happy noise; while the birds sit in their tight rows along the eaves and window-ledges, feathers sparkling, heads turning, wings folding and bodies settling for the night.

  With the coming of darkness, the electric advertisements glow and flicker, and the lovely fountains by Nelson’s lions rise and fall in showers of floodlit silver. And still the starlings sit and chatter, loving the lights, as excited as children. I can’t think when they get any rest at all. I was coming home quite late from the theatre the other night, and they were still at it. I stood and listened, and a stout motherly old lady in a bus queue nearby cocked up her head and gave them a stern but affectionate glance. ‘Them birds,’ she said. ‘They ought to be asleep.’

  And that, I suppose, is the attitude of most of us towards them – affection, mixed with concern and wonder. The sanitary authorities, of course, feel less indulgent, and wish they’d never come. In fact they have thought up all sorts of devices to discourage the birds, from nets and supersonic rays to nightly alarms of flares and banging rockets.

  But here they still are. Every night, as we go home, they take over. And as they shower down out of the evening sky we are stirre
d by strange far-off instincts at the sight of them, reminding us of other worlds and other ways. They suggest, among other things, how slight are the frontiers still between modern man and nature. For if starlings can occupy so spontaneously the heart of a city, might not man just as easily go back to roost in trees? ‘Just think of that,’ says the clerk to himself as he climbs to the top of his bus. And for a moment there is an old primeval glitter in his eye.

  Return to Stroud Secondary Modern School

  I woke in the cold dark of the November morning and began fumbling miserably for my clothes. A point of pain in my groin, which I’d not felt since boyhood, started replaying the old excuses for not going at all.

  I’d have preferred to revisit my village school, but that had been scrapped several years ago. So I borrowed my daughter’s satchel and set off for the old secondary modern – not the usual three-mile run through the rain in dripping shorts and split boots, nor the occasional rusty grind on the family bicycle, nor yet the hot flesh-and-rubber creak of the bus more recently laid on by the council, but, for the first and last time, by car.

  The handsome redbrick complex of education islands still lies athwart Stroud’s western meadows. Architecturally and by sexes they remain an archipelago, and are now academically joined.

  Wishing, like Odysseus, to retrace the final stage on foot, I asked to be set down at the end of the lane. The tuckshop on the corner, once a casket of jewelled sugars, was now a bulldozed and rubbled space. I slouched up the lane. It was 8.45 a.m. Morosely I stared at the backs of the schoolgirls’ legs. What I remembered to have been encased in thick black lisle was now dipped in the sheerest nylon.

  I approached my school’s iron-toothed and engulfing gate. How often, unprepared and unannealed, had I been sucked in and chewed up here? Half a lifetime later, how would I be received? As a middle-aged freak or total stranger? A small boy approached me with an armful of books. ‘’Allo, Laurie,’ he nodded, and passed on.

  The assembly bell rang and my scalp immediately prickled with old anxieties and compulsions to obey. I hurried with the other boys to the Assembly Hall where we paraded in unnatural silence. A murmur arose from somewhere. ‘You’ll not be told again!’ thundered the chaplain. It seemed that it was me who was doing the talking.

  The Headmaster arrived; the masters lined up by the wall; somebody hit the piano hard. The Head prayed for the unsuccessful; then we sang ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, during which a polite boy lent me an upside-down hymn-book.

  Since my time, the main school had grown by a kind of cellular action, adding mini-expanding huts and Terrapins. Which class would I like to sit in on, they asked – French? German? Physics? All of them unheard of in my day; I chose English.

  I would have preferred to slip in unnoticed and to follow my usual grubby evasions – drawing nudes, scribbling verse or just dozing. But as I entered, the whole class rose to its feet like guardsmen and the master shoved me up front where he could keep an eye on me.

  He was a gifted man, with a prowling, challenging style, snapping out questions like a prosecuting counsel, but he managed to keep the class in a state of unrepressed eagerness, all crackling with impatient answers.

  It was at this school, in this lesson, at the age of these boys, that my formal introduction to English ended. This morning we did some spelling, and I still got ‘achievement’ and ‘protein’ wrong: then, after tackling a verse of Tennyson, I asked to be excused.

  I headed straight for the locker room – that boot-smelling, crushed-grass refuge with its original wooden lockers still gaping like raided tombs. The whole school, battened down to its morning tasks, was humming drowsily like a coastal oil tanker. With ears cocked for that always possible and fatal footfall of exposure, I crouched in my old corner and knocked off a couple of beers.

  Reckless now, with the empties rattling about in my satchel, I went brazenly into the Headmaster’s study. In no way impressed by the empty gesture of bravado, he asked the chaplain to pour me a cup of coffee.

  Together they had dug out for my inspection the old school logbook, opened at the appropriate page. In the faded handwriting of earlier, less amiable headmasters, it recorded the dates of my arrival and departure from the school. ‘Term completed’, it added lamely, but between the dates nothing, no honours or failures, nor even a ripple of scandal. Indeed, I had left no mark on that school, not even my initials scratched on a wall. I had been a hider, a watcher, a fence-sitter, a no-risk-taker, committing myself to life’s embrace only during after-school hours. So this morning, to make up for it, not only had I gone swigging liquor in the locker room, I also went, uninvited, and rang the handbell for break …

  Sacred moment of power, reserved only for prefects, a dizzy status I never achieved. Now, at my signal, lessons stopped, doors flew open, masters sped to their hideouts, boys streamed out on the tarmac. I joined the boys for football but we fell about too much, so they pinned me against the wall. ‘Give us your autograph, then.’ Well-chewed biros were offered, but they seemed to have nothing to write on except the flyleaves of hymn-books. I found myself scribbling: ‘Bless Kevin’, ‘Praise Keith’, ‘May Grace Fall on Garry’, or ‘Pray for Laurie Lee, a Sinner’.

  ‘You ought to be writing gags for Morecambe and Wise,’ sniffed Garry, snatching back his battered ballpoint.

  After break I slipped into one of those supreme temples of our maleness, the stand-up WCs pitched against the High School wall – magical and inexplicable siting, from which one could hear the throb of the girls at their games, or watch the sweet curve of their netballs rise above the sheet-iron fence.

  I went next to the History lesson. My original desk was still there, and I was allowed to cram myself into it. I recognized the ribbed grains of the wood, like old dried kippers, the blots and knife-whittlings, and the claw-marks of boredom. The last time I’d been here we were doing Assurbanipal of Nineveh, this morning it was Hammurabi of Babylon; the boys were at least a dynasty ahead of me and were manifestly enjoying Hammurabi’s codes of law – all about knocking people’s eyes out and keeping women in their place.

  I shared the first sitting at lunch with the Headmaster and his lady, and were served by a bright extrovert who claimed I’d been to school with his great-uncle. He had a plaster cast on his left hand inscribed ‘I Love Julie’, with other mottoes. Alas, we had nothing like such style in our day.

  We didn’t have such excellent food, either; we brought our own, wrapped in brown paper – sugared margarine sandwiches or perhaps a crinkled apple. Some of the better-off farmers’ sons might bring chicken bones or cake, and what they threw away we fought for.

  As the schoolday gradually closed for me I began to count how much and how little had changed. Rooms and corridors, pictures on the walls, even the masters were the same (with their jackets and flannels and enthusiastic, half-despairing energies). But the boys were a new breed altogether. My mates had been a lumpy, rough, rather grimy lot, all shapes and sizes, like potatoes grown among stones. Today’s pupils were polite, witty, noisy, well dressed and many with an extraordinary smooth beauty which we did not have. They had a dash and a confidence too, being now part of the grammar school next door and having access to a sacred turf we were never allowed to tread.

  But they’d been robbed of one thing, I thought. When the day’s lessons were over, buses would sweep them instantly back to their tea and television. They would not know, as we had, the languors of the slow walk home, with a couple of girls at last freed to join us and the pleasures of climbing the valley together, on foot, throughout the seasons, while pursuing the endless after-school investigation of each others’ minds and bodies.

  The Recurring Image

  Of all the aberrations that propel the driving force of love, one of the most mysterious is that of the recurring image. Who could it be, this chosen one who constantly haunts you, who you follow in a lifelong pursuit, this face and figure that obliterates all others and whose magic works only for you?

 
; A friend of mine, comfortably married for years, suddenly left his wife and went halfway round the world to marry another who could have been her twin.

  Miss Elizabeth Taylor seems always to wed the same dynamic gold-digger, Miss Brigitte Bardot to dote on the same languid youth, while Tommy Manville’s thirteen brides, when you study their photographs, are as identical as a row of knickerbocker glories.

  What can be the source of this image which enters one’s heart and imagination with all the regularity of the visiting moon? We seek it and hold it, marry and remarry it, or just love and leave it to search for it again. But where, in the beginning, did this phantom spring from? Obviously the ideal can approach one from many separate paths, uninvited, unsuspecting, unknowing.

  It could be the quite ordinary figure whose chance appearance coincided with a moment of first sexual arousal. Or the never-to-be-forgotten ghost that sleep chose as a companion to share one’s first erotic dream. Or the search could be for a girl whose face most closely resembled that rosecheeked schoolboy whose sweeping eyelashes and fresh-scrubbed innocence first stopped the heart and taught one what beauty was.

  Although many of us have been spared this particular fixation, most have witnessed its effect on others. Often with some surprise or even cynical resignation: ‘Can’t think what he sees in her, myself’; ‘Surely not another gamekeeper? – or ski instructor or Swedish starlet or priest?’ ‘What a very odd couple, my goodness.’

  We may not understand it, but it would be wrong to discount it, for the recurring image is one of love’s most permanent guardians. On whoever’s head the flickering flame may fall, and no matter how often it may dance from one to another, the lover will recognize it and follow it steadfastly in a paradoxical act of lifelong fidelity.