by Laurie Lee
It can begin with that special look, line of cheek and shoulder, the silhouette that stops one dead in the street.
It can drag you out of a train and force you to take the one going in the opposite direction because of a face seen in the carriage window.
At its most extreme, it can make one leave home, change jobs, even change one’s country. Its force can be so personal no one else will be aware of it, yet it can entirely direct and rule one’s life.
In my case I have been split by two opposing obsessions, occupying two sides of my nature and reverse sides of my fate. They may have sprung from dreams, from inheritance, or something going back to the doorways of childhood, but I recognized them first at my village school. They were as different from each other as noon from midnight, but they have kept me perilously balanced between them.
One was pretty gold-haired Rosie with her tight-petalled curls, sticky mouth and air of portable sweetshops. The recurrence of this healthy, romping, innocently carnal little blonde has been with me like perpetual summer.
The other I first saw in the pub-keeper’s daughter – something sinuous, slant-eyed, oriental or Celtic, with hair as black as slate or the oils of Oman. The Rosie image has always been one of scampering pleasure, of a kind of creamy pastoral wantonness. But from what deep crevice of the mind did the dark one rise, that she should so incessantly command my senses?
I remember the pub-keeper’s daughter and the first sign she gave me, that blank almost basilisk stare, and the brooding hold of her body, with me on the school wall, watching, struck dumb to the marrow, knowing that something terrible and everlasting had started. She was the first imprinting of that symbol which I have constantly met since, in flashing glimpses or in longer possessions under different names and in different places, in India, Spain, Cornwall, London.
Looking back, I see this recurring image as one of the preservatives of love, a succession of occupations by a spirit unique to herself and to which all one’s passions belong. I don’t say that this way happiness lies (believing mere happiness to be one of life’s shallower experiences).
This hovering visitation need not always be a physical presence. It can be a quality of mind, a way of regarding the world. But for me, trapped all my days in my double helix, slowly spiralling between sunlight and shades, the stronger and most compelling has always been the dark one, her panther tread, voice full of musky secrets, her limbs uncoiling on beds of moonlight.
Why this should have been my allotment I shall never discover now, but whoever she is, wherever she came from, in spite of her treacheries and long dismembering knives, she has kept me alive beyond the dreams of apathy, and honoured me with a love more than normal love.
Not everyone requires, nor seeks, the stimulus of the recurring image. They are content to be without directions. But for those of us who are branded by this particular mark, at least we know where we’re going.
We are going, as it were, on a series of seasonal journeys, the climax of which is simply returning home.
The Street Where I Grew Up
Home for most of my youth was a thick-walled Cotswold cottage in the village of Slad, near Painswick. There were seven children, three inherited from Father’s first wife who died young. In those days, cottages were called by the family name, so ours was Lee’s Cottage.
I was dumped into the long grass, aged three, and left grizzling among the beetles and grasshoppers. I lived there until I was nineteen and left home to see the world and make my fortune. I knew every flower, weed, stoat, badger and bird. Not many people know that in Slad the blackbirds sing with a Gloucestershire accent. When I returned after twenty years’ exile I heard the blackbirds’ accent and knew I was home.
Our cottage looked up a steep bank to a road that was built in the eighteenth century. This road was our social centre and playground, where we’d spin tops, roll marbles, play five-stones and chase the girls. There was no danger from traffic because there wasn’t any. If a cart came, we’d see it half a mile away advancing in clouds of white dust. It was a great event when the wagoners drove by, bringing timber from the woods and pulled by as many as six horses.
My billowing sisters used to run up and down like butterflies, and the village women climbed up their steps and gathered in inscrutable, garrulous bunches to gossip about scandals, disasters and love affairs, clicking their tongues and rehearsing the age-old histories of village life. I only have to list the names – Brown, Green, Webb, White – monosyllabic names which were derived from wool-weavers, for me to be transported back to that intense intimacy which I shared with that community.
Lee’s Cottage was, and still is, shaped like a T. Part of it was inhabited by two old ladies who we called ‘’er up top’ and ‘’er down under’. They were very cantankerous towards each other. One would hop up and down on her floor to create a disturbance and the other would bang on the ceiling with a broom.
I remember watching one as she combed her hair and saying – you know what kids are like – ‘You’re going bald, gran.’ Cackling, she replied: ‘I got more than ’er down under, the old faggot, she’s as bald as a potato root.’
My mother wasn’t very good at cooking. We all crammed into the kitchen for porridge, lumpy baked cabbage, bread and marge with sugar on it and lentil soup which was like eating hot, rusty buttons. On Sundays we sometimes had a rabbit which a neighbour gave us.
At the village school I learned poetry that I’ve never forgotten. Neither have I forgotten the girl whose hand I held as we sat at our desks, and who was the gateway into the extended world of sexual awareness.
But I have something rather shameful to confess which I’ve never admitted before. When I was eleven, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Trees organized an essay competition, and our teacher told us to choose a bird or tree, study it and write an essay. I found my prize-winning effort, called ‘The Dabchick’, among some old papers the other day. Written in copperplate handwriting it starts: ‘The Dabchick or Dipper haunts streams and ponds and is called Dab or Dipper because it dabs or dips its bill in the water …’ And from this point onwards I am cheating, making it up, as I describe the nest-building habits and the way it feeds its young etc. I certainly never consulted any books; not a word is accurate, yet I got a medal for it, presented by a teacher with moist eyes.
My father left us when I was tiny and I always hoped that he would come back. I still have all the love letters he wrote to his first wife, which my mother kept. She treated her predecessor with a certain amount of reverence – obviously you can forgive someone who dies young. But I don’t forgive my father. I remember him coming home when I was about eight and Mother saying, ‘Oh Reg, can’t we make it up?’ and I knew with icy certainty that this would never happen. Mother used to dress in her best silks and play the piano on summer evenings, and I thought that this was the time he should have come down the path and back to her. I knew I ought to embrace her as she played, but I never did.
When war came, Father bought himself a bulletproof vest, but never saw active service, and after the war he claimed pension money. He’d send a form which my headmaster would sign. One day I was asked what my father’s wounds or disabilities were, and, as I didn’t know, I asked Mother who said that he was ‘partially incapacitated’ which, I now suppose, meant ‘nerves’. So the next time I took the form, I said to my headmaster: ‘I understand that my father is partially decapitated.’
When I was eleven, I wanted to learn the violin. There was a violin hanging on the kitchen wall but no bow. Mother wrote to Father asking if he could buy me a bow, but there was a very slow response. Meanwhile, I attended lessons, learning the fingering but without a bow. I still have my music teacher’s report which says: ‘Lack of a bow has spoilt Laurie’s chances at playing the violin’, which is rather like Nureyev’s teacher writing on his report: ‘Lack of feet has spoilt his chances of becoming a dancer.’
In those days, the seasons affected us. Winter and summer we
re different countries. During the long languorous twilights of summer, we kids were outside playing chase and hide-and-seek throughout the length of the valley until – and I know I’m sounding a bit idyllic – the final setting of the sun.
In winter, we took refuge from the elements by gathering together in our kitchens, heated by brushwood fires, lighting candles and oil lamps and sitting round sketching, singing, chatting, my sisters sewing; no wireless or TV to distract us. We led marooned lives, marooned by nature and by lack of transport. What it all boils down to is the growth of my consciousness, of being the height of grass, dominated by beetles and birds; and later, people, seasons and emotions. Slad village was the centre of my universe.
These days, I sometimes walk past Lee’s Cottage, now called Rose Bank. It looks much the same and is known locally as Laurie Lee’s Cottage, though I haven’t been inside for sixty-one years and though my present cottage is further along the village. Some Londoners moved in twenty years ago and no doubt found the garden a tangle of redcurrants and syringa. They have been greatly pestered by pilgrims who have read Cider with Rosie, who stare in the windows and take snaps. I know that they have found living there a bit of an imposition. When my book began to sell, a chap up the road, a bit of a rascal, said: ‘If I’d known then what I know now I’d have bought that cottage and opened it up for cream teas’, and I thought to myself: ‘I’ve made it, at last.’
The road is now a racetrack for the local Ford Sierras and children can’t cross it. Every cottage has one or two bloated blowfly motor cars encroaching in their gardens, and at the time of day when women once congregated to natter about the joys and griefs that reflected the history of that small community, people now stay indoors to enjoy a second-hand history: The Archers, Emmerdale, Neighbours, written by manipulative scriptwriters in their city offices. I don’t want to sound an old curmudgeon, but soap operas are no substitute for real community life.
King Charles Lane is still there, where King Charles came through on his way to relieve the Siege of Gloucester, and so is the oak tree, called the King’s Oak, which I used to climb as a boy. The sun and the moon still rise behind a certain clump of trees. You can look across the valley and see fields and hedges which have been undisturbed since Elizabethan days. There’s still the hill with two great quarries from which came the stones that have built most of the walls and cottages in this valley.
The three-centuries-old Woolpack Inn is still the village focal point, though these days it has a ‘Cider with Rosie’ bar. I was an imaginative lad, but I could never have foreseen such a turn-up for the books – in fact, my books are sold in the pub.
Pupils who are studying Cider with Rosie often arrive with their teachers to be driven round the village in minibuses for a Cider with Rosie tour. I was sitting outside The Woolpack and two young schoolgirls said: ‘Excuse me, sir, can you tell us where Laurie Lee is buried?’
To which I replied, ‘You’ll find him buried in the public bar most days.’
But it gave me a great shiver of mortality because the churchyard is just across the road from the pub. My mother is buried there and a sister who died at four, and I expect to be buried there myself.
I want to go back. It’s my valley and I want to be returned to the soil and the roots from which I was born.
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin...
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks
Listen to Penguin at SoundCloud.com/penguin-books
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk
PENGUIN CLASSICS
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in Penguin Classics 2015
This collection copyright © The Trustees of the Literary Estate of Laurie Lee, 2015
‘My Day’ copyright Laurie Lee/Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
Cover photograph: © John Gay/English Heritage/Arcaid/Corbis
ISBN: 978-0-241-24368-8