I Can't Stay Long
Laurie Lee
* * *
I CAN’T STAY LONG
With an Introduction by Simon Winchester
Contents
Preface
Introduction by Simon Winchester
PART ONE
True Adventures of the Boy Reader
Whitsuntide Treat
Eight-Year-Old World
A Drink with a Witch
First Love
An Obstinate Exile
Writing Autobiography
PART TWO
Love
Appetite
Charm
Paradise
The Firstborn
The Village that Lost its Children
PART THREE
Hills of Tuscany
Spain: The Gold Syllable
Mexico
A Wake in Warsaw
Ibiza High Fifties
A Festive Occasion
Gift from the Sea
The Sugar Islands
Voices of Ireland
Arrack and Astarte
Concorde 002
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
I CAN’T STAY LONG
Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter.
Laurie Lee published four collections of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poems (1960). His other works include The Voyage of Magellan (1948), a verse play for radio; A Rose for Winter (1955), which records his travels in Andalusia; The Firstborn (1964); I Can’t Stay Long (1975), a collection of his occasional writing; and Two Women (1983). He wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography: Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991), which are also published by Penguin in a single volume entitled Red Sky at Sunrise. He died in May 1997.
Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, The Map That Changed the World, Krakatoa and The Surgeon of Crowthorne, among many other titles. In 2006 he was awarded the OBE. He lives in western Massachusetts and New York City.
To Pen and Virginia with love
Preface
For some considerable time now I have had spread around my workroom floor odd piles and packages of manuscripts – the result of a generation of occasional prose writings – which have increasingly seemed to me, as I continued to trip over them, non-negotiable in more ways than one.
At last I thought that the best thing to do was to gather them into a book, or at least a selection of them – partly as a means of clearing the barnacled chaos of my room but also as a way of revisiting dimly remembered experiences and exercises.
I had not re-read a number of these pieces since first I wrote them – some as long as a couple of decades ago – and what strikes me most strongly about a lot of them now is their confident enthusiasm and unabashed celebration of the obvious.
There may be a simple explanation for this. When I first left my country village, at the age of nineteen, I found an outside world that was sparkling and new. The astonishment and pleasure at what I began to discover around me has continued almost undiminished to the present day. Hence the tone of voice of many of these pieces.
I suppose the selection, on the whole, is a kind of scrap-book of first loves and obsessions. It is roughly divided into three parts. Part One covers some early recollections of my country childhood and my departure from it. Part Two contains certain abstract considerations of love and the senses, and more immediate experiences of birth and death. Part Three is simply devoted to a series of voyages, arranged more or less in the order in which they happened. Many describe visits to places in which I found unclouded warmth and welcome, when to be a traveller was not yet to be just a labelled unit. They are therefore, for the most part, memorials to times and countries whose best is probably past and gone. Jet-tourism and war has finished off most of them. Prosperity has fortunately fattened but irradicably changed the rest. I think I was lucky to have known them when I did, before darkness began to fall from the air.
Introduction
The tendrils of Stroud’s suburban blight reach northward for far too long beside the narrow laneway of the B4070. By the time the road sign announces the village of Slad, and all still turns out to be pebble-dashed bungalows, you feel the familiar sense of dejection at the creeping death of English loveliness. I had come to the Gloucestershire countryside from America, and had so wanted the place of Laurie Lee’s early years to be all that I had imagined, with cider orchards and ample Rosie lookalikes sleeping softly in mounds of sweet hay. And yet as the road lurched northward, it clearly wasn’t.
Except – hold on a moment. There was a sharpish turn to the right, and I pulled in to a muddy layby to let a lorry pass. When I emerged back on the road I could see a steep river valley to my right, with a vivid green wall of hills, coppiced above and rich with lambs below. For a quarter of a mile or so, no houses anywhere – until suddenly ahead, a church, a row of limestone cottages and a pub. ‘The Woolpack’, read the sign, and cemented into its wall was an ancient Cheltenham Brewery plaque, with a castle and the slogan claiming ‘Best in the West’ and the date ‘1760’ – the very same plaque we have mounted on our barn in Massachusetts, given to me as a birthday present years ago by a woman who was once married to André Previn. The coincidence was, in more than one way, a sign indeed.
I pulled up and went in. It was three on a drowsy Friday afternoon in late spring, the warm air drenched with the scent of honeysuckle. Four men were grouped at a table, a brindled wolfhound spread across the floor like an old carpet. ‘Don’t mind ’ee’, said his owner, and I stepped across and between his paws. The young bartender, polishing a glass, seemed to know why I had come.
‘Sit yourself down on your man’s stool’, he said, gesturing to the black plastic-covered circular seat at the north end of the bar. This was the honoured place, the seat where for donkey’s years Laurie Lee, whose cottage was just eighteen convenient strides away below, would come up to sit, his back resting on the one wall, his arm on the counter, whisky in hand, an audience ready to be enraptured, a flotilla of young girls ready to be charmed.
Maybe Slad isn’t an over-pretty name, not so fine-sounding as Birdlip or Sheepscombe or Caudle Green nearby. No matter: in happy contrast to what I had feared, Slad today has mostly been preserved, and lovingly so – a tidy edge-of-the-Cotswolds hamlet where the hills to the east tumble their wall of countryside down an uninterrupted thousand feet towards the Severn and the sea.
On the cliff-top the Romans had built a line of lookout villas and forts, the relics of most still there, with the intent of keeping their empire and their die-straight London road secure. Slad must surely once have been patrolled by centurion legions; now it is kept spick and span and preserved in amber for the benefit of patrolling readers – and kept just so in large measure because of Laurie Lee’s far-sighted generosity, and because of that of his family, who have over the years bought and saved cottages and meadows and copses and stands of woodland hereabouts, just to make sure that the village from which Laurie walked out on that famous midsummer morning still, as near as possible, had the look and feel of how it was when first he said farewell, and ventured off into the world.
If as payback fo
r ‘your man’’s munificence, the village of Slad has been transformed into a museum dedicated to the Lee legend, then on the evidence alone it seems a fair price to have paid. To the relief of all, taste reigns: Slad is no coach-party Brigadoon. So in The Woolpack there are modest memorials: above the pub piano is a version of the famous Anthony Devas portrait, Laurie gazing downward, full of thought and youth; on a shelf high above the dado there is Laurie’s prodigious collection of beer bottles (he collected much else besides, most notably his observations of the daily temperature, from which he derived long wall-charts) and a glass case holding all of his books, covers out (with the Japanese edition of what in hiragana is called Rosie and Apple Saké prominent, and much photographed). There is a village walking tour, with explanatory markers and Laurie’s poetry engraved on translucent plastic. And there is his grave, up as he insisted right beside the main door of Holy Trinity, directly opposite the pub, each to be seen by each.
I Can’t Stay Long is in The Woolpack’s glass-fronted cabinet, of course, at top right. Laurie, who at the time of its publication in 1975 was marooned in an unproductive and wine-soaked funk, and with the anthology offered as a lifeline for both his self-esteem and his cash-flow, thought precious little of its chances. He never imagined André Deutsch would make much of it nor make much out of it – in fact he bet Deutsch £25 that it wouldn’t sell more than five thousand copies (by that same year, 1975, Cider had sold a million in paperback alone).
That he was so wrong (and paid up, cash on the nail) has some sweet justice, particularly when the book is viewed from today’s perspective. For though we now know Laurie Lee to have indulged in the most amiably egregious of fantasies in the writing of his best-loved books – with battles unfought, people unmet, walks untaken, experiences unhad, and yet all forgiven because his tales were so good, his writing so intensely perfect – this collection pulsates with a palpable sense of truth.
Take his Redbook essay on ‘Charm’, for instance. His lifelong fondness for young women was naturally helped along by his fine looks, his poetry, his wit, his evident vulnerability – he was epileptic, and lived in constant apprehension of petit mal seizures. But his charm, his ‘ability to capture the complicity of a woman by a single-minded acknowledgment of her uniqueness’ as he puts it here, was a phenomenon deployed to devastatingly effective extent. He seemed always to be surrounded by gaggles of adoring women, hanging on his every word, gazing into eyes that seemed to gaze into each of theirs no matter how many at table.
‘It is a question of being totally absorbed, of forgetting that anyone else exists – but really forgetting, for nothing more fatally betrays than the suggestion of a wandering eye.’ How he ever managed this with ten girls grouped tight around him beggars belief. But the old rogue continued to the end: in his near-blind dotage he purchased a white stick, clung tight to the nymphettes who would lead him safely across roads, and then pat them with soft intimacy and say ‘thank you, young man’, to excuse any misplaced palm.
And then there was ‘The Firstborn’, his prayer of hope for his daughter Jessy, and with its lyrically unforgettable opening: ‘She was born in the autumn and was a late fall in my life, and lay purple and dented like a little bruised plum, as though she’d been lightly trodden in the grass and forgotten.’ I had a child born at about the same time as the Hogarth Press version came out – so slim a book, just five pages of text, five full-page photographs, all taken by Laurie – and my wife and I would read it out loud by the fire.
One paragraph in particular struck us: ‘As a brief tenant of this precious and irreplaceable world, I’d ask her to preserve life both in herself and others. To prefer always Societies for Propagation and Promotion, rather than those for the Abolition or Prevention of.’ To be reminded here of so exquisite a sentiment from so long ago in my own life repays in abundance of the price of admission.
And for always, Aberfan. They are vanishing now themselves, those who can remember where they were on that October morning in 1966, when the liquefied heap of coal slurry slid down that damp Welsh hillside and smothered all those children at the Pantglas Junior School. Those who do remember – I was one – can never possibly forget. The numbers – 116 children killed, 28 grown-ups – are less significant than the single stories. For me it was the mother who said that she had smacked her seven-year-old for some small moment of breakfast mischief, and he had gone off to school crying. The black coal drowned him in its filth fifteen minutes later, and the poor woman’s memory of her child is one of tears running down his face, probably barely dry as he was swept to his terrible death.
Laurie Lee went back a year after, for Redbook, and his account is spare and haunting. It is very long, probably the longest work in the book. It is also very honest, for there is no need here for excess and verbal flamboyance. ‘A colliery sends to the surface more waste than coal, and a mining village has to learn to live with it. It must be put somewhere or the mine would close, and it’s too expensive to carry it far. So the tips grow everywhere, straddling the hillsides, nudging the houses like black-furred beasts. Almost everyone, from time to time, has seen danger in them, but mostly they are endured as a fact of life. On the mountain above Aberfan there were seven such tips … what was not known was that the newest tip, Number 7, was a killer with a rotten heart.’
Aberfan, Laurie Lee went on to write, would then suffer two tragedies – ‘first the landslide, then an avalanche of money.’ His approach in this most singular masterpiece was tender, poetic, kindly, comforting; there is a near-total absence of voyeurism; there is no literary grandstanding; and yet there is plenty of witheringly well-directed anger. ‘The Village that Lost its Children’ is journalism at a most perfect pitch, and an essay that provides, for me at least, the capstone to a collection of great worth, an honest assemblage of Laurie Lee at his honest best.
Of course, in Slad and all along the edge of Cotswold hills they like you to remember the tales of sunshine and apple blossom, of warm billows of damp grass and clear thin gurgling streams, and the sounds of laughing country girls. That is the Laurie Lee we in England have taken to our collective hearts, and no harm attends our fondness for him.
But there is a still finer Laurie Lee than this – a truer, crisper, more concise, more impassioned, less indulgent and more keenly focused watcher of the world. The essays here illustrate that other side, an aspect of a writer whom we all once thought we knew – and a richly rewarding side it is. I Can’t Stay Long may be his chosen title. But the memories of his brief presence will surely endure, and for a long while to come.
Simon Winchester, 2015
Part One
* * *
True Adventures of the Boy Reader
One of my earliest memories is that of a small boy sitting in our village street surrounded by a group of grey-whiskered old men. Bored and fidgety, his mind clearly elsewhere, he is reading aloud in fluent sing-song the war news from a tattered newspaper.
This boy and I were of one generation and we shared the same trick of enlightenment: we were both the inheritors, after centuries of darkness, of our country’s first literate peasantry. My mother and father, the children of a coachman and a sailor, read well and were largely self-taught. But their parents could do little more than spell out their names – which they were not often called on to do – and if given a book were likely to turn it over in their hands, cough loudly, and lay it aside.
Not that there were many books available at that time; our elders had little more to contend with, in the way of printed script, than their almanacs and their Sunday psalmbooks, which, of course, they knew mostly by heart. About the only other bound reading material available to greet the new gift of literacy were the widely-sold ‘Penny Readers’, which offered irreproachable love stories of an unearthly gentility, tales of martyrs and foreign missionaries, collected church sermons and strictures on drink, and certain moral epics devoted to the loyalty and devotion owed by the serving classes to the gentry.
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bsp; Even so, the existence of these ‘Penny Readers’ created a revolution in home entertainment, and the gossip of grannies in chimney-corners began to be silenced by family readings-aloud. It was through this practice that I first knew the printed word, its power and its glory, its persuasive magic and ready gift of hallucination.
Many a winter’s night we would settle round the lamp-lit kitchen, after supper had been cleared away, while our mother took down one of her ‘Penny’ volumes and read to us by the hour. Through mother’s voice, and the awful tales she read, we saw the world through crystal casements, never doubting that this was the way it looked or that its peoples were less than the noblest. Alas, I can remember but two volumes now (perhaps they were all we had). One was J. Cole, the life-story of a footman who became a butler through thrift and prayer; and the other, called simply Although He was Black, a posthumous tribute to a young Negro house-boy who, in spite of his colour, made good as a servant by sacrificing his life to his employer in a fire. These tales, in spite of their frequent readings, never failed to bathe us in tears.
Perhaps through over-indulgence in mother’s fireside entertainments I was myself a tardy reader. When I was lent my first book, by a rich old neighbour, I thought she was off her head. It was called Aikman’s Scotland and was bound in red leather and was just a three-dimensional object to me. Then one day the old lady stopped me in the street and asked me how I was enjoying the book, adding that she only lent it to me because she knew I loved reading and that I would treat it with special care. I was astonished; it had never occurred to me to read it; I had used it as a tunnel for my clockwork train.
At that time, in those Cotswold villages of the ’twenties, we may have been literate, but were by no means literary. We had no regular newspapers and of course no radio or television, and were as yet unracked by their tortuous linguistics. We were the inheritors still of an oral tradition of language, and the stream, though thin, was pure. Outside our own class, which was that of farms and cloth mills, hardly anyone spoke to us save from the pulpit. Our vocabulary was small, though naturally virile; our words ancient, round, warm from the tongue. If we were affected by any literary influence at all, it was from the King James Bible.