Down in the Valley Page 2

  2

  Telling a Story

  True darkness, that I do remember in the village, and true silence. Today you can never get far from the noise of the road or an electric light. As a child I could get around the village almost by touch and the darkness was unbroken. You could see the stars close to you. These days, two fields away, or two roads away, there is constant traffic, which I associated with the first time I went to London when I was about seventeen. This roar of traffic I had never heard before and I thought extraordinary. Now it’s something we take for granted, always somebody, somewhere has got an engine working. If it isn’t a car it’s a microwave.

  My village was a church village. All through the seasons, social life and community life revolved around the church. There was Easter, Ascension Day, some Christian festivals and some pagan festivals. They were all part of the church. And our lives were influenced very much by the King James Bible, it was part of our vocabulary, part of our natural exchange of language at that time, and I was very much a believer. I’d say prayers on my knees until I was about fifteen. ‘God bless the king, friends and relations, make me a good boy,’ and all that stuff. I would not put up with any nonsense. No infidels came my way without a rebuff.

  And then one day, on the way back from Painswick where I’d been off to pay the rates; we used to pay the rates in the town hall. We’d run across Greenhouse Lane, a steep lane, with great banks on each side. I was on my way back coming up to Bulls Cross and through my mind went lines from the King James Bible.

  ‘And God visited the sins of the fathers, and to the third and the fourth generation of them that hate him, and he said that I will show mercy onto thousands of them who love me and keep my commandments.’

  And I thought, this is not a God that one should admire, this is an old tribal bully, laying down vengeance for those who hate and those who love, the third and fourth generation. And that was the moment, I remember vividly, just where I was when this kind of revelation came to me. I gave up God from then on.

  I still took Jesus. Christ became a man, a teacher, a prophet who I have learned to live by, and his teaching, ever since. I have respect for him, but for God and the people who use God nowadays as an excuse for all their evils and temptations and over-indulgences, he’s out as far as I’m concerned.

  ‘God is an old tribal bully,’ I said. ‘He’s a voice from the Old Testament and I’ll have no more to do with him.’ It lifted such a weight from my mind, though ever since that moment I have never been able to use God as an excuse.

  But so far as the Bible is concerned, I feel that the enrichment of language which the Old Testament, as well as the New, gave us was so important to our ways of reacting to life, to the seasons, to our relationships, our goals, our ambitions.

  The language was so rich, I think that one of the great, one of the most diabolical, changes that I cannot really forgive, is the pollution of the modern translation. Pollution is a word I use almost deliberately. The richness of the King James Bible, which was a public gift from the early scriptures, and whose unforgettable images that we learned and were brought up with, have all gone. The language I now hear in morning service I find is, it’s scaled down to a platitudinous voice of, forgive me for saying this, but of building-society managers, suburban bank clerks or insurance salesmen.

  There is one passage in the King James Bible which says that when a man was cured by Christ, he’d been brought on a stretcher and brought down to Christ, they begged that he should cure him and Christ laid his hand on him and he said, ‘Arise, take up thy bed and walk.’ Now in those few short epithets is an occurrence of suggestions; ‘arise’ does not just mean ‘arise’. I don’t have to tell you this, any old country vicar would tell you what ‘arise’ meant. But the new version says, ‘Get up, pick up your bed and go home.’ It just sounds like the local policeman arresting you for drunkenness, you lying in the gutter. It is not the gentle, healing voice that Christ used in the New Testament and set the man on his feet, and not just on his feet but on the road to a future belief, expectation. And it is brutally dull.

  So that is why I resent, no, why I grieve for the passing of the King James version. I’ve written to the bishop. He replied, but instead of saying, in reverential fashion,

  ‘Dear son, I hold your thoughts close to my mind and close to my soul, and I will pray for you and ask your forgiveness,’

  instead of that he replied, in the tone of an officious bank clerk,

  ‘Dear Mr Lee, your opinions have been noted. Yours, Cantab.’

  Cantab, ugh.

  If I wish to be buried at church I must say no more. Otherwise I shall be unforgiven. I was listening to a young woman on the radio on Sunday morning. They have half an hour on Radio Four. Half an hour of scripture problems, of faith problems, people arguing about the coming of female priests. The interviewer asked the young woman,

  ‘Have you always had the ambition to join the church, and become a priest?’ ‘Oh no, I’m very keen on horses and I like tennis very much and very keen on travel and heuristics and then one day God touched my button, and I joined the church.’

  And I thought, is it as easy as that, God touches your button?

  But that phrase, ‘God touched my button’, left me wondering, hasn’t he got other things to do, the unbelievers to destroy and massacre in the deserts of Sinai? He’s got a lot of bullying to do.

  But as for the inspiration for my writing, I suppose it comes to revisiting the sensations, the smells, the adventures of my life.

  I went away as a young man. I was away for twenty years and when I came back to Slad I was waking in the morning from a very heavy, dreamy, drugged sleep. And as I was waking I heard a blackbird singing, I had forgotten I had left the village and I thought, he sounds like a Gloucestershire blackbird; he sounds like a Slad blackbird.

  And then, when I was fully awake, I realized it was a Slad blackbird; it was a Gloucestershire blackbird. I had not heard it for twenty years but it was instantly recognizable because they mimic their fathers and mothers. Just as we mimic our fathers and our mothers and our grandparents, these birds will come back to the same wood, same field, same hedgerow and nest where their parents nested and are brought up by their parents. They have been flying back to Slad, and God bless them, it’s a good place to fly back to, they mimic their parents. So, naturally they have a Gloucestershire accent.

  But you asked me this specific question: ‘Putting it down on paper, where did that come from?’ I think it is easily understandable so far as I’m concerned. All my beginnings were hatched into this very compact series of narrow, brief valleys, which are like seed pods. They collected the seasons of the year around them and in which, as I have tried to describe, they were the same but were different. There was a winter Slad and there was a summer Slad and they were almost different countries, because the qualities of that particular season would inhabit that particular valley. All our ways of living and growing, our nourishments, would depend on the time of the year.

  I was lucky in having this very rich start in life and was never out of touch with the community. Better than any soap opera. This script that I was living and enjoying, was sharing with my neighbours, wasn’t a product of an exhausted scriptwriter, beer-stained instead of tear-stained, by someone who was recycling, for money, some second-hand experiences that he picked up from a mate of his somewhere up the Old Kent Road. No, what we were sharing was certainly a thousand years old perhaps and the habits, the greatness, the goodness and the evil and the sins and the hungers and the habits of relying on each other for help were natural to us, and natural to these parts. And I was thinking the other day that all the families, all the names of the families which are descended from, are scattered around here like little herbs. It sounds a bit whimsical but it isn’t so. You had the Greens, the Wrights, the Hoggs, the Webbs, the Carters, the Gardners, the Lights. My grandfather was a Light. Very snobby he was. He would say, ‘We are the oldest family in the Bible. God said
, Let there be light, and there was light! And that was long before Adam.’

  When I had my change of faith, I used to tease him. I’d ask:

  ‘Did God say, Let there be light?’

  ‘That’s right, boy, Let there be light.’

  ‘And darkness covered the face of the world,’ I replied and I thought, that taught him.

  My mother was a self-taught reader. She was someone who should have had a better education; she had to leave school when she was thirteen because her mother died and she had to look after her brothers. So she never quite made it. Though she was full of tastes and love for literature that she could get round to. She described to me her teacher’s grief and despair when she had to leave school. The teacher had told her that she was a wonderful girl, she had a wonderful head. She was very scatty, my mother, but she could tell a story. Mother, you could tell a marvellous story. ‘Had me in fits,’ she’d say, ‘had me in fits.’

  But then everybody could, I reckon in the village, because we were brought up on this particular diet, this food, of the Old Testament and the Prayer Book.

  We had no wireless, no television, and no newspapers, the older souls couldn’t read. Because of that start, I suppose many of the villagers, who you can still hear around, began by not being able to read. They had very compact vocabularies but they told stories with such command of their vocabulary, perhaps 200 to 500 words, they never had to hesitate and grab and use second-hand clichés, ‘at the end of the day’, ‘we must have a level playing field’, ‘having said that’, and all this jargon you get with second-hand Westminster, Palace of Westminster, and Westminster Abbey: unfortunately, they speak the same language now. But to have that command of language that these valley people had! They could tell a story just as the mariners in Homer’s day must have been able to tell, with a complete command of a very effective vocabulary, born in them, nourished in them as they grew up. They could set your hair on end, retelling the old dramas of the valleys.

  These days, to tell a story, it’s either second hand or chock-full of frustrations and incoherences or clichés. I have tried to do my best to keep away from that because I realized that in telling a story, if you use somebody else’s language people are not going to be interested. They are not going to read it. Try and describe something as you are looking at it and engage their attention. By telling them what it was like to see this for the first time as a boy, or read it aloud, or have it read to them, they’ll not only say, ‘Yes, I know what he means,’ but then they will write me a letter saying, ‘It brought back my childhood you know, it’s just how I felt.’ And I am so pleased to feel that I have touched a lot of tendril remembrances in their past. They may be living north of the border, in Wales, or elsewhere. We all share the same beginnings.

  And I felt I was lucky perhaps, though it was a struggle, when I wrote very slowly, and still do, but it was something that I was able to do deliberately, because I wouldn’t read a book written in a style which included lines like ‘The garden was a blaze of colour.’ All right, well having said that, that’s a seed package you can buy in Woolworths, but you have got to say exactly what you mean by a ‘blaze of colour’. You have to reinterpret it, recycle it, reawaken it. This woman was talking and she said, ‘Something snapped in my brain.’ She didn’t say what it was, but we know what it was, don’t we? It was the perished elastic of a misused understanding, that’s what snapped in her brain.

  3

  The Church, Miserden

  This is the grave of my old chum Frank Mansell in Miserden churchyard, quite near to where he was brought up. We had some grand times together. He was a remarkable fellow, very Cotswold, Cotswold as a dry stone wall. Rugged, windswept, honest, rooted in these hills. He was also a strange mixture, he was a workman, he worked for the post office, he was an astrologer, he was a demon bowler in the local cricket team at Sheepscombe, and he had a feeling for these stones. He was a marvellous local poet.

  He showed me some of his ballads, as he called them, when I first came back to Slad. We used to meet in the pub and go through each other’s work. And his poetry was so direct and so local and so genuine, innocent and strong, like him, that we thought we could get it published. So we got together and between us we set up a publishing firm called the Wittantree Tree Press. It was named after an old tree, a windswept tree, which is bent from the west to the east by the prevailing wind. He always felt that the way he walked bore that kind of windswept look about it. And he was absolutely right. It was mostly an inclination from the west to the east which inclined his huge muscular body to the prevailing wind. But as well as that, coming back from the pub in Bisley, after his drink, which was known as Old Peculier, this gave him that sort of inclination. An inclination which I shared.

  So we got this little printer down in Cainscross and we set him up with a little paperback. Then, when we had printed off 2,000, we’d go round the pubs with a little box of these and we’d stick them around the bar. And he sold all 2,000, which was almost unheard of, even for a well-known London poet to sell 2,000. Frank sold 2,000 just around the countryside, mostly in the pubs. We had a second printing, and he went into hardback. And at that stage I began to get rather jealous, but I swallowed my pride and enjoyed the fact that we were living off, drinking, our profits as we went around.

  And I remember his voice, he read his poems as naturally as birdsong and I can remember them now. I read one at his funeral, ‘Cotswold Choice’. My eyes are going, I can’t read them now but I can hear him, under this tree, and among these stone walls, I can hear his voice saying:

  From Wittantree tree and Througham fields,

  from Miserden and Slad

  grand would I walk through summer

  and happy times I’ve had.

  Frank, you’ll forgive me not being able to remember your verse with all its natural glory, I’m making it up a bit and editing it as I go along, t’wasn’t half as good as your original, Frank. See you later in the Butcher’s Arms. Sleep well, old lad.

  He died young, at 60. I saw him the day before he died and I’ve got a recording of him telling me of a quick way to go from Slad to a pub that was up on the top on the other side of Minchinhampton. And he was telling me about all the shortcuts and all the lanes. I thought I knew them all but he was just telling me, very slumberously, because he was quite ill then. But in this very rough, eloquent, Cotswold voice, he told me how to get from Slad to Tetbury and from Tetbury to Minchinhampton and from Minchinhampton to this pub he wanted me to go to the next day and check up on the sales. But the next day his friend rang me up early in the morning. He had died in the morning, very suddenly, not of the disease with which he was pressed by but something quite different, coronary heart. And he was buried here. And he was so well known, we had a church full and people gathered in the churchyard.

  He lived in a little cottage. When we were coming up from Sheepscombe to Miserden and where we are now, there is a crossroads and a little cottage called the Salt Box. In the old days there were salt mines around Droitwich. And they would bring the salt, on packhorses, down over the hills, over Birdlip and across this top road to the Salt Box, where they used to change their horses and take the salt on down to Sharpness, and export it along the River Severn. And so we’d tease him for living in a salt box: peppery old character, but never mind, he was very proud of it and so were we. He is remembered as lord of the manor of the Salt Box, Sheepscombe.

  He lived there, alone for most of the time I knew him. He ran a little vegetable garden and wrote these long astrological predications for old ladies. They used to send him a note saying, can you prophesy what is going to happen?

  Seriously, he would write down their birth date, and sheets of paper would go out very carefully composed, spinning the most unlikely futures for these old dears. But he believed in it and they believed in it and although I’d tease him about it, I never really said look it’s a cop-out you know very well, because he didn’t think it was. He believed he was close
to the stars and close to the seasons. And looking back at the old days we had, and remembering the way he talked, I believe he was close to the stars and as far as I’m concerned he is always alive to the seasons and the stars when I come back from London or wherever I have been.

  First thing, coming through Sapperton Tunnel, I see that old wall and I think, that’s Frank, crumbling a bit, a refuge for sheep, standing there in the winds on the top of the hills, dry stone wall. That’s Frank, indestructible.

  Frank had this double loyalty or threefold loyalty. He went to the village school in Bisley. Miserden was also very much an alter ego as it was part of the triangle with the Salt Box down the road, and he was also very closely connected with Sheepscombe where we’ve got a seat for him looking out over the cricket field.

  He was a demon bowler in the Sheepscombe side. He used to come up the hill, it was a sloping field, and you’d see the top of his head as he was running up, then you would see his shoulders, furious face, and then the rest of his body. It was just like a galleon coming over the horizon, all guns blazing, and he’d whip the ball down and if the ball did not kill the batsman, furious anger and frustration would kill him.

  ‘That should a got thee,’ he’d say. ‘It should a got thee.’ And if he didn’t get five bloody heads in one innings he was a disappointed man, a terrorizer.

  He was a Norman I think in many ways. I used to tease him about it:

  ‘Frank Mansell,’ I said, ‘you came over, you were a predator, you were one of the conquerors who showed off, you were responsible.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that was in the old days, we had some land then, we lost it all, through bewilderment, and drink and corruption.’

  ‘Not corrupt, not corruption Frank, you were never corrupt.’