Down in the Valley Read online

  You’ll find the old Norman names very often amongst the villages. Frank half admitted that Frampton Mansell was part of his heritage and that his ancestors came from there, but he thought that they had lost it, that it had slipped through their hands, largely due to … Let me put it like this, they loved too much, they drank too much, they lived too much and they never put anything by, except his honesty and his character. And that’s why he ended up digging holes in the road for the post office, and writing this most marvellous poetry.

  Which was the true voice of the Cotswolds. And I can hear him now, but I can’t remember his style. There is a recording of us both giving a double recital, you can imagine the feeling, the daredevil feeling we had at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. We marched in together, him on the left of stage and me on the right, and we really played to the audience:

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Yes, what makes you a true poet?’

  ‘Never get married,’ he said. ‘Never get married, it’s death to poetry.’

  He was married twice as far as I know and gave people a lot of happiness, but in dropping that bombshell at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, it made the teachers twitch a bit.

  4

  Bulls Cross

  We’re sitting on a seat at Bulls Cross which is the … I cannot give it its London equivalent, it would be improper to give it its London equivalent, because there isn’t an equivalent. It’s the meeting of all the roads from all the valleys around, from the Painswick Valley, the Stroud Valley, Bisley, Birdlip. The high road from Stroud to Birdlip comes through the beech wood, Frith wood, and runs just behind us.

  That’s the highway, going through the wood, the old highway from Stroud to Birdlip and then on from Birdlip to Oxford, to Cheltenham, Droitwich and the salt mines, and if you turn right it goes on to the Urals, where the wind blows from. There are branches off to Sheepscombe on the left, there is a cross road which runs to Painswick and on to Gloucester, and the other way up over to a place we call the scrubs which is just near Bisley. It also branches off and goes down King Charles Lane to Steanbridge farm and Steanbridge pond and continues up King Charles Lane.

  The other lane running down here, the lower lane into Stroud, is called Wick Street. It’s an alternative way into Painswick because Painswick used to be called Wick, meaning a dairy farm. Then the local warlord or mafia, Pain, he took it over and from then on – he was the lord of the manor, he said – he took it over and enclosed much of the land. And it has been ever since called Painswick. But we know it as Wick, because the street is called Wick and the street is older than he is. We don’t stand any of that nonsense, any of that malarkey, although some of his relations, some of his descendants, still run some firms in Stroud, like estate agents, Davies Champion and Pain, or Smith Ball and Pain, they were cloth manufacturers and legal, they had us all sewn up long ago.

  But I’m very interested in Wick Street. It has some marvellous old manor houses which you don’t see on the Victorian Road, which is the upper one with all the traffic on it, the main road now. Wick Street, the old road to Painswick, has some superb manor houses. Painswick is architecturally splendid and it has a wonderful church. We used to say it has the third-best peal of bells in the country. And on certain nights we used to hear the peal in Slad when the wind was in the right direction. It is the most beautiful peal of bells. It’s in that church where King Charles stabled some of his horses, when he was on his way back from Gloucester. We never forgave him. We didn’t mind him being defeated; we were really on the side of the common man, although we’ve got a lot of royalty living around us. I’m not sure whose side they are on, living up on the high ground, I won’t mention their names. One lives in Highgrove, one lives in Tetbury, one lives near Bisley. I think they are still retreating from Gloucester.

  Then there is another high road that goes up to Bisley, Bisley Old Road, from Stroud. It goes right up to Bisley and then on to Cirencester. And then the third one, which goes up to Rodborough, Amberley, Minchinhampton, Cirencester and then onto London. This cross road from Gloucester to Painswick is here too. This is a Piccadilly Circus. Incidentally, all those little hollows in this common land, I think this is where King Charles’s defeated army was buried. But a lot of it was stone that went to build the houses and the walls, the farmhouses and the farm walls.

  I remember when I was young, when I was a kid, we always came up here to play if we didn’t go to the pond. There was a young Vic, a Dorothy Vic, and a young boy Norman, one of the great families of farmers, and I went home and told my sister that they were sitting in one of these hollows. Dorothy was all blushing and showing the ring on her finger, looking at her finger and blushing, and her sisters were overwhelmed with excitement at such gossip. And of course he had just proposed to her, they were married the next year. They lived up on the top of the hill, a lovely old couple, both gone now. But one could see the hatching, the brood hatching, of this young pair.

  I also used to meet a girlfriend from Gloucester who stayed with an aunt in Painswick and would come over. She used to meet me on the hill and we used to go into the wood and read Shakespeare together, Macbeth. She played Lady Macbeth until the middle of the play and then she discovered there was no other part for her, because Lady Macbeth disappears. So she took over my part. I was Macbeth but then I had to be Duncan. Women, they impose their own rules. She was older than me and went to a grammar school. I only went to the local school. So that was my first lesson in Shakespeare and also in female domination. But I still remember every word. I remember most of that play, through learning it in that beech wood.

  There is an old stone milestone here, it’s really worth looking at closely, because it’s cut into steps where the old men used to get on their horses. The other milestone is in the wall of the village school, opposite The Woolpack, down in Slad. And there’s one further milestone beyond the village, it still exists, it’s been protected by time. Most of them have gone now.

  It’s on a corner where a sweep once lived. He had a van, a van full of soot. Once, going round the bend very fast on the wrong side of the road, the car turned over on him. It smothered him with soot and he choked to death. We still, happily, call it Sooty Corner. People round here would say, ‘He was going round Sooty Corner, see.’ Well just round Sooty Corner is the other milestone where I always stopped and kissed my knee when I was running to school, my secondary school, in Stroud. I’d always get a stitch coming down the hill towards Sooty Corner, I’d always get the stitch. You sat on the milestone and kissed your knee, it was supposed to cure your stitch. And then I would go into the second lap, get to school in 25 minutes, running. On the way back, the three miles would take two hours with Eileen Brown, discovering the landscape, and Rosie and Edna who went to the neighbouring girls’ school. That’s when education begins, as you walk out of that gate and sprawl over the landscape and discover just what the quality of this valley was and discover your own qualities.

  And also if it was raining, or if girls like Eileen or Doreen weren’t around, I used to slip into the Stroud public library for which I am still enormously grateful. They are talking of shutting down public libraries. But the amazing difference that it had to me was going on a cold night, for there was always heating on, there wasn’t always heating at home.

  I did all my early reading in Stroud library. I discovered people I had never heard of, like Joyce, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Eliot. I remember finding Huxley’s Brave New World. I borrowed it from the library and I was sitting by the war memorial in Slad reading it when the vicar came out of the vicarage. He saw me reading it and snatched it from me.

  ‘That profane book! Ye who doth read profanities shall be destroyed by fire,’ he said, ‘and I quote.’ But he didn’t, though he sounded as though he were quoting some dramatic death sentence from the Bible. But he took the book away. I had to tell them at the library that the vicar had seized the book and destroyed it as being profane. And could they let me off the fine.


  Well I thought I’ve touched something very sensitive here. So I’ll follow up Huxley, so I read Crome Yellow, and others. I did some immensely important reading there, but the particular quality of it that remains when I look back was that it was uninstructed reading. It was the public library that provided it, and still provides it.

  But Lawrence and Joyce, who I got to know by heart, were probably the early influences, and I thought I had personally discovered them. I didn’t know that anyone else knew about them. I’d gone along the shelves and I’d found these fascinating writers and I thought nobody else had ever heard of them. Youth, it’s the time for learning. If I’d only had more time at school, without all those wasted hours on Sir Walter Scott. I’ll never forgive Walter Scott. That heavy, cement, Latinized prose, a real pain that was. I’m told he gets on rather well now on television, they make drama, in starch new costumes. You can always tell when they are putting on a master new work on television, everybody suddenly comes out. Even out of the ditches, all the poverty-stricken miners come out with starched white shirts and special grime. I think the camera work is shot through some kind of gauze, meaning that this scene isn’t now, these are Victorian days and everybody speaks in a special stagey Victorian accent.

  I remember one chap, a decent chap, who was full of affection when he made Cider with Rosie about fifteen years ago. He put all the schoolgirls in … He put all the girls in white pinafores and all the boys were wearing brand new caps straight out of the wardrobe. Well, we were very poor and ragged and I thought that was a misjudgement so I said, ‘Before you start, get all the boys to jump on their caps,’ which they were all happy to do. They put them in the gutter and all whooped and jumped and got their caps into what I call a sense of realism, ragged and muddy, so they were all right. They don’t always remember to pay the past its rightful claim, that we were a grubby lot. That was just part of the reality of life. We weren’t filthy, we were grubby and unkempt. We’d wear a shirt for two days running and old neckties, you’d never see a creased shirt. There’s a photograph of some of the lads and a horse and trap outside the Star Inn, just below The Woolpack. The landlord, it shows he’s the landlord; he’s very short, he’s smoking a clay pipe and his trousers look as though they are made of stove piping. They haven’t seen an iron, they haven’t been creased for months, obviously, but that was the character of the day. And the old men used to wear straps, their trousers pulled up and straps just above the knee, or just below the knee sometimes, to keep their trousers out of the mud.

  I’d like to see more recognition of what the past was really like, that it had a reality that was in many ways brave, and dignified.

  Just behind me where the signpost is there was a gibbet. When the whole country was run for wool the various lords of the manor were very keen on stopping sheep-stealing, so they had a gibbet here, and they had a gibbet on the war memorial near the green in Sheepscombe. Now the hangman used to live down at Dead Combe Bottom, in a lane going down through the wood, deep into the valley. He had a cottage there. I remember it well. But the story that haunts the gibbet was that one night he was called out to string up a sheep-stealer. He came up, got the rope and took in charge a shivering lad. He put the noose round his neck and strung him up. It was a very stormy night but as the culprit was swinging and struggling and dying, the cloud was torn away from the moon by the gale and the moon shone on the face of this strangled young man and the hangman recognized the face of his son. He did not know until that moment that he was hanging his son. He went down, he said no more, he said nothing, he went down to his cottage in Dead Combe, and there was a hook. I remember going down there and you would go into the kitchen and there was a big iron hook on the wall and he went in there and he hung himself. And the house, the cottage, over the years, was never inhabited again; it just fell down brick by brick. And I can remember going in there in its state of decay, we used to play in there, not insensible to the mystery of it all, you know what kids are like, they like a bit of drama.

  But that was a very haunting story to most of the villagers and Bulls Cross was a traffic zone even in those days, busy. There was a stagecoach and the horses went wild taking a stagecoach down to Stroud and they bolted across this empty space here, they bolted and the stagecoach turned over and all the passengers were killed. And it’s said, Granny Trill said,

  ‘If you are at Bulls Cross at night on New Year’s night you’ll hear the neighing of these horses and the shrieking of women passengers and the breaking up of the carriage. And if you hear that, you won’t survive the New Year, your face will go green.’ ‘Yer what, gran?’ ‘Your face will go green and you’ll die by drowning.’ And we believed her. We never came up here on New Year’s night. We could hear the sound of the horses neighing over the top of the hill. But we’d never come up here; maybe it still happens. So I give you warning.

  5

  The Violin on the Wall

  ‘Did you learn to play the violin at school?’ I asked.

  No, not at school. A chap used to come round, he wasn’t a teacher but he used to come round on a bicycle. He held violin classes in a room in a cottage up the road, I must have been eight or nine I think. We had to pay so much for lessons and we had to pay so much a week for the violin, though they were a bit rubbishy; they were Czechoslovakian, mass-produced. But once we’d paid for the violins he just disappeared. So we were left on our own. Some of us dropped out and the rest of us just taught ourselves. I remember a saying once, the trouble about a violin, it’s a most marvellous instrument but you have to play for four or five years before anyone wants to listen to you.

  When I got older and left the village I played for money in the streets. People used to drop a penny or two and then one time an old colonel said to me, ‘Why aren’t you at work young man?’ and then he blushed and dropped in a sixpence in my bag to cover his confusion, because nobody was at work during those days. People were just wandering all over England, trying to find work. That’s how I started but when I got to Worthing I played outside an old people’s home and the porters were pushing, in wheelchairs, these very old pomaded women and I reckon until I was moved on by the police I made – they were paying me in two-shilling pieces, and I think I was playing ‘Danny Boy’ at the time, one of those and then a hymn tune or two – I made 38 shillings, which was twice the amount a man could make in a week in those days if you had a proper job. So I knew I was onto a good thing. And it kept me going and through a year in Spain I was able to live on it and come back with £10 into the bargain. But I didn’t get that through playing the violin. There were other methods.

  That was when I went to work in a hotel during the winter. I saved my tips. I used to work in the kitchen in the day and play in the saloon at night. I’d play the sort of stuff you used to get in the Palm Court in Bournemouth. I had a little German friend called Rudolpho and he played a squeezebox. I’ve still got one of the programmes. And the stuff we used to play: paso dobles, divertimentos, Mozart, Irving Berlin. We just gave it to them, all these old ladies sitting around; this was before the tourists had started to come. We had a captive audience with nothing to spend their money on but booze and us, with this great sea; the hotel was on the beach, with the sea splashing against the hotel windows in the winter. We’d go into some Wagner, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ or The Flying Dutchman, we used to stir ’em up. I’ve never enjoyed life so much as at that time.

  Then we’d go off into a market with all the produce. All the people and their children used to come and gather round, step on your toes, and just gaze at you, because there wasn’t wireless and there wasn’t television, and a musical instrument was a treat. They did not have to work, there was no work, it was a sort of a fiesta, a holiday. We never got any money from them but the old ladies used to throw me biscuits from upstairs rooms. I could always live on it.

  I suppose I was in my early teens when I realized the one thing that was important in village life was the weekly dance. I got a little band toget
her called The Three Blind Mice.

  I knew a couple of other chaps were interested in playing dance music of a very rudimentary kind. We filled in a gap because at that time in the dances in the various villages around, there were no discos and no electronic music to dance to; it was long before those days. And the dance music would be performed under a very strict guide by perhaps some local well-meaning spinster. And if you were dancing and you swung a girl off her feet this well-meaning spinster, Miss … I’ve forgotten her name now, she would ram the top of the piano down, lock it and go home. Well you can’t do that when youth is having its fling. So what we decided to do, the three of us, the chap on the drums was the local beekeeper who used to make honey and mead up the valley, the chap on the piano was a brother-in-law I think, Harold, from Stroud, and me on the violin. We collared the market, because it was very important to have a free-for-all dance once a week, a penny dance, not particularly sinful.

  We got a chap who loved going out at night, he drove a little taxi and he loved getting away from home. There was no television so there was no reason why he should stay at home. He was a non-alcoholic. In order to get out of his house, he used to come and pick us up once a week and take us, free, to Bisley, Birdlip, Sheepscombe, Painswick, Slad of course, Ruscombe, Chalford. We were coining it. We were paid five shillings a dance and free lemonade. We were rich and not only that, we were able to transmit early jazz which we learned. The beekeeper had a lot of old jazz records and we could learn it from those.

  Why we called ourselves The Three Blind Mice? Because none of us at that stage could read music. But we did very well.

  The music we played was old-fashioned, most of it, all by ear, it could have been well-known foxtrots, or something you had learned from the cinema. Then some very odd dances. A type of barn dance, I can hear it now, though I don’t know how to dance it. The Hesitation Dip was another one, perhaps you’d hear it on Come Dancing. The Hesitation Dip, very formal, Roger de Coverley was another one which was up the sides and down the middle. But generally speaking the foxtrots and rhumbas. I remember a girl in Painswick coming up and saying, ‘Laurie, you’re driving me crazy.’ I thought, I’ve made it, I’m the Mick Jagger of the district. Then I realized she wanted a tune called ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’, which I can still hear now. It was a great disappointment … but only one of many.