Down in the Valley Read online

  And he dropped in here just before Christmas one snowy night, flashing his gold coins around. He said not only how rich he was and that he ate meat every day, and that he never touched his cap to anyone.

  ‘Not like you, grovelling on the mud of Stroud. All you see of society is Stroud on a Saturday night. Me I have a horse and carriage at home in New Zealand and I eat meat every day, and what’s more, I pay for my drinks in gold.’ And he brought out these sovereigns and he laid them out on the counter. And he kept on ordering drinks and flashing his gold around and the young men sitting round watched him, they drank his drink, they kept silent, but they kept watching him, quiet eyes and glowing cigarettes, which he bought for them. Then one by one they slipped away into the blizzard. He went on until closing time, then he paid for his bill and went out into the snow and walked up to where his parents lived at the top of the village. He walked up singing into the blizzard. I’m sure I heard him singing that night. People in the village could hear that boasting, singing voice going up.

  But as he got near the war memorial the lads met him, and stopped him and said, ‘Well, Vincent,’ and they hit him and they knocked him down and they kicked him. They stole his watch and they threw him over the wall. And in the morning he was found frozen to death.

  You don’t go away, and you don’t come back boasting of riches which the young men had not been able to achieve. If you come back a pauper, on your hands and knees asking for soup, they’ll take you in and look after you. But if you come back throwing your gold sovereigns down on the bar, flashing your gold watches, they don’t forgive that. He wasn’t exactly murdered, he was ritually slaughtered. We clammed up and we were told as children never to mention it. Later, about ten years later, an old woman, the mother of one of those who’d killed him, was dying. She saw a stranger sitting by her bed and she said,

  ‘Who’s this?’ And her daughter said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a police gentleman, he doesn’t want to make any trouble he just wants to know what happened to the watch, mother, that’s all he wants to know.’

  And the old lady sat up in bed and looked at him, then laid back, closed her eyes, and died.

  I like to feel that’s how we guarded ourselves in the past. Nobody ever spoke, nobody ever went to the police, but we all knew ‘who done it’. And Vincent’s murderers grew to be respectable parishioners, parents, but they treated Vincent … well, he was a vagabond. All this happened in this pub, the place in which judgement was passed.

  Many other happier things have happened in here. We have harvest festivals here, when you cannot move for blotched cauliflowers and magnificent vegetable marrows, free drinks and the vicar going slowly green on cider, which he’s not normally accustomed to. It’s a great night, the harvest festival.

  And it’s also a great place for refreshment and relaxation. I can lean out of the window and watch who calls to my cottage. I can see the turn of the road and see the three ashen. There used to be three ash trees, they’ve gone, but we still call it the three ashen. I can see the arrivals and departures of strangers and the arrivals we hope for. Of new loves and new engagements, new pleasures and the departures of visitors from Bristol, hoping they will return. From this angle you can see the rain coming up from Wales. It comes round the corner in a silver sheet, just in time for you to get down into the house, take in your washing, stay in for the night or stay here for the night.

  You can see Peter Webb, the farmer. You can see his fields which are laid out in almost an Elizabethan lozenge, I don’t think the hedges have been changed since Elizabethan days; certainly his farm is that old. And we know when if he cuts his hay before five o’clock, by eleven it’s raining. We say, ‘Peter’s cut his hay, we’d better take cover.’ Peter keeps our sense of the seasons alive watching his fields, we know what time of the year it is. And he’s a very correct and accomplished farmer, he’s been there for fifty years. And I still know his voice, calling his cows, calling his sheep. His is the voice of the valley and the voice of the landscape. So I’m devoted to old Peter. Even if he does cut his hay in the rain, he knows what he’s doing.

  I think it’s true that you should never return. I’ve been forgiven. I returned at a difficult time because, unlike Vincent who hadn’t told a lot of stories about the village, I had. And you can tell any story in the bar about your neighbours and it’s a joke, but you put it in print and you’ve broken a taboo. It took me a lot of time, living that down. But if you live in a village there is this tight enclosed community. We’re not working out a soap opera, we’re living our own particular history, and sharing that particular history of failures, disasters, happiness, life and death, marriages. But at least it’s shared. And each of us thinks at times we are isolated. That we know the secrets of everybody else, but think that we ourselves are protected by isolation. We’re not. We know the secrets of everyone else, thank God at the expense of their knowing our secrets too. And this is something that one must admit and acknowledge and be glad of. That to share the life of a community, you have to be part of a community, you can’t watch it from a distance, you have to be involved in it, as they are involved in you.

  As a writer, I would say that whether or not putting it all down on paper sets you apart from the community depends on how you tell the stories of the village. I wrote a bit about an uncle who I adored, he was one of the heroes of my youth. He drove a bus, a double-decker bus, and he liked cider, and he’d stand no nonsense. He once got out of his bus when we were coming back from Weston on an outing. There was a man in a hedge threatening his wife. My uncle stopped the bus, got out and knocked the man through the hedge, in order to protect the wife. Then the wife attacked him for having hit her husband. But he gets back into the bus and drives home singing. And we all think top Uncle Sid, because he was a hero.

  But he got into trouble. He got his double-decker bus stuck under a railway bridge and we as boys went to see what had happened and he’d been sacked. He’d been sacked because he’d got a jar of cider in the front of his bus, and I mentioned this quite naturally. His children thought it was a bit excessive, abominable in fact, to tell these stories about Uncle Sid, in print. The Evening Standard, the London Evening Standard did some excerpts and they used that excerpt, so I wrote to, no I telephoned, my cousin and I said I was very sorry and I wasn’t thinking, ‘I do apologize and I’ll cut it out of the next edition.’ ‘Oh you don’t have to do that, there’s no occasion to do that you know,’ she said. She was obviously being very kind to me but I do understand that he is part of the book, therefore I wish it to be known what a hero he was and why he was such a hero to me and it did go into print. It was meant as a tribute of my affection for him, and my admiration for him, and so it’s still there.

  I must end up by saying when my book Cider with Rosie came out I thought I’ll have a go, and I wrote to local cider makers and suggested because they would get a certain amount of publicity for their product, they might send me a crate or two. ‘Oh no, we don’t have anything to do with the scandal you’ve caused in your village by having an affair with an under-age girl.’ I’m hoping that one day they’ll bring this up again in the committee meeting and perhaps be a little more tolerant to the fact that I was used. I wasn’t a predator. I was used and they may still send me round a crate.

  I was sitting outside the pub recently and two girls came up to me. They were part of a school group, it was about five to eleven. They were doing ‘O’ levels and they said to me, ‘Excuse me sir, can you tell me where Laurie Lee’s buried?’ A certain shiver of mortality ran through me and I said, ‘He’s in the public bar, otherwise he’d be up in the woods.’

  Towards the end of the last century a local artist did a series of lithographs based on churches of various villages: Bisley, Sheepscombe, Painswick, Ranwick and Slad, of all places. Before he embarked on these he got a list of subscribers and it was based on selling his lithographs to the gentry and the high ones and the moral ones and the grandees. So when he did Slad, you
’ll notice when you are just coming into the village, there’s the school there and the church there. It’s a very romantic little lithograph, I love it. There’s one of my ancestors sitting on the wall as you’ll see, in a long bucolic gown.

  But if you search very deeply into that picture, you won’t find The Woolpack, because what he’d done was to remove The Woolpack deliberately, so that the patrons would not be offended by having the pub obscure the church. That’s why you can suddenly see this view of Slad which doesn’t exist otherwise. In fact, it’s been censored, it’s been de-alcoholized and that’s why I love it. I always pretend the bucolic figure on the wall is me, but it obviously isn’t. But I have got that gown still.

  8

  Home

  When I was working in London towards the end of the war, a thistledown blew past my window and the movement of this thistledown brought me back here.

  ‘Thistle, blue bunch of daggers, rattling upon the wind.’

  That was the field, the church field just below the village.

  And the poem ‘Summer Rain’, it’s the same.

  I hear the sad rinsing of reeded meadows

  The small lakes rise to the wild, white rose

  The shudder of wings in the streaming cedars

  And tears of lime running down from the hills.

  That sums up, those two verses sum up, all round here. The cedars in the garden of that big house and the streams running down through the limestone hills:

  And I hear the sad rinsing of reeded meadows

  … because the rain would never stop. It was one of those summers:

  And the small lakes rise to the wild, white rose

  Imagine, it’s been happening just this week when the white roses are just opening and then the rain batters them, collects in them and flattens them. It’s a disappointed summer. It’s a summer that’s been laid and written off, a summer that cannot be regained.

  I wrote a lot of poetry that marked the changing seasons.

  Apples

  Behold the apples’ rounded world

  juice-green of July rain,

  the black polestar of flowers, the rind

  mapped with its crimson stain.

  The russet, crab and cottage red

  burn to the sun’s hot brass,

  then drop like sweat from every branch

  and bubble in the grass.

  They lie as wanton as they fall,

  and where they fall and break,

  the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,

  the starling stabs his beak.

  In each blunt gourd the cidery bite

  of boys’ teeth tears the skin;

  the waltzing wasp consumes his share,

  the bent worm enters in.

  And I, with easy hunger, take

  entire, my season’s dole;

  and welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour

  the hollow and the whole.

  ‘Field of Autumn’ I wrote here in Slad. It’s the end of summer and I had a certain amount of difficulty finishing it. For instance, in the last verse when I say, ‘Slow moves the hour that sucks our life’, then, ‘slow drops the late wasp from the flower’. But you don’t have wasps dropping from flowers, it had to be a pear. It was about the disintegration of the year and the year’s ripeness. Then I was trying to search for the finality of summer:

  The rose tree’s thread of scent draws thin

  And snaps upon the air.

  Which is, of course, a little death, when breath begins and breath ends. The rose tree’s scent suddenly ends, finishes, there is no flower:

  Field of Autumn

  Slow moves the acid breath of noon

  over the copper-coated hill,

  slow from the wild crab’s bearded breast

  the palsied apples fall.

  Like coloured smoke the day hangs fire

  taking the village without sound;

  the vulture-headed sun lies low

  chained to the violet ground.

  The horse upon the rocky height

  takes all the valley in his eye,

  yet dares not raise his foot or move

  his shoulder from the fly.

  The sheep snail-backed against the wall,

  lifts her blind face but does not know

  the cry her blackened tongue gives forth

  is the first bleat of snow.

  Each bird and stone, each roof and well,

  feels the gold foot of autumn pass;

  each spider binds, with glittering snare

  the splintered bones of grass.

  Slow moves the hour that sucks our life,

  slow drops the late wasp from the pear,

  the rose tree’s thread of scent draws thin –

  and snaps upon the air.

  I was thinking of a poem today and I was going over it with my daughter. It was called ‘At Night’ and I haven’t said it and I haven’t remembered it since I first wrote it as a teenager, first in love. And it was a poem that was so obsessed by the touch of the images of love that it wrote itself without work:

  At Night

  I think at night my hands are mad,

  for they follow the irritant texture of darkness

  continually carving the sad leaf of your mouth

  in the thick black bark of sleep.

  And my finger-joints are quick with insanity,

  springing with lost amazement

  through a vast waste of dreams

  and forming frames of desire

  around the thought of your eyes.

  By day the print of your body

  is like a stroke of sun on your hands,

  and the choir of your blood

  goes chanting incessantly

  through the echoing channels of my wrists.

  But I am lost in my hut

  when the stars are out,

  for my palms have a catlike faculty of sight,

  and the surface of every minute

  is a swinging image of you.

  Some poems require a certain amount of attention and rewriting, balancing of rhythms and images, but quite often they write themselves and you never touch them again. You don’t need to. They’re given to you. They’ve said what you wish to say. And this one I was looking at, I suppose I must have been about twenty years old, twenty-one, I still think it says what I wished to say at that time, so it doesn’t require any more words.

  Whereas in ‘Field of Autumn’, ending of summer required a way of saying it conclusively. I think the last lines and the last verses of poems are important, meaning that the conclusions should sum up what the rest of the poetry has said. It must end properly, it must end conclusively. It should not end in a mess or a squabble. Like a love affair, it should end correctly, creatively, with appreciation and celebration and forgiveness.

  ‘Day of These Days’ was dreamed up on a bright autumn morning on the top of a 14 bus going from the Fulham Road to the Strand. I had a job up there at the time and it was such a gold and glorious morning that the images of the morning began pouring into the top deck. So I was seeing the geraniums and the girls and golden light, and I began:

  Such a morning it is when love

  leans in through the geranium windows

  and calls with a cockerel’s tongue

  And the old bus was ploughing along and I went through this various succession of verses summing up my feeling of autumn, most of them based on this valley and not on the Fulham Road. And I went on:

  When the partridge draws back his string

  and shoots like a buzzing arrow

  over grained and mahogany fields.

  And the images of that kind arranged themselves in succession ending up with:

  Such a morning it is when all things smell good,

  and the cheeks of girls

  are as baked bread to the mouth

  As bread and bean flowers

  the touch of their lips

  and their white teeth sweeter than cucumbe
rs.

  ‘Yates’s bar!’ yells the conductor and I was there, I was finished, the poem was over and I had got to Yates’s bar. He knew where I was going because I used to go there every morning to get my supply of Portuguese periquito wine, which I used to work with. So there was the poem, ready written in the time that journey took. And the ticket, I remember it cost threepence, from the Fulham Road to Yates’s bar in the Strand. And I was thinking the other day, you couldn’t write a poem like that for threepence these days. It would cost you at least £1.90 perhaps. So that’s where that was written and I still have some of the empty bottles. But something more serious than that. It was a game and a celebration of the gold side of autumn. But at the same time, I say it didn’t require any rewriting, it made itself, and fitted into that bus ride:

  Day of These Days

  Such a morning it is when love

  leans in through the geranium windows

  and calls with a cockerel’s tongue

  And the partridge draws back his string

  and shoots like a buzzing arrow

  over grained and mahogany fields

  When the mice

  run whispering from the church