Laurie Lee: source material
It was then that I began to sit on my bed and stare out at the nibbling squirrels, and to make up poems from intense abstraction, hour after unmarked hour, imagination scarcely faltering once, rhythm hardly skipping a beat, while sisters called me, suns rose and fell and the poems I made, which I never remembered were the first and last of that time….
Laurie Lee Cider with Rosie (1959)
When Laurie Lee wrote the closing of his memoir Cider with Rosie, he was writing about the end of an era, a time of great change and upheaval as oil and petrol brought cars, motorbikes and buses to the Slad Valley and a ‘generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years of life.’ Those who had been born in a world of hush and patience were beginning to disperse into a fragmented world of war. And this, less than a hundred years ago. Although my world is very different to his, I vividly remember reading Laurie Lee for the very first time at secondary school and feeling that shock of recognition. I was enchanted by his work, he was one of the first authors to really snag at my imagination. I still have the special illustrated copy of Cider with Rosie that my parents gave me more than 30 years ago.
It’s now a bit dog eared and very well loved but I will never forget my astonishment when I first read it to realise that this place where I lived was a place worthy of being told about in a book and it started me on the path to writing, sputtering and sporadic for many years (the focus came later) but there has never been any doubt in my mind about the source of the spark that set that inner fire burning within me.
There have been times, I admit, when the legacy of Laurie Lee has irritated me – I have cringed more than once at how he’s wheeled out in aspic whenever someone wants to invoke some kind of literary Gloucestershire, as if Laurie Lee is all the county has ever had to offer, as if the county has remained entirely unchanged since Cider With Rosie came out in 1959.
Oh the fetishization of the English countryside aside - which, in all fairness, was never anything to do with the man himself (don’t get me started, I have got started, I apologise, I digress)… My love for Laurie Lee’s work endures. When I was shortlisted for the inaugural Laurie Lee Prize this year I practically fell off my chair, dizzy with the feeling that I had already won, that this was some kind of a sign, that he was sending me a message that I had chosen the right writerly path to write about my place, our place. Ruts, tussocks and all. That the shortlisted piece was part memoir, part lyrical essay, after Cider With Rosie in a way, seemed only fitting.
To have actually gone on to win the prize is still a mind-blowing, boundless joy to me a few weeks on.
While there are numerous regional awards for writers in the north, north west, north east, London and south east, we’ve never had anything like this before for Gloucestershire writers and we have felt the want of it. It is as if the founder of the prize Katie Fforde has flung us rural writers a line with a current running through it to electrify our work and light up the sky - even if only for a moment. A flare to find our way by in the backwaters of beyond. Huge thanks are due to Katie and the judging panel, Adam Horovitz, Jane Bailey, Jamila Gavin, Jessy Lee (Laurie Lee's daughter) and Norah Perkins (Laurie Lee’s literary agent) for what they have done to encourage and nurture our local literary community and writers like me who spend so much of my time alone with a pen and the page, not knowing where the words will lead me or if there will be anyone on the other side to listen.
Below is the opening of ‘Source Material,’ which I read at Stroud Book Festival for the Winner’s Event. The full essay will be published by Good On Paper magazine in January 2023.
SOURCE MATERIAL
WILD
We crested the brow of the hill at dusk and saw the twinkling lights spread out between the vehicles and sound systems down on the common with an electrifying sense of excitement. All talking at once, rolling fags, hanging out of the windows, we found a spot to park up off the B4208 on that evening in May 1992 and entered three days that would change the rest of our lives.
It wasn’t the first rave I’d been to – there were a lot of others (Stroud, Lechlade, Acton, names I can’t remember) – and it wasn’t my last, but immersed in Castlemorton and the spectacular weirdness of the Spiral Tribe sound system, dancing all night to DIY DJ’s Digs & Woosh and Circus Warp with a nomadic, open, inclusive community of like-minded souls, my sense of belonging to a wild land beyond the urban normcore was cemented.
Being an old skool raver has been part of who I am for decades now, I admit. I took it with me when I moved away from Gloucestershire in the mid-1990s up to university in Madchester and the club nights then on to the glory days of early noughties Brighton and that infamous Fat Boy Slim beach rave. But it wasn’t just the outdoor parties that made me feel part of the wild. I had begun to carry the wild with me as I’d snuck out of the house as a kid in the early hours to go walking in the fields and parks before dawn, later on long nights at country pubs, in the lakes and rivers where we paddled and swam, scooting along the current on tractor inner tubes. The seed of that impulse to be outdoors as much as possible, and the sense of communality that came with it, was sown much earlier by my parents, when we walked the dogs through the feral beechwoods that crest the Cotswold escarpment, on the managed land of Bathurst Park which began more or less at the end of our street or over the freshly ploughed fields on the hills.
I carried the wild with me on nights spent camping in the medieval woods of Estcourt Park, an estate which had been the setting for a now demolished country house and seat of the Estcourt family since the early fourteenth century. A small group of us sixth formers headed there quietly on the weekends, delighting in the darkness as we jumped over the stones in the young River Avon and boiled up water in a whistling kettle, unfazed by the ever-present sense of generations of ghosts (poachers, maids, gardeners) living in the large conifers and ancient oaks that surrounded us. The Gloucestershire landscape then is much as it is now, shaped by the wealth of the landed gentry that was generated by rental income, inheritance, the historic trade in wool and raw materials from the colonies and slavery overseas. Public access is restricted to a tiny percentage of the local area via the footpaths that by definition curtail adventure. As an adolescent and young adult, I quietly disregarded these man-made rules as my edges became porous, blending with the vibrant matter of marsh marigold, nettle and limestone, with the breeze running through the ash, with the song of the blackbirds. Sometimes – often - it was mind-bendingly boring living in a rural area (some wonder we welcomed rave culture with open arms) but if I were cut in half like a stick of rock with a knife now, I’ll wager a ram and a pint of snakebite and black that Gloucestershire is written all the way through.
CHURN
I may not be much of a raver these days but that connection to the land endures, the sense that I belong to a wild, weird, illicit space somehow bound to the seasons yet beyond the confines of linear, conventional timescales and the primness of the chocolate box Cotswolds in the English imagination.
After twenty years away from Gloucestershire, it was death that brought me home when my father passed away. I moved back for good, bringing my partner with me and giving birth to two children at the Royal Gloucester Hospital. True to the saying, no sooner was one child born than another family member died. First my grandmother went with Alzheimer’s, then my mother-in-law just after the birth of our second child. Then my sister-in-law died tragically with a brain tumour. Slowly, one by one, our blood family was - is - disappearing.
The desire to live with the irrepressible spirit of the wild drove my impulse to immerse myself in local lakes and rivers. More way of life than a pastime, these tiny adventures into wild water are small slices of epic freedom in the domestic week and an act of reclamation by this female body which has forever been told the outdoors is not a ‘safe’ space to be. It is also a way of connecting to the past and claiming a sense of belonging that is strongly bound to water and a family history that glistens with tall tales of lives lived on rivers and the high seas: Dad swimming the Channel smeared in goose fat, my lockkeeper grandfather on the Thames at Sonning, uncles working the London docks, others sailing the world in the merchant navy, migrating to Canada to work in fishing. With this inheritance and my love of outdoor swimming all year round to guide me, in 2021 I resolved to swim-walk the River Churn, 23 miles from the source to its confluence with the Thames.
The Churn is my ‘home’ river, I’ve known it for over forty years. I played in and around it as a child growing up in Cirencester, watching water voles scurrying along the banks, paddling and fishing for snotty dogs and minnows, riding the current where the flow ran high at the water meadows. Curious to see how it had changed since that time, I made my journey along the river in a haphazard way, swim-walking it in stages, out of order and when arrangements at home allowed.
I set out on an idyllic day by visiting the source of the Churn with my partner, two children and our dog. My youngest child crouched down to watch the lice wriggling in the water up close. We jumped on the stepping-stones and cleared some litter from the area - cans, cellophane, a barbecue charcoal bag. From there, the Churn runs under the A436 and the headwaters empty initially into a pond in the garden of the then-closed Severn Springs pub. It was fenced off and weedy. An inauspicious start.
At Rendcomb, Mum joined us from her home nearby. To have had her and my immediate family - now almost our whole blood family - with me on that first day of swim-walking the river was an unfamiliar joy. The scene was almost a cliche, softly bucolic with the newborn lambs frolicking on the valley slopes and the sun shining brightly in a clear sky. A very warm day but the wind was cold when it blew, reminding us that April’s cruelties were still with us.
The first place I was able to access the river was beyond the lamb field after the electrified fence came to an end. In Conigree Wood, where young wild garlic carpeted the floor, I eagerly climbed over the waterfall - a Romantic construction of manmade stone and boulders - and swam under the bridge at the old gatehouse to Rendcomb College in the roiling jade waters. A carved stone Father Thames looked on from the arch of the bridge as I passed below, then walked and swam the river almost to North Cerney. It was shallow in many places - ankle deep - gravelly, irises shooting out of the riverbed. Weeds were beginning to grow at the margins after their winter dormancy. A strong smell of water mint pervaded the air and a young deer drank from the riverbank, leaping away over the field at our approach.
Fencing crisscrossed land and water: the barbed wire was strung between fence posts along each bank and at intervals, it bisected the river itself. Much of the riverbank on the upper reaches of the Churn is not a public right of way, but private land belonging to farmers and agriculture co-ops, Rendcomb College and the Bathurst Estate. This is the norm. Just 3% of England’s rivers are legally open rights of way for all. It felt appropriate to be coincidentally walking this forbidden riverbed on the anniversary of the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932, for which around 500 people did a walking protest to secure their right to access open country. By chance, on this day in 2021 all around the UK, groups and individuals were taking action for the ‘Right To Roam’ and to prevent the impending criminalisation of trespass.
We left the river and climbed the hill up and over to North Cerney. I bought up a climbing rose and a blue lily from a house selling them along the way and stopped at the Bathurst Arms for a drink and packets of crisps for the kids. It was busy - only the second Saturday of opening after lockdown. A huge surreal wigwam had been erected in the garden and decorated with a papier-mache zebra, peacock wall hangings and garlands of fake flowers. We sat by the river and the children played in the shallows. As I watched the kids, I thought of my dad who loved this place and our diminishing family and wondered if perhaps my strong attachment to this place was becoming a kind of precaution against grief. A holding close to permanence.