A Thousand Laurie Lees Read Online Free PDF Page A

recorded poetry for radio, the seed of a realisation that it mattered to listen, to take in the cadences of one’s surroundings as much as the voices of the people, growing in my ear.

3
    Three Points of the Diamond
    I lived, then, in a small, enclosed galaxy, caught partly out of time between two villages, with few facilities but the ones we built for ourselves or the ones some long-evaporated glacier had gouged and melted into the valley millennia ago.
    Electricity was a fairly new phenomenon in the valley – the mullioned cottage in which we lived, capped with a caul of yew, had only been wired up and connected to the water mains twenty or so years before we moved in. We were often travelling out, to Bisley, to Stroud and beyond, out of the enclosed sphere of the valley and into other worlds. We travelled less often to Slad, however; Slad was us and other at the same time, a smoke signal puff of civilization at the end of the valley. We could see it clearly from our garden, it was a mere two-mile stroll from our door, but the village always seemed far away.
    It was due to the lack of a road in that direction, and the lack of a shop in Slad, the latter a change wrought in the wake of electricity and cars taking trade to larger villages and towns. Walking was for pleasure and escape; without the rattling, coughing second-hand car my mother had learned to drive whilst pregnant with me, we would have felt almost entirely divorced from the wider world.
    We would strike out in Slad’s direction often enough to visit Diana Lodge, the painter friend of my mother’s, who was the first point on the erratic diamond of people who we knew in this valley before we came ourselves. Her house, Trillgate, was halfway to Slad and we would walk a quarter of a mile or more through mud and cowslips, avoiding horses and the occasional bull the farmer had forgotten to fence away from the footpath (which had once been the main road between Slad and Bisley) before we hit the tarmac, but we rarely walked on into the village itself.
    Diana kept a caravan up in the Black Mountains, at Capel-y-ffin, just around the corner from the old monastery where Eric Gill had lived and worked, and where Gill’s granddaughter and her family, the Davieses, still lived. My mother had met Diana there, visiting the old monastery with her mentor (and later my godfather) Father Brocard Sewell, a friend of Gill’s in his youth. She became one of my mother’s dearest friends.
    A game and eccentric woman – she seemed to me to be built out of milk and mountains and to be as old and wise as the hills, though she was the same age as my grandmother – Diana had lived an extraordinarily full life. She married the poet Oliver W.F. Lodge in 1932, having initially answered his advertisement for a nude model, and had previously posed for Eric Gill and danced with the high-kicking Tiller Girls.
    Diana and Oliver travelled, to Canada and the United States, gathering up a whorl of friends such as Lynn Chadwick and his first wife, the Canadian poet Ann Secord, who also found their way back to the area of Gloucestershire where Oliver had settled with his first wife, before her death, on the estate near Painswick of Detmar Blow, the Ruskin acolyte.
    After Oliver’s death, and after teetering on the verge of becoming a nun when her relationship with Leopold Kohr broke up, Diana embedded herself in Trillgate and into the landscape of Slad, becoming so much part of it that it seemed to me that she had never been anywhere else, despite painting the Black Mountains as well as the Slad Valley in an astonishing array of watercolours that captured the exactitudes of the landscape in a faintly surreal technicolour palate, and which she exhibited and sold in aid of charity until the end of her life.
    Like her watercolours, Trillgate existed in a little bubble of faded Cotswold grandeur; a set of semi-modern kitchen units tacked on to the heart of an old, old house that ran you in circles