A Thousand Laurie Lees Read Online Free PDF

if you walked through it and felt brave enough to walk through Diana’s spartan bedroom and back down the worn stone semi-spiral of stairs that wound around the chimney stack. Kitchen and bedroom were very likely all there had been of the house once, and they were all that mattered of the house – as a child I ran through the chilly bedrooms and freezing drawing room, only stopping to hide in a tipped-up basket of an armchair next to the unlit fireplace, ready to leap out on unwary passers-by, or simply staring at the hugger-mugger collection of Diana’s paintings, which filled the vast dining table and the nooks and crannies around it, but I did not linger in these rooms.
    As with any good house, the only room that mattered when the garden was not available was the kitchen; its deep fireplace which housed a wood-burning stove and a defunct bread oven, its long wooden table with a high-backed pew running down the pantry wall that seated ten or fed forty if there were parties in the garden. The pantry itself was a thing of wonder, a walk-in cornucopia, lined with jar upon jar of preserves and foodstuffs that beggared the modest imaginings of a child raised in a small house that was always stocked but never replete.
    Diana was a generous and warm woman – she welcomed and engaged with children as much as with adults, and my earliest memories of her are at Easter, when the garden became alive with hungry children engaged in her annual Easter egg hunt. We rushed back and forth amongst the exquisitely wild borders and through the small orchard hunting chocolate, as she stood by and laughed and encouraged us to look harder.
    Diana was an intensely devout Catholic, having converted a few years before, but the only clue was in the subtle crucifix she wore and the quietly placed iconography in the kitchen – religion was never pronounced, never interfered with the joy and adventures of children, who ran roughshod and happy through the gardens as if they were theirs entirely to command, some little adjunct of Eden. The house itself was ‘an act of worship in colour – [it] communicates joy similar to a Fra Angelico painting,’ my mother wrote in a letter in 1969.
    A sense of bohemia lingered like incense in Trillgate, more so when Diana’s children and grandchildren came to visit. The eldest, Tom, brought over from Canada not only his three boys, Tom Jr., Lionel and Brodie, but a whiff of rock and roll glamour still clinging from his time on Radio Caroline, the pirate station of which he’d been the controller in the sixties. His brother Colin figured more in my life; a puckish man with a bright, jutting beard and a playful, quixotic demeanour, whose barking laugh chased us children wherever we ran throughout the house and garden.
    His children, Owen and Caitlin, were regular visitors, up from Bristol. They came with a sharp, new manner, like a change in the air; the smell of the city on their breath. Owen played particularly hard, with a snap in his eye and a ready push that led to trouble and fun. Outside Diana’s studio, a precarious log cabin built to be hidden just beyond the garden, I remember suddenly fighting back; inspired perhaps by Katy’s years of more metaphorical pushing, I carried Owen over the edge of the veranda where he disappeared in an avalanche of nettle, bramble and boy, yelling and rolling down the hill to the fortuitous fence at the edge of the field. I remember the horror and the guilt of his fall, the way he slipped and rolled, the terror in the adults’ eyes. I also remember the way Owen, bruised and scratched, got up laughing and groaning, and how nothing more was ever (nor ever needed to be) said.
    It was a house of small, precise details hidden amongst the jumble of a bigger life: the Catholic icons stood out on the wall despite, or perhaps because of, their careful amalgamation into the general architectures of daily life. In the same way, Diana’s intensively curated spirit filled her