Free A Thousand Laurie Lees by Adam Horovitz

with Ginsberg on Guy Fawkes Night, aged eight, were not very good – charming enough for a child, as pure as any child’s writing can be if they’re given the chance to be free – but the lessons that came with them stayed with me, as did the sounds of the valley. These have driven nearly everything I’ve written as an adult, much of which stems from a long conversation with my mother’s writing and with the places that were important to us; the only real communication I was able to go on having with her, since she died when I was twelve. Death and absence taught me how to begin to write.

6
    You’ll Be Kissed Again
    T he valley was undergoing a multilateral evacuation in 1980. As low-flying jets from Fairford whizzed overhead, the free-thinking party of the 1970s crawled to an end as all the families that had come there began to move away and a procession of holidaymakers and weekenders moved on in.
    The Hortons moved to Australia, leaving a blank at the end of the garden. The land had been open for years; our gardens were as one and the children ran between them endlessly, through rows of potatoes my father had grown after a potato blight and a rhubarb patch that remained persistent until new neighbours built a wall right through it and stopped the rhubarb dead.
    I was immediately sad about that blank space – no more parties filled with small girls who found me endlessly fascinating and were prepared to show it. I wasn’t sure what to make of the attention, but I knew I’d miss it. I had come home along the garden one afternoon wet-faced and bewildered after visiting the Hortons. I think I must have been eight.
    â€˜What’s the matter?’ my mother asked.
    I didn’t know quite what to say.
    â€˜Nobody hurt you did they?’ she asked, crouching and cupping my face in her hand.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘A girl wouldn’t stop kissing me.’
    â€˜Wouldn’t stop?’ she said.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Did you ask her to stop?’
    â€˜No,’ I said, a little mulish. I think she may have laughed.
    â€˜Didn’t you like being kissed?’
    â€˜No. Yes. I don’t know,’ I said. I can still remember the girl’s warm mouth pressed on mine as she sat on my lap, telling me I was funny and hugging my neck as I sat there contemplating the strangeness of it all. She was six, I think, and charmed by my white skin and my red hair. She liked my freckles too. She kept on kissing me and calling to others in the garden and talking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. Then a jet flew over, scratching its belly on the treetops and roaring like a wounded dragon. We flung ourselves to the floor and the kissing stopped, became crying. I remember Judy Horton flat on the floor and cursing, words I had only heard before from my mother in a towering rage. I ran home, wet-faced, frightened, not sure if it was the kissing or the plane that scared me most.
    â€˜You’ll be kissed again,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not so strange.’

    Some people, at least, were moving in to stay. Pat and Hans Hopf, whose sons John and Robert had been fast friends with Jules and Jamie Lloyd when they came at weekends, moved down to the valley permanently in 1979 in a cloud of sweet-smelling pipe smoke, taking up residence at the other end of our little terrace in a house they’d owned since 1963. I instantly, cheekily renamed them Hat and Pans, much to my father’s delight.
    Hans was a stocky German, his pipe in constant motion between hand and mouth, a gruffly cheerful man whom I associate mostly with clouds of tobacco and pesticide, standing in his immaculate garden raising a hand in greeting and warning me off cycling too fast down the path past his front door, having seen me crash my first bike spectacularly outside it the first time I rode it, taking the skin from my knees. Pat was (and remains) quietly indomitable and kind.
    Hans came