Free A Thousand Laurie Lees by Adam Horovitz Page A

prepared for the worst, with snow chains for his car, having seen winter’s obliteration howl through the valley many times, long before I was born. Sometimes, walking past their house now, I still smell the sweet tobacco smoke and hear him calling out his perennial, thickly accented cry of ‘Do not play ball on my land!’

    What was strangest to me was that Katy was leaving too, Katy whose valley this was as much as mine, my sister in all but blood, who even now can see through me to the truth and call it without resentment (or too much, anyway) on my part. Katy, who when I got a stuffed fox in a dandyish red waistcoat for Christmas, had had to have a stuffed fox herself to avoid resentment and arguments and jealousies. Katy, who my cousin Zoë (two years older than myself) had accused of being ‘a bit too big for her boots’ as we walked down the steep slope, away from St Benedicts; Katy had tried to lead the way in every game and Zoë, also used to getting her own way, had led an uncomfortable revolt as I sat rigid on the fence. Katy, who had suffered my illnesses when I succumbed to them because her parents had sent her down to see me, making sure she got them out of the way. In bed with mumps and tonsillitis, I remember the frown haloed by her mop of unruly white blonde hair, her concern. A few weeks later, better, I remember her grumbling fury at me as I sat by her bed, eating the grapes I’d brought as consolation for the mumps she’d taken home.
    Before the Lloyds left, midway through 1980, a few months before my mother and I, they moved into the dark old haunted house at the end of the valley. The snows had come and Katy was ill and bored. I packed up my collections of Beano and Dandy comics, dragged them down on the sledge for her to read. Taking them home a week later in the thaw, slush, shivering down from the naked rafters of the abbey of trees, destroyed every single one. I remember weeping with fury as Desperate Dan was mulched to pulp, the ink merging Jocks with Geordies whilst Chips melted into Bully Beef and Korky shrank away to nothing.
    So much was changing, merging, having the colour washed from it. The valley was emptying itself, melting away, taking childhood with it.

7
    Midsummer Morning Log Jam
    I n 1984, a year after my mother died, I came back to the Slad Valley in a blank state, against my mother’s dying wishes, much of my memory of childhood scrubbed away by grief. I came back to live with my father, who for four years I had seen only in school holidays and more often than not in London, dancing through a street party with him for the 1981 royal wedding or pestering him into taking me to an all-day showing of the Star Wars trilogy.
    The only time I remember visiting him in the valley with my mother in those years away, living in Sunderland and Herefordshire, was when she drove me through Slad to the last clot of tarmac before the road ran out at Snows Farm, having called my father from the phone box next to the Woolpack to let him know we were near. Setting out again, she narrowly avoided hitting two boys playing football on Steanbridge Lane, at the top of the hill before the steep descent down to the drowning pool. I remember her cursing herself and at their carelessness, shaking as she drove on down the hill and fretting as we awaited my father by the house at the end of the road.
    He arrived in a huff of lateness, upset that she had come that way instead of down the perilous road from Bisley and that she would not come into the house. For my sake, the argument was muted, saved for letters or past-my-bedtime phone calls – the last huge row of their separation I had witnessed was in the summer of 1980, over books. Aged nine, and long protected from such vicious and pointless disputes, I had withdrawn into the corner by the door, under a poster that stated ‘Anyone caught smoking on these premises will be hung by the toenails and pummelled into unconsciousness