Free A Thousand Laurie Lees by Adam Horovitz Page B

with an organic carrot’; a tourist token, decorated with cartoon Native Americana, from my father’s tours of California reading poetry to beatified literature students in Berkeley, UCLA, Stamford et al.

    ‘Stop it,’ I yelled at them as they sniped and squealed about which book belonged to whom. ‘You’re behaving like stupid, small CHILDREN!’
    There had been arguments before, of course, and my mother could be fierce and satirical when the need arose, with either my father or myself. Her closest friend, Jane Percival, came to stay one night, out of the blue and through the rain, despairing of the strained relationship with her husband at their home in Somerset. She had driven up in the dark, in urgent need of the comforting shoulder of her friend. My mother tenderly invited her in and, sitting her by the wood-burning stove, fed her homemade cakes and tea. I was lying on the couch, off school for a couple of days with a slight cold. I waved to Jane, who started to speak and, as she did so, shakily lit a cigarette. My father came down the stairs, an ex-smoker of evangelical proportions, who had quit his twelve-year addictions to Players Mild, along with whatever forms of marijuana came his way, soon after we moved into the cottage, and never looked back.
    I coughed a little as he opened the door. He turned to Jane and demanded she put the cigarette out.
    ‘Can’t you see you’re making him cough?’ he said, waving in my direction dramatically before sitting by me and cuddling my shoulders.
    ‘I’m alright,’ I said, trying to sit up, unheard as the row escalated and Jane was banished over the garden to stay with the Hortons, where, thanks to the regular incursions of strangely scented Saturday night smoke drifting over to our house almost as effectively as their renditions of Dylan, my mother knew she would be made welcome, smoker or not. My mother went with her, to make the arrangements, almost smoking herself as she reached the tipsytoploftical pinnacle of a towering rage.
    I was hurried into bed, huddled up the stairs in my father’s arms, and listened enthralled and terrified as my mother’s fury vented itself downstairs when she came home. It was carefully modulated, her anger, as was everything she did, as precise and quietly explosive as her movements. (This was a woman who would buy a Mars bar, divide it into five slivers and keep them in the fridge, eating one piece a day at most over the course of a week – and who would pick daintily at the immaculately prepared and considered food she cooked as if it were a meal in a play or a film, which you were only supposed to pretend to eat).
    My father matched her with his more expansive, discursive and diversionary modes, running little rivulets of counter-argument in the defence of my health past her, trying to wear down the barricades of the Stanislavskian fourth wall she had built around her outrage. She simmered like an Ibsen heroine. He danced his tongue around the argument like an angry Puck.
    Living in the valley again after four years away was a strange experience, without my mother or any families or children my age there to temper it and tame it. The valley had existed in me as a state of perfection, a place where everything was right with the world, which blurred with the roseate tinge of half-forgotten allegiances and love. It was far less rewarding to explore alone, back in the reality of it – the dry stone walls seemed less sure of themselves, more careworn and mossy with inattention, the homes-from-home that Katy and I had built in tangled copses were small and run down, empty of the fantastically mundane lives that she and I had created in them for ourselves.
    The valley was a place of importance to my father, too. A giddy nostalgia possessed us both, for the time we’d spent with chickens and the attempted smallholding dreams of food for free, basking in my mother’s presence from 1971 to 1979, all interruptions and absences forgotten