let him write it with her and fabricate it utterly.
Beneath this easy charm lay what seemed to me to be a seam of sadness, however. ‘It isn’t easy to write in the country,’ he told the New York Times in 1993, after A Moment of War came out. ‘Either it’s a nice day and you lie in the long grass, or people knock on your door and want you to go to the pub for a chat. And that’s that day gone.’
It can’t be easy to follow up a success as widespread and all consuming as Cider with Rosie , either. I remember the Stroud launch of A Moment of War , in the echoing concrete cavern of the town’s starkly municipal leisure centre. The worthies and celebrants gathered in the high mezzanine corridor overlooking the game courts, their words confused and amplified by the architecture, Babel-bound in the baffling surroundings. There were a great many people there, but the building contrived to make it feel as though there were only ever ten or so people milling around and sipping wine, whilst Laurie sat with signing pen in hand at a table piled high with books looking a little forlorn, though he cheered up considerably when familiar faces came to chat.
Whatever the reasons for the slow-down in his writing life, it didn’t stop him from appreciating and pushing others, and this is where my meetings with him became a joy.
‘Ah, Adam,’ he’d cry, Kathy smiling warmly at his side. ‘Are you writing?’
I’d make my best excuses, saying I was keeping at it, working away, trying not to get too bogged down in student life to lose the impetus. Often I was not, and it showed.
‘Well you have to keep at it,’ he’d reply, with teasing seriousness, ‘or you’ll never escape the real jobs people expect you to do.’
The second time we met this way, at Stroud railway station, he reached into his pocket and brought out a well-worn wallet.
‘Here, have a fiver,’ he said, pressing the note on me and leaning in conspiratorially as if Kathy shouldn’t hear and couldn’t know. ‘Go and get drunk and write some POETRY!’
This was not an offer it would have been sensible to refuse, a fiver being quite enough to get drunk on in 1991. I took the money and the advice gladly and headed to the Pelican where all the prettiest women were likely to be drinking, ordered Uley ale and began to write.
E ARTH S ONG
Clouds skate over icy skies,
their heavy bellies ready to burst.
The embers of the sun splinter
on distant, claw-like trees
send shards of dank light
tumbling into the valley.
A mob of crows canters into the air
to bully an adventurous owl.
Bluetits pick at the last rotten apple
on an unattended tree.
As shadow swallows the garden
I sit on a log and defy the night.
A bat deftly manoeuvres
through intricate webs of dew-laden pine.
I close my eyes and call your name.
It echoes around the valley,
the sound undulating
through trees and hills,
building power
until my cry is a mantra,
chanted by the whole immediate world
of night creatures, plants and spirits.
I am swallowed whole
by darkness and warmth.
The valley breathes into me
and softly I breathe out your name.
The earth answers in song.
I spin in air currents
as the planet rocks me
in its malleable paw,
croons lullabies and lost odes
in languages I almost understand.
I whisper your name.
The whisper does not vanish,
but is borne on the wings of a butterfly
into the singing storm.
Sun bursts from my pores.
In a fragile case of air I await your reply.
10
The Real Rosie?
Walking out of the cottage and up the airy little path behind the Old Chapel (renamed Scrubs Bottom in a fit of typically British scatological humour) I learned to vanish into the woods to escape homework. I accessed the path by climbing a set of stairs, stairs my father had claimed when they were torn out of the Wilde’s cottage in the 1970s and had recycled into a sort of Jacob’s Ladder into the woods, a stairway to heaven straight out of A
Beneath this easy charm lay what seemed to me to be a seam of sadness, however. ‘It isn’t easy to write in the country,’ he told the New York Times in 1993, after A Moment of War came out. ‘Either it’s a nice day and you lie in the long grass, or people knock on your door and want you to go to the pub for a chat. And that’s that day gone.’
It can’t be easy to follow up a success as widespread and all consuming as Cider with Rosie , either. I remember the Stroud launch of A Moment of War , in the echoing concrete cavern of the town’s starkly municipal leisure centre. The worthies and celebrants gathered in the high mezzanine corridor overlooking the game courts, their words confused and amplified by the architecture, Babel-bound in the baffling surroundings. There were a great many people there, but the building contrived to make it feel as though there were only ever ten or so people milling around and sipping wine, whilst Laurie sat with signing pen in hand at a table piled high with books looking a little forlorn, though he cheered up considerably when familiar faces came to chat.
Whatever the reasons for the slow-down in his writing life, it didn’t stop him from appreciating and pushing others, and this is where my meetings with him became a joy.
‘Ah, Adam,’ he’d cry, Kathy smiling warmly at his side. ‘Are you writing?’
I’d make my best excuses, saying I was keeping at it, working away, trying not to get too bogged down in student life to lose the impetus. Often I was not, and it showed.
‘Well you have to keep at it,’ he’d reply, with teasing seriousness, ‘or you’ll never escape the real jobs people expect you to do.’
The second time we met this way, at Stroud railway station, he reached into his pocket and brought out a well-worn wallet.
‘Here, have a fiver,’ he said, pressing the note on me and leaning in conspiratorially as if Kathy shouldn’t hear and couldn’t know. ‘Go and get drunk and write some POETRY!’
This was not an offer it would have been sensible to refuse, a fiver being quite enough to get drunk on in 1991. I took the money and the advice gladly and headed to the Pelican where all the prettiest women were likely to be drinking, ordered Uley ale and began to write.
E ARTH S ONG
Clouds skate over icy skies,
their heavy bellies ready to burst.
The embers of the sun splinter
on distant, claw-like trees
send shards of dank light
tumbling into the valley.
A mob of crows canters into the air
to bully an adventurous owl.
Bluetits pick at the last rotten apple
on an unattended tree.
As shadow swallows the garden
I sit on a log and defy the night.
A bat deftly manoeuvres
through intricate webs of dew-laden pine.
I close my eyes and call your name.
It echoes around the valley,
the sound undulating
through trees and hills,
building power
until my cry is a mantra,
chanted by the whole immediate world
of night creatures, plants and spirits.
I am swallowed whole
by darkness and warmth.
The valley breathes into me
and softly I breathe out your name.
The earth answers in song.
I spin in air currents
as the planet rocks me
in its malleable paw,
croons lullabies and lost odes
in languages I almost understand.
I whisper your name.
The whisper does not vanish,
but is borne on the wings of a butterfly
into the singing storm.
Sun bursts from my pores.
In a fragile case of air I await your reply.
10
The Real Rosie?
Walking out of the cottage and up the airy little path behind the Old Chapel (renamed Scrubs Bottom in a fit of typically British scatological humour) I learned to vanish into the woods to escape homework. I accessed the path by climbing a set of stairs, stairs my father had claimed when they were torn out of the Wilde’s cottage in the 1970s and had recycled into a sort of Jacob’s Ladder into the woods, a stairway to heaven straight out of A
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