Review by Jay Ramsay

A Thousand Laurie Lees—Adam Horovitz (The History Press)

‘THIS is not a book about Laurie Lee…’: the back cover states it clearly, but some people have still apparently been confused. It is an autobiographical memoir tacked on to the occasion of Laurie’s centenary: it is essentially Adam’s story, but is no less remarkable—and certainly no less readable—for that. It is a poet’s story, and if Cider with Rosie (1959) lyrically evokes a vanished world, then Adam’s book no less evokes the reality of country living close to Nature and the elements which has become in its own way just as rare…mirrored in his own crafted and colourful prose.

The Thumb of the Slad Valley (as I also know) is a magical place where it’s still possible to time-slip back several hundred years. Free of car-noise, the woods are dense with birdsong; only an occasional plane drones high overhead. Wildness, and its flowering, are still there, as Adam’s father Michael abundantly celebrates in his Midsummer Morning Jog Log (Five Seasons Press, 1985).

Adam, like Laurie, came to live there when very young; his roots are there, his mother Frances wrote exquisite poetry there; and he still (despite various absences born of necessity) lives there. Frances tragically died when Adam was only 12; Michael, after many absences in pursuit of his own Olympic mission, has been more or less London-based, and remains so. Adam, apart from a brief absence up near Hadrian’s Wall with his mother, has stayed local; a familiar and unique figure who has grown in his own strength over the years we’ve all known him, sometimes against considerable odds. The valley and The Woolpack (which Laurie lived close behind), then, is as much ‘his’ as his own story.

He narrates that story skilfully, with tact, humour, truth, and an absence of judgement. People (including his own parents) are as they are, both human and animal, perhaps especially seen against a backdrop of Nature. People, like neighbours, come and go, as does their pride, their ambition, their dreams. Adam manages to write both subjectively and as an observer—and as I say, with no axe to grind. He’s too busy surviving in his own way.

The book is rich with memorable characters and vignettes; not least Laurie himself, of course, who also appears as a mentor to the young man. Adam’s own journeys to school make the average school run look like a pre-paid holiday, and his later motorbike escapade evading the police by plunging deep into the woods up near Elcombe is a memorable and remarkable episode. There are plenty more of them.

The book in its own way is about the life cycle, and the life journey too, set within the seasons of our lives. Death is always as close, and for the occasionally accident-prone author, vulnerability is decisively the nature of being human. The egotism of some of The Woolpack’s visiting celebs (none of them local) seems remote by comparison. I’d love to see any of them stumbling home in the dark alone as Adam has countless times with only a flickering torch, or moonlight to guide them. That would be medicine.

In a year where we’ve seen all the inevitable war celebrations (with not enough criticism, perhaps, of its continuing insanity) we’ve also had the re-issue of the Dymock poet and nature writer Edward Thomas’ In Pursuit of Spring (1914), which records a journey he made on a bicycle from London deep into Dorset. Adam’s own memoir stands beside it as much as a statement of ecology as history, his own poems included. The world that the Great War shattered and left behind in the increasing urbanization of consciousness and poetry here returns to its roots, with another wave of Nature Poetry beckoning—a flame that Laurie himself kept alive in his own writing, and which adorns the valley-facing side of his tombstone. The blessing remains; and Stroud itself is full of that blessing in all the creative people who now live here in pursuit of their own authenticity of life.

Jay Ramsay