SOURCE: "Bright as a Windblown Lark," in The New Yorker, Vol. XXXVI, No. 9, April 16, 1960, pp. 172, 174, 177-78.

The common reader will put up with absolutely anything, but how like getting a stock split or finding a four-leaf clover it is to read a book by a writer who has managed to separate the material that is his from everybody else's, whose style is an approximation of his own manner of speaking, and who with some courage lays his cards on the table. The Edge of Day, by Laurie Lee, meets all three of these requirements, and is beautiful besides, as one would expect the autobiography of a poet to be—beautiful, rich, full of stories, full of the humor that fountains from unsuppressed human beings, full of intelligence and point, full of damn near everything.

I have a fondness for first sentences, and the first sentences of this book are "I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began. The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before."

He was rescued by his three big sisters, who came scrambling and calling up the steep, rough bank and, parting the long grass, found him. "There, there, it's all right, don't you wail anymore," they said. "Come down 'ome and we'll stuff you with currants." It was the summer of the last year of the First World War, and 'ome turned out to be "a cottage that stood in a half-acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake; a cottage with three floors and a cellar and a treasure in the walls, with a pump and apple trees, syringa and strawberries, rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling, and all for three and sixpence a week."

Shortly before this, his father, "a knowing, brisk, evasive man, the son and the grandson of sailors," had decamped, leaving his mother to bring up their four young children and four more by his first marriage—on what it would be an exaggeration to call a shoestring. But at least he didn't abandon them entirely; he sent them a few pounds a year, and though they were always hungry, they never quite starved, for the simple reason that they had neighbors. "See if Granny Trill's got a screw of tea—only ask her nicely, mind," his mother would say. Or "Run up to Miss Turk and try and borrow half-crown; I didn't know I'd got so low." And the child spoken to would say, "Ask our Jack, our Mother! I borrowed the bacon. It's blummin'-well his turn now."

"Our Mother" is larger than life-size. She was descended from a long line of Cotswold farmers, and the village schoolmaster, finding that she had a good mind, lent her books and took considerable pains with her, until her mother fell sick and she was needed at home and her father put a stop to her education. At seventeen, wearing her best straw hat and carrying a rope-tied box, she went into domestic service and worked as a scullery maid, household maid, nursemaid, and parlormaid in the houses of the gentry—an experience that haunted her, because she saw luxuries and refinements she could never forget and to which, her son says, she in some ways naturally belonged. "Real gentry wouldn't hear of it," she would tell the children. "The gentry always do it like this"—with the result that they, too, were haunted by what she passed down to them. She had been more than pretty, and she was still a strong, healthy, vivid, impulsive woman. She was also extravagant and a dreadful manager.

The rent … was only three shillings sixpence a week but we were often six months behind. There would be no meat at all from Monday to Saturday, then on Sunday a fabulous goose; no coal or new clothes for the whole of the winter, then she'd take us all to the theatre; Jack, with no boots, would be expensively photographed; a new bedroom suite would arrive; then we'd all be insured for thousands of pounds and the policies would lapse in a month. Suddenly the iron-frost of destitution would clamp down on the house, to be thawed only by another orgy of borrowing, while harsh things were said by our more sensible neighbours and people ran when they saw us coming.

Add to a love of finery unmade beds; add to her anger, which did not last, her gaiety, which was indestructible. To the old newspapers that were knee-deep all over the house add—in bottles, teapots, dishes, and jugs—all manner of leaves and flowers: roses, beach boughs, parsley, garlic, cornstalks. Add to her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe her genuinely kind, genuinely compassionate heart. The bus driver is honking his horn and all the passengers are leaning out of the windows and shaking their umbrellas crossly, and a voice, sweet and gay, calls from down the bank, "I'm coming—yo-hoo! Just mislaid my gloves. Wait a second! I'm coming, my dears." She drove her children half crazy; she infected them with the wonder of life.

Here she is getting supper:

Indoors, our Mother was cooking pancakes, her face aglow from the fire. There was a smell of sharp lemon and salty batter, and a burning hiss of oil. The kitchen was dark and convulsive with shadows, no lights had yet been lit. Flames leapt, subsided, corners woke and died, fires burned in a thousand brasses. "Poke round for the matches, dear boy," said Mother. "Damn me if I know where they got to."

Here she is with a sick child:

Then Mother would come carolling upstairs with my breakfast, bright as a wind-blown lark. "I've boiled you an egg, and made you a nice cup of cocoa. And cut you some lovely thin bread and butter."

And here she is in bed:

My Mother, freed from her noisy day, would sleep like a happy child, humped in her night-dress, breathing innocently, and making soft drinking sounds in the pillow. In her flights of dream she held me close, like a parachute, to her back; or rolled and enclosed me with her great tired body so that I was snug as a mouse in a hayrick.

Though she bestrides the book, her largeness is not of the kind that results in somebody else's having to be small. The author says that there was no male authority in the house and that he and his brothers were dominated entirely by their mother and sisters, and yet he and the three other boys and every other man he writes about are thoroughly masculine. Somewhere, somehow, it all came out right.

They were not isolated. The stone house they lived in had once been a small manor house and was now divided into three cottages, in two of which lived two immensely old women who referred to each other spitefully as "Er-Down-Under" and "Er-Up-Atop" and lived only to out-live each other. One spent all her time making wine out of almost everything you can name, including parsnips. The other sat taking snuff and "biding still," and, if pressed, would take down the almanac and read about disasters to come, or tell the children about her father, who was a woodcutter and so strong he could lift a horse and wagon.

Gradually, little by little, the reader gets to know the people in other houses round about. The beautiful English landscape had a sufficient number of figures in it, and under the author's hand, one after another, they come to life. But not statically, not as set pieces or portraits, but as people who are being swept along in the current that flows only one way. Old people give up and die, children are picked up bodily, kicking and bawling, and carried off to school. The boys that were roaming the fields are lured under the hayrick and marry, all in good time, as trees come into leaf or shed their foliage, as plants come into flower. But not all of them, of course. For example, in the author's family there was another sister, who slipped away without warning when she was four years old, and every day of his mother's life she continued to grieve for and talk about that dead daughter, whose name is included, most touchingly, in the dedication of the book, among the living sisters and brothers.

The word I have been avoiding using all this time is "love." It is conveyed on virtually every page of this book. All kinds of love. And also, as might be expected of any place where love is amply present, murder and mayhem, fornication, incest, perversion, rape, suicide, grief, and madness. All of which the village managed in its own private way. Outsiders were not called in to punish or adjudicate, and when they came of their own accord, their questions were met by stares, and the information they sought after was given to every man, woman, and child of the village, in detail, so that they would know what it was they were to hide.

On the brighter side, here is the Parochial Church Tea and Annual Entertainment:

The stage curtains parted to reveal the Squire, wearing a cloak and a deer-stalking hat. He cast his dim, wet eyes round the crowded room, then sighed and turned to go. Somebody whispered from behind the curtain. "Bless me!" said the Squire and came back.

"The Parochial Church Tea!" he began, then paused. "Is with us again … I suggest. And Entertainment. Another year! Another year comes round!… When I see you all gathered together here—once more—when I see—when I think … And here you all are! When I see you here—as I'm sure you all are—once again … It comes to me, friends!—how time—how you—how all of us here—as it were …" His mustache was quivering, tears ran down his face, he groped for the curtains and left.

His place was taken by the snow-haired vicar, who beamed weakly upon us all.

"What is the smallest room in the world?" he asked.

"A mushroom!" we bawled, without hesitation.

"And the largest, may I ask?"

"ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT!"

"You know it," he muttered crossly. Recovering himself, he folded his hands: "And now O bountiful Father …"

The motorcar brought all this to an end. The last days of the author's childhood were also the last days of the village, the end of a thousand years' life, in that remote valley:

Myself, my family, my generation [Mr. Lee says] were born in a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cart wheels, innocent of oil or petrol, down which people passed rarely, and almost never for pleasure, and the horse was the fastest thing moving. Man and the horse were all the power we had—abetted by levers and pulleys. But the horse was king, and almost everything grew round him: fodder, smithies, stables, paddocks, distances and the rhythm of our days….

Granted that one has to live in one's own Age or give up all contact with life; nevertheless, one puts this book aside not with nostalgia but with a kind of horror at what has happened. There was perhaps no stopping it, one thinks, and at the same time as one thinks that, one thinks that it should never have been allowed to happen, that our grandparents would not have put up with it—with the terrible, heartbreaking impoverishment that is not confined to a single village in a remote valley of the Cotswolds, or to any one country. It is all but general, and very few of us know, at first hand, anything else. Like a fatal disease, it has now got into the blood stream.