‘Once he got into his stride his words flowed like honey’
Boudicca FoxLeonard talks to David Parker about his remarkable encounters with Laurie Lee
People often ask David Parker why Laurie Lee agreed to speak to him. The acclaimed author of Cider with Rosie had rarely given interviews in the intervening 40 or so years since the book’s publication in 1959, let alone agreed to be filmed.
Yet there he is, aged 79, down by the village pond of his childhood, in an overcoat and silk scarf, speaking of tea parties and ice-skating.
Lee took Parker all over the Slad valley; Swift’s Hill, Bulls Cross, the church at Miserden. It was in The Woolpack, the still-thriving village pub, that they first met, though; Lee in the corner drinking a half of Uley ale: “Never cider,” asserts Parker.
Everyone laughed when he first suggested he try for an interview with Lee. Charles Walker, Lee’s agent, said he’d never do it. But Parker pressed on. “I said, ‘Won’t it be a shame if he dies without ever talking about how and why he wrote?’”
Walker told him to put that in a letter, which resulted in a missed phone call, one that Parker now feels made all the difference.
His answer message at the time was recorded by his 12-year-old son. “And when I listened back there was a message saying, ‘That’s a very nice answerphone message, if I may say so. Could you tell your daddy that Laurie Lee called him.’ I think my son’s squeaky little voice was important in making it happen,” says Parker.
Lee was adamant during their initial meeting that he didn’t want to be filmed. But his resolve softened. The next time they met Parker recorded Lee’s voice. The time after that he got his film in the can.
Laurie Lee’s Gloucestershire – A Writer’s Landscape was transmitted by HTV West in August 1994. Parker sees now that his request came at a time when Lee was perhaps thinking about his own mortality. Indeed, less than three years later, Lee died, aged 82, and was buried in the churchyard in Slad, in the spot he had earmarked.
“He told me: ‘I’ve found a place halfway up the churchyard, near enough to the church to be aware of, in the spiritual sense, to be conscious of matins, Sunday morning, but also to be within reach of, in a temporal way, orgies on Saturday nights in The Woolpack. And alternating between the temporal and the spiritual is the way I wish to spend what eternity is left to me.’”
The words come readily to Parker, taken as they are from his 1994 interview. After rediscovering the rushes in a misplaced archive box in 2017, Parker transcribed their conversation, which has now been published in a new book, Down in the Valley. Like Cider with Rosie, the chapters resist chronology.
Instead, they are shaped by the places Lee took Parker to for the filming and recording. There are glimpses of the extravagant phrasing of Cider with Rosie, amid the more prosaic moments. Lee was, by his own admission, a slow and methodical writer. His biographical trilogy, which comprises Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991), was published over his lifetime, and he left far more poetry than prose to his name. “He told me that publishers want you to be prolific, write lots and die young. ‘I’m determined to subvert them on both counts,’ he said.”
To be interviewed for radio or television was the antithesis of his craft, which comes through in the film and book. “Sometimes he was like a steam engine gearing up to get ready to move, and once he gets into his stride it then flows in warm honey,” says Parker.
If Lee had something of a reputation as a “miserable old fella and grumpy”, then Parker never found that. Lee endured the hours of filming in the damp and cold without complaint.
He drove the agenda, though. There was no talk of his bohemian life in Forties London, the love affair with Lorna Wishart, who left him for Lucian Freud, his involvement in the Festival of Britain and the coterie of creatives of which he was a vibrant member.
“Lee moved in circles that you would only expect people of a certain background to move in, writers being able to transcend class,” observes Parker.
Television producer David Parker, above; Laurie Lee, the author of
and
main; Lee chats to Parker in a rare interview, below left
It was Cyril Connolly, for whose literary magazine, Horizon, Lee wrote, who first encouraged him to write about his childhood; the beginnings of what would become
Cider with Rosie. When it was published in 1959 it was an instant hit. It was a balm for an audience being fast flung into an era of rampant modernisation, one that had “never had it so good”.
That’s one of the reasons it remains so popular, says Parker, whose book launch at the Cheltenham Literary Festival sold out. “There are a lot of people who do like the world he was writing about. Especially now because we’re in such a chaotic world. He was writing about a much less complicated world as a child.”
The “Rosie” of the title, though, hints at the rose-coloured spectacles of nostalgia. Lee was at pains to point out to Parker during their interviews just how poor his childhood was. “He could see that his mother was struggling to feed them,” he says.
Cider with Rosie wasn’t incontrovertibly bucolic. It was honest about the brutalities of village life; the failed plan to gang-rape a local girl, the resigned acceptance of incest and the villager who returned from New Zealand having made his fortune only to be brutally beaten and murdered for his audacity.
Down in the Valley strikes the same mordant notes on occasion. The “very, very macabre” suicide of one of the village’s inhabitants, Miss Flynn, the hijacking of the Aberfan tragedy in order to close the village school.
To be able to present this extra insight into the life of a much-loved author is a privilege that Parker, now 71 himself, still feels keenly.
“There’s a picture of me with Laurie which sums up our relationship. I am kneeling at the feet of the great man and, actually, I don’t mind that at all.”
‘I said, won’t it be a shame if he dies without ever talking about how and why he wrote?’
Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape by Laurie Lee is available from books.telegraph. co.uk