Cider With Rosie

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For me, his sumptuous imagery and poetic prose ( and the fact that this was an autobiographical memoir, which reads like fiction) drew a comparison with Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. We began to shrug off the valley and look more to the world, where pleasures were more anonymous and tasty. I was reminded, with a jolt, in amongst the stories of day trips to Weston-super-Mare, and blackberry picking, and carolling in the snow, of the violence, grief and sometimes sheer brutality of village life. It is a collection of Laury Lee's memories of his childhood spent in a remote village during the time after the end of the first world war.

Regardless of the authenticity of specific details, it is Lee’s lyrical and affecting language in Cider with Rosie that makes his memoir so memorable; the way he manages to transport us so effectively to Slad, to the icy family home, the fields covered in cowslips, the old schoolroom. Music was by Wilfred Josephs, and Rosemary Leach was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for her roles as Lee's mother and as Helen in The Mosedale Horseshoe.

Laurie Lee is inextricably linked to the Five Valleys, this small pocket of the Cotswolds in the West of England. This is not a fast-paced adventure book but it does create a beautiful picture of quiet country lanes, honeysuckle on the breeze and both the wonders and tragedies of living so far out in a world controlled solely by the forces of nature. This is also the time when Laurie Lee experiences the first stirrings of poetry welling up inside him. Quintessentially English but not as purely delightful as I expected, this was still a book I valued for its characterization and its description of golden moments in memory.

Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie's burning cheeks. But, in my university library on the other side of the world, it was his first memoir, a remembering of childhood and the beginnings of adolescence spent in a Cotswold village, with which I fell in love. For some reason I read this after "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning", which is the follow up to this. Sick Boy is an account of the various illnesses Lee suffered as a young boy, some of which brought him to the brink of death. During one particularly cold winter the village boys go foraging with old cocoa-tins stuffed with burning rags to keep their mittenless hands warm.

Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.

Cider with Rosie, regardless of any literal truth, reads as an emotionally truthful recollection of childhood – of those moments, both hopeful and horrific, tantalizing and terrifying, which shape and form who we grow into. Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie is a classic of English rural writing, lauded for its evocation of Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley in the early 20th century and the last days of an intensely experienced, millennium-old way of life. Parts of it were good, I especially liked the chapter on the grannies, only if the whole of it could have been like that? Towards the end, I really didn’t like how he and his friends tried to rape a mentally handicapped girl.Fans of Lee’s books often visit on a pilgrimage of sorts, to see for themselves the village they already know so well, thanks to Cider with Rosie (1959). Every child in the valley crowding there, remained till he was fourteen years old, then was presented to the working field or factory, with nothing in his head more burdensome than a few mnemonics, a jumbled list of wars, and a dreamy image of the world's geography. However, reader be warned, don't fall in love like I did with the bucolic, English countryside of Lee's childhood because it does not exist anymore. Life in a rural community was as much about the daily life and way that the seasons slowed moved on slowly.

Lee states that "quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad", and states that the village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority.The most memorable scenes for me are not the famous cider in the haystack but two big disappointments: when Laurie is deemed too old to sleep in his mother’s bed and then when he starts school and is told to sit in a particular place “for the present”, and is bitterly disappointed not to be given said present at the end of the day. Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee (published in the US as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, 1960). I enjoyed this little book, so to say I was somewhat disappointed sounds disingenuous, but I honestly thought this would be a 5 star read. At the beginning Lee makes a reference to his father, who had abandoned them, saying that he and his brothers never knew any male authority.