Laurie Lee's 'Cider with Rosie'

Laurie Lee (1914-1997)

Cider with Rosie is a book I have always been meaning to read. At last, I have - and in first edition. Laurie's Lee's account (The Hogarth Press, 1959) tells of his upbringing in the small Cotswold village of Slad, where he lived until he was twenty. Laurie belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years' life... Myself, my family, my generation, were born in a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the 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...the horse was king, and almost everything grew around him; fodder, smithies, stables, paddocks, distances and the rhythm of our days...Then, to the scream of the horse, the change began...

First Edition, 1959

The combustion engine - the car, the charabanc, the motor-bikes descended on the village - chickens and dogs were the early sacrifices. It must have been like the first railway engines terrifying the cows in the adjacent fields. Other changes took place - the Squire died; his Big House was auctioned to become a Home for Invalids; the lake silted up; his servants scattered; the estate was broken up. The elderly passed on: Kicker Harris, the old coachman; Lottie Escourt, peasant shoot of a Norman lord; old Miss Clissold. Meanwhile, Laurie's sisters courted, got married and moved on. Old men in the pubs sang, "As I Walked Out", then walked out and never came back. And Laurie Lee grew up and 'walked out' himself - to London and then across Europe to Spain. I have read the sequel As I walked out one Midsummer Morning (1969), admittedly some time ago, but remember enjoying it immensely. I have the Illustrated edition (Andre Deutsch, 1985) and must read it again.

As for Cider with Rosie, for me the key lies in the Note on the page before the first chapter:

Some parts of this book were originally published in Orion, Encounter, The Queen and The Cornhill, and two other fragments have been adapted from pieces first written for Leader Magazine and The Geographical Magazine. The book is a recollection of early boyhood, and some of the facts may be distorted by time.

The book does feel like a series of snapshots - almost like a series of Magic Lantern slides which move, or like the penny-machines Laurie ogled through onWeston-super-Mare pier on his annual charabanc Choir Outing days. Each chapter feels like a stand-alone and the narrative never come across as 'straight' autobiography. How much was fact and how much fiction? Perhaps 'faction' is an apt description. Moreover, occasionally I felt that the telling was 'distorted' by the poetry in the man - the use of colourful adjectives, of similes and metaphors where plainer recounting might, ironically, have rung more true. (I kept comparing my remembrance of the much more down-to-earth Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy of Flora Thompson, whose memories of the late 19th century on the borders of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire seemed to strike a more unvarnished and real note.)

However, this is really nit-picking, as there are some wonderful cameos of people and events in Lee's book. A few examples will suffice:

Eight to ten loaves came to the house every day, and they never grew dry. We tore them to pieces with their crusts still warm, and their monotony was brightened by the objects we found in them - string, nails, paper, and once a mouse; for those were the days of happy-go-lucky baking.

"Jones's goat! - " our Dorothy whispered; two words that were almost worship. For this was not just a straying animal but a beast of ancient dream, the moonlight-walker of the village roads, half captive, half rutting king.

Cabbage-Stump Charlie was our local bruiser - a violent, gaitered, gaunt-faced pigman, who lived only for his sows and for fighting... Emmanuel Twinning on the other hand, was gentle and very old, and made his own suits out of hospital blankets, and lived nearby with a horse.

I think my favourite chapter was Grannies in the Wainscot - Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were rival ancients and lived on each others nerves...with their sickle-bent bodies, pale pink eyes, and wild wisps of hedgerow hair, they lived one above the other in the other part of the Lee building. They referred to each other as "Er-Down-Under" and "Er-Up-Atop, the Varmint". These are twenty pages worth reading the book for! They died within a fortnight of each other.

Laurie Lee's (and the Grannies'!) home

Then, there's the tall, consumptive and pale as thistledown, a flock-haired pre-Raphaelite stunner, Miss Fluck, who died (like Ophelia), floating upwards, but in the local pond rather than a river. Lee can produce wonderful imagery: Mr Davies was sinking, that was only too clear. He lay in the ice-cold pokey bedroom, his breath coming rough and heavy, his thin brown fingers clutching the sheets like hooks of copper wire. His face was a skull wrapped in yellow paper, pierced by two brilliant holes. His hair had been brushed so that it stuck from his head like frosted glass on a stone. Laurie is giving us a poetic vision.

Laurie Lee's Mother wanders through the book and has a loving chapter to herself. Lee conjures up, through his affection, a warm-blooded, real person - she lived by no clocks, and unpunctuality was bred in her bones... old china to Mother was gambling. The sadness was her waiting for something that never occurred - her husband returning to her. When he died, she gave up, having waited thirty-five years for his praise. Other chapters remain with you, after you have shut the book: those on his four uncles, on the village school and on the hub of the families' existence - the Kitchen. And what of Rosie? She appears briefly in the penultimate chapter - First Bite at the Apple.  Well, its title, I am sure, helped to sell the novel! 6 million copies sold is not a bad tribute.

Laurie Lee returned, with his wife, to Slad in the 1960s and is buried in the local churchyard. His gravestone simply says: Laurie Lee 1914 - 1997  "He lies in the valley he loved".

I've since read an extract from an essay Laurie wrote for The New York Times:

A day unremembered is like a soul; unborn, worse than if it had never been. What indeed was that summer if not recalled. That journey? That act of love? To whom did it happen if it has left you with nothing? Certainly not to you. So any bits of warm life preserved by the pen are trophies snatched from the dark, are branches of leaves fished out of the flood, the tiny arrests of mortality.

Couldn't have put it better myself - hence my 200+ pages of Reminicences from my earliest year until I left University!