Cider With Rosie

Product Information

We readers find in it great fecundity: trees ‘writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels’.

It was followed by As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, the tale of his lengthy wanderings on foot and with fiddle, and A Moment of War, his writings on the time he spent in Spain during the combative 1930s. Rediscovering Laurie Lee's beautiful wordplay made me initially think that his prose was wasted on a boy who could clearly imagine a clean-shaven Tarzan swinging from vines through the jungle. There is also the Parochial Church Tea and Annual Entertainment, to which Laurie and his brother Jack gain free admittance for helping with the arrangements. It is fortunate that Laurie Lee happened to be there to experience it and possessed the ability to document it with the vision of a poet before it disappeared.There was a reassuring prevalence of Penguin books, resplendent in orange cummerbunds, as I rummaged through a squished cardboard box in my attic. Although these articles may currently differ in style from others on the site, they allow us to provide wider coverage of topics sought by our readers, through a diverse range of trusted voices.

Here his world is large, scary, cosy and baffling, a world dominated by females and the language reflects this. But the first book that made me miss my stop because I was unable to leave my seat due to the large bulge in my trousers was Cider With Rosie.Luckily, they lost their nerve and nothing happened, but Lee’s blasé recounting felt out of keeping and somehow more dated than the rest of his material. I inexplicably felt relieved to finish reading this wonderful book since it has long challenged me since around those late 1960's in my college years in Bangkok (there were only six state universities then). 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.