Cider With Rosie

Product Information

His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). Lee was born in Stroud in 1914, and in 1917 the family moved to a damp and crumbling cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Slad. In the evenings the whole family sits around the big kitchen table, the girls gossiping and sewing as the boys do their homework and the eldest son, Harold, who is working as a lathe handler, mends his bicycle.

There were some nods to the writing of Welshman Dylan Thomas, and although the memoir was pleasant, with some poignant moments, I just found Lee's basis a little too sweet and sickly for my liking, like being covered in honey and having a big soppy Labrador lick it off. Evoking nostalgia plays heavy throughout, that was easy for me to relate to as his home village wasn't a million miles away from where I grew up, and I felt a connection with the areas he describes. Lee describes his mother as having a love for everything and an extraordinary ability with plants, being able to grow anything anywhere. Laurie Lee is inextricably linked to the Five Valleys, this small pocket of the Cotswolds in the West of England.

I was especially looking forward to it since this part of the series was based in one of my favorite places in England – the Cotswolds. As a young girl she had lived with her father, a woodsman, and she still seeks comfort in the forest. To walk around this area is to walk in his footsteps – there is a Laurie Lee Wood and the Laurie Lee Wild Way, lined with his writings printed on Perspex plaques.

It is easy to think of Cider with Rosie as a slice of English nostalgia, a recollection of idyllic rural village life in the early twentieth century. These stories were marvelously written and poignant and gave me a true sense of the life in this small village before the advent of machinery and automobiles opened it to the greater world.Towards the end, I really didn’t like how he and his friends tried to rape a mentally handicapped girl.