![]() ![]() His adventures eventually took him to mainland Europe and down through Spain, a country which was on the brink of a bitter civil war. It recounts a year of wandering with only his violin for company, beginning in 1935 when he was 19. Cider with Rosie is not just a rosy picture of a rural past, but a magical evocation of growing up in a lost world that still rings emotionally true.įor those of you who wish to follow Laurie beyond his childhood in Slad, we have also reissued his second memoir, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Yet he acknowledges that village life could be brutal too. He writes ecstatically of going blackberrying in summer, and skating and carol singing in icy Christmas weather when it hurt to breathe and the air was ‘like needles’. ![]() When the First World War was over Laurie’s father abandoned his wife and children and life was hard, but for Laurie his warm hugger-mugger home and the village with its familiar characters and unchanging round were full of wonder. ![]() ![]() Lee was born in Stroud in 1914 and in 1917 the family moved to a damp and crumbling cottage in the remote Cotswold village of Slad. Whether or not they have, as one critic put it, ‘ Cider with Rosie seems true as long as you’re reading it – and that’s the most important thing.’ Laurie Lee described this, his best-loved and best-known book, as ‘a recollection of early boyhood’, adding the acknowledgement that ‘some facts may have been distorted by time’. ![]()
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