Cider With Rosie

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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. It is also a nod to the duality of nature, the depthy of its beauty, paralleled with it's boundless power and extremities (flooding, droughts). As he grows older, he starts to recognise the villagers as individuals: Cabbage-Stump Charlie, the local bruiser; Albert the Devil, a deaf mute beggar; and Percy-from-Painswick, a clown and ragged dandy who likes to seduce the girls with his soft tongue. In 1998, not long after the death of Laurie Lee, Carlton Television made the film Cider with Rosie for the ITV network, with a screenplay by John Mortimer and with archive recordings of Laurie Lee's voice used as narration.

This penultimate chapter on the lust of the flesh takes an alarming turn as he describes the village boys’ planned gang rape of a religious 16-year-old, Lizzy.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. In the middle I disassociated myself from what I was hearing by repeating the magnificent lines in my head.

The cider I am drinking is, inevitably, pressed from local apples: ‘golden fire, wine of wild orchids and of that valley and that time and of Rosie’s burning cheeks’.

The novel is an account of Lee's childhood in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, England, in the period soon after the First World War. Lee's real skill is that as the child grows so does his vocabulary as in normal life but never does the child's voice leave it. 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; … [The horse’s] eight miles an hour was the limit of our movements, as it had been since the days of the Romans.

The first time I read it, I was quite young and slightly confused as it was the first book I read that was not really chronological, but instead told the story grouped by overlapping themes, such as seasons, school, grannies (not blood ones) and festivals. This juxtaposition, the stark contrast between light and dark, has arguably contributed most to the book’s longstanding appeal.

She is replaced by Miss Wardley from Birmingham, who "wore sharp glass jewellery" and imposes discipline that is "looser but stronger". It is two families that have come together, the elder children are from the first marriage; his father re-married when their mother died, and had a second family before going off to war. The title comes from a late moment when Rosie Burdock tempts the adolescent Lee with alcoholic cider and kisses underneath a hay wagon. Treat it as a collection of short stories about different aspects of the rural life of the time period.

One of the most perfectly written books I know of (right up there with A Month in the Country and The Remains of the Day).For me, that was a far superior read, looking at time he spent crossing Spain one year with little in the way of possessions.